Ink and Shadows

by Rhys Ford

  “Mortals.” Ari leaned over and picked at a scab on Death’s consciousness. “Don’t feel bad about not liking to talk to them or them not talking to you. One doesn’t make a pet out of the pig that’s going to be the Christmas ham. Besides, it’s better if you’re all mysterious and aloof.”

  Death snorted. “We are what we are.”

  “True, but you skulk. People like that. All spooky and shadows. That makes you more legend-like. I blunder, stomp, and whore my way through it. Not much mystery there.” Ari grinned, flashing a bright smile at his oldest friend. “And I happen to like blundering and stomping.”

  “And whoring,” Death pointed out.

  “True, whoring’s a good bit of fun,” Ari agreed. “Let me get dressed, and we can go hunting for rabbits.”

  “I can’t.”

  The pain in Death’s eyes stopped Ari in his tracks. The cinnamon shade held in them burned from a fire inside of the immortal.

  “I’ve got a calling to attend to in Asia.”

  “You’ve got souls to look to?” Canting his head, Ari drew back to his friend’s side. He knew what was coming, what was out there waiting for Death, but his mind denied wanting to look any further, trapped by conflicting emotions. “Bad time for it if you want to go out hunting for this mess.”

  Ari ached to touch Death’s face, to feel the strength of bone in the cradle of his palm. Ari loved his role in the Horsemen, but Death dreaded his, seducing souls to pass. Most went without Death’s attendance, carried on to unknown places. No one living behind the Veil, a shadowy existence just beyond the Mortal world, knew what lay beyond. Where an immortal went after their service, no one knew, not even Death.

  “Do you really need to go?” Ari knew the answer to that question before the words fell from his mouth. Death answered with a silence steeped in duty. “I mean, do you have to go right now?”

  Of course Death would go, Ari scolded himself. If he didn’t, who knew what the world would become. Souls torn from their bodies, usually from tragedies or conflicts, roamed the area and threatened the Veil’s ability to hold back the other things that fed on mankind. Single specters were not much of a problem, but a large concentration often proved troublesome. If not persuaded to sever the ties to the mortal world, a resonance would linger… sometimes drawing others to stay behind or try to reach out to the people around it, not understanding that its body turned it out.

  Drawing out his breath, Ari asked, “How soon?”

  “Soon.” Death found his voice and picked at a piece of rind on the counter, smashing the skin between his pinched fingers. “A fire in the slums of lower Hong Kong. I don’t know how many yet, but I’ll want to be there.”

  “You don’t need to be there when it starts. There’s hours after their passing until they’re stuck here.” Ari gritted his teeth, chewing on a point of argument ages old. “Go after. Spare yourself that pain.”

  “Someone needs to be there when they die. No one should pass unseen, untouched,” Death said. Ari’s anger was thoughtless most of the time, but now Ari held it rigidly in, something Death appreciated. “If not me, then who? It’s what I’m here for. So they don’t wander, alone and forgotten.”

  Ari placed his palms flat on the cold counter, his hands resting by the sides of his friend’s hips. “Yeah, we’re the Horsemen… the Four. But there’s no one here telling you that you have to drink from that cup every time it’s poured hot. Let it cool first.”

  “We’ve talked about this, Ari.” Death’s voice was a whisper, husky from Ari’s closeness. “I have to. It is who I am, what I am. I need you to take a look around tonight. Something in my gut says that it can’t wait.”

  “You’re the brains. I’m just the muscle,” Ari said, pushing free from the counter, tucking the ends of the unraveling towel around his waist. Ari was reluctant to give up this fight, to let Death loose into the slums where he would wander for hours, reaching into each soul to see if they wanted or needed assistance in shedding the mortal world. “But I’m definitely sexier.”

  “Take Mal.” Death held up a hand, fending off Ari’s yet unspoken protests. “He’s one of us. He needs to know what we do, and not just from stories told around the dining table.”

  “Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me.” Ari hissed with frustration. “Look at him. He’s chasing a wraith around the apartment like he’s a goldfish looking for flakes.”

