by Jeff Somers
Two years.
I’d asked Claire how she knew that, because in my memory I hadn’t spoken a word to her since she’d melted away after the failed biludha in New York. And she’d told me I’d shown up in the parking lot at the diner one night, in bad shape, drunk and unhappy, and I’d told her. Who knew what the fuck else they’d changed. What if every other memory I had in my head was wrong? What if I was remembering things that never actually happened?
My head hurt. I folded up the knife and pushed it into my pocket.
I directed the old man to Broadway, and there was no traffic until we hit 158th Street. As if a switch had been thrown, there was suddenly nothing but traffic, a wall of idling cars blowing their horns. We sat there staring for a second. I was certain that if we walked about thirty blocks downtown, we’d find cars that had been sitting there so long they’d run out of gas.
“Well,” the old man said, gesturing at the two cars idling behind us, “guess we walk.”
I was picking through my memories for useful mu, something to clear the way. I thought about all the people in the cars behind us, following me around. They’d end up Bleeders, every one of them, unless Billington found a spark in one of them and someone else took the time to teach them a thing or two. I’d have nothing to do with their eventual fate, that much was for sure—it was all Billington.
“Cops,” the old man said.
I glanced up and twisted around in the cracked seat of his truck. It was an unmarked car, a black sedan with a cherry in the dash.
“Fuck,” I whispered. I hadn’t seen a fucking cop in at least a year. As I stared, the passenger door opened and Ev Fallon climbed out. He appeared to have stopped for a new suit—cream-colored and spotless, with bold black piping, sharp and tailored. And a haircut.
Fucking enustari motherfuckers.
“Wait here,” I said, opening the door.
“Nowhere to go,” the old man said jovially enough.
“Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said with a curt nod. “You look surprisingly alive.”
“Safe passage,” I said. I opened my mouth to say something else, something about Mags, but couldn’t find the words. What could I say? Did Fallon remember the same way I did? Had anything I remembered actually happened? I felt like the ground was made of gelatin, unreliable, apt to shift under my feet without warning.
Before I could speak, Claire got out of Daryl’s truck and stood eyeing us. Fallon turned at the sound of her door, hesitated, then turned back to me. “Hello, Ms. Mannice,” he said loudly. “You have brought her. That is . . . incredible.”
Behind me, blocks deeper into the endless traffic jam, the clear sound of gunfire split the air, followed by the muffled sound of screams.
I shrugged. “I played a trick,” I said. The driver’s-side door on the cop car opened and a tall black man half stood, one arm on the roof of the car. “Who’s your friend?”
Fallon sighed, glanced down at his shoes, then gestured at the cop. “Detective Stanley James. He is . . . indebted to me. Stanley, this is my . . . colleague, Lem Vonnegan.”
The stranger nodded once. He was the best-dressed cop I’d ever seen in my life. A few years ago, before you needed a box of twenties for bus fare, I would have said he had two, three thousand dollars on his back, including the big ruby tiepin and the gold watch, the big ring on his right hand. He was dark and tall and broad, and I had no doubt he’d won every fistfight he’d ever been in. His expression wasn’t exactly friendly, wasn’t exactly mean. It was open.
Behind me, the gunfire spat again. It seemed just as far away, but the screams were closer. Like a distant tide heading towards us.
“C’mon,” the cop said, his voice a deep, satisfying drawl I’d never heard. “I’ll make a hole for you.”
I studied him a moment longer, then looked back at Fallon and shrugged. “Rue’s, then.”
“Is that safe, Mr. Vonnegan?”
“We’ve been there for years, Ev,” I said, feeling tired. “It hasn’t exactly been a secret.” I was losing track of who might have been searching for me—Renar, Elsa, all the insane enustari trying to live forever in different ways. One by eating the world, one by switching bodies every few years. Del Traje Blanco, twin girls hiding under my bed—despite Billington’s efforts to shield me, I’d been found plenty of times. And after Shanghai, I knew I’d been conned. Everyone always knew my next move. So why start being clever now?
