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  Blue Diablo

  ( Corine Solomon - 1 )

  Ann Aguirre

  Corine Solomon is a handler—when she touches an object she instantly knows its history and its future. Using her ability, she can find the missing—which is why people never stop trying to find her. Like her ex-boyfriend Chance, who needs Corine's gift to find someone dear to them both. But the search proves dangerous as it leads them into a strange world of demons and sorcerers, ghosts and witchcraft, zombies—and black magic...

  Blue Diablo

  (The first book in the Corine Solomon series)

  A novel by Ann Aguirre

  For Ivette, who is seven flavors of awesome cake...with sprinkles. I’m lucky to have a friend like you. (Andres said this dedication is totally cool with him.)

  Chance Met

  Right now, I’m a redhead.

  I’ve been blond and brunette as the situation requires, though an unscheduled color change usually means I need to relocate in the middle of the night or face people burning crosses on my lawn. I’ve set a new record, going on eighteen months in the same city. No consequences, no demonstrations, and for the last year, I’ve been a respectable business owner to boot. Maybe I should knock wood.

  So I do.

  But right now, a redhead. I tell myself it goes with the blue eyes, even if my skin is a little too olive for the carpet to match the drapes. And sure, I get a few looks because it’s a true red, Garnier Nutrisse 46R to be exact, not the plum that most women here favor, but I may as well please myself because I will never, ever blend in entirely. The best I can do is to make sure nobody reckons me any crazier than anyone else.

  Around here they call me la Americana loca, but I figure it’s affectionate, as it doesn’t stop them from coming to my shop. Unlike many of the open-air tiendas, I have a front door and a bell that chimes softly when anyone enters my domain, a dim and shady store piled high with junk or treasure, depending on your definition. I have handmade pots and broken radios, alleged religious artifacts and rare books in sixteen languages.

  A ceiling fan stirs sluggishly overhead, but it never gets hot inside. The buildings are heavy, solid rock covered with plaster, so it’s cool and shady when the mercury rises and even the lizards are too lazy to move. Sometimes people step in, wanting a break from the sun or to get out of the deluge during rainy season, but they never leave without buying something. That’s part of my unique gift (and why I always work in retail). At one point I sold furniture on commission but it just wasn’t fair-fish in a barrel.

  Ostensibly, I run a pawn shop marked by a simple red and white sign that reads CASA DE EMPEÑO, but anyone who lives in Los Remedios along the road to Atizapán will tell you it’s more. They’ll also offer you a fuchsia candy tortilla at the stoplight just before you come to my store; it’s the intersection where a man with a mime’s face juggles fire and a monkeyless organ-grinder plies his trade dispiritedly (how he lost the monkey is another story). Don’t eat the tortilla, don’t tip more than twenty pesos, and make a left turn. You’ll find me, if you really need to.

  I’m an expert at staying hidden. More than once, it’s been the difference between life and death, so I live lean and keep my head down. So far as I know, I’m doing well here. Nobody knows what I’m running from.

  And I’d like to keep it that way.

  Unfortunately, our pasts have a way of coming back, time and again, just like our shadows. Oh, there are ways to sever your shadow, and I know a guy who did, but it was a really bad idea. He took sick afterward, died the slow death of a consumptive, and last I heard, his shadow was making a killing in Atlantic City. Literally.

  These are dark times, and I just want a quiet place to ride them out.

  Unfortunately, things never seem to work out the way I want them to.

  My first inkling that I hadn’t covered my tracks completely came on a sunny Monday afternoon. I was sitting behind the glass case in my shop, eyeballing a pair of hand-painted porcelain miniatures I’d bought for two hundred pesos maybe twenty minutes before. Nice, they looked Dutch, and some tourist would buy them by next Friday.

  Foretelling isn’t really my thing—well, only as an adjunct to my real gift and only as relates to the object I’m handling. When I touch something, I know what’s happened to an item, who’s owned it, and to a lesser extent, what will happen to it in the future, although that’s less sure, as any diviner could tell you. Such prediction isn’t much use, unless you’re breathless with wondering about the fate of hand-painted Dutch miniatures. Most people aren’t.

