And yet, the Patron thought in passing, the visitors still came.
“I’ve fulfilled my side of this transaction.” The Patron leaned forward. “Give me the antidote.”
“There is none.” The apothecary shrugged. “I never expected you’d agree to my terms.”
Then she walked out.
The Patron could only watch. Inflicting more pain would serve no purpose.
A momentary stillness gripped the shanty, one that an outsider might have mistaken for peace.
Then the bodyguard collapsed to a knee and vomited blood.
The bodyguard’s condition worsened by dusk. By dawn’s knell she lay propped against the Patron’s leg, skin stripped of color, lips stained crimson.
The Patron stroked her bald scalp, her notched ear, her sweat-glazed jaw. She remembered.
She remembered waking one morning to find the bodyguard prying at her chain’s lock. She remembered the fierce glint in the bodyguard’s eye, months later, as she produced a rusted hacksaw. For the chain—or if that didn’t work, the ankle. She remembered the bodyguard’s silent protests when the Patron shrugged her off, time and again. She remembered thinking: I deserve this fate, and besides, the daemons would not abide my escape. She remembered saying nothing.
She remembered other moments, too—not all of them bad. Some close to good. This was the worst part of remembering.
But even now, a cocktail of remedies surged through her bodyguard’s bloodstream. Hope lingered. The Patron stared knives into the daemons. She forced her thoughts to retribution. She honed her plan.
So it was that when the next visitor stepped into the shanty on snakeskin soles, his own glut of bodyguards milling in the swelter outside, the Patron sat composed. The void at her side and the faint rasping from the kitchen did not betray her poise as she received her guest.
This one was famous. Perhaps, even, the one she sought. If her bodyguard were to die... at least unchained, she could dig the grave herself.
“Patron.”
Mr. Midas’s voice unfurled like velvet over bare skin. His suit—three-piece, bone-white—was immaculate, despite the sandstorm that had hammered the town at dawn. A greased mustache provided cover for his too-thin lips; wire-framed sunglasses concealed his eyes, which the Patron imagined were small, red, lustful.
“I assume my reputation precedes me.”
The Patron stifled a sigh. “I know your company—Spore Brothers. Their sterile seeds and their starvation tax. I also know, by your presence here, that you aren’t as powerful as some might think.”
This garnered a brooding silence.
“I respect you, Patron—” He raised a corrective finger. “I respect your pursuit.”
The Patron rapped her fingers impatiently.
“The pursuit of pain.” He spread his hands, as if welcoming her into some sinister club. “The threat of murder is always more effective than the act itself. Fear and pain are the only true motivators.”
The guitarist fingered a jarring tritone. Mr. Midas reddened at the interruption.
She plucked another chord, less pleasant still. Her unblinking eyes twinkled.
Mr. Midas glowered, as if the Patron owed him an apology for the disruption. As if she were the girl’s charge.
That one came with the place.
“State your intentions,” the Patron said with unchecked irritation.
“Elixir.” Mr. Midas’s lip twitched. “They are a scourge—the last credible threat to my empire. Yet how can I kill that which I cannot see? Their cowardly honcho remains anonymous. This is my demand: his head.”
Politics. Some things never changed.
Still, she couldn’t stave the need to try.
“Have you ventured negotiation? Armistice? A cup of tea?” The Patron winced at her own choice of words.
Mr. Midas exhaled sharply. “I want his head.”
So be it. “You understand the terms.”
At this, a wry grin. “Of course.”
Darkness, as cruel and certain as death. The daemons split, advanced—all tendril and vice. Unwelcome thoughts percolated in the Patron’s mind—he was not the one—and her attention snapped again to the kitchen. Time was running out for them both.
But the plan. Her preoccupation had cost her valuable time. She turned her thoughts inward, probed the psychic bridge—there. Not a fissure, but a valve. As thoughts filtered in, others might slip out. Damage, perhaps, could be done in both directions. Lasting damage. She prodded the valve with her psyche—
Mr. Midas chuckled.
