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Synopsis

If there's one thing Eric Carter can count on, it's his past coming back to bite him in the ass.

Gabriela Cortez, La Bruja, has had her soul trapped... somewhere, and the only one who knows how to get it back is the Oracle of Las Vegas, a powerful artifact that Carter helped create almost thirty years before. It doesn't just predict the future--it makes things happen, influencing events to reach the goal it wants.

Only somebody's gone and stolen it, attempting to turn it into an artifact that doesn't just change the future, but also the past.

Eric needs to find it and steal it back before this comes to pass. If he doesn't, Gabriela's soul is lost. And quite possibly the future as well.

Excerpt

Chapter 1

Everyone dies alone.

Doesn't matter if you crack your head on the shower floor or go up in a fireball surrounded by a hundred-fifty people in a cratered Boeing. It's unique no matter how it happens. It's your death and yours alone. Your experience of it-and believe me, no matter how unconscious you might be, you're experiencing it-is shaped by context.

Who you are, what you believe, the things you've done. They're what make your dying an experience that no one else will ever have.

Let's take Las Vegas. There are places on the planet that shouldn't exist. Vegas is near the top of that list. An artificial oasis in the middle of a desert wasteland fed by the waters of Lake Mead, it's about as fake a place as you can find. But there's one authentic thing about it you won't find anywhere else in the U.S.

See, Vegas is the suicide capital of America. You don't get much more real than that.

You'd think it's people who blew all their savings at the blackjack tables or the locals who just can't handle living in Sin City, anymore, right? Not even.

The ones holing up in their hotel rooms with a fifth of Jack and a bottle of Ambien come to Vegas with a plan. They come to party, gamble, maybe hire a hooker or two, and then make their exit. A final blowout before their final blowout, so to speak.

This is where being a necromancer and seeing the dead gets to be a problem. We can't shut it off. I get to watch the Echoes, Haunts, and Wanderers of the desperate and lost as I drive by the hotels on the Strip. Even the ones I can't see directly, I can feel. I know they're there.

You got those who went with guns; always a popular choice, particularly with the largest demographic, middle-aged white men. Hanging, of course. That's number two on the list. Drugs and alcohol are a distant third. And that's as true in Vegas as anywhere else.

There used to be a lot more jumpers, though. Last time I was here it was like watching a fucking waterfall. But hotels started sealing their windows a long time back and a lot of those ghosts have faded over time.

Sure, it's only a couple hundred visitors a year offing themselves, but that stacks up fast. I was last here almost twenty-five, maybe thirty years ago. That's something like six thousand new dead just on suicides and about a third of them leave ghosts behind.

And for however much all those deaths seem similar, every single one is unique. Every one. Viva Las Vegas.

Vegas isn't all corpses and slot machines. Take Candyland, for instance. It's not a strip club, though there's a lot of that going on, and it's not a sex club, though it's got a lot of that going on, too.

To call Candyland high-end would be an understatement. Saudi princes, movie moguls, the wealthiest people you've never heard of. They're here for the exclusivity, the mystique. Not just anybody gets in. Sometimes not even the Saudi princes.

The club sits in an old, squat office building, gutted and rebuilt with pure hedonism in mind. When most people find out about it, they're surprised more people don't know it. That's just its magic at work. If you know about it, you're supposed to know about it. If you don't, you don't.

The line for Candyland is half a block long. Men and women in sharp black suits open doors to help the uber-rich out of their limos while taxis disgorge the hoi polloi at the curb.

Everybody standing out here is a Las Vegas high roller or wants to be. The only thing they have in common is that most of them aren't getting through those doors. But they'll stand out here waiting and hoping. Why? Because it's fucking Candyland.

I walk past the line to a group of well-dressed bouncers, stupidly wealthy clubbers glaring daggers at me. The bouncers are what you'd expect for a place like this, big, beefy, immaculately dressed. They're well-schooled in the rules of Roadhouse: be nice until it's time to not be nice.

One man stands at a podium checking names off of those allowed to get in tonight. I can tell he's a mage. He's got a subtle-for this town, at least-spell going. At a guess I'd say he's turned up his senses and is sniffing around for any magic. I don't have any spells going and I'm not drawing any power from the local pool, so as far as he's concerned I'm just some random asshole trying to cut in.