  History, though... yeah, therein lies the magick. And the reason folks never stop trying to find me. If this could talk, people say dreamily, peering at a piece of antique jewelry. In truth it’s generally pretty boring; the item gets worn, and then it goes in a box. Repeat. But once in a while, once in a while an item passes across my palms with a real story to tell.

  And that’s where the trouble starts.

  Trouble smells like singed horsehair. I’ll never get past that. When I was ten, my pony died when our barn was burned down, and I’ll never forget the way Sugar screamed. That was my first look at an angry mob, but not my last. If you think they don’t burn witches anymore, you never lived in Kilmer, Georgia.

  And that’s the damnedest thing; those same folks will come creeping after dark to your back door, one by one, begging for the moon, but get them together, talking, and they start lighting torches. Not the whole town, of course, but a select few who come in midnight’s dark to do their devil’s work. They said it was for the greater good, but I saw their eyes before I ran.

  To this day, when life is about to get rocky, I smell the burning all over again, one of two legacies my mama left me. And on that Monday, the shop stunk to high heaven as someone pushed through the door, jingling the bell. I put down the miniatures, already braced to make a break for the door off the alley.

  But I didn’t want to leave, dammit. Thanks to the second gift my mama gave me, I made a good living here and sometimes I even went out on Saturday nights. Nobody brought me tiny pierced earrings from dead babies or soiled mittens from missing children. Nobody expected me to do anything at all, and that was exactly how I liked it.

  I don’t know my ex’s real name. He first introduced himself as Chance; he claims he came by the tag from the silver coin he likes to toy with, rolling it across his knuckles, tossing it for a hundred and coming up tails every time. I’d pumped his mother for information, more than once, but she had a way of changing the subject that was downright uncanny. The most I ever got out of her was, “It would be dangerous if you knew his true name, Corine.”

  Regardless, his presence in my humble shop in Los Remedios, two thousand miles from where I’d seen him last, could mean nothing good.

  ”You’re a hard woman to find,” he said, leaning up on my counter as if he thought I’d be glad to see him. “I could almost be hurt by that, Corine.”

  Well, I couldn’t really argue, as I’d left him sleeping in my bed when I took flight. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I need you to handle something for me, just one job. I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important.” Pleading, he fixed striated amber eyes on me, knowing I was a sucker for that look.

  Or I used to be. I wasn’t anymore.

  Chance wasn’t my manager any longer. Or my lover, for that matter. I didn’t want to handle charged objects, didn’t want to tell people their loved one had been strangled while wearing that sweater. I didn’t want to do that anymore.

  We had a hell of a run, him and me. For as many bereaved families as we helped, we encountered neo-pagan witches, truck-driving mediums, guys who sold genuine lucky charms out of the trunks of their cars, and folks who simply defied descript
ion with what they could do and why they did it. Sometimes I felt like we might’ve even brushed up against angels and demons, slipping by beneath the hot velvet of a summer night.

  Chance had a way of ferreting out the weird and the improbable as if his inner compass focused on such things, quivered with unseen divinations. And he looked beautiful while doing it.

  My heart gave a little kick. After all this time, he still had the power to make my pulse skip. Some genius genetics had gone into Chance’s making: long and lean, a chiseled face with a vaguely Asian look, capped by uncanny tiger eyes and a mouth that could tempt a holy sister to sin. I wondered if he’d felt the last kiss I brushed against that mouth, eighteen months ago. I wondered whether he’d missed me or just the revenue.

  To make matters worse, he knew how to dress, and today he wore Kenneth Cole extremely well: crinkle-washed shirt in Italian cotton, jet with a muted silver stripe, dusty black button-fly jeans, polished shoes, and a black velvet blazer. I didn’t need his sartorial elegance to remind me I’d gone native, a sheer gauze blouse with crimson embroidery around the neck and a parti-colored skirt. I was even wearing flip-flops. They had a big red silk hibiscus on each toe, but were flip-flops nonetheless. It was amazing he could look at me with a straight face.

