by Gary Jonas
“His name is Juke,” Brand said coming up behind us.
“I’ll make him juke,” Amanda said.
“I’ll bet you will,” Brand said. He casually slipped an arm around my waist, and I didn’t make him move it.
Juke glanced at Amanda as she walked toward him, then gave her a longer look as she held his gaze. I imagined they’d be geeking it up together in no time. Among other things.
Kin collected around Kess, Bliss and Jiggs, to pay their respects. Other Kin whispered to the wizards, and gently but firmly ushered them and the former prisoners to shadows where waiting Kin escorted them through.
One Kin approached me and said, “Excuse me,” but Kess stopped her.
“This is Kelly Chan,” Kess said. “She stays. We owe her everything.”
“Kess, you don’t owe—”
Kess squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head so I stopped.
“Her friends stay, too. If they want. If she wants.”
In the end, Amanda, Jessica, Brand and I all stayed for Jiggs’ funeral.
Kin funerals take place as soon after the death as possible and are kept simple. The people closest to the deceased say a few loving words. Then the gathered guests all do the Good Work on the body together.
Brand bent close to my ear. “Hey, do you think they expect us to do the, um….”
Kess spoke up behind him. “The Good Work? No, that would be an insult.” She walked to the front of the room and from the look on his face, it took Brand a minute to realize she meant it would be an insult to the Kin and Jiggs, not to him.
The Kin quieted down as Kess began to speak.
“My Jiggs was an affectionate husband – kind, gentle, handsome. Funny, always teasing, always keeping me on my toes. And he adored our daughter, Bliss. Just as he already adored the little one blooming to life inside me right now.” Kess cradled her abdomen. “Jiggs was all the things you could want in a father. Loving, protective, and he did everything he could to give his daughter what she needed to grow up strong and healthy.”
“He tried to give that to all of us,” someone said. I recognized him as the ghoul who had stolen the arm from the Dumpster. “And we fought him on it. We undermined him. I undermined him. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Kess, I pledge to make sure that Bliss and your unborn baby and all other young Kin never starve. In memory of Jiggs.”
“In memory of Jiggs!” the other Kin joined in.
We non-Kin left as the Good Work began, out of respect. On our way to a shadow, I noticed that Liz’s body had been dragged off to the side. Fresh, whole, quite dead and reserved for Bliss.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
That spring, my dojo never looked more festive. Monique and the other students went out and bought ten times the lights I’d had at the previous party. They added more champagne flutes and a chocolate fountain to fill them when the booze ran low. If the booze ran low. They bought a lot more of that, too.
I was happy to reimburse them. My bank account was full of zeroes, all on the good side of the decimal point. Grateful Kin made sure of that. Cash and checks poured in. The memo line on the checks all read, “For the Midwife.” I’d have to explain that to my accountant later.
For the time being, I had enough money to be comfortable, and to hire an employee who could keep me in line. The party was for her. Jessica sat in a decorated chair in the middle of the room. She wore a tiara with pink rhinestones in the shape of a heart. Her friends flocked around her, a loving court.
They stopped asking Jessica about what happened to her after Monique did. A week after we’d gotten back, Amanda and I were in the dojo when Monique had asked Jessica – quietly, cautiously – what happened. Jessica told Monique that she didn’t want to dwell on the negative.
“Honestly, I felt really bad for my fish the whole time,” Jessica said. “I left the poor little guy to die.”
“Oh!” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right back.”
I went to my office and returned with the fighting fish in his clean bowl.
“See, look, he’s fine. I took him out of the apartment when I broke in.”
I looked down at the fish, who turned scarlet and vainly attempted to attack my fingers through the glass. I’d miss him.
“Here you go.” I thrust the bowl at Jessica.
She pushed the bowl back at me. “No, you keep him. Truth is, fish are kind of a pain to take care of.”
“Told you they were,” Amanda said.
Great. But how could I say no?
“What’s his name?” I said instead.
Jessica blushed. “Um, Fish?”
I turned to Amanda. “See? I told you. I’m not the only one who doesn’t feel compelled to name everything I own.”
“No, but you have to name the fish,” she said back. “It’s sentient.”