“That would be my point. And you have some extra . . . cargo whose absence perhaps protected you in the past.”
That might have been true. Everyone really wanted Claire. If they took down Rue’s they might never find her. Renar, Elsa, all of them might have taken a wait-and-see approach, see if she washed up on the curb one day. “And we have a fucking army waiting for us there.” I paused. “A useless army, sure, but an army nonetheless.” I turned and walked back towards the truck. “Rue’s!”
As I got back in the truck, James’s sedan swung out around me. Going about ten miles an hour, it bumped a few pedestrians roughly out of the way just as a wave of people streamed uptown, running in panic, screams trailing behind them. James spiked his siren and drove up onto the sidewalk, crawling along as the pedestrians made a sullen corridor for him. We steered behind him, and the wave of humanity streamed past us in one direction as we crawled in the other, following the spinning cherry top.
After a block or so, I tasted a thread of gas in the air, and then the sidewalk opened up as people began scrambling out of our way instinctively. James goosed the sedan and we followed suit. The people were still running, screaming past us, but now they were a blur, and I closed my eyes and let the old man steer. Then the George Strait tape was back on and the screams were drowned out.
I WALKED INTO RUE’S in silence, a hundred eyes on me.
They were all there, in their ratty black suits, lined up behind the bar, in front of the bar, on the other side of the room. I don’t know, if I’d let Mags die—if I’d accidentally killed my friend back at the church—why they were all still here. If I hadn’t had my little god moment, why would they all treat me like I had? I walked in leading everyone and they all just watched me, like always. Mags’s absence didn’t feel real. He’d been alive a day ago, not two years. He’d been there and I’d felt his heart beating. But if he were alive, he’d be walking with me. He’d be looming over my shoulder and scowling at everyone, daring them to keep looking at me.
His absence surrounded me, and I felt the nothing that had been his heartbeat just the day before. I began to tremble. There had been that one terrible moment in the church when I’d not only thought I’d lost Pitr but when I knew I’d bled him to death. In the heat of battle, I’d grabbed on to that thick full-throated line of gas in the air that had been him, had been Pitr, and bled him white to save myself.
The world had shimmered, I remembered that. I’d been speaking the spell, the useless piece-of-shit mu that was all I’d been able to think of. Just speaking it and peaking it and pouring blood and Words into the universe’s hungry maw, and I’d known it was doomed, it was useless.
And Mags had come back. And Billington had told everyone what she’d seen. That I’d brought him back. Done the impossible, considering my skill, the spell itself, the blood on hand.
Except I hadn’t.
Halfway to the back door that led to what once was the banquet room, my legs began to shake and my knees went out from under me. Arms shot out and righted me, lifting me to my feet, settling me, patting me on the back. I managed two more steps and stumbled again, catching myself on someone, and another four sets of hands pushed in and held me until I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and nodded.
I hadn’t.
They followed me into the back room. All of them. The Bleeders whose names I’d never learned, who’d been crawling in from around the world for two years expecting miracles and getting nothing but a cheap black suit and abuse. I’d still defeated Renar. Still stopped the first attempt at the tah
-namus. That much remained real. Fallon, his pet cop James. Claire and Daryl, dusty and tired. The eight newbies we’d picked up along the way like a fucking magnet picking up debris, as if the universe had been remade just for me and they could sense it. Suckers who would get their own black suits as soon as Billington made her way back to New York.
Assuming Billington, in this new reality created by the kurre-nikas, was still alive.
Pitr was dead.
Hands helped me up onto a chair. I stood there while the room settled, and then looked up at them all, my vision blurry and damp. Someone handed a lit cigarette up to me. After a moment someone took it and placed it between my lips.
I heard Billington in Colombia: You sure? If that had still happened.
