Uncanny Collateral

by Brian McClellan

  The ghoul hesitated. For the first time, I saw real fear in its eyes. It took one step back into the darkness, then another, snuffling cautiously. “Get me out of here,” it said to me. “Get me out!”

  “You may go,” the skull told me.

  I blinked, and I was back in the gymnasium, lying on the floor in a slick puddle of blood and rice. I craned by head to search for Maggie, only to find her procuring a large hoodie from one of the pallets of stolen goods. She pulled it over her head, turned, and spotted me. Running over, she exclaimed, “Holy shit, Alek, are you okay?”

  Everything hurt. It was worse than the car accident by far. Even the muscles in my fingers and toes felt like they’d been crushed beneath a boulder. I flexed my arms to make sure they’d still move and checked my thigh. Even with Maggie’s cauterization, it still bled. I took a deep breath, receiving a sharp pain in my chest as a reward.

  “Cracked ribs,” I told her. “Probably cracked other things. I should probably get some X-rays.” I forced my tusks back down and let her help me off the ground. I blinked against the pain and took a close look at her. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face haggard. “Are you okay?”

  “I shouldn’t expend that kind of energy right out of the ring,” she said with a weak smile. “I’ll be okay, but I’m glad you could still move, because I wouldn’t have been able to hold him for more than a few seconds.”

  I pulled her into a hug. “That’s all that I needed,” I said.

  “Delivery made?” she asked.

  “Delivery made,” I confirmed.

  She put her shoulder beneath my arm, waving away my protests even though I could tell she was swaying on her feet. “Let’s get you to a hospital.”

  “I’ll be okay,” I told her. “Help me to the car. We have somewhere to be.”

  Chapter 15

  We arrived at a nameless little beach on the coast of South Carolina at about six o’clock in the morning. The very first rays of the sun were visible over the rolling ocean, and as I pulled into the parking lot, I stopped to look at Maggie’s small form curled up in the passenger seat. Her face was serene, the wrinkles gone. A little real-world sleep had returned her strength in a way that I could only be jealous of. My own body was a mess. Breathing hurt. Talking hurt. Driving hurt. I’d almost passed out three times on the drive down, but I’d be damned if I ever told Maggie that.

  I gently touched her shoulder and watched her eyes flicker open.

  She sat up slowly. “Where are we?” she asked, and froze in midstretch as she spotted the beach. She let out the kind of squeal one might expect from a little girl opening Christmas presents rather than from a seven-hundred-year-old jinn. She threw the car door open, stripped off her pilfered hoodie, and ran naked toward the beach, diving into an oncoming wave without hesitation.

  I couldn’t help but grin as I slowly pulled myself out of the car and walked gingerly out onto the sand. Someone had left behind a folding beach chair. I sank into it and put my head back, watching Maggie as she frolicked in the surf like a kid. I lay there peacefully as the sun rose, until I felt the heat of my barcode suddenly cut through all my other pains.

  I pulled out my phone. It was crusted with dried blood that I had to wipe away to see that I had nine messages from the past twenty-four hours. One was from Justin, two from Nadine, and six were from Ada. A shiver of fear went through my belly that I’d somehow screwed up—that the job wasn’t finished and she was going to kill me for running out in the middle of work. My mouth dry, I dialed her number.

  “Where the hell are you?” she asked.

  “I’m in South Carolina,” I told her.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I had a promise to keep to a friend.”

  I could feel her glaring through the phone. “Ferryman called last night,” she said without pressing further.

  “And?”

  “He paid in full. He said you did an amazing job and that I should treat you better.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I don’t disagree,” I replied.

  “Whatever. Don’t be a prick about it. He said you’re hurt?”

  “Yeah. Some cuts. Probably a bunch of cracked bones. A lot of blunt-force trauma.”

  “What did you fight that can crack your bones?”

  “A ghoul.”

  “I don’t know what the hell that is.” She gave a long-suffering sigh. “Fine. You have the next five days off. I expect you back in the office by Thursday. And you can…” she muttered something under her breath.

