by M. R. Forbes
I wasn't a pretty man. I looked as sick as I felt. My body was rail thin, with grey skin clinging so tightly to muscle and bone that it looked like it had just been laid on top of my skeleton. My head was way too big for my body, my face was small and sharp, and my eyes were sunken and sullen, with no sign of brightness inside the almost wholly black orbs. I had no hair to speak of, and every breath I took carried a hint of pain and decay. I could still remember when I had been healthy, and almost handsome. At least, Karen had always told me I was the most beautiful man she had ever met. It had been enough for me.
The sink turned off, and I heard the snap of latex gloves. I turned the knob to unlock the operating room door and walked in, my body shaking from the clean cold. I grabbed a fresh sheet and laid it over the table, and then sat down.
"Just make sure you don't touch me." Dalton entered the room and went over to a safe, bolted into the floor. He put in the combination and heaved it open.
"It doesn't work like that, and you know it."
I watched him pull out a sterile bag which contained the medicine. It was nothing but a small, round capsule that contained who-knows-what. By itself, it was nothing too bad. The problem was that it couldn't be taken orally. It had to be injected.
"It had just stopped hurting, too." I leaned back and twisted a little, exposing a nasty pucker of scarred flesh that served as a twisted target for the treatment apparatus.
"Sorry, Conor." Dalton picked up the injector from the table next to the bed. It bore a vague resemblance to a gun, except the nozzle ended in a needle that was thick enough for the capsule to blast out of. He popped the side of it open and dropped the capsule in. A small bottle of compressed air went into the back, and would fire the little pill through my innards.
He flipped it on, and brought it to my stomach. I closed my eyes while he lined up the needle and jabbed it through the scar tissue. It gave pretty easily, having been penetrated so many times before. Even so, his precision was almost embarrassing. Dalton was a black market merchant who had learned medicine on the internet, and he was almost as good of a surgeon as I had been.
I grimaced through the pain. In the beginning I had taken his offer of anesthesia, but over time I'd realized the stuff he was giving me made me feel worse than the pain did, and cost a lot more to boot. Now I just grinned and bore it, and even watched the procedure with a calm expectancy. Every time I saw the blood start running down my abs I waited for it to be a thick black pus.
He put his finger on the trigger. "The hard part."
I nodded and took a few deep breaths. He'd have to get the capsule in pretty deep. Whatever was in it would spread throughout my system and attack the ugly cells that the base was producing, keeping the factory in check for up to a month at a time, unless I touched someone and caused it to go into overdrive. Why it couldn't actually destroy the mass that was causing the trouble I didn't know, and neither did Dalton. When I asked, he would only say, 'they're working on it'. Whoever 'they' were.
"On three," Dalton said, shifting the device in his hand, changing his aim.
He'd have to get the positioning just right, or it wouldn't travel to the right spot, and would open too soon and be relatively ineffective. It had happened once before, and I'd only gotten a week out of the treatment. Even worse, the whole thing was buyer's risk. Too bad it didn't take, I had to pay full price all the same.
"One..."
I closed my eyes, mentally preparing myself for the pain that would follow.
"Two..."
I sucked in one more deep breath, and held it tight.
"Three..."
There was a puff of air, and then I could feel the capsule moving down deep towards the base of my gut. I felt the burn of it, the hot agony of it pushing through my innards. It was a thousand stabs at once, dense and tight and unbelievable. In an instant, the needle retreated, and I felt the coldness of the air against my flesh again.
I opened my eyes, reaching up to wipe the tears away from them. Dalton put the injector down and grabbed some thread, stitching me up in less than a minute. Then he took a damp towel and wiped away the excess blood.
"Not so bad, was it?"
"Go to hell."
He laughed. "Would you let me stay there?"
"Would you want to?"
"Go put your clothes back on."
