Fiction River: Hex in the City (9 page)

The light from the dash glowed blue, making her feel like she were drowning and reinforcing the unreality of the situation. Ruby, sensing her distress, squeaked and burrowed against her stomach.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Having second thoughts? Guess you could call your buddies. Though you’d lose your job, we’d both go to prison, and they’d probably throw the kid into some government program that isn’t supposed to exist.”

“I left my phone at home.”

Cord shut off the engine. “Why are
you
doing this?”

“I need to do something,” she said softly, “Day in, day out. I just watch and point. Everyone else deals with the messes. If it weren’t for Ruby…” she trailed off, staring down at the bulge in her sweatshirt, heat rising in her face.

“All right, Detective. Detect.” Cord’s smile was in his voice and it barely sounded forced.

There were no cars parked around this warehouse and no marks on the outside to tell them anything about what was inside. Cord ghosted alongside Verity, a shotgun held lightly in his big hands, as they followed Ruby’s white shape down the pocked asphalt along the edge of the building. Verity hadn’t bothered with a leash. Ruby wouldn’t run away anymore than Verity would willingly slice off her own hand.

There was black magic slime all over this place, making it difficult to track the salt and sweet scent of the boy’s power through the miasma of rot. The trail led them around the side and to a closed roll-up door. Parked up against the building was a new model Toyota. Verity and Cord shared a look. Probably weren’t natives, driving a Japanese car like that in Motor City.

Ruby paused by the roll-up door and tossed her head in the air, whiskers twitching as she indicated this was the place. Verity pressed herself to the side of the building and crouched down, holding out a pellet, which her rat came to get, taking it with her delicate pink paws before scarfing it down.

She listened for a long moment, hearing only the occasional rush of traffic on the road behind them and a plane taking off from the airport somewhere in the distance beyond the rows of metal and cement. Then, muffled voices, coming from inside, and a light came on beyond the truck, shining through a window that had previously been hidden in the dark, blending into the wall. It illuminated a small gap beneath the roll-up door.

“Think there’s a button inside to raise that?” Verity whispered.

“Maybe, but what good does that do us?”

“Rats are better than cats at getting into tight spaces.”

She pushed the link between them as open as she could get it, going deeper into Ruby’s mind than she usually did. Verity’s head hurt and the white rat rubbed at her whiskers and ears. Focus. She took a deep breath and pictured the memory game, sending Ruby the images of what she guessed the button for the door would look like.

Ruby seemed to understand. She scurried along the door and crammed herself in where the uneven cement and the bottom of the door didn’t quite meet up. Through the link, Verity got a rough picture of the inside. The roll-up door opened into a big space full of wooden shipping crates that stank of the rotten magic. To the right was the boy’s delicious scent trail, leading toward the light and a half-open door. Through Ruby’s eyes, Verity found the button that controlled the door. It hung from a thick cord, out of the reach of even the two-foot-long rat.

“We’re going to play a game,” Verity whispered, sending what she hoped was an explanation through the link to Ruby.

Ruby seemed to understand, her heart sped up and she got the same agitated vibrations to her thoughts that came when she was demanding the TV be turned on. She climbed the closest stack of boxes, her sensitive nose twitching at the stink, the smell strong enough to raise bile in Verity’s throat through the link. Ruby balanced on the edge of a crate, about six feet out from the hanging door control.

“Jump,” Verity whispered.

Ruby sprang, her powerful hind legs carrying her to the cord and her sharp claws catching hold as her long tail curved out, balancing her on the button as it swung wildly beneath the sudden weight.

“TV on.” Verity pushed the image through the link and felt as much as saw Ruby respond.

The door made a high-pitched noise and then started grinding slowly upward.
So much for surprise.

Verity gripped her revolver and ducked under the door, aiming toward the light as she moved so that Ruby could leap from the controls to her shoulders. Cord moved up beside her as two men, backlit now, appeared through the doorway.

“Hands up,” Verity said, sticking with an oldie but goodie.

“Duck!” Cord’s warning saved her as a bolt of power sizzled past them.

Ozone smell combined with month-old herring singed her nose as she threw herself to the side. She didn’t know what the hell that had been, but it smelled like the first figure had somehow fired off a hex right at her.

She wanted to fire back, but didn’t know if the boy was inside that room. At the thought, Ruby leapt free of her shoulders and charged toward the light, still thinking they were playing a game. The lithe rat twisted past the two men and Verity had a quick impression of a desk shoved to one side and then Andre, bound with tape and laying on his side on the floor.

The men shouted as the rat slipped right between them, one of them turning enough that she recognized him as the groaner on the floor from earlier. Groaner went for the rat. The other man went for her and Cord, raising his hands to throw more hexes.

Andre was clear as long as she aimed high. She yelled to Cord to do the same.

Hex versus guns. Guns won.

“Jesus mother fucking ice on toast,” Cord muttered as the roar of his shotgun and the sharper report of her revolver died away.

Her hands shook as she lowered the gun and nausea swept up in a burning tide from her belly. Cordite and fresh blood swarmed over the black magic rot. She shoved it all away, closing down the link with Ruby as much as she could. Save the boy. Get the hell out before on duty cops showed up. Think about dead people later.

“Get Andre,” she said, moving forward and stepping over the still twitching body of the hex-thrower.

Andre was conscious. They untied him, pulling the tape off as gently as they could. He didn’t speak, but picked up Ruby and pressed his cheek to her fur in a gesture that Verity was intimately familiar with. Ruby didn’t protest, seeming to understand that it was important to let this stranger touch her, something she usually hated.

“What’s in the crates?” Cord asked as they all picked their way around the bodies.

