by Scott Colby
“Do you always have to be so fucking dramatic about that?” Ren asked Driff angrily. He took another bite of scone and washed it down with the rest of his coffee. “Do you know how much that fucking hurts?”
Driff stashed the revolver inside his coat. “I wouldn’t have to keep doing this if you stupid humans weren’t so stubborn about what is and isn’t possible.”
Abelia was on her hands and knees at his corpse’s side, then, sobbing and praying and damning Driff to hell.
Fuck, Kevin thought. I’m dead.
That revelation brought forth a cascade of emotion—fear, anger, and a sensation of loss so profound it defied words. Kevin didn’t want to be dead. He really, really didn’t want to be dead. He’d never not wanted anything so much in his entire life. It overwhelmed his senses and his thought processes, wiping away Driff and Ren and Abelia and everything else in the room that hadn’t once been a part of Kevin. Reaching out with every fiber of his spirit, he gathered up every drop of blood and fragment of bone and chunk of brain, willed it all back into his skull, and pulled with all of his might.
The world went black again.
Kevin sat up with a ragged gasp, choking for air and willing his blurry vision to solidify and his ears to stop ringing.
“Welcome back,” Ren said nonchalantly.
Abelia swooned and fainted.
The healed entry and exit wounds were a bit warm to the touch, but otherwise Kevin seemed to be intact. A small trickle of blood disappearing into his fingers was the only evidence of the gore in which he’d laid. The hardwood wasn’t even discolored.
“My hangover’s gone,” he muttered incredulously. It took a moment for reality to sink in. “You fucking shot me!”
Driff nodded. “Do I need to do it again, or have I proven my point?”
Kevin took a deep breath, fighting the urge to throttle the strange man. “Fine. So no one around here can die. Why?”
“We intelligent creatures are not good at dying,” Driff said slowly. He grabbed a scone, took a bite, then ostentatiously spat it out on the floor—obviously not even tasting it. “We understand what it means, and in almost every case we are unable to accept it. Free will is a powerful thing, as you just experienced, and properly directed it can heal any wound. Obviously, the world would get a bit crowded if we were all allowed to live forever. That’s where the reapers come in: distributed across the globe in strictly defined territories, they help us come to terms with death so we can let go and make room for the next generation.”
Kevin couldn’t believe the words coming out of Driff’s mouth. His story was fucking insane. Death was a natural part of life; it was simple biology, the ultimate and unstoppable destiny of a body too old or too damaged to function. It was logical and rational and just flat out made sense. There wasn’t anything supernatural about it.
Applying that line of reasoning to what he’d just experienced, however, left Kevin frustrated and a bit frightened. Logic and reason couldn’t explain how he’d willed himself back to life. Nor could they explain how Doorknob had survived a broken neck or how Oscar had lived through several instances of being impaled on the same pitchfork. He wasn’t naïve enough to think that science had taught humanity everything there was to know about the world, but he also had never been one to accept something new without solid proof.
He hated to admit it, but solid proof had blown his brains out all over the floor and then tucked them back inside his skull and patched up the holes.
“So,” he said, putting together the pieces of Driff’s explanation, “the local reaper isn’t doing his job.”
Ren clapped sarcastically. Driff nodded. “Word on the street is that it’s got something to do with a woman named Nella. A different word on that same street says you know this Nella very, very well.”
Kevin felt the blood drain from his face. Nella was a figment of his horny young male imagination. Or was she? Could she be real? That could explain why he only ever encountered her here in Harksburg. Kevin wouldn’t have thought it possible the day before—but he hadn’t died and resurrected himself the day before, either.
“I’ll take the job,” he said. All of this weird shit was intriguing, and at the very least it would be better than sitting around at home and feeling sorry for himself. “When do I start?”
“Right now,” Driff said. “We’re going to see Nella.”
— CHAPTER FIVE —
Before they left, Driff checked on Abelia.
“You!” she snapped when the smelling salts brought her around.
Driff sighed and rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Me.”
