Part-Time Gods

by Rachel Aaron

  It had been several days since I’d backdrafted all of that roaring Gnarls magic into Kauffman’s face, and my casting muscles still ached from it. I could move magic if I really had to, but even the smallest spells felt like trying to walk on a sprained leg. I couldn’t afford to go to a doctor, but everything I’d read on the internet said my magic would heal if I left it alone, so I’d been avoiding casting whenever possible. You’d think that’d be more of a liability given how much magic my job usually required, but working with a partner had a lot of upsides I hadn’t anticipated. Nik’s ability to lift pretty much anything and bash open doors without the aid of magic was a huge plus when your casting was laid up.

  But while his ability to stop bullets was a definite plus, Nik’s armor wouldn’t do much against an angry former magic shop owner with a quick casting circle. That required finesse, so I gently pushed him aside and pulled my goggles down over my face to get a better look inside the shop. When Sibyl’s density scanner didn’t turn up any human-shaped traps lying in wait for us, I stepped back to give my cameras a clear shot of the shop’s street address.

  “Ready when you are, Sibyl.”

  “I’m always ready,” my AI said proudly as the red recording light appeared in the corner of my augmented-reality vision. “This is the video log for College Walk Commercial District Unit 4733, Detroit Free Zone Skyways Block 74, Receipt #145443. Cleaner IDs: Nikola Kos and Opal Yong-ae. Do you verify?”

  I flipped my camera to selfie mode. “This is Opal Yong-ae, and I verify.” I smiled at my own image before turning the camera on Nik, who heaved a long, put-upon sigh.

  “Do we have to do this every single time? You know no one in the Cleaning Office checks these things.”

  I pushed up my goggles so he could see my glare, and he sighed again. “This is Nikola Kos, and I verify.”

  Nodding approvingly, I turned my camera back on the door. “Proceeding with occupant notification.”

  This was usually where I knocked and announced myself, but Nik beat me to the punch. “Cleaner!” he bellowed, banging on the glass so hard I was afraid it would shatter. “You’re behind on your rent, Collections can’t reach you, etcetera. We bought your stuff at auction this morning, so we’re coming in. Yell if you’ve got a problem with that, because shooting at us will end real bad for you.”

  “Super professional,” Sibyl grumbled.

  “Good enough for me,” I said, pushing my goggles back up on my head as Nik fit his Master Key into the shop’s lock. “Unit has no reply. Proceeding with reclamation. Look out for wards!”

  That last bit was for Nik, but he’d already opened the door. I winced as he stepped inside, bracing my poor, aching magic against whatever alarm or other nastiness was certain to go off. Even if the security wards had degraded, it was still a sealed room packed with magical stuff. There was bound to be a shock wave of some sort, but I didn’t actually feel a thing. Now that it was blowing past me, the air from inside the shop actually felt markedly less magical than the air outside. It also smelled absolutely horrendous.

  “Ugh!” I said, covering my face with my hand. “What is that? It smells like rotten hot dogs.”

  “It is pretty thick,” Nik said with the iron stoicism of a seasoned Cleaner.

  I was pretty seasoned myself, but that didn’t mean I was willing to expose my nose to torture when it wasn’t absolutely necessary. I had my rebreather out of my bag and over my face in three seconds flat, pulling the strap so tight that my cheeks bulged out around it. “Did something die?” I asked nervously, remembering the last stinky apartment I’d had.

  Nik scowled. “Maybe. Doesn’t smell like one of the usual suspects, though. And nothing looks chewed up.”

  That was a good point. Animals who got trapped inside units typically tore the place to shreds before they gave up the foul-smelling ghost, but as we’d seen from outside, the shop looked great. Neat, orderly, not even dusty. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said this place had been closed for the night, not two months. The smell was the only sign something was off, that and the fact that it still felt like there wasn’t a drop of magic in the whole place.

  That was starting to seriously freak me out. Even after months on the shelves, this much magical merchandise crammed together should have been vibrating like a tuning fork. The hum was part of the magic store experience, but despite the piles of inventory I could clearly see in front of us, I didn’t feel a thing. Maybe it was just my magic acting out, but I would have sworn the place was dead.

