by Tam MacNeil
He wakes shaking and panting and lies there trying to calm himself down, till he hears Sean’s footsteps pad softly away.
He’s not tired any more, not after that, so he gets up and goes after him. Sean’s gone outside, out on the balcony. It’s early morning and the light is grey and thin, and the air is cold and ocean-smelling. Sean’s leaning on the rail just sort of staring, but he looks over when Alex comes to the door.
“Thought you were going to be able to go back to sleep,” he says.
Alex shrugs. Sean looks tired. His eyes are threaded with red and there are black smudges under them. The grey light’s not helping. “What about you?”
“It wasn’t a sleeping night,” he answers and works up a smile. Alex nods. Those nights are bad.
There’s a bench on the balcony and Alex sits down on it. “I was dreaming about being a shinigami,” he says. Sean looks at him, but doesn’t say anything. Alex rubs at his face. He’s greasy, and the uneven skin under his hands bothers him this morning. “I gotta fix this. I promised them.” He picks a little at the corner of the scar on his jaw, scratching because the skin is rough and raised there. He knows what it is to be trapped and suffering. “I gotta fix this.”
Sean sits down beside him. “What if we tell Art, but ask her not to tell Simone?”
He’s starting to wish he hadn’t said anything about it to Sean, all he wants to do is tell other people, and Alex knows what’ll happen. Sedation, surgery, tests, machines. He shakes his head.
“They’re getting bigger,” Sean says. “You know that right? And the range of their call is getting stronger. We gotta do something.”
Something slick on his finger. He looks and finds blood; he’s scratched the edge of the scar raw. He wipes his hands on his pants. “The old one asked me to stop the one who calls,” Alex says, touching his jaw gently with his finger to see if it’s still bleeding. It is. “So I guess that means somebody’s called it here, and maybe keeps calling it?”
“Like, summoned it?” Sean echoes. He’s got this kind of faraway look on his face. “You thing that means like a… like a wizard or something?”
“I guess.” He shrugs. He’s not bleeding any more, but the spot is sticky. Just what he needs, something else wrong with his face. “Know any wizards who aren't your doctor friend?” he means it as a joke because there are way more scam artists than the real thing, and everybody knows somebody whose made a little money pretending to have the gift of the shinigami. But Sean doesn’t laugh. He’s looking out over the city again, frowning.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I actually do.”
“Like a real one?”
“Yeah, actually.” He looks over at Alex and Alex can see he’s deciding whether or not to say something. “But if he’s not banging Simone it’s just a matter of time, and I don’t know him well enough to know if he’ll keep his mouth shut.”
He thinks of the shinigami and the old one. He thinks of how he wanted to protect Sean and how it never quite worked out. He thinks about how much he’s gone through already, and how much more he can take. He doesn’t think he can stand to be cut apart again, but if everything Sean says is right, and he won’t be, maybe things will be ok. Sitting here on a warm summer morning in Vancouver with Sean near him, he feels like he can take the risk. So he nods. “If you trust him.”
Sean nods. He looks at his phone and frowns. “He won’t be in for a couple hours. I’ll talk to him when he comes in.”
“He works here?”
“Yeah. You remember the footage the BBC got? Of the pilots? We saw it when we were in Ukraine?”
Alex nods.
“Rak did that. He used to do field work, like, infiltration and stuff. He can’t do it any more; Chen kneecapped him.”
Alex winces.
“Yeah. So he does desk work mostly now. It makes him a pain in the ass to work with but,” he shrugs, “I guess he’s ok.” Alex nods again. He shivers. The breeze is coming up and the weather’s closing in. “Come on,” Sean says. “It’s cold out here and I seriously need coffee.”
Twenty
When you’re in a hurry, the traffic is always bad.
