Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift

by Fiction River

“And they both still love each other?” Screamer asked.

  “We can assume that’s what this is all about,” Lady Luck said, nodding. “And the Fates have no idea what to do this time.”

  I just looked at Patty and she smiled back, putting her hand on my leg and calming me a great deal.

  I was having a very difficult time trying to imagine a green-skinned guy and an ice-cube of a woman together. Shakespeare had really dressed up that play a lot.

  And clearly in real life they hadn’t died.

  I squeezed Patty’s hand. We had only wanted to get away, have a trip together, no pressures, and we end up like this.

  It seemed that trouble followed us. Luckily our love seemed to go through all the troubles just fine. At least so far.

  Then suddenly I had the wildest idea I had had in a long time.

  “Is it possible for me to talk with both the leader of the Frigid Women and the leader of the Qulupalik?”

  Lady Luck turned to me with a puzzled look on her face.

  “I’m thinking that if they are in love,” I said, smiling, “the wonderful suite that Patty I had on your ship, Captain, might be just the solution.”

  Lady Luck started to say something, then she nodded.

  She stood and I said quickly, “Patty needs to be with me.”

  She nodded. “In the suite. Be ready.”

  Lady Luck vanished and I smiled at the puzzled looks of my team around the booth. “Wish us luck.”

  With that I jumped Patty and me back to our suite on the big ocean liner. We were still frozen between instants, so there was no rocking to the waves and the ship had not moved any closer to the shoreline.

  Our suite was still dark and very cold and it smelled like spilled perfume.

  Patty and I quickly gathered up our scattered stuff and I sent it back to her apartment.

  She came over to stand beside me, our backs to the big sliding glass door, as suddenly the suite filled with a really nasty fish smell. Rotting fish smell.

  We turned toward the bedroom door to face a tall, very green, very naked man with seaweed draped over his shoulder. He had gills on his neck and yellow eyes.

  And honestly, he was built in a certain area like a porn star. Either that or he used it as a rudder when swimming through the water.

  Beside me Patty managed to not gasp.

  Lady Luck was standing to one side of him. “Poker Boy, Front Desk Girl, this is the great leader of the Qulupalik.”

  We both bowed. “Our honor.”

  “I have heard of your exploits,” he said.

  I have no idea how we managed to not start coughing and gagging from the smell of rotted fish combined with sewage mud. I had a hunch gagging and coughing would not have been a smart thing to do.

  A moment later the room froze down and everything coated in white as, on the other side of Lady Luck, the naked, white-haired woman appeared.

  “Poker Boy, Front Desk Girl, this is the great leader of the Frigid Women.”

  Again we both bowed and said that we were honored.

  I managed to not start shivering. I think I went instantly from cold to frozen.

  I noticed that the two glanced at each other, but then seemed to be afraid to look at each other again.

  Considering that they were both naked, I could understand that. I wasn’t sure where to look at them either.

  Lady Luck nodded for me to say what I had in mind.

  I had said a lot of stupid things over the years, and I just hoped this wouldn’t be one of those things. Way too many lives at stake.

  “Front Desk Girl and I are very much in love,” I said, taking Patty’s hand, which calmed me a great deal. I really loved that superpower of hers. “We have been fortunate to be able to spend our time together.”

  Neither leader moved or flinched, which I took as a good sign for the moment. I could read people at poker tables, but reading leaders of ancient races was another matter completely.

  “We have spent many wonderful nights together in this suite on this ship.”

  I indicated the suite around us all.

  “I realize this is a human suite, but it is fit for royalty. We would like to offer this suite to the both of you to share in this time bubble, where no one from either of your races can spy on.”

  “No time outside of this room will pass,” Lady Luck said, “for as long as you would like to have it. And none of your people know you are here, I can promise you that.”

  The guy was the first to break. He looked over at the woman he loved.

  She saw his look and looked back.

  Then she turned back to me. “Why would you offer such a thing?”

