20. Love and Loathing in Los Angeles
LOVE AND LOATHING IN LOS ANGELES
I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I was unconscious, drifting in and out of whatever William de Witt had dosed me with.
I do know that I dreamed of my grandmother, who looked just as I remembered her in life.
I don’t think she’d care for the way I’ve written her so far, or the way she only exists in my tale as a ghost. In real life, she was a vain woman, with thin eyebrows she used to draw on every day until she eventually tattooed them.
I rarely saw her with a hair out of place.
She never spoke of indignities like pain. She never forgot a petty squabble.
And she always saw what she wanted to see.
In my dream, she sat at the kitchen table and read my cards, defining my past for me and therefore determining the paths for my future.
She told me there would be change, creativity, love, and death.
She told me again about the devil, and I found myself wondering whether I really believed that any of this was real. The monster in Jude. The monster in me.
The cobbled mosaic of Emmanuelle’s face, masking whatever lived beneath the surface.
The piteous humanity of William de Witt, with so much money and power at his disposal for no higher purpose than to gamble it for more.
“What do you think the devil wants?” I asked my grandmother, as if she’d answer. As if a dream was anything but some scrambled amalgam of my own memories and thoughts.
“What does the devil always want? You to lose,” she said, and I thought about what it meant, how I could lose in such a way that pleased the devil.
If the devil were a man of straightforward transaction, then which way would I have to bend to meet my most miserable end?
If I loved a man capable of atrocity, then I was an atrocity myself.
The rules were simple: I was the woman and thus I knew better.
For each day that I stayed within his web, swung like a pendulum back to his sins, I consigned myself to moral indiscretion.
He had blood on his hands, literally, and now they were staining mine.
But for what purpose? What could the devil want from my sins that he couldn’t accomplish on his own?
I thought of Jude then, the monster that lived in him, that made a home of him.
I thought of his hunger for me, the thing I knew and understood because I shared it.
The conjoined sense of desire and terror that met up in a place of possession; the look in his eyes that said he wanted to have me, an appetite I knew to be toxic and strange.
But still, a familiar yearning, an obsession I couldn’t reasonably deny.
After all, I’d already braved hell for him.
Grandma looked at me a long time; my eyes were a mirror of hers, even if they were a different color.
“Consider,” she began, “that your devil intends to make you part of his collection. Another notch with which to mark the loss of a good and pure soul.”
(Were souls always good? Had mine ever been? I didn’t know the answer.)
“Say I have two devils,” I pointed out. Two sets of ocean eyes, identical and yet distinct. There was only one card in the deck, but in life, the devils abounded. “Which one will cost me more?”
“Depends what you consider more costly,” my grandmother said.
I had always been made of two prayers. The one where I made it, and the one that was everything else.
When I opened my eyes, I felt violently sick. I pitched forward and regretted the motion instantly. The throb in my head was powerfully deep, a reverberation from somewhere inside my skull.
I felt two hands settle me carefully back down. Jude had laid my head on his lap and was flicking the barrel of a syringe.
“Hold still,” he said.
If I’d felt even marginally more capable of speaking, I’d have said absolutely not, motherfucker.
But my head was a torrent of fire ants and the rest of me was unable to get on board with stopping him.
It was fine, then, when I said nothing and made no defensive motions, and there was a slight prick in my upper arm, followed by near-immediate relief.
“It’s just vitamins.” Jude put the needle somewhere else, incautiously jostling my head as he moved around, rearranging things. “For dehydration.”
“Where are we?” I was slowly adjusting to the darkness in the room, making out the shapes of things. It wasn’t Jude’s room, or any room in the villa I’d been in before. There were bookcases lining the walls, a few things that looked like haunted chairs. The whole place smelled like smoke.
“Welcome to the library.” Jude adjusted himself where he was leaning against a wall.
Slowly, very slowly, I managed to sit upright, the pain a low ebb in the place where my thoughts should have been.
“Library?”
“Killian’s personal library. All sorts of treasures in here. A full encyclopedia set. Law books. Charred first editions.”
My head felt heavy, like a stone on a pile of bricks. I let it fall.
Jude’s shoulder caught it. “Why did you come back here?”
“You’re here.” I don’t know if he heard me. It was a struggle to get the words out, though whatever he’d injected me with worked quickly.
Gradually, motion was returning to me. “What was he going to do to me?”
