Nefertiti’s Curse: An Urban Fantasy Page 11

  Landon’s ring began vibrating nonstop. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll keep them around. Now shall we discuss the matter at hand?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are you able to help us deal with this Baynin character? He represents a threat to both sides.”

  “I am going to slowly reach out and hand your associate a memory stick,” Isabella said. “Please advise your security.”

  One of the women behind Landon spoke into a microphone at her cuff.

  Two marksmen in Landon’s security detail took aim.

  Isabella handed the drive over.

  “What’s on it?”

  “A start. It contains certain intelligence we have gathered regarding the being known as Baynin.”

  “How do I know it’s not duplicative of what we already have?”

  “I assure you it is not.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Do you know the difference between a monster and a person?”

  “A monster doesn’t have a soul,” Landon said.

  “The difference is that a monster roars out loud.”

  “We’ll review your intelligence. If it’s worthwhile, we’ll get back to you.”

  “Naturally.”

  “How can our teams coordinate if that becomes necessary?”

  “There is a phone number on the back of the memory disk that your National Security Agency will be unable to monitor.”

  “What are you requesting in exchange for this intelligence and your ongoing cooperation?”

  “Two simple things. First, we would like the right to vote. We pay taxes, contribute to the economy and protect our national borders from supernatural threats you have no idea even exist. It is only just that we be enfranchised. There is no legal ground to deny us this fundamental American right.”

  “I doubt werewolves at the polls would go over well.”

  “Those of us for whom it is imprudent to be seen publicly can vote by mail-in ballot.”

  “What’s the second item?”

  “That is more of a personal request. I ask that we always be honest with each other. No matter how difficult the truth may be, it is always better than the alternative.”

  Despite the briefings he had been given, some part of Landon had wondered if Ms. Osilvilic would show up with a pointy hat and a broomstick. A different part of him had read her last name and automatically questioned her patriotism. But now he decided that whatever kind of godless monstrosity really lurked behind her fetching exterior, it was a worthy opponent. He said, “To the extent we can stay within the bounds of the law and the safety of the public, both of those things are doable. You have my word.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Maya called Xavier.

  “What’s up, Maya?”

  “You, apparently.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Check your phone. I just sent you something.”

  “Oh snap!” Xavier said ten seconds later. “Where did you get this?”

  “An anonymous sender emailed it to the public inbox at Celebscoop.com, which, lucky for you, I monitor.”

  “Are there more photos?”

  “Nineteen more.”

  Xavier winced. “Do you know that because you counted the files or because you looked at the photos?”

  “I would never violate the sanctity of your intimate moments with Zina.”

  “Maya...”

  “Okay, you got me. I looked at the whole set multiple times. Can I just say: Holy Microphones Batman! You guys should teach a yoga class or something. And X?”

  “Yes?”

  “Wow! It’s true what they say.”

  “I’m getting uncomfortable.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Clearly. Did you delete the photos from their server?”

  “I did. You owe me nine bucks by the way.”

  “For what?”

  “Half the remote controls in my house are missing batteries now.”

  “T-M-I. Who sent the photos to them?”

  “The metadata in the pictures matches Zina’s phone model, but the fingerprint on the header packet shows the email came from a different device. I was able to backtrack the network hops and decrypt the phone company’s lame TLS 1.0 certificate to see that the message originated from a cell tower in Largo, Maryland.”

  He frowned.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Harlem, New York

  Xavier sat on the steps of a dilapidated brownstone watching the progress of a dice game across the street. A scrawny young white man dressed in a white tank top and sagging jeans was winning wads of cash from three similarly dressed African American men.

  When the inevitable accusations of cheating started, Xavier walked over.

  “All I know is you bedda give me my duckets back,” one of the players shouted down into the white man’s face.

  “Yo, hate the game don’t the playas,” the white man replied as he backed away and scanned the immediate area for the best escape route.

