by Avell Kro
earlier.
“Selena?”
“Harv?”
“Where is everybody?” Harv says.
“Hey, I’m here. What are you doing here, anyway?” I say.
“Sean told me I had to come in. I wasn’t going to. I’m working on something, you know. The Gas
Cloud.” That’s Harv’s latest obsession.
“You would be.”
“I’m going to convince Sean one day. I have hope.” But Harv’s already-slumping shoulders slump
more obviously. If my own hopes are that poorly supported, it’s, well, hopeless.
“They’re at breakfast, across the street.” I start looking around again, à la Elizabeth, as though that
will make either her or what she might’ve been looking for spring into view.
“I saw the sign on the front door. I can read, you know. So I was surprised that the door was open.
What on earth are you doing here? You’re never here in the morning.”
“Delivery. And I don’t know how to tell time.” Harv knows that about me. He sees right through
me, something he was able to do immediately. I can see only about an millimeter into Harv,
though, through his ordinary gray suit and tall, slim frame.
He’s the perfect nobody—someone both recognizable and unrecognizable. Someone you think you
know yet has no personality.
Only, of course, Harv has a personality, but he puts it on hold for the deliveries. He’s the ideal
courier, needing no disguise, no alternate identity, no special outfit. No one would ever remember
him.
“You want some tea?” I say.
“Are you kidding me? Let’s go have breakfast with everyone else. There’s nothing going on here.”
Harv motions around the office, proving his point.
“I was just going to have something here—crackers, a cookie. I’ve got a delivery in an hour,” I say,
still scanning the room for some something.
“That’s an hour from now. You’ve got time,” Harv says.
My stomach burbles. Maybe the crackers won’t be enough. And Elizabeth hasn’t come back, even
though I felt she would. I sigh my disappointed sigh.
I’m about to close the desk drawer, but I just can’t. Instead, I open the desk’s bottom drawer, pull
out the messenger bag I’d already stocked with today’s scheduled delivery and my ID kit, and
throw Elizabeth’s package inside.
“Let’s go,” I say. Now that Harv’s here, now that I’ve got my package and Elizabeth’s package, now
that we’re going to eat, it feels like the universe has gathered everything into its proper place, me
included.
“I’m starving,” says Harv. “Haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday. Got involved, you know. I wasn’t
going to come in. If I didn’t need the money . . .”
“I could eat two breakfasts,” I say, downplaying my actual appetite. I lock up the desk again, even
though there’s nothing in it now, throw my messenger bag over my shoulder, and put my arm
through Harv’s. When I don’t feel like being left alone, I crave companionship.
“Sean’s paying,” I say out in the hallway. I lock the office door behind us, tugging on the door handle
twice, making certain.
On the stairwell, I stop for a moment, listening. There.
“What is it?”
“I thought I heard something, but . . . it’s nothing,” I say.
I reposition my messenger bag across my chest, bandolero-style.
Harv and I are the only ones here. I’m glad he came in. Something reassuring about seeing him,
despite—or maybe because of—his bad attitude.
We breeze down the stairs, arm in arm.
Chapter 8
ELI AND FLORA got off the elevator. They approached Sunbright Lifestyle’s offices, the place where
they both sold time to people who didn’t know what they were buying. To people who didn’t
realize that you can’t purchase time.
Eli’s knees nearly collapsed again as Flora opened the glass door to the bullpen. The cubicles filled
with Sunbright’s smiling salespeople. The prospects can hear your smile.
He couldn’t see Josie, who must have been smiling more than anyone else after such an unlikely,
victorious, unusually lucrative morning.
But that sensation brought on by the still-wrong sun as it gleamed its disorienting push through
the windows on the far wall. The dead green carpet.
“Didn’t you have a great time last year?” Charlie smiled his biggest smile. He nodded at Eli as he
walked past. Must be trying to convince a current customer they should buy even more time.
As though you couldn’t buy enough time. As though buying more of something you couldn’t really
own would increase your level of happiness or satisfaction or your sense of rightness about your
decisions, about your self. As though you were giving yourself something extra, something more.
Charlie could be very convincing. He sounded like he knew something that you didn’t know, that
you couldn’t know until he told you about it, and that you were a more complete person for having
discovered.
Flora was no longer in sight. Her desk, mercifully, was on the other side of the office. Leaving Eli to
himself. He exhaled twice.
At his cubicle, Eli got ready to start again, call someone new, someone he’d never spoken to before.
Josie half stood from her chair and leaned over the partition, then sat back down, her attention
abruptly refocused on her prospect. All business. Another sale, no doubt.
Didn’t you have a great time last year? He’d have to remember that. Natural sales technique,
something that came easily to Charlie. Something Eli had to work at.
