Part-Time Gods

by Rachel Aaron

  “What are you going to do?” Nik asked, hurrying after me.

  “What he said,” I replied, dropping the bags beside the dumpster we hadn’t filled before heading back to his car to grab a roll of blue electrical tape. “I’m going to put a ward on them and toss them in the dumpster.”

  “Can you cast a ward on something that eats magic?”

  “I have no idea,” I confessed, pulling the tape off the roll and wrapping it around the trash bags until I’d bound all three together into a nice, bright-blue circle. “I’m just going to do something so we can prove we tried.”

  That was pretty un-civic minded of me considering the damage these little guys could do, but frankly, at that point, I didn’t care if dream slugs ate the entire neighborhood. I was going to do the absolute minimum required to cover our asses, emphasis on minimum. I hadn’t even started casting yet, and my poor magic was already throbbing like an angry wound.

  I put my back to Nik so he wouldn’t see me wince. I hadn’t actually told him about my injury yet because I didn’t want to look like even more of a liability. Fortunately, Nik didn’t know much about the mechanics of casting, so I didn’t think he’d figured it out yet, but he’d know something was up for sure if I started moaning and groaning. To avoid this, I chose the smallest spell possible: a simple binding with less than three lines of spellwork. I didn’t know if it would be enough to actually hold the slugs in, but the magic in the ward would probably keep them happily munching in one spot until the trash truck came for the dumpster tonight, which was good enough for me.

  “Okay,” I said when I’d double-checked my spellwork against the original Sibyl had put up in my AR. “Here we go.”

  “Shouldn’t you put on your poncho?” Sibyl suggested. “You know, just to be safe? You don’t want to take another backlash.”

  I was a pretty garbage mage, but there was no way even I could backlash myself on a spell this small. Also, bringing out my poncho meant I’d have to cast another spell to activate it, and I just didn’t want to bother. One was too many already, so I shook my head and crouched, careful to keep my back to Nik so he wouldn’t see my pained grimace as I started to gather magic from the surrounding air.

  As always since the Gnarls, reaching outside of myself hurt like crazy. I felt like I was trying to scoop up sand with a broken hand, which sucked, because grabbing magic was normally the one part of casting I was actually good at. I usually had to struggle not to overfill my circles, and now I was barely able to grab a pinch. Frustrated, I pushed harder. That made my magic hurt even more, but dammit, I wanted to get this done today. I was sick of being here and really sick of these stupid slugs. I just wanted to go home and take a hot shower, so I gave my magic a shove, gritting my teeth against the pain for the short moment I needed to—

  A loud pop sounded in my ears. Suddenly, without warning, the magic I’d been trying unsuccessfully to wrangle came together all at once. The combined force was enough to knock me down to the pavement, but the real casualty was my circle. In the space of a heartbeat, I’d gone from moving no magic to moving all of it, and the sudden rush of power was too much for my shoddy tape circle to handle. It snapped like a thread. The plastic bags went next, popping like water balloons and sending burning hot chunks of invisible slug flying in all directions, including all over me.

  “Ugh!” I screamed, frantically wiping my hands across the boiled slug slime that now covered me from toes to face. “Ugh, ugh, ugh!”

  “What the hell was that?” Nik yelled.

  “I told you to wear your poncho!” Sibyl yelled at the same time. “Do you want me to call a medic?”

  I shook my head frantically and grabbed my shirt, turning it around every which way to find a clean piece I could use to wipe the slime off my mouth before I accidentally ate any of it. Nik came to my rescue with a towel a few seconds later. I wiped the cheap terry all over my face, cursing myself for being an idiot.

  “You want to tell me what just happened?” Nik asked when I finally stopped retching.

  “Not really,” I said, sliding my boots on the brick paving, which was now slick as an ice rink with slug guts. “Did I get any on you?”

  Nik shook his head. “I ducked behind my car when I saw it blow.”

  I wiped my face again. “Smart move.”

