Filthy

by Katherine Rhodes

  “Who survived?”

  I sighed. “Their father.”

  He parsed the room with the sight that wasn’t of this world, and let out a deep breath. “Retribution killing.”

  Nodding, I headed for the window, to check the locks as was a routine. “This is all so…”

  Reid moved next to the bed to begin his work. “Everything is, m’lady. Everything right now is. Are you aware that the Trium is missing?”

  I whipped my head around. “What? Since when?”

  “About a century ago, as best we can tell,” he answered. “Things have carried on, but…it’s not clear who is doing that. No one has seen the three of them, together or apart for that long.”

  “I don’t need this to be any more complicated that it already was, Reid. I don’t.”

  “None of us do,” he answered. “Do we have any hope?”

  The smile slipped on to my lips and I nodded. “We’re a lot closer to hope than we were a few weeks ago. I don’t want to say we’re close to finding out everything, but things are falling into place.”

  He turned back to the bed where the mother was and started his work.

  A retribution killing. It seemed it was a normal reason, but…the retribution, I knew, was for letting a man fall in love with the woman who was his destiny.

  I was sure they didn’t understand the wrath of Hell.

  Fischer

  The woman across from me was disgusting.

  Not in a didn’t shower kind of way, but in a Picture of Dorian Gray way. Every evil thing she’d done marred her skin, her hair, her eyes.

  I rubbed my eyes, quickly, making it seem like an allergy action. Not me trying to scrub out the gross.

  “Well, Mrs. Worth,” I said. “I’m glad the new medicine is working for you.”

  “That’s not what I said at all,” she snapped.

  One of the snakes in her hair snapped at me.

  Jesus.

  “You said you’ve been able to get about four hours of sleep for the past two weeks.”

  “Yes, but that’s not enough!” she cried. “I need to sleep eight.”

  “As I explained when you first started with me, we have to take this incrementally. We started with absolutely no sleep, Mrs. Worth. You get four solid hours now. We have to reacclimate your body to getting to sleep. We should be happy with where we are and give the body a chance to start getting used to that. About a month, and then we can talk about changing up the dosage and timing and—”

  “Why can’t we just up the dosage now?”

  “All sleep medications are very dangerous,” I explained again. For the nine thousandth time. “Especially for insomniacs. If we up the dosage too fast, you’re going to sleep while shopping, and doing all sorts of dangerous activities. It’s a terrible side effect, but if we can keep the dosage low…there’s a chance you may gain another two hours on this dose if we let your body get used to sleeping—”

  “I thought they said you were the best.”

  “Ma’am, humbly, I am,” I answered.

  “Then why aren’t you listening?” she snapped. The snake did as well.

  I slammed the folder closed. “Fuck this. Lady, if you want to die in a car accident because you’ve overdosed on Ambien, you’re going to have to find another doctor. I’m listening to you just fine, but you’re not listening to me. At all. If you just want to pill seek, go somewhere else. I am the best at the intricacies of the human brain, and you’re not interested in your own health at all.”

  “Well.” She sniffed, and grabbed her purse. “If that’s how you feel about it.”

  She stood and I walked to the door to hold it open for her. I leaned close to her ear. “And if I might, Mrs. Worth? Stop fucking the pool boy. You’d do a lot better on sleep if you weren’t sneaking around with him. Get your STIs checked. You’re showing all the classic signs of syphilis.”

  She smacked me. I had expected it.

  “Fuck you, Doctor.”

  “Not with a full latex suit, ma’am.”

  Her jaw fell open and she marched out of the office, straight past the front desk—even as the new girl desperately signaled to her to make another appointment—and slammed the door.

  The new receptionist, a woman named Vivian, looked at me sheepishly. “I’m sorry, Doctor. She was—”

  “Not worth it, Vivian,” I said. “She just wanted pills. Not cures and coping mechanisms.”

  Vivian gasped when she saw the bright red bloom on my cheek. “She smacked you?”

  “Hard.” I chuckled. “I suppose I deserved it.”

