Feast of Shadows, #1

by Rick Wayne

  “Shit.”

  With my eyes, I marked the last spot I saw her and trotted to it—a capped metal post, like an unused pipe, that erupted from the concrete at the corner of a building, near a gap too narrow to pass.

  “Oh. It’s you,” she said disappointedly. “And here I was worried.”

  I looked up. Irfan was sitting on the ledge of a fire escape, boots dangling over the side.

  “You were expecting someone else?” I asked.

  She got up and hopped down like it was nothing. She was athletic.

  “You reek of death.” She plugged her nose.

  “Death? No kidding? What does death smell like? And don’t say rotting earth.”

  “Dung.”

  I rolled my eyes. “That wasn’t very clever. You should’ve said ‘like someone pissed in a sweaty shoe made from the skin of your grandma’s rotting corpse’ or something like that.”

  She looked at me. “You are the strangest girl.” Then she took off suddenly down the sidewalk.

  “Wait up.” I scurried after her. Her legs were longer than mine, and I almost had to power-walk to keep pace.

  “Stop following me.”

  “Or what?”

  “Keep it up and you’ll find out.”

  “How do you know what death smells like?”

  “Because I saw him once,” she said without looking at me. “Years ago. In the desert.”

  “Him?”

  She nodded once. “He was wrapped in rags and carried a long, forked reed-cutter in one hand and a heavy coin purse in the other. There was that earthy-sweet stench of dried dung on top of the dust of ages. That’s what you smell like. Dung and dust.”

  I flashed my middle finger at her.

  “Fine. Don’t believe me. It’s your funeral.”

  I looked at her metallic purple lipstick with the gold streak, at her expensive bag, at her shaved head, at the dog collar. “So, like, what’s your deal? With Bastien and everything. Are you guys a couple or whatever?”

  “A couple of what?” She glanced to me. “Oh, God. Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

  “Um, gross. He’s my best friend’s ex.”

  “Oooooh.” She stopped and looked at me knowingly. “So that’s why he was acting so weird.”

  “Weird?” I asked.

  Irfan started again with a self-satisfied smirk.

  “How was he acting weird?”

  “Is this what you do? Just repeat what other people say as a question?”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  She shook her head with a smile. “I get it now.”

  “Get what?”

  “His fascination with you.”

  “Fascination? Dude, I don’t think so.”

  “He thinks you’re a challenge or something. Like the other day. For a moment, it seemed like he had you, just like all the others. Then your soul . . .” She scowled and tried to think of the right word. “Sparked. And threw off the charm.”

  “Sparked?”

  She nodded.

  “My soul sparks?”

  She turned to me with a look of mock seriousness. “Like it was ripped in half. Goodbye.”

  She trotted across the street and walked into the convenience store on the corner. But I was stuck on the implication that my soul wasn’t complete, that it had been joined to something and then pulled violently away.

  A moment later, I walked into the shop. The man behind the counter looked to be about 80. He wore a red polo shirt with a name tag that said HARV. Irfan was snagging an expensive bottle of “artesian” water from the refrigerated case.

  “I’ve told you, if you keep following me, you’re going to get hurt,” she said disinterestedly on her way to the fountain.

  I ignored the warning. “Let’s say, hypothetically, that I believed in things like charms.”

  “Oh, boy. This ought to be good.” She grabbed a cup from the dispenser and began to fill it with purple slush, which churned like a washing machine in its reservoir over the spigot.

  “What else could break one?”

  “You’re like a tiny little sand fly. Bzz, bzz, bzz. You’re gonna get squished.” She pinched her fingers together in front of my nose.

  “Tiny little? Is that a crack about my size?” I copied Fish and adopted a fake English accent. “However do you come up with these darling little insults?”

  She watched the cup fill slowly in twisting blobs.

  “So?” I urged. “What else could do it? Pregnancy, maybe? Another soul on board?”

