Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ Book 1)

by Rachel Aaron

  His heartfelt gratitude made me feel ten times worse than if he’d yelled at me, as did the fact that none of this was going according to plan. I’d hoped that Peter would see the ID and proclaim that Dr. Lyle was no longer forgotten, which meant taking his hand would be just the normal sort of illegal and not stealing from a death god. Clearly, this wasn’t going to be as simple as I’d hoped, but I wasn’t giving up yet.

  “So what happens to him now?” I asked, finally sitting down in the chair he’d offered when I’d walked in. “Are you holding his body in case any relatives come looking?”

  “Normally we would,” Peter said. “But his body was so decayed, I decided cremation would be kinder. He’s in the queue for the ovens right now.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “But you haven’t burned him yet, right?”

  “I’m not sure,” Peter said, giving me a curious look. “Why do you ask?”

  “I was just wondering,” I said, keeping my voice desperately casual. “What about organ donations?”

  Peter chuckled. “Opal, he was dead for thirty days before you found him. I don’t think they’ll be getting any viable organs out of that.”

  “What about cybernetics?” I pressed. “He had a cybernetic hand, didn’t he? Surely you don’t burn that.”

  “Normally, no, but he came in with the Empty Wind. When that happens, we burn everything the living would have considered their body to make sure that nothing they might need is left behind.” Peter’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Why the sudden curiosity? Is there something of his you want?”

  This was where I could have played the ruthless, greedy Cleaner and claimed I wanted the cybernetics for resale, but that was so shameless that I couldn’t even get the words out of my mouth. “I don’t want anything,” I lied, pulling the notes I’d taken out of my bag. “It’s just that I was going through his spell notes, and I found some stuff that looked like it was meant specifically to get around the casting limitations caused by having a fake hand. I’ve never seen anything like it, so I wanted to examine his fingers to see if they matched the description of the altered motions in the spell.”

  That was the biggest BS I’d ever spewed in my life. I didn’t even know if spells could be modified to account for cybernetics, but it sounded plausible, and it gave me an innocent reason to look at Dr. Lyle’s body. I was congratulating myself on my fast thinking when Peter suddenly rose from his desk. “Why didn’t you just say so?” he asked, giving me a smile. “I can take you down myself right now. If Dr. Lyle hasn’t gone into the oven yet, you’re free to look him over all you want.”

  I smiled back, panicking inside. If Peter was with me, there was no way Nik or I could steal the hand. But while I was scrambling to think of how I was going to salvage the situation, Sibyl’s voice whispered confidently in my ear.

  “I’ve got this.”

  Peter’s phone rang the moment she finished. Flashing me an apologetic smile, he picked it up, sitting back down at his desk so he could access his computer. “Office of the Forgotten Dead, Peter speaking.”

  What followed was a conversation too low for me to hear. It must have been very serious business, though, because Peter’s normally cheerful face grew dire. “Of course,” he said, scribbling an address down on the yellow sticky pad beside him. “I’ll head over right now.”

  What did you do? I typed to Sibyl on my AR keyboard.

  “Called in an emergency,” my AI replied smugly. “Now he’ll be out of your hair.”

  The horror I felt at that must have been loud and clear on the surface brain waves she had access to, because Sibyl’s voice grew instantly calm and cajoling. Before she could explain herself, though, Peter hung up and turned to me.

  “I have to go,” he said, his voice deadly serious. “If I give you the slab number, will you be all right checking the body by yourself?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, happy to let him assume my shaking voice was nerves over being alone in a morgue and not crippling guilt. “What’s the number?”

  He wrote it down on another sticky note and handed it to me. “I’m so sorry to leave you in the lurch. I’d tell you to come back later so I could guide you myself, but I don’t know how long this will take, and there’s no stopping the cremation queue. I’d hate for any part of Dr. Lyle’s legacy to be lost because you were waiting for me. Just tell the front guard I said it was okay, and he’ll let you in. Again, I’m really sorry about this.”