  “Smooth, Fisch,” Laxmi said from her lean in the doorway. “Very smooth.”

  I held up my finger to hold Laxmi there for a moment. “Vivian, she’s probably going to have a pill pusher calling for her records. Request a release of liability form from them when she does. I’m through with her.”

  “Yes, sir.” She nodded.

  I closed the door to the offices.

  “Slothful?” Laxmi asked.

  “No. Not even. I’m not pushing pills, and she’s seeking. There’s no middle ground. We made a stunning amount of progress, and she’s just not happy. If anything, she’s being lazy and just wanting the short cut. Fixing the brain is—”

  “Is a long, arduous process and there are no short cuts because short cuts equal short circuits.” Laxmi finished for me.

  “Did I say it that often?” I grinned.

  “Yes, enough times that I got it,” she answered, patting my arm.

  She started to walk by. I grabbed her elbow and stopped her. “Got a sec? In my office?”

  “Always,” she answered.

  She walked into the office behind me and closed the door and we sat on either side of the desk. I leaned forward on the chair and scrubbed my hands over my face. “Things are weird.”

  Laxmi sat back and laughed, the flicker of her wings dancing behind her before disappearing. “That’s an understatement, Fischer.”

  “Yeah, so it has to do with…all that. God, this is so effing bizarre.”

  Laxmi nodded. “I’m just getting used to it myself. My situation isn’t yours, but that doesn’t mean it’s any better or worse. I mean, wings? Hell? Swords? What is all this crap going on around us?”

  I stopped trying to figure out what to say, and just said it. “I can see sins.”

  She stared at me. “What?”

  “I can see…sins. Transgressions. Like Dorian Grey. Tricia Worth had snakes in her hair, and mold on her skin, and a lesion on her neck. But they weren’t really there, they were…otherworldly.”

  She held up her hand. “What do you see?”

  “Your hand. Tipped with claws, but not really. I don’t see any sins.” I pointed to the door. “With her, every flaw on her skin I knew was a sin. The lesion was her affair with the pool boy. It told me that was its reason.”

  Her eyebrows raised ever so slightly. “Really?”

  “It’s driving me insane.”

  “Can you shut it off?”

  “I’ve been trying, but it’s been coming in so slowly that I only recently realized it was happening all the time.”

  She tapped her finger on the arm of the chair. “And Lincoln?”

  “I haven’t asked him.”

  She chuckled.

  “What?”

  “Too busy with Wren to have a conversation?”

  “Christ,” I groaned, sliding a hand over my eyes. “Does everyone know?”

  “No one knows—not outside our little group, but how am I supposed to resist teasing you? She’s my wife’s best friend, and that’s what we do.”

  Shaking my head, I leaned against the desk. “I have to talk to him, don’t I?”

  “Do you hate him?”

  “Nah. He’s a good guy. I’m just…not used to this situation yet. I forget he’s a part of the…household.”

  Laxmi winked. “Get used to it. You and Lincoln are a team, and it’s important you start learning to be
one. Just like Miriam and I are. It’s taken a while, a long while, for us to get used to that.”

  “There’s more coming,” I said. “I know there is. And you’re right, Lincoln and I have to work together. But Laxi, are we supposed to protect her or she us, or…”

  “I don’t even know,” she said, shaking her head. “I have no idea. But Miriam and I… Well, we’ve been practicing with what we can do. I make no pretense of that. I don’t know how the ability to see sins can be channeled into a learnable or useful skill, but it might be worth it to see if you can. Or if other things come up, other abilities.”

  “Christ, I wish we had a clue of what was going on.”

  Laxmi stood and headed to the door, pulling it open. “Don’t we all? I mean, you see sins. That’s a pretty big clue. See what Lincoln thinks. Learn to work as a team, like we do here.”

  She shut the door quietly after stepping out.

  Hell.

  She was right. I had to start working with Lincoln as a team. We’d done a pretty good job murdering someone together. We could probably do a pretty good job saving people together.

