Death Blows

by D. D. Barant

  “Comic books,” I say. “You don’t have—wait. I know this world has comic books; Dr. Pete showed me his collection once.”

  Eisfanger’s eyes go wide. Cassius doesn’t look surprised, but then he almost never does. “Comic books?” Eisfanger repeats. He says it with more or less the same intonation you’d use for the phrase, Eat my own liver?

  Cassius sighs. “I was afraid of that. The books Dr. Adams showed you were all pre-1956, correct?”

  “Uh—I guess so. Why?”

  “Because they’ve been illegal since then. Did this Flash exist prior to ’56?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

  “Then we’re dealing with cross-universe contamination.” Cassius studies me with cool, calculating eyes. “The killer may be from your world, Jace.”

  He lets that hang in the air a moment, knowing the impact it’ll make on me. “Go talk to Gretchen,” he says. “She could use a friend right now. Second bedroom on the left.” I’m thinking furiously as I leave. Does a killer from my world mean a possible way back for me? Why the hell would comic books be illegal? And what was Gretchen doing here in the first place? I knock on the door to the bedroom tentatively. “Gretch? It’s Jace.”

  “Come in.”

  I open the door. Gretchen sits on the edge of a massive canopy bed, her knees together, a box of tissues in her lap. Gretchen’s a pire, apparent age in her mid-thirties, attractive in an intense kind of way. She always wears her blond hair in a tight little bun, her makeup is immaculate, she speaks in an elegant British accent, and her wit is sharp enough to give a suit of armor paper cuts. I’ve compared her, more than once, to a predatory Mary Poppins.

  Right now her hair is a straggly mess. Tears have streaked her mascara. Despite that, her voice is strong, her smile firm. “Hello, Jace. I do hope you’re going to lend us a hand.”

  I sit down next to her. “Yeah, of course. What happened, Gretch?”

  “I—was paying a call on Mr. Aquitaine. He—”

  “Aquitaine? Is that—”

  “Yes. Saladin Aquitaine. He and I were to go out for dinner. There was no answer when I rang up, so I let myself in. I have a key. I discovered him just as you saw. I called David immediately.”

  I hadn’t even known Gretchen was seeing someone. “So you and he were… involved.”

  “We had an intimate relationship, yes. We’ve known each other for years, but only recently have we decided to… explore further options.”

  “Friends with benefits?”

  “Not exactly.” She turns to look at me, and a little of the grief she’s feeling forces its way to the surface. It doesn’t get far; she shoves it back under with a brittle smile. “I do apologize for not mentioning him, Jace. I’ve been doing intelligence work for so long I compartmentalize everything. Yes, Saladin and I were lovers, but that’s never been anything but casual for decades. About three months ago I came to a decision, and approached him with an offer. He agreed.”

  Her face stays calm and composed, but a single tear tracks its way through her ruined eyeliner and down her cheek. “I’m pregnant, Jace.”

  Pregnant. That’s a heavy word at any time, but for pires even more so. The old-school neckbiting method was made illegal long ago, which is good since the current human population is less than 1 percent of the global total. The way pires procreate on this world is through magic; basically, both parents donate six months of their life for every year their child ages. At some point the spell that made the whole thing possible is canceled, and all three go back to being immortal—only the parents are now a decade or so older, while the kid is twenty-one.

  I have no idea what happens when one of the parents dies before the baby is born.

  I put my arm around her. “Gretchen, I’m—I don’t know what to say. I’m stuck somewhere between ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Congratulations.’ ”

  “Stuck. I suppose that’s what I am, as well.”

  “What happens now?”

  “I assume the full time-debt for the child. A normal pire pregnancy is nine months, but the mother ages only four and a half; many couples accelerate the progress of the fetus to match. That’s what we did. But now that he’s dead… I don’t know, Jace. I just don’t know.” Her voice remains steady, but a second tear has joined the first. If I were to touch it, it would be as cold as a melted snowflake.

  “What did he do, Gretch? For a living, I mean.”

  She plucks a tissue from the box and dabs her face. “He was a geomancer. His specialty was talking to dormant volcanoes, locating kimberlite pipes for diamond speculators. Geological features operate on a very different time frame, so he would have conversations that would last for years. Sometimes they were fruitful, sometimes not.”

  I glance around the room. “Looks to me like he hit at least one jackpot.”

  “Yes, he was quite wealthy. He was a very patient man; I thought he would make a wonderful father.”

  “Who would do this to him, Gretch? Did he have any enemies?”

  “You should speak to Cassius about that.” Her tone is abruptly cool, and I think I’ve offended her before I realize she’s simply being professional. Whatever Saladin Aquitaine was into, Cassius knows more about it than Gretchen does—which means this case is getting more complicated by the minute.

  “I’ll do that. Hang in there, Gretch.” I give her shoulder a squeeze and then stand up.

  I stride back to the other room, where Eisfanger’s taking pictures of the vic. Charlie’s in exactly the same position he was when I left, hands clasped in front of him, feet slightly spread. He’s very good at being immobile. “Okay, what are we looking at here?” I ask Cassius directly. “There’s no local cops, so I assume this is off the books.”

