by J. C. Staudt
“Deplorable place,” he mutters. “Awful racket.”
“You should come with me.”
“Can’t,” he says. “It’s my day off.”
“Every day is your day off.”
“And like all the others, I intend to spend it napping.”
Chapter 4
Whittaker Brothers is an arsenal and shooting range in the heart of New Detroit’s southwest neighborhood. Bob and Tommy Whittaker are cousins, not brothers, but they thought the name had a nicer ring to it when they set up shop two decades ago. There are other ranges closer to my apartment, but I’ve known the Whittakers for a few years now and they always make me feel like family.
I empty my Glock 17 into the silhouette target downrange, drop the mag, and jam a new one into the handgun’s molded polymer grip. Yes, I do handle firearms regularly. I live in New Detroit. This isn’t some podunk town where everybody knows your name and people leave their doors unlocked at night. Around here a wizard needs a backup plan.
When I first met the Whittakers I had no idea one of them was married to an othersider. Bob doesn’t know his wife Katherine used to be a peasant in a kingdom called Tolmyr, and I only learned it myself recently. Humans all look pretty much the same no matter where they were born; it’s impossible to tell the magical ones from the normals without the use of a detection spell.
Like most othersiders, Katherine Whittaker doesn’t remember much about the world she came from. She and Bob have two children, who, like me, are normals without magic in their veins. A child born of two othersiders here on Earth maintains its magic. Offspring with one othersider parent and one normal parent lose their magic, though they sometimes exhibit peculiarities in regards to how they tolerate it. It’s too early yet to know all the implications of this genetic mixing; not enough time has elapsed since othersiders started crossing over for half-bloods like myself to come of age in great number.
For every othersider like Katherine Whittaker, who has assimilated herself into our culture, there are dozens more who have fled society in favor of the sewers and forests and abandoned places, spawning urban legends and monstrous tales of paranormal mayhem in the darkness of night. That’s why guns are my fallback plan. Magic is a wonderful tool, but it’s no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.
“You hungover?” asks Bob Whittaker, shouting to be heard over the noise-canceling earmuffs we’re both wearing.
I set my gun on the bench in my shooting bay and turn around. “I was up late last night,” I yell back. “No drinking, though. Why?”
Bob is standing with his arms folded, a look of disapproval on his face. He nods toward my target downrange, where the seventeen rounds I’ve fired from my full-size magazine are arranged in a loose, disorganized group. A dark gray beard frames his thick jaw, and the suggestion of a beer gut pulls his synthetic polo tight around his midsection. “You’re shooting like shit today. Something bothering you?”
I’m not going to yell over the earmuffs and the ring of gunshots in the air to explain that yes, something is bothering me. I’m not going to tell him I’ve been feeling unwell since I suffered a catastrophic spell failure late last night and got up at four this morning to do the dishes because I couldn’t sleep. Each time I’ve tried and failed to find my father, the toll on my emotions has left me feeling like a rope fraying at the edges for weeks afterward. “Nope, I’m fine. Just warming up is all.”
“You look tense. Slow your breathing. Relax a little.”
Ersatz has been telling me to relax for the last fifteen years. I’m plenty relaxed. Just because I color-code and alphabetize everything I own doesn’t mean I’m not relaxed. It’s just that as a general rule, I’m calmer when I’m centered, and in order to be centered I need cleanliness.
Resisting the urge to grab the broom and sweep up the spent brass littering the floor around my feet, I turn downrange again and pick up my gun. When I raise the weapon and sight in, I can’t get myself in the clear. My hands are trembling, and my eyes keep going out of focus.
Frustrated, I set the gun down and step out of the booth, breathing hard.
“You alright, man? Why don’t you come out and take a break?”
I relent, feeling woozy as I unload my weapon and leave it on the bench. I step through the gallery door with him and remove my eyewear and headphones. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I lie.
“It’s all good, bro. Have a seat. Take a breather.”
