Death Blows

by D. D. Barant

  I stare at her, trying to get my breathing under control. I forget sometimes I’m no more than one bite away from losing my humanity forever—not that she knows that. She’d probably just find it funny that I’d have to grow a few new fingers—

  “Almost lost your endangered status, didn’t you?” she says. “Pretty quick for a human. Too bad—nothing I like better than a few ladyfingers for a snack.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “That gunk you’re wearing might fool Joe Thrope on the street, but you’re still pumping out all kinds of human stinks underneath. Living in a cage, you get kind of sensitive to anything new—and I haven’t smelled a genuine OR in a long, long time.” OR stands for “Original Recipe”—it’s what thropes and pires call us “unenhanced” humans when they’re being insulting.

  I stand up and pocket the lighter. “Thanks for your help. Good luck getting that lit.”

  She smiles and inhales deeply through her nose. “Oh, I wouldn’t want it lit now. Burning tobacco I can smell anytime—but it’s been a few decades since I last had a hit of good old human fear…”

  I can still hear her chuckling as I leave.

  I leaf through the comic book Dr. Pete dropped off until I come to a panel depicting the Quicksilver Kid in action. He’s the one who looks like a robot wearing a cowboy hat, though in fact he’s a golem made largely out of brass. In my world he’d be shown blazing away with a pair of six-guns, but his weapons of choice are a bandolier of gleaming silver throwing knives. Most of the knives designed for throwing that I’m familiar with have a leaf-shaped blade, weighted toward the head to ensure it strikes point-first; in the comic, the artist has drawn them more like a traditional, bowie-style hunting knife.

  The Kid himself supposedly has a brass outer shell, filled with mercury—hence the Quicksilver name. I always thought the reasons lems were filled with sand or made from clay had to do with malleability, but apparently a fluid and metallic medium is necessary even in a body where the joints are hinged and soldered. The Kid is said to be animated by the spirit of a “hundred rattlesnakes,” which I guess makes him not only fast but mean. And probably noisy.

  Charlie walks into my office without knocking. It’s not much of an office, just a windowless room with a door, a desk, and two chairs, but it was one of the things I demanded from Cassius when it turned out my stay here was going to be a little longer than I’d expected. I don’t care whether Charlie knocks or not; I’m more concerned about whether or not he breaks the furniture by sitting on it. Fortunately, Charlie seems just as happy standing as he does sitting—which is to say, not very.

  “How was prison?” he asks.

  “Vaguely informative and mostly made from rock. Kinda like you.”

  “How vague?”

  “We’re chasing a lem from the Old West. Supposedly a bounty hunter now.”

  Charlie nods. He’s wearing a midnight-black fedora today, which makes his already black features virtually disappear. “The Quicksilver Kid, right?”

  “Yeah. You know about this guy?”

  “Sure. Even lems have legends.”

  “So what’s his story?” Charlie shrugs. “Built by a mad shaman type to be sheriff of some small town in the late 1800s. Town was razed by a pack of thrope banditos, and the Kid spent the next few years hunting every one of them down. No one was faster or more accurate than he was with a throwing knife, and he packed a bandolier full of them: enchanted silver blades called the Seven Teeth of the Moon. People said he could pin a firefly to a toothpick at a hundred feet with one of them.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Disappeared after he killed the last bandit. Wasn’t seen again until that comic you’re holding came out.”

  “How about since?” Charlie hesitates, which is something he almost never does. “I don’t know. You hear stories, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Like I said, we have our legends. Doesn’t mean we believe they’re true—just means we enjoy a good story as much as the next guy.”

  “Stop worrying about looking stupid and tell me the damn story, already.”

  “Some lems say he walled himself up in a cave and just let himself rust. Others say he learned how to disguise himself and is still out there today, working as a mercenary or a cop or a spy. Half the war stories you hear have the punch line ‘and it turns out Captain Feldspar was really the Quicksilver Kid!’ But they’re just stories—though one company making lems did produce a ‘Quicksilver’ model for a while in the 1960s. Didn’t last.” He shakes his head. “Faulty joints. And of course they were actually filled with sand, not mercury—that just doesn’t work.”

