We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle)

by Jeff Somers

  And I couldn’t allow that. Time, as Hiram might have said in his fussy, exasperated voice, is of the essence. And Offense, I thought, coining a Vonnegan original, is always better than defense.

  I thought of the Man in the White Suit. The Negotiator. I felt a flush rise in my cheeks. I pictured his red shoes, his face, like a series of triangles stitched together, his pointy nose and pale, milky skin. Those dead, haunted eyes. Heard his imperious voice in my head. Nonsense. I am the Negotiator. Fixed an image in my mind of the skinny son of a bitch. Looked up at Fallon as he spoke.

  “Mr. Vonnegan, we should discuss what—”

  I turned the gulla over and pushed the needles down into my palm.

  There was a second of sharp pain. I felt the wires under my skin, moving.

  35. IN THE DREAM, AS ALWAYS, Claire Mannice was on fire. She stood with her back to me, leaning forward against the bar at Rue’s, burning, the runes on her skin bright and perfectly clear for once, glowing blue and eldritch. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t see her face.

  I WOKE UP TO a stinging pain, a weight on my chest, and the smell of mildew in the air. I opened my eyes to Fallon sitting on top of me, one huge hand cocked up by his face. He was peering intently down at me.

  I realized I was holding my breath. Panic filled me. I opened my mouth but could not make my chest move. I lay there with my mouth open, goggle-eyed, Fallon over me like a terrible ancient bird about to spit something into my mouth.

  With a grunt, Fallon swung his arm down and slapped me again.

  My whole body went into a deep, painful spasm, every muscle tensing up into something rock-hard. My chest heaved, and a tiny pinprick of air trickled into my chest.

  “Stupid,” Fallon said with an air of disgust as he shifted his weight and climbed back to the floor. “You are very stupid. But alive. Which is a relief, as your giant Indian friend has informed me many times that he would break every bone in my body if you did not wake up.”

  I sat up, moving in jerky increments as if only certain muscles were getting oxygen, and those along a selected pattern. The pinprick slowly expanded into an airway, and I gulped in mildewy air hungrily, every muscle in my body burning. My head felt like someone had pushed something into the space between the skull and brain—too tight, the pulse of my blood sluggish and thickened. I turned my head and imagined I could hear every single sinew and tendon creak. Mags was standing right over me, breathing very loudly through his nose. He filled his shirt and jacket so thoroughly, it was safe to say he had reached maximum containment.

  I tried to make my face into a smile for Mags. “Where,” I said, my voice sounding like sandpaper on rocks. “Where—?”

  “Stupid,” Fallon repeated, stalking to a window and standing there staring at the drapes, hands in his pockets. He was wearing a beautiful cream-colored suit of an old style. It had wide shoulders and a gorgeous sheen and was the sort of suit I’d always wanted to wear but knew, on an unspoken, inarticulate level, I’d never be able to pull off.

  “Seward,” I heard Mel Billington say. “Seward, fucking-A-laska.”

  “It is a trap,” Fallon said simply. “Perhaps someday we will discuss why you did not discuss your choices before invoking the gulla.”

  I looked down at my hand; the tiny golden box was gone. We were in a motel room. This came to me in chunks, like my brain was reconnecting. Done in browns and yellows—or maybe they’d been other colors a century ago, when the place was built—the room was dark and dusty, tired sunlight pushing anemically through the thick drapes to give us just enough light to see by. I was on the bed. It was fucking freezing. Mel was thrown into a broken-down chair, wrapped up in even more coats than usual, smoking a cigarette in the silver holder she favored.

  Sitting on the orange rug were three of ours. Bloody messes. They’d stripped off their shirts and sat with fresh, puckered scars on both arms, a small stain spread out around them.

  I looked at Mel. For a second I couldn’t make my mouth work. “How—?”

  “Three weeks,” she said. She pointed the cigarette at me. “You’ve been a zombie for three weeks.”

  The stink in the room was overwhelming. It was rotten and damp, and it was in the air itself, attached to each molecule. I looked at Mags; he was smiling shyly.

  “It’s good to have you back,” he said.

  I swallowed something spiky and dry. Mags was my responsibility. Without me, people forgot to water and feed him. “What was it like, buddy?”