There’s a procession of the Servants of the Shinigami, or some similar cult of nut jobs, that blocks traffic for twenty blocks in basically all directions. Rak grumbles and curses at them as his car crawls by the celebrants all decked out in their brilliant green and blue robes and he wonders, not for the first time, if any of them work, because they don’t seem to care much about everybody else who does. He sure as shit is going to be late now, thanks, and if these were his employees he’d fire every last one of them for being publicly offensive. Somebody taps on his window, somebody in street clothes, smiling faintly, a little sheepish. Maybe somebody lost. He rolls the window down.
“Have you heard the message of the shinigami?” she asks him breathlessly.
He rolls the window back up but she manages to stuff a badly-printed pamphlet in through the window anyway.
A one hour commute takes him two. He calls in from the intersection at Georgia and Howe where the celebrants have clogged the roads completely and the police are trying to move them along and the cars are trying to get through and the air is full of chanting and gong sounds and incense smoke and maybe barbecue smoke and people shouting and cursing and some brilliant jackass somewhere is letting off fireworks.
“No, I’m going to be late.” He’s more or less shouting into his phone. “Crazy goddamned cultists. Yeah, I’m stuck at Georgia and Howe. I’m going to park and walk as soon as I can. Yeah. Can you send somebody to the lab to check on Dr. Okembe? She worked late last night. Right. Thanks. See you soon. Hopefully.”
The first parkade he tries is full, but there’s space in the next one. Since he’s walking anyway, he stops at a cafe and gets himself a second coffee, because he already has a headache and he knows, just knows, it’s going to be a long day. He gets a cookie, too, because if you can’t have a cookie after a death god attack when there are cultists reveling in the streets you can never have a cookie. He’s eaten the whole thing and chucked away the paper bag by the time he gets to the Annex. It’s after ten. He’s over two hours late. He’s angry and he’s sweating through his shirt, and his feet are sore from walking in dress shoes.
“Hell of a morning,” says one of the security guards. She’s got this tired kind of grin on her face and he figures it’s the same expression he’s wearing.
“No kidding,” he says. “Good luck down here today.”
“Thanks,” she says and buzzes him through.
He steps gratefully into the elevator. It’s cool, the AC in the building is great, and Art always hated pointless music, so it’s quiet. He sags against the rail and checks his phone, sees that Simone texted him to say she’s fine, please stop sending your minions to check up on me.
He texts her back to ask if she slept last night and doesn’t get a reply.
A couple people nod at him when he gets out of the elevator on the second floor, and he goes to his office. The place is quieter than normal, and the in-and-out board by the office administrator looks about fifty-fifty in and out. He’s not the only one who had a hard time getting in today. He wonders, briefly, if any of the cultists dancing in the streets and stuffing pamphlets into car windows were, in fact, his employees and entertains a fantasy of a mass firing for just a moment.
So he’s smiling quietly to himself when he steps into his office, which means he yelps like a dog that’s been stepped on when he turns on the light and Sean is sitting in the guest chair, waiting for him.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Sean,” he shouts. He’s spilled the last of his coffee down his shirt and onto his pants. It’s not hot any more, but he does put cream in it, so he gets two stains for the price of one.
Sean smiles faintly. “Jumpy this morning. Maybe you should cut back on the caffeine.”
“Distracted,” he snaps. Then he thinks about it. “You re-locked the door after you broke in?�
��
“It was unlocked but I guess you didn’t notice.” He yawns. “You’re late. You sleep in?”
“Cultists. Traffic was impossible. What are you doing in my office anyway?”
“Waiting for you.”
Rak snorts. “What, Art order a hit on me or something?”
Sean laughs in return. “Yeah, like you’d see me coming.”
And that’s chilling. He stops wiping uselessly at his shirt and looks at Sean again. “Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but what do you want? I’m two hours late, I’ve got coffee all over myself, and the hit of adrenaline I just got is fading fast so if you’ve got a request you better let me hear it.”
Sean chews his bottom lip for a second and then says, “You’re a wizard, right?”
“Yeah. So?” He’s got a spare shirt hanging from the coat rack, because he’s been hauled in front of the press a lot lately. He chucks the empty paper cup in the garbage, undoes his tie, which is red, and reaches for the new shirt, which is yellow. It could be worse. Somehow.
