But I had just gotten it signed for them.
From hunter to hunter, he’d scribbled in his bold, spidery hand, Keep up the good work. –MdV.
Someday I’d give it to them, but tonight I had other plans. I drank until I slept, lulled to sleep not just by the alcohol and the exhaustion, but by the sounds of the city. Puyallup and my apartment blurred into one with the windows broken open.
It helped.
CHAPTER 20
It was noon before a particularly cold draft blew in and woke me. A steady drizzle was falling, which helped keep the ash down—small favor, otherwise the apartment’d be an even bigger mess—but the incoming cold front carried a chill with it, and I fought a shiver as I grabbed a leftover protein shake to wash the hangover out of my mouth and put something into my stomach.
In boxers, an undershirt, and stubble, I contemplated the broken glass, the backsplash, the mess I should’ve cleaned up, or had Martin de Vries help me clean up, the night before. Fuck. He’d left a credstick and an apology, that would do for a start, but hiring someone to come in would make it impossible to work on what I had to work on next; getting Ariana back.
“You know…” I slumped into my desk chair, the seat damp from where the morning’s light rain had splashed in. “The really terrible thing is, I might die doing this.”
Astral quests weren’t cakewalks. They were Initiate-only stuff, high mojo, arcane secrets. Spirit-walks weren’t safe, and a return was never guaranteed. My body would sit here until I got back into it, and maybe that would just never happen, and no one would ever know what’d happened to Jimmy Kincaid, or why. Or care.
“I don’t even know who to talk to about it.
“When I was young, my dad gave me these rules. Simple ones. Classics. Don’t take a swing for no reason, treat girls like they deserve to be treated, drive safe, tip your waitress. Guy stuff, too, not just life stuff. Don’t cheat at sports, do a good job, show up to work early.”
I spun my chair, turning away from my desk; it wasn’t powered up, I wasn’t talking to anyone, there wasn’t a call active. The window welcomed me, the Puyallup breeze cut deep. I looked out over my city.
“I’ve done my best. Been a straight shooter, told the truth when it wouldn’t hurt good people. I haven’t stolen, not really. I’ve done right by my employers, always. Tried to play fair. I haven’t had very many rules—I don’t like ’em, world, you know that—but I’ve stuck by the ones that matter. Not ‘by the book,’ no, but doing right. That’s…that’s what I’ve tried to do. I bled and I’ve killed and I’ve fought for this city my whole life, badge or no, power or no. I’ve tried, done my best, like my old man was always watching.”
I had a headware computer full of contacts. Full of acquaintances. Full of coworkers, or stoolies, or clients. I knew every fence in Puyallup, half the prostitutes, most of the bartenders. I knew the Knight Errant guys assigned to the parts of Puyallup they bothered to be assigned to, I knew capos like Enzo and dons like Joseph Gianelli, I knew oyabuns like Tomizawa and gang-lords like Belial.
I knew everyone. And yet I didn’t have anyone to talk to, because my imaginary friend was tucked away on another plane of existence.
“And what the fuck’ve I got to show for it, huh?
“My best friend, maybe my only real friend, is a spirit. A sliced-off part of me, all the parts I used to have, all the things I used to be. An appendage, and one that just got taken from me. So here I am, naked, hungover, tired as hell, tracking down a killer the city doesn’t care about, and I’m going to—get this, world—I’m going to throw my astral self away, all up through the metaplanes, to try and get her back.”
I threw my arms wide, let my head loll back, kicked my bare feet up on the windowsill like it wasn’t full of rainwater and glass, like all of Puyallup was my work-desk.
“And I don’t even have anyone to say goodbye to.”
A part of me wanted to laugh about it. A part of me wanted to throw a fireball out the window just on principle.
“So, hey world. Hey Puyallup. Hey, all you husbands and wives that pay my rent ’cause you get cheated on, all you parents with runaways I’ve tracked down for you, all you offices with wards I’ve put up, neighborhoods with monsters I’ve killed, working girls with pimps I stopped, murderers I’ve put away. All you cops I’ve helped up or put down, gang-bangers I’ve tried to work with, all you two-bit no-good skells I’ve beat on…”
I sighed, hauling myself to my feet.
