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Fire Season (Eric Carter, Band 4) - Softcover

Buch 4 von 9: Eric Carter

Blackmoore, Stephen

 
9780756412944: Fire Season (Eric Carter, Band 4)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0756412943 ISBN 13: 9780756412944
Verlag: DAW, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

The fourth book of this dark urban fantasy series follows necromancer Eric Carter through a world of vengeful gods and goddesses, mysterious murders, and restless ghosts.

Los Angeles is burning.

During one of the hottest summers the city has ever seen, someone is murdering mages with fires that burn when they shouldn't, that don't stop when they should. Necromancer Eric Carter is being framed for the killings and hunted by his own people.

To Carter, everything points to the god Quetzalcoatl coming after him, after he defied the mad wind god in the Aztec land of the dead. But too many things aren't adding up, and Carter knows there's more going on.

If he doesn't figure out what it is and put a stop to it fast, Quetzalcoatl won't just kill him, he'll burn the whole damn city down with him.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen Blackmoore is a writer of crime and horror whose work has appeared in the magazines Needle, Plots With Guns, Spinetingler, Thrilling Detective, Shots, and Demolition. He has also written essays on LA politics and crime for the website LAVoice.org and the LA Noir true crime blog.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Necromancy 101: You're too late.

Whether it's watching empty Echoes playing their last moments over and over again, or talking to Haunts and Wanderers with their fading memories and draining personalities, they have one glaring thing in common; they're all dead.

See, necromancers are like really bad ambulance drivers. We don't get there until way after the body's cooling in the middle of the road.

Ghosts aren't really people. They're tattered bits of soul left over from the dying. Shreds of memory, personality, will. Whether it was yesterday, last month, twenty minutes, two hundred years ago. Doesn't matter.

You're. Too. Late.

Because ghosts? They don't just happen. You're not getting a ghost if Grandma strokes out taking a shit on the toilet. No, it takes trauma. Mental, physical, spiritual. It can be sudden, or take a lifetime to build.

Suicides, homicides, accidents, gunshot wounds, stabbings, beatings, poisonings, car crashes, hangings, Colombian neckties, hacked to pieces by crazed cannibal killers. You get the idea.

We necromancers get to experience it all in nightmare color and THX sound whether we want to or not. Sure, any schmuck with some talent can talk to the dead, but we're born to it.

There is no such thing as a pretty death. It doesn't exactly paint a rosy picture of the human experience.

Some of us don't care. They're the scary ones. You get some serious Patrick Bateman shit with them.

Some of us care way too much. They're the tragic ones. By thirty they've dug themselves into a hole, too afraid to keep living and terrified of dying because they know that's not the end of things. There aren't many necromancer suicides, is what I'm saying.

Like doctors or morticians, most of us land somewhere in the middle. Dying's tragic, but shit happens. Death is something that needs to be accepted. It's not good, it's not bad. It just is.

But some deaths are a little harder to take than others.

Burn victims, for example. The ones who go from smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide don't usually leave a ghost behind, but if they burn to death? Jesus fuck, it's rough. It's not just agonizing, messy, and loud, it can last anywhere from five minutes to an hour or more.

First time I saw the Echo of a burn victim was a car accident on a back road that had happened three or four years before. Middle of nowhere. Guy inside slow roasted for almost an hour before he finally died. He was conscious for way too much of it.

That's what makes this particular Echo I've been watching for the past couple hours, a woman set on fire in a burned-out shell of a three-bedroom bungalow in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, so unusual.

She starts at the door to the kitchen, becoming visible as she enters the living room. There's panic on her face. Someone I can't see shoots her in the back. Her legs go out from under her. She hits the ground screaming, but keeps dragging herself away.

Then the flames kick in. I see flickers of their light shining across her skin, though I can't see them, yet. They won't be a part of this scene until they're eating her alive.

Doesn't take long. They erupt around her in seconds, crawl up her legs as though she's been dipped in liquid oxygen, bright blue flames dancing up her body, relentless, unforgiving.

