It was mutually decided that they would wait until hurricane season was over before going to Florida. Mr. Aronofsky had spent most of his life in Philadelphia, and had no desire to experience a hurricane, and Gryph wasn’t thrilled with the prospect either. He could just imagine getting possessed by a someone who had been killed by a falling tree or a flying toilet, and it seemed like a joy he should save. Good things came to those who waited, right?

He was in Portland, Oregon by this time, and thought he might hang around another day or two. It was another good, artsy fartsy liberal city that tried to add a touch of the bohemian to its otherwise anonymous cityscape. It was like Seattle, but farther from the Canadian border. Besides, he felt better wherever there was a boho touch, as that was the atmosphere he grew up in.

He thought about going back to Seattle, back to Naheed but he just told her he was going, and it might seem stalkerish. He couldn’t afford to get his hopes up anyways; relationships were for normal people, not people full of dead people gifted with erratic telekinesis.

Gosh, that sounded sane.

As it turned out, Portland had its own ugly weather system to deal with. A big storm blew in while he decided to loiter, not a hurricane but something with strong winds and buckets of rain - an American version of a mild typhoon - and he found it difficult to sleep in his car while it was being buffeted by the angry winds, and pelted with fat drops of rain that struck with the force of pebbles. Also, there was apparently a minor leak in one of the back windows, getting him splashed a bit. The others convinced him to use some of his cash to get a cheap motel room, at least for the night.

So that’s why he was in a Motel 6, eating microwave popcorn and drinking diet Pepsi, and watching a repeat of Buffy The Vampire Slayer as rain lashed the window like hail, and branches slapped against the siding like a drunken man punching at shadows. Gryphon had to admit it was kind of a novelty to have his own room, and watch a t.v. that wasn’t in a bar.

And strip down to your shorts while doing it, Ruby noted. Do that in a bar, and they’d kick you out. Or, some skeevy guy would shove a five down your jockeys .

“Thanks for the mental imagery,” he said, taking a gulp of his pop. “Although, it would be more action than I’ve had … well, ever.”

And there goes the shirt, Hugh said, as the actor playing Angel showed up shirtless. If this were a drinking game, he could take a shot now.

He could bite me anytime, Ruby said. For free even.

Me too, Hugh agreed.

I get nervous when they agree on anything, Mr. Aronofsky said.

“Me too,” Gryphon said, shoving a handful of popcorn in his mouth. It was too salty, and had some of that weird butter flavored stuff on it, but the more he ate, the hungrier he realized he was.

Cause you haven’t eaten in what, two days, you stupid cracker, Taneesha said helpfully. You’ve spent all your food money on booze. You’re a punk ass drunk.

“I am not! And stop calling me cracker.”

Why can’t you look like that? Ruby complained.

“He’s an actor who can work out for weeks in advance of his shirtless scene. You can’t compare me to him.”

Yeah, I guess you’re right, she agreed, far too readily. I mean, you’re a busy guy … busy being homeless, drunk, and self-pitying …

“Okay, now it’s quiet time. Everybody shut up.”

Why? Taneesha asked, clearly combative. When was she not combative?

“’Cause I’m watching this, okay?”

You’ve seen this one, Ruby pointed out. We’ve all seen this one.

“I don’t care.” But quiet time, it seemed, came just in time for the commercial break, and there was an ad for what must have been a local talk show, as he’d never heard of it before. This woman with a frighteningly botox’ed face (it looked like you could bounce a quarter off her skin and send it straight over the roof) and hair that looked like a well groomed badger crouched on her scalp, talked about their guest on the next show, Madam Paula, a “spiritualist” who claimed to talk to the dead. “Bullshit,” Gryphon snapped irritably, lobbing an unpopped kernel at the screen. It hit it square and bounced off, getting lost in the carpet.

These people just crawl out of the woodwork, don’t they? Mr. Aronofsky mused.

Why don’t you do that? Hugh suddenly asked. You actually know dead people. Go make some money off it already.

“I don’t think so,” he scoffed. “Besides, I don’t talk to dead people. I just get possessed by poltergeists, who never know when to shut up, and occasionally use me to kill the people who killed them. I really don’t want to carry a business card to that effect.”

You can do more than that, Mr. Aronofsky insisted. Remember at that show? You knew that woman’s son was dead.

“Everyone in that audience had a dead someone. That’s why they were there, and that’s how that fuck makes his money, by exploiting their grief. I’m not gonna do that; I don’t care how broke I am. That’s just fucking sick.”