  But then, he’d been raised well. His mom, Yi Min-chin, was a nice lady who made great kimchi, but he’d never say who his daddy was, claiming such knowledge granted too much power over him. And his mother went along with it. I figured it was just more of his bullshit, but with Chance, you never could be sure. He had the devil’s own luck, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Lucifer himself someday came to claim him.

  “It’s never just one job with you,” I said with a trace of bitterness. “I’m a show pony to you, and you never get tired of putting me through my paces. I am out of the life now. Retired. Get it? Now get out, and if you ever felt anything for me, don’t tell anybody where I am.” I hated the way my tone turned pleading at the end.

  I’d built this life. I didn’t want to have to parlay to keep it.

  Without a word, he flattened his palm on the top of the glass case that housed my rare treasures. When he lifted his hand, I expected to see his coin because the item glinted silver. But as I leaned in, I saw something that sent snakes disco dancing in my belly.

  Because it meant I had to help him.

  The Pewter Buddha

  Hard to believe such a small item could cause me so much trouble.

  I stared at it for a long moment, willing it to disappear, but like Chance, it wouldn’t. Not until I handled it and followed the trail to its source. The last time I saw this little pewter pocket Buddha, it had been cupped in Yi Min-chin’s hand.

  It wasn’t valuable—such things sold for around two bucks—but his mother rubbed it for luck or when she was nervous, and it had never been out of her possession before to the best of my knowledge. The fact that it lay on my counter...

  Well, I understood Chance’s expression a whole lot better now.

  “Tell me what you know.” I still didn’t touch it, but he knew my acquiescence was a foregone conclusion. Over the course of our benighted relationship, I came to love his mom more than I ever loved him.

  Sometimes I missed him; sometimes I hated him. I hadn’t thought I’d see him again. My life tends to run by chapters, and when I close one, there are no recurring characters, mainly because they lie beneath six feet of cold dirt. So I suppose Chance did well enough with me; he was still breathing when I left him.

  While he seemed to gather his thoughts, I knelt and fished from the minifridge a couple of old-fashioned Cokes, the kind that come in bottles that remind you of a sexy woman’s figure. Because I was shaken, the Cokes managed to feed me glimpses of the manufacturing plant and the truck that carried them to the store, the sweaty man with a comb-over who stocked them on the cooler shelf before I bought them.

  Focusing my will, I shut it down, a TV show nobody’s watching. I have to choose to read something, or I’d be bombarded with images all day long; it takes pure focus born of necessity and habit to keep my gift in check. The more traumatic of a charge an item holds, the worse it is. I had a feeling that whatever his mother’s Buddha held would be bad.

  As if even my soda pop felt nervous about my situation, the glass bottle immediately began to sweat. I set the drinks down and found a bottle opener.

  “I was tracking you.” His voice carried a bare-bones quality, like it was all he could do to keep from showing me how deep he was cut.

  “How’d you find me?” I thought I’d been so careful, honest to God.

  His smile flickered in time to the tumble of his silver coin along the knuckles of his right hand. Fully ambidextrous, he could do it with his left as well, but I wasn’t interested in his parlor tricks. At one time or another I’d seen them all, and I missed only the wicked thing he did with his tongue.

  “Luck,” he said, as if it could’ve been anything else. “I showed your picture, and a car rental agent in Shreveport remembered you. She looked up where you dropped the car off for me.”

  Well, naturally she did. She’d probably have volunteered a kidney and her firstborn if he’d only thought to ask. I hadn’t used my real name or any of the aliases Chance knew, but that clearly hadn’t slowed him down much.

  “So you knew I returned the car in Laredo.”

  He nodded, eyes fixed on the pewter icon still lying untouched on my counter. “Didn’t take too much to figure you must’ve made the border crossing. Then I just had to figure out where you went from Monterrey.”