  “It could have been worse,” Sibyl said cheerfully. “You could have had your mouth open.”

  I almost vomited at the thought. Even though I couldn’t see them, I could feel the cooked slug guts coating my clothes and skin in a warm, chunky layer, and the smell of rancid pig fat was so far up my nose I was never going to get it out. The only positive thing I could say about this entire situation was that at least it wasn’t kabocha pumpkin.

  “Why are you so bad?” I whispered in Korean, glaring down at my hands. “Why can’t you just be normal?”

  I wasn’t sure who I was talking to, my magic or myself. Either way, it didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Well,” Nik said, reaching down to help me up, “at least now we don’t have to worry about a ticket. The slugs are all dead, and the mess is even invisible, so no one will ever know.”

  That was some seriously glass-half-full outlook, but I was too happy Nik wasn’t cursing me out to tease him for it this time.

  “Can we go home now?”

  “Sure,” Nik said. “Unless someone else wants to come out and yell at us.”

  “Let’s leave before that happens,” I said quickly, toweling myself off as well as I could.

  We had everything packed up in ten minutes flat. Since the couch was the only thing in the truck, that was easy too. I just told Sibyl to drive it back to my apartment and flopped into Nik’s car, though not before putting a towel down to guard his seat from my slime. Nik had said he was ready to stick it out with me, but I didn’t want to test his resolve by carelessly getting dead slug on his baby. Seriously, he cleaned his car every damn morning. He was already giving my boots the stink eye, so I made sure to take them off and wrap them in plastic before putting them in the back seat.

  “So,” Nik said as he removed his own heavy Cleaning waders, revealing the sleeker pair of lace-up black combat boots underneath. “Now that hell’s over, want to go back to my place for dinner before the evening auction?”

  My head jerked up in surprise. Not at the invitation. I’d actually eaten at Nik’s several times now, and not just because of the free food, though that was nice. I ate at Nik’s because he absolutely refused to eat anywhere else. You’d think he was an emperor worried about poison the way he avoided consuming anything he didn’t prepare with his own hands. But while I was starving from working all day without breaking for lunch, I had to shake my head.

  “Thanks for the offer, but I already made plans tonight.”

  “What plans?”

  “I’m taking Peter out for dinner tonight.” I still owed the death priest for the stunt we’d pulled on him at the morgue. I’d been saving up all week so I could take him somewhere nice to make up for lying to him. And sending him on a wild goose chase. And stealing from his god. Honestly, it was a lot more than one dinner could cover, but I was still going to try. “I told you about it yesterday, remember?”

  “Oh,” Nik said, scowling at the steering wheel as he started the car.

  The terse one-word reply made me wince. “Are you mad about something?”

  “I’m not mad,” Nik said, reaching up to rub the back of his neck. “Just tired. It’s been a long day.”

  I winced again. We both knew whose fault that was. “You don’t have to drive me home if you don’t want to,” I offered. “Sibyl’s already driving the truck over. I can tell her to come back and pick me up, so—”

  “I’m not letting you risk your life in that ad-supported death trap,” he grumbled, turning around to back us out. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “It’s really okay.”

  He shook his head firmly. “You still owe me money for paying your debt la
st week. How am I going to get that money back if you die riding around in a plastic box they can only get away with calling a truck because it’s the DFZ and no one cares?”

  I didn’t think my truck was that bad. I’d been using subscription cars since I’d started Cleaning, and while they weren’t what anyone would call safe, I’d never had a problem that had actually led to injury. But I wasn’t inclined to keep fighting when winning meant I’d have to ride home clinging to the moving truck’s terrifying jump seat as opposed to Nik’s sleek black sports car with actual glass windows, air conditioning, and speakers that didn’t start playing advertisements at max volume the moment you sat down.

  “If you insist,” I said, snuggling into his passenger seat.

  Nik nodded victoriously and pulled us out into traffic.