My eyes roamed the room and settled on Ev Fallon’s ancient eyes, wrinkled and puffy from his own brand of exhaustion. All of us except him in black, in the back room of a bar. A wake. For Pitr. For the fucking world, splitting apart outside as it was bled by Renar, the death throes not pretty.
The world was broken. I had broken it.
“We,” I said in a voice that wasn’t more than a croak, “have been conned.”
All of it a grift. Two years, I’d been fucked with. They’d played my own game and beaten me. Two years they’d been dangling something in one hand, and I’d been staring at it like a simp, while the other hand picked our pockets. I’d gone tearing ass to Alaska, the smartest man in the room, and they’d fucked me again. Three questions for one. And I hadn’t wanted any of the answers.
The room shifted its weight. Everyone breathed.
“What do you do when you’ve been conned?” I asked quietly. I was still trembling, the cigarette dancing in my mouth. Pitr was dead and I’d let it happen twice. And brought him back once.
You sure?
I took a deep drag on the cigarette and plucked it from my mouth, flicked it off into the air. Thought of Pitr, who’d been taken away from me—because he had been there. He had come back. And been taken away again. Leaving me nothing left to lose.
“You go to war.”
43. “A SUMMONING,” FALLON SAID, MAKING the word sound like it tasted bad, “is very dangerous. With someone of his level.”
“Ev, I’d say the time for worrying about safety is passed.” Pitr was dead. “They’ve already used the fucking kurre-nikas once, maybe twice. Who knows? They’ve been bleeding the world for years, poking away at this. You think it matters if we play it safe? Do we just sit on our dicks and wait for them to use it again?”
He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “A Summoning is not a typical spell, Mr. Vonnegan. It violates many things. The will of the summoned. The physical laws of the universe. Violate one, yes, it can be done easily. Violate both and you have the potential for a violent outcome.” He glanced around the room, his dry, careful eyes landing on Claire and Daryl before flitting back to me. Everyone else had crowded back out into the bar area. “What do you accomplish if you attempt to Summon him and he resists, and you . . . do not survive the attempt?”
Truth be told, I hadn’t realized death was a possible consequence of a failed spell like this. Summoning someone—even someone as powerful and strange as the Negotiator—seemed straightforward enough.
“They resist, Mr. Vonnegan,” he continued, as if reading my mind. “They feel you pulling at them, and they resist. A normal person, not part of our guild, has little to resist with. This Negotiator, Mr. Harrows, he is skilled. His resistance would be more intense.”
He sighed. For a moment we all just existed in silence.
“Hey.”
I jumped a little and turned to look at Claire.
“So, I’m fucking here,” she said. “Why am I fucking here?”
Fallon beat me to it, so I let him talk.
“You are here, Ms. Mannice, because everyone wishes to kill you. Mika Renar for her interrupted Rite—you are the only person who may be bled as the cornerstone of the Ritual. Mika worked diligently to create you, Ms. Mannice. She wishes to use you as she intended.”
It was one way of saying Mika Renar had played geneticist with her own apprentice and created dozens of daughters, all marked for the Ritual, who would give their mother eternal life. I saw no profit in reminding Claire of that.
“Elsa—whom you have not had the pleasure of meeting—wishes to kill you outside Renar’s Ritual, thereby rendering it moot. For, without you there can be no Ritual, I assume, as I do not caucus with Elsa anymore. I must extrapolate.”
Fallon in his nifty cream suit. Like he was on vacation. “You are irreplaceable,” he said softly. “You are the most unique person in the world, Ms. Mannice.”
She stared at him, a half-smile on her face. “No, I’m not.”
Fallon closed his eyes. “When the kurre-nikas is used, it essentially creates an alternate universe. In one universe, the previous moment. In the new, the adjustment. We do this constantly simply by making decisions. This is why the Fabrication is possible without bleeding the world dry each time—the mechanics already exist.
“In each of these universes, a version of you exists. It is possible, although unlikely, that in every other possible universe, you have died. You no longer exist there. You have reached what we call Terminus.” He opened his tired, sharp eyes. “You are truly unique. As a Terminus, there remains only one of you. Only one.” He opened his eyes and glanced at me. “There is much we fought to keep secret.”
