Description: Chapter 1 Dying is easy. Grieving is hard. Necromancers get a lot of questions about where the dead end up. Did Auntie Fiona go to Heaven? Is that Nazi being ass-fucked by demons? Are they getting what they deserved? Happiness? Peace? Punishment? My answer is usually along the lines of, "I dunno. Let''s ask ''em." So far nobody''s taken me up on the offer. It''s probably just as well that they don''t. Actually contacting a soul in its afterlife? Hardly ever works and fuck knows I''ve tried. Maybe that''s by design. A small kindness in a universe that doesn''t give a good goddamn about any of us. Grieving is about not knowing, not having answers. Answers collapse possibilities, bring out unpleasant truths. Who wants to risk that? No, sorry, Auntie Fiona is burning in a pit of liquid hellfire. That murderer who took out a school with an AK is in Valhalla yukking it up with Odin and Thor. Yes, your true love is being reborn right now, but come on, stop obsessing about them. They''re a baby, that''s just creepy. Get over it already. Like it or not, souls go where they''re supposed to go. Heaven, Hell, Mictlan, Elysium, whatever. Not even their ghosts, if they''ve left one behind, know. The ghosts are just cast-off shells, a thin veneer of the person who''s gone. Grieving is about being in the question and looking for the answers. Sometimes that means denial, alcoholism, sex with strangers, Ouija boards, phone psychics, talking to guys like me. If you''re lucky, it means acceptance and moving on. In the end a soul''s destination is all uncertainty and doubt. And ultimately nobody really wants to know. The air inside the house smells like grief and smoke. Everything smells like that now. A month and a half on and though most of the fires are out, the smoke hangs heavy and thick over Los Angeles like angry clouds threatening to rain down flames. Most of the freeways are still collapsed, or impassable, like parts of the 110. When the small industrial city of Vernon exploded all at once, so many toxins got thrown into the air that they blanketed South L.A. The place is still toxic. It''ll be months before the air is breathable and years before anyone can live there. It''s not just the stink of smoke that fills the air, it''s the rot underneath it. It''s that back-of-the-throat taste of shit and piss and Febreeze. Cholera waiting to happen. I doubt this house has running water. There''s sure as hell no electricity beyond the handful of portable solar chargers they''re using to keep their phones working and the LED camp lanterns lit. "Didn''t know you ever came out this way," Keenan says. A wiry man with skin like teak, Keenan Mitchell has taken up in an abandoned two-story Craftsman off Figueroa in Highland Park. From the look of things it started as a flophouse, or maybe a hotel in the twenties. Now it''s a run-down apartment building with shoebox-size studios on both floors. It''s one of the few buildings on the block that isn''t a charred ruin. Two of Keenan''s cousins, Aaliyah and Indigo Wayne, twins, hover on either side of his chair like an honor guard. They''re younger than Keenan by about ten years or so, a little lighter skinned, but the family resemblance is obvious. The only way I can tell the twins apart is the attitude. Indigo is all spiky-edged, don''t-fuck-with-me energy, Aaliyah is more-subtle''s not the word-coiled, like a spring, or a snake on the hunt, waiting. "What can I say? I''m a roamer." When the towers came down in Manhattan on 9/11, killing almost three thousand people and injuring more than six, the sheer number of people in the tri-state area who knew one of the dead or were close to someone who did was staggering. Twenty-eight million people were suddenly playing a game of Six Degrees of Holy Fuck What Just Happened. The grief was like a lead blanket crushing everyone under its weight. How do you grieve for that many people? How do you even process it? Surrounded by that much heartache, that much sorrow? Some people buckle under the weight, some prop up others and damage themselves in the process. Grief grinds you down, leaves you in shock. Even the professionals, the people who get paid to deal with it, they''re hammered by it, too. Three thousand deaths in an afternoon is going to break people. Now up all that by a factor of thirty. The Los Angeles Firestorm, or Firepocalypse depending on which news sites you read, swept across the entire county, from Long Beach to Lancaster, Malibu to Claremont. Almost a hundred thousand people died in one night, three times that many injured. Not