Blood Engines

by T. A. Pratt

  Marla didn’t know whether to be flattered that the most accomplished group of hired killers in the world had such respect for her, or annoyed that more than one person had contacted them about putting a hit out on her. Actually, that was kind of flattering, too. “So if you aren’t here for murder most foul, what do you want?”

  The knife withdrew. He’d made his point, she supposed. She turned in her seat to face him. He was a mild-looking man of middle years, with thinning hair, dressed all in black. She expected the residue of a lookaway spell to sparkle around his edges, but there was nothing. He’d avoided being seen just by sitting very still and being one with the shadows. Any doubt Marla had about his identity dissolved. You had to be pretty badass to do a trick like that without magic, and it was the kind of thing the slow assassins taught. “I am the outreach coordinator for my organization,” Kardec said. “I’ve come to you, in your capacity as a civic leader, to inform you of some activity in your city. I am here with a few of my colleagues to apprehend a criminal.”

  “Since when do you guys do law enforcement?”

  He smiled, showing small perfect teeth. “We enforce the laws of our organization, of course.”

  The light dawned. “Ohhh. You’ve got a deserter, huh?” She’d heard about them—men and women who went into the slow assassins, learned some tricks of the trade, and then slipped away to freelance. The slow assassins didn’t like that. Once you were in, you didn’t leave alive. Marla had never heard of a deserter living more than a few months. The assassins weren’t slow when it came to dealing with things like that.

  “Yes. He calls himself Mr. Zealand.”

  Marla frowned. “I’ve heard of him. He’s been working as a freelance hitter for a long time, Mr. Kardec. He’s one of yours?”

  “Oh, yes,” Kardec said. “He is not some initiate who broke under the stress of the patience we require. He completed our whole course with great aplomb, and took a twenty-year contract as his first.”

  Marla whistled. The slow assassins would stalk their victims for as long as the customer wanted, though of course the victims never knew how long they had. Six-month contracts weren’t too expensive—more than a normal contract killing, but nothing mortgaging a nice house wouldn’t cover—but the longer the term, the pricier it got. She couldn’t imagine how much money it would take to hire a slow assassin to stalk a victim for twenty years. Even she probably couldn’t afford it.

  “At first,” Kardec went on, “we thought he was engaged in his duty. He introduced himself to his victim, and pursued at a reasonable pace as the victim attempted to flee. But at some point…Mr. Zealand got bored. He began taking other contracts, secretly. Simple murders and assassinations. We don’t approve of such moonlighting. Eventually his actions came to light, and we sent a crew to apprehend him.” He frowned. “They were all killed. At that point, some dozen years ago, Mr. Zealand went completely rogue, abandoning his first target.” Kardec shook his head. “Perhaps if we’d started him on something easier, a two-year contract, maybe…but who knows. Mr. Zealand likes killing, and has made a nice living doing so. We’ve been after him for years, but he is a hard man to catch, and, of course, he is very familiar with our techniques. But we finally had some good fortune. He was seen here in Felport by one of our operatives, an assassin who studied with him years ago. We don’t know what he’s doing, who his target is, or who has employed him, but we’ll find out.”

  “You want me to get in touch if I hear anything?”

  Kardec produced a business card and handed it over. “My cell number. Please do. But don’t spread the word too far—we don’t want to spook Mr. Zealand. I was more concerned with you…overreacting…if you noticed the presence of several dangerous individuals in your city.” He smiled thinly. “We slow assassins have a reputation for disregarding local politics, and it’s true that we fulfill our contracts above all other considerations, but we don’t wish to cause any unnecessary trouble.”

  “Understood,” Marla said. “Thanks for the heads-up. And next time you try to touch me, with a knife or anything else, you’ll have a spurting stump where your hand used to be. And I’m not speaking metaphorically.”

  Kardec slipped out of the Bentley, walking swiftly away to disappear among the derelict train cars.

  “This has been a crappy morning,” Rondeau said, starting the car. “It’s not fair that I’ve got a clogged toilet in my future, and you’ve got a beautiful man in yours.”

  Marla snorted. “I’m not going to see Joshua because he’s pretty, Rondeau.”

  “Oh? I thought being pretty was the only thing he had to offer?”