No one said anything. Or moved. After a few seconds Fallon clucked his tongue in a way I recognized from my lessons with Hiram, when the old man thought I was being particularly stupid.
“I fire a gun at your head,” he said, making a gun-shape with his nimble, age-spotted hand. “In one universe, you are killed. In another, you live. In the latter, I fire the gun again—the process repeats. On and on, branching, branching. This is a simplification, you understand, for your benefit. Over a long enough time—or if assisted by magical meddling, say in the construction of a large biludha of which you are the cornerstone—there is only one version of you left, the version that lives each time. The last version.
“Ms. Mannice, if you die here, in this universe, you cease to exist anywhere. You remain marked because Renar’s biludha cannot be cast without you. She has been trumped by a force more fundamental and powerful than magic.”
I thought of Pitr, thought of him in another dimension or some shit, exactly the same, hanging out with someone just like me but not me. My head was spinning. “How do you know she’s a fucking Terminus?”
“The runes. They should have disappeared when the tah-namus collapsed, but they remained. The biludha is trapped with you.”
She blew out a breath and leaned back. “Ah, fuck all of you,” she said tiredly, scrubbing her face. “Just tell me what it fucking means.”
“It means they can’t use anyone else as the keystone of the Ritual. It’s all suspended in you,” I said, pulling off my jacket and draping it over a chair. “That’s why the whole fucking world didn’t end when we stopped the ritual. It didn’t really collapse; it’s been suspended in you ever since. Because there’s no place else for it to go. And it means this.”
I slashed a quick line of blood down my arm and spoke four Words. Felt the energy move from me, draining me. And nothing happened.
Fallon sat forward. “Remarkable.”
“This is new. Before Mad Day, magic curved around you, warped because of the power of the Rite. Now you’re like a fucking black hole,” I said. “Everything cast within a few feet of you just dies on the vine. The gas is sucked into you and gone.” I smiled, thinking of Pitr, alive somewhere. “You’re a secret weapon, Claire. You fuck up magic in ways I don’t even pretend to understand, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. Who knows what happens if someone casts a really big spell on you.”
“Well, bully for fucking me,” she said, scowling and crossing her arms under her breasts.
I looked at Fallon and wondered whether I’d be u
p for stopping her if she tried to leave. I knew she felt some sense of debt to me because I’d saved her. I knew she had some affection for me—more for Pitr but some for me, too. I also knew she was the Survivor Type, and it all came down to what she saw as her currently running best shot. I couldn’t Charm her, and I couldn’t Compel her. For the first time in my life, I was dependent entirely on someone’s goodwill.
I felt sick. But hell, it was good to have her smell in the room again.
“So,” I said, tearing my eyes from her. “A Summoning?”
Fallon sighed and closed his eyes again. “I regret . . . There was an Artifact, once in my possession, that would be of use here. It required some amount of sacrifice, but it made such a Summoning much easier.”
I rolled my sleeve down to the wrist. “What happened to it?”
Fallon opened one eye. “Your old gasam, Bosch, stole it. As he stole everything.”
I paused, staring down at the buttons on my sleeve. “Describe it.”
He waved his wand in the air. “It was decades ago—”
“Describe it!”
He closed his eye again. “A small ivory box. A symbol of a scarab on it inlaid in gold. No obvious way to open it.”
“I know where it is.”
The eye opened. I looked at Claire. “You up for some breaking and entering?”
“THIS IS CREEPY.”
I sighed, staring at the building from across the street. “Tell me one moment you’ve spent in my company that wasn’t creepy.”
She didn’t respond, and we went back to staring at Hiram’s old building. We were in the alley where she’d killed two cops not so long ago.
“How do you know it’s still in there?” she asked.
“It’s Warded. Pitr . . . Pitr and me, we made the whole place invisible.”