  Confused and on edge, I reached into the basket by the door to pick up one of the brightly colored packages exuberantly labeled as “All Natural Chimera Feather Casting Enhancers.” Before my hand could make it all the way around the vacuum-sealed tube of supposedly magical feathers, though, my fingers bumped into something soft and wiggly.

  I snatched my hand back with a scream so sharp and loud that Nik pulled his gun. “What?” he demanded.

  I couldn’t answer. I was too busy scanning the display bin for whatever it was I’d just touched. Probably a rat. I was praying it was a normal rat and not one of the city’s magical varieties since I wasn’t keen on getting third-degree burns today, but despite what I knew I’d felt, I didn’t see anything in the basket except packets of feathers. They didn’t even have dust on them. Everything was clean, actually. The basket, shelves, and floor were all spotless. There was no grime or fur or rat pellets or anything you’d expect from a place that had been sealed up for eight weeks and stank like a sewer.

  Stomach sinking, I pulled my goggles back down over my eyes. “Sibyl,” I said quietly, propping the shop’s door open behind me with my boot in case I had to make a quick exit. “Show me heat vision.”

  The view through my goggles flickered as my AI obeyed, overlaying a projected shot from my thermographic filter on top of my normal cameras. Sure enough, now that I was looking at heat instead of just light, I could see the too-clean shop wasn’t actually clean at all. Every surface was covered with thousands of oblong shapes that stood out bright yellow and red against the cold blue background. They were all over the basket I’d just reached into, wiggling together in a seething mass that looked straight out of a horror movie.

  Cursing loudly, I dug into my work bag for the rubber-and-steel-mesh gloves I really should have been wearing from the start. Hands properly protected this time, I reached back into the basket to grab one of the bigger glowing shapes. The thing was nearly as long as my hand when I finally pulled it free of the cluster, slug-like in shape and soft as a jelly-filled condom. It wiggled like crazy when I squeezed it, but while it looked like a bright purple and red sausage against the cool rubber of my glove in my thermographic vision, I couldn’t see a thing when I switched back to my normal cameras. It didn’t make any sounds, either. Or, more accurately, it didn’t make a sound that I could hear. Given how it was thrashing, I was sure it was screaming its little head off, wherever its head happened to be. Being a mere mortal, though, I couldn’t pick that up. I couldn’t see so much as an ooze trail when I slid my goggles back up on my hair, either, even though I knew I was looking right at it.

  “What’s going on?” Nik asked, coming over to peer at my seemingly empty hand.

  “The last thing we need,” I muttered, opening my fist to drop the silently screaming creature back into the wiggling pile of its brethren. “This whole place is infested with dream slugs.”

  “Infested with what?”

  “Dream slugs,” I repeated furiously. “Semi-reality carrion feeders who thrive on residual magic.”

  “Okay,” Nik said slowly, putting up his gun. “Say that again, but in a way I can understand this time.”

  “They’re like termites,” I explained. “Except they’re invisible and they eat magic.”

  Nik looked alarmed at that last part. “Are they dangerous?”

  “Not to living things,” I said, shaking my head. “They’re scavengers who eat the residual mana left in the corpses, us
ually those of magical animals, which explains why this place felt so dead. Little bastards ate the entire stock!”

  Now Nik just looked confused. “But the shelves are still full.”

  “They didn’t eat the physical objects,” I explained. “Just the magic inside them. Look.”

  I knocked the slugs aside and grabbed a package of casting chalk. “All the stuff they sell in shops like this has a bit of magic inside it. It’s not usually enough to help power the spell; it just acts as a bumper, something you can feel while casting. You don’t actually need a bumper, of course. Technically, you can draw a circle or write out spellwork with anything, but the bit of magic inside casting markers and chalk and so forth makes it way easier to stay inside the lines you put down for your spell. Same goes for spell-ready paper and ward tape and all the other stuff people have come up with to make casting more convenient. It’s all magically charged. That’s what makes it valuable, and those little slimeballs have eaten it all up! They didn’t even have to break the packaging. They just sat on top of the stock and slurped. And since they’re invisible, we had no way of knowing the place was ruined before we bid! Now we’re out ten grand for a bunch of useless crap!”

