Death Dealers

by M. G. Gallows

  “Right away,” Donnie promised. He hopped the counter, grabbed a slab from the freezer and set it in front of Max. “C’mon man, lunchtime.”

  Max sneered. “I don’t want it.”

  Donnie’s eyes darted from me to Max. “Y’gotta eat. Yeah, it sucks. And your guts hurt ‘cause you took a bite from an old lady full of embalming fluid.”

  Max groaned, and it turned into a growl. “I don’t want it! I want to go home. I want to see Maddie. I wanna get out of here, goddamnit!”

  I looked at Donnie.

  “His ex. From before.”

  “She’s not my ex,” Max snapped. “You make me sit down here. I can’t even see her!”

  Donnie grabbed his shoulders. “Hey man, stay with me. You can’t be spinning your wheels hoping for tread on that action. If she won’t return your calls, you gotta move on, man. There are bigger fish in the sea. Even for zomb-”

  Max shoved him against the counter. “I’m sick of your shit, Donnie!”

  I grabbed Max and gave him another corpse-jolt to the forehead. He bounced off his seat, fell on his butt, and kicked at the ground, letting out a disgruntled cry. After a few moments of wordless muttering, he calmed to his normal, petulant self.

  I knelt. “Eat, Max, ‘cause I’m sick of your crap. If you want to ruin your chance to go topside with permission, that’s your choice, but I’ll bury you up to your neck if you keep this up.”

  His face stretched in a grimace, clenching his fists until the knuckles creaked. I didn’t so much as blink. After a few seconds, he shuddered and relaxed, black tears rolling down his cheeks.

  “You make sure he eats that,” I said to Donnie. “Every ounce. If he doesn’t calm down, he stays with his dirt, field trip or not.”

  “Every bite,” Donnie said. As I walked away, I heard him muttering. “Jesus, Max. I fucking swear if you fuck this up...”

  I rode the elevator to the surface alone and fumed all the way home. By then it was mid-afternoon, and I could feel the weight in my steps as I walked up the front step.

  Something clicked behind me. “Hold it, you bastard.”

  I turned, confused and angry. A woman had a gun aimed at my head, with a look of nervous wrath about her. “Tell me what you’ve done with my brother!”

  EIGHT

  My muscles tensed, but I didn’t panic as the woman waved the gun in my face. It wasn’t the scariest thing I’d faced in the previous twelve hours. My year had been going so well until recently. What the hell happened?

  I inhaled. “I don’t know who-”

  “Don’t lie to me!” Her hands shook. If I couldn’t talk her down, she was liable to splatter my brains across my front door.

  “My name is Alex Fossor,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what is going on?”

  “I was at your trial. I know you’re involved. What did you do with him?”

  I looked past the barrel, and my brain did a backflip. She was gorgeous. Shiny gray eyes like silver mirrors. Thick, curly brown hair that hung off her shoulder. A leather jacket and tailored trousers hugged an hourglass figure you just didn’t see outside of the movies, or some of my more imaginative dreams. I only got a quick glance, I swear.

  Under normal circumstances, I would have remembered seeing her at my trial. But learning the Illuminati was real, run by wizards, and wanted to execute me, was a lot to take in. Still, that meant she was a Society mage. One of the ‘Versed’. Why hold me at gunpoint?

  “What’s your brother’s name?” I asked.

  Her brow furrowed. “Jesse.”

  “Last name?”

  “Kendall. But he doesn’t use it.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  Her frown deepened, but the confusion relaxed her grip on the gun. “He’s your height, gray eyes and brown hair like mine. Crooked nose from a fight years back.”

  “Okay. I don’t know anyone by that description, but do you mind if we go inside?”

  She flinched. “I’m not interested in what you want. I came to find my brother. Start talking!”

  Damn. Even her voice was attractive. I detected a soft London accent, and a lyrical undertone, like every word was on the cusp of a song, despite her agitation.

  “I gave you one. Whether it’s the answer you want doesn’t matter, ‘cause it’s the truth and I’m too tired to lie right now. I’m gonna open my door. We can talk somewhere warm, eh?”

