by Scott Colby
“It’s a good change of pace.” Kevin couldn’t believe he’d managed to say that with a straight face, and he especially couldn’t believe that he meant it. Being stuck in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by people who hadn’t really made anything of themselves as defined by fancy businessmen with plastic smiles and holier-than-thou attitudes, had rejuvenated Kevin Felton. Hell, he’d even kind of enjoyed his dealings with all the insane magic assholes in the area, as much as he hated to admit it. He’d made new friends, solidified old relationships, and learned so much about things he’d never even imagined possible. After what Tallisker and Kylie had put him through, returning to Harksburg had pretty much been the best thing that could’ve happened to him. Except maybe for the parts when he got shot or punched in the face.
The other man chuckled. “Do changes of pace come with stock options and 401(k)s these days? This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play in the big leagues, my boy! I’d hate to see you turn it down because you were charmed by a few local yokels.”
His gaze drifting to Kylie once again, Kevin took a deep breath. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at what? To be used and abused by whatever the hell these people were for whatever nefarious purposes they pursued? To be just another cog in their immoral machine? Life in Harksburg wasn’t glamorous, but at least it was honest. Kevin felt his temperature rising and chose his next words carefully.
“I’m sorry, sir, but where was this attention when Tallisker gutted Noonan, Noonan, and Schmidt? If you’d wanted me so badly, all you had to do was give my pink slip to someone else.”
Demson snorted. “You’d yet to prove yourself, my boy. Consider my offer; it won’t be on the table forever. So, how do you think the Cubs will fare this year? We own a VIP box, you know.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Kevin tracked Kylie as she removed herself from the far wall and integrated herself into the group surrounding Driff. She bent over to pick something off the end table beside the couch, which she offered to the elf. Driff wrinkled his nose, shook his head, and took a long swig from his bottle of champagne. A few of the other men in the group happily partook in whatever Kylie was passing around.
Kevin turned back to Demson nervously. “I try to get to Wrigley as often as I can, preferably along the first base line.”
“You haven’t lived until you’ve watched a game from right above home plate while an army of attractive waitresses services your every need.”
“Sure sounds better than sitting in the bleachers, waiting for the beer guy to come around.”
“Undoubtedly. Slumming it with the rabble can be…cute…from time to time, but people like you and me deserve our space and our comfort.”
Kylie appeared at Kevin’s side then, holding a wooden bowl up to his face. Kevin peered over the rim tentatively, expecting some sort of vile concoction these strange people would expect him to eat. Instead, the bowl was simply full of key rings.
“I drive an Audi these days,” Kylie said with a wink.
Kevin’s gaze settled heavily on the remote starter atop the pile, its blue and white logo blurring his vision as if he’d inadvertently looked right at the sun. These people really wanted him to join their little cabal and they knew exactly how to tempt him. A job was one thing; but Kylie, well, she was something else entirely. Would it really be so bad? What could they possibly do to him, or make him do, after all? This was his chance to get it all back and then some; he could leave Harksburg, get back together with Kylie, and enjoy all the perks that came with gainful corporate employment. No more living in the basement. No more nights at the Burg. No more worrying about Nella, the blue girl with whom a real life would likely be impossible. He could be himself again, the well-dressed, hardworking, ladder-climbing future executive with the gorgeous, successful girlfriend and the trendy apartment and all the other trimmings of a promising young professional, and all he had to do was pick up that key ring.
Driff snapped him out of his reverie. Clutching a half-dozen bottles of champagne to his chest as if carrying a cord of firewood, the elf leaned in close to Kevin’s ear to whisper a few words of advice.
“Once they’ve got you, they won’t let go.”
Kevin watched, stunned, as Driff sauntered toward the exit, opened the front door—revealing the front yard of the Roberts estate—and left, abandoning him to choose his own fate.
He glanced over at Ren, who watched from the far corner of the room. His friend shook his head gently.
That was all it took. “I’m sorry, Kylie, but it’s time for me to go. It was nice to see you again.”