  Marla considered. “Touché,” she said.

  Snow flurries began as Marla strolled along the salted sidewalks. It was February, and winter wasn’t through with Felport yet, not by a long way. Marla turned a corner, three blocks from Hamil’s building, and saw a woman sprawled out in the snow near the base of an apartment house. The woman’s thick caramel-colored hair obscured her face. She wasn’t dressed for the weather, wearing jeans and a pale yellow blouse with only a black wool scarf as a concession to the elements. Her cheeks were rosy, and her dingy white tennis shoes had no laces. The woman’s arms were extended in a Y over her head, and her legs were spread apart, as if she’d passed out in the midst of making a snow angel. But there was no snow around her body, just dead grass, as if all the snow had melted around her.

  Marla knelt and touched the ground. Warm, but not hot. She studied the woman, watching her chest rise and fall and her eyelids flicker. Not dead, only dreaming. Could a fever be hot enough to melt snow and ice? If so, Marla should have felt the heat radiating from the woman, and she didn’t. Was she some kind of pyromancer, then? Or hag-ridden by a now-hibernating fire demon? Marla consulted her mental clock and chewed her lip. She should look into this, have the woman checked out, but she didn’t have time to do it herself. No one else in town knew about Joshua Kindler and his valuable power, but the longer he spent in town unrecruited, the greater the chance Gregor or Ernesto or some other sorcerer would discover his presence and make him an offer. She’d send Hamil to check out the woman after she got to his apartment.

  “Sleep well,” she said, rising. And then stopped. “Holy shit,” she said. This woman was sleeping. Marla tried to remember what the woman in the photograph at the Blackwing Institute had looked like. It had been a shitty picture, blurry, but this woman was petite, she had that mass of hair, it might be her. “Hey,” Marla said. “Is your name Genevieve Kelley? Are you…lost, hon?”

  The woman moaned, a sound of deep distress, and Marla knelt again. “You okay?” she said, and touched the woman’s cheek.

  The street tilted around, and the sides of the surrounding buildings bulged out like the bodies of huge creatures taking deep breaths. Marla ducked her head and tried to grab the pavement, vertigo upending her sense of gravity. This was like falling through space, but the only movement was inside her head.

  The woman opened her eyes—they were violet, the color of crushed flowers—and clenched Marla’s hand. “His mouth,” she said, her breath a hot wind on Marla’s face. “His reeking mouth.”

  Marla fell backward, breaking contact with the woman and sitting hard in the snow. She looked around, bewildered, head pounding.

  What happened? Why was she on the ground? Had she fainted? That had never happened before. She looked at the homeless woman lying on the grass. I didn’t even see her, Marla thought. Did I trip over her? She stood and brushed snow from her coat. The woman before her shifted a little, her fingers fluttering as if grasping for something. Marla felt a twinge of pity mixed with disgust. A thin layer of snow had started to form on the woman’s face. She’d be buried within an hour if she didn’t move. Marla nudged her in the side with her booted foot, but the woman didn’t respond. Sleeping off a drunk, probably. Marla sighed, took off her long coat, and put it over the woman’s sleeping form. That would keep her from freezing to death, at least, and Marla had other
ways of dealing with the cold. She’d walk back this way when she left Hamil’s place, and if the woman was still there, Marla would call someone from a shelter to pick her up. She stepped around the woman and went on her way.

  Z watched as she knelt to examine a woman sprawled in the snow. Quite the humanitarian. Suddenly, Marla fell backward in the snow, landing hard on her ass. She sat still, chin on her chest, eyes closed, for almost a full minute. Z inhaled and exhaled seven times while Marla sat unmoving. Very interesting. Was she narcoleptic? No one had mentioned that. A woman who fell unconscious on the street would not be difficult to kill, he thought.

  Then she jerked, lifted her head, and looked around, confused. Z didn’t breathe, because the puffs of his exhalations made small clouds of mist, and she might see them when she looked his way. Marla rose to her feet, draped her coat over the still-unconscious woman, and then walked on purposefully.

  When Marla turned a corner, the assassin slipped out of the doorway silently and padded after her. As he passed, the sleeping woman stirred and sat up. She yawned and stretched, as if waking in her own warm bed, Marla’s coat sliding down her body to puddle in her lap. She looked at him, frowned, and said, “You remind me of someone. No. Wait. I remind you of someone.”