  Tyler Flanagan was a luck sprite, a child produced from a liaison between a human male and the Goddess of Good Fortune. Lady Luck was many things, but a loving mother was not of one of them. After giving birth she routinely left the newborn child on the doorstep of the father’s home and then permanently disappeared from their lives. Nearly all the fathers were men of Celtic ancestry, which some found a curious preference for a deity who always appeared in human form as an attractive young Asian woman. What was not a curiosity was her appetite for male companionship. There were more than one hundred living luck sprites around the globe, none of whom had suffered any physical or emotional harm from their maternal abandonment. Each of Lady Luck’s offspring had a limited supernatural ability to manipulate probabilities, which many quietly put to good use in the world’s financial markets. Things almost always went their way, making them among the happiest, healthiest and richest people in the world.

  The same was not true of their fathers. About nine months after the marvelous few weeks they got to spend with Lady Luck, they unexpectedly became single parents, a task made all the more challenging by the unusually bad luck they experienced for the rest of their lives.

  Tyler only remembered his father as an emotionally detached alcoholic who had committed suicide, but his aunt claimed his dad had once been a dashing bachelor who owned the largest electrical supply business in West Chester County. As a boy enjoying an otherwise happy childhood with his aunt and her loving husband, Tyler rarely gave his parentage much thought. Then, when they were on a family vacation at a ski resort for his tenth birthday, he unexpectedly met his mother.

  Tyler and his uncle had been waiting for an elevator when a red-headed young man walked up with an Asian woman on his arm. The couple had been sharing an apparently hilarious joke when Tyler made eye contact with the woman, who stopped laughing and narrowed her eyes at him. Somehow, he knew this woman was his mother. He opened his mouth to speak but the woman quickly led her beau toward the opposite end of the hall and disappeared down a stairwell.

  His bad luck started minutes later in the hotel lobby when the concierge informed them that the ski lift had to be shut down for emergency maintenance. It continued when he was expelled from his expensive private school for being caught trying to dispose of a bag of marijuana someone had dropped in front of his locker. It peaked when his guardians were killed in an auto accident and a paperwork error led to him becoming a ward of the foster care system in Yonkers instead of the wealthy part of the county where he should have been placed. His teen years in Yonkers had taught him that adopting the dress, dialect and other cultural affectations of the African American community caused him to get into fewer fights.

  His good luck and ability to affect statistical outcomes spontaneously returned on his twenty-first birthday, a point in his life when he thought that winning a few hundred dollars on dangerous street corners was living well.

  Half the time all he won was a brutal beating.
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  The man grabbed a fist full of Tyler’s tank top. “The game is ‘bout to go up in your mouth, Casper.”

  “C’mon Laron!” Tyler shouted as he tried to squirm free. “Don’t do me like this.”

  One of the others started to riffle through Tyler’s pockets.

  “Check his socks too,” Laron told his minion.

  Then Tyler was snatched from their midst so swiftly it took the men a second to realize he was no longer there.

  Laron turned to his right to find Tyler cowering behind Xavier. “What the...”

  Xavier tossed a thick roll of bills wrapped at the thug. “I just broke you off a grip that’s way more than Ty copped from you in Cee-lo. Me and my man gonna bounce a’ight?”

  Laron fingered the roll of cash. “Yo Dunn, who you?”

  “Just count your doe and go back to huggin’ the block,” Xavier said. “Don’t worry ‘bout who I am.”

  Another one of the men stepped up. “Ty, you know this cat?”

  Tyler glanced at Xavier. “Yeah, he my people.”

  Laron drew a battered handgun from his waistband and cocked the hammer. “Oh Word? Well you bedda tell your people you still need to come up off the rest of my cheddar.”

  “Oh for real?” Xavier asked.

  “Yeah Homey,” Laron said, looming over Xavier. “This Harlem World. I’m ‘bout to take your doe and his doe for comin’ on my block with some broke ass dice.”