  “He needs to feel like he’s a part of us.” Death’s dark eyes were distant, running along another train of thought. “Mal doesn’t feel like he’s one of us. I know losing Batu was hard on you. It was hard on all of us. He was a good friend.”

  “Batu was a damned good friend,” Ari grumbled, crossing his arms over his bare chest. “And a damned good Pestilence. Mal’s…. Death, the kid’s useless compared to Batu.”

  Mal stopped before entering the living room. He’d heard Batu’s name whispered about when the others thought he wasn’t listening. Ari’s words hurt, deep in his chest, and the young Horseman gritted his teeth to keep from biting Ari’s head off.

  “That isn’t Mal’s fault. New ones feel excluded for a long time,” Death reminded him. “And that’s not something that I can have between us.”

  “He feels outside of us. Min, she fit right in. Not a problem. She’s a good Famine, skinny little twit but vicious. I like that in a Famine,” Ari bit back as Death’s gaze slid over him, and he felt the reproach there. “He’s different than us. Too different.”

  “We needed different.” Death leaned forward, their bodies close and his eyes still on Ari’s tanned face. “So they gave us Mal. You and I, we’ve been here forever, but the others need changing sometimes. You know that. Even if we want them to stay, they have to move on. Mal’s here because we need a Mal. And maybe he needs us. We don’t know.”

  “Batu just worked. No fuss. No massaging little-boy egos and hurts. He just slid in and did what Pestilences need to do.” Ari’s mouth twisted sourly at the thought of spending hours with the youngest Horseman. “Mal’s like a sheath that’s too tight for the sword it was made for.”

  Mal, the new Pestilence, seemed to have a knack for getting in the way, and the constant questions drove Ari to distraction. Most of all, and Ari hated to admit it, he plainly missed the last Pestilence.

  The last Pestilence was a lean-boned black man with twisted dreads that hung down his back and had been one for a good laugh or a shared quiet joke over a beer. When Batu decided it was time to leave the Horsemen, Ari spent days grieving, staring up from bottles of whiskey and vodka. Min joined Ari for a day or so before moving on with her work, but her eyes were always drawn to the small ebony sculptures Batu had spent hours carving and left behind. Death sat and prepared for the new Pestilence that would arrive, naked and confused, with a head filled with an immense knowledge of how to inflict the worst kind of suffering on mankind.

  Batu was replaced like he replaced the Pestilence before him. Within two hours, a fresh-faced innocent arrived, a myopic blond with a guileless face. A studious-looking young man with wire-rimmed glasses, a mess of straw-colored hair, and a curiosity that seemed to well up from a bottomless pit, this new Pestilence also arrived overflowing with technological babble and other modern ideas.

  “Are you talking about me again?” Barefooted, Mal approached nearly silent on the polished wooden floors, still holding a third-filled cup of cold coffee in his hands. “Don’t you have anything else to keep you occupied? I hear they invented coloring books.”

  “Death wants us to go sniffing around for something. And somehow I pissed him off enough that he’s making me take you along.” Ari took advantage of his friend’s distracted glance at Pestilence and brushed a light kiss along Death’s jaw. “Talk the boy into listening to me for once and maybe getting some shoes on.”

  “He listens to you better than you listen to me,” Death grumbled as Ari walked off.

  Mal snarled at Ari, biting back more words when he felt Death’s eyes fix on him.
Turning to the eldest, Mal pursed his mouth and mumbled, “There’s nothing I can say without sounding like a whining child.”

  “He’s better at arguments than you are,” Death replied. “It’s what he does.”

  “He hates me.” Trying to choose his words carefully, Mal still grimaced when he heard himself speak. “No, I still sound like a whining child.”

  “Ari’s a simple creature.” Death contemplated that notion for a moment. Ari brimmed with strong emotions, a stormy tempest blowing through the quiet. “He growls at things or people he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand you. Did the wraith leave?”

  “You sidestep well.” Mal grinned at the older Horseman. “And it disappeared after a few moments.”

  “I’ve had millennia to practice sidestepping,” Death said, the thin scar over his cheek nearly invisible when he smiled in return. “Ari’s going to grouse if you keep him waiting.”

