Giving Him Hell_A Saturn's Daughter Novel Page 2

  Since the gas cloud earlier in the fall, casual violence had become chronic. Occasional bouts of benevolence erupted as well, but mostly they went unheralded—just like in the real world.

  I reached Max’s—Senator Vanderventer’s—voice mail. “You flaming moron,” I shouted at the phone. “Do you want to get these nice people killed? Pull your Do-Gooders out of here now, before your grandmother starts crisping them!”

  I wished I had enough money to fling phones at the wall to express my frustration, but I’m not that rich. I clicked OFF and shoved the cell into my pocket. Lawyers probably shouldn’t throw tantrums anyway.

  “Grandmother?” Cora asked, crossing her arms and letting the snake wrapped around her biceps sink back into her tattoo. Once upon a time, Cora had been a prostitute working the streets in the Zone. Weirdly, the chemical flood had given her tattooed snakes a life. That was just how the Zone worked. “Were we talking to the good senator? Must be nice to have private congressional phone numbers.”

  “Dane’s a tool meant to be used,” I muttered.

  Granny Vanderventer had been evil, as in demonically impaired. She and her real son, Senator Dane Vanderventer, had my boyfriend Max killed and had done their best to kill me.

  Except Max’s Do-Gooder soul now resided in his cousin Dane’s senator body, which was a source of constant confusion. Don’t make me explain.

  “And what does our good senator have to do with flaming wreaths?” Cora asked with interest, as the fireman attempted to find a hydrant. I winced as a hose melted before they could hook it up.

  “Dane’s formed a foundation with granny’s money to improve the Zone that she polluted.” I should have known he’d do that. I’d threatened him with mayhem if he dared close down Acme, because mass unemployment was as toxic as chemicals in this industrial backwater. The DGs were his retaliation. “I’m sure he didn’t order flaming wreaths, though. Do you think there’s a gas leak?”

  Cora gazed at the pole outside the office with interest. “They were gas lamps once, but they quit working a gazillion years ago. The city wired them for electricity back before the chemical spill, but they’ve been blowing out lately. Maybe they’ve reached their expiration dates.”

  I didn’t have to turn to recognize the snort of derision behind me as Andre’s.

  “They call it infrastructure deterioration,” he said, pocketing his own cell now that the posse had arrived. “Our sewers and water mains are leaking, the underground wires are corroding, and the gas lines are decaying. And until recently, we didn’t have enough tax base to be worth the city’s time. The good senator has apparently been pulling strings to finally get inspectors down here.” He didn’t say that with appreciation.

  I wasn’t so certain that bad wiring was at fault, but Andre hadn’t seen Granny’s face screaming at him from a gas flame. Max and I had, though, and we knew there were stranger things between heaven and earth than even Hamlet knew about. After all, Max had lived in the outer rings of hell—or another dimension—for a while.

  “And here come the infrastructure police.” I nodded at a yellow truck covered in ladders and spitting out men in hard hats and orange vests. “That was mighty quick.”

  The fire department’s tanker truck arrived at the same time. Amazing. Two trucks at once—Max had really been leaning on the city. Usually, they just waited for us to burn down. This bunch intelligently hooked hoses to the tank instead of hunting non-working hydrants.

  Andre ignored the wreaths and firemen and focused on the utility guys. “That was one of the notices I gave you this morning,” he said, his usual insouciance barely hiding his irritation. “For whatever reason, we’re to be inundated with line crews covering every damned utility at once. I predict power outages and gas shut-offs in our future.”

  I shivered, but not just from the chilly wind. I didn’t need to walk between dimensions as Andre did to predict the future. I had an overabundance of common sense and disaster expertise to calculate the odds of the city approving of sidewalks that turned to mud and stoplights that flashed rainbows. Or manholes containing sentient Cookie Monster blobs. Trepidation escalated to flashing amber alert.

  “Let’s go shopping,” I told Cora as a white hard hat walked our way. “I don’t want to be here for this.”

  “Frank has our computer cable wired outside the Zone,” Cora said. “But I’ll have to shut the machines down if they’re turning off the electricity. We can’t risk frying the equipment.”