  Over Laron’s shoulder, Xavier could see the residents of the street begin to scatter. He waited until he could no longer see any children present, then he looked at Laron and said, “Make it happen, Dunn.”

  Laron swung his gun hand with the intention of pistol whipping the stranger.

  With lightning speed and thunderous force, Xavier thrust his left palm forward and broke the man’s wrist.

  Laron dropped the pistol and yelled in pain.

  One of the other men tried to flank Xavier, but Ty produced his own pistol and pointed it at the attacker’s face. “Don’t do dat, Leek.”

  Leek stopped short.

  Xavier gave the third member of Laron’s crew a menacing glare. The man stepped backward with his hands up.

  To Xavier’s surprise, Tyler tossed his entire wad of cash at Leek’s feet, sending bills fluttering in the air.

  “That’s all the doe,” the sprite said to Leek with new bravery in his voice. “Now we ‘bout to get ghost before I have to peel somebody’s wig back. A’ight?”

  Leek nodded. “A’ight.”

  * * *

  In the shadow beneath a stoop two blocks away, Tyler did a celebratory jig. “Yo, wait ‘til I Giz and Craig what I did to Laron and ‘em.”

  Xavier scowled. “If you had any sense, you would never set foot in this neighborhood again.” He craned his neck to look down the street. “Where the hell is my Uber?”

  Tyler found that incredulous. “You’re sick. That might as well be my block now. And your Uber got grayballed, B.”

  “Gray what?”

  “I think I need to pull your Black Card.”

  “Why?”

  “For not knowing that half the time you request an Uber in the hood they send your request to a fake app that doesn’t call anybody. It’s called Grayballing.”

  “That’s a thing?”

  “You just lost all the dap I gave you for rollin’ up on the block like Big Homey. I know you’re tapping celebrity ass and live out by the country club now, but I always heard you grew up on the real side of Philly.”

  Xavier pulled out his phone. “You know what, I’m calling Lyft.”

  A few moments passed. “Real rap,” Tyler said. “What are you doing here? I can handle my own business.”

  “Your business must be getting your ass beat.”

  “It’s real in the field.”

  “I came to ask for your help. Something crazy is about to pop off and we’ll need all the luck we can get.”

  “Does this have something to do with Poppy lacing the Fam with turbo?”

  “Baynin’s been through here?”

  “The streets are always watchin’. You gotta keep an eye out for cats suddenly changing their behavior ‘cause it might mean they’re trickin’ Mollies with the Five-Oh.”

  “What’s good?”

  “Ol’ girl over on a hundred-twenty-third stop coming out on trash day a month ago.”

  Many practitioners of witchcraft had the habit of going through garbage looking for blood, hair and other items useful for casting spells.

  “She still around?”

  “Uh huh. She still goes to the bodega every week to cop pickled meat and borax, but every time I see her now she looks five years younger than she did the last time. And she stopped mumbling to herself.”

  Xavier held out his phone. “Pin drop her building on my GPS.”

  Tyler’s concentration was interrupted by the sound of screeching tires and slamming car doors. He stuck his head up for a look. “Aw damn,” he said, quickly crouching back down.

  “What is it?” Xavier asked, rising to his feet.

  “It’s Diesel and ‘em.”

  The plume of fear pheromones emanating from Tyler told Xavier all he needed to know. He peeked out and saw that both ends of the street had been blocked off by vehicles. Two groups of five men were converging on their hiding spot. Leek was among the group approaching from the West, following behind a tall and heavily muscled black man with a pronounced beard.

  That would be Diesel.

  Xavier was frantically thinking of ways he could end this without any bystanders getting shot when a late model Cadillac Escalade plowed through one of the cars barricading the street and skidded to halt in front of their stoop. Its rear door flew open. A man in his thirties with chocolate brown skin who was every bit as stout as Diesel leapt out and ran straight toward the bearded man.

  Xavier’s hope for a deathless outcome deflated when he recognized who it was.

