by Chloe Garner
As long as she had to be here, though, she reminded herself to ask Jason if they could take an afternoon at the market. Ten years ago, there had been a massive exodus of demon artisans to New Orleans to sell to the magic community, and it had sucked some unique skillsets out of New York that Samantha could have made use of. Her credit was good here. Carter was known to make good, and he knew where her cash was to reimburse himself.
“You want to go scout?” Jason asked from the doorway. Samantha picked up her backpack.
“Sure.”
“Sam, get a move on,” Jason called behind him and closed the door. He came to stand next to Samantha. “I love New Orleans. Special brand of crazy here.”
“Drunk and naked?” Samantha asked. “I hate it.”
“Oh, come on, you can’t judge the place by Mardi Gras,” Jason said.
“As if I’ve been here at Mardi Gras,” Samantha said. “It’s not that, though. The place just feels… hostile, to me.”
“I figure most people are only hostile to you if you’re hostile to them first,” Jason said.
“Said the one who kills things for a living,” Samantha said.
“If this is a living, I’m underpaid,” Jason said. Samantha smiled.
“They get it wrong. Crime does pay. It’s justice that doesn’t.”
“Can I steal that?” Jason asked.
“It’s yours.” Samantha sighed. “It makes me think of something Heather said. Having the power of angels makes people think they’re god. I’ve met a lot of really powerful magicians here, and everyone is just trying to prove they’re stronger than the next guy. It’s the capital city of small-g gods. Tiny magical despots thumping their chests. I’m not popular here, and I don’t like it here.”
They stared at nothing for a while.
“I vote that, no matter what happens today and no matter what we have to do tomorrow, we go out dancing tonight and you try to see this city for the place it is to everyone else,” he said.
She licked her lips.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on. Sam isn’t dead, you’re only a little crazy. You get to take me to New York and beat me up. Don’t think I don’t see that coming. Let’s go get roaring drunk and act stupid.”
She smiled.
“The attitude about you that is simultaneously most endearing and most infuriating,” she said.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes.”
<><><>
Samantha changed in the backseat while they watched the funeral home. The parking lot was full; small groups of people were standing around the doors as more people arrived and went in. Jason kept reaching for the rearview to pull it back down from where Samantha had pushed against the roof, and Sam’s hand kept flying involuntarily into his face when he did it. Most of the time.
“You don’t cut it out, I am going to put a stiletto through your skull,” Samantha said.
“You couldn’t get one of those into my head,” Jason said. She shoved her hand forward with a black shoe in it. The heel was four inches tall and intimidating.
“You wanna bet?”
“Withdrawn,” Jason said. Her hand came back forward through the seats holding Lahn in a worn custom leather sheath. Sam and Jason both leaned out away from her.
“Will you hold her for me? I can’t bear to put her back in the backpack again.”
Sam reached out and gingerly took the blade, straps of harnessing falling down to the console as he took her.
“She’s slippery. Likes to hide. Be careful,” Samantha said, opening her door and getting out. Jason got out, and Sam walked around. She was smoothing her knee-length black dress that she claimed made her invisible. “Come here,” she said to Sam. She re-fitted the harnessing to be a belt. “Put that on.”
He pulled his own belt and tossed it through the window and across the Cruiser into his seat, then fitted the blade to his hip. Twenty-two inches, pommel to tip, he estimated. A short sword, a long knife. Samantha’s reliance on the machete made sense as a substitution.
Samantha watched critically, pressing her lips and nodding.
“That will be okay. She should stay there. You shouldn’t use her unless you come up against an extreme emergency. Epic blades are fidgety about that kind of stuff.”
“You talk about it like it’s a living thing,” Jason said. Sam felt Samantha cringe at the pronoun.
“She was crafted by a living thing, with complex magic that reacts in the way that that living thing, in this case a gray angel, designed. So, yes, they do act like living things. The more complex the magic, the more they act like they’re alive. Many are widely known to have opinions.”
“Screwed up,” Jason said. “It’s a piece of metal.”
Samantha gritted her teeth.
“That’s why Sam has her.”
Jason laughed.
“I’m sorry. I’m messing with you. You’re just such an easy target. You sure you’re okay on your own?”
“I wish you’d quit asking,” Samantha said, still stung.
“Okay. Let us know if you get in trouble,” Jason said.
“Same to you,” Samantha said. She left, going in the front door of the building.
“She’s wearing the wrong color,” Jason said.
“She still blends in,” Sam said.
“She really is kind of invisible, isn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, let’s go do this.”
They made their way around the building to a much more functional pair of metal doors. Jason unlocked the handle on the one and pulled it open. Sam leaned against the other, casually watching the alley around them.
“Yup,” Jason said. Sam pushed himself off the door and followed Jason in, closing the door behind him. It took a minute to let his eyes adjust to the darkness in the basement level of the building, but enough light filtered down through a far stairwell to eventually begin making things out. The room was well and truly empty of people, from what they could see from the door. Jason clicked on a flashlight. There was a normal spectrum of tables and equipment for a mortuary. They were equipped to work on three bodies at a time.
