We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (56 page)

If that had still really happened.

At some point the white box had migrated, first to the shelves in the office and then, finally, into the safe. I realized with a start that I hadn’t been aware Fallon and Hiram had known each other well enough, or long enough, for Hiram to steal things from the Fabricator.

After a moment’s hesitation, I reached into the safe and took hold of the box. It felt normal. No current running through it, no Wards on the lid. I wondered if just being near Claire had killed it, short-
circuited it. It was heavier than I would have expected. But it didn’t crawl against my skin the way the
Udug
had. I studied it for a moment and then slipped it into my pocket. I let my eyes roam over the remaining trinkets in Hiram’s safe, wondering what else might be of value.

“How come him?” Claire suddenly asked. “If Fallon can use this to snatch anyone, why not
her
? Snatch her, hit her over the head, be done with it.”

I didn’t blame her. If someone was trying to murder me ritualistically—and even change reality so that they already
had
murdered me ritualistically—I might be voting for their murder, too. “First of all, she’s
enustari,
Claire. Even if she doesn’t expect it, she’d be fucking hell to beat in a battle. Always go for someone you know you can
beat
. And second, Renar can’t
negotiate
.”

“Why does that fucking matter?”

I let that hang. I didn’t want to answer.

“Excuse me.”

We both turned. An older woman was standing in the room behind us, dark skin, bright red and very fake hair. She was wearing a black cloth coat a little too long for her and carrying a tiny, shivering dog in her arms. She was wearing a pair of cheap red slippers, the kind you bought in a drugstore and got change for five bucks.

The expression on her face was best described as
alarmed
. “What,” she said, eyes everywhere, “have you
done
?”

44.
DETECTIVE JAMES WAS STANDING AT
the bar, drinking a shot of bourbon with a Coke chaser. There were three empty shot glasses in front of him. One of the Bleeders was playing bartender, instructed by Fallon to treat him as a guest.

“Mr. Lem Vonnegan,” the cop said in a pleasing baritone without turning around. “I ever tell you me and Jim Holloway were old
friends?” His face cheerful in the mirror opposite him. “I guess not, as I’ve been here just four hours or so, waiting on your friend. You maybe remember the man? Picked you up a few years ago.”

Alarm flashed through me. Holloway. Marichal. Two cops in over their heads and totally unaware of that right up until Claire killed them both. In self-defense, sure, but I had a feeling Detective Stanley James would give two small shits about the distinction.

“Sure, I remember,” I said. “It was right before . . . before everything went to hell.”

Mad Day. A stupid name, but it was the one the cable talking heads had started using, with their slick graphics and grainy footage, so it had stuck. Death toll in one day: six hundred fifty-nine thousand people. A few hundred thousand a week for months afterwards. Cities—hell,
countries
—had disappeared under that weight. I remembered Pitr Mags crashing into the precinct to save me, a cannonball. Indestructible.

James turned around, nodding. He was smiling, but there wasn’t anything very friendly about it, and I didn’t like cops in the first place. Definitely not cops like this one, who dressed beyond their pay grade and acted like their shield meant they could do whatever the fuck they wanted. The sort of cop, I was pretty certain, who carried a set of brass knuckles in his pocket just in case some citizen complained.

“Sure!” he said. “See, Jim got killed shortly after he sweated you. For obvious reasons, the case never got a real workout, you know? But he was a friend, and I’ve been trying to work it in my spare time, right? Shit, police work is all for show these days anyway, ain’t it?” He shook his head in a world-weary way. “You know, two days ago an old man—must have been ninety years old, truth—got out his old rifle from when he was in the service and shot everyone in his building. Went door-to-door, knocked, and blew whoever opened up straight to hell. Then cleared the apartment. Then went on to the next one.” He shook his head. “You know what? He must’ve made one
hell
of a noise, you know? All that knocking and shooting. Thing is,
no one
ran. No one
called
us
. And no one thought,
Shit, no way I’m answering when he
knocks. He killed everyone. Does that make any fucking sense? Any sense at all?”

It did. Because the world was broken.
I
had broken it.