  I stepped into my house, ignoring her as she tripped over a response. I walked into the kitchen and leaned against the counter, waiting. She took a hesitant step into my home, checking her corners like a cop.

  “You look hilarious,” I said with a smirk.

  She huffed, then relaxed her shoulders and shut the door behind her. “I could have shot you.”

  “That would fix a lot of my problems right now. Why don’t you sit and tell me what’s going on? Maybe we can help each other.”

  She perched on the edge of my couch, holding the gun in her lap. “My name is Jocelyn. I’m trying to find my brother. I-I think he’s in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked.

  She gave me a wounded look. “The kind that gets people killed.” The word turned into a sob and she buried her face in her gloved hands.

  I let her cry for a minute or two. She let it all out in one go, removing her gloves and opening her jacket to reveal a plunging neckline. I tried not to watch as she tugged a kerchief from her cleavage—yes, really—and dabbed her face dry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “God, this is embarrassing.”

  I shrugged. “Crying is good. Relieves stress. A good orgasm would do the same, but I promised my mom I’d get married first.”

  Jocelyn snorted, grimacing the way women do when they’re both amused and mortified by the opposite sex.

  “Laughter works, too,” I offered. “How about some coffee? Tea?”

  “Coffee, please. Black as you can make it.”

  I took my time grinding the beans and searched for a suitable mug while she composed herself. I didn’t have any ‘missing sibling’ mugs, so I settled for ‘How I Like My Men.’

  I buy my stuff at garage sales and thrift stores. Sue me.

  I set the cup on the coffee table and slid it within reach, then retreated to the far end of my couch. “Why don’t you start from the top?”

  Her eyes wavered as she took a sip. “Bloody hell, that’s good.” She put the gun on her lap and held the mug in both hands.

  “Is that thing legal?”

  “More than that antique I saw on your fridge,” she smirked.

  Huh. Good eye on her. “It’s an heirloom. I don’t like guns.”

  “Hm. Being a Necrourge, I imagine you don’t need a gun to throw some pretty nasty darkness at people.”

  I shrugged. “Eh, I don’t like using it on the living. The last guy I hexed, it went a little overboard. Might have trouble sleeping for a while.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Er, a cop. I think he was trying to goad me into confessing something. So I pulled his fear trigger.”

  “Oh yeah? Let’s hear.”

  I frowned. “You want to hear?”

  “I’m a Fonourge. A voice mage. I know how to protect myself from mental influence.”

  I smirked. “That Society naming convention is a little odd. Why not ‘fonomancer’?”

  “Because it’s inaccurate,” she said.

  “Well, I’m sticking with necromancer, because I talk to the dead.” I rolled my eyes, breathed out some magic fog and said, “Boo.”

  It wasn’t a potent effort. My heart wasn’t in it to terrify her, and I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’d made with the cop. Jocelyn leaned back, eyes wide, and giggled.

  “That’s a tingler! Not bad, but you put a bit too much personal menace in it. You want them scared, but not scared of you, know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  She chewed on her lip. “Think of it like a dream. In a dream, you feel a we
ird emotion and your brain conjures all kinds of scenarios to explain it. Fear, sex, the point is to make the emotion first, and let the target create the cause. Otherwise they know you’re the source of their fear.”

  “I think that’s how it works for me. Necromancy is predatory.”

  She pursed her lips in thought. “That explains the shivers. I can’t do it that way. For me, playing with someone’s mind is like playing a harp. Nice and gentle. Lemme show you.” She licked her lips and flashed her eyelashes. “Why not take off your shirt?”

  The words flowed off her tongue and cupped certain parts of my anatomy. The idea hit me like inspiration, or an epiphany. It was hot out and I had nothing to hide. The next thing I knew, I was topless, flexing a little, and pondering the idea of skin-on-skin contact.

  The sensation faded a second later, and I felt a little stupid, like I’d poured coffee on my morning cereal in a half-awake daze.