You knew things you couldn’t have known, Mr. Aronofsky continued. You knew his name, you knew how he died, you knew that putz was lying to that woman about him. You sense the dead, you sense where the bodies are buried - isn’t it possible you’re picking up much more than you ever realized?

He shrugged and searched the popcorn bag for another edible piece, but there was nothing left but the unpopped remnants. Not only did he not want to talk about it, he didn’t want to think about it. The lamp on the bedside table flickered, and he said, “Knock it off.”

I don’t think we did that, Hugh replied.

The rain was pounding against the window like it was desperate to get in, and the wind was a dull and angry roar, making the siding creak like it was scared. There was another flicker in the bedside lamp, and then the power died all at once, the lamp and t.v. shutting themselves off, leaving him sitting on the bed in the dark, listening to the storm rage outside. “Fuck.”

The good thing about living in a car is you don’t have to worry about power outages, Ruby said. He supposed that was sarcastic.

He sat there for a few minutes, finishing his soda and waiting for the storm to abate or the power to come back on, but neither appeared to be a possibility. He sighed heavily, then slid off the bed, aware of where he’d left his clothes. He hardly had to feel around much at all.

What do you think you’re doing? Ruby asked suspiciously.

“There’s a bar up the street. It looks like a real dive, but if I’m going to be waiting in the dark, I’d rather do it with beer.”

See, what did I tell you? Taneesha snapped. Punk ass drunk.

Well, at least he’s clean, Ruby replied.

And he was too. The first thing he did, after getting over having a bathroom all his own, was take a very long shower. His fingers were still a bit pruney.

The sun had only recently set - it wasn’t quite seven yet - but it seemed dead (no pun intended) outside, the violent storm having chased everyone sensible inside. It was dark too, as all the blocks he could see had no lights whatsoever, and he thought this was what a nighttime world would be like; it would be this contained, this quiet, and only the dead or their rides would be walking the street.

You sound drunk already, Ruby interjected. Sure you feel well?

“Honestly? I’m a little dizzy.” And he was, he had been for a while, but he assumed it was a general giddiness in not sleeping in the Buick for once, or the sickly sweet floral room freshener they used at the motel. That stuff could strip paint off the walls.

Maybe you should eat dinner instead of drinking it, Mr. Aronofsky suggested.

The wind was strong enough that he could lean into it and have it hold him up, but the rain was hitting him like gravel, and it really wasn’t that pleasant. As he reached the corner, he saw a fluorescent green flyer hanging on to a crosswalk pole for dear life, a ragged corner flapping violently in the breeze. He caught the letters “P-S-Y” in big letters, and just had to look.

It was an ad for a “psychic fair” (fourth annual), taking place at something called the Brenmer Pavilion. The name and address meant nothing to him, as he didn’t know Portland at all, but the “fair” started today, and went until Sunday. There was a truly goofy illustration of a floating pyramid and a meditating guy with his two eyes closed and his third eye open, and he ripped it off the pole.

Hey, there’s a place to start, Ruby said. Go there and say you talk to dead people. People will probably line up to talk to you.

“I was hoping people who claimed to speak to the dead were already there,” he admitted, shoving the wet piece of paper into his pocket. “I wanted to go chew them a new one.”

Oh good, you have a crusade now, Hugh said acidly.

“I need a hobby.”

The bar was indeed a tiny little dive, a small wooden frame place that looked like it may have once been a convenience store, and inside it was almost comically dark, much darker than outside. But there were several people inside, all men, and there were many lit candles - mostly those citronella types in glass jars - scattered about, tiny puddles of illumination that hardly cut the gloom. Still, a couple of guys were playing pool by candlelight.

The bartender was a bald mixed race man, with dark skin and Asian eyes, who also had a nose ring that was connected to his earring by a slender golden chain, and seemed to have a tattoo on the top of his head, but in the darkness it was almost impossible to tell what it was.

He had a couple of beers that tasted little better than piss, but it gave him a small but pleasant feeling that wasn’t quite a buzz, but was close enough. He also ate all the peanuts in the basket on the bar, but there weren’t that many left, so he didn’t feel like a pig. He ordered a vodka, just to mix things up, and then, because this place was so quiet and depressing, he asked the bartender how to get to the Brenmer Pavilion.

The guy, fearsome appearance aside, was actually very nice, and drew him a little map on a cocktail napkin. It was a couple of miles from here, and the guy at the end of the bar suddenly said, “They might have power in that quadrant.”