  “I can what?” I asked. Five days? That was unheard of. Ferryman must have paid her an absolute fortune.

  “You can have bank holidays off this year. Ferryman’s request. Seems he knows about our little arrangement and thought I should throw you a bone. This year only, mind! Enjoy your damn trip.” She hung up.

  I checked Nadine’s messages, but she was just trying to let me know that Ada was looking for me. Finally, I listened to the message from Justin. It was from Thursday morning.

  “Hey, bud,” it said. “Mission accomplished. You necromancer buddy demanded his phone call about half hour after you left. He talked to a woman named Kimberly Donavon. From the sound of things, she’s definitely the one who hired him. Normally, we’d go after her ourselves right away, but I figured you might want first stab, so I put it off until Wednesday. Nick is back in solitary, so she has no idea you’re coming. I texted you her address.”

  I called him back and thanked him, making sure that I still had the rest of the weekend before OtherOps made their move. I did.

  Maggie returned, dripping, a half hour later. I was half asleep when she dropped none-so-gently into my lap.

  “Ow!” I said.

  “Oh! Sorry about that.” She grinned at me. “I haven’t been swimming for five centuries, Alek. Five centuries!” She leapt back to her feet, throwing her hands in the air. The wind whipped off the Atlantic, but she barely seemed to notice the spring cold.

  “Sorry we’ve blown through most of your anniversary,” I said, glancing at the clock on my phone. “What do you want to do for the rest of it?”

  “You sure you don’t need a hospital?” she said, sobering.

  “I think I can get through another six or seven hours.”

  “Good. Let’s get shit-faced and spend the rest of the morning in a hammock.”

  “That,” I said, “is the best idea I’ve ever heard.”

  Epilogue

  The three-story, white stucco house sat on a quiet, old-moneyed street in Cleveland Heights, just a stone’s throw from my favorite Thai place in Coventry. It was the type of hundred-year-old house I used to dream of owning someday, back when I went on ride-alongs with the old reapers as a kid. I stood in the street outside, leaning against my rental while Maggie took stock of the place.

  I don’t sense anything out of the ordinary, she said. No wards, no sorcery, no bodyguards. There’s one lady in there, probably in her midfifties. She’s watching soap operas.

  It was four o’clock on Monday afternoon. I’d managed to get back from South Carolina without passing out, and I’d spent most of Sunday in the hospital. The ghoul had cracked pretty much everything in my body, but Ada’s personal doctor had given me a bunch of heavy painkillers and told me that my troll blood would heal it all within a month or two, which didn’t seem all that useful to me.

  We’re good, Maggie concluded. Either she’s so goddamned powerful that not even I can sense her sorcery, or she’s just an ordinary person.

  Why would an ordinary person hire a necromancer to kill me?

  Because they can’t do it themselves? Technically, she hired the necromancer to bring her my ring. There was menace in Maggie’s voice.

  Let me take care of this, I told her.

  She snorted.

  I walked up the short drive and knocked on th
e door, listening to the soap opera playing through the living room window. I was wearing a Valkyrie Collections hoodie over my flak jacket, the hood pushed back, one hand ready to reach for my gun. I saw a curtain shift, then heard footsteps inside. The door opened to reveal a blonde-haired woman with crow’s-feet in the corners of her eyes and a heavily made-up face. She looked more tired than menacing, and she gave me a single glance before letting out a sigh. “It’s you,” she said.

  “Hi.” I managed a smile, even though I didn’t feel like it. “Kimberly Donavon?”

  She glanced past me, into the street. Her jaw tightened, and she lifted her chin toward me. “You going to kill me?” she asked.

  I tongued at the torn-up gums of my bottom canines. “Can we talk inside?”

  “Might as well,” she said with a shrug, turning and walking away.

  I followed her inside, shutting the door behind me and heading into the living room, where she turned off her soaps and dropped into the couch. Despite the exhaustion in her face, there was an edge of defiance. “Well?” she asked. “Get on with it.”

