Title: Godmother
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider (Marvel Comics)
Rating: R (themes)
Length: 6k
Warnings: Aftermath of prostitution and rape of a minor. Graphic violence.

Summary: On a normal Uber trip, Robbie suspects one of his passengers is in trouble.

Something didn't feel right about these Uber pax. This was common. He'd picked them up a block from the Greyhound bus station, a rakish man with a gold chain and embroidered red shirt, his muscled arm possessively around the slim waist of a dark-haired girl in flip-flops and a string tank top. He started the trip by passing Robbie two ragged twenty-dollar bills. “My girl and I—my daughter—our car broke down. She's upset. Just get us across town, don't talk.”

He looked a bit young to be her father, but what did Robbie know. He kept touching her, where they sat together on the Charger's back bench—his arm around her shoulders; palm on top of her head; hand gripping the back of her neck. Her eyes were low, like she was shy. From the front seat, Robbie could hear him murmuring to her. “Why'd you think you could leave like that,” he said. “You know you belong at home.” He said home a lot as they crept through bumper-to-bumper traffic on Interstate 110. He'd punctuate the word with a tiny shake to the scruff of her neck. “Let's go home. Hey. Baby-girl. Where we going?”

“Home,” she whispered.

“I love you, baby,” he murmured. “I'll never look down on you for what you've done. Not ever. You'll always have me. Just.” Another tiny shake, and then a stroke from the crown of her head to the nape of her neck. “Stay.” The pair hadn't bitched about the Charger's lack of air conditioning, a nice change, even though it was almost ten in the morning and the cabin was warming up.

You don't like this, Robbie.

“You know I care about you,” the man murmured. “My sweet little girl. But I thought you were smarter than this.”

You've got a bad feeling about them.

Robbie deliberately relaxed his grip on his steering wheel. I can't trust my feelings anymore. Thanks to you. He glanced in his rear-view mirror, twitched it a little to get a better view of the girl. She looked skinny. Flat-chested. If she'd tried to run away from home, and been caught, why wasn't she angry? If she'd bought that skimpy top to show herself off, why wasn't she proud? How old do you think that guy is? Twenties. Early thirties, maybe. The girl? Robbie squinted into his rear-view mirror, as the traffic around him bunched together and slowed even further. She could be young enough to be his daughter. If she's younger than she looks, and he had her young. Heh. How many irresponsible young men stick around that long? Robbie shrugged. Not many. Think she's his girlfriend? No way. She's too young. And why would he lie? Good question, Eli said, in a tone Robbie had come to recognize as his teaching-thoughts. So there's your bad feeling. Something's not right, and if you take the next exit, I'll explain it to you.

“Tell me you're sorry,” the man murmured, stroking his hand up and down the girl's bare arm.

“I'm sorry.” Very soft.

“Good girl.”

Unless you'd like me to tell you now. Robbie glanced back in the mirror again. The girl had a piece of false eyelash dangling from one of her lower eyelids. She was wearing a miniskirt. Did she have a purse or anything? Not that I noticed.

Robbie half-closed his eyes and slid his mind halfway into the car, feeling for some sort of purse or bag on the floorboards. He felt the man's sky-blue dress-boots crushing into the carpet, and uneven pressure from the girl's feet—she'd somehow twisted her calves around each-other. One of her hands lay slack on the seat, while she was digging her nails into his upholstery with the other. No purse. The traffic ahead of him opened up a few car-lengths and he crept forward, then came back to himself with a long slow breath.

He felt cold, suddenly. Cold and afraid and shaky. He revved his engine: heat, noise. Crap. This was...that thing his mind did, when he was about to get irrational and obsessive about people. He felt he was about to say something that made no sense, and he wished he could stop himself, but he didn't entirely want to. He shook his head, listened to the rumble of his engine, and asked, “Why's she bleeding.”

The man and the girl met his eyes in the mirror. The girl's eyes were deep brown, almost black, with a subtle epicanthic fold.

“I said no talking.” The man cupped his large palm on the girl's narrow shoulder. “You took my money just fine.”

Robbie put on his turn signal.

“What's that for?”

“Gas.” Robbie scratched at his cheek, his chest, his hip: phantom pain and cold. He blinked hard at the road ahead of him, turned on the radio. A commercial for a waterpark. He cranked the volume. High in the sky, probably five miles away, he spotted a helicopter. He couldn't hear it yet, but he wasn't sure noise alone would drown it out if he did.