  Hamil greeted Marla at the door of his vast apartment, his bulk filling the entire entryway as he beamed at her. Beads of perspiration glistened on the dark skin of his shaved head. He smiled broadly. Hamil was her consiglieri, her chief advisor and closest ally among Felport’s secret magical elite. Without his support, she would have been assassinated during her first year as chief sorcerer, though since then, she’d solidified her position by saving the city from destruction once or twice. He still helped smooth over the inevitable interpersonal conflicts, though. The powerful sorcerers in Felport were used to deference and respect, and Marla was lousy at faking such things. “You’re sweating,” Marla said as he stepped aside to let her in. She gasped as the heat of the apartment hit her. “It’s sweltering in here, Hamil! God, doesn’t all the fat on you keep you warm enough?”

  “It’s only eighty degrees here,” Hamil said, shutting the door. “You just feel hotter because you’ve been outside in the cold.”

  Marla shook her head. “Eighty degrees? Why so warm?”

  He shrugged. “I’m growing orchids. They like it hot during the day.” He led her across the gleaming tile floor toward a long low table that took up most of a wall, with about twenty evenly spaced pots, each bearing a single flower, all different colors and shapes.

  “I guess they’re pretty enough,” Marla said. “But I don’t quite get the point of making a flower comfortable at the expense of your own comfort.” She squinted. “But…ah. Sympathetic magic, right?”

  Hamil nodded, gesturing for Marla to sit. She settled herself on his black leather couch and he lowered himself into a big club chair, specially made to accommodate his weight. His apartment was sleek, modern, and spare, everything her own place was not, which was why Marla preferred to take her meetings here.

  “Growing orchids is very delicate, but the result is a beautiful flowering. I am involved in some, ah, other delicate negotiations, as you know, and by caring for the flowers, I’ve created a field of sympathetic resonance. As the flowers prosper, so will my other endeavors.”

  Marla laughed. Hamil looked like a giant bruiser, a movie version of gangsta street muscle, but in reality he was a master of delicate sympathetic magics. Marla could work a few sympathetic magic spells—burning effigies to create bad luck for her enemies, that sort of thing—but Hamil was an artist of the technique. Specialization had its benefits, though Marla preferred her own hodgepodge approach to magic, using a little bit of everything. She’d been called a brute-force-omancer, and a foul-rag-and-bone-shop sorceress, and though both terms were usually meant as insults, she supposed they were accurate enough. She preferred broad adaptability to niche expertise.

  “You can meet with Mr. Kindler in my office, if you like,” Hamil said. “The heat there is less oppressive. He should be along shortly. He called to say he was running late.”

  Marla grunted. “He’d better learn to be punctual if he wants to work for me.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure you’ll be very stern with him,” Hamil said. “It’s not as if he has some supernatural power that makes people fall in love with him—oh, wait, he does. He’s a Ganconer, Marla. I doubt even you would find it possible to speak sharply to a lovetalker.”

  “Whatever. You’ll see. Besides, he’s not a Ganconer, a Ganconer’s a kind of fairy, and I’m not even convinced those things are real, despite what your crazy-ass friend Tom O’Bedbug says. Joshua Kindler was born of man and woman. He’s no elf.”

  Hamil rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes. But we call his kind lovetalkers and Ganconers for convenience, even though they can do more than seduce. Once upon a time we called his sort Charismatics, did you know that? A good name, but since the 1950s that word has acquired so many religious associations, it’s mostly been abandoned.” He glanced at his watch. “I hear from one of my street urchins that you rushed out to the countryside this morning. Any problems?”

  Marla grunted. “Your little orphans have eyes everywhere, huh? Yeah, I went out to Blackwing. Dr. Husch has a runaway.”

  Hamil’s eyes widened. “Not Jarrow? No, of course not, you wouldn’t be sitting here so calmly if that were the case. Who, then?”

  “Genevieve Kelley. She’s a psychic, maybe a reweaver. She’s been catatonic for a long time, but Jarrow woke her up while trying to escape, and Genevieve’s gone wandering. I’m going to track her down before she gets hurt, or hurts anyone else.”