I hopped off the bed and left the operating room, grabbing my stuff and getting myself back into it. Every movement hurt again, the stitches in my side bringing back the old, familiar pain. The payment card fell out of a pocket as I swung the trench back on.
"What's this?" Dalton asked. It had landed at his feet. He picked it up and twirled it in his fingers. "Haven't see one of these beauties in a while."
"Payment for my next job." I held out my hand to take it back.
He looked up at me, his brows arching in concern. "You know this is Black's, right?"
"Yeah."
"Does Dannie know about this?"
"Not yet. I'm going to tell her as soon as I get home."
"She's not going to be happy."
"I know, but I think I can ease her mind. There's two million on that card."
Well, I hoped I could. There was no love lost between Danelle and her father, and that normally meant an embargo on jobs sourced through House Black. Then again, our jobs didn't normally pay two million.
He whistled and handed it over. "I don't think any purse is high enough for Dannie when it comes to Black."
I shrugged. "I guess I'll find out."
Now that I was dressed, Dalton wasn't afraid to reach out and grab my arm. It didn't matter how many times I told him it didn't work that way, he still treated me like a leper.
"I would think long and hard about taking this job, pardner. There's a reason the value is so high, and no offense, but you're small shit compared to the types that usually take this kind of work."
I reached for his hand, and he whipped it away before I could make contact.
"Tell that to the corpses Mr. Black was going to hire."
I left the pawn shop without another word.
CHAPTER FOUR
Never had a friend like me.
Danelle and I lived in a tiny two bedroom house on the outskirts of the city, close enough to make getting in for jobs easy, far enough to make being under scrutiny hard. The house itself was nothing special - beige paint badly in need of a touch-up, a patched grey roof, and boards over half the windows. It was the kind of house you'd think somebody had killed someone in, and if you ventured into the basement you would have realized that wasn't too far from the truth.
Maybe I'd never killed anyone in the house, but I had a few murdered corpses stashed beneath the stairs.
Dalton's words were still resonating with me as I pulled the van between the posts of a rusted fence and up a driveway that in a past life had been a solid block of concrete. He had stolen most of the wind from my sails about the job, and the throbbing in my side was mangling the rest. I wasn't excited about stepping over the threshold and having Danelle confront me about botching the work for Mrs. Grey and needing to touch someone. I was even less excited about telling her I was going to be working for her father.
Dalton was right. I should have reconsidered. Danelle was the only reason I had survived so far outside the two months the doctors had given me. She had been the one who had found me, a depressed mess wandering through a dangerous part of town at the wrong time of night, almost begging someone or something to come and kill me. She had been a little late - I had already been mugged and beaten up a bit - though in retrospect it had been for the best. She claimed she'd smelled the aptitude in me even before the treatment had introduced me to the actual power I could wield. She'd also admitted that when she saw me laying in the street, she thought I was gorgeous, despite the swelling in my eye and jaw.
She'd fixed me up, nursed me back to health, and got me talking about everything. I'd spilled my life out to her, and found myself crying in her arms a
s she rocked me to sleep. That was the first week. We'd kissed once, but I'd just left Karen and Molly behind and she was nice enough not to take advantage. For reasons that were still unclear to me, we hit it off. She claimed it had to do with the zodiac. I thought it was because she was an idiot.
Still, the romantic part of the relationship had gone nowhere. The night of our first job together, we had gotten a little too excited, had a little too much to drink, and woke up the next morning in one another's arms. By the end of that day I'd come to the conclusion that our night of sweaty, messy sex had been way too awkward, in a brother-sister incest kind of way. She had concurred. It never happened again.
I shut down the van and shoved open the door, wincing as it squealed. I had been hoping to make a more subtle entry, but had been betrayed again. The kitchen light went on.
A deep breath. A review of excuses. I hopped out of the van, slammed the door closed, and made my way around to the back, to go in through the kitchen door. She was waiting there when I opened it.
"Hey, Dan."
