Shadowrun: Crimson
Page 25
I kneel down, tracing my fingers along the bones. I’ve made a study of the I-Ching, but it never speaks to me as well as more direct divination. I wish I still had my tarot deck. European styles mixed with Asian philosophies always appealed to me. I have to wait until someone gives me one as a gift, unsolicited. I wonder if Su Cheng knows I’m thinking that.
Probably.
“Tell me, instead.”
“You have grown bolder.”
“Perhaps just more direct.”
He inclines his head and traces the end of a nail along the fibrous cracks of the bone, his eyes shining down to dance back and forth along the pattern of golden tiles.
“There is a man at Dante’s Inferno. A man who sits among sensuality, comfortable and at ease, seeking those who will do work for him.”
The second circle of Hell. Lust. Was the first floor just a lobby, or the first circle, Limbo? I couldn’t remember, it had been so long. “Does he work for—”
Su Cheng cuts me off with his free hand without looking up, closing the black nails with a clack that does not echo in the muffling haze of the chamber.
“He does not have work for lone wolves, no matter their skill. He likes a stable of fresh talents.”
“I’m not exactly fresh.”
“He does not know that. So don’t tell him.”
“But I do have to build a team?”
“Or at least find a partner.”
“That could take a while.”
“Tonight it won’t.” He strokes an errant joss stick where it crosses a foil-stamped stone, eyes on mine.
“You have someone in mind?” Silence. “Maybe a name?” He chuckles.
“Fine. I’ll go find my own fate, or whatever you’d like to call this. What about the contact?”
“A man with a name of Inari.”
“He’s called Inari?”
“I did not say that.”
“Inari is a Kitsune fox-god of the harvest.”
“Yes.”
“A Japanese god.”
“I know.”
I look around the Taoist temple and its exclusively Chinese trappings. “I didn’t know your riddles were multicultural.”
“As are my friends.”
“Are we friends now?”
He gestures to me. “Isn’t this what friends do?”
I stand up. “I’m starting to get some idea just how old you really are.” He smiles and bows his head as I begin to depart, but I stop halfway out.
“You know, it’s not fortune telling if you make it happen. And it’s not friendship if you’re using each other.”
“Come now, Richard...you’re starting to show how young you really are.”
He melts into mist and blends into the haze of incense, leaving me to the sound of chimes and rainfall, and to ponder my clue to employment tonight.
Dante’s throbs with bass even a block away, where the line ends, even at this late hour. Unlike Penumbra, which seems heedless of the changes of time or the date on the calendar, the Inferno recognizes the season. Sinners and Saints is the theme tonight, non-denominationally holiday-themed in the sense of blasphemy and sin for the sake of entertainment. Men and women alike are dressed as angels, devils, and even stranger in the line, wrapped in AR augmented costumes, Second Skin, latex nuns, leather businesswear and more. Rather pedestrian for the Inferno. The really impressive specimens will already be inside.
I find the end of the line, next to a tall human woman in a topknot headdress that extends along a leónized body to become a one-piece of cocktail dress and boots, impatiently enduring the whining of her partner, an ork with a collar and leash. I’m considering how long this will take and whether the couple will prove entertaining or exasperating when a flicker in the corner of my eye catches my attention. I abandon the line for the alleyway behind. Devil rats scatter between the dumpsters, which are already auto-compacting their collections of bottles and trash. Business must be booming.
The alleyway stinks of piss, vomit, and spilled, stale synthahol. To my particularly sensitive nose, it is nigh overwhelming, but the footsteps of the man shadowing the girl are too filled with promise. I focus on him. The sound of the man’s heartbeat, accelerating with a heady sense of control and lust. He stinks of insecurity, his aura tinged with longing and loneliness and rage. She sways her hips just a little more, subtly curls a finger to hitch her plaid skirt up. I gape. She’s playing him.
His pace speeds up and he catches up with her quickly, slapping a hand over her mouth and pressing a knife to her throat. Now that I realize who the hunter is, I can see she knows well enough to play along, squealing and kicking her legs as he lifts her off the ground and presses her to the wall. Maybe it’s his first time doing something like this. Maybe he thinks the next time will be easier.
