So to speak.
Jonah stepped back and let the bat swing down. The end of it hit the drive with a thud, and Jonah leaned his weight on it.
“We all have ghosts,” he said. “It’s the human condition.”
“I don’t.”
“Yeah, well, wait.”
It had been a year. Jonah had gotten out of the way of assuming everyone he encountered was, one way or another, involved with the supernatural. In Babylon, everyone either laid hexes, bought hexes, or got hexed. It was that sort of town. Insular. Set in its ways. A gateway to the Underworld that, like the rest of them, had been slammed shut years ago. The dead still flowed that way, only to back up and go stagnant waiting to get through.
Most people from Jerusalem had no idea. When they had heart attacks, they blamed it on fast food chicken. If they got a promotion, it was probably on merit. The problem was that magic-users tended to have interests in common. So when you ran into one, it meant there would be more around the corner.
Jonah knew that. He should have remembered it.
“Look, I don’t care what your problem with Slater is,” he said. “I met her tonight. No deals. No secrets. Whatever this is? It’s nothing to do with me.”
The biker looked amused and stayed where he was, one arm hooked up over the side of the truck.
“You think so, do you?” he said. “I guessed you were new in town, but notthatnew. How long have you been here?”
Jonah shrugged rather than commit to a lie. He’d been in Jerusalem since a week after his granny breathed her last. He’d driven here the day after he locked her house up. Long enough that he should have known the local cunning folk… if he’d wanted to.
The biker tilted his head to as he considered Jonah, his face neutral. He rapped his knuckles against the side of the truck in a lazy, just off-beat tattoo. Finally, he pushed himself up off the truck and broke his silence.
“In Jerusalem, people like Slater—like you—have two choices. They work for us, or they work against us.”
“Us?”
“My boss. My associates. Me.”
“And the other side?”
There wasalwaysanother side. Good guys and bad guys, left-hand path or right hand, blood magic or book magic. In Jonah’s experience, once you took away the trappings, it was pretty much “those assholes” and “the bigger assholes.” It could be difficult to tell them apart because there wasn’t much difference.
“You don’t want to meet them.”
“I didn’t want to meet you, but I didn’t get much of a choice.”
The biker smiled, slow and empty. “See? Now you get it.”
“And Slater works for you?”
“She did.”
“And now she doesn’t.”
The smile deepened enough to pull up the hint of a dimple in one cheek under his stubble.
“Look at that,” he said with sugary regard. “I can barely see the green anymore.”
Jonah clenched his jaw for a second on the scratch of offended pride. The last thing he needed was for this guy to think he knewanything.For anyone—anyone else, he corrected himself as he thought of Deborah and her rough, desperate voice—in Jerusalem to think he was useful.
That didn’t mean it didn’t gall—just a little.
He could swallow it, though. He’d swallowed worse.
“She thought she knew me,” he repeated. He stepped forward and chucked the bat into the cab of his truck. It rattled down behind the seats. “We’re both drunks. We frequent the same haunts. Look at AA. The meetings are full of us.”
