Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black) (10 page)

If one or more individuals of indiscernible species had gone into the office building, but hadn’t come out again, he would instead decide to spend such a day at the auto salvage yard his friend, Ralph Madden, owned.

Jonathan made enemies. It was part and parcel of the private investigator business. When you held the dubious position of being the only private dick
and
practitioner in the city, the number of enemies tended to rise dramatically, as did the dangers that came your way.

Jonathan knew no other way, though. He’d been what he was for too long to stop. Even if he retired from the business, he couldn’t stop. The enemies he had made wouldn’t forget he had shafted, screwed, and sold them out, just because he hung up his hat for good.

And saying you were no longer a practitioner amounted to saying you were no longer a butcher just because you washed the blood from your hands. Once you started using, once you saw the world for what it was and knew the things that went bump in the night also slithered, bit, and conjured, it made it rather hard to take a desk job at the local public works department.

The use of magic was a drug.

If you pulled energy from within—or someplace deeper—cascading it through yourself, used your own atoms as both power source and conduit, there was no way it could not change you.

Channeling such energy through your physical body actually changed the chemical balance in your brain. New proteins were built. Synapses fired differently. Peculiar compounds formed. Brain waves became altered. Once they changed, they never reverted back. No methadone existed for magic. Once you used, you walked a razor-fine line of abuse or abused.

The Dragon Black ate you up inside and then replaced what had been there with something else. Eventually, nothing of the original you resided in the flesh, only the thing that got drawn along with the magic summoned by, and through, you.

If you were one of the lucky ones, you died a slow, wasting death from the final stages of your very self being replaced. If not, then you became something inhuman. Something housed in flesh, moved not by a soul but the energy which had fed your magic. Powerful but brittle.

The first time Jonathan had seen for himself one of these things for himself, it had scared the shit out of him. He had checked in to St. Dym’s the next day and had gone straight in their care. It had lasted just shy of three weeks. The longest he had ever gone clean before or since.

The next time he’d faced one of the abominations, he had killed it.

Jonathan held no illusions; he knew how it would end for him. This wasn’t like smoking where you pushed the reality of the coffin nail and the scary big C behind a curtain and said ‘not me.’

He used and thus would be used up—end of story. All he could do was try to stay on top of it for as long as he might. Walk the line and hope not to fall. He’d already made Ralph promise to finish him off in the end—no matter what form that end took.

Late at night, when haunted by visions of the last moments of his father’s life, Jonathan would hope he would be allowed a slow painful death. Sometimes, when he felt optimistic, he thought maybe the job would catch up with him before the using did.

He entered his dark apartment but didn’t bother with the lights for the same reason he had walked and left the car in front of the office building, so he didn’t alert anyone to his presence. Better to let someone—a couple zombie thugs for example—think he remained in the office working late, than know where he called home.

There was just enough light, even with the fog, from the bank of windows for him to navigate his Spartan space. Jonathan thought briefly about calling his friend, Mary, to ask about the tarot cards displayed in the fortune machine, but only briefly.

He grabbed a few beers from the fridge and set all but one on the floor beside him, as he settled into his chair facing the windows. He opened the first beer and looked at the thickening fog.

“Wendell. What the hell have you done?”

J
onathan woke at nine-thirty the following morning. He would have just rolled over and buried his head under the covers, if it weren’t for the fact that he had a client.

A client for whom, though he had spent hours working the case, he’d accomplished nothing for except feed him dinner and give him the advice to get plastered.

Jonathan’s bones felt like they were filled with broken glass syringes and a cold sweat filmed his skin —he felt like a dead fish’s eye.

He clearly should have drunk more.

After getting out of bed and finding trousers and a shirt, Jonathan went into the kitchen and took the last bottle of beer from the fridge. He spun the top into the sink and wandered to the front window. A thin layer of snow had dusted everything during the few hours he had slept. The street showed nothing more than puddles now, and on the sidewalk most of the snow had been trampled to extinction.

Jonathan shuddered. Every year, for the last five, he had hoped global warming would finally do something in his favor and make
this
year
the one he didn’t have to contend with frozen bits of dirt drifting down from the toxin-laden skies.

Heaving a sigh, Jonathan turned away from the window and drank his breakfast. He’d stayed up for quite a while thinking about Wendell’s problem, trying to figure out the what and how, which eluded his powers of investigation. He had finally gone to bed with a spinning head, which had nothing to do with the beers and everything to do with his lack of answers.

He had promised Wendell he would phone, but he couldn’t recall why now that morning had arrived. Jonathan had meant it as a reassurance to his client—he didn’t feel very reassuring. Admitting to the poor guy that he still hadn’t found a clue didn’t seem helpful, and the only other thing floating in his head—‘Keep calm and carry on’—proved to be of little help.

Jonathan downed the last of the beer and set the bottle on the counter. He took his coat from the kitchen island where he’d tossed it the night before and left the apartment.

The day was calm and, without the wind of the day before, warmer, but it didn’t make Jonathan any happier to see the white dust everywhere. He made his way to his office building thinking of what he could say to Wendell when he called.

In his distraction over Wendell’s peculiar predicament, Jonathan got caught unaware. His mind, running over and over what few facts he had regarding the case, led him to slip up.

When he swung open his office door, he suddenly remembered the one reason to lock it behind him—if he found it unlocked when he arrived, he’d know it had been tampered with.

Two strong grips locked themselves on his upper arms as soon as he entered. Jonathan found himself lifted from the ground, his feet dangling uselessly.