The bartender looked down at him, chain shaking and shimmering. “Why’s that?”

The guy, who was just a lumpy shadow, sighed wearily. “From Brook Street to Madison Court, this is Portland Pacific Power territory. From Rose Avenue to 28th Street, it’s Columbia Power & Water territory. Just ‘cause Portland Pacific’s had an outage doesn’t mean Columbia’s had one too.”

“Huh,” the bartender said, an acknowledgement that what the guy said was kind of interesting, but only if you were absolutely starved for company. Gryphon assumed the guy was some sort of Cliff Claven wannabe, or he actually worked for one of those power companies. Which begged the question why he wasn’t out there helping restore power.

Would you want to be out there working? Hugh said.

A damn good point.

He thanked the bartender, gulped down his vodka, and ventured out into the storm again, returning to the motel to get his car. Hitting the vodka had improved his mood measurably; he almost felt like he was floating as he walked down the empty, rain lashed streets to the motel parking lot.

You really shouldn’t drive in this condition, Mr. Aronfosky said. Let me do it.

Says the guy who died in a car crash, Taneesha commented.

That wasn’t my fault, he replied archly. I was hit by some schmuck who didn’t know red meant stop.

“I’m fine, guys, don’t worry about it.” He didn’t know if that was true or not, but he felt so good he didn’t care. After having died - well, at least in memories - about a dozen times, it was hard to be afraid of anything.

He managed to get there just fine, in spite of all the nagging going on in his head, and the Brenmer Pavilion turned out to be not so much a concert hall as a place where you had boat shows - tiny boat shows. And the guy at the bar had been right, this “quadrant” still had electricity, as the streetlights were still functioning, as were the traffic lights at the main intersection. But by the way the lights swung in the breeze, it would be a lucky thing if they kept the power for much longer.

In spite of that - or perhaps because of it - the parking lot was surprisingly full, and he had to park far away from the Pavilion and walk in. But by that point he felt like he was drifting, being blown along like a dried leaf. Are you sure you haven’t been smoking pot behind our backs? Ruby asked. That made Gryphon laugh.

You had to pay eight bucks to get in, which seemed unfair, but as soon as he was inside the slightly drafty pavilion, he was approached by a heavy set woman in a floral patterned dress. She had wavy, dyed blonde hair and an open face, and wore what looked like a crown of knotty twigs. If she had been fifteen years older, brunette, and a bit thinner, she could have been his mother. “Welcome, truth seeker,” she said, then held out a fan towards him. “Pick a card.”

Oh boy, did every entrant get a complimentary magic trick? He chose a card at random and looked at it, a little surprised at what was on the face. It was roughly the size and shape of a regular playing card, but instead of the three of clubs or something else expected and mundane, it had on it that dog headed Egyptian god. “Uh, what’s this?” He asked, giving her back the card.

She took it, guileless blue eyes wide with wonder. “Oh, you got Anubis, the psychopomp.”

“The what now?”

“Psychopomp, it means conductor of souls,” she explained. “Not many people choose this one.”

Conductor of souls? Ruby piped up. Hey, we have a new name for you.

“Is that bad or good?”

The way she paused made him suspect she was lying, or simply forgot. “Oh, it’s good. It means you’re a generous and old soul, very protective of others.”

He gave her a weak smile. “Not by choice, honey. Trust me.” He then walked away, before her puzzled look could morph into a question.

The “psychic fair” was a sea of tables and booths, loosely arranged in a grid work pattern for maximum occupancy and density, and ran the gamut of people selling odd products and services, to your more traditional astrological forecasting, Tarot card and palm reading tables. It was really hard to know where to start.

You’re not going to cause a scene, are you? Mr. Aronofsky asked.

“Me? No,” he whispered under his breath. But not nearly quietly enough, as a couple passing by turned and gave him a funny look. He smiled at them, and said, “Conversing with the spirits.”

You stop this now, Mr. Aronofsky scolded. If I have to take you over and walk you out of here, I will.

“Lighten up. I don’t have a lot of fun.” He scanned the crowd, looking for … well, hell, he wasn’t sure exactly … but his eyes settled on a fairly large sign that read : “Spirit Guides”. “And that looks like a good place to start.”

Mr. Aronofsky groaned. There are times when I’m glad I’m dead.

Gryphon could sympathize. But it wasn’t about to keep him from biting those bastard’s heads off.