  And that would’ve been child’s play, based on how well he knew me. I fought down the dead man’s hand creeping up my back, trying to consider the question with a cool head. If he found me, could someone else? Someone who meant more harm than Chance?

  Right now I couldn’t let myself think about that.

  “How does your mom figure into this?” Wow, I sounded remote.

  “She went missing in Laredo,” he answered, his tone dull like the pewter of her pocket Buddha. “The police have no leads and I... I swear to God, Corine, before this happened, I had no intention of looking you up. I just... I wanted closure. I wanted to know where you were, wanted to be sure you were okay.”

  Oddly, I believed him. He hated uncertainty, hated not being in control, so my taking off must have ruffled him some. So he needed to find me. If he chose not to see me thereafter, that was his call. To Chance’s mind, having power and not exercising it was far different than being left in the dark. Frankly, it surprised me that it took him this long to give in to the urge to search.

  Maybe, just maybe, once upon a time, I had been disappointed not to find him hot on my heels. Sometimes a woman runs because she wants to be chased. But I was over all that. And him. Right now, I just wanted to find the fastest way to make him disappear.

  One thing puzzled me. “What was she doing in Texas?”

  “She came out to meet me. Closed up the store in Tampa and called it a vacation.” I heard the guilt lacing his voice like strychnine tea, smooth on top but razors going down, and I felt mildly disgusted with myself for wanting to comfort him.

  To distract myself from disastrous impulses, I cracked open the two drinks. The Coke bottles sat in water rings that I smeared idly with a fingertip. He took his and drained half the soda in one go. My hormones clamored; why couldn’t I stop watching his brown throat work as he swallowed?

  “Is this going to be bad?” I looked at the pewter Buddha like it was a coiled rattler.

  He exhaled, the sound of someone letting the air out of a tire real slow. “Maybe. I’m as afraid of what you’ll find as you are.”

  That made sense. Nobody wants to receive bad news any more than I want to deliver it. Goddammit, I thought I was done with this for good. Bracing myself, I reached for the token before I could think better of it. It burned a little before it kicked in and I felt the pain on my palm where the metal blistered my skin.

  You s
ee, my gift springs from my mother’s sacrifice, dying for me in the fire, and every use of it carries me back to that night. But I didn’t let go. I accepted the price and let the vision come.

  Fear subsumed me, bolstered by the resolve of a woman who made the better of two bad choices, a woman walking with a lesser devil. She definitely went of her own free will, though. No force, no physical coercion. But there’s no sound track; I can’t hear what’s been said; I just feel what they feel, see what they see.

  Details were fuzzy, like I was looking through a dirty lens, but beyond the door, I saw a white truck parked. On the side it read Something Sanitation or maybe Salvation. My head throbbed, almost overwhelming the pain in my palm. Holding on, I watched while the pewter Buddha slipped from her fingers, bounced twice, where it lay until Chance found it.

  Done.

  The token clattered to the glass countertop as I let go and wrapped my wounded hand around my Coke bottle. It took a minute before the nausea subsided enough for me to speak, but I got it out in fits and starts, knees threatening to give and let me fall to the floor. Not the most horrific handling, but the mystery of Yi Min-chin reminded me of trees that grow in bayou country, miles of root hidden by dead green water.

  I couldn’t figure why she’d left her luck. Did she think it was tapped out? She wouldn’t need it anymore? Well, if she’d known Chance was looking for me, she might have left it as a record. She’d seen me handle, and she knew the scars on my palms didn’t come from a self-mutilation fetish. So maybe that was why. Or maybe it was a map; maybe something I’d seen could help us find her.

  Chance had probably been turning over similar thoughts. Without a word, though, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a tiny green tin. I felt a spurt of annoyance he’d been that sure of me, but at the same time I appreciated his forethought. His mom had made it for me: honey, aloe, and papaya—she is (or was) a certified homeopathy practitioner.