Messiah of Burbank - An Urban Fantasy Read online

  Henaghan looked around at the Burbank environs. For a moment, she panicked because she thought she might see Ciara, the White Lady. That was more distraction than she needed. She shook it off. “I’ve been thinking about Sam,” she said.

  David nodded. “She has a way of getting into your head, doesn’t she?”

  “You saw from our conversation I already knew some of the backstory. I had a neighbor who wrote a book about Verbic and his weird history. She told me about the funky circumstances around Sam’s conception and birth—only, as far as she was concerned, it was a) unverifiable and b) possibly nonsense.”

  “Right. You mentioned a ‘Gladys’. Sam’s mother.”

  Quinn crossed her legs and hugged herself. “My friend heard the story from a retired reporter who talked to ‘Gladys’. ‘Gladys’ was a cocktail waitress who had the extreme misfortune of working in a club owned by Reginald Verbic. Charles Sato offered her a ride home one night only he didn’t take her home. He took her to the house on Mulholland. They kept her there for three weeks. Kept her drugged. Apparently, she was raped by a series of shadowy figures and Sam was the result.”

  Olkin winced. “That,” he said. “Is really fucking grim.”

  “It is,” the redhead conceded. “But what I really wanna know is why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yeah. Why does a billion-year-old Asura suddenly decide he needs a family? What possessed them to grab this girl and do what they did?”

  “I would say that I don’t know and that I’m grateful I don’t know, but I sense you’re headed somewhere with this.”

  Henaghan’s shoulders drooped. “I… wish I could tell you what. It’s just that I have a vague intuition about it. I don’t think Verbic just suddenly woke up one morning and said to himself, ‘I should father a child with a cocktail waitress’.”

  “I think that’s a reasonable assumption. What else can you tell me about this ‘Gladys’”?

  “Unfortunately, my friend didn’t dig any deeper. Now I wish she would have. She said ‘Gladys’ went back to wherever she came from. Hopefully, to live a full and carefree life.”

  “But you don’t have a real name?” David asked.

  “I don’t.”

  “That makes it tough. She was a waitress in one of Verbic’s clubs. Do you know which one?”

  Quinn thought for a moment. “Oh, Christ. Annabelle told me. What’d she tell me?” Finally, she snapped her fingers. “Siesta del Mar! That was it.”

  Olkin smiled. “As you’ve probably gathered by now, Reginald Verbic was a fanatical keeper of records—except when it was in his best interest not to be. Give me a day or two. Let me see what I’ve got from Siesta del Mar.”

  David dropped Quinn off at her house and Henaghan found the home empty. She suspected Molly and Josie had gone off to do something girlie. Probably involving finger- and or toenails. After a little while of kicking around and wondering what to do, she thought she heard a rattling from the back porch. More importantly, she felt a vibration in the ward she’d put around the house. She peeked out one of the rear windows to make sure her mind wasn’t playing tricks on her. It wasn’t. There, trying to force his way past the screen door was Pietro Laskov, one of Simone Gros’ team of doomed thieves. When he saw her, Laskov said, “Hide me, Quinn!”

  Henaghan walked round to the back door, went through it and took the single step down to the patio floor. She looked at the little Crimean man through the screen door. “What’re you doing here for Christ’s sake? How did you know where to find me?”

  “You’re in the phone book,” Laskov said.

  “Serves me right.” The redhead unlatched the door and motioned toward the couch (the one that’d been in her living room back at the Gower Street apartment).

  “No!” Pietro said, looking at the couch, panicked. “Not here. It’s too exposed. Please, you must take me inside.”

  Quinn rolled her eyes and walked back to the house. “Fine,” she said. “But you go where I take you and nowhere else. And don’t touch anything. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. Only, please, a room with no windows.”

  Henaghan took him to the work room. She and Molly shared the space. It had two computers with a table between. Also, the room had no windows. The girl sighed. “Alright. What can I do you for, Petey?”

  Pietro didn’t even react to the hated nickname. He was too frantic. “Have you not heard? I would’ve thought you’d be affected too. The Tīvara, they’re hunting me.”

  “The who?”

  “The Tīvara. They’re the Resolute secret service. The elite unit. Do you remember when those filthy people murdered the athletes? At the Olympics…”

  “In Munich, yes.”