  “Yes. This is going to be a closed investigation, Jace, and I want you to handle it.”

  “We’ll see. First of all, are we sure this is Saladin Aquitaine?”

  Eisfanger lowers his camera. “No fingerprints or DNA, but the remains still have a psychic residue. I’ll check it against our animist files.”

  “Okay. Second, who was Saladin Aquitaine and why would someone kill him?”

  “He was a successful geological surveyor, a geomancer. He made sizable donations to a number of political parties and organizations. He was fairly active socially. I don’t know why anyone would want him dead—which is why I called you.” There’s something he isn’t telling me, but with Cassius that was almost always the case. I’ll have to dig for it.

  “You think this is the work of someone mentally unbalanced,” I say.

  “Don’t you? I admit I don’t have your level of expertise, but this hardly looks like the work of either a professional assassin or a burglary gone wrong.”

  I shrug. “No? I’ll tell you what I see. Two shamans, some professional jealousy, and a magical pissing match that got out of hand. The other guy tossed a spell intended to be used on landscape instead of flesh-and-blood, and this is the result—Mr. Coppertop. Don’t tell Gretchen I said that.”

  As a theory it was full of holes, but I wanted Cassius to point them out—one of the best ways to get information is to make your source prove how smart he is.

  “Uh, there’s one big problem with that,” Eisfanger interjects. He’s waving a device that looks a bit like a cell phone with a dual antennae in slow circles over the corpse’s head. “This guy wasn’t killed by the lightning—or by having his bones transformed. Those were both done postmortem.”

  I frown at him. “Wait. So the whole scene was staged? The treadmill, the costume, the electric skeleton?”

  “I don’t know about the treadmill—”

  “Pires don’t exercise, genius. So what did kill him?”

  “Sharp silver object through the heart. See?” Eisfanger points to a small notch on the underside of one rib. “Chipped a piece off going in—wooden stake wouldn’t have done that. I’ll take a closer look once I’ve drained the voltage, but I’m betting I find traces of silve
r.”

  Cassius shakes his head. “Someone went to a great deal of trouble to do this. Someone either from your world, or with access to its knowledge. Anyone that goes to this much trouble to send a message—and I think we can both agree that this is supposed to be a message—tends to want that message understood.”

  I sigh. “Unless they’re speaking their own private language that only the voices in their head understand.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Cassius says. “I think there’s at least one person in this room who might be able to translate.”

  “It’s not me, is it?” asks Eisfanger. “I mean, I’m still working on that sandwich thing…”

  “Look, I’d love to help out,” I say. “But I just got a lead on Stoker, and that is who I’m here to catch. I have a contract that spells it all out, no pun intended.”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” Cassius says. “There’s a problem.”

  My stomach drops to somewhere around my knees. The contract I signed states that once I catch Stoker, I get to go home—but if my employers don’t want to honor it, what exactly are my options? Hire a good lawyer and hope I don’t die of old age while the case makes it way through the courts?

  Cassius sees the expression on my face—and looks away. “Cross-dimensional travel is difficult. In order to put you back where and when we removed you, conditions must be just right. The shaman we used to bring you here is now… unavailable.”

  “So? Use another one!”

  “We can do that. Unfortunately, it means that the passage of time becomes an issue. The original shaman can return you to your world within minutes of you having left it; a new one couldn’t. In fact, the opposite would be true—years would have passed since you left. Decades, most likely.”

  And now my sunken stomach is turning into a clenched, icy fist. “Like being in a coma, I guess. At least I’ll still have my youth—”

  “No. The spell would age you, as well. I’m sorry.”

  Right. They said they’d return me, but they didn’t specify the condition. “You know, my incentive to do my job is sort of going down the tubes here.”

  “Then let me rectify that. Aquitaine was well connected. There are certain favors I could call in if you were to locate his killer—favors that would eliminate the problem I just mentioned.”

  “The shaman would stop being unavailable, is what you’re saying.”

  Cassius at least has the grace to look uncomfortable. “This isn’t blackmail, Jace. The situation is what it is. Help me, and you help yourself. I promise I’ll do everything in my power—”

  “Save it. I’m on board.” I haul my gut back into place with one deep breath, and let the anger already simmering there thaw it out.

  So now I’ve got three people to find. A superheroobsessed killer, a rogue human terrorist… and the son-of-a-bitch who dragged me to this world in the first place. Unavailable? I need to have a little talk with him about the meaning of that word.

  Or the world that I go back to won’t be mine anymore.

  TWO

  First things first.

  I go through all the procedures that start every investigation: I talk to his neighbors, get in touch with his last few clients, ask the standard questions: Was there anyone who would want him dead, was he involved in illegal activities, did he have a gambling or drug problem? No to all of the above—though I do get a sense of what sort of person he was.

  “The thing about Sal Aquitaine,” a geologist named Gary Wyndham tells me over the phone, “is that he had this certain way of looking at the world. Some people thought he was a snob, but that wasn’t it. He didn’t just talk to mountains, he identified with them. He was the calmest guy I’ve ever met in my life; just sort of let events flow around him without taking any of it personally.”