  I looked around the living room. Everything about it screamed upper-middle-class family home, from the baby grand piano centerpiece to the big-screen TV over the fireplace to the expensive-looking suede couches. There was no hint of anything out of the ordinary. No sign of the Other. “Get on with what?”

  “Whatever you people do to people like me.”

  I took a deep breath. “What do you think I am?”

  “I have no idea. All I know is that fool kid Nick couldn’t bring me what I paid for and landed himself in an OtherOps lockup.” She scowled. “How did you find me? They trace the call? I figured they’d do that the moment I hung up the phone. Been waiting all weekend for someone to show up. So what’ll it be? Torture? Maiming? Death? I assume you’re friends with some pretty powerful people to keep Nick locked up.” She spoke a thousand words a minute, one sentence bleeding into the next, barely stopping to take a breath.

  Jesus, Maggie said. She is an absolute mess. There was actually a note of sympathy in her tone.

  I noticed Kimberly’s eyes flick down to Maggie’s ring. I turned the armchair away from the TV and sat down across from her, lacing my fingers. “I’m not going to kill you,” I said gently.

  “Why not? I tried to kill you.”

  “You tried to steal from me,” I corrected her. “The fact that your errand boy decided to make things violent wasn’t your fault.”

  “It was,” she insisted. “I told him to get me the jinn at all costs. I wouldn’t have batted an eye if he’d killed you.”

  “You’re not very good at poker, are you?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” I drummed one fingernail against a lower canine. “Why do you want the jinn?”

  A flurry of emotions crawled across Kimberly’s face: guilt, anger, relief, hatred, revulsion. She had a million different things bottled up in that head of hers. I couldn’t imagine what had caused them. Her eyes moved to Maggie’s ring again. “Is that it?” she asked. “Her vessel?”

  Oh, no, Maggie suddenly said.

  My attention split between the two. I covered the ring with one hand and said to Maggie, What’s wrong?

  I just figured out who this is. Look at the picture on the piano over there.

  Instead of answering Kimberly’s question, I got up and casually paced the room, letting my eyes play across the photo Maggie had pointed out. The quality wasn’t great—probably taken fifteen or twenty years ago. It showed a well-dressed man in his midthirties leaning against a tree, laughing. Who is that? I asked Maggie.

  She fell silent. Across from me, Kimberly shifted on the couch, her face twisting into a grimace. “I wanted the ring for revenge,” she said.

  It was my turn to be caught off guard. I turned away from the piano. “Revenge for what?”

  She sniffed and got up from the couch, crossing to the photo. She stood beside me, plucking it from the piano and practically shoving it into my hands. “For him. For my baby brother.” I looked at the photo, wondering if I was supposed to be getting all of this. Maggie wouldn’t speak up, which meant I was the only person in the room completely in the dark.

  “She killed him,” Kimberly said.

  “Who?”

  “That creature in your ring. She turned him inside out and left his corpse to rot in the gutter.”

  “Wha…” I didn’t know what to say. Maggie couldn’t do that. I was pretty sure I knew the limitations of her powers from within the ring. She could set people on fire with her sorcery at close range, but turning them inside out wasn’t on her list of tricks. “How the hell do you know any of this?” I asked. “Who are you?”

  “Just a woman who wants her brother back.” She snatched the picture away from me and returned it lovingly to her piano, then paced the floor. “I didn’t know any of this. Not until a few months ago. I’ve spent the last decade thinking my little brother had been murdered by hoodlums or thieves. But a man came to me—an old man. He claimed he was some kind of magician. He showed me the truth that the jinn killed my brother. He said that he was the one who’d put her in that ring, and if I got the ring for him, he would allow me my vengeance.”

  Maggie, what is going on?

  She remained quiet.