“Big operation,” Jason observed. Sam nodded, turning on his own flashlight. Jason found a door locked and started to work on it as Sam went through drawers of equipment.
“They keep the place clean,” he said.
“Hey,” Jason said. “This is weird, right?”
Sam looked over as Jason stepped away from the doorway, opening the door with him. At first glance, it looked like a normal supply closet. Cloths, tubing, various instruments of the post-mortem industry. Then he saw what Jason was looking at. Down in the corner of the closet was a wadded blue blanket and a small pillow. Sam got closer to look at the streaks on the walls.
“Yeah, that’s definitely weird.”
“Is that blood?”
“Looks like it.”
“I’ve never heard of wraiths taking live prey, not to mention keeping it around for funsies.”
“If that were prey, there should be a lot more blood,” Sam said.
“You’re not wrong.”
“Weird,” Sam said.
“Yup. On to the bodies?”
“On to the bodies.”
They opened one of the refrigerators and pulled the sheet back off of the man inside, but nothing stood out immediately as odd.
“You want to cut it back open?” Jason asked.
“Are we looking for proof or confirmation?” Sam replied, pulling the next drawer.
“What does that mean?”
“Are we afraid of getting caught, in case these are just normal people?”
There was a pause as Jason considered.
“I don’t want to cut it back open, anyway.”
“Me, neither.”
“Sooo…” Jason said.
A door up the stairway opened and the lights flipped on. Sam slid the table back into the refrigerator and closed the door as J
ason quickly swept the room for anything they might have disturbed. He held the back door for Sam as voices and footsteps became more and more audible. Jason eased the door closed, not quite latching it, and they leaned in to the crack in the doorway, listening.
“What time is the delivery?” one voice asked.
“End of business,” the second one answered.
“Wankers,” the first said.
“Yup.”
“Who’s around tomorrow?”
“Wendy, Jeff… Everyone, I think, except Jessie.”
“I think that will be okay. Get everything set up, will you? I don’t want to be late tonight.”
“You leave those doors open?” the second voice asked. Sam and Jason got three quiet steps away from the door before they took off running for the front parking lot. Sam let Samantha know they were fine, once they got to the car - she had been concerned - and they sat for another ten minutes before she joined them. She handed Jason the clipboard as Sam took Lahn off and handed the harness back to her. He looked at the top page of the clipboard, where Samantha had sketched over a printed page a layout of the first floor with security measures identified.
“Why not use a blank sheet of paper?” he asked as Jason looked over the details of the drawing.
“They had cameras. If someone looks at the footage and sees me, I look like an anonymous inspector. It excuses the level of attention I pay to everything.”
“This is good work,” Jason said.
“Four members of staff I saw,” she said. “Three men and a woman. Well dressed, well groomed.” Sam frowned.
“Would have been nice if you had warned us they were coming downstairs,” Jason said.
“Is that where they went?” Samantha said, leaning over the driver’s seat with a pencil to draw in a set of stairs behind a doorway.
“They’ve got something coming tonight,” Sam said.
“I’m guessing a body,” Jason said. “What else does a mortuary take delivery of?” He paused. “So let’s see if Simon can track down who it is, and when the funeral is, and then we come back in the morning and see what we can figure out.”
“I’m on it,” Sam said, pulling out his phone. “But I think we should stay here tonight.”
“I’m going out tonight,” Jason said. “Sam agreed to it, and I’m not letting her off the hook that easy.”
“What if they cut up the body and eat it tonight?” Sam said. “We won’t figure out anything new tomorrow.”
“They were talking about who’s around tomorrow, not tonight,” Jason said.
“Not worth the risk,” Sam said. Jason considered. Sam finished typing the quick note to Simon and sent it, glancing at Jason. “Now isn’t the time to play.”
“We get this done, we’re out of here,” Samantha said. “I’m not staying any longer than we have to.”
“How about this,” Jason said. “We stay until they all leave. “If a body turns up and they stick around too long, we’ll go in. If they head out, so do we.”
Sam thought about it. Samantha didn’t hate the idea.
“Okay,” he said.
“Done,” Jason said, starting the car. They parked down the street and Samantha lay across the back seat and was promptly asleep.
“She doing any better?” Jason asked.
“Some,” Sam said. “It’s like whatever it was is still bothering her, but she just has better control of it now.”
Jason nodded.
“And you’re okay?”
Sam took a moment, appreciating the quiet lack of aches, the readiness he felt, just sitting.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt better.”
“I can’t believe she actually hurt you,” Jason said. Sam nodded, remembering the hours of restless semi-consciousness, pain, nausea, layered over with Samantha’s own terrified confusion.
“She wouldn’t have done it, any other time, but I think it was a good lesson. I was eventually bound to try to change something I saw in a vision, and we don’t normally have time for me to do a twelve-hour migraine like that,” Sam said. “Don’t be mad at her.”
They were silent for a while, then Jason drew breath again.
“You think about what she said about killing stuff just for being on a list of stuff to kill?”