“Better be gas. I'm in a real bad mood. That money's still yours when we get home, though.”

A gap opened up between the cars to the right of them, and the Charger snugged into it. The pax were silent as Robbie joined the line crawling down the exit ramp. At last they emerged on an arterial. Robbie drove past two gas stations.

“You said you need gas.” The man leaned forward now, his heavy hand crushing Robbie's headrest.

A card. “I have a card,” Robbie said. “Points.”

The man settled back slowly into his seat. He had to stretch across the center of the cabin to pull the girl close to him again.

Robbie tried to meet the girl's eyes in the mirror again, but she was looking down. “Are you okay?”

“She's fine. She doesn't like talking to strangers.” The man scowled at him, braced his feet against the carpet and his shoulders against the seat-back.

“I wasn't talking to you.” The man leaned forward toward Robbie, in a way that would probably be menacing to normal people. This was how a lot of Uber drivers got stabbed in the back: a long knife right through the seat. Robbie tried again. “Are you okay.”

The man snapped his fingers in front of the girl's face.

“I'm okay,” she said.

Robbie passed another gas station, then turned off onto the side street immediately after. Robbie felt the man's hands find the lap belt latch, and jammed the mechanism when the man tried to unbuckle himself.

“Shit,” the man said, struggling. The girl didn't help, just hunched on her side of the bench seat.

Robbie downshifted and punched the gas, throwing his pax backward as he passed a dentist's office and a diner, then a stark concrete warehouse. He skidded through the turn behind the warehouse and parked with a jolt. “Don't watch,” he told the girl, and then he sparked up the car a little, let its fires chase the cold away just enough to shove both his human hands through his door and up through the floor of the trunk where his chain rested. I can help. Eli was of course better at strangling people. Please. He grabbed a short loop and pulled it out, hot, through the metal of the car door, then made room in his body for Eli as he leaned the bucket seat back hard into the man's lap. He saw the man's startled face upside down as his own arms shot up, the chain tight between his fists. He felt how Eli started with both his hands just behind the man's left ear, then swung his right arm around and up to snug tight under his chin, then wrenched his body and the seat forward, pulling the man up with him.

Robbie trembled with tension and the chain bit into his hands, stretching the man against the lap belt. The man cursed and panted and spat against his shoulder, and Robbie cranked his right hand around his head one more time, as his feet kicked and hands slapped and punched at the upholstery. His stubble scratched Robbie's cheek. He smelled like cologne and morning breath. It was taking so long. The man's right hand scratched Robbie's face and he had to duck to the left, against the man's head. Keep pulling. Robbie shut his eyes and breathed as his abs ached and his arms shook—and suddenly he felt the man's body shuddering against him.

It was electric. Better than that time Eli had seized control for a split second and snuck cocaine at a concert. Eli wasn't even in Robbie's body right now, he was hovering in the car, but feeling the pax's head trembling against his ear, spine stretching forward as his body relaxed and his life neared its breaking point in Robbie's hands, was undefinable joy, triumph, ardor, ecstasy—dammit, dammit, dammit. “Dammit,” Robbie hissed. He kept pulling, until the tremor started to slow, then unlatched the man's lap belt and let him sag forward until his knees rested on the back of the driver's seat. Robbie swallowed, tried to arrange his face in an indifferent expression, something he could show to the girl, if she dared to look up at him.

“Is he your dad,” Robbie asked, twisting around, pulling his head away from the pax's slack, purple cheek to face the girl.

She was staring at the man.

“Is he your dad.” Robbie gave the chain a little shake. “If he's really your dad. If I made a mistake, then I'm sorry. Did I make a mistake?”

She shook her head, very slightly.

“Did he hurt you?” Ask her if he's got any other girls. “Does he—does he have. Anyone else?”

A nod.

Robbie smelled blood again. The man had pissed through his pants and wet the leather of the bench seat, but he didn't feel any other wet spots on the Charger's upholstery. He loosened the chain around his neck a bit more, enough for the purple color to start to fade, and thought. Tried to think.

He'd just assaulted this guy, and he couldn't afford to be caught. But he didn't see any cameras. Strangling messed with people's memory, but not as much as being hit in the head. He had to stop the guy from complaining to Uber support about “Eliot.” And he had to find the other girls.