“Ol’ Jimmy Kincaid says goodbye, if you don’t see him again.”
I left the hole in the wall and tossed my crumpled-up protein shake carton toward the garbage—a miss—and just turned my back. I needed my library right now, not my office.
Except for the meticulously flawless circle in the center of the room, my library looked like a hoarder’s dive. It was everything I’d found, basically ever, that had to do with magic. For over a dozen years I’d been gathering whatever knowledge I could find, keeping the trinkets dropped by magically active skells, trading favors for knowledge, finding what worked for me, and working it as best I could. I didn’t have my old power, no, but I had plenty of tricks, all the same, and a half-dozen different ways to do everything I knew to do.
Straining shelves lined the walls, full of dusty old tomes, rolled up scrolls, Nordic rune stones, and a few actual clay tablets. Datasoft chips were haphazardly shelved next to translation guides, hardcopy print-outs of Hermetic journals were stacked next to bead patterns that told tribal stories, texts of biblical lore rested alongside cheap, old pocket secretaries laden with video files showing Aztec blood rituals. I had texts from Bruce Lee and Club Amsterdam, Ehran the Scribe and Dunkelzahn, the Hawkins Group and the Society of Elemental Studies, and dozens more writers and organizations.
This room, and what I did in it, was one of my dirtiest secrets. It’s what Dr. Minirth had known and accepted about me, what Dr. Reynolds had—however briefly—tried to hold over my head. Despite my card-carrying membership in the Hermetic Order of the Auric Aurora, I wasn’t actually a Hermetic spellcaster. Not any more.
I’d dropped the fancy formula, dropped the conceit of understanding this art like it was a science, dropped the pretension of insisting physics could explain what Talent can do. When Nimbus had taken my power from me, I’d looked elsewhere to try and get it back. I’d tried chemical cocktails to numb the loss, I’d tried Better Than Life chips to pretend it never happened, I’d turned to a street doc and Sideways to take away the pain, I’d tried to find that old spark—hell, I was still trying—at the bottom of a bottle.
Only magic could replace magic, though.
I stopped limiting myself to the Hermetic tradition, and embraced the idea of just doing whatever worked.
The Order didn’t really trust me, didn’t really want me, because I was a Black magician, in the old school. Not this new stuff that’d cropped up in the last few years, flashy kids with flashy magic, all about tits and blood and fucking your way to mastery. Not the mustachio-twirling villains of Karl Kombatmage trid-shows, either, doing evil for evil’s sake.
To me—and as a Black magician, only my definition of it mattered—Black was about the will to power. It was about taking what you could, holding onto it, and not letting anyone else take it away from me, ever again. It was about flexibility, doing what got the job done, and browbeating magic into doing what you needed it to.
I’d never been the sort to reason my way into spellcasting, even when I was a student, even when I’d called myself a Hermetic. It wasn’t logic that brought me my power, it was will. Force of personality. Stubbornness, the insistence that scientific laws didn’t matter, me wanting to throw a lightning bolt did, the knowledge that a spirit’s desire to stay on their home plane was secondary to my desire, my ability, to drag them here.
That’s why, that’s how I did what I did. That’s why I could use a voodoo doll, a Hermetic formula, and a Buddhist chant all at the same time to make a ritual work. Th
at’s why I had a dowsing rod, an athame, and a golden cross all piled together on my rickety ritual table.
I did what worked, leaned on whatever could get the job done for me. My magical philosophy was simple, direct, and honest, no matter what Reynolds might think.
This sort of thing took time and concentration. Shutting the study door behind me, I lit candles, eschewing electricity for the formality of the moment, the ritual of it. I stripped down to my shirtsleeves and sat in the middle of the circle.
Disrupted spirits returned to their home planes. A metaplanar quest would get her back. All I had to do was leave Puyallup behind, focus on her, and I’d be back in business.
I thought about Ari, as hard as I could, as focused as I’d been since the day I dreamed her into being all those years ago. I chanted in Enochian, in Sperethiel, Latin, and a half-dozen other languages. I closed my eyes, and fell away from my body. A blue-white ghost of me appeared on the Astral, all surrounded by the murky unreality of the spirit side of my apartment.