Andre shuddered and stepped close to Verity. “Hexes,” he whispered, looking at Cord with worried eyes. “They use my blood to make them.”

Verity found a crowbar, her ears straining for the sound of sirens. She pried the lid off a crate and gasped. Inside were hundreds of charms, vile things that looked like rope and thorn spiders, all twitching and crawling over themselves as though alive.

“Think they are safe to burn?” she asked Cord.

“Safer to burn than to leave here,” he said. “Get the boy to the car, I’ll figure something out.”

Whatever Cord did, and it was likely magical since his smell changed from cedar to cinnamon, it proved super effective. They drove away with the flames rising behind them, heading back into the city.

Andre, still holding an unprotesting Ruby, curled up in the back seat with Cord’s coat for a blanket, fell asleep with the kittenish power of the young. Verity watched him as the miles rolled by.

“What do I do with him?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Cord said. “I know a place in Canada, the kind of people who will keep him safe and hidden from those who might use him. It’s best if you don’t know anything about it.”

He was right, but it hurt. She felt more engaged in her life than she had in a long time, and now that she was finally doing something that felt wholly right, she apparently needed to do what she had done all along. Let things be Somebody Else’s Problem.

“I guess you can drop Ruby and me off at home,” she said, still watching the boy sleep. At the sound of her name, Ruby opened her blood-red eyes and bobbed her head at Verity before going back to sleep on the boy’s chest, looking like a pile of dirty snow on a Christmas blanket.

“What are you going to do?”

“Shower. Sleep. Get up for work. I’m on call for warrant duty tomorrow.”

“Going back to work? After this?” She didn’t need to look at his face to read what he meant by that.

“It’s my job.” She shrugged.

They rode in silence for the rest of the drive. As she gently took Ruby back from Andre, she placed a kiss on the boy’s forehead. He did not wake up.

She stood outside the car, the door still hanging open, and looked up at the tall shadow of her apartment building. Other than Ruby’s television, she couldn’t remember a single personal thing in her apartment. Somebody else’s life was up there.

Verity got back into the car, cuddling Ruby close. She’d get her a new TV.

“Drive,” she said to Cord.

He smiled at her but kept his mouth shut, putting the car in gear, and they headed out into the maze of dark buildings. Verity did not look back.

Introduction to “
A Thing Immortal As Itself”

Lee Allred is a soldier. I was sure of that when I met him, and I’m even more sure of it now after reading “A Thing Immortal As Itself” and meeting his main character, Nathan Fairchild. This is the vampire I want to see at the movies. Seriously. I’m one adorable, sensitive vampire away from a tantrum, and Nathan gives me hope that someone knows that vampires are predators. This makes him a Guardian in my book.

Dubbed the “Master Sergeant of Alternate History,” Lee Allred has sold his unique brand of short fiction to
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, Baen Books,
Fiction River,
and numerous other publications. He’s also scripted for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and Image Comics. His classic novella
For the Strength of the Hills
earned a finalist nod for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Lee served worldwide in the US Air Force (including three tours in Iraq) before retiring at the rank of Master Sergeant. He currently resides on the beautiful Oregon Coast. Lee writes:

“‘A Thing Immortal as Itself’ is part of a series of Stakeholder vampire stories. This one takes a look at the interplay between the vampires’ secret society and human politicians who know vampires exist but feign otherwise.”

A Thing Immortal As Itself

Lee Allred

Two A.M. on a sweltering summer night in Washington, D.C. Nathan Fairchild pulled his rusted-out Ford pickup into the deserted parking lot of the 24-hour franchise pancake house nestled among crumbling brick apartment houses. Light streamed through the building’s wraparound windows, an oasis of light in a dark and darkening world. Fairchild opened the squeaky-hinged door and stepped out into the muggy heat. Police sirens wailed as District patrol SUVs flashed past, heading down Alabama Avenue towards some routine homicide or another. He relaxed slightly. Nothing to concern him. Not yet.

He pulled out his cell phone and dialed his boss to inform him he’d arrived. The Judge wasn’t too happy about Fairchild being pulled off his regular work to run this assignment. Fairchild wasn’t too happy either, but he knew his boss didn’t care about that. Fairchild’s priorities were a little different from the Judge’s and the Rookery’s, but the Judge didn’t care about
that
, either.

Fairchild hung up and jammed the phone in his back pocket. He hated being used, but that went with the job. He hated the things the job required him to do, but usually that entailed doing them to members of the Rookery, not to human beings like himself.

Or rather, like he used to be.

He walked across the parking lot in the stifling, humid heat. Just in the short walk from his truck to the door of the pancake place, his boot-cut jeans began sticking to his legs. Sweat soaked the back of his t-shirt.

Good. He’d be counting on the heat later on tonight. That didn’t mean he wanted to stand out in it, though. He pushed the door open and let the welcoming cool air-conditioning wash over him.

The restaurant stood deserted this time of night, and particularly now with news reports of a mad slasher in the neighborhood. Only a single customer, Fairchild’s contact, sat in one of the back booths. The man wore a three-thousand-dollar suit, a three-hundred-dollar haircut, and a three-dollar cloisonné lapel pin identifying Mark Rinsley as a senator’s aide.

Fairchild slipped into the booth opposite Rinsley. The gummy residue of blueberry syrup, spilled on the half-wiped seat, smeared blood-black across the seat of his jeans.

He’d have worse stains later in the night.

Condensate beaded on the interior of the air-conditioned window panes. A droplet scudded down the window, gathering size as it leeched other droplets in its downward path. Fairchild’s reflection on the window showed a tall, trim blond-haired man. A young man with young gray eyes.

The reflection lied.