Dead Man in a Ditch

by Luke Arnold

  Still, I was no scientist. Just because something is strange, it doesn’t mean someone’s unlocked the secret that makes magic flow again. And even if they did, I certainly wasn’t going to be the first one to say it.

  “Seen anything like this before?” I asked.

  Both of them shook their heads.

  “Not for a long time,” said Simms. “The rest of the force will be here soon. Anything else you want to tell us before they let their imaginations run wild?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how it’s related but look in here.”

  I opened up the bin. The two stoic police officers peered inside and their faces cracked like china plates on a concrete floor.

  The bin was full of little bodies. More than twenty of them. They were tiny: between one to two feet tall, and all skinny and stiff.

  They were the bodies of Faeries. All dead. Dried up and devoid of magic.

  “Oh God.” Richie stumbled out the back door. Simms stared into the abyss.

  “What did he do to them?” she asked.

  She was talking about their faces. Finding a dumpster of Fae bodies would be bad enough, but they’d also had their heads split open. Someone had ripped open their faces, done something to their insides, and thrown the bodies in the trash when they were finished.

  Simms slammed the lid back down. I sucked on another Clayfield. Richie stayed outside swearing.

  There were plenty of magical creatures in the world but Faeries were different. In a way, they were magic. Pure pieces of the impossible that walked among us. They were limitless in their variety: Brownies, Imps, Leprechauns, Bogarts and Sprites, but when the Coda came, they were identical in their suffering. They froze up, just like the great river itself, and the life faded from their bodies.

  Even in a steel-built city like Sunder, away from the forests, you could feel the empty space they’d once filled. I thought the tragedy of the Faeries was that you didn’t see them anymore. It turns out that was a better feeling than finding a pile of their lifeless bodies desecrated and thrown into a dumpster.

  Eventually Simms asked, “Do you know why there were…?” She waved a hand over her face.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  We were quiet again for a while. Richie came back in.

  “Was this yours?” he asked, wiping his shoes.

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “No, I get it.”

  Simms wiped her eyes.

  “When the rest of the team get here, I’m going to be hard on you, like the old days. I’ll ask you why you were snooping around and threaten to bring you downtown if you don’t tell me who you’re working for. You know the routine.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m sorry, Fetch. I’m sure you’re as shaken as I am but the Mayor is already interfering in this case, asking for updates on whatever we find. We need to keep you isolated, free, and—”

  The front door opened and the first of them arrived. Ten minutes later, every beat cop, detective, constable and traffic warden had filed in to get a look at the second miraculous kill of the day. Simms, Richie and I stuck to our plan, acting out the play we’d performed so many times before.

  I was being a right smart-ass. It was more fun when I knew I wasn’t actually going to get dragged downtown for it. I had to pull back my performance when I felt like Simms had stopped pretending to be annoyed and was actually pissed for real. With a warning to keep my mouth shut and not leave town, they eventually kicked me out of there. I was happy to go. I wanted to be as far away from that dumpster of broken bodies as possible.

  The image of the Fae was burned into my mind. It was all too sad. Too tragic. Too familiar. My stomach swirled with every step and I couldn’t work out if I was angry, afraid or about to weep.

  But I knew exactly where I needed to go next.

  9

  I went past my office to drop off the Clayfields and the sap. I washed my face and brushed the burnt hair from my head. I looked in the mirror and found solace in the fact that only one of my eyebrows had been vaporized.

  I dusted myself off. Used some mouthwash. I even put on a clean shirt.

  As if it mattered. As if I wasn’t going out to see a girl who hadn’t had a thought in her head in six years.

  I filled a pewter flask with whiskey, tucked it into my coat and made my way uptown.

  Everything was perfect.

  The gate to the mansion was closed and there weren’t any footprints in the snow. The door was shut. The windows weren’t broken. The roof hadn’t caved in.

  I climbed the stone steps, careful not to slip on the puddles that had turned to ice, and took the key from my pocket. I used to leave it under a pot on the front porch. It hadn’t felt right to take anything away back then. Now, this place was all mine.

  The new key slipped into the new lock and I pushed open the door that I’d recently reinforced. I stepped inside and quickly closed the door to shut out the wind. It was quiet. The air was almost completely still, but not quite. There was a breeze coming from somewhere above: a gap, up on the second floor, that I hadn’t fixed yet. I’d already spent a solid week patching holes, covering windows and filling cracks. The house had been left to rot after the Coda and I was the first person to try to get it back in shape. There was always more work to be done but I was happy to do it. For her. For the woman who was waiting on her knees in the middle of the room.

  Amari was a Wood Nymph. A Forest Sprite. Larger than the Fae back at the pharmacy but just as precious. Once upon a time, she’d been the most magical thing in the world. You can keep your sunsets, shooting stars and babies’ laughter. All those birthday-card ideas of what makes life worth living. I’d trade them all if she could say a single word again.