I ignored the background count, ignored the astral aftertaste of my own home, of the things I kept on shelves within it. I looked down and saw my body, a worthless hunk of meat more dead than alive from this side of the mirror, and then I closed my eyes.
“Ariana, I named thee. Ariana, I will find thee. Ariana, I come for thee.”
Whatever works, I try.
It worked. The Astral plane fell away.
CHAPTER 21
When I opened my eyes, I knew nothing I saw was real. Like the Matrix, in a way; space stretched out before me, infinite in all directions, as pitch black and unreal as the vastness of that digital skyline.
I focused. I wished. I pushed past it.
There.
My mind strove to reach the plane of earth, but I knew where I had to go first.
Go there.
There was a pinpoint of light in the distance, the only thing there was to look at, to focus on, to drag myself toward. I went.
In an eyeblink—take that, Gentry’s fancy Cyber-5, now who’s fast?—I was there. The featureless black void became a featureless white room, white walls, white floor, white ceiling. Blindingly white. Perfectly white. The idea of white.
And I knew who’d be waiting for me there, at the junction, the doorway to the higher planes, at the Threshold.
“Hullo, Watcher,” I saw the shadow of someone, just the profile, and waited for them to turn. The Dweller on the Threshold was a monster, or maybe an angel, or maybe a figment of our spellcasting collective imagination. It was a thing you had to get past, a fear you had to conquer, a secret you had to confront, a pain you had to endure. It was the worst sort of spirit guide, and it threw itself at anyone who tried to go on an astral quest.
The first time I’d faced the Watcher, it had looked like my old man. It had beat me silly, said it was ashamed of me, said I was a coward, said it’d never loved me. Swinging back hadn’t worked. I’d had to call it a liar for it to vanish, and my quest to succeed.
The second time, it’d been my mom. I don’t like to think about it.
“Who’ve we got this time, huh?”
I figured the best way to get it over with was confidence. Honesty. To go into the Threshold believing in yourself. I bitched sometimes, sure, but I never doubted that I was right. This had to be the right path.
“Hullo, Jimmy,” I heard my own voice come back at me, saw my face as the longcoat-clad figure turned, face dark under a dirty fedora, shadows cast away as it lit up a smoke.
“Shit.”
It laughed at me, the Dweller on the Threshold with my stubble, my eyes, my meanness.
“Jesus, Jimmy, would you look at you? Running errands for Reynolds, that prick who’d never liked you and who you never liked. The ThD who thought you couldn’t cut it, who always pushed you, always made you work harder. The bean-counter for the lodge, the one with all the rules and paperwork who made you work on your sad little ally-formula over and over again.”
I stayed quiet. The Dweller wasn’t here to listen to me, it was here to hurt me. To test me. I figured if I shut up, it’d be over with more quickly.
“Running errands for Reynolds, that is, when you’re not chasing drunks and losers, and camouflaging yourself perfectly to fit in with them, huh? Very nice work with the Don, by the way. Cripes, if Dad could see you now, am I right? It’s a miracle you didn’t trip on your way out of Sunny Salvo’s, lynchpin of the Gianelli empire in Puyallup, the way you ran out with your goddamn tail between your legs.”
I gritted my teeth, but didn’t rise to the bait.
“Oh, but hey, way to pump those contacts before that, though. Beating the shit out of a punk kid, that really showed ol’ Enzo, didn’t it? I can’t help but notice you didn’t try to cast a single spell. Why is that, Jimmy? Not sure if it’d still work? Didn’t want to embarrass yourself when an amateur-hour knucklehead like that countered your mojo as easily as you countered his?”
The Dweller sauntered toward me, walking slow, savoring my frustration, my rage, the impotence of both. It blew smoke right in my face; harsh, rough smoke, not the mellow, minty overtones of my favorite brand.
