Uncanny Collateral

by Brian McClellan

I hung up, turned on my camera app, and began to take pictures of the dead imps.

  Much to my surprise, Judith was sitting up within half an hour. She stared despondently at the bloodstains on the carpet, her eyes avoiding the pile of imps I’d stacked neatly in one corner and covered with a blanket from the sofa. Even in such a short time, she already looked improved; some of the color had returned to her face, and she seemed to be able to move—if painfully—under her own power. Her secretary brought her a cup of coffee, then retreated, after which Judith returned her gaze to me.

  “Why are you pretending to be an OtherOps agent?” she asked.

  I’d already introduced myself for real, and I gave her a tight smile at the question. “If I’d shown up and told the secretary I was a reaper, you wouldn’t have seen me.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because you’d assume I was either here for a client or for the secondhand soul. You wouldn’t have wanted to talk to me about either. Reapers might have some pull, but nobody says no to OtherOps.”

  She sniffed, took a sip of her coffee, and then held it in both hands to hide their trembling. Despite her condition, she still had sharp eyes, and she managed a stern, disaffected air. “You’re not wrong. I suppose I shouldn’t report you, considering the circumstances.”

  I heard Maggie laugh in the back of my head. She’s an arrogant old broad. Should you point out that if she reports you she’ll go down for soul fraud?

  I don’t think that’s a thing, I told her.

  It will be if she calls OtherOps on you.

  “I appreciate that,” I said to Judith. “This secondhand soul—what can you tell me about it?”

  She hesitated before answering. “I’ve suspected that it was killing me since I first got it.”

  “And how long have you had the soul?”

  “Four months or so.”

  “And how long until it started to do this to you?” I asked, gesturing at her emaciated body.

  Judith shook her head. “I started to feel strange within a week. The physical changes became apparent after a month.”

  “If you suspected something was wrong, why didn’t you just call the guy you bought it from and ask to have it removed?”

  Judith rasped a chuckle. “Denial, I suppose. I wanted to believe I was just sick. Do you know what it’s like to not have your soul?”

  “I wouldn’t, no.” A better reaper might have injected a little sympathy into their voice. With my background, I have a hard time relating to anyone who willingly makes deals with the Other. “But I’ve heard it starts to hurt after a while.”

  “Not hurt,” Judith explained. “Not exactly. You just start to feel… empty. Like a shell. It’s like a really bad breakup, where no amount of joy can fill the void left behind. Nothing—money, food, sex, power, thrill. Life becomes tasteless. I sold out to LuciCorp fifteen years ago. I paid immediately. None of those damned deferment plans that eventually find the reapers at your door. It took almost a decade for the emptiness to hit. After a while, it was all I could think about. Then…” She gestured to the pile of dead imps. “One of these little bastards showed up at the office and offered to sell me a used soul. Claimed it would feel just like my old one, and I’d be back to normal within weeks.”

  “How much did you pay?” I asked.

  “Five hundred grand.”

  Maggie let out a low whistle.

  I said, “I’m looking for the people who sold this to you. Did I get them all?” I certainly hoped not. If I had, I’d just killed everyone who could tell me where to find the rest of Ferryman’s missing souls. I was pretty sure I was in the clear, though. Imps rarely act on their own.

  “No, no,” Judith answered. “At least, I don’t think so. I don’t actually recognize any of those… gentlemen. I only let them in because one knew that I was sick and claimed he could help me.” She scowled into the distance, her eyes hopeless. “They were going to kill me.”

  That was interesting. “How do you know?” I asked.

  “They talked about it. I could barely fight back. They said they were going to repossess the soul they sold me, then slit my throat. They would have killed Robert, too—gotten rid of us and then sold the soul to the next poor sap.”

  I assumed Robert was her secretary. “Imps are gossips,” I told her, “and they’re savage little bastards who tend to be low on the food chain. Whenever they get a chance to lord over others, they do. Do you know who their boss is?”

  Judith shook her head. “I paid in cash. Dropped it off at a warehouse in the Flats.” She tried to get up, and I had to help her to her feet. She teetered over to a filing cabinet and came back with a scrap of paper. “That address.” She leaned heavily against the wall, staring at the covered corpses, and I thought I saw a flicker of life—of anger—in her eyes. “I’m going to leave town for a while.”

  “Probably a good idea,” I answered. “People will be here to clean all this up in ten minutes. You’ll want to make sure that your secretary—Robert, was it?”

  “Yes.”

  “That Robert doesn’t tell anyone about this. It’s best if he keeps thinking I’m OtherOps, but if OtherOps does show up for some reason… well, I was never here.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good.” I felt around my lower canines with my tongue. I could still taste some blood from where they’d split the gums. It was painful, but a good kind of pain. The berserker in me enjoyed the sight of the bodies in the corner, relishing the memory of putting down five of those creepy little fuckwits. The human part of me felt vaguely ill. I’m a good reaper partially because I’m dangerous, yes, but I’m not an assassin or a thug. Without Maggie’s urging and that troll blood in my veins, I would have moved a little more cautiously—maybe even left an imp alive for Maggie to question. I felt foolish.

