Also by Jamie Sedgwick
Aboard the Great Iron Horse
The Clockwork God
Killing the Machine
The Dragon's Breath
Clockwork Legion
Starfall
Hank Mossberg, Private Ogre
Murder in the Boughs
Death in the Hallows
The Killer in the Shadow
A Fool There Was
A Dame to Die For
When the Boughs Break
Shadow Born Trilogy
Shadow Born
Shadow Rising
Shadowlord
The Tinkerer's Daughter
The Tinkerer's Daughter
Blood and Steam
Standalone
Karma Crossed
The Darkling Wind
Watch for more at Jamie Sedgwick’s site.
Table of Contents
Also By Jamie Sedgwick
A Dame to Die For (Hank Mossberg, Private Ogre, #5)
A Dame to Die For
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
A Note from the Author:
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Also By Jamie Sedgwick
About the Author
Hank Mossberg, Private Ogre
Book Six:
A Dame to Die For
By
Jamie Sedgwick
Published by Timber Hill Press
Prologue
Five years later.. .
Angus “Moon-face” McBride, also known as Moonie, was a lazy, slovenly, miserable excuse for a dwarf. He had no friends to speak of, no wisdom to impart, and no talents -except perhaps a flair for the lowest sort of business. His personality was generally regarded as worse than a gloom-fairy on a binger, and his reputation was what you might expect from a low-grade con man masquerading as a pawnbroker in a bad neighborhood. Even delver dwarves refused to acknowledge Moonie as one of their own, and that’s pretty low, coming from creatures who live in trash bins and city dumps.
Among Moonie’s lack of redeeming qualities was a shocking absence of hair. Not only was there not a single thread of hair on his ivory smooth scalp, there wasn’t any on the rest of his body, either. He couldn’t even grow a beard, which for a dwarf, is a failure of the highest order.
They say Moonie owed his strange appearance to some distant ancestor, probably a gnome, but no one could say for sure. It may have been a random quirk of the fae blood or some other mishap of nature. Regardless, the resulting creature looked more like a bleached thumb than a dwarf, and had even less personality.
Moonie operated his little pawnshop on the southeastern side of the Financial District, and that’s where I found him at four o’clock in the morning on that fateful day. The undercity was quiet, the Governor having enacted a curfew between the hours of midnight and six. As improbable as it may seem in a place like the undercity, the curfew seemed to have worked. One might argue that the Governor owed the curfew’s success to the shock and mourning of the city’s residents after the terrorist attacks, but more likely was the fact that a special security force had taken over the city. The Governor called it an act of “National Security” but it looked more like martial law, and the security forces looked less like Peacekeepers than an occupying force.
More on that later...
When I walked into Moonie’s pawnshop that foggy morning, he was sitting behind the counter, flipping through the pages of a magazine. It was a long, narrow shop with musical instruments lining the wall to my right, and rusty old tools filling the shelves on the left. Low music streamed out of a pair of buzzy old speakers. Gems and precious metals gleamed in the glass case. The place smelled like stale cigarettes and sadness. Moonie sat engrossed. He didn’t even bothering to look up as I entered, instead simply mumbling, “Let me know if you need anything,” as he flipped another page.
I walked quietly over, looking him up and down. The magazine, I realized as I got closer, was the latest issue of Playfae... Now with More Pictures!
“Have you seen this woman?” I said, tossing a picture in front of him. Moonie nudged it aside without even looking.
“Can’t help you,” he murmured.
I threw a drawing on a scrap of paper in front of him. It landed with a loud rustling sound. “How about this symbol? You ever seen a ring like this?”
He rolled his eyes. “Look, Pal, whatever you’re looking for, I don’t know nothing about-” It was at that point that he raised his head and his eyes met mine. His jaw dropped.
“It can’t be. I know you... You’re dead!”
My fist closed around the front of his shirt and I lifted him off the stool. I dragged him across the counter, pulling him close to my face. “That’s right,” I said in a low, drawn-out snarl. “I am dead. And if you don’t start talking, you’re gonna be, too.”
Meanwhile, halfway across the undercity in a cozy little three-bedroom cottage in the Heights, Butch O’Shea woke from a dead sleep. He was panting, practically gasping for air, covered in a cold sweat. His heart drummed so loudly in his ears that he couldn’t hear anything else. He bolted upright, sucking air into his lungs, his eyes wild as he scanned the darkened room. The sheets knotted up in his curling fingers.
“Butch?” Talia said next to him. “Butch, are you all right?”
When he didn’t answer, she turned on the reading light and sat up next to him. She reached out, trying to comfort him. “Butch, are you okay, honey?”
Butch blinked. He took a deep breath. The drumming in his ears subsided and he relaxed his grip on the sheets. He turned to stare at her. His face was ashen, his eyes wide, his red-hazel irises sparkling in the dim light. He licked his lips, staring at her with a confused look. Talia reached out, touching his face, stroking back the damp hair on his forehead.
