by Carrow Brown
My mind drifted back to Kathy in the hospice group home. Alone and afraid with no one to really remember her when she was gone. There wasn’t a need to speak with her before she died, but I’d done it. Silence would’ve referred to it as self-torment. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that you’re subjected to a fixed opinion by a group that doesn’t change. Humans do. Fuck, we change our minds about stuff five times before our morning coffee.”
I wrinkled my nose but kept silent.
David pointed a finger at me. “Let me tell you what I see. We’ll subtract the monster and people eating for a moment. Your friend called you and asked for help. What did you do?”
I shrugged. “I helped them.”
“In Tokyo, the little beggar girl held up her hands to you. What did you do?”
“I gave her the protein bar in my bag.”
“And seeing how the protein bar doesn’t do anything for you, you carry it around to give to others when they’re hungry?”
“What if I enjoyed the taste of cardboard with hints of chocolate?”
David snorted, but continued. “And the bartender, who told you about mythics going missing, you instantly became worried for the missing people and what would happen to the humans if the queens found out.” He looked back out to the trees and the glowing cocoon. “I’ve seen monsters. They don’t give two shits about others. You do. You’re not a monster to me. You’re just someone doing the best they can with the shitty cards they have.”
My lips quirked up. “Thanks.”
“Nothing to thank me for. Just calling it like I see it.”
I nodded and rested my chin on one palm. “So how did you go from being a Marine to working in a non-profit coffee shop? Seems like a drastic change.”
“The military dropped me pretty fast after the attack, claimed I was mentally unstable, and tossed a bunch of drugs at me. I took them for a while, but I was a zombie. It was hard on my family. So, I stopped taking them and left, looking for something. Looking for purpose. Something to fix me. Since Badb picked me up, I feel good.” He waved a hand toward Grave Wood. “This is the most real thing I have seen in a long time.” He looked over at me. “You’ve seen shit, too. I see it in your eyes. A lot of soldiers get that look after a while. It’s kind of why I liked you at the start.”
“Because of the look in my eyes?”
“‘Cause you’re a soldier. You know what war is like and living with yourself afterward. A lot of people don’t get it. They preach about peace and harmony while the guy next to them is only one bad day away from murdering his family. They don’t make tough calls when it matters.”
“And what were your tough calls?”
He looked at me. “I tell you mine and you tell me yours?”
“Mine would take longer, but I can.” I tapped my fingers together.
“You know, why don’t we meet up again later to do that? Nothing formal.” His hands spread. “Maybe over a few beers.”
“You’re going to get a bad reputation if you keep hanging out with me.”
“And?”
“I’m just giving you the chance to walk away.”
He stared at me for a moment and then reached over to take my hand. “I ain’t gonna walk away unless you’re coming with me. Maybe it is just me, but I can’t remember the last time it felt right to be with someone or even be at ease. If I’m the only one feeling this, let me know and I’ll get out of your hair.”
My neck went hot and my chest became tight as I looked at my hand in David’s, watching my fingers curl around his. I wanted to say something, but nothing left my lips. The hope welling up in my chest didn’t make sense and my brain shut it down. The feeling wasn’t reasonable. I’d only known David for a handful of days, but the rightness of my hand in his didn’t fade. On the heels of the sensation, a primal part of my being rose to state undeniable truth.
David was mine.
I couldn’t explain it or rationalize it, but the sensation felt right. The logical thing to do was nip it in the bud. David could do better than associate with me, but the idea left me nauseated.
“I don’t understand what is happening between us,” I said. “And, if I am being honest, it frightens me a little. I’d like a little more time to think about it before we decide something.”
David opened his mouth to respond when a crow landed on top of his head.
We both jumped at its sudden appearance and it fluttered to the roof.
It opened its beak and croaked, “Come home now! Come home. Badb home. Come home.”
A sense of relief flowed through my veins. If Badb was summoning David, then she had to be feeling better. “Well, that’s your cue.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Yeah.” His brown eyes found mine. “We can pick up this conversation later.”
I forced a smile to my face. “Sure.” I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out one of my cards. “Call me once you’re settled.”
“I will.”
I watched him climb down the ladder and stayed on the roof to watch him walk down the path, his bag slung over his shoulder. The crow glided from the roof to perch on his bag, its croaking voice reaching my ears even after David disappeared into the forest.
When I knew he was gone, I took a step off the edge of the roof and landed neatly on my feet. Shaking the ache from my feet, I shuffled through the underbrush in search of Silence. It didn’t take long to find him embedded in the soil, the bright glint of his metal darkened by mud. Part of me felt bad for throwing him as I had. Without me, he couldn’t see or hear anything. Just alone in the dark. With a sigh, I picked him up.
You dropped me! he snapped the moment my hand wrapped around his hilt. Why would you do that? What if someone else picked me up? You’d be sorry then!
“Shut up,” I said, my giddy mood replaced by sternness.
Silence went still, the image of a wide-eyed child flashed in my mind.
“I am going to ask questions and you will answer them. And if you don’t, I am going to find a boat going across the Atlantic and drop you into the ocean. Are we clear?”
