Poison Sleep (3 page)

When they returned to the mostly empty parking lot, Marla eased into the passenger side of the Bentley. The door had already clicked closed by the time she realized there was someone sitting in the backseat. Before she could turn, she felt the prick of a blade at the back of her neck, just below the base of her skull. “Crap,” she said. “And I was having such a good day.” She cut her eyes to the left, and saw Rondeau sitting stiffly, hands on the wheel, eyes wide. Probably a knife at his neck, too, which meant the guy in the backseat—how had she not
seen
him?—was sitting awkwardly, with both arms outstretched. If she could signal Rondeau, and time it right—

“Do not move. My name is Albertus Kardec. I am a slow assassin.”

Marla exhaled. No point trying to surprise this guy. If he was telling the truth, she was dead already. Slow assassins didn’t fail. But…the whole point of a slow assassin was to create dread in the victim, and make their last days—or months or years—haunted and miserable. If the victim didn’t know there was a slow assassin after them, they wouldn’t be looking over their shoulder constantly, wondering when the inevitable strike would come, trying fruitlessly to escape their fate. Nobody had ever let Marla know she was marked. “You aren’t here for me,” she said. “What, then, for Rondeau? Are you shitting me? I can’t believe he’s ever pissed off anyone who could afford to hire
you.
”

Kardec chuckled. “I am not here for either of you. We have received…inquiries…about you, Ms. Mason, but the price we set has so far been too high for any would-be clients to accept.”

Marla didn’t know whether to be flattered that the most accomplished group of hired killers in the world apparently had such respect for her, or annoyed that more than one person had contacted them about putting a hit out on her. Actually, that was kind of flattering, too. “So if you aren’t here for murder most foul, what do you want?”

The knife withdrew. He’d made his point, she supposed. She turned in her seat to face him. Kardec was a mild-looking man of middle years, with thinning hair, dressed all in black. She expected the residue of a look-away spell to sparkle around his edges, but there was nothing. He’d avoided being seen just by sitting very still and being one with the shadows. Any doubt Marla had about his identity dissolved. You had to be pretty badass to do a trick like that without magic, and it was the kind of thing the slow assassins taught. “I am the outreach coordinator for my organization,” Kardec said. “I’ve come to you, in your capacity as a civic leader, to inform you of some activity in your city. I am here with a few of my colleagues to apprehend a criminal.”

“Since when do you guys do law enforcement?”

He smiled, showing small, perfect teeth. “We enforce the laws of our organization, of course.”

The light dawned. “Ohhh. You’ve got a deserter, huh?” She’d heard stories of men and women who went into the slow assassins, learned some tricks of the trade, and then tried to freelance. Marla had never heard of a deserter living more than a few months. The slow assassins didn’t bother drawing things out when settling such internal…
disagreements.

“Yes. He calls himself Zealand.”

Marla frowned. “I’ve heard of him. He’s been working as a freelance hitter for a long time, Mr. Kardec. He’s one of yours?”

“Oh, yes,” Kardec said. “He is not some initiate who broke under the stress of the patience we require. He completed our whole course with great aplomb, and took a twenty-year contract as his first.”

Marla whistled. The slow assassins would stalk their victims for as long as the customer wanted, though of course the victim never knew how long they had. Six-month contracts weren’t too expensive—more than a normal contract killing, but nothing mortgaging a nice house wouldn’t cover—but the longer the term, the pricier it got. She couldn’t imagine how much money it would take to hire a slow assassin to stalk a victim for twenty
years.
Even she probably couldn’t afford it.

“At first,” Kardec went on, “we thought he was engaged in his duty. He introduced himself to his victim, and pursued at a reasonable pace as the victim attempted to flee. But at some point Zealand…got bored. He began taking other contracts, secretly. Simple murders and assassinations. We don’t approve of such moonlighting. Eventually his actions came to light, and we sent a crew to apprehend him.” He frowned. “They were all killed. At that point, some dozen years ago, Zealand went completely rogue, abandoning his first target.” Kardec shook his head. “If we’d started him on something easier, a two-year contract, perhaps…but who knows. Zealand likes killing, and has made a nice living doing so. We’ve been after him for years, but he is a hard man to catch, and, of course, he is very familiar with our techniques. But we have finally had some good fortune. He was seen here in Felport by one of our operatives, an assassin who studied with him years ago. We don’t know what he’s doing, who his target is, or who has employed him, but we’ll find out.”

