Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift (16 page)

“So what happened?” Stan asked, leaning forward and asking the question all of them clearly wanted to ask.

“Romeo and Juliet are enjoying a little private time in our suite on your ship, Captain,” I said, smiling.

He started to say something, then closed his mouth, clearly stunned.

“Your ship will be moved when they are finished in twenty-four hours,” Patty said.

“Fantastic,” Stan said, clapping his hands. “So we stay in this bubble until then?”

“Seems like it,” I said.

“You actually met a Qulupalik?” Ben asked, also clearly stunned. “Are they green?”

“He was,” I said.

Then I turned to Patty. “You want to describe him?”

She started to say something, then shut her mouth and her face got very red.

I laughed. “Just say he was naked and very well-built, if you know what I mean.”

“And he smelled like a sewer at a seaport,” Patty said.

“The leader of the Frigid Women didn’t seem to care,” I said, smiling at the woman I loved.

“After twenty-four hours in that suite with that guy’s body,” Patty said, smiling back at me, “she’ll be far from frigid.”

Stan and Screamer just moaned and then laughed as I turned red, failing completely to get the image of Romeo and Juliet, naked and together in our big bed, out of my mind.

Introduction to “
Old Magics”

Steven Mohan, Jr.’s short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of places from anthologies to
Interzone
. He’s published ten novels that he admits to, including the technothriller
Winter Dragon
, which he wrote under the name Henry Martin. Steve last appeared in our pages in
Moonscapes
, with a science fiction adventure story. This time, he takes on fantasy, and shows just what a talented, diverse author he is.

Once you finish “Old Magics,” take a look at “Call of the Second Wolf,” (available as an e-story) which also features the Russian mobster Valeri Kozlov. I expect we’ll see more stories about Kozlov because, as Steve says, “when your enemies can call upon zombies, dragons, and unicorns, you’re never safe for long…”

Old Magics

Steven Mohan, Jr.

One o’clock in morning and air was as thick and hot as potato soup from old country. Not as tasty, though. The cemetery smeeled like rolls of sod and willow tree, wilting graveside flowers and stone dust. But most of all, it smeeled of fresh-turned dirt, that heavy odor of soil and earthworms and living things forever-sleepink, so rich you could gag on it.

It was the fresh-turned dirt I was there for.

The strange, shrill whistle of cicadas filled the trees, sounding like an alien spaceship landing. Fireflies darted around me, soft smudges of pale green against the purple night. A black beetle bigger than my thumb whirred right past my face and settled on the square, dark shadow of the grave marker.

In the sky, the moon was shrouded in black clouds that broke up its shape so it looked like a shard of broken bone.

There are magics older and more powerful than human magic. If you have something secret to do it is wise to cloak yourself in these powers so no human magician can spy on you. And of all of them, death is the oldest, older than the turning of the earth, ancient even when our infant sun first burned hot in space.

Which is why I had come to Oak Lawn cemetery in Skokie. That, and the obituary I’d found in the
Trib
.

It would be bad if Valeri Kozlov, chieftain of Krasny Mafiya—the Red Mafia—were seen tonight. If I were seen by Chicago PD or FBI it would earn me a stretch in prison. If I were seen by Chinese mob—the Black Dragons—it would earn me slashed throat. And if my own men saw me . . .

It would be infinitely worse.

I reached into my jacket, pulled out flashlight. I thumbed it on with a click, painting a circle of yellow light on the polished black marble gravestone of . . .
da,
Abraham Heilmann.

Heilmann was good because he’d been nineteen when he’d died, a big strapping boy, six-two and muscular, inside linebacker for UNI Huskies. He hadn’t been smashed up in car accident or wasted away from long illness, no he had aneurysm, blood vessel popped, ruining his brain, but that was okay, I didn’t need his brain.

I thumbed off the flashlight and closed my eyes, hearing the crazy shrieking of the cicadas, feeling the beetle watching me.

Feeling the body sleeping in the earth.

I muttered an ancient phrase in old Russian, a tongue no modern Muscovite would know.

I felt the body stir.

Shift
.

It came easy—almost too easy. I am gifted in magic,
da
, but not necromancy, not especially.

But Abraham Heilmann came, punching through the polished cherrywood of his new and expensive casket, swimming through the six feet of earth like a child in a pool rising to the surface.

A hand appeared.

And then he was clawing his way out of his grave, dressed in a charcoal suit, his face handsome and square-jawed and pale. His eyes a blank white without pupil or iris, like two hardboiled eggs.

He said nothing, just turned that sightless gaze on me.

Zombies were the perfect emissaries for certain tasks. Since they were already dead, they couldn’t be killed. They didn’t know anything except what they were told, they didn’t want anything except for the occasional fillet of human flesh, and they couldn’t be tortured for information. Take off a zombie’s arm and he wouldn’t even
notice
.

“I have five kilos of heroin to sell,” I said. “Afghani heroin, high quality.” Actually I had a lot more than five, but this was a dangerous move, so we’d start small and see how it went. “You will approach a man named Oscar Gutierrez in Houston, Texas. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Heilmann said, with rough, sandpaper voice. Being dead is hard on the vocal cords.

What the zombie didn’t know, what
no one
could know, was heroin was stolen. Chicago PD couldn’t know because they’d been looking for way to bust me since I was Georgi Dorbayeva’s underboss. Chinese couldn’t know because I’d stolen the H from them. And my people couldn’t know because I used theft of drugs and war with Chinese as pretext to assassinate Dorbayeva and eliminate Russian soldiers not loyal to me.