  “So he was passive?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Hey, a mountain can kill you just as easily as a forest fire—it just does it with a lot less drama. One second you’re standing on a cliff, the next you’re a big red stain at the bottom. Sal was quiet, but he could drop a boulder on your head without blinking.”

  “Yeah? He drop boulders on the heads of anyone in particular?”

  “It was just a figure of speech. If he had any enemies, I didn’t know about them—or friends, for that matter. Sal would go off for months or even years, spend the whole time camping in a mountain range in the middle of nowhere. You spend that much time talking to geological features, it has an effect; I got the feeling Sal didn’t feel that connected to the world. Not the parts inhabited by people, anyway.”

  I think about that after I hang up. What would it be like, being cut off from your own kind for years, nothing but ageless rock to talk to… and then I remember who my partner is. If mountains had the same kind of deadpan sense of humor Charlie did, you’d either find it entertaining or commit suicide sometime in the six months between a setup and the punch line.

  I wonder how would it feel to come home. A welcome return to civilization? Or simply a burst of frantic noise between long periods of stillness?

  He hadn’t completely abandoned the company of his own kind—his relationship with Gretchen showed that. Maybe having a child was his attempt to reconnect with the rest of the race, to put down roots that weren’t made of bedrock.

  Maybe he was just scared of coming back one day and finding out nobody remembered who he was.

  Or cared.

  I take a look at Sal’s computer, but his e-mail is encrypted with some sort of voodoo that Eisfanger tells me he can’t break in my lifetime, so no leads there. Security footage from the lobby of his building reveals no lurking maniacs carting around treadmills—I don’t know how it wound up in Aquitaine’s living room, but it didn’t come in through the front door. A once-over of his apartment turns up nothing more interesting than a collection of Moroccan recipe books and a freezer full of lamb chops.

  None of which surprises me, though I was hoping to get lucky. The first-timers usually start with someone they know or have some passing connection with—but this doesn’t feel like that. This feels like someone with a big old pot of crazy that’s been simmering a long, long time and finally boiled over. He or she put a lot of time and thought into it, and isn’t going to be tripped up by something as elementary as killing an old lover or getting caught on camera.

  But really, I’m just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s until I get what I’m really after.

  An invitation.

  The entrance to the Four Color Club is not exactly what I expect. Cassius had warned me that the comic book subculture in this world was vastly different from mine; he’d said they were secretive and dangerous, blackmarket magicians and rogue shamans playing with types of sorcery the government had outlawed decades ago. They bore about as much resemblance to the Simpson’s Comic Book Guy as Hello Kitty does to a hungry lion.

  But some of them apparently still live in their parents’ basement.

  By “parents” I mean the city of Seattle, and by “basement” I mean beneath the Fremont Street bridge. That’s where I’m standing right now, looking up at an eighteen-foot-high stone statue of a troll rising from the earth. Only his upper body is exposed, so I guess he’d be close to forty feet tall if he ever climbed out of his hole. He’s got a crushed VW Bug in one massive paw, and he glares at me with an eye made from an old hubcap.

  Vehicles rumble by overhead. I wish Charlie was with me, but the only invitation Cassius was able to wangle was for one. I take a deep breath and let it out with a single word: “Kimota.”

  The troll’s mouth opens, revealing a stone staircase spiraling down. I enter.

  There are no lights, and once I’m around the first few turns the light above vanishes completely. From what Cassius told me, their clubhouse isn’t actually in the bowels of a stone troll; this is just one of the spots they’ve temporarily anchored a mystical gateway to. Come back tomorrow, and you can scream “Kimota!” until your head e
xplodes and nothing will happen. The true location of their secret headquarters is, well, secret.

  I round the final bend in the staircase. There’s a small antechamber here, with a door at the end of it. The door is outlined by a strip of glowing purplish-red light, with an illuminated yellow line running down the center and a thin belt of glowing blue across the middle. The lines divide the rectangle of the door into panels, all of them black, and there’s a doorknob shaped like a little white word balloon. I grab it and turn.

  On the other side is an immense cave. The ceiling must be fifty feet above me, with stalactites half that length hanging overhead like a battalion of Damoclean swords. The floor is an intricate mosaic of comic book panels under transparent tiles, and the rock of the cave has been surfaced with white walls that reach to a height of around twelve feet. Small spotlights mounted on their tops angle downward to illuminate the framed artwork hung on them, and there are numerous white leather armchairs scattered around. The only other door is a large, oak affair at the far end, and the only person in the room other than me is a man wearing a black leather jacket, jeans, and sunglasses. He looks to be in his twenties, with tousled, mid-length black hair and a friendly smile on his face. He’s clearly expecting me—he gets to his feet and walks forward as soon as I come in.

  “Hello,” he says. His accent is British, but more relaxed than Gretchen’s. He offers me his hand and I shake it; the coolness of his grip tells me he’s a pire. “I’m Neil.”

  “Jace Valcheck. Thank you for agreeing to talk with me, Mr… ?”

  He smiles, revealing incisors definitely meant more for puncturing jugulars than rending meat. “Just Neil will do. Is it all right if I call you Jace, or do you prefer Special Agent Valchek?”