“So I got some questions. You know, when you’ve got time.” Sean smiles, because he’s an asshole, and he knows Rak doesn’t have time because he’s two hours late, just like he knows Rak loves to talk magic, never gets to talk about it enough. Rak changes one shirt for another and decides against the tie, and bites the bait Sean left for him.
“I’m already late, another twenty minutes isn’t going to hurt.”
Now Sean shifts where he’s sitting, he’s gone from looking cocky and amused to a little bit uneasy. “Look, you gotta promise to keep your mouth shut about it, ok? The stuff I’m going to ask you.”
“Why would I do that?” Rak asks. He tucks in his shirt, drops into his chair and flicks on his computer. When he looks back at Sean, Sean looks really uncomfortable. Rak glances at his computer. The emails in his inbox have somehow hit triple digits. He looks at Sean again. He hasn’t moved, like he’s too tightly wound to relax and get comfortable. “What’s going on, Sean?”
“Might have something to do with the shinigami,” he says. He’s being careful in a way Rak has never seen before.
Rak stares at him for a long while. Nobody knows why some people develop their weird skills and some don’t, nobody knows when it’s likely to happen. There hasn’t been enough time to learn that stuff. “Sean, are you getting powers?”
He laughs, seems relieved. “God no.”
“Ok. Well, don’t fuck around with magic users. We don’t know enough about how it all works to know what’s really safe or not. And don’t fuck around with the shinigami.”
“Not me. Somebody else.” He looks around, as if he’s looking for eavesdroppers or checking exits. In a lot of ways, Sean is still a bit like a wild animal. “Look, at SysCorp the other day, you said we were friends.”
That catches Rak a little wrong-footed. He’d been upset, and he'd been hyperbolic, but things had gone kind of crazy and he was thrilled to have gotten out of the building with both kneecaps intact after the crap that happened, so, well, yes, he’d called Sean a friend. He nods.
“Well, I could use a hand. But you have to keep your mouth shut about it.”
Rak nods, slowly. “Ok,” he says. Then, “sure.” Because it might as well be the devil you know, after all.
“So Alex,” Sean says and Rak has a moment of disorientation, thinking of Alex who does the PR stuff one floor up, and then remembers the rag-doll body that Sean carried into medical, the one who doesn’t react to the shinigami call.
“Beridze.”
Sean looks at him like he’s stupid. “Yeah. Alex Beridze. He can hear the shinigami and they can hear him. He can, like, talk to them.”
And it’s like someone’s just dumped a bucket of cold water over him and he knows his mouth is hanging open and he frankly can’t spare the brain cells to care, even if the memory of his grandma’s voice is saying, Rak you are smart boy not a dumb fish, in his head.
“He talks to them. That’s why he went out the other day when Mad and I were deployed. He says they’ve been called by someone. Summoned. And they’re trapped here. That’s why we can’t kill them.”
Rak laughs a little, faintly, and it’s just this side of hysteria, really, because it’s crazy, the idea that anybody could summon creatures like the shinigami, and keep summoning them over and over again, anywhere in the world that there’s water or a forest. That someone could just call three death gods over and over again, in spite of everything that humanity is doing to try to fight them. It’s crazy. It’s super villain level magic, and magic only started happening when the shinigami arrived.
“Come on,” he says. “This is a joke. This is absurd. There’s no one who could summon something like that. It’s preposterous. The shinigami are basically gods. It’s be like,” he shakes his head, looking for a parallel that Sean might understand. “Like Jacob wrestling an angel every time,” he says.
Sean doesn’t say or do anything, just looks at him across the desk in that expressionless way he sometimes has.
“Come on,” Rak says again. Then, “It’s not possible Sean. It’s… It’s…” but there’s something niggling at the back of his mind. The fact is the shinigami didn’t start off this big; the fact that they’re growing. And they never killed so many people back in the early days, even before everyone walked around with earplugs in their pockets.