  Jocelyn looked on with a grin. “See? You don’t know where that came from.”

  “Pavlov’s dogs,” I said. “But I can’t do sexy.”

  She hooked one leg over the other. “I dunno. A bit pale, but you work out.”

  I tugged my shirt back on, conscious of the heat in my cheeks. It didn’t escape my mind that she had been pointing a gun at me ten minutes ago. But there we were, trading banter.

  “I think that’s enough wizard flirting for today.”

  Her smile flattened out. “Sorry. I don’t meet a lot of the Versed casually. My mentor was all business. It’s kind of nice to talk shop and not feel I’m being talked down to.”

  “Yeah.” It was nice. Most of my life, I’d lived two identities, presenting myself as normal to others and hiding the truth for their sake and my own. It had made life kind of lonely.

  Jocelyn sipped her coffee. “Please, Alex, tell me what you know. I’ve been chasing echoes for months. I talked to the Sheriff, but he doesn’t believe my brother is here. I know he is. I think he’s involved in the boy’s death.”

  I sat up. “He’s the necromancer?”

  She nodded. “We only ever had each other. It wasn’t easy, but I, well, my magic helped. At first it was petty stuff, you know? Talk a guy into handing over a few bucks here and there. As I got stronger, I moved on to bigger things. I had a little flock of well-to-do gents back home.”

  My left eyebrow crooked. “A magic sugarbaby?”

  She winced. “I’d like to think I didn’t stoop that low. Nothing physical. But if I sang them a lullaby, they’d wake the next morning convinced they’ve had the best sex of their lives. I was making a few grand off each of them a month, and I never had to take off my shirt.”

  “So how does Jesse come into this?”

  “He’s my twin, older by a few minutes. He always wanted to be the one taking care of us, even when I had a good thing going. I think he resented my abilities, or what I did with them, but his only ever gave us trouble. Every Versed we met treated him like he was diseased.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I know how that feels.”

  “When the Society refused him a mentor, he went looking for one outside of their reach. Do you know what a hedge witch is?”

  “Yeah. I traveled with a clan for almost five years, but he isn’t likely to find a mentor among them, either. They don’t like necromancers any more than the Society does.”

  Jocelyn nodded. “I haven’t heard from him in two years. No letters, no phone calls. Then some contacts said they had seen him in Haiti almost a year ago. The mages there are independent of the Society, ingrained in the Vodou faith, something that skirts the Edicts. But they’ve been losing influence, I hear some have been making overtures to join the Society. Others broke with the faith and went looking for other ways to gain power.”

  I saw the connection. “Stig?”

  She nodded. “They practice alchemy forbidden by the Edicts, pretty dangerous stuff in the wrong hands.”

  “I don’t imagine it made them very popular with the Vodou community?”

  “No. Our contact in Port-au-Prince is a houngan priest named Papa Williams. He and his associates rejected getting into the drug trade. But some of their Versed went rogue. A man named Samuel Kincaid founded a group called the Brothers Midnight, and they’re operating in the States.”

  “Here in the city.”

  “Yes, and they were seen with someone matching Jesse’s description.”

  “You believe this ‘Papa Williams’?”

  “I want to say ‘no’, but when we were teens, we did some unsavory things to survive.” She sighed and put her head in her hands. “I thought you were with them. You were my first lead in months.”

  The Brothers Midnight. I had a name for the group fighting the Lincoln Street Mambas. I had no reason to disbelieve Jocelyn’s story. She’d admitted a lot, and her concern for her brother seemed genuine. Flirting aside, I didn’t see an ulterior motive. Instead, she just looked tired. On the verge of despair. If she could be honest, I could be honest.

  “I do some work for a black marketeer, he pays me to clean crime scenes.”

  Her brow twitched into a frown.

  “Yeah. Unsavory things, like you said. But two nights ago, I helped a few members of the Lincoln Street Mambas dispose of a body. One of them said the dead guy was Haitian.”

  Jocelyn sat up. “Go on.”