  “After that, Israel sent its people—the Mossad—after the killers. The Tīvara is like that. Like the Mossad.”

  Quinn rubbed her temples. “Why are they hunting you?”

  “You have to ask? I… We violated the sanctity of their temple. We killed dozens of people and wrecked the place.”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, Laskov, but we killed dozens of people. Me and Arnold and Simone and Matt. You, on the other hand, betrayed your friends and walked willy nilly into a gas cloud.”

  The Crimean turned bright red. “Yes. Well. A misunderstanding to be sure. At any rate, I—that is to say we—were supposed to leave San Francisco with unimaginable wealth. We were supposed to have enough money to let others do our dying for us. That, sadly, was not the outcome, and now I’m being hunted like a dog.”

  “Deservedly so?”

  Pietro dabbed at the corners of his mouth with his handkerchief. “Would it make you happy if I said yes? Please. I need your help.”

  “How?”

  “You’re—if what they say is true—you’re the Aja. You can send me to another place and time. A place and time where the Tīvara aren’t hunting me and I can live out the rest of my days in relative peace.”

  Quinn adjusted the hem of her dress. “You want me to send you to another one of your own realities.”

  “Yes, yes. That’s exactly right,” the little man said, excited.

  “And does it bother you there’ll already be another you there living out the rest of his days in relative peace?”

  Laskov grinned an unwholesome grim. “Yes, well, that is a problem I can handle.”

  Henaghan said, “There’s no way in hell I’m sending you to another dimension so you can murder yourself and settle down and raise two-point-five shifty-eyed little creeps.”

  Pietro’s shoulders sagged.

  The girl ignored his disappointment. “There’s something I’m curious about… You’re a Channeler. Why don’t you pop yourself back to Crimea? Hide. Dig in your heels.”

  Laskov replaced his handkerchief in his jacket pocket and lowered his eyes. “I… do not Channel,” he said.

  Quinn nodded. “I noticed. Why is that?”

  The man sighed and picked a piece of lint off of his pants. “You’re aware that Channelers are, by and large, horrible misogynists. Even the Tilted. We learned that from our teachers. The Asura. A patriarchal culture if there ever was one. As much as the magical community despises women, it disdains homosexuals even more. We’re pariahs. Many years ago, I ran afoul of a very old Asura. In Europe. I tried to steal from him. I was caught. He probably should’ve killed me for what I did. Instead, he took away my ability to Channel. My skills were meager and, most days, I don’t miss them, but to him it was funny. To neuter me in that way.”

  “Oh,” Henaghan said quietly. “I, uh, I didn’t know that. That’s really fucked-up. I’m sorry.”

  Pietro shrugged. “It is what it is.”

  “Just to reiterate, I’m not sending you to an alternate dimension. But I will help you if I can. Short of a crazy magical murder-suicide-type deal, what can I do? Is there any place you can go?”

  “I don’t know of anywhere on Earth the Tīvara can’t find me. Unless… Yes, perhaps you�
�re right about Crimea. I know a network of people there. A former lover. Perhaps he can help me.”

  “Picture the place in your mind. Don’t spare the detail. I need to know precisely where you want to go.”

  Laskov shut his eyes. “Yes, I know it like the back of my hand. The place you are when you’re a boy… It never leaves you.”

  Quinn looked at the picture in Pietro’s head and prepared to send him into it.

  “Wait!” Pietro said, holding up a hand. Henaghan held her Channeling for just a moment. Laskov reached into his pants pocket and removed a small stone statue. He handed it to Quinn. It was a squatting frog. “Something to remember me by,” he said, fully aware of the irony. “I picked it up in Istanbul. It’s a trifle, really, but I’d like you to have it.”

  The redhead sent her visitor to Crimea. Then she put the stone frog down on her desk next to her iMac.

  After Josie and Molly came back from having their fingers and toes done, Taft went into her room and closed the door. She kicked off her sandals and sat down on her bed for a closer look at her toes. Something about freshly lacquered toes fascinated her.

  The funky aunts had allowed Josie to decorate the room as she saw fit. She had a hand-drawn poster of wasps labeled with Latin phrases. That she adored. She also had framed album covers ranging from The Beatles’ White Album to Radiohead’s O.K. Computer. All music that’d come out long before she was born but which she loved.

