The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy (71 page)

Every death is a story and every death is mine.

Yeah, I’m a busy man.

And that’s not even counting the constant battle I have containing the madness of the Hungry Death. No one wants that thing taking control of my body, least of all me. I like autonomy. I like not slicing the world into little pieces…most of the time.

You can’t say the same thing about old HD: it twitches just beneath my skin like five cups of double-shot espresso mixed with bloodlust. Sometimes I wake in the dark, not even knowing I’ve slept, right hand clutching the scythe, looking to do (or having done) what, I don’t know. Or at least I tell myself I don’t know.

Crows sing on the powerlines behind us, vocal and squabbling, their caws of discontent sound like ducks on helium. If I let them they’d be swooping on a cloud of midges blown in from across the water. Their hunger’s an ache in the back of my throat. They’re watching me watch Tim.

My cousin waits for me on the edge of a stony wall that drops away to slimy rocks, tiny waves slapping and sucking against it. He grinds out a cigarette with the toe of his polished boot and lights up another, all this as he stares out across the bay to Stradbroke Island. He’s dressed in a suit, standard gear for a Pomp, though he could be any senior partner of any company.

The set of his shoulders says everything I need to know, backs up those texts. I walk up beside him, and he doesn’t turn or even acknowledge my presence, but I know he knows I’m here. There’s an electricity when you get Pomps in a space together, a dull toothachey
buzzing. He’s my Ankou, my second-in-command, and I’m his boss. Not that there’s even a hint of deference.

Ah, the liberties family take.

“What’s up?” I say after a while, but not nearly long enough, I don’t have time to keep playing games and draw this out. As much as I’d like to.

Tim regards me bleakly; his lips thin. I know what’s up. But he damn well got me out here.

“You should have never snatched those souls from it,” he says.

One hundred and fifty souls. A crowded plane, and me responsible for its crashing into the sea. Those souls were mine, even if it was the Death of the Water’s territory.

I scowl at Tim.
Arrogant pup! How dare he tell me what to do?

But the bastard’s scowl-proof. He returns my glare with a look of cold disregard. “They’re out there.” He points, seawards, and offers me a pair of binoculars, but there’s not really any need.

There are eight waterspouts, easily visible between here and North Straddie. They dance and shift around each other with unnatural grace. It would be beautiful if it weren’t so eerie. The air is silent over the water, not a bird in the sky, not a boat nearby. There’s a dark mass to the west of the spouts.

“What’s that?” I ask gesturing towards it.

“Fish,” Tim says. “They’re terrified.”

“I don’t blame them.”

“You should be too.”

I snort, waving my hands at the immensity of the water as though it’s nothing but a pond and those spouts are little more than irritating and particularly well-coordinated geese. “We’re equals. This is merely a Death having a huge hissy fit.” I look at him significantly. “A bit like a man who insists on only voicing his displeasure via texts.”

“Equals!” Tim laughs. “You, and an entity, which has been the Death of the Water for eons? Sure, I’ve had some ministers who
thought they were the shit, but this is a new level of ridiculous. This is a being intimate with the depth and breadth of its powers, a creature as vast as the sky; its territory covers seven tenths of the earth’s surface…seven fucking tenths. Do I need to go on?”

I shrug. “You were getting a bit of a rhythm going there.”

Tim taps the ash off the end of his cigarette, a gesture far more aggressive than it should be. “This isn’t a joke.”

A news chopper angles in low towards the twisters. Another follows on its tail. The damn things run in packs. The silence out to sea is broken by their approach. Idiots. I hope the pilots don’t get too close. These spouts strike me as pretty vindictive, and I know I’m not up to stealing more souls from the sea. I wouldn’t dare. Tim’s right, we’re hardly equals.

It’s one reason I’ve put off doing anything. The Death of the Water is unpredictable, I don’t know how it might respond. And my guesses aren’t particularly pretty. HD’s are even worse.

“Slow news day,” I say.