  “Do we have a description? I can put the word out.”

  Marla shrugged. “White lady, dark hair, petite. Wearing a yellow blouse and a black scarf…Wait.” She frowned. “Strike that last. We don’t know what she’s wearing. Probably a nightgown. I don’t know why I thought…huh. Funny. I have like this mental picture of her in yellow and black.” She shook her head. “I’ll have Rondeau send the picture over.”

  “I’ll expect it to arrive in six to eight weeks then,” Hamil said dryly. Marla grinned. Rondeau was not the most reliable courier. She really needed to hire a personal assistant. She groaned. “And I met a slow assassin this morning. There are a bunch of them in town looking for one of their wayward brothers.”

  She recounted her conversation with Kardec, and Hamil clucked his tongue. “An eventful morning. I hope this Mr. Zealand isn’t in town to eliminate anyone we know. Well, unless it’s Gregor, that insufferable prig. I wouldn’t shed any tears over him.” His phone rang, and Hamil flipped it open and said, “Yes? Ah, yes Mr. Kindler, I’ll buzz you in.” He closed the phone. “Your beautiful boy is downstairs. Don’t be too rough on him. I’m sure he’s very delicate.”

  “Yeah, a precious flower who’s always gotten his own way. A little jolt will do him good.” She cracked her knuckles.

  A few moments later the doorbell rang, and Hamil opened the door. “Do come in,” he said, and Joshua Kindler entered.

  Once she saw him, Marla couldn’t stop looking. His slim hips, his pale eyes, his dark long eyelashes, his sweet lips, his copper-colored tousled hair, his beautiful hands, the entirety of him. Looking at him was like sipping brandy, like snuggling into down comforters, like soaking in a warm bath. Just the sight of him was sensual. The thought of touching him—it was enough to make her a little dizzy.

  Fucking pheromones, she thought. Or aura manipulation, or empathic projection, or however the hell it works. She didn’t usually like having her senses hijacked, which was why she avoided most drugs and only indulged sparingly in alcohol. “Mr. Kindler,” she said, putting a lot of steel and razorwire into her voice. “If you’re going to work for me, you’re going to have to learn to be on time.”

  He still stood in the open doorway. He looked shocked, and in his shock, he was beautiful. Marla wondered if she was the first person to ever see that expression on his
face, or even the first to cause it.

  “I haven’t agreed to work for you yet,” he said cautiously, “Ms. Mason. I’ve just come to hear you out.”

  Marla shrugged. “So come into Hamil’s office, and we’ll talk.”

  “If you don’t mind, Marla, I’m going to make a few calls,” Hamil said. He couldn’t take his eyes off Joshua, either.

  Marla gave her assent, and beckoned for Joshua to follow her. He moved like a cloud, and for the first time she noticed his clothes, perfectly white coat over an immaculate shirt and slacks. Most lovetalkers didn’t bother to make themselves look good, trusting their magical attractiveness to win over anyone they encountered. Marla had met a few who were disgusting slobs, who took pleasure in their ability to seduce people even while picking their noses or sucking on foul cheap cigars. Joshua was different, special, more wonderful than the rest—

  Ah, shit. His power was strong. She shut the door to the study and pointed to a chair in front of Hamil’s desk. She plopped down in Hamil’s huge executive chair, grateful to have the desk between them. She squelched the mental voice that lamented her choice of clothes, that wished she’d worn something more feminine than loose pants and a baggy shirt, after all her breasts were still pretty good, she’d been a topless waitress once upon a time, early thirties wasn’t too old for him—a whole annoying line of insecure bullshit.

  Joshua sat down, gentle as fog settling over the city.

  “Let me get right to the point,” Marla said.

  “Please,” he murmured, looking at her from beneath his long lashes, eyes fixed on hers. Marla thought of pictures she’d seen of Persian harem boys, bronze-skinned and slim with girlish lips, and thought I’d like to kiss him all over.

  She leaned forward in her chair, counteracting her urge to lean back and stretch, catlike. “Occasionally I require certain services.” He raised an eyebrow and smiled, and Marla blushed, much to her irritation. “Not the kind of services dried-up rich women cruising in Cadillacs ask you for, Joshua. I think you know that.”