  I exchanged cards with Judith and stepped outside just in time to see Ferryman’s cleanup squad enter the office. There were over a dozen of them—all human, as far as I could tell, and the group included janitors, a butcher, carpet men, and even a couple of guys wearing the shirts of a local glass company, here to replace the one frosted glass wall I’d shot out in my little rampage. I stepped around them and headed into the hallway, where I wished, not for the first time, that I followed in the footsteps of almost everyone else at Valkyrie and smoked. It might have relieved some of my tension.

  You don’t seem too hot right now, Maggie said.

  I just killed five people.

  Imps.

  Yeah, imps. They’re not human, but I’d still feel bad if I hit a dog with my car. Besides, I should have left one alive.

  Move too slowly, and that one might have gotten the drop on you.

  I snorted. She was right, of course. Always shoot first and ask questions later when it comes to a room full of hostile imps. But I still didn’t feel great about it. I’m taking the rest of the day off. I’ll call a friend of mine at OtherOps and find out who owns this warehouse. Then we’ll hit it first thing in the morning.

  Chapter 6

  The warehouse at the address Judith gave me was empty.

  I stood just inside the open door of a truck loading bay and gazed across thirty thousand square feet of breezy concrete lit by morning sunlight streaming in through broken pane windows near the ceiling. Taking a quick walk around the open space, I found a bit of trash, plenty of dust, and no evidence that anything of substance had been stored here for some time. I returned to my truck and dialed Judith, who picked up on the second ring.

  “I’m at the address you gave me,” I told her. “When you dropped off the money here, did you actually go inside?”

  “I did.”

  “Was the warehouse being used for anything?”

  “I’m not sure. I just went up to the office on the left.”

  I spotted a small staircase off to one sid
e of the truck loading bay. It led to a windowless manager’s door. “Hold on for a moment, please,” I told her. I ran up the stairs and tried the knob. It was unlocked. I flipped on the lights. The room inside was just as empty as the warehouse. “Any other details you can remember?” I asked Judith.

  “I gave them the money. They used one of those mirrors to give me that damn soul, and I left. I think there were three or four imps inside having lunch at the time. There really isn’t anything else.”

  That’s all she knows, Maggie confirmed in the back of my head.

  “Understood. Thank you.”

  I hung up and called my friend at OtherOps. Justin and I go back longer than me and Maggie. I like to call him a desk jockey because he hates leaving the office, but he was a capable agent and third in command at the Cleveland OtherOps office. My call went to voicemail, but he rang back almost the instant I hung up the phone.

  “Alek,” he said, “you get anything at that warehouse?”

  “Nothing. Everything is unlocked, and the place is empty.”

  He snorted and said, “I got in touch with the owner this morning. Turns out she rents to anybody willing to pay cash up front, no questions asked. Her last tenant was human, but she doesn’t have much of a description: male, six feet, blond hair.”

  “That could be me,” I said flatly.

  “Yeah, she wasn’t very helpful. She did say that they still have three months prepaid on the rent. Someone was there, but it sounds like they cleared out before you could reach them.”

  Human, huh? Maggie said. So the imps definitely aren’t working alone.

  Sure sounds like it. We just need to find out if this human is another henchman or the big boss.

  You make it sound like a video game.

  Don’t shit on the ways I keep my life interesting, I told her.

  I said to Justin, “Any word on who hired that necromancer to rough me up?”

  “Nothing,” Justin replied. “The kid won’t say a damn word to anyone at the station. I’ve got our sorcery specialist talking to him right now. Hopefully I’ll get a little more out of him at some point.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  There was a pause from the other end of the line. “You, uh, gonna tell me who you’re after this time? Is it teeth? You’re always chasing teeth.”

  “I don’t actually do that many teeth these days. The Tooth Fairy is semiretired, and Jinn Enterprises has scaled back their Midwest operations.”

  “Blood?”

  “Nope.”

  “So are you going to tell me?”

  “Sorry, client confidentiality. But I’ll buy you a beer next week if you’ve got the time.”

  “Deal.”

  I hung up and stared at the warehouse, feeling more than a little annoyed. Ferryman was wrong about one thing: that souls didn’t have any value in this life. Judith had paid half a million for that secondhand shit. I had plenty of smoke—five dead imps and a half-dead lawyer—but no actual fire. Someone in town was running a very lucrative scam with Ferryman’s missing souls, and if Judith’s run-in with the imps was any indication, people were going to start turning up dead sooner rather than later.

  You think they’re packing up business? Maggie cut into my thoughts.

  Maybe, I replied. They abandoned the warehouse with three months’ worth of rent already paid. People don’t close up when business is good.

  So either business is bad, Maggie said thoughtfully.

  Or, I replied, they know that someone has caught on to their little scheme.

  I tried to work through a dozen different angles. It could be someone inside one of the soul collecting businesses, maybe a disgruntled or ex-employee. It could be an Other, like Maggie, who had limited omniscience and smelled trouble. It could even be a reaper gone bad. There were too damn many possibilities. I cursed Ferryman for bringing this to me instead of OtherOps and got back in my truck.

  Where to? Maggie asked. We’re kind of out of leads.