  “Why would you trust this guy?” I asked Kimberly. “Some stranger you never met, claiming to know magic…”

  Kimberly shifted anxiously. She leaned toward me, as if it were of vital importance that I know she was being truthful. “I just knew. He showed me things. It was like watching a movie in my own brain, like living the events myself.” She blinked rapidly, tears forming in the corners of her eyes. “He showed me what that bitch did to my brother.”

  I was getting fed up with Maggie’s silence. There wasn’t a lie in Kimberly’s anxious eyes, but I had a hard time believing Maggie was capable of what she claimed. “This magician,” I asked, “did he leave some way to contact him?”

  Kimberly swallowed hard, then fetched her purse from the other end of the couch. She fished around inside for a few moments before handing me a white card. It had a phone number on it and the name Matthias in small letters in top right-hand corner. “That’s him. He said not to bother going to OtherOps—that the jinn had power over the cops.” Kimberly paused, staring at Maggie’s ring. Her fingers twitched toward it, ever so slightly, and then her entire body sagged in defeat. “This isn’t my world,” she said, finally averting her eyes to stare into the middle distance. “I shouldn’t have gotten involved. I should have known better.”

  “Yes, you should have.”

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “To you? Nothing. You’re just a patsy. I recommend that when OtherOps comes by you deny everything. All they have is a single phone call.” The last thing I needed was OtherOps sniffing around Maggie’s ring. I held up the business card between two fingers. “I’m going to find your magician friend and smash his face in. You’re done with this business. You get involved again, and there won’t be any second chances. Understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Good.” I felt a swirl of anger and pity. Someone had gotten to this lady—someone who could convince her that Maggie was a killer. Maybe it was one of my enemies, maybe it was one of Maggie’s, but a magician had tried to use this lady to grab the ring. It made my blood boil. I left before I could get any angrier and got in the car. I leaned the seat back, trying to cool down.

  Maggie, do you have any idea what’s going on?

  There was a long, terrible silence. I willed her to deny everything. To respond. To make any sort of noise.

  It’s true, she finally said.

  What’s true? I asked.

  Her brother. I killed him, just like she claims. Maggie’s voice was flat, devoid of emotion.

  What the he
ll? I was blindsided. I couldn’t think through my own confusion. This wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. She might not talk much about her past, but I felt like I’d gotten to know what type of person she was over the last ten years, and I couldn’t even imagine her doing such a thing.

  He had the ring before you. He was an amateur magician, and he had an artifact he could use to amplify my power and control it. He thought I was his little genie in a bottle. He thought I was a slave to be used and abused. A snarl entered her tone. One year, during my anniversary, I got him drunk and killed him. I took the ring and hid it. And then you found it.

  I was speechless. I definitely didn’t know that she could kill the person who was wearing her ring.

  Maggie continued, her voice level again. That woman in there has no idea that her brother was a practitioner or a sleaze. To her, he was just her baby brother; an innocent murdered by an ancient evil. I could sense the belief in her words, feel her grief. She let out a long, trembling sigh. God damn it. How is he still alive? Why did he bring her into it?

  Wait, who is still alive? I thought you killed him.

  Not my last ring bearer, Matthias—the asshole magician who put me in here. He’s still alive, and now he’s trying to get my ring back. Damn it! I’m not going to let him hurt you or take my ring. Alek, you’ve got to get me out of here.

  I sat in a deli on the east side, a half-eaten Reuben in front of me, my appetite gone after my confrontation with Kimberly. Maggie hadn’t spoken since, and I didn’t know what to say to her. I always knew she was powerful, of course, but the idea that she could kill the person who carried her ring terrified me. I became aware of a complacency that I didn’t even know was there; I felt like a fool for being fast, loose, and friendly with an ancient creature from the Other.

  It also meant that I was now part of whatever game this Matthias was playing. To come after her, he would have to go through me. Maggie was still my best friend. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I would have liked the opportunity to make that choice for myself.

  I looked up as the diner doorbell rang, and Ferryman strolled inside. He walked over, paused dramatically, and looked at me over a pair of sunglasses. He took a long drag from his cigarette and crushed it out under his boot, then dropped into the seat across the table.