  Lincoln

  “So, as you can see the contracts are all in order and the terms are laid out clearly.”

  I couldn’t concentrate. The guy was crawling with worms and lesions, and he had some snakes in his hair. Motherfucking snakes in his motherfucking hair.

  The laugh escaped me, and I had to turn it into a cough behind my hand as I reached for the bottle of water. I turned the contract so I could read it over.

  That’s when I realized that some of the phrases were trying to crawl off the page. Not really, but the illusion was that they didn’t belong there and were trying to leave the rest of them behind.

  I concentrated on those.

  They changed to red and were very easy to read. When the three dozen or so sentences were individual from each other they appeared harmless. Reading them in sequence made them suspect, and when taken in context with the whole of the contract, they were a recipe for disaster.

  As soon as I recognized that, the words and letters all settled down and nestled back on the sheets, looking incongruous.

  “I have questions,” I started. And for the next twenty minutes, ripped the contract these men presented as honest and upright into small paper shreds.

  By the time I was done, they were up out of their seats and nearly running for the door. I was sure I’d never see them again, and if I did, I’d call the Feds on them and let them end up with RICO charges, as well as tax evasion and interstate fraud.

  Gil stared at me from his seat next to me. “Are you kidding?”

  “What?” I asked. I risked a glance at him.

  “You just utterly destroyed that contract, in a few short minutes!” He was laughing. “You saw shit in that I never would have thought to put together!”

  “It’s a gift,” I answered.

  Gilbert was, thankfully, clear of snakes and worms. There were a few bruises on his arm, but I’d started to realize most people had some bruises. They were merely white lies.

  Everything else was a damn distraction. Like the snakes that guy had in his hair. Who had snakes in their hair?

  Worse, I knew they weren’t really there, but not reacting to a ghost snake when it snapped at me was a trick. One I wasn’t sure I had managed to pull off every single time.

  They were big imaginary snakes. And I had started out not liking snakes—or the men who came with the contract. When a nightmare anaconda-looking-thing snapped its jaw at me, all bets were off.

  “So, what do we do now?” Gil asked. “We have a big hole in the investments side of the equation. We really don’t have time to find another group that can fit the project.”

  “We need to find one more,” I insisted. “Find someone, anyone with a good tech idea and drag them in. I want this full, and I want this on the up and up. No more of that fly-by-night we aren’t telling you the deal unless you sign our contract crap. I just don’t have it in me to deal with it.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and marched smartly out of the room.

  I hung my head in my hands. Gil was a good guy. A really good guy. He was the best and that’s what I always got: the best.

  But I fucking missed Vance. Those scheisters never would have gotten in here with their convoluted contract bullshit for the startup if he’d been here. Yeah, I was able to suss out the bullshit—with my new magical lie detecting powers!—but I wouldn’t have had to if he was here.

  No one had seen Vance in close to two months. He disappeared after I came out of my comatose state, and…poof! gone. I’d been to his place, which was completely empty, like he’d never existed. His car was gone, the phone was shut off, all of his bills were paid and closed, and I couldn’t find a storage bin with his personal stuff.

  Even more, day by day, the traces of him that lived in databases, and online searches, public records, in banks and junk mail that doesn’t get delivered anymore, he’d disappeared. In a few months, no one would have ever heard of Vance Rikers, except the few people I knew.

  All I really wanted, out of all of this, was just the chance to say goodbye if he was really determined to go. I wouldn’t have held him back.

  A knock on the door knocked me back to the present. Scrubbing my eyes again, I called for them to come in.

  Fischer.

  “Hey. Busy?”

  “No,” I answered, sitting up straight. “Come on in.”

  He closed the door behind himself. “You look like I feel.”

  “Hell?”

  “Mmm, slightly worse.”

  “What’s worse than hell?”

  Pulling out the chair, he sat down. “Fucking hell.”

  I laughed. He was right, and I headed for the wet bar. “I need a drink.”

  “It’s…” Fischer looked at his watch. “Oh. It’s three. Right. Let’s do this.”