I have a job to do. Not exactly a pep talk, not the kind of motivating encouragement you’d give
someone else. Not what Hugh would say. But the fever, the chills—gone now, depleted by chasing a
phantom more familiar than anyone he could see from his seat.
Someone he knew. Someone he remembered even if he couldn’t remember his name. Although if
he could find him, he’d instantly know his name. He could picture it—the meeting, the expected
gestures, his saying the man’s name as though he’d always known it. The relief. The release.
Eli put his hand in his pocket and felt the cool metal. His link to a reality he couldn’t grasp.
“Hi! This is Eli from Sunbright Lifestyles. I have a special gift just for you! Just for answering a few simple questions . . .”
Chapter 9
I’VE ALWAYS LIKED this diner, although there’s no reason to. The place has lackluster food, zero
personality, and zero-minus atmosphere. As clouded over in here as the constant dullness outside,
here in Port Jordan and everywhere else.
Yet the diner’s good. Comfortable and comforting. Maybe because we come here so often.
Sean, Spencer, and #2 are sitting at the usual table, the one by the side window in the back, and
there are two empty chairs, as though they knew Harv would be here, as though they knew I’d
catch up with them eventually.
Sean and #2 are sitting across from each other, the great friends that they are. I sit next to Sean,
and Harv plops down in the seat next to #2, who’s graciously pulled out the chair for him. Sean
hasn’t even noticed me—he’s too busy plowing through a plate of something that looks like it’s
striving to be eggs. #2’s spreading some sort of orangeish goo on her toast.
Spencer’s by himself in the chair blocking
the aisle. He’s got a plate of pancakes in front of him,
which he’s staring at.
“You can eat?” I blurt out.
Sean chokes on his near-eggs. #2 takes a bite of her toast and a delicate sip of a cranberry-colored
liquid. She leans over the table. Can’t get crumbs or stains on her perfect suit.
Harv waves his hand at the server, who’s turned away from us. Harv sighs and stares at Spencer’s
pancakes, which I’m also admiring.
“I’m studying them,” Spencer says.
“Yeah,” Sean says. He shovels another giant mouthful of whatever it is that’s on the plate into his
mouth. The body of a Greek statue needs nourishment. He must look fabulous naked.
“Why are you studying them?” I say to Spencer. What’s there to learn about pancakes? Is he
thinking of becoming a chef? It’s all I can do not to pick up the fork in front of me and cut myself
off a quadrant.
“To understand,” Spencer says. He can be extremely cryptic.
#2 raises her flowerlike hand, and the selfsame server who ignored Harv materializes at the table.
The server glances at Harv. “I didn’t see you come in,” she says. More proof that Harv’s
unnoticeable, almost invisible. That’s probably the main reason Sean hired him and, more to the
point, doesn’t fire him, even though Harv’s so damned difficult.
“Pancakes,” Harv says. “They look good.”
Spencer turns toward the front door and cocks his head, as though he’s heard something. He’s got an advanced sense of hearing, so maybe he has.
“I’d like—”
But my words are drowned out by the scraping of Spencer’s chair on the tile floor as he pushes
away from the table and heads to the front door.
We all stand. Everyone in the restaurant’s on their feet. We’re all as alert now as we were
complacent only a second ago.
A shimmering globe of heat blossoms in the air just outside, knocking against the windows. The
glass on the front door cracks into a jagged rivulet. Spencer, who was about to open the door,
moves back several steps.
The burst of light’s more intense than the heat. I look away. Even Spencer shields his eyes.
A woman who’d been sitting at the table in the front window but who’s now standing behind
Spencer shouts something I can’t hear over the noise of my own fears and the trembling underfoot
as the floor shifts, then abruptly drops back into place.
The air outside expands in a heat-infused burst, the sound unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.
Like the sound of a hundred thousand agonized shouts.
My hands and arms tremble. I’m living in someone else’s body, separate from myself and from
what’s around me.
#2 grabs on to me for support, her hands moist and shaking almost as much as mine. Harv’s
frozen in place, staring openmouthed at the scene outside.
“Fire!” someone shouts.
Sean’s headed for the front door, but Spencer holds him back, stares him down. “Don’t you dare,” he
says. Spencer thrusts his arm in front of Sean. I had no idea Spencer could be anything but
obedient, that he could take charge.
THE BEST LAID PLANS
‘The Chronicles of Breed’ Prequel Novella
K.T. Davies
Copyright 2018
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,
including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author,
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events and incidents are either
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Published by Scimitar Media
Cover Design by Scimitar Media
Chapter One
“Cock,” Sweaty Stefan observed.
I squinted at the cloud. “That’s nothing like a cock. It’s a sausage, or a worm maybe.”
“Are ye blind? It’s obviously a cock.” The sellspel stretched out and put his reeking feet against the
parapet that hid us from view.