“Kill you,” Jude said.
I fell deeper into his shoulder and he shifted to hold my head in the crook of his arm, one hand tentatively cresting on my hair. “Kind of a longer story,” he added, “but that’s the gist.”
“We should leave,” I told him. “Just run.”
“Anya.” Jude sighed. “I don’t expect you to understand this. But I’ll become very boring to you the moment we’re out on the lam.”
“Not true,” I said. It might have been true. I did know the most interesting option was to try it, seeing as the least palatable option was to die. “Let’s just go, now, before he finds us.”
“He won’t find us here.” Jude went quiet. “And I can’t … I can’t leave. It’ll only get worse.”
“Worse than serial murders with public displays of sadism?”
“That’s not—” Jude hesitated. “Yeah, worse than that.”
“That’s not what?” I tried my best to lift my head, an effort that was only fractionally successful. “What were you going to say? They’re not sadists? They’re not littering the streets of Hollywood with women’s bodies for everyone to find?”
“No,” said Jude.
“Oh, silly me, then,” I muttered with a roll of my eyes.
Rather than answer, Jude looked away from me, his eyes on a fixed point in space.
It came to me then, the thing Roro had been saying, the thing I hadn’t fully been listening to before. That the Santa Ana bodies were arranged with an element of sensationalism, almost like a strange desire to be caught.
The ritual was something different, then, maybe. It did suddenly seem possible that what had been left out for the world to see might have been scattered like breadcrumbs by somebody else.
I thought of the blood under his nails, the misery coiled up inside him, the tonal frequency of his personal monster.
Did he know? I couldn’t tell, so I pressed for something else.
“Where’s Teresa?” The girl who worked for Ara.
“I don’t know.” Jude’s mouth tightened.
“Was it—”
“Not the ritual, no. As far as I know they left the blood.”
I shuddered with a wave of revulsion. “But then…?”
“Maybe she said no. Or maybe she saw something.”
Fair enough. Women died for all sorts of reasons related to one or the other. “But you didn’t—?”
“The point is, if we run then the sickness will follow.” He didn’t seem to notice he was drumming his thumb on the cavern of my chest. “The devil goes wherever I go because at least part of it lives in me.”
There’s a devil on my back.
I see it.
“What are you going to do to me?” I murmured to his chest, taking a long, deep inhalation of his T-shirt. He didn’t smell clean. He smelled like ash and sour sweat and the safety of a demon who hadn’t yet laid a hand on me, like I was his.
“I don’t know.” His hand paused for a moment, tightening around the nape of my neck.
I let out a sigh, a shallow breath of something I might have called pleading, or relief.
“It must be me,” Jude said. “Some of it. Enough of it.” He paused. “For a long time I think I just did whatever I was told.”
It sounded like confession, the holy kind. A mea culpa. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Survival? Not that it should matter, given that the alternative never seems to take.” I could hear his heart beating in his chest. I put one hand over the sound like I could hold it. Like it was owed to me. Like it was mine.
“The monster, it tells you to…?”
“It does things of its own accord. But sometimes I think I do things. I think I must.”
“How can you know?”
“I don’t, I guess.” He was quiet for a moment. “I just don’t always feel like there are two wills in my body. There isn’t a constant battle. So there must be times when we agree.”
“Why try to save me?” I shifted to look at him.
I couldn’t see his face in the dark. But I could feel him sigh.
“Anya.” His voice was gruff, impatient. “I told you not to ask stupid questions.”
I swallowed heavily then, wondering who he’d be if he could give me a straight answer, whether I’d be repulsed by the candor of everything I wanted to hear.
“Can it be exorcised?” I asked.
He shook his head, his forehead meeting mine. “Don’t think so.”
“But all demons can be exorcised.” I based this on a cinematic consistency rather than any actual knowledge, occult or otherwise.
“Not this one.” He sounded weary, down to the bone.
“Fine.” His head shifted slightly at the sound of my voice. “Who cares? I like it.”
“You like it?” He sounded like he couldn’t believe a person so stupid could exist.
“I’ve never known you without it. So I don’t see the point in shooing it off.”
“It might be a fucking murderer,” he said.
“There’s a whole lot hanging on that might be.”
“You have absolutely no sense of self-preservation.” Now he sounded awed, on the edge of inspired. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“I’ll survive it.” I said it like a promise, or a dare.