  He looked down at his surprisingly small feet, dancer’s feet. “You were, like, asleep. Your eyes were always closed. You got thinner and thinner and you were, like, gray. Like you were suffocating even though you were breathing. Sometimes you twitched. You just walked all the time. We had to tie you down, sometimes.”

  My feet, I realized, ached painfully.

  “It is difficult to travel by foot in the modern world,” Fallon groused. He gestured at the slumped forms of our Bleeders. “Ms. Billington had to employ much of her organizational skill to secure Bleeders so we could obscure ourselves. And we put much effort into getting you bundled into vehicles when we could, at which point you would thrash and kick—possessed.” He paused, and then raised his voice just slightly, the result like a shout from anyone else. “By foot, Mr. Vonnegan!”

  “The town,” Mel added immediately, sounding almost cheerful, “is abandoned. As in, totally fucking empty. Which I am inclined to think isn’t because of Mad Day or Mika Renar or what the fuck, but because Seward is a fucking hole no one should ever live in.”

  I felt like I’d been doing chin-ups for three weeks. Shuddering with some final spasm, I felt something mysterious unlock deep inside me, and my whole body relaxed into a steady, awful aching. I sucked in breath and moved my sand-dry tongue around in my mouth.

  Fuckin’ magic. It had been a long time since I’d felt that thrill. That thrill I’d felt thirty years before, watching that old gent levitate in a motel parking lot. That thrill of possibility. For a while now it had been survival, then nothing. Nothing for a long time.

  I tried to move my legs, to swing them over the edge of the bed. This did not work, and I started to get a little alarmed. Fallon wasn’t infallible, after all, and he seemed like he was in the mood to accidentally-on-purpose leave me paralyzed. As a lesson. We were not, I reminded myself, good people.

  “Why the fuck Alaska?”

  “You chose someone or something to find. The gulla has brought you to it.” Fallon took a deep breath. “This place is damp with magic. Blood, everywhere, recently. I believe you have been seen coming, as the expression goes. Perhaps because we came here by foot.”

  The door opened. Mel leaped from her chair and all three of the kneeling Bleeders—white-faced and covered in a cold sheen of sweat—stiffened. But it was Remy and Roman, wearing identical pea coats and newsboy caps like father and son, or grandfather and grandson, doing grandfatherly things like dressing identically.

  They glanced at me blankly for a second, then turned and took off their caps to Mel.

  “Not a soul in town, Mum,” Remy said, his voice serious and without humor. “We checked every place likely.”

  “Looks like they packed up nice and careful when movin’ out,” Roman added, twisting his cap in his hands.

  “How long have we been here?” I asked.

  Roman glanced at me, then back at Billington. She gave him a nod, studying her fingers, and he looked back at me.

  “Two days.”

  I worked my jaw, which felt stiff and sore, like I’d been clenching my teeth for weeks. Which, I guessed, I had.

  “Lem,” Mags said suddenly, leaning down. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, reaching up and putting my hand on his neck, hot and tough, and pulled his face down into my shoulder. I’d brought Mags to meet the Negotiator, the man who’d killed him as far as I was concerned, and hadn’t even told him. Stupid, as Fallon had said. I got a toe wiggling, stiff and painful. It was inspiration
al. “Let’s take the tour.”

  No one moved until Billington nodded again. “Let’s take the fucking tour, then,” she said, and Roman and Remy snapped to and held the door open.

  IT WAS OBVIOUS THAT Seward had been a hole before this, whatever this was. The sort of Alaskan town where I imagined people looked forward to seasonal affective disorder as a sort of vacation from their miserable lives.

  It was cold. Felt like it had been so for decades straight, the sort of deep core cold that got into bones and made them fragile. The town was a long corridor along a road, open and exposed to the elements. One big restaurant, one small bar, a bunch of sad-looking houses. Everything gray. We went into the houses, the shops. Everything put up, but none of the doors locked. Clothes folded in drawers, dishes in the cabinets. It reminded me of a dozen stories on the news. Towns gone, abandoned, mass suicides and assorted mysteries.