Careful to keep my head down, in case any of the servants loitering by the gates happened to look
back towards the house, I took the witch wood box Mother had given us out of my pack. “I have
better eyesight than you, human and if your cock looks like that, I pity you.”
Sweaty cupped his nethers and grinned suggestively, displaying a worn set of false teeth that had
been carved out of old bone and amber. He was a grubby pain in the arse, but he was one of the
more reliable sorcerers Mother hired from time to time. I say more reliable. It had been a couple of
hours since he’d used any pel and without his favoritedrug, he was starting to twitch and sweat
more profusely than usual.I prayed a silent prayer to the shadows that the job went as planned. I
didn’t want to deal with a strung-out sorcerer while we were hiding on the roof of the mansion of
an imperial senator.
He wiped his sheened face with the back of his hand, shuffled over to the parapet, and put his eye
to a crack in the fancy stonework. “And there’s no need for your pity, lizard. It’s not what it looks
like that matters, it’s what you do with it. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Lizard, eh? I’m half-thoasa, if you please, sirrah. And I have no desire to understand how you rut.”
The sorcerer snorted. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Something that looks like a wonky sausage, apparently.” I heard the drum of hoofbeats on the
road and kicked the mage. “Riders.” Mythoasan senses are more acute than those of most humans,
and I could pick out the faint tattoo of hoofbeats that were still beyond the range of Sweaty’s
hearing. I could also smell Mother’s scent clinging to the box. Her unmistakable, olfactory signature
was suffused with the sweet iron tang of blood and the eldritch spice of sorcery. It lingered like a
malevolent, ghostly presence reminding me not to fuck it up. I broke the seal. Stefan held out his
hand. Scratched into his palm was an arcane sigil. The marks Mother had scribed with the demon
fang were deep and crusted with dried blood. “She wasn’t in a good mood when she did this was
she?” I said and opened the box. The breath of ancient tombs assailed my nostrils, and I would
have sworn before the sternest beak that I could hear distant screams and growls.
“Is she ever in a good mood?” The mage swallowed, choked by the sudden remembrance of who he
was talking to. “No offense. I mean…”
I folded my arms and composed the straightest of faces. “Do go on.”
“I know Mother is your actual mother and might I say the best leader of one of the finest guilds I’ve ever had the pleasure of working for, but she’s not one for smiling, is she?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to see her smile. You’ve done work for Pork Chop, haven’t you?”
The sellspell paled at the mention of Mother’s rival gang boss. “It was a long time ago, and even
then, it was a small job, out of town—”
“No need to dissemble, Sweaty. I don’t give a shit, it’s just business, and if Mother gave a shit, she’d
feed you to her dog rats. I just wondered what he’slike is all. I mean, I’ve seen him from a distance,
and unlike Mother, the spider’s always smiling, like he knows something nobody else does.”
“It’s not dee
p insight,he just smokes a lot of pel. He lets his broodlings do most of the day-to-day
grind while he sits there stewing in a warm, fuzzy haze. The lucky bastard.” The guards’ horses
halted by the gate. “There are only four, a sergeant and three rankers,” Stefan whispered. “Looks
like Senator Rublis isn’t as important as he thinks he is.”
“Are they local greenshanks or Imperials?” I poured the contents of the box into his spell-marked
palm.
“You’re the warspawn, can’t you smell the difference?”
“You’re such a prick.”
“You sure you don’t mean sausage?”
I answered with a gesture that left no doubt as to what I meant. Sweaty grinned, closed his eyes
and began mumbling an incantation over the pile of dust in his palm. While I waited for him to
summon the homunculus I tasted the breeze. I already knew the servants by their odors, which to
someone like me were as unique as their names were to them. There was ‘the nursing mother’
who smelled of stale milk and baby puke, ‘the drunk’ who supped mint leaf tonic to hide the smell
of cheap brandy, and ‘the youthful self-abuser’ a stable lad who had slightly more on his hands
than horse shit.
As for the guards, there was a strong smell of blade oil but happily, not a whiff of calthracite
powder which meant that they weren’t armed with handcannons. Not that I was expecting a
confrontation. If this job went as planned no one would know about it until we were long gone, but
as Mother was fond of saying, “Never count your vipers before they hatch.” It also meant that, as we
suspected, the senator wasn’t a big enough fish to warrant imperial aid in hunting down the
dastardly curs who’d attempted to rob his country retreat.
Stefan looked up. “So, what do you smell?”
“There are three men, one woman. Obviously, they’re all human. The woman’s old, past her
seasons. One of them oils their hair. One of them has a bad back or knee. Whichever it is they stink
of langer gal . One of them likes fermented cheese, one smokes a pipe, and one unlucky cul has
cancer.”
“You smelled all of that?”