  The girl had something churning through her head persistently. Why, she wondered, had the Vidyaadhara, the phantasms, taken such an interest in her? They were hostile, yes, but they were also drawn to her in a way that seemed to surprise even Quinn. Did it mean something or were Changelings like delicious beef jerky to beings from the Astral Plane?

  Taft raised her eyes from her shiny black toenails and looked in front of herself—not with focus or intent but in a meditative way. When she did that, she could see beyond what was and look at what was behind. She saw the membrane separating the Physical Plane from the Astral. (She hadn’t exactly lied to Quinn by not telling her she’d glimpsed the Astral Plane before. Seeing it firsthand was amazing.) In her mind she said, Here I am! Look at me. It’s Josie. To her surprise, the tactic worked. Within moments, she saw a phantasm peering at her through the membrane. Soon there was another and then another. A school of the sperm-shaped creatures watching and wondering. Taft heard a voice. A woman’s voice, though she could neither identify it nor understand what it said. Then it occurred to Josie—something her Uncle Glen had told her: The membrane is porous. The Vidyaadhara (and select other creatures) could come through it into the Physical Plane. The girl panicked, focusing her eyes not on infinity but on her chest of drawers and the wall beyond it. She scrambled backward to the head of her bed and shot her legs under her comforter. She waited for a while, expecting an assault from beyond.

  The assault didn’t come.

  Once she was over her fear of attack, Josie went outside to the backyard and kicked off her sandals. She stepped into the percolating body of water in the middle of the dead grass and closed her eyes to think. A voice startled her so much she leapt out of the pond. “What the hell’re you doing?” Taft couldn’t find the source of the voice at first, so it spoke again. “Look up. I’m up here.”

  Josie looked up. Lying on her belly on a strong tree limb overhanging the fence between Quinn and Molly’s house and the one behind it was a girl. She too was around sixteen and had blond hair. She was lankier than Josie and had big blue eyes. “I’m soaking my feet,” Taft said. “What’re you doing? Up in a tree startling people…”

  The lanky girl flipped over on the branch, dropped down on top of the wall and then into the yard with Josie. Standing on the ground, she was a whole head taller than Taft. She wore a white spaghetti-strap top and white shorts. Her hair was in two pony tails. “Where did you come from?”

  “What do you mean where did I come from?” Josie said, trying not to sound defensive.

  “I mean you’re not from around here. You don’t live in this house. If you lived in this house, you would go to my school. Or you’d be a snooty private school kid but the two lesbians that live here don’t look rich enough to have a snooty private school kid.”

  Josie’s mind raced. She almost never spoke to people her own (apparent) age and she didn’t know how to interact. She’d seen plenty of tweens and teens on TV, but she was pretty sure those weren’t anything like real tweens and teens. She froze for a moment, but then realized she already had a semi-plausible story. “I live in West L.A. I go to school there. I’m just visiting my aunts.”

  “Aunts? As in plural? Is one of them your real aunt and one of them the wife of your real aunt?”

  Taft cocked her head. “You ask a lot of personal questions for someone who I don’t even know what their name is.”

  “Oh, right,” the visitor said. She rubbed her hand on her shorts and, advancing a few feet toward Josie, she extended it to shake. “I’m Lailah. I live in that house there behind your aunts. Although, duh, you probably already figured that out.”

  Josie shook Lailah’s hand. “I did. Why were you in that tree?”

  “I’ve been climbing that tree since I was six years old and I refuse to stop now. You didn’t tell me your name…”

  “Right. I’m Josie. Josie Taft. And neither one of them’s my real aunt. It’s a friend-of-the-family kinda deal. It’s complicated.”

  “Which one you live with? Your mom or your dad?”

  Josie blinked. “What gave you the idea my parents’re divorced?”

  “You used the word ‘complicated’. It’s a synonym for ‘child of divorce’.”

  “Well, in this case you’re wrong. My dad’s dead and my mother’s a drunken whore. I live with my uncle.”

  Lailah smiled. “Okay, so I was wrong. That’s still pretty complicated.”

  Taft returned the smile. “I guess it is.”