Those are really the only ways you can identify a mage. Like we're all walking around with concealed guns but nobody else knows about it until we either pull it out to load or start shooting. Mage fights are kind of annoying that way.

"End of the line's down there, sir," he says.

"Here to see the Twins," I say. "I'm expected." I better fucking be expected.

"Name?" The bouncer pulls a clipboard from behind the stool he's been sitting on.

"Eric Carter." The bouncer freezes. I can feel a tension in the other bouncers behind him.

"You're, uh . . ." He swallows hard. "You're not on the list."

"Look harder." He flips a page and the relief washing over him is like watching a cresting wave.

"Yeah, you're good. Go on in. They're in room one."

"Thanks." The men covering the door step aside as if they might catch something contagious from me. I stop right before stepping through. "Am I really that scary?"

"I saw your fight last week."

"Ah."

"Yeah," he says.

I helped a friend out by fighting her cousin in a deathmatch. Complicated family politics. A group of people who make the Borgias look like amateurs. I thought I'd throw him off by having the ring owner make the fight public. I just hadn't realized how public.

Thousands of people saw me in person, and thousands more streaming live or later online. Anything resembling anonymity among the mage community has gone straight to hell. Doesn't help that I paraded the other guy's severed head around the ring. They say any press is good press. I can tell you from experience that that's not the case.

I don't say anything else, just push my way inside and let them think whatever they're going to think. There's power in anonymity, but there's power in being recognized, too. No matter what, I'm going to be different things to different people. The constant seems to be that they fear me or hate me. That's okay. I do, too.

The inside is the classiest not-actually-a-strip-club you'll ever see. Multiple stages with beautiful dancers, men and women, lots of dark booths, VIP rooms, bars. And loud, though you're only going to hear what's in your immediate vicinity once you get to a table. They use magic to bend the sound away. Gives it an air of intimacy and also lets you actually hear a conversation.

Another bouncer in a black suit and tie with a maroon shirt and a conspicuous bulge that isn't happy to see me stands watching a staircase to the private rooms upstairs. That's where I'm headed.

"Mister Carter," the bouncer says, stepping aside to let me pass. "You'll want room one. Great fight, by the way. Hope you do another one soon."

Fuck, I don't. If I hadn't had an ace up my sleeve, I'd be a smear on the floor right now. I just nod and head up. The music fades a bit as I go up the stairs, leaving a persistent squeal in my ears.

I stop at the top of the stairs. Do I really want to do this? The place has changed drastically, which is probably just as well. I have, too.

I was murdered on a school blacktop in Los Angeles about five years ago. Because of a deal I'd made with an Aztec goddess, my soul went to Mictlan, the Aztec land of the dead. The deal was to act as a stand-in for the god Mictlantecuhtli. To sort of grow him, in a way, with my humanity as the core. It's complicated.

About a month ago the human part of Mictlantecuhtli was pulled out of Mictlan and dumped into a new body. That would be me. Or us. I'm still not clear on what pronouns to use.

I'm also still having trouble adjusting to being human again. Breathing, eating, sleeping. It all still feels a little alien. The worst part is that, though I'm not Mictlantecuhtli anymore, I still have all his memories up to the point we separated.

Mictlantecuhtli's been around in one incarnation or another for thousands of years. That's a lot of memories to shove into somebody's head. Sometimes I forget myself and start speaking Nahuatl or go on a rant about Spanish colonialism and how they should all burn. Most of the time it's both.

So yeah, though Candyland's changed, I suspect I've changed more.

If you're looking for information in Las Vegas, the Twins are who you talk to. They're tied into the mage community like nobody else. Some of that's because they've been around so long, but mostly it's because everyone really wants to get into Candyland and the best way to do that is to be their friend.

The Twins. Whenever anyone says it, you can hear the capital letter. Ken and Kendra. Not their real names. I hear they change them up every so often. Bob and Bobbi, Del and Delilah, you get the idea. When I was here last, they went by Vic and Vicky.