“You’re telling me Cecil’s sentient, too?”
Amanda just smiled.
I tapped the bowl. “It’s only a fish. It doesn’t care.”
“It’s your first pet, Kelly. Be a real girl and give him a damn name.”
I thought for a minute. Jiggs was the first word that popped into my head. But it seemed wrong to name a stupid fish after an important friend.
There, I said it. Jiggs was a friend.
So, I thought of his daughter, who would grow into a healthy Kin because of her dad’s sacrifice. And his brave example.
“I’m naming him Mufasa after the lion’s dad in that Disney movie.”
Circle of life, you know?
When anyone asked Jessica about her kidnapping after that, she’d repeat that she didn’t want to dwell on the negative and that she’d actually made a friend through the ordeal, a friend named Bliss. Classic Jessica. And classy.
Her new friend wore a matching tiara and sat in a chair next to Jessica, swinging her legs and politely sipping chocolate from a champagne flute. Funny, but the level of chocolate never seemed to drop. Bliss’s mother sat next to her, holding a baby boy wrapped in a blanket. Jiggs Junior, of course.
Kess and Jessica had become good friends, too. When I asked Kess about their friendship, she told me, “Sometimes we talk about what happened. What we lost. Other times, we just make cookies.” She shrugged. “We’re both women. We know how to bear up.”
When I asked Jessica about her captivity, she said, “You saved me, but Bliss saved me first. If she’d given in to the taste, I would have been responsible for turning her into a monster. I could have caused her a lot of harm just by being there. I talked to save both of us. I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I didn’t.”
Never mind that she wouldn’t have lived at all.
Besides Jessica, I’d hired another new employee. As annoying as Brand could be, he wanted to help with the dojo until he found other employment. I thought it was a great opportunity to let the women really whale away on an opponent, and who better? Especially after his proposition.
“Can I call the students my harem?”
“No.”
“How about Brand’s Babes? No, wait, Brand’s Brand Babes. Like I’m making them my brand.”
“I. Fucking. Hate you.”
“So that’s a no?”
I hate to admit it was kind of fun having someone around besides Amanda who wasn’t afraid to tease me.
I searched the crowd for Brand but didn’t see him, not even with the other Sekutar 2.0. Amanda was hanging out with them, specifically Juke. He was wearing a fresh Green Lantern shirt. Amanda bought it for him. It looked really good.
Then I heard a tapping on the glass door in front. There was Brand, trying to get my attention.
I opened the door. “What happened? You lock yourself out again?”
“Nope. Got my key right here. I just wanted a minute alone with you.” He pulled me outside. The door closed behind me. Good thing he had that key.
Cars drove up and down the street. One honked as it went by. “Newsflash, Brand. You’re never alone on Colfax.”<
br />
“Close enough.” We sat on the stoop, enjoying the warm spring air. Brand studied my arm. I still had the faint pink scar ringing the place where Jiggs bit me, saving all of us. It never faded.
“Don’t you like my scar?”
“I love your scar. Scars are sexy. They’re proof you’ve survived. Lived, even.”
I grinned at him. “Like these?” I lifted my shirt so Brand could see the double line of pink dots from the stitches he’d given me. They never faded, either.
“Those are my favorite.” He ran his finger along the trail, making me shiver.
Then Brand was quiet for a minute. I asked him what he was up to.
“Well, funny thing.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking about how we got off on the wrong foot at first.”
“Oh, yeah, when you tried to kill me. You think we got off on the wrong foot?”
“Okay, we definitely did. So, I hope this makes up for that.” Brand reached behind a concrete planter I have next to the stoop and pulled out a long, flat box tied with a green ribbon.
My eyes flicked from his face to the box and back again. “Is this—?”
Brand gestured at the box. “You won’t know ‘til you open it.”
It was a knife of course, the blade artfully folded and striped in the process of burning off the impurities, the metal from a meteorite. I studied the knife closer.
“This is the actual one from the show, isn’t it?”
“Sure is. No other would do.”
“Damn. Maybe I should have taken the job with DGI. I can’t imagine how much this cost.”
“It wasn’t cheap, yeah. But he owed me a favor so he made up the difference.”
