Part-Time Gods

by Rachel Aaron

  But just because I could technically wiggle the new stuff over my butt didn’t mean I wanted to wear it. Not only was my mom’s taste wildly different from my own—I liked color and fun, she liked elegance and simplicity, which was a fancy way of saying boring—everything she’d put in my closet was so delicate and expensive I was terrified to put it on. Even the jeans clocked in at over five hundred bucks per pair when Sibyl looked them up online. A few years ago, of course, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye, but now all I could think was how did anyone actually wear clothing this pricey without having a heart attack every time they touched something?

  The only silver lining was that at least now I had something to sell. There was always a market for designer stuff. I could tell my mom had tried to limit herself—there were only three pairs of shoes in my new wardrobe and zero handbags, the most obvious cash cows—but she couldn’t force me to wear clothes she approved of and avoid giving me a windfall. If I hadn’t been overdue to meet Peter, I would have rushed out to sell the whole closet right then and there. But I was already late bordering on super late, so I forced myself to stop pricing and started looking for something I could actually use to cover my body.

  After much searching, I settled on a floral skirt with a busy pattern that wouldn’t show stains and a blue silk top with no sleeves so I wouldn’t have to worry about sweating in it. I put some makeup on as well. Not much, but while I hated my mom’s taste in clothes, her instinct for beauty products was flawless, and I’m only human. I can’t resist a whole table full of brand-new shiny product in clever packaging. Also, my bare face looked incredibly out of place above the fancy clothes. Makeup was required to balance me out, so I put it on as fast as I could before shoving my feet into the lowest of my three new pairs of heels and racing out the door.

  I felt better the instant I was out of my apartment. It was slightly selfish of me, but my promise to take Peter out to dinner to apologize for how horribly I’d taken advantage of him during the whole Dr. Lyle-Empty-Wind-Hand-Thing wasn’t entirely for his sake. It was also an excuse for me to go out to eat, a luxury I hadn’t indulged in in months. I was super excited tonight, too, because in an effort to show off, I’d told Peter to meet me in the Corkscrew, a huge shopping development near downtown that contained several of the DFZ’s best Korean restaurants.

  As the name implied, the Corkscrew was a massive spiral structure that ran from the Underground all the way up to the Skyways. The pedestrian ramp in the center was lined with shops and restaurants on both the inside and the outside of the spiral, though how fancy things got was determined by how high up you went. My budget being what it was, I was taking Peter to a place on the lowest loop of the spiral, but it was still delicious. Growing up, my childhood had been evenly split between my father’s homes in Seoul, Las Angeles, and Hong Kong, but I’d always thought of Korean as home cooking and my absolute favorite. I didn’t know if that was because most of our cooks had been Korean or because kimchi was goddamn delicious, but I ate Korean food every time I got the chance. The place I was taking Peter tonight might have been cheap, but it had the best Korean comfort food I’d found in the DFZ. Honestly, I probably would have taken him there even if money had been no object. It was that good.

  Peter was waiting at the auto-taxi drop-off when I arrived. He smiled and waved when he spotted me in the cab line. Then I actually got out of the tiny car, and his expression turned to horror.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, tugging self-consciously at his perfectly nice charcoal-gray button-down and dark jeans. “I didn’t realize this was formal.”

  “It’s not, I swear,” I said quickly, picking at my own outfit in an effort to look less like I’d just sneaked out of a garden party on the Skyways. “It’s just…um…My mom bought these for me.”

  For some reason, that excuse seemed to make Peter even more nervous. “Oh,” he said, looking everywhere but me as he rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. Then, as if he’d come to a decision, he straightened up and turned to face me head-on. “Opal,” he said, his voice deadly serious. “I’m honored you invited me out for dinner, but before there’s any misunderstandings, I feel I should remind you that I’m a priest of the Empty Wind.”