  Standing out in the middle of the main road, wind whipping at us, we felt like we were at the farthest point from anywhere in the world, the point where you had no choice but to turn back. I stood hunched over with the wind pushing at me, my army in miniature—three Bleeders, the Twins, Mags, Mel Billington, and Ev Fallon—standing around me, hands in pockets, faces grim.

  I’d learned to have faith in magic. I’d learned that it always did exactly as it was told; the trick was in knowing what orders to give, what questions to ask. The gulla hadn’t led me to this fucking ghost town as a joke. Someone was here. Or had been.

  Shivering, I led them through every building, every room. The place had been sucked dry, I knew it. I sensed Fallon and Billington exchanging looks, trying to decide how much leeway to give me. How long to let me wander an empty town before they took charge and got us back on track. But I kept walking. I knew what I was going to find. As we moved through each antiseptic tableau, I had this idea that we were all repeating ourselves. Setting the same tragedies in motion over and over, stealing from the bloody massacres of the past. Cribbing blood from our predecessors in the same way we were repeating the same spells, no one making anything new.

  Except this. This felt new. This draining of the earth in slow motion.

  All of the buildings felt the same. Wood. Bad decor. Yellowing laminate. The smell of tobacco and used beer. Seward was not a place I would have chosen to live, but then, these days there was nowhere that made sense. Maybe Seward was as good as anywhere.

  After about an hour, we turned a corner heading towards the water and found a suitcase sitting in the middle of the road, closed tight, its old vinyl battered and stained. A thin trail of luggage formed an almost straight line to the ocean, going off-road and curving around buildings, thickening as it went. Starting with that one suitcase, then a cluster of luggage a few feet later. Then a stream of rolling bags and trash bags filled with clothes, then an unbroken line of handbags, backpacks, and trunks, all just left on the ground.

  People walking, growing tired, divesting themselves of their possessions.

  The luggage thinned out as we got near the metallic shoreline, but we didn’t need its direction anymore. We found everyone in the ice-cold gray water lapping at the town, erasing it a millimeter at a time.

  All of them were fully dressed, all of them weighed down by different things: logs, stones, backpacks filled with power tools. They’d slashed their wrists, mostly, though some had opted for the throat. Self-inflicted, to judge by the angles and the variety of blades on the ground or in the water. They’d lined up on the edge of the freezing Pacific and opened their veins and tipped backwards into the water one by one. Not a drop of blood anywhere to be seen.

  We stood for a moment or two, just studying their bloated gray bodies. I was shivering, hard. I heard someone approach and turned to find Fallon next to me, hands thrust in his coat pockets, breath steaming.

  “Collected,” he said. “The blood.”

  I nodded. “Everywhere.”

  I thought of Claire. Then unthought of her. The Ritual of Death had failed, but she was still marked for it in a way no one else could be. I didn’t know why. My education was incomplete because I’d gotten my Master killed.

  My shivering became epic. My whole body jerked and twitched. “What . . . do we do . . . about . . . this?” I managed to chatter through my clicking teeth.

  My legs went out from under me, but Mags was there, catching me easily under the shoulders and then heaving me up, supporting me.

  “You should be inside, Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said, his hands strong and firm on my shoulders. “The gulla has brought you here. The thing you seek is here, somewhere. We cannot see it because this is a trap.”

  I nodded. That made perfect sense. Or no sense at all. And Fallon was fading away anyway, turning into mist, and then I was passing out. It felt like I was falling into the water. A woman’s bloated face, peeling away from her skull a few inches under the gray water, stared up at me, her teeth showing through her frayed cheek like an awful smile.

  36. IN THE DREAM, AS ALWAYS, Claire was wearing a bear costume, her leg a bloody mess, caught in a huge rusty trap bolted to the floor. Tiny flies swarmed the wound, laying eggs.

  I WAS BACK IN the motel. I could tell from the rotten-egg appearance of the water-damaged popcorn ceiling. Remy, Roman, and our three Bleeders were sitting around and smoking cigarettes. Fallon, Mags, and Billington were playing cards. I didn’t need to pay much attention to know that Melanie was winning. Mags’s face was screwed up into the red mask of anger he wore when he was losing, and Fallon was up against true grift. You didn’t win at cards with idimustari.