She was sitting in her wheelchair, a red blanket folded tight over the remaining stumps of her legs. Her thin, muscled arms snaked down to where her hands rested on the wheels, ready to roll forward over my feet at her first spark of discontent. The long, dark hair of her Native American ancestry flowed out around her angled face, and her dark eyes were on fire. There was nothing even hinting at contentment in her voice.
"Do you know what we have left, Conor?" She pointed to the laptop on the kitchen table. "Four thousand."
"That's more than enough for rent."
"What about next month? You just finished the fucking job, and we're broke."
I hadn't expected to reach the moment of truth so quickly. My heart pounded while I reached into my pocket and found the card. I dropped it into her lap.
"I have another job."
She looked down at it, and then back up at me. The fire in her eyes had blossomed into a nuclear blast. Her anger had gone from a controlled yell, to a seething whisper. "That's Black's card."
"Put it in."
"Conor-"
"Put it in."
She growled and rolled herself into position in front of the computer. She took the card and waved it in front of the screen.
"What the hell?" She looked at me. "Where did you get this?"
"From the job for Mrs. Grey. The two ogres I fed to the dice were supposed to ghost it."
I could tell she was conflicted. As much as she hated her father, she liked having a home, and food in her stomach. It was enough to cool some of her temper.
I waited patiently while she cooled down a little.
"I don't know, Conor. No job that pays this well is going to be no-frills."
"You don't think I can handle it?"
"I'm not oozing confidence. Especially since you didn't exactly get through this last one without a hitch."
Ouch. She knew how to hit me where it hurt. "That was Caroline's fault. She came in too early."
"I told you not to bring her. She always has to be a drama queen. Where is she anyway?"
"She got hit in the jaw. I put her back to bed. Anyway, you know I didn't have anyone else who can be seen in public."
Her face softened. "I'm sorry, Conor. You could have used Mr. Timms if all you wanted was a distraction."
I shrugged. "Cats are harder to keep in line than people. Talk about a disaster." Not that the slightly decomposed feline couldn't be useful at times. That just wasn't one of them.
She sat and stared at the computer screen for a few minutes, not saying anything. When the tension had gotten thick enough, I broke it with capitulation.
"I don't have to do it."
She turned the chair and motioned for me to kneel down at eye level. "You had to do it the minute you took the card. Welcome to the big time, Conor. They've been tracking its movement since it left the hotel."
Damn me for thinking I was smart again. "Oh. Shit."
"Yeah. If that isn't bad enough, they'll probably think I'm the one who took the job. Mr. Black's failure of a daughter trying to get in his good graces."
"I'm sorry, Dannie. I didn't know."
She laughed. "How could you? You're a small-time thief and a so-so hitman. You should just be glad none of the Houses know you're a necro." She licked her lips and held the card up again. "I was pissed at you before you came home. I'm even more ticked now." She let loose a huge, heaving sigh. "What's done is done. I'll get my due once you finish the job, if you survive. Did you get any kind of data dump?"
I nodded, pulling the glasses from another pocket. She took them and put them down next to the laptop. "I'll transfer the data so we can both review it. You need to go clear out as much as you can keep in the van from the basement. We'll have to burn this place down."
"Burn it down?"
"I swear, Conor. How the hell did you graduate medical school?"
"Come on, Dannie. You know the treatment takes it out of me."
She rolled over to the counter and opened one of the drawers, pulling a small, thin cable from it. "How long do you have to finish it?"
"Forty-eight hours."
She looked even more unhappy. "Right. So, what do you think they're going to do in forty-eight, if the job isn't complete? They're going to come looking for you, tracing your steps backwards. One of those steps leads to this house, and an invalid in a wheelchair who can't defend herself. The kill team won't care whose daughter I am while they're putting a bullet in my brain."
She plugged one end of the cable into the laptop, the other into the specs.