I opened my mouth to say something, then thought that it actually did make sense if everyone in the fucking building was Charmed. A man in a white suit in the jungle, collecting blood for his boss. Why not a man in a white suit in Manhattan doing the same? The idea dovetailed perfectly with everything else and made me feel smart.

When I didn’t answer, he shrugged. “So your name is like the last name in his notes. You walked out of the precinct after a little scuffle, right? Jim didn’t make too many notes on that. Just said you came in, got a little sweating, and then you left. Bam! Few days later, Jim’s dead.” He sighed, a big theatrical production. “Shit, police just a gang now. You got a gang”—he waved one huge hand around the room—“I got a gang. No difference anymore.”

He downed his shot and made a show of looking around. “Seems like you moved up some, huh? Own this place now?”

A few years ago this would have been intimidating. A few years ago I would have shit my pants and prayed for an intervention. Instead of answering, I pointed at him. “Give me your gun.”

He frowned. “Excuse me, now?”

“Your gun,” I said slowly. “We need it.”

He smiled. It was an impressive smile, big white teeth and bright red gums. “How bad?”

In my pocket, I had the switchblade positioned against the inner seam, ready to slice my thigh if I pushed the button. A simple
mu
sitting on the back of my tongue, ready to turn him into a newly erected statue of Detective Stanley James if necessary.

“You’re standing here,” I said slowly, “waiting to be dismissed by Ev Fallon, right? Because he owns you.”

James didn’t flinch, but the smile had become a mask, lifeless. Humorless.

“I don’t know what he’s got on you. Magic, money, shame, whatever, it doesn’t fucking matter, Detective. He’s got something. Else you wouldn’t be standing here like some fucking valet, would you? So, I can go and get Mr. Fallon and ask him to ask you for your gun. Or we can cut the shit and you can just give it to me.”

He stared at me with bloody eyes. A second later, he shook his head, forcing a laugh, and pulled open his coat. Reaching in, he produced a stainless-steel semiautomatic pistol with a black grip. He spun it around and gave it to me handle-first.

“Never liked those Glocks they tried to push on us. This is a good all-American gun. You know anything about guns?”

I shook my head, feeling the weight. It wasn’t heavy at all. “Never needed one.”

James winked. “That’s right. Jim Holloway was fucking
strangled,
wasn’t he? From behind, his own goddamn handcuffs.” He turned back to the bar. “You tell your man Evelyn that we are dangerously close to me considering my debt
paid,
okay?”

I took the gun back to the banquet room, feeling the eyes of the Bleeders on me. They were all standing around, smoking cigarettes, chatting. Doing nothing because Billington wasn’t around to organize them. I shut the door behind me and found that Fallon had taken off his jacket and cleared the furniture to the edges of the room, except for a single chair. He glanced from the gun to me, then to Claire, who stood behind the second bar with Daryl. The small white box sat on the chair.

Suddenly, from beyond the door, shouts and commotion. Noise resolved into cheers, then applause, and a familiar female voice booming out instructions. The cheers warped into the sound of industry, and then the banquet room door banged open and Mel Billington strutted into the room, trailed by Remy and Roman.

“Jesus fucking
Christ,
” she shouted. “Don’t fucking fall all over yourselves looking for us. I mean, it’s not like we were fucking
abandoned
in the wilderness or something.”

I tried hard not to smile. “You were left at a
motel,
” I pointed out.

She grinned, looking dirty and rumpled, like they’d been Charming their way south and east without pausing for rest. “That place was deadly. We left to sleep under the stars in order to
survive
.”

I grinned back.
Idimustari
—we were like roaches. We could not be killed by normal means.

“We will need blood,” Fallon said, gesturing at the chair by way of explanation.

Billington winked at me. “Good to see you, too, old man.” She cocked her head. “Maybe I need a bit more before I tell the kids to open the floodgates, huh?”

“No,” Fallon said. “It must be Mr. Vonnegan’s sacrifice.”

She hesitated and looked back at me. I swallowed a sudden ball of anxiety that made no sense. I’d bled before. I was fresh. “Go have a drink. Keep an eye on the cop out there.”

