by Jim Butcher
And this was the beginning for you, a raw piece of meat with your guts in your lap. Just the beginning because the Auphe loved their toys. They played hard with them, but they knew how to make them last until they’d taken everything from them. They took your arms and legs and what was between them, as you had no use for that now, did you, little toy? The only thing they didn’t take from their toys was their tongue, so they could scream, and their hearing, as it’s no good if your toy doesn’t know how much fun it is playing with it and how much longer the playing will last.
No, the First hadn’t been much on talking, but when they had, you’d have ended up saner if you hadn’t listened. Or less insane. It didn’t matter in the end. If the Auphe had been talking to you, you were likely fucked a thousand and one times over with no way out. I’d been lucky. I hadn’t been a toy. I’d been a tool. I hadn’t been born, but had been intentionally bred like a damn dog—best in show, a half-breed experiment. I’d managed to keep all my parts, my dick in particular, which I did have use for and would’ve missed like hell.
I’d opened the gate as soon as I’d left the bar and walked to turn into the alley where we dumped the garbage. The gate itself was a constantly shifting circle about twelve feet in diameter, with the seething ring a roiling mix of the murky gray of a tornado-spawning storm, a slick oil-spill black, and the dark, dusky blue of a bruise with the sizzling flash of livid purple-edged lightning racing around the circumference.
This was my toy. If you survive being an unwilling guest of the Auphe, you deserve one incredible fucking prize. Learning how to gate was mine.
Fun and useful; I could travel from place to place, but they had to be places I’d been before, knew, or could see. That was good enough for me. I gave it the same look you’d give a well-trained pet, fond and proud, then stepped through. I stepped out more than seven hundred miles away, in Kentucky. Lots of little four-way-stop towns, but also an ocean of horse-country money. Kentucky was one was the biggest producers of two things: expensive racehorses and more pot than almost anywhere else in the country. Half the farmers, it seemed when I was thirteen, drove cars that cost more than houses. Millionaire-nice houses.
We’d lived in Lexington, a college city, racetrack city, but surrounded by velvety green fields with grazing-sleek, coated-muscle flesh. Wind captured in the body of horse. I’d seen horses before, chunky farm horses, but when I’d seen my first Thoroughbred run, I’d thought it was an entirely different animal, different species. They might not be as fast as cheetahs, but they were silk and lightning and thunder—a cyclone exploding into motion. It was amazing. Not much impressed me at thirteen, or any age, but that first run was a frozen snapshot in my mind. That the majority of them ended up as dog food when their racing days were over made me hate that place more than a good deal of worse ones where we’d lived as kids.
People: I didn’t understand them, and that was one more reason I didn’t feel any urge to try.
I’d gated to the parking lot of the junior high I’d gone to for a few months before we moved on—Sophia, one step ahead of the cops as usual, had maxed out her anonymous new presence with enough stealing, conning, and whoring. There was always a new city, always a new school, always another first day.
I remembered my first day here; I wouldn’t have if not for the first name on my list. First days all had blended together. However, thanks to this being the birthplace of that list, thanks to Mr. C., I remembered.
Studied the school, brown, boxy, and ugly as before but older and with more grime. I smiled. I’d never done a first day over in the same place. This was the exception. This time I was getting it right. “Mr. C. Coach Lee Callahan. No more hiding in the tall grass for you.”
I couldn’t gate to his house, although I had to give credit to the Internet for being as invasive as kudzu with tendrils that refused to stop spreading. Thanks to it, I had his address. I had that and a damn good deal more, but there was something I wanted from the school first. Breaking in was easy. I could’ve gated, but I liked to keep my whole range of skills up. Bypassing simple security systems, and they didn’t get any simpler than the one they had: lock picking. I’d learned those by watching Sophia. She sure as hell hadn’t taught me anything on purpose. She didn’t bother wasting her breath to even talk to me if she could avoid it, unless she was feeling especially spiteful, then it was an all-day monster marathon.
I was a monster, a thing, a freak, a living disease, a nightmare that had washed out of her womb and had been planted there by a worse nightmare.
