by Jeff Somers
The little girl’s body was wracked with laughter. She knelt there with blood running down her chin, laughing, body shaking. After a few seconds she lurched forward, planted her hands flat on the carpet, and vomited a prodigious amount of clear liquid. She started laughing again, a thick string of saliva connecting her to the floor. She spoke between gasps.
“And . . . now . . . my . . . question!”
Next to me, Mags whimpered, like a kicked dog. Dread solidified inside me like a pebble I’d swallowed.
I’d been conned each and every way possible.
“Tell me,” she said, her voice sludgy and thick, “where Claire Mannice is.”
39. I REMEMBERED HER IN THE stupid fucking uniform. Pink. A white apron. Her name tag read CAROL. She’d been wearing white tennis sneakers and had that tired look that got burned in after a while. I didn’t even recognize her at first. She was just another too-skinny chick working the breakfast rush, trying to keep truckers from pinching her ass too much and exhausted from some other job or a kid or some other fucking thing.
When I realized who she was, I kept my eyes on her. I hadn’t bled. I had four Bleeders roasting in the car out in the lot, sleepy and unhappy, but I hadn’t let them bleed, either.
I didn’t need to bleed to keep Claire from noticing me. She wasn’t looking, for one, and I knew from bitter experience grifting my way through New York that half the time you didn’t need to cast anything—people just didn’t see what they didn’t expect to see.
My own waitress was an older version of Claire. As if Claire had been cloned and terribly fast-forwarded thirty years and fifty pounds. She had a blurry tattoo on her forearm that I kept trying to steal a glance at, and she kept calling me sugar like it was a word she’d just invented and would grow famous for. I’d ordered pancakes and sausage and black coffee. It was all sitting in front of me on the greasy, sticky table in the booth by the bathrooms. The least popular booth in the whole place. But I had a good view.
I sat and watched and drank coffee. I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t bleed anymore, so I was never hungry. My body had reached a silent deal with the universe.
Claire never smiled. My waitress, Claire Mark Two, smiled constantly in a brain-aching way that had ruined my appetite. But Claire’s face was set in the sort of determined expression that still scared me after all this time. The same expression as the girl who’d almost punched her way free of Gottschalk’s place, the girl who’d killed two policemen in New York City. Her hair was tied back with a rubber band, and she had scratches up and down both legs.
On the television, the news was reporting that a pilot had flown an Airbus A340-600 into a mountain, killing 355 people. No one was paying any attention, because they were all discussing the shirt-factory floor manager who’d chained all the doors shut and set the place on fire, then sat outside and ate a brown-bag lunch of a PB and J and sixty-two sleeping pills, all washed down with a pint of bourbon. The debate evolved into the question of staying in town or packing up and trying to find higher ground.The world was broken. We had broken it. I wanted to lean over and explain to them that there was no such thing as higher ground. Not anymore.
My pancakes got cold. My waitress refilled my coffee every ten minutes, like clockwork. She’d been working the job so long, she didn’t even have to think about it. I watched Claire get hassled by a bunch of sunburned assholes in plaid shirts who thought it was hilarious to call her honey and tell her that her sneakers were cute.
OUT IN THE PARKING lot, it was pitch-black and quiet. My Bleeders were all asleep in the car. I didn’t give a shit. I hadn’t asked them to come.
I stood in the shadows, leaning against a telephone pole, smoking. I still wasn’t worried about being seen. Claire didn’t want to see me, I knew that. But I’d spent enough time too tired to bleed; I knew a few tricks that didn’t require any gas.
She came out of the diner with the second waitress and a short, round guy who was the manager or the owner or something. They said good night in those too-loud voices people used when they didn’t give a rat’s ass about each other but couldn’t admit it. They spread out, heading for cars. There were four vehicles in the lot, and I already knew which one belonged to which person: The beat-to-shit hatchback on not one but two donuts belonged to the older waitress. I could picture the duct tape holding the engine together. The decade-old but well-maintained sedan was the manager’s, bought after years of careful saving, and goddamn he was going to die in that car. The blue pickup was Claire’s. It was old and rusted, but every pickup in the world had an old and rusted future and it didn’t matter. Pickups were judged on a different track.