She blew out an explosive breath. “You got it, Chief. Need-to-know and all that. I get it.”

I looked at Remy and Roman, who stood, hats literally in hands, looking dirty and stiff. “You, too. Out. Get a drink.”

They looked at me impassively until Billington gestured at them. Then they nodded, waited for her to pass, and followed her out.

“She is a good general,” Fallon said, sounding almost jaunty. “It is important to have someone who organizes. Who keeps everyone in line.”

I nodded, staring down at the white box. “So how will this work?”

Fallon followed my gaze. “
Gespu,
” he began. “There were once dozens of these. Fabricators before my time—known then as Thaumaturges—created them frequently, as a Rite of Passage. These and other Artifacts and Fabrications. Simple bindings, really, with powerful effects. There was once a concentration on simple things that had great effect. Much of this knowledge has been lost.” He looked up at me and blinked. “It is simple. You open the
gespu,
speak the name of the person you wish to summon, and bleed. He will be Summoned.” The
old man paused to purse his lips. “The amount of sacrifice required will be determined by how much he resists.”

I nodded. “So he might
resist
me to death?”

A crisp nod. “Certainly.”

“And I can’t take volunteers?”

“The
gespu
requires a connection between you and the subject. Ideally, you will picture him as you bleed.”

The fucking universe was fucking
greedy
.

Fallon smiled tiredly. “Artifacts and Fabrications make things easier, in a way,” he said gently. “But there is always a price, and it must be paid somehow. You can put in the work, or you can put in the blood. It is an old saying.”

“Fine,” I said, and crossed to the chair, taking off my jacket. “Daryl? Claire?”

Without Pitr, my Trust Circle had gotten small. I had an army milling about in the bar and in the general area, but they weren’t really mine. Every time I gave an order, they all looked at Billington for confirmation.

They glanced at each other, a lovers’ glance, and I swallowed a pang of anger at seeing it. Not because I was jealous. Just because it wasn’t fair. She stepped around the bar and walked over to me.

“He’ll be in the chair?” I asked Fallon over my shoulder.

“Yes.”

I looked at Claire. “Step out of the room,” I said.

She squinted at me. “If you fucking think—”

“Spells go sideways around you,” I said. “That’s why you’re
here
. To be a secret weapon. We cast this and you’re standing here, we’ll get a goddamn purple gorilla in this chair instead of him. Or nothing.”

She looked from me to Fallon, over my shoulder, and then back again. “Fucking fine,” she finally said, turned, and walked to the door. She didn’t open it, though. She leaned against it, crossing her arms. I sighed and looked at Daryl, standing behind the chair like he’d seen this movie before and was afraid of it.

“When he shows up,” I said, “you make sure he doesn’t make a
sound
.”

Daryl nodded. It wasn’t convincing.

Fallon was next to me, his own tiny penknife in hand. He leaned down and opened the small white box, then took hold of my arm. He was brusque, businesslike. A man who had bled plenty of people. With a single deft movement, he opened a vein and my blood began pouring out of me, down my forearm, through my hand, and into the white cube. It should have filled the tiny box in seconds, but it didn’t.

“Think of him, Mr. Vonnegan,” Fallon said. “Picture him. Call to him.”

The moment my blood splashed down on the box, I felt it reach up into me, like invisible spiders climbing rapidly up my body. I was connected to it in a way I’d never felt, and I could feel . . . something waiting patiently for me to interact, to feed it. Patience. I could feel its patience as a physical thing, like a wall, softly throbbing, unhurried.

It waited. It would wait, I was certain, until I bled to death.

I pictured the Negotiator. Realized I knew his name and struggled, for a moment, to turn back in my mind to the apartment in Shanghai, to the Girl Who Was Not a Girl slurring it at him.

Harrows,
I thought.
Richard Harrows.

The invisible, patient thing throbbed and pulled at me, jerking the gas from me in a greedy lunge that made me stagger slightly. And then I felt him. Like he was on the other side of a wall, a heat signature. And I knew two things: To pull him through, I would have to move quickly, before he realized what was happening; and I would have to pull him
through
the wall before I bled to death.