The Twins look identical so long as they have their clothes on, and even when they don't it can be tough to tell them apart. They're beautiful. Be careful or you'll find yourself staring at them for hours-which they're just fine with, by the way. Not too tall, not too short. Slight build, close-cut black hair, otherworldly purple eyes. I'd say they were contacts, but my eyes turn into pitch-black orbs when I'm pissed off, so I'm not really in a position to judge.

They have the same androgynous features, dress the same, sound the same, move the same. Neither looks any more or less like a man or a woman. They trade off who's who. You think you're talking to Ken and suddenly it's Kendra, but it doesn't actually make a difference because they're finishing each other's sentences anyway.

I hear they've been in Vegas since before Vegas was Vegas. Story is that they ran brothels when the place was just a watering hole in the desert for the railroad. Before then, they were in New Orleans, Paris, who knows where else.

Are they human? Who cares? Personally, I think they're one person with two bodies. I couldn't prove it if I wanted to, and they're not saying.

But the most interesting thing about them is that they are two of the most powerful erotimancers in North America.

Yes, erotimancers. It's a stupid word, but "Sex Wizard" sounds like something airbrushed onto the side of a van with a waterbed and a disco ball in the back.

Every mage has a knack, one thing they're stupidly good at. Some people get sex magic. I got necromancy. We all have our crosses to bear.

Room one is, of course, the first along a dimly lit, carpeted corridor. The music from downstairs fades into a low whisper of bass and melody. I knock on the door, and when I hear a muffled "Come in" I open it, and stop.

What exactly is the etiquette for walking in on somebody with their head buried in someone else's lap? I skipped that day in charm school.

"Bad time?"

"Oh no, it's fine," says a voice to my right. "My sister's merely indulging. Kendra, dear? We have a guest. So terribly sorry, Stacy. We'll call you up later tonight."

The woman on the giving end of the evening's festivities gets up, dabs a napkin on her chin, kisses both twins, and walks out the door, closing it quietly behind her. Her flushed and lucky recipient hikes up her pants.

"Eric, it is so good to see you," Kendra says. "Forgive me?"

"For getting your rocks off? What's there to forgive?"

This is their thing. Some people think sex magic is all tantric blowjobs, raw-dogging it in the middle of a pentagram, or some bullshit like that. Sometimes it is. Mostly it isn't.

Most people think that an erotimancer's most powerful trick is to make other people want them, like it's mind control, which it totally isn't. Not that some of them can't do it on purpose. It's more they have an instinctive empathy and understanding of what a person wants or needs, and like my seeing the dead, they can't shut it off.

Like anything else there are good and bad aspects. Maybe you want to make the world a better place one handjob at a time. Or maybe you want to seduce secrets out of your enemies' trusted companions.

Magic isn't the Force. There's no light side, no dark side. There are no sides. It's just energy. It doesn't care what you do with it. Feed a starving city? Murder a hundred thousand people? Magic's got you covered.

The thing with erotimancers isn't just their powers of desire. Unlike most mages, who can only get power from their own reserves or by tapping into the well of magic that's everywhere around us, erotimancers get it from the raw energy of sex and desire itself.

They're not unique. There's a whole school of emotion-based mages out there. The scary ones are the ones who draw power from suffering. Ran into one of those once. He had a basement filled with dead boys and girls and a few live ones chained to the wall.

He kept them just barely alive and when they were spent, he'd just toss them onto the pile. When I got to them the three survivors were so broken that they each picked up the first sharp thing they could find and slashed their own throats.

This ability of erotimancers to pull magic from desire and sex makes Candyland like the Hoover Dam for sex mages. What do they do with all that energy? Fuck if I know. I've never been to a ritual. Nobody wants to invite a guy who can summon dead eyeball-eating rats to the orgy. Go figure.

Las Vegas is a popular city for them. The place is soaking in sex. You can't go five feet along the Strip without having it shoved in your face.

They have a ridiculous amount of power, though they can't do a whole lot with it on their own. Good for rituals, not as good for slinging spells. But the ones they do pack a wallop.

Copyright © 2022 by Stephen Blackmoore

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