  I was shouting by the time I finished. I knew I sounded hysterical, but I couldn’t help it. Nik and I had bought a new unit every single day this week—two on Wednesday—and we’d yet to turn a profit. This was supposed to be our jackpot, but now it looked like I’d locked in our biggest loss yet. We couldn’t even sell the sucked-down casting markers as normal markers because they were covered in dream slug poop. That was why this place smelled so bad. The slugs hadn’t just been munching on the magical goods. They’d also been pooping all over the place while they ate. The excrement was just as invisible as the animals that had made it, but now that I knew what to search for, I could feel the sticky, caked-on mess all over the shelves and the floor every time I put my hand down. This whole damn place was a write-off, but we couldn’t do that because we were still contractually obligated to clean it out so the city could rent the shop to a new tenant. It might take days to get this place clean enough for the DFZ to accept it. Days we’d never get paid for. I couldn’t even calculate how much this was going to cost us.

  And it was all my fault.

  “It’s not your fault,” Nik said sharply, reading the thought right off my face. “We both looked at the same picture and agreed to bid. You couldn’t have known.”

  “That’s not what I’m mad about,” I said, my voice desperate. “I don’t blame myself for not seeing invisible slugs, but do you know what the chances are of finding a dream slug infestation in the DFZ?”

  “No,” Nik said. “But I didn’t even know what a dream slug was before you told me, so I’m guessing low.”

  “It’s zero!” I cried. “Because they don’t live here! They’re native to sub-Saharan Africa. The only reason I know about them is because I watched a ton of cryptozoology nature shows as a kid. There shouldn’t even be dream slugs in this hemisphere, and yet somehow an entire colony just happened to end up trapped inside our unit.”

  I reached out to grab him before I remembered I was wearing gloves covered in invisible slug slime. “Don’t you see?” I said, clenching my filthy hands into fists instead. “It’s my curse! My dad’s magic can’t sabotage me directly now that you’re doing all our buying, so it’s finding new ways to keep me from making money. This is all my fault!”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Nik said dismissively. “We only bought this unit this morning. These slugs have probably been here for weeks. How could a curse set that up?”

  “Probably the same way it’s been setting me up to buy bad units for the last six months,” I replied angrily. “I don’t know how it works! Dad never taught me the specifics of dragon magic because I’m not actually his daughter hatched from an egg, but you know as well as I do that something’s going on. We’re both experienced Cleaners, and we’ve been working our butts off all week, but we still haven’t made a profit. Now we’re ten grand in the hole!”

  Nik shrugged. “Cleaning’s an up-and-down business.”

  “Not like this!”

  “Not all bad luck is magical, you know,” he said stubbornly. “I get that you’re cursed, but you’ve been blaming it for everything since you learned it was on you. You even said it caused my flat tire two days ago.”

  “That was totally the curse!” I cried. “I looked at that tire, and there was no hole. You got a flat from nothing, and it just happened to make us miss the best deal of the night!”

  I’d found out later that DeSantos had been planning to hire Nik and me to help him with a glut of self-storage lockers. It would have been a straight-up hourly wage, guaranteed money, but we’d been late, so he’d given the job to someone else. That sounded like pretty obvious curse-work to me, but when I said as much to Nik, he set his jaw.

  “Opal, it’s fine. Bad things happen. Just let it go.”

  It was not fine and I was not going to just let it go. I hadn’t told Nik yet, but one of the first things I’d done with the small amount of money he’d paid me after selling what we had managed to salvage—after taking Sibyl to a hacker to get my dad’s spyware out, of course—was go to a curse breaker. I’d actually tried two, but they’d both told me the same thing: only dragons could remove dragon curses.