Put him in the trunk. I'll show you some tricks. You told me before that torture doesn't work. Eli was quiet for a moment. Only if you don't know what you're doing, he corrected, but his mind had the tension and activity that Robbie had come to suspect was from Eli making shit up.

Robbie bit the inside of his lip hard, sucked blood into his mouth, and spat on the back of the man's shirt collar. Then he shoved the chain back through the door, got out, hauled him out of the Charger, and patted down his pants for his phone. Set it under one of the Charger's front wheels.

When he returned to the driver's seat the girl wouldn't look at him. He put the car in gear and drove back and forth over the phone a few times, until he could feel it flatten and warp under his tire, then left the alley. He drove a few blocks and parked in front of a hardware store. Stop feeling sick. What's your issue? The blood? That's just your blood.

Robbie shut his eyes. He could still smell the man's cologne on the side of his headrest. I'm busy. He turned in his seat and watched the girl. “Are you from LA?”

The girl stared back at him, but low, at his elbow not at his face. She said nothing.

Robbie remembered how close they'd been to the Greyhound station. “Are you from out of town? I can take you back to the bus station.”

A tiny nod, then a shake.

“Do you,” Robbie squeezed his eyes shut. There was a reason he accepted cash bribes from sketchy pax. “Do you have money for fare?”

The girl spun away from him, tried to squeeze around the passenger seat to get at the door handle.

“Hey, hey.” Robbie kept the locks down. “It's okay. I can give you money. Or I can take you right home. Right where you want to go, I mean. Just tell me where to take you.”

“Why.” Her voice came out as a soft creak. “What do you want me to do.”

Shit. Robbie had been there: refusing desperately-needed help out of hard-learned suspicion. No promises had reassured him, just time, and the advice of someone he trusted. He didn't know anyone the girl trusted, but he might know someone who understood what she'd gone through. He pulled out his phone, slowly, and dialed Salomé.

“What the fuck, Eliot,” Salomé greeted him.

He took a breath. “I just strangled a guy and dumped him out of the car and now there's this girl and I don't know what to tell her. I think he was a pimp.”

A pause and a huff of breath, probably while Salomé parsed that jumble. “You killed a pimp and you're trying to make sure the girl doesn't snitch?”

“No!” Not yet. “The girl tried to run away. I want to take her home, but she won't tell me where that is.”

“And you called me why.” An irritable clicking sound, like fingernails on a phone case.

Robbie swallowed. Why're you wasting time talking to this whore. Drop the girl off at the bus station and be done with it. “I hoped you'd know what to do.”

Salomé sighed. “This isn't easy for me, either,” she said. “You strangled a pimp. How strangled?”

Pretty good. “Pretty bad. He was out.” Robbie sucked on his bleeding lip, considering how much he should reveal. “I can find him again.”

“Don't ever tell me shit like that. Just.” Another sigh. “Leaving a pimp is hard. He, he'll twist you around, and he's good at it. It's his job. A lot of girls get caught so young they don't know what's happening. They think he's their first love. He's in their heads. He's like a cult, they want to go back.”

Robbie looked back over his shoulder at the skinny girl in the halter top and miniskirt. He couldn't see where she was bleeding, but she had to be, he was so sure. She looked innocent, terrified, curled away from him with her head tucked under her arms. “But she ran away,” Robbie whispered. “He was mad at her.”

“Hmm.” Robbie waited anxiously for Salomé to continue. “You can't just let her go, like a seagull. Someone else'll pick her up. A couple days on your couch won't cut it, either.”

“I just want to take her home.”

“Put her on.”

Robbie reached out with his phone, set it on the bench seat beside the girl. She uncurled a bit as he withdrew his hand, stared at the phone. “This is my...friend,” Robbie said. “I drive her around. You can—you think you can tell her what you want me to do?”

“Does she work for you?” the girl asked, soft but distinct. Respectful. Maybe because Robbie had just strangled a guy right in front of her.

Fuck. “I work for her. Salomé, she works for herself.” Robbie struggled to come up with an endorsement for Salomé. Nice was not correct. “She's honest.”

The girl stared down at the phone. He heard Salomé's voice, faint, hello?