  Mal chewed on the inside of his bottom lip, unsure of what to think. He’d already made a mess of things among humans once. The world was still reeling from his need to prove himself to the older Horsemen. He wasn’t quite ready to jump back into the thick of things when his first disaster had crept through entire regions, wiping out innocents without any regard to race or gender.

  “Are you sure about me going?” Mal glanced up, a sheen of light sliding over his glasses. “Can this thing with Ari wait until you come back?”

  “I have to answer a calling in a few hours,” Death replied, sweeping the discarded rinds into the palm of his hand. “You and Min might have to follow my trail in a couple of days. We’ll have to see how it goes.”

  Death’s face stilled, a placid mask of nothingness that hid more secrets than Mal could even imagine. He knew why Death would not be coming with them and why Ari bristled and walked away.

  Only one thing brought out a brittle anger from Ari. Something large and horrible would happen during the night, and Death would be forced to walk among dying humans to pull them out of the now and into the beyond.

  Mal knew about horror, but not on the scale that Death dealt with.

  Mal had been jubilant when his first plague struck. As thousands died, he knew those deaths were necessary, sacrifices made to bind humanity together. The world should have rallied to beat the virus Mal developed and let loose.

  Instead, as more died and tolerance waned, leaders rose up, proclaiming the sick deserved their deaths. Soon no one was safe from the disease, and Mal then realized what he’d let loose, an illness twisted into hatred. Mal took a good hard look at the chaos and where it would lead.

  And wept hard.

  Death was there. As everything crumbled and his wondrous plan to shape society into a kinder, more giving community shattered under a zealous condemnation, Death was there for him, for the shattered Pestilence who had let his ego and arrogance overwhelm him. Death gave comfort in words, with cups of hot steaming tea, and reminded him that they were to be outside of humanity, to be above changing society and to let mankind evolve or devolve as it needed to. Free will drove mankind. The Horsemen could only react and sometimes influence.

  “Remember that you… we… are human, even as we’re now, for all intents and purposes, immortal. We have their flaws. We have their strengths. We are pulled from our deaths to serve,” Death told him then. “None of us are perfect. The Horsemen are here to give mankind an avenue for hope. We do despicable things and try to have faith that mankind will rise to that challenge we have put down before them. That is our purpose, Pestilence.”

  “I’m sorry.” Mal stumbled over his words. “I wasn’t thinking. It’ll be good to get out even if it is with Ari.”

  “It’s about time you pulled your weight in things.” Ari rejoined them, hair tousled dry. Pulling on a leather jacket, worn soft from years of wear, Ari walked into the kitchen area. Nodding at Death, Ari tossed a set of keys in the air and caught them. “Sometimes we have to go chase down shit that nobody else has time for.”

  “He knows that, Ari,” Death replied softly. Sliding from the counter, he let go of Mal’s shoulder. “People who see us tend to shy away from me. With good reason.”

  “Not if they knew you.” Mal leaped to Death’s defense.

  “If they know me, then chances are they’ve been long dead and are looking for conversation. And the dead tend to be very poor conversationalists.” Death grinned, an easy humor on his face. “It’s okay, Mal. I’m used to people running from me. It’s a fight-or-flight response in humans. Just go with him and try not to let him bully you too much. Or anyone else for that matter.”

  “Come on, Pest.” Ari bumped Mal’s shoulder with his own, nearly knocking the younger immortal off his feet.

  “I hate it when you call me that.” Mal grabbed at the counter, glaring at War. He stepped away from the kitchen area, locating a pair of sneakers he’d left near the sprawl of couches in the main room. Tugging his discarded socks over his feet, Mal listened with half an ear to what the other two were talking about in the kitchen.

  “Probably why I do it,” Ari muttered, his voice barely dropped to a whisper. Drawing close to Death, Ari stood nearly nose-to-nose to him, breaths intermingling. “I don’t know if you’ll be here when we get back.”

  “Probably not.” Death shook his head. “I’ll be gone for hours, maybe. That area is packed with people, and they’re disposable to the government. I’m guessing that there will be little to no emergency response.”

