Tainted Waters

by Leah Cutter

  It took me a second to place her. “Oh!” I said. “Charlene had said I should go find you.” I took a deep breath and tried to find whatever professional demeanor I could, talking across a counter full of sex toys.

  “I’ve been working with the police on the bomber,” I told her. Might as well come right out and tell her that up front. Working girls didn’t tend to have the best relationship with the police. It would give her another reason not to trust me.

  Hopefully it also gave her another reason to not reach across the counter and throttle me.

  “Really?” Alice asked in that fake, breathless tone of hers. “How exciting!”

  She didn’t mean it. I don’t think she could say anything that I would believe, including “The sky is full of clouds,” as it was.

  “Some of the letters the bomber has sent in have mentioned the Old Ones,” I told her. “Would you know anything about them?”

  “Oh, my, yes!”

  Alice’s eyes weren’t really glowing, were they?

  “The Great Old Ones are the ancient and powerful space deities that once ruled the earth,” Alice went on in that breathless voice of hers.

  “Yeah, I know that,” I told her. I’d done the internet and Wikipedia searches. “But they’re going to be rising soon, right?”

  Alice blinked. I seemed to have thrown her off script. “You are not a believer,” she accused me.

  “I’ve seen some pretty freaky shit in my time,” I told her. “I’m probably easier to convince than most.”

  I mean, if Odin and Loki were real, why couldn’t Cthulhu be? Hell, all of the gods.

  Though that was a disturbing thought, given what I knew of some of the strange gods and mythology out there.

  Alice shook her head. “You will see, like the rest, when the Great Old Ones rise.”

  “But when?” I asked. That was what I really wanted to know. My gut told me Wednesday night, as part of the torchlight parade, but I could be wrong.

  “Now you see, that’s just what’s wrong with people today,” Alice said, suddenly serious.

  Her voice dropped into a more regular register. Huh. Maybe she was human and not just a windup doll, no matter how much she’d been made up to look like one.

  And what kind of john liked that? Seriously? Her entire shtick made some of the toys that Chinaman Joe carried look mundane.

  “No initiative,” Alice continued. “You can’t just learn the secrets of the inner circle by asking. You have to apply yourself. Study the mysteries. Memorize the arcana. Pay the price for such knowledge.”

  “You don’t know either,” I guessed.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised what I’ve learned,” Alice bragged smugly.

  I raised a single eyebrow at her. I didn’t actually doubt that she’d managed to sleep her way to the top of whatever freaky cult she was a member of. I still challenged her. “Oh yeah? Like what.”

  “The three girls—the three virgins,” Alice said. “Their sacrifice marked the start.”

  Three girls? What the hell was she talking about? “Go on,” I said.

  “Their blood marked the path that we all must follow, down to the river, where the eternal island will be raised,” Alice said, nodding as if she really believed the crap she was spouting.

  “The eternal island?” I asked, still playing dumb. “What, you mean like Atlantis?”

  Alice rolled her eyes. Interesting. The glow had faded and I could tell she was wearing contacts that gave her a freaky pupil that never increased or diminished in size.

  “People always make that mistake,” she said. “But no. Not Atlantis. But R’lyeh. Where the dread Cthulhu lies dreaming.”

  “This Cthulhu guy doesn’t sound like he’d be much fun at a party,” I told her. “What, part dragon, part octopus? I mean, the tentacles might be okay, but—”

  “You know nothing,” Alice said as she slipped back into the crazy persona again. “His power is infinite. His wisdom unmatched. His rule unending.”

  “Yeah, well, he doesn’t seem to be doing much right now but sleeping and dreaming,” I pointed out.

  “You’ll see. You’ll all see,” Alice told me ominously as she stepped back from the counter.

  “Wow. You practice that in a mirror? Very threatening,” I assured her. “A little bit less on the crazy eyes, though, would make it more impactful.”