  I blinked at him, thoroughly confused. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I’m sworn in eternal service to the Forgotten Dead,” he clarified, looking increasingly flustered. “There’s no formal restrictions, but it’s a very demanding position with long and unpredictable hours, and I wouldn’t feel right… That is, I don’t feel it’s responsible of me to enter into a relationship—any relationship!—so long as I’m part of the priesthood. You see what I’m saying?”

  I really didn’t. It wasn’t until he dropped his eyes back to his canvas shoes—and pointedly away from any part of my body—that I finally realized what was going on.

  “Oh!” I said, cheeks burning as I looked down at my fancy outfit, which, given how I usually dressed, did indeed look exactly like something I’d wear on a first date. “Oh, no. No, no, no! I didn’t ask you out with any hidden intentions! This really is the only thing I had to wear. I swear I’m not trying to put the moves on you or anything. I just wanted to thank you for your help with Dr. Lyle.”

  Considering how eager he’d been to tell me he wasn’t available, I expected Peter to look relieved at that, but he actually seemed a little disappointed by my quick rebuttal. I was a little disappointed too, which was a surprise. I’d never even thought about Peter in that way before, but now that he’d told me it couldn’t happen, it was suddenly occurring to me how good a catch he would have been. Peter was handsome with his dark skin and quick smile. He was also decent, hardworking, kind, and protected by a death god, which meant my dad couldn’t bully him. He was everything I could have asked for in a boyfriend, but I’d been so busy with my own problems I hadn’t even noticed. Not that I’d ever had a shot since Peter had been a priest for as long as I’d known him, but it was still a bummer. It was also just my luck. Leave it to me to get rejected before I’d even realized a guy had potential.

  “I hope I didn’t offend you,” Peter said quietly as we climbed the steeply curving pedestrian path that channeled customers into the Corkscrew’s gauntlet of restaurants, shops, and attractions. “You really do look very nice tonight.”

  “I’m not offended at all,” I assured him, pushing my hair—which had dried beautifully shiny and maximumly voluminous thanks to my mother’s PhD-level knowledge of hair products—out of my face. “Thank you for the compliment. Now let’s go eat. I’m starving!”

  “Where are we going?”

  I immediately launched into an overly enthusiastic explanation of how I’d found this place and how good it was in a desperate attempt to make things less awkward. Fortunately, I really was eat-a-trashcan hungry, and soon the heavenly smell of frying meat banished every other thought from my head.

  From the outside, Jeju’s Home Cooking was your standard pan-Asian bistro. It had an enormous menu featuring everything from sushi to bulgogi to pan-fried noodles, all of which had been safely Westernized to appeal to the typical Underground dweller’s palate. It all was decent enough, but if you spoke Korean, you could get the real menu, which was where the magic happened.

  Since Peter’s experience with the world’s best food had previously been limited to chain Korean BBQ joints, I took my time translating the menu for him in lavish detail. It would have been much faster just to ask him what he liked, but I wasn’t here for fast. I was paying for this, dammit. I was going to enjoy every bit, and there are few things I can talk about at greater length—or with more passion—than food.

  After listening patiently to my dramatic reading, Peter ended up getting a bowl of knife-cut noodles with spicy pork belly. I got my usual fried chicken, which sounds dull until you remember that Korean fried chicken is in a league of its own. They did it “market style” here, too, which is where they butterfly-cut the chicken and fry the whole bird. A
dd in all the side-dish bowls of pickled radish, kimchi, and rice that they gave you for free and it was heaven. I got us beer, too, and lots of it. It was a bit more than I could afford, but you can’t have fried chicken without beer. Soju would have been cheaper, but I always got way drunker than I intended when the soju came out. Given how fast I drained my beer when it arrived, going harder didn’t seem like a good idea.

  “Thank you again for taking me out,” Peter said after the waitress left with our order. “I hope I didn’t make things too awkward before.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, refilling my glass from the frosty pitcher on the table. “I’m the one who overdressed. Honest mistake.”