  “We understand love,” I said, again proud that my voice didn’t shake from the cold. “We also understand politics between people that are older than all of us.”

  Lady Luck nodded. “We can offer you more as well,” she said. “Every major human liner such as this that comes near your waters, we will freeze time around it and allow you to spend private time together as often as you want.”

  “Your motives?” the green man asked, his voice sounding a little like it was being pushed through water.

  “We do not want a war between your fine people,” I said. “The last one killed far too many of all three races.”

  Both leaders nodded slightly so I knew I had them.

  “And we hope that with the two powerful leaders of such powerful peoples spending time together,” I said, “there may come a chance for a more lasting piece given enough time.”

  I felt it would be rude to add the words “…and sex.”

  “You are a dreamer, Poker Boy,” the leader of the Frigid Women said.

  I bowed slightly. “I am honored.”

  Both leaders smiled, or at least I think what they did was smile.

  “We will give you time to decide,” I said “and spend time together.”

  I was about to jump us away when the leader of the Frigid Woman walked over to the leader of the Qulupalik and took his hand. I was amazed he didn’t turn into a block of ice, but her touch didn’t seem to bother him other than make the rudder move in a way I didn’t want to notice.

  “We need no time, do we, my love?”

  He kissed her and then looked at me, then Lady Luck. “We accept your kind offer. It will allow us, for the first time in centuries, to spend real time together.”

  “It is our honor,” I said, bowing.

  Lady Luck also bowed.

  “Give us one full day of time in this time bubble,” he said, “and then we will move the ship out of sacred waters.”

  “Thank you,” I said and this time both Patty and I bowed as deeply as we could in the cold.

  Lady Luck also bowed again. “And there will always be a suite waiting for you both in any human ship passing,” she said. “Your privacy will always be respected.”

  They both nodded, standing there naked in each other’s grasps.

  “Call for me when you would like to return to normal time,” Lady Luck said.

  And with that we were back in my office floating over Las Vegas.

  FIVE

  The warm hit me like a hard brick and beside me Patty seemed to collapse. I caught her and we slid back into the booth. In all my life I couldn’t remember being that cold.

  Lady Luck smiled at us and we both warmed up almost instantly. Amazing how having Lady Luck smile on you can make you feel warm and comfortable.

  That was a nifty power and some day I would have to ask her about it.

  She reached onto the table and took a couple of fries from one basket. “These things are killers on a girl’s figure.”

  She popped one of them in her mouth, then smiled. “Tell Madge I’m joining you guys here for dinner tonight. I’ve got a few people to tell what just happened.”

  With that she vanished.

  Outside I could see a plane still stuck in the sky, frozen there because we were all inside a time bubble. The same time bubble we ne
eded to maintain to allow the two leaders to do what they wanted and clearly needed to do.

  Twenty-four hours in this time bubble would be a small price to pay for stopping a war.

  “So what happened?” Stan asked, leaning forward and asking the question all of them clearly wanted to ask.

  “Romeo and Juliet are enjoying a little private time in our suite on your ship, Captain,” I said, smiling.

  He started to say something, then closed his mouth, clearly stunned.

  “Your ship will be moved when they are finished in twenty-four hours,” Patty said.

  “Fantastic,” Stan said, clapping his hands. “So we stay in this bubble until then?”

  “Seems like it,” I said.

  “You actually met a Qulupalik?” Ben asked, also clearly stunned. “Are they green?”

  “He was,” I said.

  Then I turned to Patty. “You want to describe him?”

  She started to say something, then shut her mouth and her face got very red.

  I laughed. “Just say he was naked and very well-built, if you know what I mean.”

  “And he smelled like a sewer at a seaport,” Patty said.

  “The leader of the Frigid Women didn’t seem to care,” I said, smiling at the woman I loved.

  “After twenty-four hours in that suite with that guy’s body,” Patty said, smiling back at me, “she’ll be far from frigid.”