“Not really,” Sam said.
“You think she’s right?”
“About which part?”
“That we’ve killed innocent people?”
“You think she’s wrong?”
Jason looked out the side window.
“No.”
“Me, neither.”
“I don’t like the idea of being someone’s weapon.”
“Then don’t be.”
Jason smiled and nodded.
“It was easier, though, wasn’t it?”
“What was?”
“Before her. Pick up a case, ash some demon, kill a creature dead, move on to the next one.”
“Yeah.”
“You ever regret not leaving her in Macon?” Jason asked.
“Do you?”
There was a very long silence. Samantha was chasing something in a dream. Something that was afraid of her, and that she was going to catch.
“No. Not at all. Not any of it.”
Sam didn’t have to think, but he did anyway. The dark dreams when he first turned psychic, when they had lost her in Memphis and she had nearly died, the moment the world had gone dark when he had actually died. The weeks he had grown increasingly dark and distant as he had known that the spell Carly had put on him was going to kill him. He couldn’t even begin to regret it. He thought of her, behind him, surrounded by a sea of goblins, exuding confidence. On a sawdust floor fighting off a wave of goblins with a crowbar. He grinned.
“Me, neither.”
“I could live without Carter, though,” Jason said.
“I don’t think she could,” Sam said, surprised even as he said it that he was pretty sure it was true.
“You think?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.”
There was another long silence, and Jason tipped his seat back to the point that he would have only just been able to see over the steering wheel.
“You’re still wrong,” Jason said.
“About what?” Sam asked.
“Backing She-Ra over Xena in a fight to the death,” Jason said.
“Seriously? The warrior princess over the companion of He-man?” Sam asked. “You really think that’s a smart bet?”
Jason grinned.
“Oh, yeah. Three reasons.”
<><><>
The mortuary van left at quarter after five and returned at quarter to six. They unloaded a stretcher with a body bag on it, and by six, everyone was gone.
“You convinced?” Jason asked.
“I’m convinced,” Sam said.
“So we go drinking?”
“We go drinking.”
Samantha sat up in the back seat.
“I need to go shopping first, if you don’t mind.”
“Thought you hated it here,” Jason said.
“Doesn’t mean they don’t have stuff I can’t get anywhere else,” she said. “I’ll need to get dressed first.”
“Dressed,” Jason said, starting the engine.
“They wouldn’t sell to me, looking like this. They wouldn’t recognize me like this.”
<><><>
Samantha changed quickly and was standing outside by the car again as Jason came back downstairs. Sam was watching her.
“She’s like a cat, here,” Sam said.
“Does she strike you as someone who’s standing guard?” Jason asked. Sam nodded. “Against what?”
“I don’t know.”
“You boys going out again?” Andre asked. Jason grinned over his shoulder.
“Much as I enjoy taking your money, we’re going to go enjoy the local scene.”
Andre nodded.
“You know where the key is.”
/>
“Thanks,” Jason said. He nudged Sam with his shoulder. “You ready?”
“Yeah.”
Jason drove the directions Samantha navigated through a strange section of downtown, parking where she indicated. She got out and straightened her long skirt.
“Stay close. No guns.” She picked up her backpack and started pulling things out of it, guns, clips, a couple of knives.
“What?” Jason asked.
“There are a few of the guys who keep up enchantments that super-heat brass. They’ll trigger every bullet in your clip at once and shoot you in the side if you’ve got one chambered. It’s as much about self-protection as it is about killing off the uninitiated.”
“Huh,” Jason said. He and Sam ditched their guns into the glove box and followed Samantha to a door guarded by a tall, skinny man with a scraggly blond beard. He smiled wickedly as Samantha approached the door.
“Thought you were too good for us, princess,” he said.
“I am,” Samantha said. “You want my money or not?”
“Who are the yokels?” he asked.
“With me,” she answered.
The skinny man peered at Jason, then glanced at Sam.
“You know how much they appreciate the target practice in there,” he said. Samantha didn’t answer him. He grinned wider, watching as a car went by, then slowly looked down the length of Samantha’s body. Her arm whipped out viper-fast and his head jerked to one side with a sharp crack. He rubbed his face, smile gone but eyes still darkly gleeful.
“I didn’t realize Gregoire was in the habit of letting his half-wit bouncers turn mages away,” she said. “My misunderstanding.”
“Mage?” he asked, eyes widening. She slid her tongue over her shiny-red lips as she slowly smiled at him.
“Ask Nuri the next time you see her,” she said. Jason glanced at the blond and felt his mouth turn up at the open astonishment he saw. Samantha sighed.
“Any time, Davy,” she said. Jason watched as the guy’s jaw worked, then he pushed himself off the doorway and opened the door for Samantha. Jason walked past him with a smug smile, and the doorman gave him what Jason supposed was intended to be a withering glare.
“You need more teeth for that to work,” Jason said. Samantha grabbed Jason’s arm and jerked him into the front room of the building. She made a short hissing noise at the man behind them, watching with sharp eyes until the door closed again, then she turned the glare on Jason.