I collapse into one of the chairs along the wall of windows looking onto the range. Bob sits too, leaving a chair between us. He studies me for a minute, then asks if I’ve been messing around with stuff I shouldn’t be.
“Like what?”
Bob folds his arms. “You tell me.”
The Whittakers know my dad left when I was seven and my mom died ten years later. They know I clean houses for a living, following in my dad’s janitorial footsteps, and that my favorite way to spend a Saturday is unloading a few boxes of brass. But there are only two people in my life who know I’m a wizard, and the Whittakers aren’t them. So I can only assume Bob thinks I’m high on something right now, and that’s what’s making me all shaky and scatterbrained. “There’s nothing to tell. Seriously.”
“I’ve seen you like this before, Cade,” he says. “It always starts slow. Occasional. Tommy was on heroin on and off ‘til he was in his forties. Got himself cleaned up before it took him away for good, thank God. I screwed around with it for a while myself. Never as bad as him, but enough to where I knew when to get myself off that shit and get help. If you need help, you let me know. Understand? We can get you the help you need.”
“I’m not on anything,” I assure him. Besides the after-effects of a spell gone wrong, I think, but don’t say. When a spell as powerful as the one I tried to cast last night goes wrong, emotional damage isn’t the only side effect. Bad magic is like bad food; it’s a wrecking ball, and nothing works right for a while afterward. I’ve always recovered before, though. I’m young. Resilient. I bounce back.
“Look, man, I’m going to be real with you. All it takes is one bad dose to make you wish you’d never started. Don’t become a statistic.”
“What is this, an intervention? I told you, I’m not on drugs.”
Bob shakes his head. “I’ve seen kids like you come and go around here. No guidance. No direction. Working their dead-end jobs, looking for a little excitement. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you feel like that’s an option, think twice about it. The stuff will kill you if you let it. It’s only a matter of when. It poisons the mind against itself.”
I want to tell him I met McGruff the Crime Dog when I was in elementary school. I’ve gotten all the advice I need about drugs. But then I start to think maybe that isn’t true. Because the drug I’m on has the potential to become more addictive than any controlled substance Bob Whittaker and his cousin Tommy have ever experimented with. In the end, all I manage to say is, “If I needed help, I’d ask for it.”
Thusly declared, I lurch to my feet. When I belch, half a mouthful of Lucky Charms comes up in a sweet acidic lump. I swallow with a grimace.
“I don’t think you should be on the range right now, buddy,” says Bob.
“I’m done shooting. Let me pack up my stuff and sweep up my brass before I go.”
“Where you headed?”
“Have a good one, Bob. Thanks for the talk.”
While grabbing my stuff and cleaning my area, I begin to feel lightheaded. That done, I stagger through the gallery and the adjoining shop, past the glass display counters where sales clerks stand guard over racks of shotguns and shelves of ammo boxes. The city sidewalks are packed with Saturday afternoon foot traffic. I stumble into the tide. My eyes defocus and my knees wobble, but I know the way to Quim’s house without a map.
A few blocks down I hang a right. There among the crowds I see, or I think I see, the man who was following me last night, wearing the same low-slung fedora and high-coll
ared trenchcoat. It’s daytime now, so I should be able to see him clearly. Everything is bright and blurry, though, and people pass so quickly he slips from view behind the head of a passerby and vanishes.
I lean forward into a run, weaving through the crowds until I arrive at the spot where I saw him, a garbage can beside a light rail stop where everyone is piling into the train about to shove off. I walk alongside the train car, scanning the interior. Just as the train pulls away I see him, hunched in his seat along the aisle, and then he and the train and all its occupants are gone.
Maybe he wasn’t following me after all. Maybe it wasn’t even the same man as last night. I’m not even sure why I thought it was. The way my body feels, achy and restless and thirsty for something I can’t pin down, I’m beginning to wonder if anyone was actually following me in the first place.