  “I’m relieved I was wrong,” he said, tracing patterns in the condensation of his own barely touched beer. “Not that I wouldn’t have been flattered, but you seem so happy with Nik. I would have been sad to hear it was over.”

  I almost spit my beer in his face. “What?”

  “You and Nik Kos,” Peter said, giving me a funny look. “Aren’t you dating?”

  “Why would you think that?!” I cried, drawing startled looks from the nearby tables.

  “Well, I mean, you two are always together at the auctions now,” Peter explained. “And the other Cleaners said you were together, so I thought…Sorry, are you not dating?”

  “No,” I said reflexively. “We’re just business partners.”

  “Oh,” Peter said, looking sheepish. “Looks like I’m wrong about everything, then. Sorry, Opal.”

  I took another giant swallow of my beer, desperate to escape this conversation. In hindsight, I wasn’t sure why his assumption had made me so uncomfortable. Aside from his spurts of weird grumpiness like earlier tonight, Nik and I got along pretty great these days. I didn’t even flinch at his driving or gun grabbing anymore, and we were always together. Looking at it from an outsider’s perspective, I could totally see why Peter and the other Cleaners thought we were an item, and for some reason, that filled me with panic.

  I had no idea why. Unlike my delayed reaction to Peter, I’d had no problem noticing that Nik was handsome. He’d saved my life several times now, and—more importantly—he’d saved me from my dad. A crush would have been totally natural at this point, so why did a casual mention of us being together make me freak out? Why did I have trouble even thinking about it?

  “Because everyone you like leaves.”

  My head shot up. Across the table, Peter was sipping his beer and studying the Korean menu with seemingly authentic interest, which meant he didn’t see me slip my hand up to press Sibyl’s earpiece tighter into my ear.

  What the hell are you doing? I thought at her, trusting her to catch the thought through the mana-contact hidden in the tiny wireless speaker-bud.

  “Being a good Mental Support AI,” she whispered back, her voice so low I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting the vibrations through my skin or if she’d found a way to reply in my thoughts as well. “Think about it. Every guy you’ve ever liked has ghosted on you. That would be heavy baggage in a normal relationship, but you need Nik to survive right now because of your curse. That’s why you can’t even allow yourself to imagine the two of you being together. You’re afraid connecting with him will make him leave.”

  That’s stupid, I thought angrily at her. Stop trying to psychoanalyze me!

  “But that’s what you bought me for!” Sibyl argued. “I’m a state-of-the-art companion AI programmed to support your mental health and emotional stability. I’m built to help you with this stuff! If you just wanted a yes-bot to keep track of your calendar and connect your calls, you should have gotten one of those suck-up personal-assistant AIs.”

  I rolled my eyes and pulled the speaker out of my ear and shoved it into my bag. It was a cheap escape, but I was here to have dinner with Peter, not a therapy session with my computer. Fortunately, our food arrived a few moments later, and I was able to lose myself in the miracle that is crunchy, spicy, Korean-style fried chicken.

  After that, we talked about normal stuff: Cleaner gossip, weird things we’d seen around town, speculations about Broker’s personal life. As always, Peter was a goldmine of stories. As a priest of the Empty Wind, he’d seen some wild stuff, more than enough to keep us talking well past when the waitstaff had cleaned away our plates and started blatantly ignoring our empty glasses in the hopes that we’d get the hint and leave.

  The bill was a bit painful when we finally cleared out, but that was due more to me than Peter. I’d had way more beer than I’d meant to, but it had been such a happy atmosphere. I hadn’t had dinner with a friend in ages, and not just because I’d been broke. Even when I’d been raking it in as a Cleaner, I’d had to cut myself off from all my old friends so my dad couldn’t use them. As a protection strategy, it had worked beautifully, but it had left my social circle a single dot named Sibyl.