  Frank was the shadowy owner of Discreet Detection. He’d been helpful in the past, but I wouldn’t want to dig too deeply into his business or his abilities. Right now, the sign above his agency was flashing a collage of unsavory mug shots—including the mayor’s. There’d been a time when my photo had been up there.

  So much for normal. Resigned to hunting down new monsters instead of holiday shopping, I waited for the hardhat guy to finish flipping through his clipboard of papers. In the TV ads, guys with hardhats had six-pack abs and cleft chins. This guy was bundled up to his ears in a down jacket and wore a wool scarf muffling everything above the jacket. Management, I concluded, not acclimated to working outside.

  “We’re gonna have to shut down the electricity for a few hours, folks,” Hard Hat informed us, handing over a printed memo.

  “This can’t wait until after the holidays?” I asked, covering my half frozen nose with my gloved hand. “This is the busiest time of year for the shops around here.”

  Well, for the clubs and bars, anyway. The florist shop and a minimart up the road was as close to legitimate businesses as it came.

  “Won’t be busy if they burn to the ground,” Hard Hat said laconically, nodding at the flaming lampposts that the fire hoses hadn’t doused. He walked off without further pleasantries.

  “Crap.” I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jacket as Cora ran back in to turn off the computers, and Andre headed for Bill’s Biker Bar to set his own office in order.

  Down the block, Ernesto, manager of Chesty’s Bar and Grill, shouted his rage and shook his fat fists at another utility worker. Chesty’s is a bar and restaurant with pole dancers that caters to the industrial workers from the plants to the north. Andre owns it, but Ernesto was apparently furious at having to turn out his lunch crowd.

  I studied the fizzling wreaths with disgruntlement. “If that’s you, Gloria,” I told the post, “I’m sending your bony ass straight to the deepest bowels of hell, so you’d better think twice about messing with me, lady.”

  The wire shot sparks.

  See, this was where superstition started. I could believe Granny had heard me, or I could figure the wiring was faulty. Except in my case, it was almost always the supernatural and not natural physics at work. My life was such an interesting balance of the impossible and the improbable.

  That was Granny in there all right, doing her best to destroy us. Her last goal in life had been to shut down the Zone so Acme could take it over. I didn’t know why and cared less. She was gone. I wasn’t. I would not let her have a second chance to destroy my home from the Other World—if I had to hunt blue monsters to prove it.

  Three

  I considered hunting my sisters in Saturn—I had their useless web page so I knew they existed in some form—but I had a notion that ones with experience in evil electrical wiring were thin on the ground. Besides, I had been handling problems on my own practically since infancy, so I had no good mechanism for saying help me, even if I had a way of contacting them, which I didn’t.

  With a sigh of regret at missing my personal holiday celebration , I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets and stalked down the nearest alley. If Cookie Monsters and fried utilities had any relation, I needed to slay me a monster.

  Reaching the dead man’s land between the Zone buildings and the harbor, I could see no blue blobs. The usual assortment of vagrants camped on the chemically polluted ground, undisturbed by the Zone’s peculiarity. Of course, some of the tent people were as peculiar
as the Zone.

  Avoiding a lackadaisical fist fight just outside the fenced-off harbor, I turned back up the next alley—not a blue blob in sight. I headed home without a clue of how to stop Gloria. I shuddered at the possibility that the answer was—blow up the Zone.

  My fancy new phone rang the “Star-Spangled Banner,” jarring me from my funk. The Zone has a warped sense of humor I’d hoped to shut out when I’d bought the not-so-smart phone. I had not programmed in the song, but I knew who it was.

  I punched a button without bothering to check ID. “Max, if Granny doesn’t set your ass on fire, I will. You had—”

  “She’s already tried,” Max/Dane said with weariness. “My condo went up in flames about three this morning. Don’t you ever listen to the news?”

  “Oh crap.” I picked up my pace. “I work, remember? Listening to the news is for retired people. What happened? Are you all right?”

  I didn’t much care if his ultra-wealthy neighbors lost their Guccis and Rolexes, but I still cared about Max. Learning how to retrieve him from a hellish dimension had been an education I’ll never forget.