As I continue toward Quim’s apartment, my thigh begins to buzz. I pull out my cell and look at the number. My heartbeat quickens. I pick up. “Hello?”
“Hi, can I speak to Cade?”
“This is he.”
“Cade. Jim Lennox.” Jim is my supervisor, and has been since I started at ZipMaids three years ago. His accent is pure Michigan, and he speaks in a steady, almost patronizing gait. He’s an okay guy, and calls me regularly to ask if I want to fill in for other housekeepers when they call out sick. Somehow I know that isn’t what he’s calling about.
“Hey Jim. What’s up?”
“How we doing today?”
Cut the crap and get to the point. “Fine, how are you?”
He clears his throat. “I’m good. Thanks for asking. So I got a call from one of your clients this morning.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Uh huh.”
“Says she walked into her bathroom last night and saw you doing something you shouldn’t have been. According to her, you exhibited some inappropriate behavior toward her.”
My insides groan. “What did she say I did?”
“She didn’t, exactly. She couldn’t bring herself to repeat it. All she said was she doesn’t want you cleaning her place anymore, and when I asked if she’d prefer a different housekeeper next week she told me she wanted to cancel all her future appointments with us. Now, I believe there are two sides to every story, so I’m going to give you the chance to explain yourself. I figure it must’ve been pretty serious to make her withdraw her business altogether, but sometimes misunderstandings happen. So do you want to tell me what it was you were doing in there when she came in?”
Not really. I’m shocked Felita Skaargil actually went through with filing a complaint, so I feel unprepared to have this conversation with my boss. I figured she’d mull it over and conclude there was no simple way of explaining to a normal what I’ve been stealing from her apartment for the past year, or why. Instead she’s defaulted to the basest of accusations by framing me as some kind of perv. She’s a clever one, is Little Miss Werewolf. Since the customer is always right, all she needed to do was cast reasonable doubt on my standing to appear justified for banning me from her home.
There are a few directions I can take this. I can deny, deny, deny, pitting my word against hers. I can admit to something I didn’t do and face the consequences in order to keep the truth hidden. Or I can beat Ms. Skaargil at her own game, and make up a fictional scenario in which my actions were misconstrued.
Yeah, I decide. We’re going to see what’s behind Door Number Three. It’s a split-second decision, but one I’m willing to take a gamble on. “It’s kind of embarrassing, actually. I had a bit of an emergency and needed to use the facilities pretty bad. I forgot to lock the bathroom door when I went in, but since Ms. Skaargil usually isn’t home while I’m cleaning her place I didn’t think it would matter. And of course, since I’ve got the worst luck in the universe, she happens to walk in at just the wrong moment. Didn’t knock or anything. She must’ve assumed I was, like, doing something else.”
“Hmm,” says Jim Lennox, a less enthusiastic reply than I was hoping for. “She told me she knocked before she went in.”
“If she did, I didn’t hear her.”
“I didn’t get the impression, talking to her, that she just walked in on you going to the bathroom. It sounded like there was something else going on. Like you did something to her.”
“Well, Jim, I don’t know what to tell you. Forgive my bluntness, but I was taking a dump. That’s what I was doing. It wasn’t anything else, I promise.”
“I see. Because she told me you were in the shower.”
“Well, yeah. I mean, I was washing myself off. Like I said, it was embarrassing.”
He pauses. “Well I can certainly see how that might’ve surprised her. Any other details I should know about?”
“Nope.”
Jim sighs. “Okay. This is the sort of thing, unfortunately, where I have to get corporate involved. I can’t just sweep it under the rug, because a complaint like this, if it was legitimate and well-founded, could cost the company bigtime. If some other client were to take us to court because of something you did, and it came out that I’d received a previous complaint and didn’t do anything about it, it could reflect badly on us.”
“I understand.”
“For right now, and this is just to cover our bases, I’m going to have to place you on suspension. Which is basically the equivalent of a leave of absence without pay.”