“Steve, something like these spouts trashed Tweed Heads the other day. And that’s the least of it. People are drowning. Murdered.” He pauses, thinks about it. “Is it murder when Death takes you? No, let’s stick with drowned.”

“People drown all the time.”

“Not this far into autumn. And not in these numbers. We’ve had nearly a hundred percent rise in the number of drowning-related deaths on Australian beaches. We’re not the only ones who have noticed either. Do you ever watch the news, or read the papers?”

“I try not to. Far too depressing. I do have a stab at the crosswords though.”

“What? Well…you really should.” Tim takes a long drag on his cigarette, flicks the stub at his feet. “Steve, when you want to piss someone off, I can’t fault you. You aim high.”

“It could be totally unrelated,” I say, hopefully.

“Yeah … unrelated.” Tim taps his phone. Mine shudders in sympathy a moment later.

I squint at the screen. There’s a whole bunch of coordinates—at least that’s what I think they are.

“In case you don’t get it, they’re all coastal.” Ah-ha, I’m right—coordinates. “And they’re only the ones we know about. Oh, and some smart guy at the office even worked out what you get if you substitute letters for the coordinates.” He looks at me expectantly.

“Don’t leave me hanging, mate.”

Tim shakes his head. “It spells your name.”

“Really?” I peer at the numbers. “I can’t see it. How do you get a name out of coordinates?”

Tim waves his hands vaguely in the air. “It’s there, believe me. And if Owen in the office can work this out, on his lunch break no less, there are all sorts of agencies across the world that can too, none of which we want to make any more nervous than they already are.” Tim’s voice cracks a little. “Steve, we’re Pomps, we send souls to the Underworld, and we fight Stirrers—and God knows there have been enough of those lately. We’re not equipped to deal with the Death of the Water. Christ, it should be an ally. We
need
allies, Steve. There’s the whole End of Days thing looming.”

“I know,” I say, and I do. “I know, but that bastard wasn’t going to get those souls. They were mine.” I growl those last words, the knives in their sheaths beneath my jacket stir. Tim steps back, and I don’t like the way his heartbeat shifts up a notch. Tim shouldn’t be frightened of me.

Yes, he should.

I take a deep breath, and push HD down. Tim relaxes, but he doesn’t move any closer. My hands shake.

“Mate,” he says, “the Death of the Water’s taking them whether you want it to or not. These are unscheduled deaths.”

Death runs to a schedule. Mine. Cerbo tried to explain it to me
once. If the schedule starts breaking down…it’s not good. And already unscheduled things are happening. Stirrers stirring when they shouldn’t be, people dying with years left in them. A vast weight of death is coming, and the schedule isn’t reflecting it at all.

“I’m going to have to sort that out,” I say, not really that confident which issue I’m talking about, or if I’m up to the job of sorting either. “And I will.”

Tim walks from the shore to a nearby picnic table, jumps up and sits lightly on top. For a moment, I’m remembering him as kid. There’s something unconsidered and natural in the movement, despite the frown on his face, and I realize it’s because he’s totally engaged with the problem, and that he’s come up with some new solution, finally we’re past the acrimony and onto the action. “I’m thinking maybe we need someone else to negotiate this,” he says.

“Your reasoning being?”

“We can’t afford to lose you. You’re the Orcus; you’re our most potent force in the battle that’s coming. Use someone else to…um, to test the waters.”

“Too risky. I made this mess. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt as result.” Besides, if I can’t deal with something as simple as an aggrieved Death, how am I going to deal with a god? Though when you work in a business where the term “negotiation” also describes a knife fight to the death…“Who were you thinking of?”

“Not really a who, but a what…Charon.”

“I don’t think the ferryman’s going to be happy with that.” Except, boats, water, there’s an affinity there. They may even get along. Water has to have some friends, surely. “And that’s if I can even find him. He’s been keeping a low profile lately.”

“Maybe he feels threatened after what happened to Neti.”