  My dinner with Peter was not mentioned again. Instead, we spent the drive back to my place discussing what sort of units we wanted to buy at the next auction. We had no control over what units came up, of course, but it was fun to dream. I was telling him about the time way back at the beginning of my Cleaning career when I’d scored a hoarded apartment that had belonged to the former assistant curator of the Algonquin Corporate Museum when Nik suddenly slammed on the brakes.

  I lurched against my seatbelt. Scrambling back into my seat, I whipped my head around to see a fleet of work trucks taking up my apartment building’s entire parking lot.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” Nik said, leaning out his window to get a better look at the gridlock. “Is it moving day for your whole place or something?”

  If it was, it was news to me. The DFZ did sometimes destroy buildings instead of moving them around, but she usually gave the residents at least a month’s notice. I hadn’t heard anything, but I hadn’t exactly been home a lot this week thanks to Nik’s obsession with hitting both auctions every day so we didn’t miss a good unit. I left my apartment before five most mornings and usually didn’t get home again until ten, so I’d had plenty of time to miss a notice. Maybe I’d missed something important?

  Having worked myself into a proper panic, I grabbed my bag and jumped out of Nik’s car, sprinting between the trucks toward the renovated motel’s open-air stairs. Nik parked his car on the sidewalk and caught up with me a few moments later, sticking right on my heels with his hand in his jacket pocket, which I now knew meant he was holding his gun. That seemed like super overkill to me, but it was pointless to tell him to stop. I’d long since learned that “gripping weapon” was Nik’s default mode in stressful situations. He’d stop on his own eventually, so I put it out of my mind and just focused on getting up the stairs as fast as I could.

  Fortunately, the further up I went, the less it looked like I was about to lose my building. There were a lot of people in uniforms running around, but they looked more like workers than movers, and they definitely weren’t going into every apartment. In fact, there was only one door open when I reached my open-air hallway on the third floor. And, of course, it was mine.

  My apartment—which I’d only just cleaned up from Kauffman’s attack—was absolutely jam-packed with people. In addition to the aforementioned workmen, there were decorators and designers in impossibly chic suits carrying AR viewing pads. There were at least two crews of electricians, one of which seemed to be installing a security door where my wooden one had been. I was opening my mouth to demand to know what was going on here when the workers parted like a school of fish dodging a shark to reveal a woman—a staggeringly beautiful Korean woman with perfect black hair, perfect makeup, and a perfect body underneath her perfectly draped, perfectly styled designer dress.

  She smiled when she spotted me standing outside, her face lighting up like a sunrise. It was so lovely that even I was frozen in my tracks, all the anger and confusion knocked clear out of my head by the jaw-dropping loveliness of the perfect woman holding out her flawlessly manicured hands to me.

  “Opal.”

  My name hung in the air like perfume, strangling my breath and snapping me out of my stupidity. I jumped backward with a yelp, colliding with Nik’s chest in my rush to get away from the trap I now knew I’d walked right into. But it was too late. The lovely woman had already grabbed my chapped hands in her iron grip, pulling me into a gentle but inescapable hug that smelled so nostalgic I started to panic. I was done for. The cage had already closed. My only hope at this point was to try to limit the damage, so I forced myself to be still, taking a deep, steadying breath in preparation for the coming battle as I said,

  “Hey, Mom.”

  Chapter 2

  “Wait,” Nik said behind me, voice quivering. “That’s your mom?”

  The glare I shot him must have been one for the ages, because he began backtracking immediately.

  “It’s just, she doesn’t look old enough,” he explained quickly, stumbling over himself. “I thought maybe she was your sister or something.”

  My mother flashed him a dazzling smile, and I rolled my eyes. In Nik’s defense, the woman standing in my doorway really didn’t look a day over twenty-five. A feat achieved by religious application of moisturizer, top-notch plastic surgery, and, on occasion, literal black magic. People had been mistaking her for my sister or my cousin or pretty much anything other than my mother since I was five years old. Of course, given how I looked right now—ratty haired, big eye bags, and crispy with dried slug slime—I suppose I should have been flattered Nik saw the family resemblance at all.