  “We are many,” Alice proclaimed. “Everywhere. When the dread Cthulhu rises, his army is ready. There are more of us than you suspect.”

  With that, Alice turned and marched out of the store.

  “Have a nice day!” I called out cheerily after her.

  I gave her a minute to see if she’d come back. When she didn’t, I closed my eyes and tried to go back into the conversation, to review it, to see if there was something else there.

  To see if she was actually the bomber.

  However, the conversation barely registered in the timelines. There hadn’t been enough emotion. Plus, it was always difficult and weird for a post–cog to go and checkout their own past.

  The bad news was that from what little I could pick up, she wasn’t the bomber. There weren’t any weird skips or jumps.

  The good news was that my suspicions were right. There wasn’t just a bomber. It was a whole group. Possibly more than one group, all in on this event.

  Holy crap.

  I finally realized what she’d been talking about.

  I pulled up the news on my phone, looking for the account about the people—girls—killed on the site where the bombs had been assembled.

  They’d all been in their early twenties. It was possible they’d all been virgins.

  Fuck.

  That meant the killer of those girls hadn’t just been a hired hand, as he’d claimed.

  He was part of the bigger conspiracy.

  Ξ

  Sam finally called me back later that afternoon. I figured three voice messages as well as three texts hadn’t been too much. I had news.

  “Hey,” I said. Then I pushed the phone down and answered the guy holding the dong that was as long as his forearm, supposedly a realistic sculpture of some porn star’s dick. “One–twenty–nine,” I told him.

  The guy nodded and wandered off.

  “Where are you?” Sam asked. She sounded suspicious.

  “At Chinaman Joe’s,” I said, confused. Where else would I be?

  “Why aren’t you at the Jacobson Consortium?” Sam asked.

  “Oh. Yeah. That,” I said, “called in sick.”

  The sigh that came from the other side was impressively long–suffering. “Cassie, you can’t just do that. You can’t call in sick on your second day of the job!”

  “It isn’t as if I’m going to make a career out of it or something,” I told her.

  The silence was deafening.

  Oops.

  She’d really wanted me to have a normal job, with a normal company and normal pay.

  “So you’re not even going to try,” Sam accused me.

  “You know what Josh wants me to do? Recruit working girls for their program,” I said. A lot of the working girls weren’t my friends, necessarily, but some of them were good clients.

  I didn’t want to turn them over to the slime of Josh and his company. I knew I wasn’t supposed to tell Sam, but I didn’t care that much.

  “Cassie,” Sam said, then she sighed again. “You know that if they blackball you there won’t be a snowflake’s chance in hell that you’ll ever get another job or be able to work in this town again.”

  “I know,” I told her. “But I missed a shift here. And I had to make up for it.”

  “Great. So you chose to be faithful to your dead–end job instead of trying to make a career and have a real life,” Sam snapped.

  “That’s not fair,” I told her, stung. “This place…this place has been my home for a long time. These people are my friends. What do you expect me to do?”

  Sam gave me a bitter laugh, the kind I�
�d not heard from her before. “Honestly? Grow the fuck up. Then call me when you do.”

  “Wait, Sam,” I said, hoping to catch her before she hung up.

  More silence.

  “Yes?” Sam said eventually.

  “Look, there’s this working girl. Alice. She’s part of the cult that’s trying to raise the Great Old Ones. They’re also the ones behind the bombs,” I said all in a rush. “And the god Poseidon is involved.”

  “Cassie, the gods aren’t always involved,” Sam said as if she were trying to reason with a two year old. “You said yourself that Odin claimed not to be part of this. Or Loki.”

  “There’s more than one set of gods,” I told her. “Poseidon has a float in the parade, remember?”

  “I know,” Sam said. “I went to look at it. Then I called the detective in charge and had him put more security on that float.”

  “Good,” I said. That at least would make it more difficult for the bomber and his crazy cult to get at it. “But the gods are involved.”

  “How do you know?” Sam asked.