  Not half as sorry as I felt. “Thank you, Peter,” I said, taking the sticky note. “I owe you big time.”

  “Not as much as we owe you,” he assured me, grabbing his bag and holding out his arm so that his cat could climb onto his shoulder. “You’re the one investigating his spells. The things we create in this life are so much more important than our names. By pouring your energy and interest into something Dr. Lyle made, you honor his memory and keep his flame alive. I couldn’t ask for a greater service to the Forgotten Dead.”

  I couldn’t even fake a smile after that. I followed him out of his office feeling like an absolute villain. Fortunately, Peter was too busy to notice. He was already jogging away down the hall, calling for the service mechanic to get his truck pulled around.

  “Sibyl!” I hissed when he was gone.

  “Why are you mad at me?” my AI cried. “I exist to help you! And it’s not as if I put the priest in danger. I just sent him on a wild goose chase. By the time he gets back, you’ll have the hand and the corpse will be in the cooker. No one will even know it happened.”

  That did sound like a pretty clean getaway, but even though everything was now going as well as I could have wished, it felt like the world was collapsing on my head. “I’m going to get cursed forever,” I groaned, pulling out my phone to message Nik to meet me at the front. “The Empty Wind’s going to damn my soul, and Peter’s going to hate me.”

  “Peter will never know,” Sibyl said confidently. “And the Empty Wind probably isn’t even paying attention. He only cares about the Forgotten Dead. You’re alive and remembered. You’ll be fine.”

  As an AI, Sibyl was the least qualified entity to give her opinion on Mortal Spirits, but there was no point in arguing. I was already deep in the hole; might as well get what I’d paid for. So with that, I sucked it up and marched back to the front door to signal Nik.

  Chapter 6

  “Good job,” Nik whispered as we walked into the morgue. “I’ll admit, I was worried you wouldn’t be able to pull it off, but this is fantastic. We don’t even have a chaperon.”

  As Peter had promised, the guard had let us through as soon as I showed him the note. He didn’t even ask about Nik, which struck me as sloppy, but I guess you didn’t get many complaints when all of the people you’d been hired to guard were dead. Now we were walking together into the enormous, freezing warehouse that held the DFZ’s corpses. Just as with the offices, it looked astonishingly normal: a big, open room filled with huge racks of metal shelving stacked all the way to the high-efficiency lamps built into the ceiling. If the plastic-wrapped objects we were walking past had been rectangular, I could almost have imagined we were in a normal warehouse for perishable items, but they weren’t. They were body bags, very obviously so, and I was sorely wishing I’d never gotten involved.

  “We are so cursed.”

  Nik harrumphed. “You’re just being superstitious.”

  “It’s not superstition!” I cried. “The mortal spirits are real. You live in a moving city! How can you doubt this?”

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said, checking the numbers on each block as we went past. “I just don’t think they care as much as you do. The Empty Wind is responsible for all the people who’ve ever died and been forgotten. What are the odds he’s going to notice one cybernetic hand out of billions of souls? And even if he does, why would he care? It’s just going to be cremated along with the rest of the body.”

  “It’s the principle of the thing,” I said stubbornly. “We’re steali
ng from the dead.”

  “Stop calling it stealing,” Nik chided, stopping in front of a tall stack of bodies beside the wall. “You bought both of his units. Technically, all of his material possessions are yours now, including his fake hand.”

  I didn’t think the death god would see it that way. I had minored in religious folklore for my degree, and I knew from countless stories that trying to slip around divine edicts on technicalities usually got you into more trouble, not less. But it was too late now. Nik was already punching the number from the sticky note Peter had given me into the sorter. A few seconds later, a giant mechanical arm slid over along the rail set in the ceiling. When it was directly over our heads, it plucked the slab with the correct number on its bar code off the second-highest shelf and dipped down, pneumatic gears hissing as it lowered the body all the way to us on the ground.