He’s already planning next time. I can feel it running off him in the astral like sweat, and so can she. Her blank, unremarkable aura shifts subtly, masking I hadn’t noticed drops, and the darkness in her is running tendrils through the connection he’s already created with her. Lust. Hate. Fear. She’s hunted this way before. And just like the others, he can’t look her in the eye as he threatens her, his voice a choked hiss.
“Make one sound and I’ll kill you.”
Her face is a mask of terror. She nods shakily as his knife slides down to her tank top. He draws close, his body covering hers, the blade slicing one shoulder strap. He shudders as his lips approach her neck. Outwardly, she cringes. Inside, she is assensing him. Finding her own hate. Finding its target in his aura. He feels like a god. She quakes with hunger.
I step from around the corner to approach quietly when she exposes her fangs and clamps her mouth on his neck. His scream stifles almost as quickly as it starts, and he is moaning with the ecstasy he sought tonight and more besides. Her own moans remain, her eyes rolling up in the pleasure of the kill.
I clear my throat, and she comes back to reality, eyes snapping into focus on me through the purple of her hair. They narrow as she glares at me, now supporting the weight of the much larger man, her skin flushing as his grows more and more pale. I wait as she sucks, until she pulls away. Arterial red has sprayed across her chest, lingering crimson in her mouth and the scent of fresh blood fills the alleyway. “What do you want?”
I slide my hand in my pockets, at ease. “Just thought you might need help.”
She scowls out a phony smile. “I didn’t need help.”
“Yeah... I can see that.”
She drops the dying rapist to the ground, pulling a small, minty spray out of her jacket and remedying her breath. She looks up and down the alley, then back at me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Trying to help you. What were you doing?”
She wipes the blood from her chest, licks it from her fingers as her teeth extend again from the stimulus of feeding. “Hunting.”
I smiled with fangs of my own. “Huh. Me, too.”
She smirks as she kneels down to the man. He isn’t dead yet, moaning and weakly trying to push her away, his tattered soul still flaring with ebbing life. She stares at the wound. “I don’t like to share.”
I sigh, keeping an eye open at the mouth of the alley. “That’s all right. There’s plenty of vermin in Seattle for the both of us.”
She is too wrapped up in the terror, the blood, even the lingering lust as she drinks her would-be rapist’s soul in response. When she raises her head again to look at me, she’s not scowling any more. Just suspicious. Good. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Rick. My employers know me as Red.”
“Employers?”
“Yeah.”
“And who are they?”
I keep my eyes at the end of the alley. “It’s not my job to know who. That’s one of the reasons I get paid so much. But from what I can see, money isn’t exactly your problem.”
“And what do you see?”
“That you’re bored. You’re a party
girl. Daddy’s a lawyer, if I were to guess. You use your looks to get your way. You’re a mage. You’ve got some real talents, and no way to use them, and you feel useless. And—” I focused on her. ”—you worry about your father. You worry that he’s in danger, and you want to help.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Your aura shifted with worry and affection when I mentioned him. Not corporate. Mob. Is he thinking of turning state’s? Making a run for it?”
She shifted her aura back into a masked form, appearing in the astral to be nothing more than a teenage girl. “Peeking’s no fair.”
“You use every trick you’ve got in this business.”
“So you’re, what, a mercenary?”
“A shadowrunner.”
I can’t go by her aura anymore, but I can read a face quite well, and she’s intrigued. “So, you want me to be a shadowrunner?”
“I suppose yes, I’m offering you the opportunity.”
“Why me?”
“I’m kind of charmed at the thought of having a partner who can regenerate. It might be nice not to have to absorb all the bullets for my friends.”
“And what makes you think you can trust me?”
“Two reasons. One, if your father is connected, you can’t afford to go talking about me without catching Hell in turn.”
“And the other reason?”
“My astrologer said I’d meet you tonight.”
“Romantic.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I don’t like her,” whispers Mene in my mind.
She smirks and snaps her fingers, a spell lifting the gore and grime from her body to fall to the alley floor. She gestures to the body, levitating it into one of the dumpsters as it starts compacting.