  “I told you that Loki came to see me, right?”

  “No, you didn’t mention it,” Sam said.

  “He told me I was doing a piss–poor job of saving the world.” I paused, remembering the other thing that Loki had told me. That Hunter had told me as well.

  That I was going to have to take more of the ghost tripper drug if I wanted to be able to see the non–men this time.

  “What,” Sam asked flatly. “What aren’t you telling me.”

  I sighed. I didn’t want to tell her. I knew it would break us up for sure, though I wasn’t sure that there was an us anymore anyway.

  “Both Loki and Hunter have told me that I need to take more of the ghost tripper drug if I want to be able to see properly,” I said softly.

  No response came from the other side.

  “Sam? You still there?” I asked. I wrapped my arm across my chest in a half–hearted attempt to hold myself, because I knew Sam wasn’t going to hold me again.

  “Don’t do it,” Sam warned. “Don’t give in to them.”

  “What if it’s the only way to save the world?” I challenged her.

  “There must be other ways,” Sam said. “You can’t always be the one who sacrifices herself. Make the others do it. Make Hunter do it. You can’t take more of the drug. Even the Jacobson Consortium will fire you for that.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m not sure I’ll have a choice.”

  “There’s no making up between us if you take more of the drug,” Sam said frostily.

  “Fine,” I told her, pissed off. “You go ahead and judge me from that high horse of yours, Sam. Stick with your friends. Stick with the blessed. And your pure training. I’ll just be doing what needs to be done.”

  I hung up on her then.

  She didn’t understand. She never had. I wasn’t addicted to the drug, not like Hunter. I wasn’t addicted to seeing the alternate timelines either, though they were always tempting.

  I was, however, chained to using my powers to do good, to make a goddamned difference in the world.

  No matter what form those powers took, or how they were enabled.

  Ξ

  “I need Wednesday night off,” I told Laura. God, I wanted another cigarette, but we were sitting in the back, in the break room. Laura, of course, didn’t smoke. And even though it was almost two in the morning, the heat from the day hadn’t backed down a bit. I wasn’t about to ask her to come stand with me outside in the back alley.

  I didn’t go there as often anyway. Not since Kyle was killed back there. And everything else.

  Laura shook her head. “Look, I already told you. I can’t come in. Amy has another date. And Travis is out of town. You need to be here. You can’t call in sick. Or the store will close.”

  Chinaman Joe would have my head if the store was closed during regular hours. Unless there was an actual apocalypse, the store was open during its proclaimed hours. Chinaman Joe always said, “Never disappoint a customer.” There were far too many other places where people could go to get their toys and gadgets.

  “But I can’t make it either,” I told her.

  “You’ve told me that. More than once. But I still don’t believe you,” Laura said, sitting back, crossing her arms over her chest.

  That actually wasn’t a bad thing. She did have pretty good tits.

  “Look, weird things are going to happen that night,” I told her. I didn’t know for certain. But I was pretty sure. Something would happen to the float that contained Poseidon. And somewhere, on some patch of water, the cultists were sure to be trying to raise Cthulhu, like they had at Lake Calhoun.

  I couldn’t be two places at once. Hell, I couldn’t be three places at once. And I had no idea where Hunter was, either. Or how to contact him.

  “I’m sorry,” Laura said. She didn’t sound sorry, but at least she didn’t sound pissed at me either. “You’re just going to have to make a choice about what’s most important.”

  That sounded to me an awful lot like Sam telling me to grow the fuck up.

  I sat and fumed in the backroom after Laura left. I didn’t like my options.

  Come in to work at Chinaman Joe’s, and let the world end.

  Try to stop the cultists from blowing up Poseidon, probably one of the last barriers for the rise of the Old Ones.

  Or just to stop them from holding their ceremony down at one of the waterfronts. There were too many lakes to choose from, however. I had no idea which one they’d be at.

  None of them sounded like great choices.