“You shot my boy! The Lord Jesus as my witness, I swear upon Peter, Mary, and all the Corinthians that I shall not rest until the proper authorities have locked you—”
Driff dropped a handful of silver dust into Abelia’s face. She inhaled it with a heavy snort. Her eyes rolled back in her head, exposing their white undersides, and her body suddenly went rigid.
“No,” Driff said calmly. “I did not shoot Kevin Felton. The four of us had a perfectly civil bit of brunch. I made a great first impression and you’re excited that your son is going to be working with me. I’m not carrying a sidearm, I did not shoot anyone, Kevin did not come back from the dead because he was never dead in the first place, and from now on you’re going to use buttermilk or yogurt in your scones so they don’t have the texture of a pile of sawdust.”
Kevin wanted to protest that his mother’s scones were, in fact, fucking delicious, but he worried that any sort of attempt to interact with her would negatively impact the spell under which Driff had placed her.
Abelia’s eyes righted themselves. She blinked a few times and looked to Driff, obviously confused. “Professor? What am I doing on the floor?”
Gone was the emotional maelstrom of watching her son get shot in her own dining room. When Abelia looked at Kevin, she did so without worry or suspicion.
Fuck me, Kevin thought. He wiped her memories.
“You had a nasty fall,” Driff replied, his tone surprisingly concerned. “You hit the back of your head pretty hard.”
She accepted Driff’s hand and let him pull her to her feet. “It doesn’t feel like I hit my head…”
“Lucky. You must’ve landed just right.” He smiled unconvincingly, as if he hadn’t gotten much practice lately.
“Damn elves always forget the details,” Ren muttered under his breath.
Kevin bit his tongue. Elves? First people who can’t die, then reapers, then Nella, and now elves? This was getting to be too much. He kept his mouth shut, though. Driff clearly wanted to keep Abelia in the dark, and Kevin didn’t want him giving her any more of that silver dust.
He waited until the three of them were safely inside Ren’s green Jaguar before speaking up. “You’re a fucking elf?” he shouted from the backseat. Noticing the red welt on his forehead in the rearview mirror, Kevin leaned forward and touched it gently. The place where he’d been shot was tender, but it didn’t hurt much.
Driff leaned around the passenger seat to face his accuser and rubbed each of his ears in turn. The pointy tips Kevin thought he’d noticed in the Works became visible once more.
“Don’t ask me about Santa’s workshop unless you want to get shot again.”
Driff spoke with such malice that Kevin flinched. He forced himself to recover quickly. Showing any weakness to his strange new employer seemed like it would be a mistake. “Fine,” he snapped, “but don’t you fucking dare do whatever the hell it was you just did to my mother ever again! Not to her, not to me, not to Ren, not to anybody in fucking Harksburg!”
Ren snickered and turned the key in the ignition. The Jag came to life with a soft purr and rolled out onto Main Street. Kevin had always liked Ren’s car. The heated seats were great in the winter, the interior was always spotless and the ride always smooth, and it attracted more easy girls than a movie star with a bucket of top shelf cocaine. Ren could be a ridiculous prick sometimes, but th
e perks of being best friends with the richest kid in town more than made up for it.
Driff, meanwhile, took a few seconds to consider his response. Kevin counted that as a victory. “The narii dust is a necessary part of my people’s existence,” the elf explained. He sounded almost embarrassed. “It protects us, and others as well, by hiding memories that might otherwise lead to unwanted repercussions.”
Kevin decided to push his luck. “So, you’re afraid of humans.”
The elf’s demeanor darkened. “My weapon carries six rounds. I’ve only used one today.” He turned back around, putting a firm end to the conversation.
Kevin leaned back into the plush leather seat and took a deep breath. His return to Harksburg had taken a turn for the insane he never would’ve imagined. He’d been hoping to take a month or two to rest and recuperate and give himself time to miss the dog-eat-dog world of corporate finance before latching on with another big city company. Things so rarely went according to plan, however, as he’d realized after the buyout of and layoffs at Noonan, Noonan, and Schmidt, and so he felt like a bit of an idiot for expecting his time in Harksburg to be simple and quiet. Life was a lot of things, but simple and predictable weren’t on that list.