“Okay, Rick. I’m game. Let’s try this out.”
“It’s Red, when other folks are around. You’ll want some kind of handle, too.”
She looks me up and down, considering. “Okay. Call me EB, Red.”
“Is that short for something?”
“Yes.”
“Your real name?”
“No.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
She smirks and starts walking to the mouth of the alleyway. “All good things, Mr. Shadowrunner.” With a grin, I follow.
With EB at my side, getting into the club is easy. A pair of amazing biosculpt jobs, thinks the bouncer as we subtly influence his mind to let us by. The cursing at the head of the line vanishes in the wash of pulsing bass as the door opens into the First Circle. I guess there’s no lobby after all.
Limbo, though Cacophony would suit it better, given the screams and bustle of the crowd writhing to the waz-step or whatever they’re calling it these days. The lights strobe too quickly to make out details of the crowd. EB seems even more blasé about it than I am. I’m happy enough to lead the way to a roped off ramp leading down to Lust. EB whispers something in the augmented bouncer’s ear, who grins as she opens the rope for us.
Lust is low-lit, subtle scents I can recognize as phero-stims pumped into the air, warm colors and soundproofed against upstairs, even as we look up to see the boots and strobes. In here there are lounges and booths, reclining chairs in alien baroque fashion while we get a better look at the people in their fetishistic finest. EB is tame, and I’m utterly bland against a crowd of body-mod enthusiasts, symbiote-clothed celebrities, even one man wearing illusory magical flame and very little else. Beside them, the present AR patrons can’t hold a candle. A club dancer is on stage, moving to vintage trip-hop. Body mods, magic, or astounding makeup make her appear to be a sexualized hybrid of human and reindeer among falling snowflakes and rose petals.
I head to the bar, EB in tow, and tell the bartender I’m meeting a new acquaintance here, someone with a name that has to do with foxes. She grins and takes the fifty nuyen I offer, gesturing toward the round corner booth by the stage. In the low light, clad all in violet to offset an auburn ponytail, is the fixer. He lets his IR glasses fall down his nose and looks us up and down, eyes lingering on EB, before speaking.
“Help you?” A hint of UK drawl. Educated upper-crust, but still sleazy.
“I understand you’re looking for talent.”
“Depends on the talent, huh? What are you good at?”
“Getting into clubs, for one. Coming here. Finding you.”
He grins with his eyes, and gestures for us to join him. His mouth never approaches the emotion.
“Reynard,” he offers, by way of introduction. Ah. Reynard the Fox. Su Cheng’s prophecies have a sense of humor.
“I’m Red. This is EB. And this—” I indicate the swirl of materializing water forming into feminine dimensions. “—is Mene.”
“Charmed,” he says as he takes EB’s hand and raises it to kiss. She smoothly slides hers out of his, twisting lightly to caress in the departure. He likes that she’s playful. He likes the initiative. If EB can handle a fight, can keep her edge then as she’s doing now, then this is a good start.
Mene, meanwhile, remembers the professionalism of when we did this before, and whether its become inherent to her nature or she just wants to impress me, she’s cool as can be.
Reynard orders a round of Blind Reapers he’ll end up finishing on his own, and leans back expansively in the booth as he takes us in. “So. Runners. Wiz. I’ve got a need, but I’m not going to hire people sight unseen.”
“You want us to prove ourselves?” EB seems eager at the prospect. I can sense Mene rolling her eyes internally.
“Heh. Everything has a price in the shadows, love. Su Cheng says you check, so you check. But I want to see results.”
I blink. Smile. Every step leads me back to this. The club. The table. The Johnson.
“Let’s hear what you have in mind.”
About the Author
Kevin R. Czarnecki has been playing Shadowrun since he was 12, and aspired to be an author, actor, and Ghostbuster since he was a kid. Now that this novel is done, he has accomplished all three and can die a happy man. You can also find some of his work in Run Faster. He has a Bachelors Degree in Voice Over and a minor in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago.
Kevin lives in a pre-Bug Chicago, where he works as a freelance writer and voice-over performer.
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
About the Author
Legal