enough hospitals, beds, doctors, medical supplies-a guarantee that the death toll was going to increase in the coming days, and it did. First responders were spread too thin, or dead at the scenes. The fires hit men, women, boys, girls, infants. Straight, queer, black, white, Asian, Latino, it didn''t care. Fire is an equal opportunity killer. Worse, it was magical fire. Fire that the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl stole from Xiuhtecuhtli during the invasion of the Spanish five hundred years ago, when Quetzalcoatl betrayed his brothers and sisters. Fire so hot it burns bodies to ash, melts steel, tears through concrete, destroys buildings, freeways, lives. And why did Quetzalcoatl do it? Why did he burn a city that he shouldn''t care a rat''s ass about? He did it partly because he wanted to goad me into bringing him an artifact I didn''t even know I had. Almost worked, too. Which would have been a whole other kind of nightmare. But mostly he did it because I defied him. I refused to burn Mictlan, the Aztec land of the dead, to ash and destroy all the souls there for him. For that act of disrespect he wanted to hurt me, so he burned L.A. to the ground. He didn''t care that it killed a hundred thousand people. He didn''t care that the people he murdered were innocent. He didn''t care that he left behind ash, corpses, and heartbreak. Gods are assholes. "Somehow I don''t think you just roamed on over to our neighborhood. So, to what do we owe the pleasure of your company, Mister Carter? Or can I call you Eric?" I showed up on their doorstep about half an hour ago and announced myself from the street by taking a small draw from the local pool of magic. Mages can feel that sort of thing, and they''ll know where it''s coming from. It''s the magical equivalent of ringing the doorbell. "Eric''s just fine," I say. They didn''t want to talk to me at first, but instead of simply ignoring me, they upped the challenge by drawing more power from the pool. I was just trying to say hello and be all non-threatening about it. But since this had suddenly turned into a dick waggling contest, I saw their bet and raised them. I pulled more power. And kept pulling more power. A lot of power. You''re only going to know a mage when they do something with magic. We don''t walk around with pointy hats that say MAGIC BOY in neon letters. But once you know they''re there, a few things can give one mage an idea how powerful another is. How much power can they draw? How fast can they draw it? How much can they hold on to? If you''re really unlucky you might find out how much they can disperse, like, say, with a really big fucking fireball. We go back and forth a bit. There''s more than one mage in the house and they''re all getting in on the act. But I''m tired and just want this over with, so I end the contest by pulling so much, so fast, that it blocks them from getting any more. That''s when they opened the front door and let me in. I lean back on the couch. I came here with no weapons; no straight razor, gun, or pocket watch. I have my messenger bag, but there''s nothing in it that could be considered an immediate threat. Everybody here knows who everybody else is and bringing weapons would just send the wrong message. I won the pissing match. That''s humiliating enough. There''s no need to be insulting, too. I''m here to have a conversation. I can tell they''re on edge, and in their position I would be, too. Keenan and his cousins are all largely untrained mages. Born to normal parents, they''ve had to scrape whatever they can from the mage community, too many of whom see them as some kind of normal / mage half-breeds, which should tell you pretty much all you need to know about the mage community. For all their lack of training they''ve done remarkably well for themselves. They finally got the attention of some established mages when they made what was basically a DMZ around their neighborhood in South Pasadena. Crime pretty much disappeared within a two-mile radius. They won''t start a fight, but you bet your ass they''ll finish it. After the fires and the riots calmed down a little, they pulled together a caravan of family, friends, and neighbors looking for someplace a little more defensible amid all the chaos. They found this empty stretch before the National Guard came in to lock down chunks of the city that were deemed uninhabitable, shutting off the grid, turning off the water. The Guard makes periodic patrols, but L.A.''s a big place, and they''re easy to avoid.

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