  In hindsight, I supposed that should have been obvious. Humans couldn’t even see the damn thing unless I told them it was there. Dragons could see it just fine, though, and that put me in a real bind. Just like the Heartstriker who’d first informed me that I was cursed, any dragon I went to would instantly know that I was under Yong’s magic, and while there were plenty of dragons who’d love to stick it to the Dragon of Korea by setting me free, they weren’t the sort I wanted to be in debt to. Being cursed by my dad sucked, but at least he wouldn’t kill me. There was no guarantee of that with another dragon, especially one who hated my dad enough to directly defy him. If I couldn’t get this stupid thing off, though, my life was only going to get worse.

  “It’s not so bad now, you know,” Sibyl whispered in my earpiece. “I know you aren’t raking it in with Nik like you’d hoped, but at least you’ve stopped running a loss. That’s better than you were doing by yourself.”

  “Say that after we figure out how much this job is going to cost us,” I grumbled.

  “Now you’re just being pessimistic,” my AI scolded. “Sure, the merchandise is ruined, but the rest of the shop is still here. There’s the shelving and the register and all kinds of useful retail equipment left. You can always sell that, right?”

  Not if it was covered in slug shit.

  Sibyl tsked at my negativity, which should have enraged me since I hadn’t said it out loud this time. But I was too depressed to even care that she was reading my mind anymore. I was sinking down on the shop’s front stair to brood about it when Nik caught my shoulder and dragged me back up.

  “No time for that,” he said, shoving a black plastic trash bag into my hands. “This place isn’t a write-off yet. There could still be something good in the back. Maybe the previous owner left his safe or something.”

  That was so ridiculously hopeful, I actually started to laugh. “Since when are you the optimist?”

  “I’m not an optimist,” Nik said, pulling off his armored coat and hanging it over the railing in front of the shop, safely away from the slug slime. “I’m a realist, and the reality is we can’t do anything about the stuff that’s already ruined. Our best bet is to get this done as quickly as possible and move on to the next job. Now.” He pointed at my trash bag. “You’re the one who can see the slugs, so you’re on roundup duty. I’ll pull the shelving and the register. Who knows? Maybe there’s something we can save.”

  “Maybe,” I said, but I couldn’t even fake being hopeful. Much as I wanted to mope, though, Nik was right. Wasting time would only deepen our losses and give my dad an even bigger win, so I forced myself to follow Nik back into the
shop, huffing through my rebreather to avoid the rotten-hot-dog smell as I started grabbing the wiggly, slippery slugs off the ground and shoving them into my trash bag, stubbornly telling myself with each slimy lump I removed that things could only go up from here.

  ***

  Surprise, surprise, they did not.

  After the last six months, you’d think I’d be used to disappointment, but today was a new low even by my rock-bottom standards. It wasn’t just that I was shuffling around picking up disgusting lumps of goo that wiggled like crazy and smelled like rancid lard. It was that I had to pick them off lovely handcrafted boxes with labels that said stuff like “Single Origin Kappa Water” and “Fair Trade Screaming Mandrake.” Just reading all that fancy nonsense made me want to scream, because I’d been right. This place should have been a gold mine. Some of the packages I was picking slugs off had price tags in the thousands, but the stupid dream slugs had sucked them dry. Now all that wonderful product was just a bunch of bulky, heavy trash that smelled like death, but the real insult was the slugs.

  You’d think it’d be easy to round up something with no eyes that didn’t move, but you would be wrong. Even with my thermographics to help me see them, catching the dream slugs was disgusting, frustrating work. No matter how carefully I piled them into my trash bag, they always found a way to ooze back out again. I eventually caught one phasing right through the plastic, which made me wonder how all the slugs had ended up trapped in here in the first place. Or maybe they hadn’t been trapped at all. Maybe they’d just stayed for the food.

  Whatever the reason, it took me an hour to bag them all up. I’d planned to toss them in the building’s dumpster, but after seeing their escape skills, tossing them into an open bin felt like inviting disaster. Also, they stank. I didn’t want to be around that even with my rebreather, so I ended up dragging each bag back around to the front of the building and dumping it down the trash chute. Hopefully into the incinerator, though I was satisfied with “no longer in my sight.” Once I’d chucked the last bag down the hole, I shook the slug slime off my gloves as best I could and went to see how much progress Nik had made.