  Amari hadn’t moved a muscle in six years. She was stuck in place. Turned to wood. Splintered and cracked. But she was safe. I’d made sure of that. I’d fixed the tiles on the roof and laid canvas in the ceiling before the snow came. I’d even cleared away the vines that had once been wrapped around her body. Unwound them from her waist, snipped them from her limbs and peeled them off the floor with more care than I’d ever put into anything. I’d taken off that rotten nurse’s uniform. Cleaned her of bugs and dust. Scraped the moss from her legs and the dirt from under her knees.

  She was in one piece, relatively speaking. The major threats to her body had been eliminated. She was still delicate. Too delicate to touch unless absolutely necessary. Even if all I wanted to do was put a hand on her cheek and remember what it was like when it was warm, it wasn’t worth the risk.

  She was wearing a new uniform. Just like the old one, but clean. I’d done everything that I could. More than was necessary. Because none of it was necessary. None of it mattered because she was gone. It was just her body, abandoned and empty, and there was nothing I could do to bring her back.

  That’s what I told myself. Over and over. It’s what I told every lost soul who stumbled to my door with an idea of going back to a time when the best things in life weren’t broken. I kept saying it till I almost believed it.

  But then, there was Rye.

  I’d been kicked around a basement floor by a three-hundred-year-old Vampire who shouldn’t have had the strength to get out of bed. Some kind of power had slipped back into his body and if it could happen to him, then why couldn’t it happen to her?

  That’s why I’d been keeping her safe. Because what would be the point of any of it if we fixed the world for everyone but Amarita Quay?

  I sat down in front of her. The whites of her eyes were pale wood. Her pupils slightly darker but just as still. I took out my flask and drank a toast to her beautiful face and the beautiful soul that had vanished from behind it.

  I’d seen something evil in the drug store that day. Some kind of unimaginable cruelty. But maybe I’d seen magic. Maybe it wasn’t all lost after all. Maybe I was right to keep her safe. Forever.

  Just in case.

  10

  Baxter Thatch was a one-of-a-ki
nd Demon: Minister of Education and History, museum curator, sometimes friend, occasional enemy, an ageless expert on a variety of magical phenomena, and technically neither male nor female. Their magical expertise came not from performing magic, but by witnessing and studying its use throughout the centuries.

  Baxter had been working tirelessly to get Sunder City back on its feet. I never knew where I was going to find them, so it was always best to call ahead to the House of Ministers. This time, they informed me that Baxter was over at the Sunder City Power Plant because, apparently, “The fucking thing is on fire again.”

  The power plant was built on the north-eastern side of the city, tucked behind a hillside like the city was ashamed of its presence. That was fair enough: the plant was ugly, dangerous and unreliable. Mortales, the Human-owned electronics company, constructed it in a rush after the Coda killed the fires. It was a sad replacement for the eternal flames that had founded the city. The plant couldn’t produce enough energy to put the factories back in production or even keep the lamps lit on Main Street. It got the phones going and kept the lights on in most homes most nights of the week but if you pushed it too hard it was likely to shit itself.

  There were always plans to fix it up but none of them ever eventuated. Every year, the Mayor talked about building more, but that never happened either. All the effort went on repairing the parts that broke or cutting down on the number of accidents, as the steam engine produced fatalities more reliably than it produced power.

  The plant was pumping out even more smoke than usual, blackening the already dark sky, and I could smell the building before I could see it.

  All the workers were standing on the street as members of the fire brigade ran in and out of the building carrying hoses and buckets of snow. The fire looked like it was almost under control and the crowd seemed more frustrated than panicked. It would likely be a day or two before the plant was up and running again, but every Sunder local had learned to keep a healthy supply of candles on hand.

  It was a tired routine, nothing worth writing to the papers about. The plant workers were already making light of the situation and planning how to spend their time off. Baxter Thatch was the only one who looked truly depressed.

  Baxter’s body was a huge, red and black, seemingly indestructible piece of marble topped with two huge horns. When the Coda happened, nothing about Baxter changed at all. That led some, including Baxter themselves, to worry that they had never actually been part of the magic.

  That might be why Baxter worked so hard. They dedicated their days to helping whoever they could. First as a traveler, now as a minister, they always managed to keep up an air of positivity and confidence.

  Until now.

  Baxter was across the road, sitting on a rock, with their head in their hands. Baxter’s typically smooth suit was a crumpled mess. The tie that was usually on their neck had been tossed to the ground. I’d never seen Baxter emotional. Despondent maybe. Disappointed, sure. But nothing like this, especially in public.

  “Something wrong, Bax?”

  Baxter raised their eyebrows, pushing them into the red-and-black horns on their head.

  “Only everything.”

  Damn. Baxter had been around for an eternity and something had finally broken them. I took a seat on the rock, pulled out the flask and passed it over.

  “It’s pointless,” they said, after a sip. “Without the fires or the factories, this place is nothing. Yet people keep coming here. Not because of what it is. Not even what it was. But because of what it was once supposed to be. They’re coming in search of a story.”

  “Not all the stories were that welcoming.”

  They scoffed and passed back the flask.