“I can leave,” Robbie offered. “I'll stand over there.” He pointed at a jacked-up Silverado a few cars down from them, which cast a tall shadow. “Just please don't take my phone, I need it.”

The girl slowly picked the phone up, then stared silently at Robbie until he left the car. He left the door ajar, and tried not to watch too closely as the girl listened to the phone. Finally, she began to speak.

If Robbie concentrated just so, he could hear her voice through the car. He turned away. Okay. Is there anything you were gonna tell me that I haven't already figured out?

Eli shifted from side to side in his mind a bit. No.

Stay out of my head when I hurt people, Robbie demanded. If I do things like that, I want it to be just me.

You asked for my help. Robbie felt a spark of hope that Eli had been in his head at the time, and that was why strangling the man half to death had felt like winning ten grand only better and sharper and simpler, until Eli added, I went into the car once I knew you had the technique right.

Really.

You don't trust me? Robbie felt offended. See? See! You push things at me!

You were on your own for...probably the last two minutes of strangling. Why, you worried I stole some of your nut?

Robbie rubbed the left side of his face, trying to drive away the phantom sensation of the man's tremors as he lost consciousness, the scent of him. I liked it.

Of course you liked it. Eli sounded patient. It's fun. That's why people do it. You should strangle more shitstains, it's good for us.

The girl thankfully interrupted Eli by knocking on the Charger's window. Robbie jogged over. She held out his phone with a hard stare, and Robbie took it. Salomé was still on the line, and the girl had set it to speaker. “Hey,” he said.

“Eliot. Luisa told me what happened. She says she wants to go home. Luisa, will you give him your address or would you rather he take you to a police station?”

Luisa's face was a blank mask as she stared at Robbie from the back bench. “5091b 3^rd Avenue, Aguila, Arizona.”

Robbie opened the Uber ap out of habit and found the meter still running for the man's trip. He canceled it, giving the reason, belligerent. He realized he probably shouldn't enter an Arizona address into the Uber ap, right after he'd just gotten half-way through killing someone. Instead he opened a janky open-source map, whichh might work, and supposedly wouldn't log his searches. “What was that again?”

The girl repeated herself, quieter.

Robbie had a shift at Canelo's starting in an hour and a half.

“He won't find my family, right?” Luisa whispered as Robbie stared down at the map on his phone, considering how to do this. Not this again. I ain't your Scotty. Last time, you promised me a kill and then you pussied out after you caved the guy's chest in and gave him double pneumonia. And then I. Killed his boss. Eli, if you take us there—Are you seriously trying to tell me you won't track the pimp down and kill him tonight? Robbie breathed out hard through his nose. I could give him double pneumonia and call the cops on him. Like usual. And since I'll be expecting it, I'll be ready to stop myself from going too far. Unless you take us to Arizona. “Sir. Can he find my family?”

“No,” Robbie said firmly. “He won't find anyone.” Will you do it? Give me your word you'll kill him. And no welching. I don't care if he's got a sick mama, two hooker-wives and five kids at home. You committed? He kept an innocent girl prisoner and tried to blackmail her into staying with him. Yes or no. “Yes,” Robbie snapped. Then, with a glance at Luisa, “I mean, I promise.”

“You two good?” Salomé asked.

“Probably,” Robbie said. “Um. Luisa?”

“Yes.”

“I'm not a social worker, Eliot. I don't work for free. You make this a habit, get to know some. This was a favor.”

“I appreciate it.”

Salomé hung up. Robbie stared down at his phone and drummed his free hand on his steering wheel. “I can get you home really, really fast, but you can't look, and it'll make the car really hot,” he began. He leaned forward and took off his leather jacket. “Put this over your head.”

Luisa recoiled.

“Just for thirty seconds,” Robbie pleaded, holding the jacket out. “When I tell you, count to thirty and then you can take it off.”

She took the jacket carefully, and turned it inside out, feeling the lining. She smelled it and wrinkled her nose. “Why?”

Heh. Robbie winced. “Um. Top-secret...SHIELD technology.”

Luisa finally, finally, met his eyes. “Your friend was right, you're a terrible liar.”

“It's just thirty seconds. Please.”

“Why.”

“I just don't want you to watch. And when you take the jacket off, you'll be in Aguila. I promise.”

“Okay,” Luisa said at last.