“You want me to get in touch if I hear anything?”

Kardec produced a business card and handed it over. “My cell number. Please do. But don’t spread the word too far—we don’t want to spook Zealand. I was more concerned with you…overreacting…if you noticed the presence of several dangerous individuals in your city.” He smiled thinly. “It is true that we value contracts above all other considerations, but we don’t wish to cause any unnecessary trouble.”

“Understood,” Marla said. “Thanks for the heads-up. And next time you try to touch me, with a knife or anything else, you’ll have a spurting stump where your hand used to be. And I’m not speaking metaphorically.”

Kardec slipped out of the Bentley, walking swiftly away to disappear among the derelict train cars.

“This has been a crappy morning,” Rondeau said, starting the car. “It’s not fair that I’ve got a clogged toilet in my future and you’ve got a beautiful man in yours.”

Marla snorted. “I’m not going to see Joshua because he’s pretty, Rondeau.”

“Oh? I thought being pretty was the only thing he had to offer.”

“Touché.”

M
arla mistrusted cabdrivers—they all reported to
somebody,
even if they didn’t realize it—so she waited for a bus on the corner near Rondeau’s club. He owned the place, having inherited it from the previous owner, a troubled pharmacomancer named Juliana, but Marla kept an office upstairs in a spare bedroom of Rondeau’s apartment, and did a lot of business there.

The bus arrived almost twenty minutes late. It was mid-afternoon on a weekday, so there weren’t many people on board, aside from a few street people trying to keep warm, most of whom she recognized. One, in the very back, was an unfamiliar face—middle-aged, slumped, glassy-eyed, wrapped in a beaten camouflage coat. Marla wasn’t dressed all that differently, having changed in her office, trading her cloak for an old brown overcoat. The cloak and her dagger of office were locked up in a secure safe, protected by all sorts of nasty anti-personnel magic. Marla had a special fondness for martial magic in all forms, and collected destructive spells whenever she could. She dropped into a seat near the stranger, curious. There was the briefest of pauses before she glanced at the guy and commented, “You smell.”

He cocked his head and smiled, showing coffee-stained teeth. There was whiskey on his breath. He’d probably been handsome once, but now his face was lined and he looked exhausted. Marla expected a perfunctory “Fuck you,” but instead he said, “I can take a shower and get the stink off, but you’ll still be a bitch.”

Marla wrinkled her nose. “I’ve never smelled you on this bus before. You new in town?”

“Been here a few days. What’re you, the world’s rudest social worker?”

She shrugged. “None of my business if you freeze to death. Not many people come to Felport in the winter. There are nicer places to sit out the end of the year.”

“There are colder places, too. Some places, they make Felport look like a tropical paradise in comparison.”

“So, what, you used to stink up Siberia or something?”

“Been everywhere, done everything, don’t need to explain myself to
you.
”

“Amen to that,” Marla said amiably. She always enjoyed a little impromptu back-and-forth. The slight bristle of hostility reaffirmed her faith in human nature. “Got a place to stay?”

“I’ll get by.”

“I bet you will.”

“Why, you offering to share your bed?”

“There’s not enough soap in the world, Stinky. You might check out the Marlo Street underpass though, down by the docks. Some good people there, they won’t steal your shit, and there’s enough of them all together to keep the punks and crackheads on good behavior.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

They rode for several stops in silence. Marla made a point of meeting the long-term denizens of Felport’s streets and alleys. They saw things nobody else did, and many of them were happy to spill secrets in exchange for cash, which kept her better informed than the other sorcerers, in their high towers and libraries and laboratories. After forty minutes or so Marla pulled the cord to request a stop. Hamil’s place was a few blocks away, but she wanted to walk a little.

This part of town was nicer than the neighborhood where Rondeau’s club and her office were, with apartment buildings overlooking Fludd Park, lots of bike paths, and plenty of little shops, coffeehouses, and restaurants nearby. Some of the professors and administrators at Adler College lived in the area, though the cheap student housing was mostly on the other side of the campus.