She catches fast when the flames touch her. Her skin already blackening and cracking. The fire sweeps over her like piranha devouring a cow. Bits and pieces shred away as ash and char. Conscious and screaming until there's nothing left but a blackened corpse that's more skeleton than person lying among the ruins. Ash drops in clumps from her body as pieces of her disintegrate.

The scene disappears like a soap bubble, there one second, gone the next. I can still smell the stink of charred pork, hear the screams and the crackle of searing skin.

Then it starts all over again. It's the fourth time I've watched it. I crouch down to look at it from another angle, time it with my pocket watch. The moment the flames hit her she goes up like flash paper. From ignition to ash can be measured in seconds.

Nobody burns that fast. Even knowing it's obviously magic, it's surprising how fast she goes from burning to ash.

At least, it would be if I hadn't seen it before.

I take my phone out, dial a number. Hear a sleepy grunt when it picks up. "Hey," I say, "it's Eric. It's happening."

"Can we all die in a horrible rain of fire after I've had coffee?" Gabriela says. Most people know her as the Bruja, and she's at least as powerful a mage as I am. Maybe more so. We fought once. Called it a draw. To say we're friends would be stretching things. A lot.

"I think you got time for a cup."

"Oh, good. I'd hate to meet the apocalypse uncaffeinated."

"We should all be so lucky."

"All right. Spill. What's going on?"

"Xiuhtecuhtli's fire." I describe the scene to her. The man, the gunshot, the flames-particularly the flames.

"Fuck me. You're sure about the fire?" she says.

"Well, I am standing in the burned-out shell of a house, so . . ."

"I meant about what kind of fire. Are you sure it's Xiuhtecuhtli's fire? You're the only one who's seen it in action."

"Yeah," I say, watching the flames consume the Echo in front of me one more time. The preternaturally blue flames turn it to char and ash in moments. "I'm sure. And I'm sure it's Quetzalcoatl doing it."

"You can't know that for sure," she says.

"He pretty much told me that this is exactly what he was going to do. Anyway, it gets better."

"How so?"

"Last I saw him Q was a fifteen-foot-tall trash fire in the shape of a winged serpent. Not exactly in a position to hold a gun."

"He's got a friend," she says. "You see the shooter?"

"No. Too far away. Didn't get captured in the Echo." Not that it probably would have, anyway. The shooter isn't the one who died.

"You piss off the best people," she says.

"What can I say? I'm a high achiever."

About five hundred years ago, give or take, a Spanish dickhead by the name of Hern‡n CortŽs de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca (a title he gets a little later), shows up on the Aztecs' doorstep and proceeds to kick seven shades of shit out of them. It's touch and go for a while. His attention's split. He's not the most popular guy with the Spanish government at the time. When they send troops after him he pretty much turns them into reinforcements.

That out of the way, he turns his attention to not only conquering the Aztecs, but their gods, too. CortŽs puts a lieutenant, guy named Juan Rodr’guez Cabrillo, in charge of the invasion of the Aztecs' thirteen heavens. The ace up Cabrillo's sleeve is an eight-thousand-year-old Djinn named Darius that CortŽs loans him, and an alliance with the Aztecs' own wind god, the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, who's turned traitor for fuck knows what reason. Gods fall like dominos; Tlaloc, Ixcuina, Citlalicue, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, Xiuhtecuhtli, Ometeotl, and on and on.

Then they reach Mictlan, the Aztec land of the dead, where its two rulers, Mictlantecuhtli and his wife, Mictecacihuatl, set a trap. Cue Epic God Battle. Doesn't end well for anybody. The Conquistadores die, Quetzalcoatl is seriously wounded, Darius is trapped in his bottle, Mictlantecuhtli is turned to jade and trapped in a hole deep below Mictlan.

The only survivor is Cabrillo, who limps back to the mortal world with Darius in his backpack. Quetzalcoatl does a runner to licks his wounds, and Mictecacihuatl tries to hold what's left of Mictlan together. The thing with Mictecacihuatl is that she's a survivor. Flexible, changes with the times. By the time I ran into her she'd...

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Verlag
DAW
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0756412943
ISBN 13 
9780756412944
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
DAW
https://www.aeuln.top/

Kl?nenfeldstr. 22
Muttenz
4132
Schweiz
Verantwortliche Person
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