Without waiting for a response, Kevin turned and headed for the door. He didn’t look back—not when Kylie tried to woo him with half-hearted platitudes, not when the men and women at the poker game started to laugh at him, and not when he stepped across the threshold and back into Harksburg, forsaking his old life forever.
— CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE —
Kevin found Driff sitting on the front lawn of the Roberts estate, sipping from a bottle of champagne as he looked up at the stars. The five other bottles he’d pilfered lay on the ground beside him.
“Welcome back to reality,” Driff said, patting the lawn to his left. “Pull up some grass and have a drink.”
“Don’t mind if I fucking do,” Kevin replied as he sat. He snatched up a bottle of champagne and started untwisting the wire that secured its cork. “What made you decide to leave?”
“My people spend enough time in bed with those Tallisker fuckers,” Driff said with a snort. He’d begun to slur. “Besides which, I made a New Year’s resolution against participating in demonic orgies. How’s your old girlfriend?”
Kevin worked the cork out of the bottle with his thumb and fired it off into the night upon a burst of champagne. He raised the bottle to his lips to drink the cool bubbly rolling down the sides. “Just like old times. Hasn’t changed a bit.”
“Always been a greedy hanger-on, huh? Wonder what it was you saw in her in the first place.”
“Tits. Ass. Style. Brains.” Kevin shifted uncomfortably, pulled a twig out from under his ass, and tossed it aside. “The perfect fucking accessory for my urban professional lifestyle.”
“Ha! A lifestyle. That was your first mistake.”
For a few moments they sat and drank and looked up at the sky. Despite all he’d seen the last few days, he had difficulty processing the last fifteen minutes. Surprisingly, it was neither the demons nor Kylie that left Kevin feeling introspective; rather, he wondered what choice he would’ve made had Driff and Ren not been there. Would he have been strong enough to resist Tallisker’s temptation on his own? He hoped so, but he wasn’t sure.
“Ever think about the people you work for,” Driff slurred thoughtfully, “and just ask yourself ‘what the fuck?’”
Kevin turned to examine him. Driff was hunched over his knees, dangling his bottle of champagne between his legs and staring at the grass. Kevin wasn’t sure exactly what had gotten into the elf—or why he kind of cared—so he just shrugged.
“The people who make the decisions…why do they get to decide how things go? What gives them the right?” Driff continued. “Why is it that anyone else who comes along who wants to be in charge and promises that things will be different inevitably ends up just as fucked as whoever he or she replaced?”
Kevin punched Driff playfully in the arm. “Aren’t you some kind of big shot yourself, Councilor of Intelligence?”
“It’s Council,” the elf snapped. “Technically I was elected to 437 different Councilor positions. I am a Council unto myself.”
“That’s…really fucking strange. Why did you want the job?”
Driff finally looked up at Kevin. The elf’s eyes were distant and quivered as he spoke. “It wasn’t really my idea. I was part of…of a movement. My role was decided for me. And it’s gotten a little out of control.”
After taking a long swig of champagne, Kevin gave Driff the best advice he could think of. “None of u
s really has complete control over his or her life. That’s probably what the people in charge really want, more desperately than the rest of us. We all have to do our best without crossing whatever line those fuckers in Minnesota stomped right over.”
“Hear, hear!” Ren called out from behind them. He dropped himself casually to the grass beside the elf and grabbed his own bottle of champagne.
Kevin and Driff exchanged an awkward glance. Neither knew what to say to Ren. Given their history, Kevin figured breaking the ice was his responsibility.
“So how long has your father been a winged demon?”
Driff cackled and spilled champagne all over his right leg.