Silence meekly said, Crystal.
“I get that you don’t want to talk about what’s going on, but you’ve left me in a position neither you nor I like—the dark. My first question is what are these voices I am hearing?”
The mental image of Silence squirmed. They are from where I came from but are different. I was made to cut.
“And they were made to do what?”
Eat.
A shiver ran through me. The part of the dream with the fence and my mirror images screaming that they were hungry flickered about in my head.
“All right, next item. Everyone in the dream kept saying I was late. Late for what?”
I’d like to pass on that question.
My lips curled back into a snarl. “Bottom of the fucking ocean.”
No! Silence wailed. Don’t make me answer that! Please! His fear and desperation rippled through me. Please, Ghost, I’ll do anything. Turn me into a butter knife or a spoon.
“The ocean bottom, Silence,” I said, glowering. “I’m serious.”
Moments passed before he responded, I’ll go to the ocean. It would be better down there. Safer.
I frowned, still feeling him tremble in my hand. The image of the little boy curled up, resigned to spending the rest of his existence at the bottom of the ocean. My options were limited and I felt like a grade-A asshole. With a sigh, I placed him back into his sheath. “Does any of it have to do with Badb’s prediction?”
No. Even she can’t foresee what they will do. The whimper in his words pulled at me. Are you still upset with me?
“No, but we’re not done with the topic, Silence. Once this thing with Patrick is over, we’re going to focus on it and figure stuff out together. For now, we’ll focus on the job at hand, which is killing Patrick.” I gave him a pat. “A bit of murder should cheer you up.”
Maybe, Silence said. Wha
t did you have in mind?
A wicked grin covered my face. “We’re gonna to take a look into this bit with the Hunters. But first, a visit to the toy store.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Wascally Wabbits
Jim’s Pawn was my toy store. It had all the things I could materialistically want. My only gripe with the place was its location, Louisiana. It was a nice place to look at, but it was infested with all types of supernatural trailer trash.
There were the standard shelves of DVDs, TVs, mounted guitars, and jewelry in the main lobby. In the back part of the store, where a security code was needed, were the guns, swords, and occult items. The walls in there were covered with shrunken heads, dried herbs, masks, figures, skulls of different species—including human—and prayer beads of various origins. Here and there I’d see a staff or bottle inside a glass case with a sticky note on the surface reading “No touchy!”
The owner, Jim, and I had a solid working relationship. He sold me thousands of dollars of ammo on discount as long as I never mentioned the faint scent of corpse flesh or his lone milky eye to the enforcers. Sometimes the best thing to do was not talk about the zombie in the room.
“If you’re looking for a big boom, maybe I can interest you in the Double Barrel 1911?” Jim said, tapping the glass over the gun. He was a stocky dark-skinned man with a bald head and clean-shaven face. His words carried a hint of his Haitian origins. I could always find him wearing his black “Jim’s Pawn” logo shirt when I came for visits. His lackeys manned the front while he worked with returning V.I.P.s in the back.
I shook my head. “No. I’ve always been a fan of the Glock-nineteen.”
“If you do insist on sticking to pistols, you should consider giving the Colt a test run at the very least.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s fancy, I’ll give you that, but the accuracy on it is shit. Even at fifteen yards away, it can’t hit the flat side of a barn without overcompensation. I want something dependable, not flashy.” I pointed a finger at him. “Stop trying to upsell me.”
The pawn shop owner narrowed his eyes. “What are you looking for then?”
“I need a few cases of nine mil.” I eyed the display of firearms. “Do you have a Desert Eagle in fifty cal?”
He pursed his lips. “That’s more of a mantle gun.”
“I know, but I need a fifty caliber, and the reviews for it are good.”
“There’s always the Smith & Wesson 500 if you don’t care about size,” Jim said. “But you want an automatic, I’m guessing.” He shook his head at me but still went down to a glass cabinet and pointed to the Desert Eagle resting inside. “You’re lucky. Just got it the other day.”
Jim unlocked the back panel and bent to pull out the Desert Eagle. He pulled the hammer back to show me the empty chamber before handing it over to me handle first.
I took it, rolling my wrist to get myself used to the weight.
“The kick back on that is something fierce if you haven’t handled it before,” Jim said. He reached back to the sliding cabinets and placed a box of ammo on the counter. “Takes grenade rounds if you’re interested.”
“Oh, my. Yes, please.” I grinned and continued my inspection of the gun, fiddling with it until I had the barrel off and waved it at Jim. “I’m surprised you could get those here. When are you going to move to a gun-friendly area?”
“When selling them legally makes more money than selling them illegally,” Jim said with a grin.
I looked at him with one eye through the wonderfully large-caliber barrel. “You have more of these? Or did the previous owner give it as is?”
He shrugged. “What you see is what you get.”
I nodded and reassembled the gun. “I’ll take it with the boxes of grenade rounds on top of everything else, then.”
His brows went up. “What are you hunting? Bears?”
“Wascally wabbits,” I said, with an innocent bat of my eyelashes at the zombie.
He snorted. “I’ll get your things ready,” he said, fixing to walk off but stopping when I reached across the counter to him.