“You’re pathetic, Jimmy. Weak. Nothing. You let the Gianellis run you out of a little kid’s pizza joint. You almost died to a bunch of crazy trolls—super subtle ones, I’ll give you that—and needed a bunch of two-bit gangbanger FantasyLand elves to save you. You blacked out like a scared child when you went on your little digital ride-along. The best work you’ve done all week is running down a degenerate in a titty bar, and then letting him fucking go, Jimmy. Look at you. You let a fucking leech throw you out your own window, then you brought him back into your place and asked him for help.”
The Dweller shook my head at me, tsk’ing softly.
“A leech, Jimmy. A parasite, a scavenger! That’s what vampires are, and you know it. You should know it. You know why? Not because one bit you, once—boo hoo, cry some more—but because that’s what you are, too. For all that you bitch about the mob and the Yaks and all the gangs being parasites, what do you think you are, huh?
“You don’t solve a damned thing. You bark at shadows, you chase your tail, you shit where you eat. You’re just a jackal, a mutt, eating the scraps your shitty home town tosses you sometimes. You’re as much a scavenger as any vampire, Jimmy. You roll corpses. You don’t pay your bills like a normal damned grown-up. You waste money on booze and time on moping around brooding while your city turns to shit around you and your friends take off to get away from you. You aren’t a good man. You’re not even a decent man. Look at you! You killed six fucking guys because you changed your mind about letting them sell beetle-chips to your neighbors!”
It leaned in drill-instructor close, my disgusted face right in my disgusted face, brim of its hat almost hitting me.
“You were letting them sell that shit right there, under your nose, and you call yourself a good guy? You protect some gangbangers instead of letting them kill each other off, you play favorites based on looks, killing trolls while helping elves, and you call yourself a good guy? You make deals with the fucking Gianellis, then break ’em, and you think your word is worth a damn? You let the Kenran-Kai keep the Sleeping Tiger running, let them fill it back up with girls, and you act like you solve problems? You kill six men ’cause an old lady gives you a plate of enchiladas, and you think you’re some kind of hero?”
It was almost kissing me, leaning in close like a lover, not a hater. Its voice got low and mean, honest. The voice of an ex right before she became an ex, when she’s not yelling and throwing things, but when she’s done crying, when you’re done fighting, when she’s just speaking simple truths that twist the knife.
“Puyallup ain’t no place for heroes, Jimmy Kincaid, but even if it was, you ain’t made of the right stuff. You’re a fraud. A chiphead junky, like any one of those bums in Tinman’s place. You ain’t no Chandler detective, Jimmy Kincaid. You ain’t no Marlowe, you ain’t no Spade. Hell, you ain’t ev
en a Hammer. You walk down mean streets, sure, but you’re mean, too, and afraid. You’re tarnished. You’re as incomplete a man as they come, you’re a sham, you’re pett—”
“Just shut up, would’ja?”
The Dweller froze up for a second, cut off mid-rant.
“I do what I gotta do, all right? My house is a sinkin’ ship, and I’m just some asshole with a bucket full of holes. I’m not perfect. I know that better’n you, you fuckin’ parlor trick. I haven’t claimed to be perfect in a long time, pal.”
I took a step toward it, it took a step back. I kept going.
“I make deals because deals are my guns. My Colt’s for show, my Colt’s for when deals don’t work. My real ammo is compromises. My real weapons are favors. I make deals with Enzo, with his uncle, with fucking Tinman, because deals are how things get done in my world. Deals are how wars don’t start. Deals are how turf stays sane instead of getting soaked in blood. I make deals because deals are all that matter, and I killed Tinman and his boys because they broke a deal.”
Another pace, another breath before I kept ranting, the Dweller took another pair of big steps back.
“And yeah, I fucked over Enzo. Yeah, I compromised with the Yaks. Yeah, sometimes I look the other way. But it’s because the alternative is worse. It’s because I had to save a little girl, I had to try and keep things peaceful, I had to try and not kill folks for once.”
The Dweller stopped backing up. I crowded in, reached out and took my hat from atop its head, stuffed it where it belonged, just on principle.
“And I’ve got another job, and I need my ally spirit to get it done. So just shut up and get out of my way, pal. I’ve got shit to do.”
The Dweller laughed square in my face, done attacking, but done retreating.
Shadowrun: Shaken: No Job Too Small Page 12