The fourth vehicle was a truck, too, and it was surrounded by the good ole boys who’d been fucking with Claire in the diner. Smoking cigarettes and laughing. I knew what the script was here. So did the other waitress and the manager, which was why they were trying like fucking hell to get into their cars as fast as possible and acting like they hadn’t noticed the crew. So they could have plausible deniability later.
Leaving my cigarette burning between my lips, I fished in my pocket for my switchblade. Flicked it open and hiked my sleeve up. Dragged the blade in one sharp, quick motion. Not deep; I wouldn’t need much gas for this.
As the manager and the other waitress drove off, Claire was just getting to her car. Like it had been planned that way. I expected the good ole boys to jump for her, but they didn’t. They just started calling out to her from where they were.
“Good night!”
“Thanks for puttin’ up with us!”
“Hope that tip keeps you warm tonight!”
I stood there with blood dripping off my fingers, uncertain. Maybe they weren’t dangerous. Maybe they were just assholes. I’d have to recalibrate my Redneck Meter.
Claire didn’t respond. She was struggling to open the truck’s door. It looked like an old, familiar battle. After a few seconds, the rednecks took notice, and one of them, wearing a pair of brown heavy-duty pants and the classic white thermal shirt under a blue workshirt, peeled off from the group.
“Need a hand, there, honey?”
The other rednecks consulted in a series of whispers and chuckles and ambled to follow. I tensed up again. I glanced over at my Bleeders and they were all staring at me. Smelling the gas in the air. I shook my head and turned back. The rednecks had crowded around Claire.
I hesitated. Maybe I was being racist, in my way. Classist, something like that. Maybe these guys went home and read poetry; maybe they’d die to protect her. Maybe I was being an asshole from the northeast.
Claire decided for me.
I didn’t see what sparked it. One second she was surrounded, the next there was a shout and the rednecks stumbled backwards. Claire had the first guy by the nose. Two fingers hooked into his nostrils with her arm wrapped around his neck, a small penknife in her other hand, pressing against his neck hard enough to draw a bead of blood.
I whispered a mu. Something short and sweet, simple. I felt the familiar push and pull of sour energy flowing from me, draining, and then . . . nothing happened.
I whispered it again. The same thing happened, but this time I could almost feel it flowing towards Claire. And disappearing, as if it had never been bled. I remembered how spells twisted around her, because of the runes. But they’d never just failed like this.
She was shouting, sounding calm, and the rednecks were backing off, hands up, looking honestly terrified and confused. When they were ten feet from her, she spun the first one away and landed a kick on his ass, sending him sprawling onto his hands and knees, sputtering.
Without another word, she turned back and—the key working easily this time—got into her truck. The rednecks waited until she’d started the motor and put the truck into gear before stepping forward to help their friend up.
I watched her drive off, chewing on it all. I felt the scabby, dry wound I’d opened up. I’d felt the energy flowing out, typical, familiar. It hadn’t coalesced a
round the Words, for the first time in my life. It had flowed towards her . . . and disappeared.
Watching the rednecks help their fallen comrade to his truck, I slashed the wound open again, wincing slightly at the burning pain. Spoke another mu, similar, just as simple. Felt the old familiar drain, but this time it firmed up around the syllables and exploded outward, invisible and silent, and all four tires on the boys’ truck blew out simultaneously, like shotgun blasts. They all jumped and hollered.
WE SAT IN THE car in the darkness and watched the house. The so-called house. It was a faded wood structure that appeared to be standing more out of habit than good construction code. It was gray and splintery-looking, a one-floor bungalow with a porch that tilted to the left. The blue-rust pickup truck was parked in front. We were smoking in the darkness, and all I could see of any of them were the red coals of their cigarettes, three men whose names escaped me, although I’d been introduced to them many times. Three men who looked at me like I was fucking Jesus.