Robbie pulled up the town in Google maps, found a reasonably-private looking side street a few blocks from the address she'd given him, and pulled up Street View. He stared at red dust, a lacy-looking tree, a low wire fence. Good? Turn it around a bit, I want another landmark. He slid Street View up and down the road, until he spotted an ancient gas station and Eli said, Hold it. Robbie stared at the phone, blinking every so often to push back his fatigue and adrenaline and stop the screen from dancing around in his vision, until Eli said, Got it. “Okay.” Robbie started the Charger and pulled out of the lot, cast around for another private alley with no obvious security cameras that didn't have a half-conscious pimp collapsed on the asphalt. He pulled into a garbage alley between two rows of houses—best he could do in an unfamiliar neighborhood—put the Charger in neutral, and revved up just below redline and held it. He felt the water pump strain and the intercooler struggle against the lack of airflow, felt the engine heat, and called to it, pulled its power into his body, breathed out slowly through his mouth until he could taste its fumes. Belatedly, he rolled down the windows so Luisa wouldn't have to breathe them.

The cold arrows of phantom pain in his body seemed to draw the fires toward them, heating him from within. He tried not to think about the blood in the back seat, or wonder where it was; easy, he told himself. Easy. He tried to shut the Rider's vents, even though he could barely feel them, shifting under his scalp, and he swallowed experimentally as burnt oil welled up from under his tongue. “Cover your face and start counting,” he told Luisa, and then he curled down against his steering wheel, wrapped both arms over his skull, and slammed the gas pedal to the floor.

Burning up hurt.

It always hurt, all his flesh charring away and his bones drying and cracking in the heat, but this time he felt like he'd swallowed a bomb; his sealed vents warped with the effort of holding that first flare of fire inside as his leather skin snapped tight. Nothing stopped the gout of flames from between his teeth. He let out a wounded growl as burning oil dribbled uncontrollably down his jaw and splashed against his knees. He twisted in his seat and saw Luisa half-hidden behind the sturdy leather of Robbie's motorcycle jacket. Eli, hurry. I'm hurrying. How did you make this suck so much?

He melted his body into the car and let streams of fire escape all the voids and seams of its body while Eli concentrated on whatever he did to open portals, revving delicately—more power—revving a little higher, concentrating on the slight weight of his passenger on his back bench, the skin of her back and thighs cool against his hot leather. Hurry. She's fine. Maybe some blisters—hurry!

At last he felt a load on his engine, and saw a crack of flame in front of his bumper swirling wider and wider into a black hole just large enough to fit through, and he shifted to first, let his clutch burn, and eased through the portal.

They landed on a county road in the vast desert, right in front of that ancient gas station. He braked, parked, rolled his body out through the metal of his front quarter panel and onto the shoulder, opened his vents wide with a shriek of escaping gasses, and snuffed out.

Robbie staggered, gravel jabbing up through the soles of his Converse. A guy in a Stetson was staring at him from the filling station, gasoline dribbling from the nozzle in his hand. Robbie leaned on his hood and made his way back to the driver's seat, put the car in gear, and headed toward the town. “You can look now,” he croaked. He pawed around under his seat for a water bottle and twisted it open with his teeth as he drove. “I'm sorry about the heat. You okay?”

Luisa had his jacket in her lap, wringing the leather in her fists. “We're here,” she said.

“Just a mile.” Robbie pulled his phone back out of his pocket and consulted his privacy-map. “Maybe five minutes.”

“I'm really here,” she repeated, and took short, hitching breaths.

The Charger's radio was still on, playing nothing but static. Robbie switched it off, concentrated on not missing any turns.

He rumbled down the road into town, slowed to twenty-five. Turned off at a tiny general store, passed what could be a park or a soccer field or just a vacant lot, and trundled off the dusty asphalt onto a rutted gravel road that led to a cluster of low duplexes and triplexes. Found 5091b and parked. Let out a shuddery breath.

Clean air wafted through the Charger's open windows, carrying the scent of chiles cooking, and something faint and piney and unfamiliar. A bird trilled in the distance. Robbie heard a baby crying. With the Charger's engine off, the world was so quiet. He felt he could hear for miles. “You can get out if you want,” he told Luisa, who stared rigidly at the back of the passenger seat, tendons standing up on her fists as she clutched Robbie's jacket. Robbie could see her ribs around the bottom of her string top. He wished he'd thought to stop and find her some better clothes.