“What is it, baby? What’s wrong?”
“Blaga agaba,” Butch said in a quiet, gravelly half-whisper.
Talia shook her head at the nonsense jumble of words. “Butch, you’re not making sense. You’re not awake, are you?” She gently slapped his furry cheek. “Wake up, honey. You’re dreaming.”
Butch caught her by the wrist and pulled her closer. “Blagga!” he said, his eyes growing suddenly wide with excitement.
“Bla... blagga? What are you trying to say?”
Butch narrowed his eyelids. The confusion vanished and a slight smiled turned up the corners of his lips. “He’s back!” Butch exclaimed.
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s back, Talia. I’m telling you, he’s back!”
Talia pleaded for an explanation, but Butch was already throwing back the covers. He leapt out of bed and ran in the direction of the bathroom. He disappeared around the corner behind the vanity.
“Butch!” Talia shouted. “Where are you going?”
Butch stuck his head out, grinning from ear to ear. “Gotta shower. Got work to do!”
Down the hall, one of the children cried out. Talia sighed as she crawled out of bed.
Chapter 1
“F irst they ignore you , then they attack you, then they kill you. Then, you win.” -Hank Mossberg
IT’S NOT EVERY MAN who gets to investigate his own murder. I couldn’t help savoring the novelty of the situation, regardless of
the fact that there really wasn’t anything funny about it. The woman I’d loved had betrayed me. She had set me up to look like a terrorist and then killed me. She didn’t do it alone, of course. She teamed up with my worst enemy, my arch-nemesis Gallan. Nope, nothing funny there.
I did get my revenge, though. I watched Gallan burn like a candle in the massive fireball that killed us both. And now that I was back, it was Siva’s turn. She was still alive, still out there somewhere, and she had some explaining to do...
But I’m getting ahead of myself. You don’t want to know about the investigation. Not yet. What you want to know is what happened after I died. You want to know how a guy who’s been blown to smithereens can come back. Your confusion is understandable. I felt the same way for the first few days. It took me a long time to put all the pieces together. This is how it happened, more or less:
At the moment of the explosion -the moment I died- there was a burst of flames and heat and brilliant white light, immediately followed by a complete loss of all senses. There was no pain, no color, no sound. No consciousness of anything at all. Everything was gone. Or rather, I was gone.
I’d like to tell you that there was a tunnel of light, or a beautiful angel, or a big green field full of lions and lambs sleeping peacefully. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any of those things. That’s not to say they don’t exist, just that my story happens to be unique. I am, after all, an ogre. I was aware of nothing.
Two years passed before I knew anything. Even then, I wasn’t really what you’d call aware. There was no consciousness to speak of, just a quiet observation of distant sounds, the vibrations in the earth, the sensations of changes in the soil. I didn’t know I was alive any more than the roots of a vegetable know they’re alive. I was simply growing, working my way slowly towards being something, or someone once again.
As time passed, I became aware that I had a companion. While I was gradually turning back into myself, the Mother tree had been growing in leaps and bounds around me. From that tiny branch, she had already grown into a mighty tree. Not as large as she had been, of course, but enough to keep the fae of the undercity marveling. I could feel her shifting in the earth from time to time, hear her thoughts as she rejoiced in the rain and stretched up to reach for the sun. When she felt warmth, I felt warmth. When the rain fell on her roots, it fell on me, too.
At some point, long before I became self-aware, I’m sure the Mother tree became aware of me. I’m not exaggerating when I say she cradled me in her roots, swaddled me like an infant, nurturing me with all the nutrients my rapidly-growing body required. I don’t know how she did it; I just know that she did.
Over time, I gradually began to hear things: distant voices, the rumble of the undercity tram, the distant moan of traffic on the highway. Eventually, I began to tune into the sounds, and they enveloped me. They filled my consciousness, washing over me in a barrage of images that may or may not even have been real. I was dreaming, for lack of a better explanation.
These visions were nonsense at first, as dreams often are. It takes consciousness and memory to form a dream with any real meaning. It was a jumble of white noise; a collage of color and sound that didn’t really make any sense. But eventually, something triggered my real memories, and I began to relive some of the events of my past life. I saw them like a third party, hovering over my body, yet somehow aware of all the emotions and importance related to these distant events. I relived my entire life in that period. My mind somehow sorted out the details and put them all back in order.
As the process continued, my consciousness began to expand. I became aware of other things around me; things that I could sense on my own, as well as certain thoughts and visions that the Mother tree shared with me. She is conscious, after all. She always was. She lived every moment of the chaos and despair after the attacks. She felt the loss of thousands of lives, watched the shifting of powers that followed in that great tragedy’s wake, and suffered from the memory of her own temporary destruction.