The daemons severed the bridge. Her awareness jolted back to the shanty.
“I’ve outsmarted you, Patron.”
The Patron’s skin went cold. Another bounty hunter?
Impossible. This honcho had all the coin he could carry.
Mr. Midas’s voice snaked through the darkness. “I’ve steeled myself to all forms of pain. I’ve eliminated every compassion, every weakness. My wife and son are dead. I exiled my beloved daughter across the desert years ago, so that none should leverage her love against me. With pain as your arsenal, I am bulletproof.”
Before the Patron could respond, the lights flicked on. Behind the honcho, the daemons’ other half slipped inside from their foray. Mr. Midas held his chin high.
It was almost a shame to bring him down so fast.
Almost.
The Patron picked dried blood from her fingernail. “It’s not your daughter’s love you should fear.”
A shout from outside drew Mr. Midas’s attention. He left without a word—returned moments later, a shade paler. Trembling.
Cradling a human head.
“You should’ve feared her fury.” The Patron echoed the daemons’ thoughts. “Exile doesn’t suit every young woman’s taste.”
Mr. Midas stared into his daughter’s vacant eyes. Above her brow, a gilded headband read Elixir.
It was a convenient, if grisly, package. Rarely did both sides of the transaction require but a single maneuver.
The Patron continued. “One might take offense to being treated as a pawn by her own father. One might connive a covert return, a gutsy power grab. Escalate a turf dispute into a full-scale war. Wield fear and pain as her weapons.” The Patron regarded him coolly. “You must be proud.”
Mr. Midas remained impassive. Gauging the repercussions of destroying the shanty outright, perhaps. He certainly had the capacity.
But that wasn’t this honcho’s style, and even now—his daughter’s blood still warming his hands—he retained his ideals. Pain promised, rather than delivered.
He left without a word, then promptly installed a blockade around the Patron’s shanty. A dozen armed guards would dissuade even the most desperate of visitors. His logic: the Patron drew reputation from these transactions; without them, she was nothing. Obsolete. Forgotten.
This wasn’t far from the truth. But much worse was the blockade’s timing: with just two days before month’s end, her chances of finding a replacement had already grown slim.
Now they were nonexistent.
She hadn’t always been a bodyguard. Once, her name was Ania.
A cruel desert wind had blistered the town for forty days when she first set foot in the Patron’s shanty. Two weeks escaped from Northern slavers, the necessary murders still staining her palms. Her eyes were hungry vortices—taking in everything, letting nothing out. Her clothes were tattered and too small; the inscription emblazoned on her wheel-lock pistol long since filed off. Even her name was stolen.
She came in search of protection, work. Companionship.
The Patron had none to spare. Memories of her brother were still too sharp. Would always be.
“This relationship is purely transactional.”
The tips of Ania’s lips had twitched upward. Her vortex eyes said: sure it is.
For the first time, the Patron wasn’t certain.
Then Ania had stated her terms.
The Patron balked. “You can
’t—”
“I can.” Ania folded her arms across her chest, all filth and bones and beauty. “And I will.”
The Patron’s pulse stuttered. “Begone. You are unwanted here.” It had already become instinct to dissuade her visitors.
Ania didn’t blink. The vortices said: nice try.
And so Ania’s terms were met. A place by the Patron’s side, in exchange for her newfound freedom. Bound by chains less corporeal than the Patron’s, she would never leave her post. The fierce wanderer known briefly as Ania was no more. Now, there was only the bodyguard.
At the foot of her chair, the Patron hunched over the dying bodyguard. “Fool.”
Outside, the sun chewed at the scorched horizon, signaling the month’s end. The cries of the blood locusts ebbed to a dying murmur.
The bodyguard’s eyelids cracked. “Where will you go, when your replacement arrives?”