That had bothered me some when I was little, and bothered me more when, at five, I’d seen my first monster peering with eyes the color of blood through the kitchen window at me. Surrounded by empty night, it had tapped the glass with a pointed black nail that contrasted with its transparently pale skin, and then it had grinned wide, wider, wider still, until I’d thought the expression would wrap around its head.
How could a grin be so big?
It had teeth that were the same as the metal needles at the clinic where my brother took me for flu shots. Bright silver needles, hundreds and hundreds. I’d run and hid under the bed, letting my brother crawl under to curl around me as I shook. In the morning when it was gone, I’d pushed the fear down, putting it in a toy box I kept in my head, and locked the lid. I’d seen the toy box in a store window once, painted bright green and blue with dinosaurs. It cost a lot. I’d wanted it, but I’d known even before then that wanting and getting weren’t the same.
Instead I’d built one inside my head. When things scared me or made me feel stupid because I didn’t understand, I’d locked them in the box. Like I’d done now. It let me think, and I had. I’d thought hard. Sophia had only sex stuff for money. Living with a whore, by five years old or earlier, you know something about sex stuff. She called it fucking and made it sound ugly, but Niko said to call it sex stuff.
She’d said it before, too, and I hadn’t understood then, but I did now. “It gave me gold and diamonds,” she’d muttered, hunched over a Scooby-Doo glass of whiskey. Whiski? “Hundreds and hundreds of necklaces and rings,” she’d slurred, “but now they’re all gone, and you’re here instead. You’re still goddamn here.”
If I was a nightmare, what did it mean that she’d let something that was a bigger nightmare, and looked like one, pay to put his thing in her and put me inside her stomach?
It meant if I was a nightmare, it was her fault because she’d fucked one for money. “Fucked” because what she’d done, fucked a nightmare, was ugly. Ugly and wrong, but she’d done it, anyway. So she should shut up about what she called me before I got the kitchen knife and made her.
I hadn’t appreciated at five what a cool little kid I was.
Those were the days.
Once inside I roamed around, looking for the library. A half hour later, I’d found it and everything I wanted from it. Sitting at a table with a pronounced lean, I had five yearbooks spread out. I played a small flashlight over them. I was able to get the names and bare-bone details off the Internet, but only half of the pictures, and then some of the details were too glossed-over. They didn’t like to mention suicide in obituaries, and not every kid who kills himself is considered worthy of a news article. Cause of death tended to be “taken too soon.” If you died between twelve and fifteen years old, the age range of these yearbooks, whether by a rope or a brain tumor, “taken too soon” covered pretty much anything.
All had dedications, and everyone had mentioned “shy,” “talked so little yet said so much,” “you didn’t know how you depended on seeing his smiling face every day until you didn’t see it again.” The customary bullshit for “that geek, weirdo, freak, bat-shit kid who tried to sit by me, as if I want his crazy getting all over my new outfit, God, who had gone and killed himself. Now we have to come up with something nice to say for the yearbook, when no one ever talked to the loser. Let’s make it short. I have cheer pr
actice in half an hour, then I need to hit at least three stores to find a dress for homecoming. Life is so hard when you’re popular.”
The kids—the dead ones, not the ones the world would be better off for if they were—were similar. Nothing close to identical. They were all boys. Some had fair skin, some darker. Their eyes weren’t the same color, but they did all have black or dark hair, and all, from what you can tell in a yearbook pictures, were on the smaller side. Either short or skinny or both. Two wore glasses. None of them were smiling but one, and it was a smile so false it shouted “misery” twice as loud as the blank faces. At thirteen, when I’d gone here, I’d have fit right in with them . . . except for their unhappy and lost expressions. I’d never had a yearbook picture. We were Rom. We lived off the grid, and we didn’t do pictures, real addresses, anything that could lead someone of the lawful nature to Sophia’s door. But if I had, I wouldn’t have the label these kids virtually stamped on their forehead.
Vulnerable.