Truthfully, a couple things came to mind, but kicking a zombie, especially ones as barely reanimated as these two, was an exercise in futility. It would be a better use of one’s time to try and convince a statue to move out of your way by reasoning with it, than to inflict pain on reanimated flesh.

It wasn’t the zombies he found interesting in this situation, however.

The man who resembled a weasel wearing a tacky suit seemed the more likely threat. Hell, the horrible, light blue suit itself constituted a threat. Jonathan assumed his moment of discomfort had been brought to him courtesy of his involvement with Wendell. He looked forward to finally gaining some insight. Unfortunately, his hopes dashed against the rock of reality as soon as the man, who looked like he’d raided a Southern evangelist’s closet, spoke.

“Mr. Alvey, my company doesn’t appreciate the destruction of its property.”

Oh crap
, Jonathan thought.
Apatedyne. Again
. But he smiled all the same and said, “Well, then, perhaps you should have ensorcered them better. It seems they mistook your order to deliver pamphlets as an order to deliver punches. A slip of the tongue in the original resurrection cerem—”

A gut-busting blow to his stomach from the zombie holding his right arm stopped Jonathan from finishing his witty comeback.

“Apatedyne has sent me here to inform you that, not only do you owe us for three of our ‘second life’ employees, but we feel the potential monies we will no longer receive from certain parties should also be reimbursed.”

“You know what they say about water and stones,” Jonathan managed to cough out.

“Oh, I don’t think you understand, Mr. Alvey. We
will
get the money from you. And should you think about trying to cast a spell to aid you at this moment, my associates will crush just enough of your ribs to be sure you live, but extremely painfully.”

“Right. I’ll be sure to remember that.”

“Now, let’s discuss payment plans.”

“Sure.”

“We were thinking,” said the weasel, opening up a leather-bound ledger, “four hundred a week, for the next year, should bring us all a satisfactory end to this unfortunate incident.”

Jonathan couldn’t help but laugh.

“You possess a most remarkable sense of humor, Mr. Alvey.”

“Yeah, you could say that. But I think your joke was really funny.”

The punch this time came from the ‘second life’ employee on his left.

Jonathan wondered how many more he could take before something really did rupture. At least they weren’t punching his kidneys. He hated pissing blood.

“We expect the first payment at the end of the week and will send someone around to collect it. I advise you be here. You wouldn’t want me and my associates to come down for another little talk, now, would you?”

“How about I give you another payment plan?”

The weasel in the blue suit raised a single eyebrow, a maneuver Jonathan firmly believed this particular individual actively practiced in the mirror, over and over.

“I pay you nothing, until the day I die, and then, as my last act of generosity, I’ll leave you double the amount in my will?”

The weasel wrinkled his lips. “I am getting bored with this, Mr. Alvey. Perhaps I need to make myself more clear.”

The evangelist suit-stealer stood up, took a small, black quartz orb from his pocket, and began to roll it in the palm of this hand. He spoke evenly and concisely, pronouncing each word with perfection. Dark yellow tendrils squirmed around the practitioner’s hand and the orb.

Jonathan assumed the drawn out nature of the performance had been to give him time to squirm in trepidation of the invoked spell. He thought it only fair to warn the man against casting that particular spell on him, but again his words were cut short as an undead thug rammed his hand into Jonathan’s stomach. At least these two ‘second life’ employees moved slow enough to allow Jonathan to tense his muscles before the battering ram connected.

His middle management guest finished the spell and released it.

The blue-suited weasel wasn’t worried about it hitting the zombies, as the undead were immune to the spell, especially with pain as its main feature. Even if they weren’t immune, Jonathan bet the man still wouldn’t have worried.

The wave of energy hit Jonathan and shook his bones like they were the dice of unspeakably ugly gambling gods. It caused his tendons to tighten until he feared they would snap and fray.

Jonathan ground his teeth together for the split second the spell washed over him. Then, the inked ring of wards and protective sigils inlaid under his skin did their job and repulsed the spell.

Jonathan watched the practitioner’s eyes grow wide as he realized his mistake. The next second, the rebounded spell pounded the man’s body.

His head snapped back first. Then he flopped to the floor with all the grace of a beanbag doll where he thumped about as though filled with beans of the Mexican jumping variety.

It always confused Jonathan why so few people thought to bother with permanent protection. A few hours putting up with a needle made a world of difference when it came to this game. At the very least, the man could have had wards woven into the pattern of his awful tie.

However, most practitioners couldn’t be bothered to slip a knotted cord with a sprig of Wormwood tied to it around their neck. They all acted like to take such measures equated to cheating, or being a bad sport.

Witches, on the whole, approached these things with some sensibility and he admired them for it.

Jonathan liked to take a drop or two of distilled Wormwood every couple days, just to be sure. The green fairy had helped him out on more than one occasion.

“I think your boss needs some help,” he pointed out to the two brutes holding him.

A long moment passed when the two barely living things on either side of him tried to figure out what to do. At least Jonathan assumed so but, as he feared, they ended up doing nothing.

Barely self-automated, these sorts were cheaply animated beings designed only for muscle. Their command spells didn’t include making decisions. Because of this, they remained as they had last been instructed, holding Jonathan a couple inches off the floor, his arms starting to go numb.

Their master lay sprawled on the floor, out cold for the moment. The spell he’d cast had warped and twisted when it reacted to the protection Jonathan had around his neck. The outcome had morphed from a long painful torment into something more like being hit by a series of blast waves.