She clearly wasn't ready to leave the car, but the last thing Robbie wanted to do was put his hands on her to lift her out. He contemplated knocking on the door, but she'd probably prefer if she had time to collect herself. Maybe he should get out so she could have privacy.

His dilemma was solved when the door of 5091b 3^rd Avenue opened slowly and a gray-haired woman in a floral dress dress poked her head out. Robbie glanced rapidly back and forth between Luisa and the woman, then got out of the car. “Ma'am.” Robbie always felt like a kid when he spoke Spanish, but it was usually best when talking to old people.

“What do you want?” She didn't need a cane, but she hunched down as though she leaned on one, as though something pressed down on her shoulders and her mouth and the corners of her eyes. Robbie noticed movement behind the window blinds, a child or a young teenager, there and gone.

He waved at the Charger. “I found Luisa.”

The woman straightened. She darted around Robbie and hopped over the concrete bumper at the edge of the parking lot, as Robbie slid the passenger seat forward out of Luisa's way and started to swing the door open, and Luisa broke into long, loud sobs that sounded through the small town, bringing faces to windows and people out of doors. The old woman knelt half-way into the door and clutched Luisa's head to her chest, kissing her hair. A girl, maybe ten or twelve, bolted out of the house to join them.

The younger girl had a white bandage on her forearm, and she smelled strongly of blood.

Robbie stood by the apartment door, shifting from foot to foot until Luisa finally crept out of the car, pinning her body against the woman and covering her face in her hands. Robbie started to back away, but the woman stopped him. “Don't go. Come in.”

“I don't know her,” Robbie said, as the girl grabbed his hand and pulled him into the blood-smelling family room. “I don't really know what happened.” The old woman waved for him to sit on a sofa neatly covered in a red sheet, and guided Luisa deeper into the house, where three doors branched off a tiny hallway. Robbie heard water running.

He should go. He wasn't making any money. He didn't know any of these people, and if he said the wrong thing, he could make things even worse for Luisa. He folded his hands and bounced his knee.

The younger girl backtracked from the bathroom and stood over him. “Where was she?”

“Boyle Heights, near the bus station. I think she was trying to come here.”

“Why not after the first bus?” the girl asked. At Robbie's blank look, she continued, “She was gonna go home early because the aquarium was closed. That was ages ago.”

Robbie licked his dry lips. “Something bad happened. You, um. She might not want to talk about it.”

“What, like amnesia?” The girl cocked her head, incredulous.

“That'd be nice. I mean. I think she wanted to come home, really bad.” For a change of subject, Robbie pointed at her bandaged arm, where the blood smell was coming from. “Are you okay? What happened?”

She squinted at him, then took his hand again, tugged him off the couch. “Come on.” She led him past the bathroom, where running water hid Luisa's sobs and the woman's murmuring, and into a small bedroom where neatly stacked milk crates served as shelves and dressers and two small beds sat, one neatly made, every corner of the blankets tucked in, the other rumpled. The girl steered him across a pile of books and toys to a small closet, opened it, and tugged a pull-chain for the light.

A shoe-box served as the altar of a tiny shrine, where a black and a white candle had burned down to stumps below a paper print-out of a skeleton in a dark robe, two bony fingers raised in blessing. Below her, leaning against the shoebox, was a whittled human figure, black and silver paint and orange glitter and whisps of yellow fur and feathers jetting out from its skull.

Robbie sucked in a breath. “Who's that.”

“That's La Madrina,” the girl said, pointing at the image of the skeleton. “Santa Muerte. She's not evil. People just don't like that she helps anyone who prays to her and doesn't judge. I burned a white candle, and I showed her I was serious,” she pointed at the bandage, “and she made you bring Luisa back. So I'm not sorry.”

The pimp's car breaking down and landing him and Luisa in the Charger could have been chance, but to happen so soon after her sister had done this ritual—he could smell her blood, and it was setting off his flashbacks even though she wasn't dead—was a coincidence too far. This was the second time Robbie had found himself unwittingly answering a plea to Santa Muerte. He supposed he was fortunate that most people weren't desperate enough to actually cut themselves. “The black candle?”