“Could be, though I doubt it.” I find it hard to imagine Charon’s threatened by anything. Neti wasn’t either, until Francis Rillman, one time Mortmax Ankou, sliced and diced her—but we dealt with him.

Yes we did.

“You find him, and you get this mess sorted.” Tim says, not looking at me, facing the sea and those churning shafts of water. His phone’s rung three times in the course of this conversation. All, I’ve gotten is a text from Lissa asking when I’m going to be putting in an appearance for lunch.

Is it wrong I’m more worried about that than this?

“I’ll consider it. But until I do, don’t you tell Lissa,” I say.

“Is that wise? Secrets haven’t been that good for you two, remember?”

“No, a scheming RM who just happened to have also slept with Lissa’s father wasn’t good for us.” I look at Tim, and he’s clamping down hard on a chuckle. Yeah, that’s the soap opera that was my life last Christmas. Five months on and I’m not even close to ready to laugh about it, and I’m more than a bit annoyed that he is. “You haven’t seen the Death of the Water. No one’s going to be getting jealous over that.”

“It’s not jealousy. It’s disgust at duplicity, mate. You need to be more honest.”

“I am.” Not always, not nearly enough. For one, there’s how I dealt with Rillman. His body is buried in dust in the deepest part of the Underworld. That’s a secret I’m never sharing. Not with Tim, not with Lissa. I can almost convince myself it never happened, or, at the very least, that the bastard deserved it. “She knows I took those souls, she just doesn’t know it made me an enemy.”

This is much harder to hide, can’t kick a pile of dust over the sea. All you’re going to end up with is mud and that sticks. On the plus side, this snatching of one hundred and fifty souls from the Death of the Water can’t be anything but justifiable. Hell’s never going to be confused with a great time, but all the rumors I’ve heard suggest the Death of the Water’s equivalent is much, much worse.

“Have you asked her yet?” Tim’s voice softens. “Well, have you?”

“As if you’d not know by now.”

“You ask her, and then you sort this out.”

Tim’s gotten me into and out of a lot of trouble. But this is something I’m going to have to resolve myself.

“Absolutely, I’ll ask her, and I’ll make peace with the Death of the Water straight after.”

Yeah, easy, right.

“One thing though,” I say.

Tim’s sunglasses hide his eyes but I know they’re narrowing. “Yes.”

“You haven’t said anything about my hair.”

He flicks his cigarette butt in the air, gets to his feet, and grinds it to a black smear, all without looking at me.

“Look, I only got it cut yesterday.”

But he’s already gone. Shifted back to the office. I’m left staring at the angry dancing water, my crows squabbling like a bunch of naughty school kids behind me.

“Soon,” I say. “Soon.”

And maybe it hears me, because all at once the waterspouts are gone, and there’s nothing but vapor and a rainbow.

Spooky.

Why do I always put these things off?

S
o, I have two major issues, not counting the nearing End of Days: how do you make peace with the Death of the Water, and how do you ask a girl to marry you?

The first, well, I’ve got something of an idea. The second … not so much.

I sit at a table outside a cafe in West End waiting for Lissa to pay the bill because I forgot my wallet—perfect illustration of how distracted I am. I should be too busy to worry about this, but I can’t help it. I keep waiting for the moment to present itself, but it never does.

See, here’s the thing—is she going to think I’m asking because the world’s end is nigh and it isn’t much of a commitment?

Ask, then save world?

Save world, then ask?

Problem is, what if I don’t save the world? What if I ask and she says no, and I don’t feel like doing the whole saviour thing after that? I mean, it’s the kind of work you have to put your heart into.

Bugger, it would be easy (I guess) if I had another job. But I’m the guy who got to be Death.

Trust me, you don’t want to be following my career path. For one, there was a lot of blood and slaughter involved. Before I came along, those who wanted what I have sacrificed their friends and family willingly—even excitedly—in what is known as a Schism.