“He turned not long after my sixth birthday,” Ren explained solemnly. “He came home from work one day and announced that he’d been awarded a big promotion that required him to attend a six-week training course in L.A. When he came back…”
Turning his attention back to the grass, Kevin considered Ren’s story. He’d never met his own father; the closest facsimiles he’d known were the various dads on network television. Warm, smart, caring bastions of knowledge and guidance, he’d grown up assuming everyone’s father was just like Cliff Huxtable and Andy Taylor: a role model, someone a boy learning to make his way in the world could look up to and emulate. It was a character Kevin had assigned to his own absentee father, attaching it with a steady string of silly rationalizations for the man’s vagrancy. His father couldn’t be with him because he was a CIA spy. His father was never around because he was in the Florida Everglades, searching for the fountain of youth. His father was one of the masked wrestlers Kevin occasionally saw on TV. Now a jaded, cynical adult, Kevin knew that no one was perfect and had long ago cast off those ridiculous daydreams, but the thought of Ren’s own bubble of fatherly perfection having been burst at such a young age hurt—doubly so given how much Kevin and everyone else in Ren’s peer group had always idolized Ed Roberts. To all outside observers, Ren’s father had always been perfect.
“My mother knew what was coming, I think,” Ren continued. “She encouraged him. Pushed him. Asked him every day what he had done to take one more step up the ladder. When he first showed us his new form, she didn’t even blink.”
“Your mother’s a hellfucker,” Driff said with a chuckle. He pointed at Kevin. “Just like fancy boy’s ex!”
Ren shook his head. “Thank you for your deep elven insight. Anyway, he never mistreated us. If anything, he was even better to my mother and me than he was before the change. These demons…they aren’t what you expect. They’re grounded. Focused. Running around being blatantly evil monsters all the time is a great way to get shot, so they stick to the shadows and manipulate others into doing their evil for them—a well-placed arms shipment here, a food shortage there, a bit of corruption in this church over there—so that they can live long, productive lives of luxurious bastardy. And to keep themselves from going off the rails, they maintain a connection to humanity: a family.”
“That’s fucking nuts,” Kevin replied, washing down his statement with a mouthful of champagne and then punctuating it with a loud belch.
His friend laughed sadly. “Isn’t it? But it works. These assholes live forever. That Demson jerk’s almost four hundred years old. And he wants me to be his protégé.”
Kevin gagged on his next drink. “You? The fuck why?”
“Better hope Daddy lives a long time,” Driff added.
Ren shook his head and rolled his eyes at the elf. “My father did something that pissed him off once. There’s some sort of convoluted professional rivalry between the two. I’m not real clear on it. Whatever it was didn’t necessitate any sort of official censure. When there’s a beef, the wronged party attempts to woo a member of the offender’s family into the lifestyle—effectively stealing part of the perpetrator’s connection to his sanity. Remember Carolyn Peters?”
“Yeah. In fact, I ran into her last night. She looked a little…pale.”
“Well, now you know what happened to her. It wasn’t just that thing with their shared ex-boyfriend that brought them together; Janice Redding’s demon mother got involved and that was that. Luckily Demson can’t act on me overtly as long as I remain in my father’s presence or in his territory, so he has to resort to convoluted tricks instead.” Ren took a long drink before continuing. “Like—”
“—like ruining your best friend’s life by nuking his job, stealing his girlfriend, and forcing him to move back in with his Jesus freak mother, then sucking him into Tallisker’s web with promises that he could have it all back and more,” Kevin finished for him. “Then you turn that best friend into a demon to exert pressure on the real target. Like you said, tonight was all about you.”
Shifting uncomfortably on the grass, Ren’s eyes locked onto his shoes. “Yup.”
“Well,” Driff slurred, “that was even more awkward than I expected.”
“It’s not your fault, Ren,” Kevin said quickly, hoping to head off any sort of confrontation and set his friend at ease. “It’s not even your father’s fault. It’s Tallisker’s. Harksburg is fucked up, and the things those demons can offer…”
Ren said nothing, but his shoulders seemed to relax. Kevin meant what he’d said, and he didn’t blame Ren for having difficulty talking about it.