  “Right,” Nik said quietly, pulling a heavy pair of Cleaning gloves very similar to mine over the thinner leather driving gloves he usually wore. “There’s a camera directly behind us. Don’t look!” he hissed when I started to turn. “Just stand there and block it. I’ll get the hand.”

  I stood where he told me, heart pounding harder than ever. No matter what Nik said, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was wrong, probably because it was. I knew that, and here I was doing it anyway because apparently I’d rather anger a death god than miss a payment to my dad. But no matter how firmly I told myself I’d chosen the lesser of two evils, it sure didn’t feel that way. Especially not when Nik reached out and unzipped the plastic, filling the morgue with the reek of decay I remembered from this morning.

  “Ripe, isn’t he?” Nik whispered, wrinkling his nose. “Which hand is it?”

  “His left,” I whispered back, wrapping my arms around my torso so I wouldn’t shake. “Be gentle, please.”

  “Why?” Nik asked, shoving his gloved hand inside the white plastic sheeting to grab what was left of Dr. Lyle’s left wrist. “He’s dead. What’s he going to do? File a complaint about—”

  He cut off with a sound that made me jump. It was halfway between a choke and a gasp, but when I looked to see what was wrong, Nik wasn’t moving. He was just standing there like he’d been frozen, his eyes so wide I could see the whites all the way around. I was still trying to figure out what had happened to him when a cold draft blew past me.

  I jumped again, eyes going wide. A wind was rising. Since I’d left my protective poncho in the car like an idiot, I could feel it all the way up my bare legs and on the back of my neck. Even in the chill of the morgue, it was piercingly cold—as cold as the grave—and as it blew over me, it spoke.

  What belongs to the forgotten remains to the forgotten.

  Now it was my turn to choke. The words hadn’t come from a voice. They weren’t sound in my ears or even a pressure on my skin. It was my magic the voice spoke into, each word sending little puffs of icy breath through the secret space in the back of my mind I’d come to think of as my soul.

  Leave, it whispered. You both are guilty, but you showed remorse, so you shall be let off with a warning. This one, though… There was a horrible creaking sound, and Nik gasped again. This one will pay.

  The voice vanished then, leaving me gasping as I whirled to look at Nik. And started to panic. In the brief time I’d been caught by the voice, Nik’s face had gone as white as the plastic body bag. He didn’t look like he could move, but his eyes were darting frantically down. When I followed them, I saw why. Something invisible was pushing into the skin of his neck. I could only see it from the imprint the pressure made on his flesh, but it looked as though a giant transparent hand was wrapped around his throat. When I reached up to try to pry it off, the cold was so intense it burned my fingers, making me gasp in pain.

  Leave the thief to his fate.

  “No!” I said, scrambling into my bag for the notes I’d taken from Dr. Lyle’s homes. “We’re not thieves, and this man is not forgotten. His name is Dr. Theodore Lyle, and he died trying to hide his life’s work from some very horrible people.”

  That was all supposition. I had no idea why he’d been hiding down in that hole. For all I knew, he really was a criminal who’d stolen from his boss just as Kauffman had claimed, but that wasn’t what I believed. I’d never met Dr. Lyle, but I’d been through two of his homes now, and everything I’d seen told me that this was someone whose interests and values lined up with my own. He was also a collector, someone who appreciated history, and who’d died with work unfinished. I didn’t know why he’d wanted cockatrice eggs so badly, if it was just for the money or if there was something else, but he’d cared enough to hide his notes in a hole at the bottom of the Underground rather than let Kauffman have them. I might not have known Theodore Lyle as a person, but I’d seen his work and how far he’d gone to protect it, and that was enough to let me jump to the conclusions I needed.

  “We need this hand,” I told the cold presence wrapped around Nik like a noose. “It’s the only thing that can tell us where Dr. Lyle hid the project he died to protect. If we don’t find it, his work will either fall to his enemies or be lost forever.” I put my hand on Nik’s shoulder, which was now as cold as the wind surrounding us. “Dr. Lyle might have died lost and forgotten, but he’s remembered now. We know his work, and his enemies are after us because of that. But if you let us take his hand, we can beat them. We can find the ritual Dr. Lyle died working on and bring it back to the world. We can rekindle his memory, just as Peter said! That’s what matters the most, right?”