The first attack only killed about a dozen people, and there may even have been a survivor from that attack. The next killed something like thirty and nobody survived. Then there were over fifty, but no one is sure how many. Then a hundred. Exponential increase in death from the attacks, at least until humanity started fighting back. But they weren’t always so big. And smaller things, they’re easier to summon. And there’s a tradition of shinigami just spontaneously appearing, no need for summoning. A Japanese tradition. It’s how they got their name.
“Are you saying that something came to take the dead away and got stuck?” he asks.
Sean shrugs. “I don’t know.”
He thinks about it. The more he thinks about it the more it makes sense. The lonely dead, who so desperately do not want to be alone, calling out to others who come running. But in the tradition, shinigami are gods of double death, not single, not masses. Some something weird is going on.
“Ok, well, the first thing we need to do is call Art-”
“No,” Sean says and his voice has gone very cold. He shifts where he sits, reaching behind him, then stops.
“You going to threaten me?” Rak asks.
Sean manages to look sheepish. “Sorry. Old habit. I’m not actually carrying.”
Well. He’d exhale if he had any air in his lungs, but he doesn’t because Sean was a killer before he came here and Rak knows it. Rak and him have never had a problem with each other, but it’s not like they go drinking on Friday nights, and sometimes Sean makes these comments, like the yeah, like you’d see me coming comment and it just chills Rak’s blood. Plus, he knows no matter how many doughnuts and coffees they have, Sean was raised by a megalomaniac to be an assassin. If Art ever wanted Rak dead, she’d just have to point Sean in the right direction and say Kill.
“Look,” Sean leans forward and puts his hands together. “Alex told me all this, but he asked me to keep it quiet, you know? You saw what they did to him.”
Rak nods. He’d seen pilots coming out of the mechs before, but he’d never seen the extent of the damage, not until Simone cut the suit off Alex and he could see the ports sunk like drains in his infected flesh, and all scars that disfigured him.
“He doesn’t trust people. He doesn’t know you like I do.”
There’s something weirdly complimentary about that. Rak inclines his head.
“I told him I was coming to you, but it can’t go any further.”
“Sean, Art’s got-”
“I know. But I promised him. So unless we have to, no. And not to Simone either.”
“What about Mad?” Rak asks.<
br />
Sean looks down at the floor and chews his lips a little. “No,” he says. “I know they’re safe, but he doesn’t. Just us.”
He feels a bit like he’s being invited into a secret club, or told he can tag along on a casino heist or something. He’s the nerdy safecracker, or the guy who works at City Hall planning department and can get the blueprints. “Sean, I’m flattered you think I’m all the brains we need on this but I don’t even know where to start.”
“But you’re smart,” Sean says. “You’ll figure it out, right?” He grins his cocky grin again and gets to his feet.
“Hey,” Rak says quietly. There’s no discreet way to do this, so he’s going to be straight forward about it. “Alex was the boy from English Bay, right?”
Sean frowns. “Simone told you that, huh?”
“Not exactly told. I looked. After you called I went down to check on her and she was pretty whacked out, so I looked. I just wanted to make sure she’d be ok. She is, by the way.” Sean looks at him like he’s waiting for the point. Rak licks his lips. “Look, this is weird but, if he was at the first attack, I might be able to track back and see what caused it. Can I… get some of his blood?”
Sean rocks back on his heels. “Are you fucking-”
“Or not,” Rak says, because Sean’s mouth is hanging open and he looks like he’d come across the desk and crush Rak’s windpipe if he got half the chance. “You know, just, nobody really knows how magic works but I’ve heard sometimes a little blood helps.” For Rak, everything’s easier if he’s got physical contact, like with Simone last night. He’s heard blood is a good proxy, as long as it’s fresh. Seems a bit ghoulish in the office, in the light of day.
Sean closes his mouth. He frowns. “Does it have to be blood?”
Rak considers. “Maybe hair would work?” he says. “I could try it.”
Sean nods. “That I can get you. I’ll be right back.”