“For how long?”
“No telling. Hopefully no longer than two, three weeks. A month tops. Just until we can get this whole thing sorted out.”
“Alright,” I say, even though it isn’t. My rent is about to come due, and I’m going to fall behind real quick if I’m out of work for a month. Mr. Montpellier is going to shit a brick.
“You may be getting a call from someone in corporate over the next few days or weeks. I don’t know how long it’s going to take them to conduct their investigation, but I’ll try to speed things along as best I can. As long as you’re confident you did nothing wrong and you can validate it to the higher-ups, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”
“Okay,” I say, dazed.
“We’ll be in touch,” Jim says. “Oh, and I’m going to need you to drop off the key to Ms. Skaargil’s apartment when you get a chance. Sooner the better.”
Chapter 5
Quimby Takkanopoulis lives on the second floor of a sixty-year-old apartment building on the lower west side called the Excelsior Panorama. His two-bedroom apartment is bigger than mine, but its aged veneer is in just as much need of an overhaul, with scuffed linoleum and stained porcelain and peeling wallpaper whose pattern incriminates it to a lost decade. As soon as Quim opens the door I head for the fridge and grab a Corona, cracking off the cap on the edge of the butcher block countertop. After an ample swig, I lean against the counter and press the cold bottle to my forehead.
“What’s your deal?” Quim asks. His voice is gravelly with sleep, his undershirt and shorts wrinkled, yet his longish blond hair is neat and perfect and his eyes show no trace of drowsiness.
“Nothing, QuimTak. Just thirsty. Hot out there.”
“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon and you’re drinking beer.”
“Yeah, and you’re still in bed. Whose priorities need rethinking?”
“I was still in bed,” he mutters. “What do you want?”
“I’m offended that you think I came over just because I want something. Can’t a guy visit his best friend for the simple enjoyment of a Saturday-afternoon chat?”
He narrows his eyes. “You’re not fooling anyone.”
“My manager at work just put me on a month-long leave of absence.”
“What for?”
“A werewolf caught me stealing hair from her shower drain and wants to ruin my life.”
“Damn. I guess you were bound to get caught sooner or later. Does she know why you were stealing from her?”
“She guessed. That’s why she wants to ruin my life.”
“Too bad you didn’t
get caught by that kobold you clean for in Palmer Park. He’d bow down in worship if he ever found out you were a powerful wizard who could turn him into a dung beetle. This werewolf lady is going to rip off your hands and choke you with them.”
I take another sip of my beer. “My theory is she wants me out of work so no one will report me missing when I don’t show up on Monday. Ersatz thinks I should go into hiding. I’d rather stay and fight, except I feel like crap and I’m running low on residue. You wouldn’t happen to be in the market for a haircut, would you?”
Quim smirks. “You can check my shower drain, if you want.”
“I might take you up on that. It’d be nice to have a little something extra for the walk home. I keep getting this feeling like someone’s following me.”
“That’s why I never leave the house.”
“Oh, please. You could avoid being followed whenever you wanted to.”
“So you assume, Cadigan. So you assume.”
“Remember in high school how I always used to dare you to shift into the captain of the football team so you could make out with his girlfriend? What was her name? The prom queen our senior year?”
Quim rolls his eyes. “Madison Haight,” he recites for the hundredth time.
I snap my fingers. “That’s it. God, she was so hot.”
“See, that’s the difference between you and me,” Quim says.
“What? I like girls and you don’t?”
He rolls his eyes. “You use your powers for evil, and I refuse to.”
“Making out with the prom queen is not evil.”
“You conjured a rattlesnake in gym class so you wouldn’t have to run the mile. That’s evil.”
“Let’s be clear; it was an illusionary rattlesnake. And I got the whole class out of the mile that day. Scared Mrs. Rangel half to death, too. I’m a goddamned hero, and I never got to take credit for it.”