  She looked up—like she hadn’t thought of that. She looked at me with a kind of grudging respect. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  She seemed lost in thought as she grabbed a clear plastic lid and a straw from the rack.

  “Oh, come on,” I objected. “You mean after all that, you’re not even gonna tell me I’m not as dumb as I look?”

  She flashed me a tight-lipped smile as she pulled a bunch of napkins from a dispenser. She crumpled them tightly into a ball between both palms, pressed hard for several seconds, and then blew long and slow between her thumbs, the way you’d blow on a fire to stoke the embers without kicking up the soot. Her eyes flashed, and she dropped the wad into the open rectangle cut into the counter. It disappeared into the trash can underneath, which was almost full of paper waste.

  “What did you just do?”

  “Trust me, little fly,” she said. “You don’t want to graduate from dumb to dangerous.”

  “Or what?”

  “I told you. Keep this up and you’ll see.”

  She grabbed her slush and her water and walked to the front, where she put on her best ditzy American girl accent.

  “Um. I think your machine is broken or something. I wanted a whole Power Grape Slush not three-fourths of a Power Grape Slush.”

  She showed the old man the cup, which she hadn’t filled, and he scowled at the machine over the stack of paper towels in the middle row.

  “I’ll charge you for the smaller size.”

  She giggled.

  “Oh, geez,” I said. “I think I’m gonna be sick. I’ll be outside.”

  The clerk rang her total and she handed him a five. The register drawer dinged open, which is just about the time the fire rose from the trash. I could see it as I turned on the sidewalk to wait. The automatic sliding door hadn’t yet closed and I saw smoke rising from the back. The old man cursed loudly and slid the drawer back as he ran for the fire extinguisher, which was all the way in the back in the hall by the restrooms. Irfan jammed a finger in the drawer at the last second and kept it from closing. She put the water in her bag, leaned across the counter, pulled a wad of twenties from the till, and walked out with her slush.

  Fuck.

  I mean, I figured it was gonna be something like that, but still.

  I heard the old man yell and both of us took off at full speed, leaving him with a growing blaze.

  “You realize they have security cameras in those places, right?”

  “So?”

  After turning and crossing a side street, we came up on a four-way intersection where the last few seconds of the crosswalk were counting down. It seemed like we were far enough away that we could stop running, and both of us slowed. But Irfan sped up again almost immediately, just as a bike messenger moved between us, nearly knocking me down.

  “Hey!”

  She ran across the crosswalk as the light turned, and I got up just in time to be nearly run over by a cab as the cars at the light started forward. She held up her grape slush from across the street, waved goodbye, and kept walking.

  I was livid. I don’t know that I had any real reason to be. But I was. I was tired of being ditched and dumped and lied to. I was tired of being the person everyone thought they could scrape off whenever it was convenient. Especially Irfan, with her unnaturally long legs and perfect skin and amazingly symmetrical C-cups. What kind of name was Irfan anyway? It was stupid.

  I looked down the road to my right. Onco
ming traffic was steady. It was rush hour and cars were coming off the freeway at a fairly steady pace. I figured it would be a long light. But there was the freeway. It was two blocks ahead, directly in Irfan’s path. I could see it in the distance. It was elevated there as it came down from the bridge. At ground level, it was a solid block wall. She would only have two choices. If she turned left, she’d head toward the bridge, where after a block or so, the elevated ramp curved in front of the street and there was no pedestrian access. I trotted down the sidewalk, moving against the traffic of the busy road. At the first slight gap between the cars, I darted across the street, cursing myself and Kell’s stupid purse and drawing a few honks and squealing brakes, before running right into a private high school. The boy’s lacrosse team was getting out of after-school practice, and they had the doors open.

  “Hey, kids. Stay off drugs!”

  I bounded up the short steps and cut through the school, emerging onto the next street through the faculty lot in the back. I circled around the far block, hoping I’d be able to meet Irfan coming up the other way.