Mr. C. had an acquired taste, and he stuck with it. I did have access to the news article telling me where he’d acquired that particular taste. He just hadn’t looked me over as closely as he should have. Sloppy for an otherwise efficient predator.
I ripped the pages from the books, which I left scattered on the table, and was outside in less than a minute. I’d walk a few blocks, steal a car, dump out the window on the road the surgical gloves I’d fished from the depths of my jacket, and pay the coach a visit.
Talk about the old days.
Say, “What about that jock asshole you sicced on me? Did his dick ever work again? No? Had to have his balls amputated. Isn’t that a fucking shame?”
Good times.
The house was outside the city on the far edge of a smaller town. Surrounded by acres of trees and unmowed fields. If you had a hobby, a noisy hobby, no one would hear anything. And screams, electric saws, breaking bones, that sort of thing, were noisy. It was a happy man who indulged in a good hobby.
I liked mine.
Circling the house, I could see his shadow moving in a window on the second floor. It was close to ten, early for bed, but he was a hardworking teacher and coach. He was probably brushing his teeth, and twelve years after I’d noticed his thinning hair, he absolutely had a helluva Rogaine monkey on his back by now. I came through the back door. It wasn’t locked, which meant no bodies in his basement, but it remained wildly naïve. It made me want to pat him on his medicated, slicked-up head or pinch his cheek—you know, before I went about shooting him in the face.
Making myself comfortable on a saggy couch, I put my feet up on the coffee table, crossing them at the ankles. The impact of the combat boots against the wood made enough noise that he couldn’t miss it. I waited for him to come down, with either gun or bat. Just move it. I’d put this off for twelve years, and I wanted it done. I wanted it fixed. I wanted to do what I should’ve done then.
Put the bastard down.
A cop, a lawyer, a jury, a human: they would all call it premeditated.
Murder in the first degree.
I wasn’t a human and this wasn’t murder. This was taking out a rabid coyote. I was killing what couldn’t be cured and protecting the defenseless herd. Also, as part of my hobby, I was removing a subpar predator from the grass. Subpar or skilled as hell, I’d kill you either way, but the subpar ones irritated me. If you’re going to be a murdering dick, be the best murdering dick possible. I’d respect your intelligence, if not the monster under your face, when I pulled the trigger.
The coach brought a gun to the party.
More ambitious than a baseball bat—hallelujah for the minuscule challenge. It’s the little things in life you have to learn to appreciate. Often there are days when the little things are all you’ll get.
“Coach.” I raised my hand and offered a lazy smile. “Long time, no see. I like your gun. That is as old-school as it comes. A Dirty Harry–style Smith and Wesson twenty-nine. Chambered forty-four Magnum? Oh shit, I get it. Coach Callahan. Dirty Harry Callahan. You are just fucking making my day. That—” I laughed. I couldn’t stop myself if I’d wanted. This was not a challenge after all, tiny or not, but I didn’t mind. It was the funniest shit I’d seen in forever.
“That is . . . I don’t know if there’s an actual term. Wait. Wait. Not calling anyone, swear. It’s you and me, Coach. No one else. Just . . . Wait.” I tried to hold back another laugh and ended up choking on it as I retrieved my phone. A few seconds, and I blinked. “Shit. There is a word. Obscure enough I’ll bet only the British know it: Ludicropathetic. Ludicrous and pathetic. Huh.”
I dropped the phone on the couch beside me, and the humor and laughter vanished instantly. “But that is you all over. Ludicrous and pathetic. Every kid killer is, but you are something special in the category. If there’s one as fucking-incompetent wannabe as you, I’ve yet to see them.”
Twelve years, but he wasn’t that different. Five to ten pounds heavier, in faded navy blue sweats, less hair, as I’d already predicted, average and unnoticeable as before—if you didn’t watch the eyes. The unnatural shine of black glass, and with a presence in them as shallow. He was empty of the numerous peculiar but generally harmless feelings humans have. The sole emotion I saw was less of a feeling and entirely about need. Hunger. There was nothing inside him but hunger. If you didn’t see that, you’d have to depend on noticing how he moved. He was the same snake he had been, gliding, quick motions. Fast as hell and an unbreakable fixation.