  Lailah then asked Josie if she wanted to come over and see Lailah’s collection of concert ticket stubs. Josie said she did, so she ran briefly into the house to tell Quinn and Molly where she’d be.

  Quinn and Molly watched the girls climb over the wall into Lailah’s yard and Molly said, “Our little girl is growing up.”

  Later that afternoon, after Josie returned, Quinn was surfing the net in the shared office space. Occasionally, she found herself glancing down to Laskov’s frog. Although she found Pietro himself creepy and wanted nothing further to do with him, the frog was growing on her. She reached down to pet its head as Molly knocked on the door and poked in her head. Blank looked as though someone had died. Henaghan felt a moment of panic. Was it Cam? Had Cam died? “Quinn, honey. Your sister’s here.”

  “Mia?”

  “Aoife,” Blank corrected. “She’s here and you need to brace for this ‘cause it’s a doozy.”

  Henaghan closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Fuck,” she said. “Tell me what it is so I can prepare myself. No, don’t tell me. It’s better if I just rip off the band-aid.”

  A few minutes later, the redhead entered the living room and nearly had another mini-stroke. As soon as she saw what was waiting for her, she turned around and headed back for the work room. A strange thought flashed through her mind, I’ve got to tune my ward for nonmagical threats. Unfortunately, Molly was right there to turn her around and push her back. Mia was sitting on the couch wearing a peasant blouse and a long, plain skirt. Her hair was braided, and she wore a choker with a Celtic knot pattern. On either side of her were a man and a woman.

  Olivia and Tom Henaghan. Quinn’s parents.

  Right off, Quinn shot her sister a look that said, I will fucking kill you for this.

  Josie poked her head out of the guest room. “Hey, I was wondering—”

  Molly hissed at her. “Don’t come out here. By all that’s holy.”

  Freaked out, Josie went back into her room and shut the door.

  Blank grabbed her purse and dashed for the fr
ont exit. “Gottagobye!” The four remaining people watched the brunette dash out and, for a moment, enjoyed the relative calm.

  Finally, Tom Henaghan stood and approached his eldest daughter. He cupped her face with genuine affection. “There she is! The prodigal daughter.” He kissed Quinn on both cheeks. Olivia remained seated.

  “Hello, daddy,” Henaghan said. Despite everything, she still harbored some affection for the old man. When she wasn’t thinking about how he’d stood by and done nothing while her mother had systematically tortured her.

  “Your roommate seems nice,” Olivia said.

  Quinn rolled her eyes. “She’s not my roommate. She’s my girlfriend. As in we have sex together.”

  The older woman flushed. “Yes, well…”

  “Please,” Tom said. “We’re just here to visit and see how you’re doing. If you could be civil to your mother…” He rounded the coffee table and sat down again next to Mia.

  “Okay. But only if I can raise up my dress and we can count all the little ways she was civil to me.”

  Olivia stood upright like a piston. She looked like a synthesis of Quinn and Mia and, at five foot even, she was right between them in height. “I don’t have to take this!” she said. She’d been ready for Quinn’s opening salvo. Waiting even. Mrs. Henaghan was nothing if not a practiced thespian. “I was trying to help you! We’ve been over this and over this.”

  Henaghan folded her arms in front of her chest and looked at her mother. “Right. Over it and over it. And yet, somehow, with all that talk, I never got how jabbing a little girl with a poker was you being helpful.”

  “Look at you now,” Olivia said as if Quinn’s current state were somehow evidence of her good intentions. “You’re famous. World famous. I was only trying to do that for you sooner.”

  “Make me famous?”

  The angry woman’s eyes darted side to side. She mirrored her daughter’s posture and remained defiant. “No. Not famous. Powerful. Commanding. Worthy of respect.”

  “Because I wasn’t worthy of respect before? Certainly you didn’t respect me. I was a prop. A toy.” Quinn turned to her father. She could speak frankly in front of Mia. Between living with a wizard and having one as a sibling, even someone as dense and self-involved as Mia had figured out what was going on. “Can you do magic?” Quinn said to Tom. “I never had the chance to ask you that. In retrospect, I’m guessing not. Otherwise, our lives would’ve been different. I didn’t really know about any of this stuff until I got out here.”