Driff regarded Kevin coolly. “You think this place is a mess? Where I come from, we’ve got a guy that once cut a lamp post in half with his broadsword because he thought it was looking at him funny. We’ve got a talking tree. I once saw a woman magically teleport a fart into the mouth of someone who owed her money. Harksburg isn’t any more or less fucked up than anywhere else. Some places just hide it better, and sometimes familiarity breaks down barriers that would be better left cemented in place.”
Although he agreed completely with the elf’s sentiment, Kevin never would’ve admitted to it. He’d encountered some truly screwed up people in Chicago, but as a big, important city, Chicago was somehow supposed to be better than a remote small town like Harksburg. In the city, local lunatics became beloved eccentrics. Annoyances became another part of that grimy urban charm. Still, he knew better, but the pride he took in having been one of the few to escape Harksburg for a place that supposedly mattered—albeit temporarily—stayed his tongue.
“How do you remember all this?” Kevin asked, changing the subject. “Isn’t that dust crap in the water?”
“You know those allergy pills I’ve been taking twice a day since I was little?” Ren replied. “They neutralize the effect. They can’t bring back memories previously blocked off by the dust, but they keep it from doing any more damage.”
“Don’t worry, Kevin. When this is all over, the dust will make it all better,” Driff said melodramatically, like a doctor promising a child his boo-boo would heal up just fine.
Before Kevin could tell Driff where to shove his bottle of champagne, a vibration in his pocket alerted him to an incoming text. He pulled his phone out, swiped the screen, and quickly read the message. The smile on his face got bigger and bigger as he read it over and over again.
“It’s from Billy. ‘Had such a good time at the Burg the other night. Decided to go on my own tonight. Met the girl of my dreams. Don’t wait up,’” he read triumphantly.
“And that,” Driff said, “is a lot more anticlimactic than I expected.”
— CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR —
Buzzed and stumbling, Kevin nevertheless made the walk home from the Roberts estate in record time. Although Driff insisted he wanted to see proof that Billy was actually back on the job before he declared their mission accomplished, Kevin had no desire to linger within dusting distance after they’d each polished off two bottles of champagne.
He entered his bedroom through the Pussy Hatch simply for old time’s sake, almost botching the landing as his inebriated brain misjudged the distance to the floor. A familiar giggle wafted up from the bed beside him.
“You are a picture of grace, Kevin Felton,” Nella sa
id. She activated the lamp on the nightstand, revealing her perfect blue body. Seated atop the comforter with her back propped up against a pile of pillows, she clutched a manila envelope over her breasts.
“And you are a creepy stalker,” Kevin replied as he shrugged out of his jacket. “What the heck were you doing in the dark all by yourself?”
“Thinking.”
“About?”
“About why the fuck Mr. Pemberton asked me to play courier.”
Kevin glanced at the manila envelope. The reaper keeper had promised some sort of paperwork. He sat down at the foot of the bed and motioned for Nella to hand it over. She hesitated, expecting an explanation.
“Mr. Pemberton cornered me in Donovan’s. He interrogated me briefly, then he told me that he knows about us and offered me some sort of deal.”
Nella’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t like this,” she said as she passed him the envelope.
Nodding, he put on what he hoped was a brave face. “I won’t let him blackmail me if I can help it, but I need to know his terms.”
Kevin tore the envelope open and dumped its contents into his lap. Two sheets of paper slid out: some kind of roughly photocopied form and a handwritten note on the sort of thick, fibrous paper usually reserved for resumes.
“Dearest Mr. Felton,” the note read in precise, flowing script. “I apologize for taking over your evening at Donovan’s, but I needed to be sure of several things. Please thank Nella for delivering the contents of this envelope. They should be most helpful, I would think.
“Long story short, I’ve decided a change of scenery is in order. I grow weary of my duties and desire a return to normal human life. My job has been most fulfilling and it has provided many a glimpse of things I never would have imagined or been exposed to otherwise. It is my sincerest hope, good sir, that you would pick up where I left off and take my position as Master Billy’s assistant. You seem well suited to the task, and I believe he would find your company most agreeable.