Watching Harksburg roll past, he was struck by how little his hometown had changed. Sure, several of the businesses sported new names and owners and a few of the houses had been painted, but the community’s aura remained the same as always. Harksburg was still an idyllic little postcard of a former frontier town that survived the winning of the West and mostly escaped the blight of industrial expansion. It was a place where people lived rather than worked, a place that wound up on lists in magazine sidebars with titles like “Best Towns to Raise Children” or “Top Ten Spots for Newlyweds!” The locals knew better, but no one ever asked them. Hiding behind the town’s pretty façade and above-average school system lurked a bitter, isolationist streak that all of the residents decried but which none of them was willing to take responsibility for.
The Jag rounded the town common, an acre of boring grass and pretentious granite benches ringed with aged Victorian homes. Kevin leaned forward. “Ren, what smells like shit?”
Driff, busily cleaning his spectacles with a soft blue cloth, answered before Ren could. “The bags of garbage in the trunk.”
Ren groaned and shook his head. “And so I ask you again: is that really necessary?”
“As necessary as a bullet between the eyes,” the elf replied with an evil smirk.
Kevin ignored him. “So…uh…about Nella…”
Driff chuckled. “You don’t honestly think the neighbors didn’t see her sneaking in and out of this Pussy Hatch of yours, do you?”
“I…I didn’t think she was real,” Kevin stammered. He wanted to slap Ren; no one else knew what he’d named that window. Why was his friend so buddy-buddy with Driff? Kevin and Ren had been thicker than thieves since their first day of preschool. They grew up together and they’d always looked out for each other. Hearing something he’d told to Ren in confidence come out of Driff’s mouth felt like a huge betrayal. What other secrets had he given away? Perhaps more importantly…what power did the elf hold over him?
Driff harrumphed. Ren snickered.
“Oh, next you’re going to tell me my neighbor’s a fucking troll!”
“Mr. Gregson is a pixie, actually,” Driff corrected. “Your neighbor hates the rest of his kind, but he can’t afford a better disguise. Functional limbs don’t come cheap.”
Kevin tried his best to picture fat, old, wheelchair-bound Mr. Gregson as a tiny man with wings and failed miserably. Surely Driff was fucking with him. Surely.
Ren turned north, guiding the Jag onto Sleeper Street. Here the homes were newer and further apart, the lots separated by thick woods. This was the part of town where the young couples sucked in by the magazine sidebars bit off pieces of the ancient deciduous forest so they could bulldoze everything in sight and drag the land kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. Landscapers twisted the earth into gently rolling hills and replaced the native elms, oaks, and maples with slender foreign species with unpronounceable names. The grass looked too lush and too green to be real, the driveways blacker and smoother than any asphalt had a right to be. Lording over each plot stood a modern home, typically something glassy wrapped in some sort of vinyl or faux wood or fake stone and topped with strange roof lines. The locals called this area Plastic Hill; they did not use that nickname as a term of endearment.
“So, Driff—what’s your interest in all this?” Kevin asked. “Don’t tell me you’re some kind of concerned citizen.”
“I am, in fact, the leading investigator for an entire society of concerned citizens. We elves intervene whenever things get weird, contentious, or violent between the various forces and civilizations in the world. We keep the peace.”
Kevin had always been skeptical of those who claimed to be altruistic. In his experience, such individuals and organizations all harbored some sort of secret desire or goal furthered by their good deeds. “What do you get in return?”
“As a people? A safer, slightly less screwed up world in which to live. Personally? Advancement up the sociopolitical ladder and a warm, fuzzy feeling.”
“That’s probably just gas,” Ren said.
Ignoring his friend’s stupid joke, Kevin continued his interrogation. “But why haven’t I heard of you elves before? Or of these reapers or pixies or people like Nella?”
“You understand what I did to your mother, right? The whole memory wipe thing? That’s why.”