  I did. I ran into her just around the corner, in fact. Surprised the shit out of us both. Her slush hit the sidewalk the same time as Kell’s purse and she turned and ran back the other way.

  “Seriously?”

  She ducked down an alley between a single-story grocer and a multi-story gym, but whereas she was tall and had to move around the rolling dumpster just past the corner, I was short and could use the empty produce boxes stacked next to it to go over the corner and give her a hard shove in the back. I landed on my ass while she stutter-stepped past the dumpster and went down near a little pile of broken pallet pieces. I had used my hands to catch my fall, so small bits of gravel had been pushed into my palms. They stung, and I was about to brush them off when a length of pallet wood struck the side of my head.

  Bang.

  I grunted with an involuntary exhale as I went hard to the pavement, again using my hands to break the fall. Irfan stood over me holding the strip of shattered wood. My ear stung hard enough to make my eyes water. I could feel it flush with heat, and there was a wetness. Blood dribbled into my ear canal, and I cupped it.

  “Fuuuck! Are you trying to kill me?” I yelled.

  I could’ve gotten seriously hurt. There could’ve been stray nails in the wood. I don’t think she even checked! Who does that?

  “You can’t catch me that easily,” she said with a grin, like it was a game or something.

  She tossed the pallet wood to the pavement and turned to start running again. But I’d had enough. I pushed myself up and hit the red release latch for the fire escape over our head. The metal ladder slid free on the far side and struck her mid-retreat. She turned just in time to see what was coming. She landed on her back amid the clatter of the metal. The pegs of the ladder landed on the pavement on either side of her throat.

  “How’s that, bitch?”

  I coughed and leaned my butt against the wall to rest. I touched my ear gently and flinched. Definitely blood. Definitely pain. Now I not only had a black eye and bruised rib, I had a split ear as well.

  “What the fuck . . .” I breathed. “You’re such an asshole.”

  I finally brushed the gravel from my palms. I was expecting a retort, but she didn’t respond. I realized I could no longer hear her panting either. And she was writhing a little, like she was suffocating.

  “Come on . . . It isn’t that heavy.”

  After her feet twitched a couple more times, I walked closer—just in case it wasn’t another trick. At first it didn’t seem like there was any way she could be choking. The bar wasn’t compressing her throat. It was barely touching the dog collar. Nor were her hands even on the metal. They were at her side on the ground, like she didn’t dare touch it, which made it seem like she wasn’t even trying. But her eyes were definitely bulging, and red, which I saw when she turned them to me in a panic. It seemed then like she genuinely needed help, like maybe she’d hit her head or something and couldn’t move. I grabbed the ladder quickly and threw it back up into its casing. It wasn’t heavy enough to choke anyone, but it was denser than I thought, as if it were made of crude or cast iron rather than aluminum or steel, and I had to use two hands. It rumbled loudly back into place.

  She turned sideways on the ground, coughing heavily. I thought maybe something had happened with the collar. It’s a stupid thing for a person to wear anyway. I thought I’d help her get it off, but as soon as my fingers touched the buckle, I convulsed with a vision. I saw a dust devil in a vast desert, a spaghetti-thin dancing tornado that stretched up to the clear blue sky. It diminished and dissipated as Irfan stepped out of it, as if from nowhere, wearing Arabian silks and jewelry. She had a crop of short, curly hair, and her dark skin was dusted in gold, finer than glitter. The tips of her fingers looked like they’d been dipped in it, but the effect faded up her hands and arms and only sparsely covered her face and shoulders. She was smiling wickedly.

  I saw her licking her bloody fingers inside a Bedouin tent. In her other hand she had a curved silver knife with an etched handle. There was a body on the ornate woven carpet.

  I saw her made of roaring fire. The snap and crackle of the flames was her cackling laughter, and the people around her huddled in fear.