I had a demonstration of that when he pulled the trigger the moment I said “kid killer.” He hadn’t tightened his lips, hadn’t flushed with guilt, fear, or anger. Not the top of the field in killing kids or brain cells, but he was an excellent snake. No tells at all.
I had expected it, though. I’d come across too many killers to not know what would set one off. Someone revealing what they were was big. I didn’t wait for any tells. I gated as I said the words, but this time I built the gate around me. I didn’t need a door to walk through. I enjoyed seeing them as art lovers enjoyed looking at a painting, but I didn’t need them. I could, in a manner, make myself into a gate.
I came back into the world inches behind him on the stairs. Finishing the rest of my accusation there, I’d snatched his gun and landed a vicious kick behind his knees. It sent him down the stairs face-first to hit the bottom hard, wheezing for breath. Snake or not, that extra weight wasn’t good for the heart or lungs. He should’ve traded the gun for a treadmill. If he dropped thirty pounds, he’d be almost inhumanly fast. But “almost” was for horseshoes and hand grenades. Not serial killers.
He managed to roll over, staring at me with a nasty case of carpet burn on one side of his face and nose. “Who the fuck are you? How’d you get behind me?”
“You don’t remember me? That makes me sad.” I tossed the gun behind me, hearing it hit the second-floor hall. “I have filled out. Finally hit a growth spurt about three years later, to put me up there with other sixteen-year-olds. Put on muscle. I do a lot of running in my business. A lot of chasing.” I grinned before adding, “I like my job. It’s important to like your job, isn’t it? It’s important to have other outlets, too. Hobbies. But you know that.” I crouched on the mustard yellow–carpeted stairs. My stairs. A lion watching a snake.
“Forget my name. Who knows if you ever knew it? I was this kid.” I threw one of the yearbook dedication pages wadded into a ball at him. This wasn’t SHO. I didn’t have a budget for a sterile room and PowerPoint presentation of the asshole’s sins. “Or this one.” I tossed another ball of paper at him. “This one.” The third one hit him on the carpet burn. “This one and this one.” Running out, I tacked on, “Or that’s what you thought.”
He had sat up, black eyes flickering from me to the paper he held in his hand. He straightened out the crumpled debris of a life extinguished and stared at the photo. “I don’t know what you’re—�
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I sighed. “Shut up. I knew when I was thirteen and I know now. I don’t want alibis or character references or arguments on how suicide can’t be murder. I don’t care.” And I didn’t, not one damn bit.
“I’m pretty certain that half those kids at least did kill themselves because their lives sucked. The other students made it worse, ignored them, called them names, shoved them around. But I’m absolutely certain it was you setting one of your faithful dogs on them that was the final push over the edge.”
I shook a scolding finger at him. “Naughty, naughty,” I said, the words casual, but the force behind them caustic enough to sear my own throat. “You had one of your brainless walking carcasses of steroid-injected beef beat them half to death. If they told their parents, a teacher, anyone, maybe someone would do something, but it would get out first. And when your dog would hear, he’d beat them the rest of the way to the morgue. Might go through with that sick rape threat your one dog liked to use to scare them out into the parking lot in the first place. They couldn’t know.”
I shrugged. “So, yeah, I believe they killed themselves. But you let your dogs off the leash and gave them the target. You were the belt, the rope, the razor blade, the overdose of drugs, the bullet.
“The others, I’m positive, were direct, hands-on. Killing vicariously isn’t enough, not for long. The drowning? The alcohol poisoning?” I nodded at the far wall of his living room, with the liquor cabinet the dimension of a full-sized kitchen refrigerator. “Sympathy from a teacher who promises not to tell. Promises it won’t get back to the dog. Or you didn’t use your dog at all. These kids were already on the ledge. Offer them any scrap of kindness. Hell, acknowledge they exist, and they’d willingly crawl right into the palm of your hand with hope, not realizing you were closing that hand to crush them.”