  Stan and Screamer just moaned and then laughed as I turned red, failing completely to get the image of Romeo and Juliet, naked and together in our big bed, out of my mind.

  Introduction to “Old Magics”

  Steven Mohan, Jr.’s short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of places from anthologies to Interzone. He’s published ten novels that he admits to, including the technothriller Winter Dragon, which he wrote under the name Henry Martin. Steve last appeared in our pages in Moonscapes, with a science fiction adventure story. This time, he takes on fantasy, and shows just what a talented, diverse author he is.

  Once you finish “Old Magics,” take a look at “Call of the Second Wolf,” (available as an e-story) which also features the Russian mobster Valeri Kozlov. I expect we’ll see more stories about Kozlov because, as Steve says, “when your enemies can call upon zombies, dragons, and unicorns, you’re never safe for long…”

  Old Magics

  Steven Mohan, Jr.

  One o’clock in morning and air was as thick and hot as potato soup from old country. Not as tasty, though. The cemetery smeeled like rolls of sod and willow tree, wilting graveside flowers and stone dust. But most of all, it smeeled of fresh-turned dirt, that heavy odor of soil and earthworms and living things forever-sleepink, so rich you could gag on it.

  It was the fresh-turned dirt I was there for.

  The strange, shrill whistle of cicadas filled the trees, sounding like an alien spaceship landing. Fireflies darted around me, soft smudges of pale green against the purple night. A black beetle bigger than my thumb whirred right past my face and settled on the square, dark shadow of the grave marker.

  In the sky, the moon was shrouded in black clouds that broke up its shape so it looked like a shard of broken bone.

  There are magics older and more powerful than human magic. If you have something secret to do it is wise to cloak yourself in these powers so no human magician can spy on you. And of all of them, death is the oldest, older than the turning of the earth, ancient even when our infant sun first burned hot in space.

  Which is why I had come to Oak Lawn cemetery in Skokie. That, and the obituary I’d found in the Trib.

  It would be bad if Valeri Kozlov, chieftain of Krasny Mafiya—the Red Mafia—were seen tonight. If I were seen by Chicago PD or FBI it would earn me a stretch in prison. If I were seen by Chinese mob—the Black Dragons—it would earn me slashed throat. And if my own men saw me . . .

  It would be infinitely worse.

  I reached into my jacket, pulled out flashlight. I thumbed it on with a click, painting a circle of yellow light on the polished black marble gravestone of . . . da, Abraham Heilmann.

  Heilmann was good because he’d been nineteen when he’d died, a big strapping boy, six-two and muscular, inside linebacker for UNI Huskies. He hadn’t been smashed up in car accident or wasted away from long illness, no he had aneurysm, blood vessel popped, ruining his brain, but that was okay, I didn’t need his brain.

  I thumbed off the flashlight and closed my eyes, hearing the crazy shrieking of the cicadas, feeling the beetle watching me.

  Feeling the body sleeping in the earth.

  I muttered an ancient phrase in old Russian, a tongue no modern Muscovite would know.

  I felt the body stir.

  Shift.

  It came easy—almost too easy. I am gifted in magic, da, but not necromancy, not especially.

  But Abraham Heilmann came, punching through the polished cherrywood of his new and expensive casket, swimming through the six feet of earth like a child in a pool rising to the surface.

  A hand appeared.

  And then he was clawing his way out of his grave, dressed in a charcoal suit, his face handsome and square-jawed and pale. His eyes a blank white without pupil or iris, like two hardboiled eggs.

  He said nothing, just turned that sightless gaze on me.

  Zombies were the perfect emissaries for certain tasks. Since they were already dead, they couldn’t be killed. They didn’t know anything except what they were told, they didn’t want anything except for the occasional fillet of human flesh, and they couldn’t be tortured for information. Take off a zombie’s arm and he wouldn’t even notice.