Robbie braced himself for the answer, and sure enough the girl said, low, “In case. In case she needed revenge.”

My pleasure, but I don't like not knowing who's jerking my leash. Who's Santa Muerte? She's...I don't know. Like a saint, but not. New-Age bullshit, got it. Robbie pointed at the wooden figure just below the altar. “Who's he?”

“La Leyenda,” the girl said, confirming Robbie's suspicion. “I got him in LA before Luisa missed her bus home. He's real. And he's from there, so he probably knows his way around.”

He bent down slowly and picked the little doll up. Its arms were bent at the elbows and jointed at the shoulders with a wire that ran all the way through. It was thick-limbed and hastily-carved, but its face was a recognizable skull, with holes drilled in to accept the feathers and fur that stood in for the Rider's flames. It looked like an Aztec death god, the kind of tchotchke street vendors on Olvera Street made to sell to tourists. But the Rider wasn't a god, and it certainly wasn't a superhero, it was just Robbie and Eli's minds twisted together in a body fueled by Eli's decades-old human sacrifices. Robbie turned it over queasily. The artist hadn't picked up on the steel caps and kevlar panels of the Rider's racing jumpsuit, but they'd included the thick white stripe that crossed his chest below his collar and turned sharply down on the sides. “Why was it on the altar.”

“On the floor,” she corrected him. “So Santa Muerte wouldn't be jealous. I thought he could help her find Luisa. He protects kids.”

Robbie swallowed, covered his mouth with his free hand, held La Leyenda at arm's length. He could see where she gotten the idea; his first big news story had been when he'd rescued Gabe from a shoot-out back in Hillrock, but a lot of the people whose hands he'd crushed and spines he'd broken had been pretty young. “How old. Is Luisa?”

“Fourteen,” she said, and Robbie turned away sharply, faced the wall, and wheezed engine fumes into his elbow. When he managed to collect himself, his cotton hoodie was scorched and his skin burned. He blinked painfully and handed La Leyenda back to Luisa's sister. Its paint cracked where Robbie's hand had gripped it.

The door opened behind them and they spun around. Luisa and the old woman were there, red-eyed, Luisa dripping wet and wrapped in a large towel. Robbie averted his eyes, backed against the wall so they could get through the door, then fled back out to the living room. Fourteen. Fourteen. Fourteen.

We gotta ring up La Madrina; if she's giving us jobs, we oughta get paid. She played you like a fiddle. Robbie paced back and forth over the thin carpet, the walls spinning around him. In the corner of his eye, he saw Luisa's sister watching him from the hallway. The smell of her blood filled the room. Robbie imagined this girl kneeling in front of her closet, probably last night, blood weeping from her arm and the smoke from the two candles flying a hundred miles on an east wind and sinking into his brain and curling around the Charger's steel. A white candle and a black candle. A plea for help and a plea for vengeance. Get a grip. I gotta go to work. I gotta make Gabe's dinner. I gotta wait for the pimp to go home so I can find the other girls. I'm not a fucking...murder genie. I'm in control.

“What happened to her?” the girl asked, and Robbie made himself stop, made himself swallow. Oil slicked his tongue.

“She was trapped,” he managed. She was still holding the wooden figure. “Don't summon La Leyenda again. He kills people.” He turned away and practically ran for the door, yanked it open, fled out into the sunny gravel lot.

The Charger's passenger door was still open, and Robbie's leather jacket lay on the ground where Luisa must have dropped it. He shook the dust off it and shrugged it on, shut the door with a thought, and flung himself into the driver's seat.

From the apartment, Luisa's sister watched him, La Leyenda dangling at her side like a doll. Robbie touched the big white stripe on his chest as though he could hide it under his hand, gave up, and punched the gas, reversing in a shower of gravel.

 

You know, you're lucky you got me, Eli remarked as Robbie struggled to hold to a safe speed on his way out of town. The streets were wide, but there were no sidewalks. Kids chased each-other with sticks in the shade of a spindly tree behind a low wooden building. Anyone else would hate you if they knew about your kills, and how they make you feel. But you and me: eternal friends. I mean that.

Robbie revved the Charger helplessly at Aguila's only stoplight, empty two-lane highway tantalizingly out of reach before him, and coughed engine fumes. His tongue still worked, for the moment. “Are you fucking kidding me,” he snarled.

Worth a shot.