The Patron looked away to mask her discomfort. She hadn’t told the bodyguard about the blockade.
“Far from here,” she lied.
The bodyguard laughed—a wretched, rasping sound. “You still think your payment was freedom.”
“I’m chained to this chair, woman—”
“I see your eyes, when the visitors come.” She raked in a shallow breath. “Your sweating brow, your clenched fists. This is called pain.”
The Patron waved a dismissive hand. “They mean nothing to me.”
“Why, then, exhort them to leave without payment? Why show pity to even the most loathsome of bigots?”
The Patron had no answer.
“Because their pain is yours. This is your payment.” The bodyguard’s expression grew distant. “Mine was watching you suffer, my love.”
Is, the Patron almost corrected. But the word never reached her lips.
The gunshot rang out like an angry thunderclap, like a sandstorm snapping the roof off a church of beleaguered worshippers, like a heart bursting through a weary chest. The bodyguard’s hand slipped from her pistol, lifeless.
Transaction complete.
“Fool.” Salt stained the Patron’s lips. This was her fault. All this time, she’d hidden behind the excuse of human nature.
This world is an abyss, people get what they deserve.
It was the easiest lie to believe.
She hardly felt the tendrils slipping into her tear ducts, probing her psyche. When she did, a brutal rage hoisted her to her feet. This was her pain—they could not have it. Would not have it.
The daemons’ presence trembled within her—drunk with surplus, slowed by her glut of agony. She knew then, what they’d been doing all this time.
They were feeding.
She seized the opportunity—focused on the connection, tore through the valve and across the psychic bridge. Nausea crawled up her throat. She saw the daemons for what they were: perverse, inhuman—yet curious. They weren’t merely feeding.
They were looking for something.
The daemons must’ve grown conscious to her presence across the bridge: they repelled her with a jarring force, severed the connection. Doubtless they wouldn’t be so careless next time—but that was irrelevant. The Patron had already gleaned their fatal flaw.
They were dependent—on her. Burrowed in like so many ticks, surviving only by the pain of their host. Without her, they would perish.
The final stage of her plan grew clear.
The Patron lifted the pistol. Its grip was still warm.
In her periphery, the daemons writhed.
The Patron reclaimed her seat in the chair. She took her time reloading the gun, pressed the barrel beneath her chin.
Hesitated.
A man stood in the shadows, foot propped against the wall, knee jutting. His Highwaymen’s duster—speckled with sand and blood—grazed the bare floor. A mop of sandy hair obscured his face, save for the crooked arc of his grin.
“There, there,” said the month’s final visitor.
It would’ve betrayed the Patron’s surprise to ask how the visitor had bypassed the blockade. So she said, flatly, “Shadows are for snakes.”
The man chuckled. “Says the asp that’s spent seven years festering in darkness.”
The Patron laid the pistol on the chair’s arm to hide the tremble of her hand. Who was this man, that knew so much about her?
She swiveled the gun’s barrel to face him. “State your business or get out.”
“My business is...transactional.”
He stepped into the candlelight.
This time, the Patron could not conceal her disbelief.
The visitor cocked his head—a childish pose at odds with the grizzled scar that gouged his face, the rust-bitten spike that served as his left leg.
The Patron swallowed bile. “Brother.”
Her gaze lingered on his jacket. Same as the one she’d worn, while she enforced the Highwaymen’s grisly road tax in exchange for coin. To afford meds for her mother. Food for her kid brother. The jacket’s heft—and the cruel indenture it signified—had been the very reason for her visit to this shanty, seven years prior. She sought her boss’s head, because—brash as she was—she knew she could run the outfit better. And because many years prior, he’d taken her mother by force—not once, but twice—as if she were some cut-rate Skin Inc commodity. He was a vile man.
A vile father.
The daemons had dispatched him, though she’d never been afforded a chance at succession.
And now, seven years later, her brother had taken up the same garb—the same bloody role, answering to another ruthless honcho.