  But I was all alone, more so than I’d been before.

  I’d been ignoring all my friends for most of the summer, all wrapped up with Sam and my new relationship. It had also been hard to be with them. They were so very different than she was. She’d worked for what she had, but she’d never had a real job, where you got up every morning at 5:15 a.m. whether you felt like it or not, and slogged through all kinds of weather for low pay and no appreciation.

  Had I made the wrong choice, being with her? No. It had been a golden time, well, some of the time. When we hadn’t been fighting.

  Now, however, it was time to call in every old favor I could. Maybe go into serious debt for some others.

  Because I couldn’t be in three places at once. But I sure as hell had to get everything covered.

  Ξ

  Wednesday morning I called into Jacobson Consortium sick. Again.

  Sam would kill me if she found out.

  If she cared.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me that my old friends rallied around me. I’d always believed that while I had their backs, they didn’t have mine.

  Maybe they actually would look after me more than I thought they would.

  Tom agreed to come in and work the store. He’d been a friend of Kyle’s—one of Kyle’s amazingly long string of boyfriends to survive the sex and breakup and still hung out with us. I didn’t know for certain, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if he didn’t have better knowledge of the inventory than I did.

  Tess, d’Angelo, and Franklin had all been planning on going to the parade anyway.

  That left me and figuring out which body of water the cult would be using.

  As well as scoring some of the ghost tripper drug.

  Fortunately, Tom at least had an idea about where Dusty might be hanging out, up in northern Minneapolis, of course, at some weird tennis club.

  I didn’t have a lot of time to get up there and back again. Certainly not with the buses.

  I took a chance and called Hakeem. I had no idea if Josh had already revoked my cab–riding privileges.

  “Hello, my friend!” Hakeem said gleefully into the phone. “What can I do for you?”

  “Can you pick me up in downtown Minneapolis, take me to northern St. Paul, wait for a bit, then bring me back?” I asked. I figured that was the easiest route for him.

  “But of course
!” Hakeem said. “Give me the direction. I will be there. One hour.”

  I couldn’t believe how relieved I felt. Maybe I didn’t have to save the world on my own.

  That is, if I didn’t manage to get all my friends killed.

  Ξ

  Hakeem actually knew the tennis club in St. Paul that I was asking about. Had he driven Josh there? Maybe to get more drugs from Dusty, to mix with the drugs that he’d give his vets from Jacobson Consortium?

  “You be careful,” Hakeem told me before he unlocked the door of the town car. “Is dangerous. Bad men.”

  Unfortunately, Hakeem hadn’t shown up for closer to two hours after I’d called him, then traffic had been stuck at a complete crawl going north. The sky was already darkening by the time we pulled into the parking lot of the tennis club.

  “Thanks,” I told him. Unfortunately, that just meant that Tom’s information was good.

  I was going to have to talk with him later about his choice of drug dealer.

  The heat, of course, had intensified. Though the orange clouds were boiling full of rain, no storms were predicted until later in the week. Figured. No break until after I’d either saved the world, or screwed everything up and destroyed it.

  The walls looked like they were black slate, under a white domed roof. Right next to the building was a three–foot–wide swath of rocks. Not even weeds struggled to breathe there.

  It looked as though the doors were controlled with a keycard, but when I tried them, they were open.

  Great. Either it was a trap, or the reader really was broken and Dusty had shitty security.

  Inside, the air conditioning had been cranked up to eleven. Groceries wouldn’t need a fridge in there. The lobby was wide open. Across the back, opposite to the door, ran a long, low cabinet that was a collection of cubbyholes for storing shoes and things. To the right stood what was obviously a reception desk, though no one sat there.

  To the left, a couple of goons stood guard outside a door. They were obviously of the rent–a–cop caliber, particularly given their cheap suits. They both glared at me.

  What were the odds that Dusty was in some sort of meeting behind that door?

  Which meant I had to get in there.