Snow flurries began as Marla strolled along the salted sidewalks. It was February, and winter wasn’t through with Felport yet. Marla turned a corner, three blocks from Hamil’s building, and saw a woman sprawled out in the snow near the base of an apartment house. The woman’s thick caramel-colored hair obscured her face. She wasn’t dressed for the weather in jeans and a pale yellow blouse, and wore only a black wool scarf as a concession to the elements. Her cheeks were rosy, and her dingy white tennis shoes had no laces. The woman’s arms were extended in a Y over her head, and her legs were spread apart, as if she’d passed out in the midst of making a snow angel. But there was no snow around her body, just dead grass, as if all the snow had melted around her.

Marla knelt and touched the ground. Warm, but not hot. She studied the woman, watching her chest rise and fall and her eyelids flicker. Not dead, only dreaming. Could a fever be hot enough to melt snow and ice? If so, Marla should have felt the heat radiating from the woman, and she didn’t. Was she some kind of pyromancer, then? Or hag-ridden by a now hibernating fire demon? Marla consulted her mental clock and chewed her lip. She should look into this, have the woman checked out, but she didn’t have time to do it herself. No one else in town knew about Joshua Kindler and his valuable power, but the longer he hung around unrecruited, the greater the chance Gregor or Ernesto or some other sorcerer would discover his presence and make him an offer. She’d send Hamil to check out the woman after she got to his apartment.

“Sleep well,” she said, rising. And then stopped. “Holy shit.” Marla tried to remember what the woman in the photograph at the Blackwing Institute had looked like. It had been a lousy picture, blurry, but this woman was petite, she had that mass of hair, it
might
be her. “Hey,” Marla said. “Is your name Genevieve Kelley? Are you…lost, hon?”

The woman moaned, a sound of deep distress, and Marla knelt again. “You okay?” She touched the woman’s cheek.

The street tilted, and the sides of the surrounding buildings bulged out like the bodies of huge creatures taking deep breaths. Marla ducked her head and tried to grab the pavement, vertigo upending her sense of gravity. This was like falling through space, but the only movement was inside her head.

The woman opened her eyes—they were violet, the color of crushed flowers—and clenched Marla’s hand. “His mouth,” she said, her breath a hot wind on Marla’s face. “His reeking mouth.”

Marla fell backward, breaking contact with the woman and sitting hard in the snow. She looked around, bewildered, head pounding.

What happened? Why was she on the ground? Had she fainted? She looked at the homeless woman lying on the grass.
I didn’t even see her. Did I trip over her?
She stood and brushed snow from her coat. The woman before her shifted a little, her fingers fluttering as if grasping for something. Marla felt a twinge of pity mixed with disgust. A thin layer of snow had started to form on the woman’s face. She’d be buried within an hour if she didn’t move. Marla nudged her in the side with her booted foot, but the woman didn’t respond. Sleeping off a drunk, probably. Marla sighed, took off her long coat, and put it over the woman’s sleeping form. That would keep her from freezing to death at least, and Marla had other ways of dealing with the cold. She’d walk back this way when she left Hamil’s place, and if the woman was still there, Marla would call someone from a shelter to pick her up. She stepped around the woman and went on her way.

Z watched Marla from the shadows of an alleyway across the street. He couldn’t believe she’d actually spoken to him on the bus! He’d been riding to the nightclub where Marla spent most of her time, to continue his stakeout, and had been astonished when she boarded the bus herself at that stop. He’d been in disguise all week, assuming the invisibility of the homeless. Instead, Marla had seemed to notice him more readily in his down-and-out disguise than she would have if he’d dressed in a suit and pretended to be a businessman. After she departed, he’d stopped at the next corner and circled back to observe her.

Z could have put a knife into her ribs while they were sitting on the bus, and he’d been sorely tempted, but his employer wanted him to cut out Marla’s heart and deliver it to him—something about preventing magical resurrection, Z gathered—and that demanded a more private location and a stretch of uninterrupted time. He would keep stalking her, pin down her routines, and kill her during some dark empty hours when she wouldn’t be missed for a while.