  “Except in comic books.” I toss the issue down on my desk. “Well, I got a tip he may be hauling in bail jumpers somewhere in the Midwest. Could be a dead end, but it’s what we have to go on at the moment.”

  “I know some people in Kansas City. I’ll ask around.”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  After Charlie leaves I go for a walk. It’s raining out, which isn’t surprising—this is Seattle, after all. That’s okay, though; I do some of my best thinking while walking in the rain.

  Dark, damp streets. Cars make that noise they only make on wet pavement. Neon shimmers off puddles on the tops of newspaper boxes. I jam my hands in the pockets of my trench coat and trudge into the night, questions percolating in my brain.

  Question number one: Was the killer really crazy? The crime scene was certainly bizarre, but I was living in a bizarre world. The comic book references were strange, but they had a certain internal logic—after all, the victim himself had appeared in a comic book. I keep seeing that grinning green skull in the red mask, crackling with little arcs of electricity, and shiver. Dealing with organized psychopaths always gives me a very particular feeling, like I’m standing on top of a cliff; a cliff where the world makes sense right up to the edge, then drops away into a howling abyss of insanity. That cliff is where my quarry lives, close enough to normalcy to fool his friends and neighbors but one step away from sacrificing everyone he knows to the great Spider God that lives in his brain. And no matter how many times I’ve been on that cliff, I always get the same sickening little tingle in the pit of my stomach, the dizzying vertigo of madness.

  That’s what I feel right now.

  That’s what my intuition says. The facts are still open to interpretation: A valuable mystic item is missing, and the victim had powerful known enemies. This could still be a glorified robbery or a revenge killing I don’t fully understand.

  Question number two: What isn’t Cassius telling me? Yes, Gretchen is one of his people and he protects his people like a pit bull does her pups, but the Bravo Brigade was a government team. Cassius knows more about them than he’s letting on, and when I have enough information I’m going to have to confront him.

  Question number three: How much does Gretch know? Was she aware of Aquitaine’s other identity, or did he keep it a secret from her? Could Gretchen be a suspect—or even one of the Brigade?

  The Brigade consisted of a pire, three thropes, and two lems. Two males, two females, two asexual beings. All sorts of possibilities for office romance, though I get the impression that pires and thropes don’t hook up with each other too often—and the lems just don’t go there at all.

  Question number four: Is Wertham really dead? I haven’t seen a body, and reports of his demise are kind of vague; in the comic, he’s killed by an exploding volcano. Dramatic, but the kind of thing that makes exhuming a body difficult.

  I sigh. A line of crows perched on the edge of a chain-link fence eye me suspiciously but make no move to leave, raindrops gleaming on their oily black feathers. The fence surrounds what used to be a gas station, now an empty square of patchy gravel; stunted weeds and white PVC out-gassing pipes stick up here and there like the periscopes of subterranean submarines.

  I start to head back the way I came. I don’t get very far, because there’s a group of people up
ahead blocking the sidewalk. I never noticed them approach, but there they are. They’re standing facing me, not moving, in the shadows between two streetlights. Half a dozen, maybe.

  The one in the center is obviously a thrope, his lupine silhouette a head taller than any of the others. His yellow eyes are only slits. He pads forward a few steps, the rest of his group staying where they are, and stops just at the edge of the pool of light I’m under. I still can’t see his face, but his black-furred, claw-tipped hands are now clearly visible.

  Thrope mouths aren’t shaped for human speech, so they’ve evolved their own sign language. I’ve become fairly fluent, but even if I wasn’t there’s no way I can miss what he signs.

  Hello, Jace.

  FIVE

  It’s definitely not Tanaka.

  The body language’s all wrong, for one thing. Tanaka stood and moved with a grace that suggested a panther more than a wolf; this guy is more hunched over, less certain on two feet. He’s big, though—must mass nearly as much as Charlie. Looks like he’s wearing some kind of sleeveless vest and dark pants—no shoes, of course.

  The rain is no more than a drizzle now, what native Seattlites don’t even consider actual precipitation—they just say the air’s a little damp. Little beads of moisture sparkle in his black-andgray fur, making it look like someone sprinkled him with industrial-strength fairy dust.