  I lay still. Enjoying the silence, the space. I’d spent the last two years surrounded by people who were always looking at me like I was going to do something amazing at any moment, because I’d defeated Renar—if you could call near-total failure defeating somone. And ever since Billington had told everyone I’d brought Mags back to life—resurrected him—the Cult o’ Lem had picked up its suffocating pace. Since she’d started building my myth, it was like I was always surrounded by people, but no one looked directly at me. So it was nice to be ignored. I felt my body ache for a while. But I felt warmer. And I wanted a cigarette, which was a good sign. I didn’t know, with the whole town deserted, why we kept coming back to this shithole.

  “Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said. “A moment.”

  I took a deep breath and pushed myself up. Swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I felt like I’d been filled with molten copper. I stumped my way over to the table by the window where Fallon and Billington sat, their cards down. Fallon gestured at the window.

  “We have visitors.”

  I looked up. Two men wearing heavy overcoats and ridiculous fur caps were standing in the parking lot of the motel. As I stared, a woman blinked into existence. One second empty space, the next a striking older woman in an expensive fur that looked at a distance like it might still have the claws attached to the sleeves.

  I’d seen this trick once before. Except the time I’d seen it, the demonstration had involved a vagrant bled dry for the spell, but there was no sign that these people had bled anyone. As I thought of the memory, he appeared. Still wearing the same white suit, still icy blond and almost invisible, he was so pale. Still thin and still mocking. He wore the same red shoes, too. I had only fragments of his teleportation spell in my memory. I probably would be able to figure out the rest if I wanted to. I hadn’t wanted to. Now I wished I had.

  “Be ready for a fight,” I said.

  “Jesus, you think?” Billington spat.

  I considered my Asshole Army in miniature.

  Melanie Billington was useless. She wouldn’t bleed. She considered herself too high up for that. She was shit with the Words. She knew some nifty mu, so in theory she could be of use. But she stuttered and warped Words in her mouth, spat out gibberish or spells that went awry. And not bleeding, she wouldn’t get off anything useful.

  Remy and Roman were scrappers. They’d never done anything amazing, but they were like me an
d the other Tricksters: roaches. They survived. It wasn’t pretty, but I knew I could count on them to at least put up a fight.

  Ev Fallon was enustari. He knew the Words and he knew how to use them. We were all scared shitless of Ev Fallon, and for good reason.

  Pitr Mags had become a wild card. He still sneezed in the middle of reciting and caused minor explosions, but he’d been making progress with Fallon’s lessons, and ever since he’d been dead for five minutes, he’d been sharper, darker, more focused.

  The three Bleeders were halfway dead.

  Fallon could do something with them, though. The rest of us would just kill them. He kept staring out the window and nodded, once. Crisp.

  “Fallon doesn’t bleed,” I said, my voice rust and dust. “Everyone else fuels their own.”

  The Bleeders, reluctant, eyed the door for a few lingering seconds, until Roman glared back at them with an implied threat. I rolled up the sleeve of my right arm.

  “That is Alfonse Alligherti,” Fallon said quietly. “Alfonse, you are forever picking the wrong side of things! Be alert. He will use a Compulsion.” He sighed almost sadly. “He always does.”

  Gas in the air. Multiple streams of it.

  “If they didn’t bring any Bleeders,” Billington said slowly, “who will they cast from?”

  Fallon sighed again. “Us.”

  I nodded. Before Renar, before everything, enustari never would have stooped to stealing gas from the likes of us. They’d have come with a dozen Bleeders, beefy men and women paid to fuel their spells. But back then they’d never have actually fought us, either—they would have ignored us. Now they weren’t ignoring us; come to fight Tricksters, it made sense for them to use our tricks. Nothing worked the way it used to.

  I didn’t know many enustari. The ones I’d met were psychotic, murderous, and contemptuous of me and my kind. They were also usually too sure of themselves, surrounded by sycophants, the Charmed and Compelled. They were terrifying, but in all my dealings with them, they’d been arrogant and stupid, too. And these were no different. Bleeding out some poor son of a bitch so they could wink in like fucking demigods. Then assuming we would all just kneel down and present our throats so they could wink back to wherever they’d come from.