  “You’re so dirty,” my mother said in Korean, looking me up and down with sharp brown eyes that noted every fault. “But at least you’ve lost weight. Have you been following the diet I sent you?”

  “No, Mom, I’ve been starving,” I snapped in the same language. “That’s what happens when Dad curses me so I can’t make money.”

  “Don’t be disrespectful,” she chided, glaring at me as hard as she could without actually furrowing her brows and risking wrinkles. “You’re the one who asked for this. Your father never wanted you to live like a rat in a hole. And speaking of rats…” She reached up to touch my head in dismay. “Your poor hair! Have you not taken care of it at all?”

  “Who cares about my hair?” I yelled, smacking her hand away. “What are you doing here? And what have you done to my apartment?”

  I pointed at my living room, which was so full of workmen I couldn’t see past the door.

  “I improved it,” my mother replied without a trace of shame. “You are the Dragon’s Opal. It was an insult to the Great Yong for his daughter to live in such squalor, so I flew over to fix it.”

  I didn’t know about fixing, but my small apartment was infinitely more decorated. The ratty beige carpet had been ripped up and replaced with dark hardwood made even darker by the blindingly white silk-damask wallpaper that now covered my cement-block walls. The ceiling—which had been covered in the standard lumpy popcorn finish that was mandatory for all cheap apartments—had likewise been stripped to make way for molded plaster motifs that swirled like waves around the newly recessed lighting.

  But all of that was just prepping the canvas. In addition to changing my apartment’s walls, ceiling, and floor, my mother had also replaced everything inside, starting with a brand-new living room suite that consisted of a six-foot-long chaise lounge, two straight-backed armchairs, and a loveseat. I was staring right at it, and I still had no idea how she’d managed to cram all of that into my tiny living room, but the real kicker was that all of this new furniture was white. I was a Cleaner. If there was any color I didn’t do, it was white.

  “There was so much to do, it was hard to decide where to start,” my mother went on, turning around to smile at the six contractors who were attempting to install granite countertops in my closet-sized kitchen. “So I decided to just rip it all out and start fresh. It made more work, of course, so we’re a little behind schedule, but as you can see, it’s already a vast improvement.”

  She turned
back around with a proud smile, clearly expecting me to fall at her feet and thank her for coming all the way out here and “fixing” my life.

  “Where’s my stuff?” I said instead, unclenching my fist to point at the giant abstract painting of a lily hanging on the wall where the remains of my collection had been. “What did you do with my things?!”

  “Don’t worry, darling, they’re all still here,” she said, leading me into my bedroom, which was just as changed as everything else. My mattress on the floor was gone, replaced by a new queen-sized four-poster bed buried under a mountain of decorative pillows. There were also a new chest of drawers, several new mirrors, and a new vanity carpeted in acres of makeup from all of my mother’s favorite brands. There was so much new stuff to look at, I didn’t even notice the lit display case full of my treasures—all freshly cleaned and dusted—on the wall above my new headboard until my mother pointed it out.

  “See?” she said as I sighed in relief. “It’s all there.” She put her perfectly manicured hands on her hips. “Really, Opal, I’m insulted you’d think I’d throw your collection away. I think it’s adorable that you’ve started your own hoard.” Her lips curved into a melting smile. “You’re so much like your father.”

  The few good feelings seeing my collection had brought back went up in smoke. “I am nothing like him,” I snarled, whirling on her. “And you had no right to do this! This is my apartment!”

  “You are the daughter of the Great Yong,” she said, as if that excused everything. Which, for my mother, I’m sure it did.

  “That doesn’t mean you can barge into my life and change everything!”

  “Your father is showing you great favor,” she lectured. “Even after you insulted and disobeyed him, he continues to care and provide for you. Who do you think paid for all of this?” She waved a willowy arm at my new bedroom. “Selfish child! How can you be so ungrateful?”