"First, you're hardly unable to defend yourself. Second, you're assuming I'm going to fail?" I hadn't failed to finish a job yet, even if one did wind up a little sloppy from time to time. She had no reason to think I couldn't do it, and it was starting to make me equally angry that she didn't believe in me.
"I'm not assuming anything. I hope you're flawless. That doesn't mean I'm putting my life on it, not when I don't have to. We can torch this place and set up shop somewhere else, after the job is done. Next time, you'll be smarter."
"Now you're making a huge assumption." I smiled, my anger rescinded.
"There's a jug of kerosene in the basement. Get your toys out of here and then dump it over anything that'll burn."
I felt like garbage for forcing her out of the house, but what I could I do? She was right, what was done was done. I was grateful she was handling it with the same grace and efficiency that had made her such a good ghost. I reached out and took her hand on my way by, giving it a quick squeeze before leaving the kitchen. She returned the affection and added a small smile.
Pissed, but always dependable.
There was a plain white door tucked under the stairs to the second floor, which led down into the basement. I pushed it open, and then reached up and pulled the string on the fixture that illuminated the steps. They were simple wood planks, old and cranky, and they complained with every step I took to the bottom.
Once there, I hit the other light and glanced around. The basement stayed cool most of the year on its own, and a huge humidifier kept the air dry, which meant I didn't need to stick all of the bodies in freezers. Instead, I had them lined up along the walls, in seated positions like the world's most fucked-up collection of dolls. I knew how sick it was, but I'd been ghosting for three years. I also knew how useful they could be.
Bringing the dead back to life was easy enough, once you knew what you were doing. In its simplest form it was a test of will - mind over matter. I could hear the thrumming of the magic around me, a decent pocket of energy that had been the reason we'd chosen this house. That, and the cheap rent paid in cash. I could feel it too, a charge in the air that tickled my skin when I stood still enough.
There was a brick wall between being a sensitive and being a user, but once you made it over that didn't mean you were on the same level as every other user out there. Wizards varied with regard to both power and ability. Most
of us had an affinity towards a specific frequency or range of frequencies within the magical fields, and that was what made someone an illusionist, or an aquamancer, or a necro. Those that could work with the whole range were the rarest of the rare, and those that could do it well were even rarer. The only ones like that I knew about were the heads of each of the Houses.
When the reversal had taken place and the fields became active, it was the Houses that had helped bring some kind of order to the chaos of a world where not only had magic suddenly become very real, but so had a number of other things that had once been thought to only exist inside of fairy tales, movies, fantasy novels, and nightmares. The new humans weren't limited to alternate homo sapiens. The fields affected everything, and not all of it was friendly.
It was the masters of the Houses that had also figured out that this whole thing had happened before, all those years ago, during the fairly early days of man when the last reversal had occurred. Scientists had called it the Laschamp event, after the lava flows that proved its occurrence. Considering the shift before Laschamp had happened almost a million years ago, the one after should have continued for hundreds of thousands of years, meaning we would have had magic and everything that went with it from our humble beginnings as neanderthals.
Instead, it lasted somewhere between two hundred and five hundred years.
So what had happened? The working hypothesis was that a single wizard had found a way to force the polarities to shift back, and in doing so had not only destroyed our access to magic, but had also killed anything that had ever absorbed the power, including himself. It always seemed too convenient to be true, but the Houses pointed to the sudden and tremendous population growth of what would evolve into homo sapiens, the only human types that weren't killed in the blast. Knowing what I knew now, and putting myself in that position... I couldn't say I wouldn't have done the same thing.
In any case, the Houses had been a single House once. A conclave of the most powerful wizards to evolve from the shift, who joined together during the original crisis to help keep the world running smoothly. Of course, given time they began to argue about what they should be doing with their power, and so the conclave went rock band and split up. A pretty even balance of power emerged among the many now fragmented Houses, and with none of them wanting to challenge one another openly, they looked to anonymous agents, ghosts, in their constant see-saw battle for control.