  Historically, lying to gods never went well for mortals. In my desperation, I’d decided to try anyway, but no one’s surprise was greater than my own when I discovered that it wasn’t necessary. I hadn’t put it together until the Empty Wind had forced my hand, but as I spoke the words, I realized they were all true. Maybe not for altruistic reasons, but whether we made a profit or not wasn’t really the point. What mattered to the Empty Wind was the fulfillment of the soul. He didn’t care about me or Nik. He just wanted justice for the lost life I’d been digging through all day, so that was what I offered him, falling to my knees because that was what you did when you were begging a god.

  “Please,” I whispered, bowing my head. “I’m sorry we tried to take the hand without permission. I’m sorry I tricked your priest. I should have told him the truth from the start, because we’re all on the same side, and that’s Dr. Lyle’s. That hand belongs to him, and I swear I will not sell it. When this is over, I’ll give it back to you. I’ll give it a proper burial or burn it or whatever you want, but until then, I need it to save his work. Ask Dr. Lyle if he’s there with you. I’m sure he’ll say yes. Just please don’t kill Nik. I can’t do this without him.”

  There was a long pause, which I hoped meant the god was considering my words. He must have found something in there to believe, because a few heartbeats later, Nik collapsed to the ground beside me, clutching his neck as he gasped for breath. I was slumping in relief when the cold tightened around my own throat.

  The living forget, it whispered. But I do not. I will hold you to your promise, Opal Yong-ae.

  I couldn’t speak to answer. Every part of me was frozen as Nik had been, but unlike him, I was a mage. I wasn’t strong enough to push the Spirit of the Forgotten Dead away—no mortal was—but I could let him in, dropping all my defenses to let the wind blow through my mind and see that I was sincere. There was no way to hide that I was also doing this for the money, but I hoped the rest would make up for that. The Empty Wind wasn’t a god of morality, anyway. I’d never once heard of him judging the living. In all his stories, he only cared about justice for the dead, and there, at least, our objectives aligned.

  I just hoped it was enough. But though it took a while for the icy wind to pass completely from my mind, in the end, he let me go, dropping me on the ground the same way he’d dropped Nik. Dr. Lyle’s cybernetic hand hit the floor a moment later, the metal fist clanging against the smooth cement like a cymbal.

&
nbsp; It is given, the god whispered over the noise. Take it and go, but do not think I am not watching.

  I was coughing too hard to reply, so I nodded instead, but the supernatural cold had already vanished from my body, leaving only the normal chill of the morgue and the grip of Nik’s gloved hands on my shoulders. “Opal?” he whispered, giving me a gentle shake. When I didn’t reply, the shaking got less gentle. “Opal!”

  I put my hand up before he shook my head off, coughing even harder as I struggled to clear my clenched lungs. When I could finally breathe again, I collapsed on my stomach on the cold floor. I was still wiping the stress tears from my eyes when Nik’s hands returned.

  “We need to go,” he said, his voice tight. “I don’t know if that thing is keeping the guard busy or what, but I don’t want to push our luck. I’ve got the hand, and I’ve already put Dr. Lyle back, so let’s get out of here.”

  I assumed “that thing” meant the Empty Wind, but I was pleased to hear him say the good doctor’s name in such reverent tones. I was the one who’d done the begging, but it was Dr. Lyle who’d actually saved us. He was the one the Empty Wind cared about. All of that was too complicated to explain while my throat was killing me, though, so I just let Nik pull me out of the morgue and past the security guard, who didn’t even look up from his phone.

  “I’m chatting with him on a dating app,” Sibyl explained when I wondered how that was possible.

  The thank you was on the tip of my tongue when I realized she’d responded to a question I hadn’t actually asked. “Stop reading my mind,” I hissed.