  “I had my gas turned off, but the lines burst next door. We have good fire walls and smoke detectors and everyone escaped, but flames went through the roof and both units are total losses. If Gloria is causing trouble in the Zone, too, then she’s on a rampage.”

  “We have no proof,” I offered tentatively. “It could be coincidence. Mercury retrograde maybe. We just got flaming wreaths and steaming manholes down here.”

  He almost chuckled. “Dump steaming shit down them and see what happens.”

  “Love to, but now we have inspectors crawling all over the place and dumping shit on them probably won’t improve their humor. And your damned Do-Gooders are in danger of going to hell with the rest of us. Call them off, Max. They don’t deserve this.”

  I shoved my key in the front door lock and yelled a greeting to Mrs. Bodine, my landlady, to let her know it was just me before tramping up the boarding house stairs.

  “No one deserves this. We have to stop whatever’s happening in the Zone, Justy,” Max said, back to weariness again.

  Max was the only one who got to call me Justy.

  “Now that Paddy has some control over Acme,” he continued, “we have to clean up the environmental disaster the plant’s created.”

  Paddy is Dane’s father, Max’s uncle, and theoretically a stockholder in Acme. He either plays his hand close or he’s missing a lot of marbles, take your choice. Sadly, a mad scientist might be our only link to sanity and responsibility at Acme.

  “You can’t clean up the Zone by frying the innocent,” I warned, unlocking both locks on my door. Caution-is-me. “I’ll deal with Granny and Acme, if I have to, but not Do-Gooders going up in flame.”

  “I’ll call the agency and tell them to pull back until we’ve determined if the area is safe,” he agreed. “But I don’t guarantee the Zone will ever be safe. If Granny Gloria can still rampage after she’s dead, you need to go somewhere she can’t find you, like Alaska.”

  “I’m freezing my buns off in bloody Baltimore!” I cried, wiggling out of my jacket as I hit the warmth of my rooms. “No way. This is my home now, and I’m not running from Dane’s grandmother.” Having spent most of my childhood traveling with my wayfaring mother, I had home issues. I wanted roots.

  Putting down roots in polluted soil made no sense to normal people. It apparently did for me. I blamed it on my contaminated gene pool. “Gloria is going down, and I’m taking her there. Where are you now?”

  “I have a driver running me over to Hell’s Mansion. I’d rather Granny burned it down than my neighbors,” he said dryly.

  Ah, that explained his weariness. Max had hated his cousin Dane and Dane’s grandmother Gloria when they’d been alive. He had reason to hate their mansion, the one Acme had built on blood money, where Gloria had died so spectacularly. Despite his distaste, it belonged to Dane/Max now. Max’s soul lived a life of irony these days.

  And Granny’s house was sitting on wide open land well above the rest of the neighbors. It could go boom and Baltimore would simply admire the fireworks.

  “Ruxton is a pretty far hike from D.C.,” I argued. “Find a fancy hotel and forget the mansion.”

  “I have to decide what to do with it sometime. Congress is closed for winter break, so I might as well look around now.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I muttered, sitting on the floor and taking Milo in my lap. Milo was a tailless, tufted Manx who looked like a baby bobcat. In the Zone, it was hard to say what he really was, but he never hurt anyone unless they tried to hurt me. His purrs soothed my troubled soul. “Did Papa MacNeill invite you for a fun family dinner over the holiday or are you on your own?”

  The MacNeills were Max’s real family. They thought he was dead and didn’t know his soul had moved into his cousin’s body after Dane had abandoned it—probably in embarrassment at getting caught trying to kill me. Middle class families were merely dysfunctional. Max’s family was rich and powerful and had thus acquired a higher degree of impairment.

  “I could invite myself, if I was interested.” Max didn’t sound interested. “What are you doing for the holiday?”

  “Updating case files, filing petitions, the usual thing.” Hunting for my invisible and possibly dead grandmother Themis, looking for other Daughters of Saturn, and gunning for Gloria’s evil soul, but I’d rather sound busy than nuts.

  “I have tickets to a D.C. gala this weekend. Go with me,” he said impulsively.

