“I don’t know. Sure.”
“Alessa Graves.”
That stops me cold.
“Are you sure you’re reading it right?”
Ray looks over the scroll again.
“Yes. Alessa Graves. Do you know her?”
“Do you think there might be a lot of Alessa Graveses in L.A.?”
“That doesn’t sound like a real common name,” says Carlos.
“It doesn’t, does it? But it doesn’t make sense. I know an Alessa Graves. She’s pretty ordinary as far as I know. All those other names, they’re big important people. Why Alessa?”
“Maybe ’cause of her dad,” says Carlos. He has his phone. “I Googled her. It looks like her dad is head of a big anticorruption bureau in the DA’s office. Could that be it?”
“That sounds like someone Wormwood would like to take down. Maybe through his kid.”
“What are you going to do?” says Ray.
“Try and stop them.”
He glances back at the scroll.
“You said the necromancer’s name was Howard?”
“Yeah. Jonathan Howard.”
“Jonathan Lee Howard?”
“I don’t know.”
“You might want to check on him.”
Goddammit. This is exactly what I need right now.
Carlos says, “Can’t you just call the cops about all this shit?”
“Definitely not.” I check my pockets and coat for my weapons. Everything feels right. “Cops don’t scare Wormwood. They probably own most of them, anyway.”
Ray keeps staring at the scroll.
“Do you want to know about the other names?”
“No. These two are enough to deal with.”
“I mean the nonhuman ones.”
I go back and look over his shoulder again. Ray points to a few indecipherable scribbles.
“I was just reading you the human names. There are other sorts of names scattered throughout the list. Protective spirits, Orishas, primitive protodeities. All sorts of mystical creatures.”
What was Marcella telling me all the time? The faction is a God-fearing bunch on some kind of holy mission. If she was telling the truth, the mystical names make perfect sense. The faction doesn’t just want to control this world. They want to control or destroy the hoodoo one too.
“I have to go,” I tell Ray. “But do me a favor and write down the next couple of inhuman names. Maybe there’s something I can learn from them.”