“That’s not why. That’s how. Answer my question: why?”
“Because most of us look at humans, both collectively and individually, as immature, short-sighted pains in the ass, and those in charge have decided you can’t be allowed at the grown-ups’ table.”
Kevin didn’t like the sound of that. “Bullshit. If the things you’re doing affect us, we should get a say in them.”
“In principle, I agree with you. In practice—can you imagine how difficult it would be to coordinate with every single one of your countries, religions, organizations, and interests? There are too many of you with too many diverse priorities. Often decisions must be made quickly; there wouldn’t be time to make sure no one’s toes get stepped on, that everyone felt their oh-so-important voice was heard. It wouldn’t work.
“And then imagine what would happen when things go wrong. Your kind is terrible at evaluating risk and too good at assigning blame. One mistake and we’re the bad guy—we’re different, after all, and that makes it easy to cast us as villains, terrorists, heathens, or whatever threat-to-your-way-of-life happens to be in vogue at the moment. That probably wouldn’t go very well for us.”
Scratching his chin, Kevin considered Driff’s words. His assertion that humanity was anything but a coherent whole certainly couldn’t be refuted. Nor did his people have a sparkling record when it came to dealing with others who looked even a little bit different. Some would surely react violently to the sudden emergence of pixies or elves or whatever the hell Nella was—and those were the things Kevin knew were out there.
“It still doesn’t sound right.”
“What good is doing the right thing if it gets our civilization wiped off the map?” Driff asked. “Sometimes the right thing isn’t the smart thing. Sometimes you have to settle for what sucks the least for everybody involved.”
“That’s a bit defeatist.”
“It’s for the best,” Ren chimed in. “These people don’t fuck around.” He spoke as if he had first-hand experience with the subject. Kevin wondered again if there was more than there seemed to his friend’s relationship with Driff and “these people.”
“What the hell makes you an expert on the subject?”
Ren didn’t answer. Instead, his sharp blue eyes drifted up to the rearview mirror to warn Kevin that it was time to drop the topic. He’d have to follow up with Ren in private, where pointy elven ears couldn’t
hear.
“Fine,” Kevin grumbled, turning his attention to the window. “Leave me in the dark. Let’s get this shit over with.”
A wide turn brought the vehicle to a steep incline. Ahead and below, the forest gave way to a sprawling Midwestern plain bisected by a ribbon of sparkling blue: the Miller River. Once Harksburg’s lifeline to the rest of the state and beyond, many of the old wooden buildings and rickety docks which used to service the steamboats of old still stood, fading reminders of a simpler age. Now, the land along the river was a game preserve held in trust by the town. Third graders at Harksburg Elementary learned all about the great industrialist who’d generously bequeathed the land to the community. Kevin couldn’t recall the dude’s name, but he’d never forget the man’s awesomely bushy mustache.
Ren turned right down a dirt road that snaked along the base of the hill and back toward the center of town.
“Nella lives in the Works?” Kevin asked, surprised. He wasn’t sure where he expected someone like Nella to live, but an industrial complex abandoned halfway through construction definitely didn’t feel right. Kevin had been attending parties in the Works since his sixteenth birthday, not long before his first nighttime encounter with the woman he’d thought was just a dream. Had Nella been watching from the shadows all those drunken, hazy nights? Was that where she’d first spotted him?
“There’s a lagoon just beyond the Works,” Driff said. “That’s where she makes her home.”
Kevin knew the spot. Fornication Point, the townies called it, a secluded overlook above a serene pool in the Miller to which lovers and drunken hook-ups often headed during keggers in the Works. Apropos that Nella made her home there.
What the hell am I going to say to her? he wondered. She’d deceived him for years, and although he wasn’t happy about that, he didn’t want to drive her away. They’d had a lot of fun together, but their relationship was more than physical; he’d always felt a strong connection to Nella, stronger than he’d felt with a lot of women he knew for a fact were real—Kylie included. Letting his guard down around Nella had always been easy. He had thought she was a dream, after all, and dreams didn’t exactly go spreading secrets around town.