  “Sure, there was crime and poverty before the Coda. But there was balance. There was a reason to wade through the mud and pickpockets and the brown fucking snow. But now?”

  Baxter sat back and looked at the sky. I took a gulp, and the lip of the flask smelled smoky.

  “I had hope, Fetch. I saw a chance to make something happen here again. Not this…” Baxter waved vaguely to the smoldering plant across the street. “This bullshit. But real progress. Industry. Jobs. Now, it’s gone.”

  “Because of this? It was just a little fire.”

  Baxter raised their hands and gestured to a big ball of nothing.

  “He died!”

  I looked back to the smoldering plant and the lazy firefighters strolling in and out. Nobody else was acting like there’s been a fatality.

  “Who?”

  “The first person to come to the city with some foresight. With gumption. With fucking money!”

  Baxter slammed their fist on a rock and I thought it might split in two.

  “Oh. His name wasn’t Lance Niles, was it?”

  Baxter didn’t raise their head. “You heard?”

  “No, I saw.”

  I filled Baxter in about the fireball and the man in the bowler hat. Simms had been right about Lance making powerful friends. According to Baxter, the Mayor had gone giddy about kick-starting industry in Sunder again and it was all because of the late Lance Niles.

  Baxter might have been in a mood, but when I described the fire and the ice that Tippity had weaponized, the brimstone in their eyes flared with excitement. Like me, Baxter had tried to squash the dream of better days under their boots. Dreamers aren’t much help to anyone these days. You need a firm jaw, cold blood, and a constant grip on reality to get anything done.

  But when I described how flames erupted out of the pouch, Baxter actually smiled.

  “I guess that’s where your eyebrow went.”

  “Yeah.”

  Baxter looked up at the sky again.

  “I never thought this day would come.”

  “Maybe it hasn’t.”

  Baxter stopped, frustrated with my interruption, but smart enough to know that they’d been getting ahead of themselves.

  “What else could it be?”

  I pocketed the empty flask and chewed a Clayfield.

  “I don’t know. I never understood magic, even back when it was happening, so I’m the last person who should claim to be an expert on it now. But from how it was explained to me, magic flowed. It was alive. This feels more like the shadow of magic. A bit left over after life dries up.”

  “But you did see him conjure a spell, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  It wasn’t all that I saw. I didn’t want to describe what was in the dumpster, though. I had no problem talking about Lance Niles in the Bluebird Lounge with his head all blown out and bloody. It wasn’t pretty but it was life. We’re all gonna bite it someday, and none of us will look beautiful when it happens. But those perfect little pieces of magic, piled up on top of each other in the dark? That was a real tragedy. The kind of thing that sticks to you once you know about it. I didn’t want to taint Baxter with that knowledge if I didn’t have to.

  “Where would someone find a Faery?” I asked. “And don’t say the Governor’s mansion because, if we’ve done things right, nobody is ever going to find anything there.”

  “Nowhere. You know that. They’re gone.”

  “But what about the corpses? I never thought about it before, but I didn’t see any Fae bodies after the Coda. I guess I assumed they’d just vanished; turned back into pixie dust or something. But that didn’t happen to Amari and it turns out that didn’t happen to a lot of them.”

  Baxter lost the last of their enthusiasm.

  “What do you mean, a lot of them?”

  I shook my head. Eventually, Baxter realized that they didn’t really want an answer, so they went on.

  “There were never many of them here. Most lived down in the slums: refugees from ruined forests who were trying to make a new start. Not high creatures, of course, but simple Fae like Imps and Bogarts. It really stirred things up when some of them tried to look for work in this industrial world.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, some
thing you won’t remember because you were still locked up in Sheertop is that a few days before the Coda, all the Fae left the city.”

  I didn’t know that. After I deserted the Human Army and was caught by the Opus, they threw me into a magical prison that was supposed to hold me for the rest of my life. Obviously, that didn’t happen. The Coda crashed Sheertop’s security system and I strolled out the front door without being stopped. By the time I got back to Sunder, the end of the world was a few days old.

  “Where did they go?”

  “South-east. Apparently there’s an old Fae church in Fintack Forest. I have no idea why they all left together just before the world went bad. Maybe they sensed something the rest of us didn’t know about yet.”

  It wasn’t impossible. Faeries were a perfect blend of magic and matter, closer to the sacred river than any other creature. Perhaps, when a hundred Human soldiers marched onto the sacred mountain and attempted to harness its power, the Fae instinctually knew that something wasn’t right.

  “Can you point me towards the church?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “So I can catch the man who killed Lance Niles.”

  The fire in Baxter’s eyes turned blue behind their glasses.

  “Come with me.”

  We went up to the House of Ministers and into a room marked Maps and Planning. The walls were lined with giant shelving units, stacked with long, thin drawers.

  Inside each drawer was a map of the surrounding areas. Each design was different, depending on the race that drew them.

  “The Fae didn’t really keep maps of their own,” said Baxter, “at least, not in a way that we’d be able to read. Luckily, a studious Elf went to the effort of translating them.”