  I looked at my hands on the steering wheel, running my eyes over my tattoos. The facsimile of Grendel’s claw on the back of my left hand made the skin itch, dormant sorcery wanting to come to life. I considered going back to visit Zeke. I owed him a slap for siccing that necromancer on me, and he might be able to nudge me in a new direction. There’s still one good option, I told Maggie.

  What are you thinking… Oh, no. I don’t think that’s a good idea.

  I started the car. I don’t either. But I’ve got a job to do, and Kappie Shuteye is the only one who might know what a bunch of imps are doing working for a soul thief.

  Alek…

  I cut her off. It’s my next move. If you don’t like it, go read a book.

  The words came out a little harsher than I intended, but I still remembered her anger at the necromancer. I get bossed around so much by Ada that I really didn’t need it coming from Maggie too. This job was starting to give me tension headaches—not to mention that fact that it had already forced me to kill five people. I needed to move quickly and decisively.

  Still, I wasn’t above admitting—to myself—that Maggie might be right. After all, Kappie Shuteye is the imp king who sold me to Ada twenty years ago.

  The term imp king sounds more impressive than it actually is. It would be more accurate to say something like imp mob boss, and for some of the people who’ve inherited the term, even that might be generous. All imp kings operate a little differently, but most of them amount to little more than a union overseer for their kind in a certain region. Their underlings bow and scape and pay their membership dues, and in return the imp king finds them steady work in his own ventures or hires them out to whoever is willing to pay for a little sleazy muscle.

  Kappie Shuteye is imp king of northeast Ohio, but that hasn’t always been his job. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, he sat on the board of directors of a company called Paronskaft. Their specialty was buying firstborn children in return for magical favors. In the reaper business, we call the children rumpelstiltskins, or skins for short. Paronskaft basically ran a slave trade until they were shut down in the late ’80s. As far as I know, I was one of the last children sold by Paronskaft before OtherOps shuttered them for good. Kappie was the one who arranged the deal.

  The last time I saw him, I broke his nose.

  I pulled off the highway at a place called Brecksville, and pretty soon I turned into the parking lot of an old, run-down elementary school in an overgrown part of town that had once been a community of trailer parks. It looked like the school had been crumbling for decades: most of the windows were broken, the brick facade was barely in one piece, and the parking lot itself could barely be called concrete anymore. Despite the empty look of the place, there were at least a dozen cars parked in the teacher’s lot around back, including a couple of flatbeds and an entire semitrailer. A team of imps loaded the semi with plastic-wrapped pallets of indeterminate origin. They all stopped to stare as I pulled up and parked.

  I got out and leaned against the hood of my truck, letting the imps size me up for a moment. I took out my phone, pretended to scroll through it, and snapped a photo of the group, which I emailed to Nadine—a little insurance policy in case Kappie decided he wanted to rough me up for breaking his nose. “I’m looking for Kappie,” I finally called to them.

  None of them moved.

  “I’ll go find him myself if you want a stranger poking around,” I said. One of the imps drew a knife. He and three of his friends took a step toward me. I did a quick count of the cars in the parking lot and decided that if fifty imps came pouring out of the old school, I’d probably be in for a rough time. I tried to act bored with their posturing and held up one hand. “Tell your boss that Alek Fitz from Valkyrie Collections is here to see him. I’m a reaper, so put your goddamn knife away.”

  Two of the imps broke off from the group and ran into the
bowels of the old school while their aggressive friend put his knife away without an apology. He gestured dismissively toward me. “Go in that door there. Wait just inside.”

  The door led to an old furnace room, which was recessed into the ground about two stories below me. There was a small, ground-level space just inside the door, and then a handful of catwalks that led above the boilers to the halls of the old school. I did a cursory look around, checking to see what had changed in the five years since I was last here—and if Kappie’s imps had rigged any improvised traps. Imps love making things that can hurt people accidentally.

  What do you think they’re loading in that truck out there? Maggie asked me.

  Drugs, probably. Can’t you sense them?

  Nah. There are low-level wards all over this place to protect against scrying. I’d have to be there in person to see through them. Why doesn’t the city shut Kappie down? This whole setup is beyond obvious.

  I’d guess that Kappie makes sizable donations to the mayor’s office and local police force. Ambition isn’t a common trait among imps. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them are vicious little creatures driven by greed and hunger, and they seldom have the ability to plan beyond the next fix, robbery, or minimum-wage paycheck. Imp kings are the remaining few who do have the ability to plan beyond those things.

  The door at the other end of the catwalk suddenly opened, and a wizened old imp appeared. He was taller than most of his kind—probably five foot two—and wore a bright red zoot suit, matching hat, and wingtip shoes. The clothes, together with an imp’s stereotypically squat, ugly face, made him look like a Dick Tracy villain. I would have laughed at his appearance if I didn’t know that he liked to trick out that suit with a straight razor in one sleeve and a switchblade in the other.

  “Alek Fitz!” he proclaimed in a gravelly voice, a salesman’s smile on his face. “My old friend! How long has it been?”

  “We’re not friends, Kappie. The last time we saw each other, you took a swing at me with a straight razor and I broke your nose. How is that, by the way?”