  I’m carrying the Ruger, but if they rush me I’m in trouble—pires and thropes are scary fast, and my gun has zero ability to instill fear in this world. If they attack, I’ll have to kill each and every one of them before they reach me. Not good.

  I sign back, Who the hell are you?

  You can call me Tair. He signs each letter of his name, then punctuates it with a sign that encapsulates the whole thing.

  What do you want?

  To warn you.

  About?

  He chuckles. It’s a sound that’s more familiar than it is menacing, but I’ll be damned if I can remember where I’ve heard it before. A mutual acquaintance—Dr. Peter Adams.

  Why? Is he in danger?

  Maybe. Maybe he is the danger.

  That throws me. Dr. Pete is probably the most decent, ethical person I’ve met since I came to this world. You’ve got to be kidding. He’s not the person you think he is, Jace. What do you know about him, really? Let’s see. He’s got a big family that loves him, he heals people for a living, he risked his own life to save mine—That’s not his family. I don’t have to bother signing What? The look on my face does it for me. Do a little checking into the “Adams” family. You’ll be surprised at what you come up with. Why have you been hanging around the clinic? Keeping an eye on the good doctor. Wouldn’t want him to suddenly vanish without a trace. “Threatening him is really not a good idea,” I say, and suddenly the gun is in my hand. I know it won’t impress any of them, but it makes me feel better.

  Wasn’t threatening him. Was threatening you. He growls to underline the remark, a deep rumble that practically makes my bones vibrate. “Oh. That’s different. Go right ahead, everyone else does.” Dr. Adams has a way of leaving town with unfinished business. That makes the people I work for very unhappy. “Oh dear. Unhappy people, I hate those. They’re scary.” He chuckles again. You’ve got it wrong again. Being scary is my job. He motions with his muzzle, and his group glides forward. Not a pack, though—they’re pires, not thropes. Interesting. There are a lot of thrope gangs—the pack structure is a natural fit—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any pires doing the same thing. The Bloods out of LA are all pires, and their leaders trace their roots all the way back to Egypt—which may explain their fetish for gold jewelry. Ankhs on thick yellow chains, rings with tiny gold pyramids instead of gemstones, bracelets embossed with hieroglyphs; more Tomb Raider than LA Raiders. But the style doesn’t stop at the bling. Pires who want to do their gangbanging during daylight hours have to cover up just like all the other blood drinkers—but instead of a nice face mask and hoodie from Abercrombie & Fitch, they wind strips of designer fabric around every exposed inch of flesh. Call themselves “wrappers.”

  Yeah, it’s kind of ridiculous. But so are baggy pants that ride so low they show off your underwear, and the reason that trend started was purely practical, too—it made it easier to hide a gun. The wrappers, for all their Invisible Man/King Tut vibe, have more than style on their minds. Other pires don’t go masked at night, but these guys do; wrapping is an excuse to hide—and sometimes swap—their identities whenever they want.

  I won’t bore you with a long description of every variation I see standing in front of me; let’s just say it looks like someone set off a car bomb in the alleyway between a jewelry outlet and a bandage factory, and leave it at that.

  They don’t carry guns, of course. But they’re large and mean and undead, and that’s all they really need.

  “Yeah, real frightening,” I say. “You guys look like the remains of a bad ski trip. Don’t you have a pyramid you should be guarding or something?”

  “Bitch thinks she’s tough,” one of them says. “Must be tough, she sure ain’t smart.”

  “Can’t count, anyway,” another says. “Must be that shiny thing she holdin’ so tight. Got some major mojo goin’ on.”

  “That what she want us to think, anyways.”

  I sigh. I’ve had special bullets made since I got here, but I had to provide the gunpowder from my one box of ammo; I don’t have a proper recipe for the stuff, and I hate wasting it educating morons like this. “Yeah, yeah, it’s my magical splatwand. I point it at you and you go splat. Wanna see?”

  Tair spreads both his hands wide in an abrupt slicing motion. Enough. Tell me, Jace, how do Dr. Adams and your enforcer get along?

