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Hate Machine (Eric Carter, Band 8) - Softcover

Buch 8 von 9: Eric Carter

Blackmoore, Stephen

 
9780756417659: Hate Machine (Eric Carter, Band 8)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0756417651 ISBN 13: 9780756417659
Verlag: DAW, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

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

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen Blackmoore is a writer of crime, horror, and urban fantasy 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

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...

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Verlag
DAW
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0756417651
ISBN 13 
9780756417659
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
DAW
https://www.aeuln.top/

Kl?nenfeldstr. 22
Muttenz
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Schweiz
Verantwortliche Person
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