  Really, though, the distance had been inevitable. Even if I had been willing to take a risk, none of my college buddies would have deigned to eat with me in a place like this. The Corkscrew was pretty tame by Underground standards, but Heidi still wouldn’t have dared descend this far below the Skyways without a security escort. Back when I’d lived with her, I wouldn’t have, either. Before my dad had put my back to the wall, I’d been just as much of a sheltered rich kid as everyone else at IMA. Now I was down here getting drunk with a death priest and happy for the privilege. Funny how life could change.

  “Thanks again for coming out with me,” I told Peter drunkenly as we left the restaurant. “I had a really good time. Like, really.”

  “Thank you for taking me out,” he replied. “Again, though, it really wasn’t necessary. I was just doing my job. You were the one who helped Dr. Lyle’s soul find peace.”

  I was also the one who’d tricked him into giving me access to the morgue so I could steal Dr. Lyle’s hand for my own greedy purposes. Peter didn’t seem to know about that part, though, which proved the Empty Wind didn’t tell his priests everything. I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve such courtesy from a death god, but I was relieved Peter didn’t know I was a thief, and I saw no reason to set the record straight.

  “It was my pleasure,” I said sincerely, leaning against the restaurant’s wall so I could enjoy the happiest, most carefree stage of being drunk without having to worry about the added complication of staying upright in heels. “Let’s do this again sometime.”

  “Sure,” Peter said. Then his face grew serious. “Before you go, though, can I ask you something personal?”

  When I frowned, he put up his hands. “I swear it’s not about your social life this time. I was just wondering what’s going on with your magic. I’ve been noticing it all night.”

  My drunken brain wasn’t following. “How can you feel my magic?”

  Now it was his turn to look confused. “Um, because I’m a mage?”

  “You’re a mage?” I cried, shocked.

  Peter gave me a flat look. “Opal, I’m a priest. It would be kind of hard for me to do my job and talk to the Spirit of the Forgotten Dead if I wasn’t magical.”

  That was a very good point and one I frankly had never considered before this moment. A stupid mistake in hindsight, but in my defense, I’d never seen Peter do anything magical. He never had spellwork on him, and I’d never seen him cast. How was I supposed to know he was a mage? Other than the obvious, of course.

  “Wow, I feel stupid.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Peter said. “I don’t usually do my stuff where people can see. This might come as a shock, but service to the Forgotten Dead is a lot of solo work.”

  I snorted, and Peter flashed me a smile before his face grew grim again. “But seriously, Opal, what is going on? I don’t make a habit of prodding other people’s magic uninvited, but I could feel yours twitching from across the table. Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “Only when I use it.” And at night when I was trying to fall asleep. And whenever I slowed down enough to notice. “But
it’s nothing serious. I just pushed too hard last week. It should calm down after a bit of rest.”

  Peter gave me a skeptical look. “Are you sure? I mean, did a doctor tell you that?”

  No, because doctors were expensive. But all the internet searches I’d done had left me pretty sure I was suffering from an extreme version of overcasting, which made total sense when you considered how hard I’d blown Kauffman’s spell back in his face. But Peter clearly didn’t share my confidence.

  “I think you should get it looked at,” he said, pulling out his wallet and handing me a business card. “This person helped me a lot when I was in a bad place with my own magic a few years ago. I think she could do the same for you.”

  I took the card to be polite, but it required every bit of self-control my tipsy brain could muster to keep from rolling my eyes when I read it.

  Dr. Rita Kowalski

  Shamanic Healing, Soul Repair, Counseling Services.

  Open 24/7 to the right people.

  The address was crazy, too. There wasn’t even a street name, just a set of coordinates, which did not make me feel confident. “You’ve been to this person?” I asked skeptically, handing the card back to him.

  “Yes. And keep the card, please,” Peter said, pushing my hand back. “It’ll make me feel better just knowing you have it.”

  I dutifully tucked the business card into my bag, but this was seriously pinging my scam-o-meter. “I’ll keep it in mind,” I said. “But I’ll be honest, this isn’t really my thing. I mean, she’s a Shaman.”