  Tyrone “Neph” Carter was a ruthless drug lord and one of the world’s two living Nephilim, the child of an angel and a human mother.

  Mayhem ensued.

  Diesel’s men on the eastern end of the street opened fire on the Escalade, which seemed to be armored. Several errant shots broke out windows in nearby buildings. People screamed. The front passenger door of the Escalade swung open and a man with a military-grade assault rifle returned fire, shattering windshields and blowing away chunks of asphalt.

  Xavier dove back under the stoop. Below him, Tyler curled into a fetal position and covered his head from the cement dust raining down around them.

  Someone inside the Escalade threw a hand-sewn rag doll into the air through the open sunroof. Instead of falling back to the ground, it hung in the air like it was immune to gravity. Every bullet that was fired after that flew straight up and struck the doll.

  Diesel and Neph collided. Diesel pancaked backward like an ironing board crashing into a speeding freight train. Neph stepped over the body and headed for Leek, who was able to get off three point-blank shots. Neph didn’t even slow down as the bullets bounced off his skin. He grabbed Leek and body slammed him so hard it made the sidewalk buckle.

  The shooter on the front passenger side of the Escalade exchanged his assault rifle for a flamethrower after the doll went into the air. He swept the street, burning men and cars alike.

  Neph ripped a rearview mirror off a nearby car and threw it like a boomerang at a fleeing figure fifty yards away. The mirror struck the man in the lower back, causing him to topple. He was about to pursue another victim when Xavier shouted, “Neph! That’s enough, man!”

  Neph smiled.

  A brown-skinned woman in her fifties wearing a yellow headwrap and matching sundress leaned out of Neph’s Escalade and said a few words in Swahili that made the ragdoll float gently down into her hand. Then she yelled something much harder at the two men in the front seat, which caused them to jump out of the vehicle with sponges and buckets. They began collecting blood from
the decimated bodies scattered around the vehicle.

  Sirens were wailing.

  Neph walked back to the Escalade. “Let’s roll out,” he said when he passed Xavier.

  Xavier turned to follow but then saw a horrified Tyler standing over Leek’s body. He walked over and placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  “Me and Leek came up in some of the same group homes in Yonkers,” Tyler said. “Is this my fault?”

  Xavier didn’t know the answer. “You should go before the cops get here.”

  The horn of Neph’s Escalade blared. “X!” Neph shouted. “Let’s bounce! Now!”

  Xavier turned in that direction and noticed that Neph’s black Escalade looked like a red minivan from where he was standing. He stepped more to his left and it turned into a white cargo van.

  An NYPD patrol car lurched to a stop at the west end of the block. Xavier sprinted over to Neph’s vehicle, which had already started moving. He leapt into the backseat and Neph yanked the door shut behind him.

  The woman in yellow sat on the opposite seat holding a human eyeball. As soon as the door closed behind Xavier, she plunged a sewing needle into the iris, causing a white shimmer to pass over the vehicle. After that, no one on the outside reacted to their passing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  As their vehicle sped away from the scene, Xavier got a better look at the woman who had tossed the doll into the air. She had long matted dreadlocks and wore a necklace made of various kinds of rusted safety pins. She sat across from him muttering curses and doing her best to stabilize the lids on a half-dozen plastic bottles filled with dark liquid.

  Xavier grimaced at the Soucoyant, a type of witch native to Western Africa that was infamous for powering their magic with human blood. The fresher the blood, the stronger the spell. Following Neph around would give her access to a lot of it.

  “You know what your problem is, Young Buck?” Neph asked. Xavier looked out the window. “I’m guessing it has

  something to do with not being enough like you.”

  “Nobody’s like me,” Neph snapped. “Your problem is that you treat everybody according to the way they act at a wedding or at church on Sunday. You give everybody the benefit of the doubt. But you can’t judge anybody based on that. You have to treat people based on the way they behave the rest of the week.”