“How did you find me?”
“The bounty note contained a sketch.” His lip curled with disgust, but his eyes bore something far worse: pity. “I had to see for myself, this throne for which you renounced your family.”
“And you? What have you traded for that jacket?”
“You thought the Highwaymen would wither without a head? Foolish sister. His lieutenants knew it was you. They came looking for you.” He paused to collect himself. “Do you think they believed us, when we said we didn’t know? What do you think they did to us? To our mother?”
The Patron could not hold his gaze.
“You left me to fend for myself. I had no choice but to join the company. So don’t judge me for my garb, sister. I’ve always lived by your castoffs.”
The Patron pressed her eyes shut, long enough to acknowledge her mother’s death. “Blame me for what you will—but not the decisions you’ve made in my absence.”
His wince was slight: a ripple of scar tissue. “My decisions pale beside yours. How many have you murdered from this chair?”
But as he spoke, his voice quivered. His own decisions already hung leaden on his shoulders. He was as she had been, seven years prior. Bitter, vicious, proud.
Sympathetic.
Their pain is yours.
Of course he’d avoided the blockade—the daemons had helped him. He was, after all, the one she’d been waiting for: brother, successor, patron.
“I’ve one last castoff to collect.” He squared his shoulders, drove home her revelation. “I’m here for your throne, Patron.”
The Patron glared at the loitering daemons. Did they know she’d turn the gun on herself? Did they know that only one person alive could’ve stayed her hand?
Of course they did. They’d probed her mind on every visit. This would be her final payment: to watch her brother assume the seat she’d so long endured. To know that for seven brutal years, he’d suffer the shared pain of every vigilante, every lover, every fraud and cripple that walked through those curtains. Even her own death wouldn’t stop it now. Her brother already stood within the daemons’ shadow. The ticks would soon crawl into their next host.
All that remained was for him to accept the terms.
Unless.
Her finger twitched near the pistol’s trigger.
The air grew tepid. Her brother’s lips parted.
The guitarist fingered
a lazy riff. The daemons began to circle.
The body at the Patron’s feet felt suddenly present. The vacancy at her side occupied more space than the bodyguard ever had.
She had always been the stronger one. What would she have done?
The Patron knew at once. She would’ve done what was needed.
The Patron lifted the gun. “I’m sorry, brother.”
Words died on her brother’s lips. Sweat stood on his jaw.
The daemons hesitated.
She narrowed her eyes. “Leave.”
“I will not—”
“You don’t qualify for an accord.” She held his gaze, not daring a glance toward daemons. “You have nothing of value. No money, no power, no family. You are less than worthless.”
His skin reddened; his breath came at a labor.
She rose to her feet. “At least when I arrived, I had your mother’s life to trade.”
His jaw snapped shut. Rage simmered in his eyes.
“Now leave,” she said. “Or you’ll follow her down.”
Amidst the fury that knotted his face, a flicker of sorrow. Her gambit had worked. He clearly believed she would do it—kill her own brother to retain her seat of power. This was the worst part—a transaction in itself. Her dignity, in exchange for his life.
He left without a word.
She could only hope he’d never learn the extent of her lies. Better to spend a lifetime in this wretched role than to endure the guilt of passing it on to another. Her brother, or anyone else. Be it seven years or seven hundred, this was her burden to bear.
Liberated from her shadow at last, her brother might finally cast off his bloody garb. She knew it from his eyes on leaving: the transaction had changed him. He was better off, now.
So was she.
Her gaze darted to the daemons, then to the guitarist propped in the corner—for by then the Patron knew she was more than just a languid musician. The girl who did not blink offered the slightest of smiles as her daemon-eyes glimmered. The Patron hesitated.
What if these daemons didn’t thirst for pain after all? What if pain was just the catalyst for pity?
I see your eyes, when the visitors come.
Derrick Boden - [BCS312 S02] Page 2
