The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

"I'll do it," I said after a few seconds' thought. "I'll want to fly up there with them and be in on the arrest make sure however much of this potion Hemandez has is sealed and then properly disposed of." I wished Solomon had heard of Huitzilopochtii; that would have made the problem of sealing the vicious stuff simple. But however effective the great king's design is with jinni, baalim, and other Middle Eastern denizens of the Other Side, it's useless against New World Powers, except those largely subsumed into a Christian matrix. And Huitzilopochtii, as Manstein's analysis had shown all too clearly, still had a great deal of independent potency.

Then something else occurred to me: Hemandez's horrible nostrum might end up in the Devonshire toxic spell dump. Tasting the irony of that, I went back to my office and got on the phone.

The first constable I talked to was a fellow named Joaquin Garda. "Madre de Dios!" he burst out when I told him what I'd run into. Being of Aztecan descent, he had a culturally ingrained understanding of just how nasty a power Huitzilopochtii was. I knew it in my head; he felt it in his gut. He bumped me up to his superior, a sublegate called Higgins, and he must have given him an earful, too, because Higgins was the soul of cooperation.

"We'll get going on a warrant for this right away, Inspector Fisher," he promised. "Any time we get a chance to put one like that out of business, we leap on it."

He didn't argue when I said I wanted to go along, either; sometimes constables get stuffy about things like that. I added, "Better make sure your people are well warded, Sublegate: with one potion like that around, who knows what else Hemandez has in there with him?"

"We'll send out the Special Wizards and Thaumaturges team," Higgins said. "If they can't handle it, nobody this side ofD.StC. can. I'll call you back as soon as we have the warrant. Thanks for passing on the information."

"My pleasure," I told him. "I want this guy shut down at least as much as you do."

After I got off the ether with Higgins, I went back through my files and found the names and addresses of the other three apsychic lads born near the Devonshire dump in the past year. Then I checked in the phone grimoire; two of the families were tested. I called both those houses and, by luck, got an answer each time. What I wanted to know was whether the mothers had bought any potions from Cuauhtemoc Hemandez.

Both women I talked to answered no. I thanked them and added the data to my notes, then spent a while scratching my head. The curandero's nostrum was certainly vile enough to have caused Jesus Coidero to be born without a soul, but just because it could have didn't necessarily mean it had. I kicked myself for not doing a more thorough job around the Corderos' house, but I didn't kick too hard. When the microimps in your spellchecker start going berserk, you'd better pay attention to that More nearly routine stuff kept me busy the rest of the day.

When Bea walked by my office door in the middle of the afternoon and saw me there, she raised an eyebrow and said,

"I expected you'd be in the field now."

I'd hoped to get to Bakhtiar's Precision Burins myself, but it just wasn't working. I said, "I'll probably be out tomorrow or the next day," and explained what Manstein had found in the potion I'd brought back from Lupe Cordero's house.

"That's-revolting," she said. "You're right, we need to clamp down on that as hard as we can. With the enormous Aztecian population in Angels City, the last thing we need here is a large-scale flareup of Huitzilopochdism."

"It would make worries over Medvamps rather smaD potatoes, wouldn't it?" I said.

"I do admire your talent for understatement, David." Bea headed on down the hall.

Understatement was an understatement. If Huitzilopochdi got established in Angels City, it wouldn't be fruit trees drained dry, it would be people. I thought about hearts torn out on secret altars, necromancy, ritual cannibalism a lot less refined than the genteel Christian variety.

I also thought about all the other bloodthirsty Powers that would be drawn to the area. The act of human sacrifice is so powerful a magical instrument that it reverberates through the Other Side. All sorts of hungry Things would head this way, wanting their share: "When the gods smelled the sweet savor, they gathered like flies above the sacrifice." What Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh five thousand years ago remains true today.

They say that's how the horror happened in Alemania. But the Leader didn't try to throw the Powers out Oh, no. He welcomed them with open arms and fed them, I dare say, beyond their wildest dreams.

The whole world has seen what came of that. Not here, I thought Never ogam.