by Jeff Somers
I pulled a much-creased business card from my pocket and held it up. “You gave this to me once, old man,” I said. “A little joke, huh? I undid the Glamour on it. It’s blank.”
Fallon didn’t smile. “A little joke, yes. But also a test. Some would not be certain they had not missed anything. Some would spend years working on it, convinced there must be a great puzzle, a great spell whose nature confounds them. Some have spent years. Some are still spending years doing so. I congratulate you, Mr. Vonnegan.”
I let the wind take the card. For a moment we all watched it dance away. Fallon sighed, popping his snack from his hand into his mouth. “Come in, the both of you. I am aware that you are a package deal.”
The workshop was as I remembered it: a largely empty space, the desk and cabinets in the middle, the creaky old chair, the slanted drafting table, the shadows and the cobwebs and the sense of decay and erosion all around.
“I hear—because mages love to gossip like young children—that you have once again been making a mess of things, Mr. Vonnegan. It is apparently a talent that you have. Having Mika Renar as an enemy was bad enough. Now you have murdered her apprentice!” He dropped into his chair and continued to pop his snack into his mouth. “The world will not mourn that irritating dandy Amir. His gasam will not likely mourn him, either, except as a lost investment. But where Renar’s desire to punish you was casual before, Mr. Vonnegan . . . well, I am surprised to find you still alive.”
He dashed off a mocking salute.
“How do you let someone like that . . . exist?” I asked. “She’s got a . . . a farm up there for bleeding people.”
He shrugged. “You should see what I am designing for the old witch. We are ustari, Mr. Vonnegan. We are not good people. And Renar may be the worst of us. But by our ways she is doing nothing wrong. No one in that room was under the protection of a mage of any rank.”
A shiver went through me. I pictured the rows and rows of idiots like me, trussed up and surgically pierced like fucking livestock, bleeding out so the demented old bitch could maintain the World’s Most Impressive Glamour—a Glamour no one was fooled into thinking was actually her. And this was okay because Renar was feared, and because she played within the insane rules of the mages. She didn’t draw attention. She didn’t bother her fellow ustari or mess with their property, their apprentices, or their own schemes. That’s all it took.
“That attitude will bite you in the ass someday,” I said.
“Yes,” Fallon agreed happily. “I believe you are right, Mr. Vonnegan. And when the time comes I will be glad to raise an army and march on Mika’s little fortress-mansion. Until then, be grateful for your escape and keep your eyes open. Now, as I am a busy man, tell me: What brings you here, finally?”
I grimaced. He knew. The old bastard knew perfectly well why I was here, why he’d invited me here a long time ago, telling me I had to make a choice. I’d been avoiding that choice. I’d been avoiding that choice hard. I’d spent years as Hiram Bosch’s urtuku, supposedly training under my master. Recently set free, I’d tried hard to stay that way.
“You said it,” I confessed, slumping a little as I gave in. “I’m lucky to be alive. I’ve got the world’s most powerful ustari and worst human being in the world angry at me.” I shrugged. “I need advice. Training. Protection.”
I looked at him. He was smiling, one eyebrow raised in amusement, waiting for my inevitable capitulation. I’d been free, but powerless. Up against someone like Mika Renar, that was as good as dead, and I felt like I was in the car with old Hilly Vonnegan again, out on the back roads, looking for the boom bands. And I hated it.
“I need a gasam, Mr. Fallon,” I said, anger making me spit out each word. “I need you to be my master.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WHEN MY EDITOR, Adam Wilson, first suggested I write some novellas set in the Ustari universe, I demanded a huge sum of money and sent him a contract rider that was forty-seven pages long, and he wished me luck in finding another publisher. When I called him at three a.m. crying and begging him to take me back, he did so, and for that I am grateful.
When I called my agent, Janet Reid, and told her of my plans to write a sixteen-volume paranormal romance about a race of superintelligent cats, she had me put on a forty-eight-hour psychiatric hold and suggested I work on this instead, and for that I thank her.
While writing these stories, whenever I had doubts or fears, I would tell my beautiful wife, Danette, about them and she would suggest we adopt another cat. This is how she shows love.
To all the people who read We Are Not Good People and who reacted with enthusiasm and excitement when these novellas were announced, you have my sincere appreciation and gratitude. I hope these stories live up to your expectations. And that all your checks clear.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JEFF SOMERS began writing by court order as an attempt to steer his creative impulses away from engineering genetic grotesqueries. His feeble memory makes every day a joyous adventure of discovery and adventure even as it destroys personal relationships, and his weakness for adorable furry creatures leaves him with many cats. He has published nine novels, including the Avery Cates series of noir–science fiction novels from Orbit Books (www.avery-cates.com), the darkly hilarious crime novel Chum from Tyrus Books, and most recently tales of blood magic and short cons in the Ustari Cycle, including the novel We Are Not Good People and the novellas The Stringer, Last Best Day, and The Boom Bands from Pocket Star Books—visit www.WeAreNotGoodPeople.com for more. He has published over thirty short stories, including “Ringing the Changes,” which was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2006; “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through,” which appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, edited by Charlaine Harris; and “Three Cups of Tea,” which appeared in the anthology Hanzai Japan. He also writes about books for Barnes & Noble and About.com, and about the craft of writing for Writer’s Digest. He lives in Hoboken with his wife, The Duchess, and their cats. He considers pants to always be optional.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Jeff-Somers
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THE USTARI CYCLE
We Are Not Good People
Fixer
The Stringer
Last Best Day
The Boom Bands
THE AVERY CATES SERIES
The Electric Church
The Digital Plague
The Eternal Prison
The Terminal State
The Final Evolution
STAND-ALONE NOVELS
Lifers
Chum
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Pocket Star Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Jeff Somers
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First Pocket Star Books ebook ed
ition January 2017
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ISBN 978-1-5011-4144-7
