by Leod D. Fitz
Talus moved in front of me and began patting me down.
Behind me, Jayr was working to get his brass knuckles off of my wrists, but it was difficult to do while keeping my hands twisted. And I certainly wasn’t going to make it any easier.
Talus pulled my jacket open and froze. “Andres!”
Andres, who’d been faced away from us, staring out over the piles of trash, turned towards us. “Yes?”
Talus pulled the worn red notebook out of my pocket and handed it to his commander.
Andres’s eyes widened as he took it, flipping through it quickly, his lips moving as he read. “Yes… gods yes. Oh, Orrin, we have been lost without you.”
Talus moved around behind Andres, trying to read over his shoulder.
Behind me, Jayr and Eryx had grown temporarily still, their breathing heavy with anticipation.
I adjusted my stance and slammed my head backwards into Eryx’s nose.
The chimera let my hands slip and stumbled backwards a step.
Andres blinked and looked towards me, frowning. I managed to get a foot up high enough to kick the notebook out of his hand and into a particularly nasty pile of trash.
Andres and Talus raced after it, abandoning their companions.
I twisted around, feeling one of the bones in my right arm fracture as I positioned myself to jab Jayr in the throat.
He blinked at me in surprise, his grip slipping just enough that I managed to pull my hand away from him.
The searing blade was hanging from a sheath on his belt. I yanked it out with my good hand, turned, and leapt.
By the time I landed I heard Talus’s wings begin to buzz. I spared a glance backwards. Andres had the notebook in hand. He frowned as he tried to clean some muck off of it. The other three were moving towards me.
A tiny, stupid part of my brain cried out to stop and fight. That this time we’d kill them all. I wasn’t going to listen to that idiot again. I picked the nearest safe place I knew and ran in great leaping bounds.
Not many people are out and about at four thirty in the morning, but I expected that rumors would be spreading around town soon about a strange flying figure passing through town. That sort of thing was frowned upon in the community, but on the off-chance word got out and somehow I was found out as the perpetrator, the punishment would be light compared to what the chimeras would do to me.
I ran fast and hard all the way to the safety of the grove. I might not have a personal relationship with the maries, but if Orrin trusted them to keep him safe from his brothers, who was I to argue?
I don’t know how long I was pursued by the chimeras. For all I know, they stopped following me after a block. All I knew was that until I had a couple of binges and a few weeks of sleep, I didn’t want another fight with one of those assholes.
A tall, rough skinned woman greeted me as I stumbled to a stop next to the house where Orrin had brought me only a couple days earlier.
“You’ve returned.”
“Yes,” I gasped, surprised at how exhausted my trip had made me. “I need to speak to Orrin.”
“Our adopted brother has not yet returned to us.”
I nodded. “Sure, sure. He’s still recovering from the operation, probably. How would you feel about me waiting for him with you?”
Orrin was not pleased.
“This is terrible.”
The chimera, sporting his fresh new god-ish body had picked me up in a car the dead man had lent him. I’d explained what I could on the short ride to retrieve my car from outside the dump, and the rest when we reached work.
“By now they’ll have left town, going after the closest key,” he continued. “Whichever one that is. Dammit, I’ve been forcing myself to ignore them for longer and longer periods of time, now I can’t even remember where half of them are.”
“I’m sorry.”
Orrin shook his head. “It isn’t just bad for me. It isn’t just bad for the people who actually possess the keys. It’s bad for the world! My brothers are all that much closer to— “ his mouth clamped shut, practically of its own volition, and he shuddered.
I continued past him and unlocked the door, allowing Tricia in. Today, she assured me, was not a school day, despite being a Monday. I did seem to remember there not being much traffic around the high school, so I assumed she was telling the truth. She headed downstairs to start working on cleaning up the prep room. I had a major remodel ahead of me and not nearly enough money to outsource it. Today we were going to figure out exactly what needed to be done, and if there was any of it that we couldn’t do ourselves.
If I had to tell The Pig that I had hired someone new AND had to pay somebody to fix the place up, he would have a conniption.
The chimera looked grim as he walked into the building.
“With your coin and your notebook, Andres has a distinct advantage,” I murmured.
“Hmm? Oh, the coin. No, he doesn’t have that any more. The dryads were able to retrieve it from the house we burned down. Presumably Andres didn’t see any reason to rescue it from the fire after he stabbed me in the heart and saw you cut my head off. For the time being, he’ll assume I’m dead.”
“Oh! Well that’s good.”
“It’s a tool. A temporary advantage. Nothing compared to the advantage that Andres has now that he knows the whereabouts of nearly half of the remaining keys.”
I grimaced. “I’m sorry I didn’t get your notebook back to you sooner.”
“No,” Orrin rubbed his face. “I should never have written it down. I should never have looked it all up. The compulsion is just so strong.”
“Why is it that you’re able to resist and your brothers were not?”
Orrin shook his head. “Truthfully, they don’t even try. Finding the keys has become their lives’ work. It’s so ingrained in them that I don’t think they even contemplate fighting it anymore.”
I nodded. “So, what are you going to do now?”
“What I’ve always done. Try to stop them. Or at least slow them down.” He held his hand up in front of his face and looked it over, curious. “This new body will take some getting used to. It’s different. Stronger and… stranger. I healed faster than your friend expected. He thinks some of your blood may have stayed with me, augmented my own healing.”
That was interesting. I actually still had a small, puckering scar just out of sight beneath my collar. It was the only scar on my body. Was it the result of the massive damage that had been done, or had his flesh somehow changed mine where we’d been connected?
“Or perhaps there’s something about this body,” Orrin continued. “Either way, I have a great deal of adjusting to do.”