  Grabbing two lowballs off the back of the bar, I poured each of us a finger of whiskey. Handing one to him as I headed back to my seat, he took it gratefully, and took a hard sip, closing his eyes to enjoy the smoky burn.

  “Rough day?” I asked.

  He nodded, opening his eyes. “I guess you could say that. Could you hold your hands up for a moment?” I complied and he nodded. “Thanks. Nothing there.”

  “Fuck,” I whispered. “You’re seeing them too?”

  “Yep.” He nodded, and took another sip. “They snuck in. Didn’t really even notice them until the past few days. Now, I can’t even turn them down or off.”

  “Snakes?” I stared at the glass of amber liquid, turning it slowly.

  “Worms. Bugs. Wounds, bruises, flies… Just everything.” He stared at his glass. “Also, they kind of talk to me?”

  “Talk? They yell at me. And today, the words on the paper were slithering around to get my attention. Oh, and let’s talk about the anaconda living in the guy’s hair, snapping at me.”

  “Ooh, anaconda.” Fischer grimaced. “Mine were just asps, at least.”

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked, after a hard pull on the whiskey. “Why are we able to see this shit?”

  “I talked a bit with Laxmi, since she seems to be embroiled in this crap with us.”

  I stayed quiet. I liked Laxmi and Miriam. They were good people and Fischer was right—fully involved in this mess as much as we were. Maybe more because both of them came with wings and swords now. I also had the feeling the two of them knew more than they were sharing with us.

  “She suggested that we’re seeing people’s sins on their skin.”

  I rolled my eyes and let out a breath, and then stared at Fischer. “I didn’t want to hear that, but that was the conclusion I was coming to myself. We’re seeing the evil that people do on their skin. It’s unsettling.”

  He let out a sigh. “Unsettling is probably an understatement. I lost it with a patient this morning. I’m sure she’s off fucking Pedro the pool boy right now and trying to find a doctor who w
ill just give her the pills she wants.”

  “I just kicked an investor out of my start up for the deceitful contract that they wanted me to sign for them to join the company. The words were there in the contract, dancing at me, trying to get my attention.”

  We both sat quietly at the table, just nursing the whiskey for a few minutes.

  “Thoughts?” I asked.

  “Our daughter has wings,” Fischer stated.

  “And a sword,” I reminded him.

  “We can see…well…sins and transgressions on the skin,” he continued a moment later. “Have we asked Wren if anything unusual has happened to her?”

  “Aside from handing Mjolnir over to Ellie?” I asked. “No. I haven’t. But Laxmi, Miriam, and Haden all insisted she and Miriam hand that sword over, so there’s something going on here.”

  “We should probably chat with her about it,” Fischer said.

  I snorted. “Fisch, there is only one thing we do with our mouths around her.”

  Scrubbing a hand through his hair, he smirked. “You’re right. We have got to stop that. We need to build a relationship here.”

  “Can’t we do that first and then talk?”

  “Because we’re not all fucked out and falling asleep every night?”

  I laughed, hard. “Fischer, stop making sense.”

  “Believe me, Linc. There is nothing more I want in this world than to make her scream every night. But we have got to establish a relationship, clear up our communication. If something is really going on here? We’re going to need to have clear, open conversations. And she can’t do that in most of the positions she likes.”

  I grumbled. Just the thought of slipping into bed with Wren was getting me hard. I closed my eyes and thought about that vicious anaconda I couldn’t be sure I didn’t react to.

  Erection, defeated.

  “You’re right. I know you’re right. We need to talk. About all of this, about wings and swords and weird friends. We’re just going to have to force ourselves to stay at the table after the twins go to bed.”

  He cocked his head. “You want to include Ellie?”

  “She’s got wings,” I reminded him.

  Fischer maked a ‘go on’ motion with his hand. “And a sword, right, right.” He sighed. “You’re right. She needs to be in on the communication. It will also help keep us from constantly pulling Wren into bed.”