The Mother showed me what she could. I saw the undercity changing as the police struggled to keep order and the gangs slowly took control. With no one left to enforce the law, corruption prospered and violence became commonplace. Terror and disorder reigned. So it was with the gangs, the mob bosses, and all the rest of the corrupt, in every place, high and low. They joined together to create a new order; a system forged in their dark hearts and minds, designed to quiet the frightened masses all the while channeling the profits of the workers’ labors into the coffers of their new masters.
The ruling class cracked down, as tyrants always do, crushing the commoner in the name of justice and fairness. A single mugger in a dark alley gave cause to oppress a thousand innocents. A single murder could justify the quelling of an entire species. Like a swarm of locusts, the jackbooted thugs came, crushing ordinary citizens under the weight of their tyranny, molesting and terrifying those who simply wished to survive in the worst of situations. The meek and frightened had no choice but to hand over their freedom in exchange for the comfort and safety of chains.
The undercity became a dark place in those times, a place of violence, depravity, and fear. It began to look less and less like the city I knew and more like some dystopian horror story. With no one there to stop them, the criminals thrived while the rest of the population lived in constant terror.
When I had seen enough, when I had become so enraged that my blood began to boil and my mind railed against the very womb that had nurtured me, the Mother tree spat me out. She gave birth to me in a shower of dirt and clay, dropping me unceremoniously to the hard, cold floor with the sound of cracking branches and the rumble of movement deep in the earth.
I landed hard, shivers of pain rolling through me. My body shook, my mind reeling as the visions and hallucinations of five long years washed over me in waves. My lungs expanded, and I took the first full breath I’d ever had in this new body. My heart thudded in my chest. I exhaled a loud moan, and the sound echoed in the dark space around me.
At last, my eyes fluttered open. After five years buried deep in the soil, sheltered by the earth and the roots and trunk of the mother tree, even the dim light of that darkened cave was like a bright sunny day topside. I winced against the light and squeezed my eyes shut, waiting, just breathing...
Chapter 2
When I could finally open my eyes without excruciating pain, it became perfectly clear to me that I was in the general vicinity of my old jail. Of course, the actual jail had been completely destroyed in the blast, as was everything that had once been located under the Mother tree, but a restoration process had begun. I could see where the workers had started carving the shape of three new jail cells into the earth at the center of the room, directly under the base of the tree. That was as far as the work had gone. Apparently, they had decided that with the Steward dead, there wasn’t much point in finishing.
I managed to crawl to my feet and stood there scanning the room. My balance was unsteady at first, like a toddler taking his first few steps. This body was new to me. It was my body, of course, but it was different. It only took a few seconds to realize how different. The old aches and pains were gone. My knuckles didn’t pop when I made a fist. The joints in my knees didn’t ache when I stood straight, and my back didn’t hurt at all. It was like I was twenty again. I felt strong, maybe even invincible.
I became uncomfortably aware of my own nakedness. I was unarmed and unclothed, which is just about as vulnerable as anyone can get. I threw a glance around the room, double-checking to be sure I was alone. I was, and from the looks of things, no one had been in that place in a long time. The place was different, larger than it used to be. And of course, everything was gone. My desk, my computer, the safe where I’d kept important documents, and my precious custom Colt 1911... all gone. My apartment upstairs was gone, too. Obliterated in the same inferno that consumed me.
The thoughts of my death brought back the memories of what I’d seen in my dreams. I kne
w the people of the undercity were crying out for help. I couldn’t bring myself to walk away from them. As much as it pained me that they had turned on me in the end, I had to find a way to help. But I also had to find Siva. That need was personal. I had to know why she’d betrayed me, what could have driven her to conspire against me with my worst enemy and the worst terrorist the fae had ever known. Siva was out there somewhere. She was still alive, and she had the answers to all my questions. But how was I going to find her? With her powers, Siva could have gone anywhere.
During the course of all these thoughts, my gaze fell on the three unfinished jail cells and a tiny sparkle of light caught my eye. I blinked, uncertain at first of my own senses. It happened again, like a tiny Fourth of July sparkler back in the corner of the furthest cell. I took a few steps closer, and noticed a trunk hidden there in the shadows. Light seemed to surround it, tiny erratic little bursts here and there that were barely visible but somehow impossible not to notice. I couldn’t imagine why someone had gone to the trouble of bringing that trunk in there just to abandon it. And the lights... Could that be a spell of some sort?
I stepped into the cell, and relaxed a little as I saw that the old wooden trunk was covered in a thick layer of dust. Probably left by the tunnel workers, I thought. Must’ve forgotten it here when they moved on...
I brushed the dust away from the front of the lid and lifted it. I winced a little, expecting the typical bang and jolt of a fizzling spell. I got neither. Instead, the lid swung easily open and the light fell on a folded, yellowing piece of paper. Written across the front in elegant cursive script was one word. It was my name. I lifted the paper and gently unfolded it:
A Dame to Die For Page 1