  I saw a man in a stars-and-moons robe chanting over a high din as the fleeing sand tornado was sucked into the narrow lip of the very lamp I’d seen in Bastien’s room. The man wore silver earrings and brandished a short, jeweled staff and he shouted in a language I didn’t understand. I heard Irfan screaming as the last of the sand devil twisted into the lamp, whose metal lid fell closed on its hinge.

  The visions stopped and I let go of the collar. I fell back, out of breath, just like her, and we both sat there for a moment, coughing in between deep, gulping breaths.

  She sneered.

  “Looks like I caught you.”

  “One thing!” she barked, hoarse. Her voice cracked on the last syllable. “You get one.” She held up a slender finger with manicured nail. “Not three. That’s not how it works. You get one. Just one. That’s all.”

  “Fine.” I cleared my throat again. My ear was throbbing. “What’s Bastien up to?”

  “I don’t know, so I guess you’re out of luck.”

  She actually snarled then. Like an animal. She stood straight and dusted herself off, but I beat her to the Balenciaga. I handed it to her. She looked at it for a second, like it was a trick, and snatched it—but I held onto the strap. She tugged once, but it wasn’t very hard. It seemed then like she had no strength to take what wasn’t hers. It seemed everything was a haggle or a bargain or a trick.

  “Who’s he running from?” I asked again.

  “I have no idea.”

  She tugged again, but it was still weak and I held tight.

  “You want it back? You have to answer.”

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “I don’t know that either,” she answered effetely and entirely too quickly.

  “But you know where he’s gonna be, don’t you? Seems like everybody does.”

  Irfan glowered. Her eyes seemed to flash with flame.

  “Fine,” I said. “Then let go of the purse.”

  There was a long pause. She glanced at the bag like she was deciding whether or not she really wanted it—or whatever was in it.

  “Fine,” she breathed.

  “Fine what?”

  “Fine, I’ll take you to him.”

  “Now?”

  She huffed, as if she’d been trying to trick me there, too—as if I hadn’t specified a time, she would’ve said “I’ll take you to him next week” or something.

  “Now,” she answered in defeat.

  I let go of the strap and she took it and adjusted on her shoulder. Then she opened the top and made sure the contents were undisturbed. I felt stupid then for giving it to her without checking inside first.

 
“I was serious,” she said as she rummaged through the bag. “I don’t know who he’s running from, but I know why. I heard him talking to his little friends. Something about a relic. A dagger.”

  “Why is everyone ‘little’ to you?”

  “You’re all little!” she snapped. “Every one of you. Insects. Barely worthy to serve us.” She coughed again and put her hand over the collar as she stretched her neck.

  “What friends? It’s not the guys who started the Couch, so who?”

  “His little mizzen friends. Disgusting creatures, all of them. They live under, like roaches. They can’t cast any magic of their own so they steal it from those who can. How do you think he got me?”

  “Okay, but—” I squinted. “What does any of that have to do with Kell?”

  “How would I know?”

  “I thought you were his familiar.” I teased her with the word.

  “Ha! You mean slave. When he bothers to let me out, which is hardly ever. I’ve been locked in that ridiculous lamp for months!”

  Shit.

  Bastien hadn’t let her out. I had when I lifted the lid. That was why he hadn’t wanted me to touch it.

  I can’t say whether I believed any of that right then or not, though I acted like I did. It’s sort of like when you’re at a party and you meet someone who’s really into glam rock or video games or sports or something. You can tell it’s important to them, so you play along and punt on the question of whether any of it really matters.

  She stepped closer. “You’re going to die,” she whispered, gloating, like no matter what I might’ve thought, it was actually her who had won whatever little game we’d been playing. “I smelled it the moment you lifted the lid. You met him, didn’t you? Death. You met him and now you have an appointment in Samarra and no matter which path you take, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, he waits for you at the end.”

  I didn’t answer.

  She snorted and started walking. “Well?” she barked. “Are you coming or not?”