  That was my old Harley-riding rebel Max speaking. I scratched Milo behind the ears and shook my head. “Not happening, babe,” I said regretfully. “You’re everything I oppose these days. Bad bad karma.”

  “You’ll look gorgeous, no one will know who you are, and we can both get bombed on pricey drinks we don’t have to pay for. It’s a holiday, celebrate!”

  I’d never looked gorgeous. Thanks to my weird ancestry, I have a naturally tan middle-eastern complexion, and thanks to Saturn Daddy granting my wishes, I now have good hair and straight teeth, but the bus stops there. “You’re sounding a little desperate, Maxie. Take one of Dane’s dollies to the party and boff her silly after. You’ll be fine.” I hated saying that, but the truth was, as lovely as Dane’s body was, I wasn’t attracted to it.

  I wasn’t even certain I’d loved Max while he was alive. I’d learned he was a lying shit just like most men. I might occasionally be desperate but never stupid enough to make the same mistake twice.

  But dressing up and getting plastered had its appeal. And it had been a damned long time since I’d had sex. I had to admit to temptation.

  “Maybe I will. Anything is better than staying in this place,” he said gloomily. “The car just reached the gate. I’ll buzz the DGs and call off the kids. Stay safe, Justy.”

  I don’t know how he did it. I wanted to rip him a new one for bringing the nutwings down on us, but I ended up feeling sorry for him. Hanging up, I cuddled Milo. “It’s you and me, babe. Simpler that way.”

  I called up Fat Chick in Canada’s blog, another Saturn’s Daughter. She’s not really fat but Viking goddess beautiful. We’d been e-mailing occasionally, enough for me to learn that she’d been crippled when she’d gone looking for a car thief to execute because she wanted to ask Saturn Daddy for a new car. Really bad karma. Thieves are redeemable, especially the young ones, and killing them isn’t justified. So Saturn put her in a set of wheels of his choice.

  Our super-abilities came with a rough downside if we didn’t carry out justice correctly.

  Does anyone know anything about evil and hell’s dimensions? I typed under her public comments, not knowing what else to ask. I mean, how do you phrase conundrums like that? No wonder we had communication problems. I kept hoping there was a Saturn’s Daughter out there who could at least intelligently discuss my questions, but Fat Chick knew about as much as I did.

  “You could give your daughters an instruct
ion book!” I told Saturn while fixing my sandwich. As usual, he didn’t answer. Not that I knew if he was an actual entity or just a genetic flaw. No instruction book, remember. All I had was the name. My own family couldn’t tell me more. I liked the astrology aspect of Saturn better than the astronomy one though. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been born on the planet Saturn, but I was a December baby. I’m actually a Sagittarius, but Capricorn/Saturn might be considered part of my astrological identity. Maybe my mother lied about my birth date.

  To pacify my shopping urge and keep the holiday mood before returning to monster hunting, I cruised some on-line sites and ordered a few presents. I still didn’t have a credit card, but I had sufficient cash now to fund a Paypal account.

  It was easy to order for my more human friends, but what did one buy for a former thug and frog turned gay assistant? Or amoral Andre, who had everything except a soul, apparently.

  Not expecting any immediate replies from Fat Chick—we hadn’t exchanged real names and exchanging phone numbers with a murderous Amazon gave even me a creepy feeling—I hugged Milo and ordered him to be my guard cat. I still had normal work to do. As long as the Zone was simply shut down by normal utility workers and not in danger of blowing up, hunting Gloria and blue blobs had to come under after-hours tasks.

  I dashed across the street to my office. The snow was falling harder. Brushing off my discontent with the snowflakes, I took some satisfaction from entering my very own law office. Being a lawyer with my own space gave me a warm tingle of accomplishment that was almost as good as sex. Almost.

  The Do-Gooder, Rob Hanks, and Ned looked up at my entrance. Uh-oh. I dragged my fingers through my uncut mane to remove ice particles and narrowed my eyes at them.

  “I thought you’d be gone by now,” I said rudely. Rob reminded me of myself in college, when I’d egged the provost’s office in protest against his fraudulent practices. At the time, I probably should have been locked up for my own safety. Rob had that same look of determined idealism.