  “I have five kilos of heroin to sell,” I said. “Afghani heroin, high quality.” Actually I had a lot more than five, but this was a dangerous move, so we’d start small and see how it went. “You will approach a man named Oscar Gutierrez in Houston, Texas. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Heilmann said, with rough, sandpaper voice. Being dead is hard on the vocal cords.

  What the zombie didn’t know, what no one could know, was heroin was stolen. Chicago PD couldn’t know because they’d been looking for way to bust me since I was Georgi Dorbayeva’s underboss. Chinese couldn’t know because I’d stolen the H from them. And my people couldn’t know because I used theft of drugs and war with Chinese as pretext to assassinate Dorbayeva and eliminate Russian soldiers not loyal to me.

  The truth is, I still grieve for Dorbayeva. To me he had been brat.

  Brother.

  But he was planning to get rid of me. Only difference was I got him first.

  Anyway, no matter how dangerous it was, I couldn’t just sit on asset worth street value of $32 million, not when an earthquake was running through the Chicago underworld and Krasny Mafiya was fighting for its life.

  This was only way to do it.

  I held out a piece of paper. “Here is Gutierrez address. Opening offer and minimum acceptable price. Name of the cutout. Memorize information and destroy.”

  The zombie looked down at my outstretched hand. For a moment it just stared. Sometimes the undead are slow, but this one had woke easy. The skin at the top of the my head pricked and I started to draw my hand in.

  Just as the zombie lunged toward me.

  I stumbled backwards, tripped over my own feet, landed hard. The ground punched the air out of my lungs and the thing was on me. I held it off, my left forearm punched up against its collarbone, shoving those snapping teeth away from my face. Barely.

  My Glock was tucked into the small of my back, pinned beneath me. I muttered spell after spell—desiccation, fire fountain, glassbones—nothing working, my panic blossoming with each try. Someone had shielded zombie against offensive magic.

  Heilmann pushed in, his sharp, hungry teeth missing my nose by quarter inch.

  Desperate, I tried a transmogrify spell.

  And just like that, the zombie was gone and I was holding screwdriver. Funny thing about tranmogrifcation, the transformed o
bject retains its core characteristic. I had been using Abraham Heilmann as a tool, so a tool he remained.

  I climbed to my feet, breathing hard, bent over, hands on knees, my thousand-dollar suit smeared with dirt.

  Someone had hijacked my zombie. That’s why it had come up so easy. Someone was helping. Someone powerful enough to work through death’s dark magic.

  So someone wasn’t human.

  I flicked the flashlight back on. This evening couldn’t get any worse.

  That’s when I saw the beetle on the grave marker flick its wings. And suddenly it was growing and morphing and changing into an African man, tall, six feet four, late forties, with a rugged face, a sprinkling of silver in his hair, trim goatee, soulful eyes.

  Dexter Johnson.

  He had his SIG out before I could reach for the Glock.

  “Well, if it isn’t my man, Val Kozlov. How ya’ doing, Val?”

  I put my hands on top of my head and said, “Lawyer.”

  That word is supposed to work on cops, but for some reason it never works on Dexter Johnson.

  “I think I got you on one count of interstate narco trafficking, won’t the feebs just love that? And a count of misdemeanor grave robbing thrown in. Suh-weet.” He looked meaningfully at the grave. “You should probably avoid making zombies. Looks like you’re not very good at it.”

  I knew it wasn’t Johnson who’d hijacked my zombie. He was nowhere near that powerful.

  “How could you be watching me? No human can pierce death’s veil.”

  “But I wasn’t human, Val,” Johnson pointed out. “I was a beetle. And beetles are death eaters. Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’ve got something to show you. It’s great. You’ll love it. Really.”

  I put my hands behind my back and Johnson clicked the bracelets on. I was angry, but not with Johnson. Being angry with police for arresting criminals is like being angry at winter for being cold. I was angry at myself. Because I’d been stupid.

  At secret meeting you should always know you might be bugged.

  ***