Billington was a shit mage, but she could fucking organize a cult like nobody’s business.
Two hours, I sat there smoking one cigarette after another, watching her house. I got that heart-pounding, jittery feeling that meant too many cigarettes. I smoked more. At two hours fifteen minutes, a man stepped out and started in on his own cigarette, standing on the porch and staring out into the flat, featureless plains. Daryl Fucking Houy. Two years ago, Mags and I had Charmed him to love Claire because we needed his help, and either we were better at Charms than we’d suspected or we’d just happened to choose her soul mate as a chump. He looked pretty much the same. Slightly less stupid, even.
His middle name, as far as I was concerned, really was Fucking.
He finished his smoke and went back inside. The house was lit up blue and silver from an old TV.
I sat there and burned a few more cigarettes in the dark, thinking about it. Not about Daryl and Claire. Why not? Daryl had been Charmed into adoring her, but that had worn off long ago. Or maybe it hadn’t; since I’d met her, magic had worked strangely around Claire, and maybe the spell was on eternal repeat. She was still marked for Renar’s biludha, and though it had collapsed spectacularly, it was the most powerful spell ever attempted, so who knew what the blowback would be. And I’d just cast two spells that seemed to have been absorbed by her, like she was some sort of black hole for magical energy. Bending everything around her gravity.
I let two cigarettes burn to the filter in my hand. One more inhalation and I was going to turn and puke all over the Bleeder sitting next to me, ruining his black suit.
I wasn’t getting out of the car.
I hadn’t come to talk to Claire. I hadn’t come to let her know how I’d found her. It hadn’t been easy, and I was confident that no one else would be able to do it. Casting didn’t help—she was still marked, and magic still went sideways around her, as I’d just learned. And now I knew: If you got close enough, magic plain didn’t work when focused on her. Something had changed after the failed biludha. Something quantum and invisible had shifted. But I was idimustari. We Tricksters knew how to sniff out the dusty corners of the world. I hadn’t come to talk to Claire. Just to see her. To satisfy myself that she was okay. That she was safe. Or as safe as she could be in a broken world. Which wasn’t so much safe as hidden.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
The Bleeders didn’t say a word or hesitate. They started the car and hit the gas like good little soldiers.
40. I FELT THE WORDS RISING in my throat instantly. The Negotiator’s geas reaching out its slender fingers and pulling words up from within me like meatball surgery, like someone gutting you on a battlefield and yanking out parts.
Mags took me by the shoulders, hands cracking my bones, and spun me to face him. “Lem! No!”
I stared at him and felt my mouth opening of its own volition. I reached up and clamped my hands over my mouth, staring into his eyes. He stared back in pop-eyed horror, shaking his head slightly.
“No, Lem, no,” he whispered, his grip on my shoulders now actively painful.
I spun away from him. He tried to hold on to me, but comically, his hands slid away without purchase, and his arms windmilled as I staggered back. He stumbled as he tried to pursue me but was prevented. The geas wouldn’t be denied.
“Speak, Mr. Vonnegan!” The Girl Who Was Not a Girl cackled. “You are compelled!”
I was. I could feel the words. They were like stones in my throat. I clamped my hands on my mouth harder but knew they would come loose. Soon enough. When the universe determined that they had to. The room spun as I staggered. I tripped and fell forward into Fallon, who straightened me up roughly and shook me vigorously.
“You know where she is?” he hissed. “You are a fool, Mr. Vonnegan!”
Claire. Claire was the most important girl in the world. As long as we’d kept her hidden and safe, Renar could do a great many terrible things, but her spell to bleed the world white so that she and her cohorts might live forever wasn’t one of them.
Which didn’t explain why Elsa wanted her, too. Assuming an insane bodysurfing alcoholic enustari-level Fabricator living in the middle of a dead city had things like reasons.