  “Then last night, they called again. The Mambas wanted me to dispose of one of their own. The Haitians—these Brothers Midnight—had overdosed him on Stig. I was smuggling him out of the area when the police got me.”

  She hugged her arms. “Would the Mambas know where the Brothers Midnight are hiding?”

  I shook my head. “If they did, they wouldn’t be on the defensive. And if they’ve found the body I was trying to smuggle, the Mambas will be out for blood.”

  Like mine, I thought.

  Jocelyn nodded. “They’d stretch their lines thin. Between the Brothers and the cops, they’ll be exposed.”

  “They already are. And now the Brothers have that body. They could leave it wherever they wanted.”

  Jocelyn stood. “Thank you.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To talk to the Mambas. See if they can point me to the Brothers.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” I jumped to my feet. “You can’t do that.”

  She glared at me. “I don’t have a choice. If my brother had a part in murdering an Untold…”

  “I know. But if the Brothers have the body, Lincoln Street could already be a warzone.”

  “I can handle myself. I’m very persuasive.”

  “It’s not that easy. Yeah, you could get a few boys talking, but if they see you coming onto their turf while they’re busy fighting a street war? They’ll shoot first, ask questions later.”

  Jocelyn folded her arms under her chest. “Assuming you’re right, what do you suggest I do?”

  “Let me talk to some people I know. Maybe they can point us to the Brothers without getting shot at.”

  “What’s your stake in this? What are you getting out of it?”

  I sighed. “I’ve already got a bullseye on me thanks to your bro- thanks to the Brothers. I have to point Sheriff Agni at the real culprit, or this hex in my chest goes off.”

  Her gray eyes darkened. “I’m going to find my brother. I won’t hand him over to the Society if it means they’ll kill him.”

  “We don’t know he killed Josh.”

  She chewed on her lip. “I don’t know.”

  “Please. Let me help, like you asked.”

  She stared at me for a moment, then a business card appeared in her hand with a flick of her wrist. It only had a phone number etched on it in glossy black numbers. “Okay, Alex. Call me the minute you find something.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, no later.”

  “Tomorrow then.” She offered an apologetic smile. “Thank you, Alex. I’m sorry I drew a gun on you.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t pull the trigger.”

 
; The sway of her hips drew my eye as she walked to a spotless, yellow European speedster. It was fast as it was expensive-looking, departing Sutcliffe with a hum of a high-performance engine.

  With her looks and talents, I had a pretty good idea how she could afford it. By day she dressed to the nines, hanging off the arms of billionaires at public events. By night, she whispered sweet magical nothings in their ears, and turned them into melted butter with loose wallets.

  And I hacked up corpses to pay my bills.

  My gut told me she was sincere. She wanted to find Jesse, but that meant going through the Brothers Midnight. They had to have at least one or two power-hitters, if they could shield themselves from the Society. And they were using magic to make drugs. Anyone could cook coke or meth, so there had to be more to Stig than just getting customers hooked.

  I thought about Josh’s body, saturated with necromancy. But for what reason?

  I tucked the card into my pocket and went inside to call Piotr. One way or the other, I knew I’d get my answer.

  NINE

  I grabbed my burner phone off the kitchen counter and dialed Piotr’s number. His voicemail answered.

  “I’m out of office. Leave a message.”

  Piotr wasn’t the type to ignore calls, and he seemed to live out of his box truck. So either he was lying low, or he was dead.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Call when you can.”

  I considered a nap, but I didn’t want to miss his call. So I cleaned my place. Did my laundry, cooked a quick dinner of eggs and salad, and a dozen other tasks I had neglected over the past few days.

  It wasn’t productive for my problem, but I needed a taste of routine to clear my head. When you feel overwhelmed, it can take the edge off if you exercise some mundane chores. It restored that feeling of control over my life I had lost.

  I think of myself as a boring person, ominous criminal activities aside. Also the necromancy. But I was a boring necromancer. I didn’t make my lair in a mausoleum, or shun human contact, or murder people in the night to join my undead army. I didn’t cavort with vampires or stitch body parts together to craft Frankenstein’s monster.