He offered me his hand, which I shook firmly.
“It was a unique experience meeting you, Orrin.”
“You as well, ghoul.”
A few hours later my brother showed up, looking surprisingly fresh for someone who had spent the entire night before and most of the morning smoking weed.
I told him everything that had happened since we parted ways.
“So you like this Orrin guy?”
I nodded.
“Then why didn’t you tell him the truth about the notebook?”
I chuckled. “Because he’s still a chimera. He still has a compulsion placed on him. If he knew that the copy his brothers took from me was a forgery, he’d be compelled to figure out where those keys really are. As it is, he’ll be focused on dealing with his brothers. If he ever figured out what I did, I’m quite confident that he’ll approve.”
“Uh-huh. So, this isn’t your revenge for him refusing to just tell you what the fuck was going on when you guys first met?”
I shrugged. “A little from column a, a little from column b?”
Simon snorted.
“So, how much do I owe your forger friend?”
Simon took in a deep breath and blew it out. “Be thankful he only had to fill half the book. And be grateful he didn’t have to make it t
o his usual standards. Things could’ve been a lot worse.”
“Yes, yes, I’m grateful, I’m lucky, what’s the damage?”
“Well, normally for a rush job like that one, and in a language he doesn’t even speak? You’d be looking at about a grand and a half, easy. Lucky for you, your brother was able to negotiate a sweet, sweet deal. You owe him five hundred and fifty bucks, and you owe me two hundred and twelve for all the weed he and his girl smoked. And that’s the ‘at cost’ price on that weed, by the way.”
I groaned. “Seven hundred and fifty?”
“Seven hundred and sixty-two,” he corrected immediately.
“Shit. I’m going to have to pay him in installments. You think you can arrange that?”
“Already did. I paid him straight up out of my savings. How do you feel about paying me back twenty bucks a month for forty months?”
I sighed. “Sounds like a better interest rate than your friend would have given me.”
Simon clapped me on the back. “What are brothers for?”
After Simon left, I returned Tricia’s searing blade to her and talked to her about her future.
We agreed that she’d work for me four to six hours a day, four days a week, which was as much time as I could comfortably pay her for given my current finances. Her primary duty was cleaning, but she’d also join me to pick up bodies from time to time, and Percy would train her how to deal with the customer. And because she insisted, I agreed to teach her how to prep the bodies after she’d been with us for a while.
I thought it was going to take a lot of talking to get her to leave her ‘boyfriend,’ but that mess had apparently sorted itself out when she caught him in bed with another girl. I didn’t even ask if that had anything to do with the fresh bruising on her knuckles.
After our discussion, she enthusiastically headed out to wash down the van and the hearse, and pick up trash around the outside of the property.
Half an hour later, when I went out to check on her progress, I spotted nearly a dozen boys in the Quick Pho U’s parking lot who were pretending to eat pho as they watched Tricia, now stripped down to shorts and a bikini top, scrubbing the van enthusiastically.
It hadn’t even occurred to me before that she was an attractive girl, but suddenly I had a much better idea why she was having so much trouble getting along with all of the other girls in school.
On Wednesday, I had a surprise visitor.
The woman looked a little bit worse for wear. I wasn’t certain if the bracelet she wore was steadily getting more difficult to bear, or if she simply had experienced a few long days.
She was definitely anxious now, though.
“Where’s the body?’
I nodded for her to take a seat.
The woman placed the large hat box she’d been carrying on an empty gurney, then took the seat I’d offered. Almost immediately she stood again and began pacing. “Do you still have it? The body?”
“No.” I watched the woman curiously.
“You destroyed it, then?”
I considered lying, then decided against it. “No. I gave it away.”
“Gave it away?”
“Someone needed it.” I tilted my head to one side. “Is there a problem?”
“A problem? Yes. Yes, a problem.” She paused, as though listening to someone else speaking for a moment, then shook her head and turned back to me. “The head, I took it to the site. I performed the ritual and it… it died. It was dead. I was taking it to the appropriate place to dispose of it when… it woke up again.”
“It woke up?”
She nodded.
The ritual the dead man performed to resurrect the body must have also resurrected the head. But would it last? Orrin claimed that if I had left his head attached to my body, my own head would eventually wither and die. Given that this head wasn’t even attached to its own body, perhaps it would eventually do the same.
Or perhaps things didn’t work exactly the same way when you were a god. However small of a god you might be.
I drummed my fingers on my thigh for a moment.
“Please, who did you give the body to? I need to see to it that this creature is destroyed.”
“Oh, the guy I gave it to is long gone, but the problem may sort itself out. He’s a chimera and they—“
The woman spit out a word that couldn’t have been polite. “Chimeras? They’re here?”
“Uh, they were here. Now they’re… somewhere else. Why?”
“The… the creature! They seek to free it!” Her eyes flickered back and forth as though examining something that only existed in her mind. “I need to secure the holy place. Make certain the key is safe.”
“Yeah, um. Sure.”
The woman moved towards the door.
“Hey, wait! You forgot your box!”
The woman didn’t even slow down. “That is irrelevant. The holy place must be secured! The creature must not rise!”
She ran up the stairs and out the front door.
I sighed and headed over to open the box.
Sure enough, a severed head looked up at me, sullenly, from inside.
I considered it for several long seconds. “I don’t suppose you speak English?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leod Fitz, despite rumors to the contrary, is, in fact, continuing his work on the Corpse-Eater Saga. The length of time between publications is due primarily to his problems with cover art, and having to format his books himself, which he sucks at. The author is currently living a hermetic lifestyle, but he hopes to eventually find and perhaps even speak to people again, someday. He thanks you for your interest.