  “So it’ll be bad, then.” Ari hooked his thumbs into the belt loops on his jeans. He didn’t trust himself to touch Death. Anger trembled in his belly at the thought of the Horseman wading through dying bodies, trying to sort out who needed to be convinced to move along. Sending a small prayer to what he suspected was a deaf God, Ari hoped for a heavy rain to slow down the fire’s progress and give people a chance to escape. “Do you want me to join you if we get back before you do?”

  “What can you do there?” Death cocked his head, a play of shadows and light. “Tensions and emotions will be high. Your being there might lead to riots.”

  “I’ll be glad to start a riot for you—” Ari cut his words off with a salacious grin. “But that can wait until you come back. Let me just take the kid with me and see how much trouble we can get into.”

  “Please don’t get arrested.” Death reluctantly pulled himself away from Ari’s warmth, heading down the hall toward his own rooms. “You’ll have to wait until I can bail you out. Min’s off in Africa doing something horrendous and probably won’t be back until tomorrow.”

  “Just take care of yourself, Shi,” Ari muttered as he watched Death disappear into his rooms. Glancing at Mal, he sighed heavily. The last thing he wanted to do was drag the young immortal along. “Guess I’m stuck with you.”

  “I’d tell you Death said to play nice, but that’ll just piss you off.” Mal fell into step, trying to keep up with Ari, whose strides outmatched even Mal’s long legs.

  “I’d know you were lying.” Ari punched at the elevator button. “Death gave up telling me to play nice eons ago. Now he just tells people I’m an asshole, and they have to live with it.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  BUTTERFLIES.

  Simple creatures. Innocuous. Spending their days looking pretty and sipping sugar. A simple life.

  Sweet and harmless.

  They never crawled back out of the skin once they were inked. Nope, Kismet thought as he added a bit of red to a wing, butterflies always stayed where they were placed. They remained under the skin, never Unfurling spiral tongues to lap at the blood welling up around the tattooed lines.

  Kismet hated butterflies. Hated tattooing them. Hated seeing them.

  There was no life to them, he decided, cocking his head to look at the spray of insects he’d laid down on a blonde’s hip. Slender creatures, barely able to take the brunt of a strong wind. It was ironic that people melted at the sight of a butterfly on the wind. Cockroaches were more admirable. Survivors of hatred
and stomping feet. A butterfly’s life was a short, easy thing. Roaches were probably plotting their downfall, a massive genocide of the prettier brethren.

  Either that or coming up with ways to make themselves prettier. For the most part, pretty survived brutality.

  And usually attracted it.

  Oh, he knew how much beauty attracted the cruelties of predators, Kismet snorted under his breath. Lost in his own thoughts, he concentrated solely on the stippling of hues across his unforgiving canvas. Another dash of blue and then a deeper shade to pull the wing out of a stilled flutter, giving it depth.

  His client murmured under him, a low moan that sounded sexual. Her fingers touched the nape of his neck, stroking at the long brown strands. The touch made him start, jerking him from his contemplation of butterflies and roaches. A smile was on her face, a heavy-lidded look thickening her eyes. He knew that look. Kismet knew it too well.

  “I’m almost done.” Pursing his lips, he turned back to the paper cups of ink he’d placed on top of the plastic cabriolet, then cleaned off his machine before dipping the needle tips into a vibrant yellow. The book of butterflies she’d brought with her gave him some idea on how the hues would look against one another, nature being generous with the nectar-drinkers’ clothing.

  “Good, because this really hurts.” A toss of her hair over one shoulder was an invitation of sorts, he figured. So was the trailing touch across his lips. He could feel the shift of heat over her stomach, the scent of her sweetness in his nose. “What are you doing tonight? We’re having a party. You could come over. I can introduce you around when I show off my new tat.”

  “Ah, I don’t know. I’ve got some things I have to do tonight.” Kismet shook his head, keeping his eyes down.

  That was a mistake. One he realized as soon as he did it. Curled under the counter ledge was his brother, Chase, his young body pulled in so his knees could serve as mountains to the ponies he made with his fingers. Enormous eyes peered out from under Chase’s mop of hair, a little boy’s innocence that Kismet had lost long ago.