“Wait, what?” Beneath the knife I noticed a handwritten note. I took it out and read it.
Brand –
Good luck with the girl. You’ll need it, asshole.
Just kidding,
Anthony
Brand laughed at me when my jaw dropped.
“Hang on. Are you saying that Bourdain’s one of us? Not a mundane?
“Well, you don’t think a guy can eat all that shit and still be a mundane, do you?”
He had a point.
Brand brushed a stray hair off my shoulder. “I wanted to give it to you on your birthday, but I don’t know when that is.”
“That’s okay. I don’t know when it is, either.”
I’d always counted the day Jonathan set me free from my former life at DGI as my birthday. Maybe it was time to change that. Maybe it was time to let Jonathan – my Jonathan – go. The man I’d met a second time wasn’t him, not really. That man was friends with a different me. He was really hers in the end.
And this was a different Brand from the one he and the other Kelly had known. Just as I was a different Kelly. My own person. With my own choices and my own destiny.
The door swung open and hit me in the back. Amanda staggered a bit. “Hey, Kel! Thought you fell in until I saw you out here. The par-tay is inside. They’re toasting Jessica. Hi, Brand.” She closed the door.
My own people, as crazy and broken and wonderful as they are.
“All right, hey, so what the hell? Happy birthday to me.”
I smiled at the guy who was the icing on my cake as he leaned in to kiss me.
We got back inside in time to see Monique raise her glass to Jessica and she responded by laughing and raising her own. I looked at her modified tattoo and wondered if anyone else noticed the change.
Jessica had opted to remember everything.
“Who would I be otherwise? Someone with false memories, changing my life to match them? Or if my memories were taken away, I’d be naïve again, ready to fall into someone else’s trap. No, thanks. Besides, I don’t want to forget the friends I’ve made.”
Amanda did the work on Jessica’s tattoo. She wove a safety ward into it, now that Jessica was exposed to the supernatural world. If you looked closely, you could see that the two hearts in the top and bottom corners of the playing card now had three swords each piercing them. Amanda took the symbol from the tarot, the three of swords. Upright, the card meant painful separation, sorrow, heartbreak, grief and rejection. But reversed, or upside-down, the card represented releasing pain, optimism and forgiveness. Jessica’s tattoo had one of each, right-side up, and upside-down.
She was still my best bet.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Rebecca Hodgkins is the author of This Dance, These Bones, Flight Risk, and numerous short stories published in fantastic places like Daily Science Fiction. She lives in the Denver Tech Center and may have cast a spell or two, but is not associated with Dragon Gate Industries (as far as we know.) Check out her website.
Books by Rebecca Hodgkins
Flight Risk
This Dance, These Bones
Night Marshal Box Set (includes This Dance, These Bones)
Subhuman Resources (oh, you have that one)
Gary Jonas needs a shorter bio, so let’s just say he writes stuff. Good enough? If you want to waste some time, go to his rarely updated blog. Or don’t.
Books by Gary Jonas
The Jonathan Shade series:
Modern Sorcery
Acheron Highway
Dragon Gate
Anubis Nights
Sunset Specters
Wizard’s Nocturne
Razor Dreams
Vertigo Effect
Club Eternity
Timeless Gods (coming soon)
The Kelly Chan series
Vampire Midnight
Werewolf Samurai
Subhuman Resources (w/Rebecca Hodgkins)
Zombie Rising (w/Rebecca Hodgkins) (coming soon)
The UFO Conspiracy Files series:
Guardians of the Sky
Rogue Alien (maybe?)
Stand-alone novels:
One-Way Ticket to Midnight
Pirates of the Outrigger Rift (w/Bill D. Allen)
Novella:
Night Marshal: A Tale of the Undead West
also available in Night Marshal Box Set (the first three Night Marshal tales in one bundle--includes Night Marshal by Gary Jonas, High Plains Moon by Glenn R. Sixbury, and This Dance, These Bones by Rebecca Hodgkins). The set kicks ass.
Collection:
Quick Shots
Gotta also give a shout-out to the amazing Robin Ludwig who does my covers!
Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design Inc.
www.gobookcoverdesign.com
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