  “Charlie? What’s he got to do with this?”

  He’s a golem. I would have thought the doctor would show some… professional interest.

  That makes no sense at all. Dr. Pete’s specialty is human beings, not golems—not that lems have doctors, anyway. The closest thing they seem to have are repairmen.

  Human beings are only the doctor’s hobby, you know; his true interests lie in humanoid animism. And he wasn’t always that particular where and how he got to practice.

  My eyes narrow. I know what he’s talking about now—the Gray Market, the underground trade in illegal lem manufacture. “Dr. Pete’s not involved in anything like that.”

  Maybe not now. But he was—and the people he worked for aren’t very happy with him. Sooner or later he’s going to have settle accounts with them.

  The biggest wrapper in the group, a guy almost as wide as he is tall, slams a fist into his open palm suggestively. It’d be more menacing if his thick fingers weren’t bound in tartan fabric—it’s like watching a Scottish mummy warm up for sumo. C’mon, then, y’wee fat man! I’ll make ye squeal like the pipes at sunup!

  What are you smiling at?

  “Nothing,” I mutter. Stupid brain.

  Most of the pires are standing very still, but one of them seems a little twitchy. He’s skinny—or maybe just seems that way because he’s standing next to Mr. Sumo—and favors strips of powder-blue suede wrapped around his bony frame. I mentally christen him Anorexic Vampire Elvis Mummy, and notice that he’s fingering a pire crucifix on a cord around his neck.

  Crosses aren’t much use against vampires in this world. Maybe it’s because the supernatural races outnumber humans a hundred to one, maybe it’s because the Catholic Church is now dominated by werewolves; whatever the reason, waving a cross in a pire’s face won’t do much more than annoy him.

  They even have their own version, what they call the Blood Cross. It’s a crucifix with two vertical bars instead of one, the bottom ends sharpened to points so they resemble a pair of fangs. They’re about as common a symbol as a pentagram, so I’m not surprised to see it—I just wonder why he’s wearing it on a cheap piece of string instead of a chain.

  Until, of course, he rips it off and throws it at me.

 
People here are very fond of throwing things. Ball bearings, darts, shuriken, toasters—whatever comes to hand. It’s partly because they don’t have guns, and partly because they’re strong enough to chuck a cat into orbit. Accuracy is usually another matter.

  Unfortunately, in this case Anorexic Vampire Elvis Mummy seems to have been practicing. Either that, or he meant to kill me and screwed up.

  The Blood Cross goes right through my wrist, the one just below the handgun. It hits so hard the only thing that stops it is the crossbar, and the impact jars the gun right out of my hand.

  I stare in shock at the two silver spikes jutting from my arm. Jutting through my arm.

  Then things get worse.

  “Well, well,” one of them says. Don’t know which one, but he sounds delighted. “That cross one hundred percent solid silver. You ain’t no bitch, after all—you nothin’ but an OR.”

  Great. I go for my gun, they rip me apart. They know I’m human, so they might decide to drink me or turn me, just for fun. Or maybe they’ll just sell me to a blood farm somewhere, and I can spend the rest of my existence being force-fed iron supplements and being bled once a day—

  And then—in the middle of the night, on a dark, rainy Seattle street—the sun comes out.

  Not out of the sky. No, the sun steps out from the shadows of a doorway, and it’s shaped like a man.

  A man dressed like a Roman soldier, to be exact: metal breastplate, leather skirt, sandals, tall crested helmet, metal greaves on his forearms and legs. Everything metal seems to be made of gold, and every inch of exposed skin shines with a brilliant white light, so bright it’s hard to look at for more than an instant.

  But an instant is more than enough. Pires wear smoked goggles or sunglasses during the day, but not at night; neither do the wrappers. A single glance at the newcomer is enough to provoke screams and six simultaneous See No Evil monkey responses; wisps of smoke from charred retinas seep between their fingers and curl into the damp air.

  Tair’s reaction is just as immediate. He leaps onto the hood of a parked truck, to the roof of a bus shelter, then onto the top of a two-story building, all within about two seconds. Then he’s gone.