I twitched away from Fallon. He hung on to me for a moment and then pushed me away roughly. I stumbled backwards and spun back in time to see him slashing his arm with something small, a blade hidden entirely in his hand. I wanted to tell him it wouldn’t work. Nothing would work. The power of the geas was filling me, crowding in to push the words out of me. It was immense. It was more power than I’d ever felt before in my life, even more than I’d felt at Renar’s biludha. This was ancient, and it had an intelligence, as if it wasn’t just blind energy shaped by Words spoken years ago, but a living, sentient thing.
My arms trembled as my hands were forced away from my face, centimeter by centimeter, by an unseen force. I clenched my teeth until my jaw hurt. Sweat dripping into my eyes.
“Men have bitten off their tongues in an effort to resist this geas,” Elsa continued, her voice rough and ragged, like she was swallowing puke with every breath. “And yet found a way to answer! This is a far older power than your tricks. Or your mentor’s toys. Wars were fought to destroy the dissemination of such things, Mr. Vonnegan, but you cannot destroy knowledge. It persists.”
I heard the ligaments in my jaw creaking as I fought to keep my mouth clenched tight. I heard the girl giggling, a wet, warm sound worming into my ear.
I stiffened, arms flying out straight from my body. I convulsed, once, undulating from my knees up, and my mouth snapped open.
“Sh—”
Mags’s tree-trunk arms slid around me and he pulled me close to him, his head on my shoulder. With a casual twitch of muscles, he hugged me. Hugged me so tight the breath hissed out of my lungs, a red pulse of light flashing across my vision. Mags routinely broke every coffee mug he encountered completely by accident, having been removed from his mother far too soon.
I could almost feel the geas pausing, waiting for a judgment as to whether this was violating my safety or preventing me from answering.
“No, Lem!” Mags whispered fiercely in my ear. “You can’t!”
I was staring right at Elsa. Her chin and neck were covered in a slick of dark red, her shirt soaked in her own blood. She was kneeling on the floor, arms wrapped around her belly, staring back at me while she laughed. They were raw, physical guffaws like something being torn from inside her. I thought briefly that she must burn out these bodies before they turned twenty-five. Twenty. She must wake up one day and be the oldest twenty-year-old in the world.
“Mr. Mageshkumar,” Fallon said, his voice like ashes, “you cannot stop him. We can do nothing. He has made a fool’s deal, and he must now pay the consequences. We must pay the consequences.”
The world was broken. I had broken it.
I felt Mags trembling around me, like I’d been buried underground just before an earthquake. He grunte
d in my ear. Mags would never hurt me, I was certain—not on purpose.
“Lem.”
For a second we were in sync. His heart beat, my heart beat twice. His heart was like a bass drum somewhere in the distance. Mine was a snare, beating double time. Boom-tattattat-boom-tattattat. I felt the blood pulsing through his veins, the sizzling chemical reactions as he breathed, as his kidneys filtered and his liver oozed and his intestines writhed and squeezed. We breathed in and breathed out as one.
Then his embrace loosened and he stepped back. I stared into Elsa’s little-girl eyes, a striking dull green lit from within with something crazy, something terrible, something that was burning up her body at fifty times the normal rate.
She nodded, smiling blood. “Go on, kid. You ain’t winnin’ this.”
I dropped to my knees and fell forward, catching myself on my palms. The rug was damp and scratchy. My whole body convulsed again, like I was vomiting the words, like I was going to puke up the address in brightly colored refrigerator magnets. Which, fuck all I knew, might be exactly how it worked. My education had been incomplete.
Slowly, my body calmed. I pushed myself back up, leaning back on my haunches, breathing hard. I could feel and hear Mags behind me, the smooth machine of his inner workings, the warm glow of him. I saw Fallon off to my left, head down on his chest, hands in his pockets, looking older than I’d ever seen him before.