“I need to talk to Seven as well. Discreetly.” I set the stack of bills on the table between the two of us. Once my hand left them, they were gone in the next eye blink.
“I can do that for you. Will you be conducting business with him, as well?” he said with another nod.
“Depends on what he has.” I looked around, my eyes resting on the closed door to my left. “He’s in?”
“Seven is always in. I’ll get your things ready while you talk.”
“Thanks.”
Jim walked past me and out of the room with my future purchase hidden away in a box. I waited for the door to the room to close and looked to the display mirror on the wall. It slowly swung open and Seven emerged from his office. His arms were much larger than the rest him, using them like an ape to get about the room. Seven’s long and drooping ears were adorned with golden rings, and another ring went through a nostril of his nose. His skin wasn’t a putrid green as was common with his kind, but something vibrant that reminded me of leaves in springtime. The fact he came no higher than my knee made him adorable in my eyes.
Many assumed goblins were dull-witted, but one only needed to peer into Seven’s golden eyes once to see the spark of a shrewd intelligence.
Seven was a product of the nature versus nurture argument I had had with Vainya. My Master had taken the stance that one couldn’t go against their nature, and I had responded to that hypothesis with the antithesis “bullshit.” To prove him wrong, I “acquired” several younglings of hostile associations over the centuries and raised them. They all went well, except one. But out of the ten I raised, Seven proved my point the best. Left to themselves, goblins were grotesque, mischievous, and self-serving. Seven, although still greedy and prone to gold fixations, was nothing like his counterparts. He was savage when it came to business and his cunning had him on par with devils and jinn when it came to wordplay. He was as vicious a businessman as Silence was bloodthirsty.
I couldn’t have been prouder.
Seven placed a hand onto the case and hauled himself up onto a stool so we were eye-to-eye.
“Hey, Seven,” I said.
“Ghost,” he said, his voice more of a raspy-hiss than words. “Have you come to sell Silence again? We know many who would pay well for him.”
Oh, yes, I like this game.
I flashed my teeth at Seven. “We tried that in the ‘80s, and the results didn’t go well.”
I’d been curious where Silence would go if put into the mythic-merchant system. I figured I would pick him up a few years later when he finished with whichever host had bought him. The Merchants had shops everywhere, some nomadic, others remaining in a fixed location like Jim’s Pawn. I supposed it was like writing my phone number on a dollar and then spending it to see where it finally popped up. Except with a lot more blood and death.
Merchants would sell their goods to anyone who could pay or would give them to people they knew would cause trouble. Silence landed with a Chinese man who’d used him to cut up a kindergarten school.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty.
Lee is just misunderstood. We should visit him. He’s still alive, right?
“A pity,” Seven said with a shake of his head, making his ears flippy-flap about. “What can we do for you today, honored customer?”
I pulled out the envelope of Samuel Henry’s pictures and laid one on the table. “I already know he’s the new leader of the Hunters and that he’s been here. What else can you tell me, please?”
Seven went still at the picture, his gaze flickering back between the photo and me. I watched the fine-tuned gears spin around with the motion of his amber cave-dweller eyes. “Are you here officially?”
I shook my head. “No, just as myself. Later on, it might be official, once I uncover more details.”
With a sigh he picked up the photo and held it closer to his face. “He came here a few t
imes, but only spoke to Jim,” Seven said. “Sometimes his lackeys come instead.”
“What do they want?”
Seven shrugged. “Guns, at first. And then books.”
I frowned. “Which books?”
“Like the ones we find for you.” He held up a finger as I started to interrupt him. “Worry not, they are never sold. We have had honest business for generations. We wouldn’t ruin that for fickle human currency.”
I nodded, still frowning. “Do they ever tell you why they want them?”
“No.” He paused again. “But sometimes they come in with pictures of others. Customers who frequent from time to time.”
My frown deepened. “You tipped them off?”
“At first. Many they sought were runts. Weaklings. We didn’t think it mattered if they were gone. We wouldn’t assume we are the only ones Hunters did this with.”
Wasn’t the shaman taken in Iceland? Seven doesn’t do business that far north, does he?
I looked back to Seven. “And when did you stop giving them freebies?”
He scratched at the side of his face. “Some months back. When they came in with your picture.” He reached into his vest and pulled out a crumpled photo and set it on the countertop. “We like profit but are not suicidal for it.” He chuckled. “They think you’re a lycanthrope. We didn’t correct their misunderstanding.”
I snorted and picked up the picture to study it. It’d been taken from a surveillance camera, so the quality wasn’t good, but between the hair, the parka, and how I was jamming out to music playing on earbuds, anyone could see it was me.
I moved to tuck the photo into my jacket, but Seven snatched it out of my hands. “Really?”
Seven returned the picture to his vest pocket. “It’s the only picture we have of you. Sentimental we are.”
He learned that from you.
Rolling my eyes, I said, “The Hunters probably didn’t like that Jim stopped tipping them off.”
“They weren’t pleased, it is true. But we would rather suffer the wrath of a group of men than your ire.” His eyes narrowed at me. “We have told you much today. Equitable remuneration is in order, we feel.”