The truth is, I still grieve for Dorbayeva. To me he had been
brat
.

Brother.

But he was planning to get rid of me. Only difference was I got him first.

Anyway, no matter how dangerous it was, I couldn’t just sit on asset worth street value of $32 million, not when an earthquake was running through the Chicago underworld and Krasny Mafiya was fighting for its life.

This was only way to do it.

I held out a piece of paper. “Here is Gutierrez address. Opening offer and minimum acceptable price. Name of the cutout. Memorize information and destroy.”

The zombie looked down at my outstretched hand. For a moment it just stared. Sometimes the undead are slow, but this one had woke easy. The skin at the top of the my head pricked and I started to draw my hand in.

Just as the zombie lunged toward me.

I stumbled backwards, tripped over my own feet, landed hard. The ground punched the air out of my lungs and the thing was on me. I held it off, my left forearm punched up against its collarbone, shoving those snapping teeth away from my face.
Barely
.

My Glock was tucked into the small of my back, pinned beneath me. I muttered spell after spell—desiccation, fire fountain, glassbones—nothing working, my panic blossoming with each try. Someone had shielded zombie against offensive magic.

Heilmann pushed in, his sharp, hungry teeth missing my nose by quarter inch.

Desperate, I tried a transmogrify spell.

And just like that, the zombie was gone and I was holding screwdriver. Funny thing about tranmogrifcation, the transformed object retains its core characteristic. I had been using Abraham Heilmann as a tool, so a tool he remained.

I climbed to my feet, breathing hard, bent over, hands on knees, my thousand-dollar suit smeared with dirt.

Someone had hijacked my zombie. That’s why it had come up so easy. Someone was helping. Someone powerful enough to work
through
death’s dark magic.

So someone wasn’t human.

I flicked the flashlight back on. This evening couldn’t get any worse.

That’s when I saw the beetle on the grave marker flick its wings. And suddenly it was growing and morphing and
changing
into an African man, tall, six feet four, late forties, with a rugged face, a sprinkling of silver in his hair, trim goatee, soulful eyes.

Dexter Johnson
.

He had his SIG out before I could reach for the Glock.

“Well, if it isn’t my man, Val Kozlov. How ya’ doing, Val?”

I put my hands on top of my head and said, “Lawyer.”

That word is supposed to work on cops, but for some reason it never works on Dexter Johnson.

“I think I got you on one count of interstate narco trafficking, won’t the feebs just love that? And a count of misdemeanor grave robbing thrown in.
Suh-weet
.” He looked meaningfully at the grave. “You should probably avoid making zombies. Looks like you’re not very good at it.”

I knew it wasn’t Johnson who’d hijacked my zombie. He was nowhere near that powerful.

“How could you be watching me? No human can pierce death’s veil.”

“But I
wasn’t
human, Val,” Johnson pointed out. “I was a beetle. And beetles are death eaters. Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’ve got something to show you. It’s great. You’ll love it. Really.”

I put my hands behind my back and Johnson clicked the bracelets on. I was angry, but not with Johnson. Being angry with police for arresting criminals is like being angry at winter for being cold. I was angry at myself. Because I’d been stupid.

At secret meeting you should always know you might be bugged.

***

I knew I was screwed, but I didn’t know
how
screwed until Johnson bypassed the local precinct, instead driving me to a beautiful Evanston mansion six blocks from the Baha’i temple. The grand house was flanked by century-old elms, a path of flat stones wending its way past a koi pond and through a lawn of Kentucky bluegrass that was golf-course perfect.

Of course I knew who lived there.

Half a dozen police cruisers were parked up on that beautiful lawn, their lights flashing blue-red, blue-red in the early morning dark. The street was blocked off on both sides by red sawhorses and there was a black coroner’s van in the driveway. Oh, and the fibbies were there, lantern-jawed men and women in smart-fitting suits and dark blue windbreakers that said “FBI” on the back in giant yellow letters.

Better and better.

Johnson got me out of the car and unlocked the cuffs. “Be cool, man,” he said softly.

“Why should I?” I said angrily. If this was what I thought it was, was last place in world I wanted to be. Just being here could get me killed.

“Because if you’re cool and help me out maybe we don’t have to tell the feebs about the trafficking charge.”

I kept my mouth shut. Not because of the FBI. SuperMax didn’t scare me. But if I was charged with trafficking my Chinese friends might wonder things like,
Where did his H come from?
and
Why isn’t he selling it in Chicago?
Those kinds of questions could get me killed in a thousand ugly ways.

The victim was on the front walk. He’d been turned into a terracotta soldier, one of those figures from the crypt of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. After that he’d been smashed into million pieces. Chicago PD’s magicians could transform him back, of course.

But it wouldn’t be pretty.

I was hoping it was just soldier or underboss or maybe newspaper boy.

But as soon as I saw that handsome clay face (the chin cleaved clean off) I knew who it was.

Zhang Shaoming, Chicago overlord of Black Dragon Triad.

After the heroin thing, I’d worked hard to head off full-scale war with Chinese. So much for that. Especially since Johnson was kind enough to show my face at the crime scene.

I looked over at him. He was peering at me intently.

“Didn’t do this,” I said.

“I believe you,” he said.

My eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Really?”

“Any idea who went Humpty Dumpty all over his ass?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but someone cut me off.