He wended his way through the tables, through the people having their runes cast and chakras read, and made his way towards the Spirit Guides booth, his mild buzz building up to a small yet palpable belligerence. About ten feet from the table, he saw a guy in jeans and a plaid shirt holding some kind of electronic device in his hands. Gryphon wasn’t sure what it was, especially since it was too big to be a cell phone. “Hey Shane,” the guy said, looking over at his shoulder at whoever was manning the table. “I think we got a ghost in here.”

He moved the machine around, and then looked up and stared Gryphon straight in the eyes

Jeremy went out onto the porch of his cabin after grabbing a mug of his special coffee, which was actually only about thirty percent coffee, and seventy percent bourbon. He found the combination much more satisfying than that Irish whiskey shit, and it got the job done faster. He sat on the top step and looked out through the trees that made up his front yard, the slices of sky visible through them turned a blood orange by the setting sun. Even though his breath came out in white clouds, the bitter coffee warmed him from the inside out.

He would be the first to admit he lived in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, in the ass end of nothing, not so much up in the mountains as in the shadows of one remarkable only for the lawsuits over clear cutting on its flanks. It was postcard pretty, but that wasn’t why he was here. He originally bought it ahead of the Y2K panic - which, to his disappointment, never materialized; he was looking forward to a more immediate societal breakdown, as opposed to this current, slow, pansy assed Balkanization - but found he liked it here even though anarchy didn’t reign elsewhere. He hated the arbitrary rules of society, the pace, the crowds, but mostly it was just the people; he didn’t trust people. They were always up to something, scheming and plotting, and the only one who was going to do any plotting around here was him, goddamn it.

The nearest “town” was five miles down the road, and was basically seasonal, most populous when the ski resorts were open, ghost towns when the season was over. Before they cleared out for the better part of the year, the local law would come over, a sheriff named Mullet (what kind of name was that for a cop?), and check on him. Why he didn’t know, unless he thought he was the Unabomber or something.

He knew the modern day and all its lawlessness would catch up to him here eventually, but he did not expect last year, right around Christmas.

Some fat bastard tried to break into his house.

It was two in the morning, and he heard something like scratching at his rear window. It wasn’t like a branch propelled by the wind, but something much more deliberate, something with purpose. He grabbed his shotgun, and stalked through the darkened house towards the noise.

He knew the law. He waited until he pried the window open and stuck one jack booted foot in the window before giving him both barrels of the thirty ought six square in his bulging gut. Fat boy flew away from the window, almost leaving his leg behind, and he went outside and made sure he was dead before he even considered calling the cops. And was he ever - his gut was split open like an overripe pumpkin, spilled intestines glistening like greasy, coiled snakes in the moonlight, meat like hamburger splattered on the ground, the blood pooling on the grass as black as ink. And the stench! Holy shit, it was like a decades old corpse had just let rip with a burrito fart.

It didn’t take him long to decide that he wasn’t going to involve the cops. He was within his rights to kill this man, but he knew there’d be paperwork, bureaucracy, and attention he did not want. So he dragged fat boy around, into the back forty, and it started to rain, as it was a warmer than usual December (global warming or El Nino or some such shit). The rain, as it turned out, helped a lot, not just washing away the blood, but opening up sinkholes around the septic pit. He didn’t even have to dig; he just made a sinkhole deeper than usual, and kicked lard lad into it, pouring a good amount of quicklime on him before not so much shoveling the mud back into place as shoving it back into the hole. The rest of the clean up was a breeze in comparison, and by the morning, you couldn’t tell anything had happened, save for the broken window (and some of the shot had splintered the frame).

But he fixed it up quite easily, and started watching the “local” news religiously, keeping an eye out for a missing man matching his description. The curious thing was, it never happened.

No missing persons report anywhere, not matching this guy, which suggested he was such a lowlife scumbag that no one cared about him. Months dragged by, and Jeremy was surprised to find himself slightly disappointed that Mullet never showed up to ask if he’d seen the guy around anywhere. He had wanted to lie to his pudgy, mustachioed face, using a pre-rehearsed blank expression to hide a strange sense of pride at having taken one more sleazeball off the face of the earth, something this rural piece of shit Sheriff would never have the balls to do.

Was he actually proud about killing a man? Yes, he was, and why should he be ashamed? Survival of the fittest, right? Kill or be killed. The fat ass was just not in his league.

In spite of the bourbon spiked with coffee, it started to turn bitterly cold as the sun faded away, the grass sparkling with frost as the sky began to turn a delicate shade of bruise violet. He got up and went inside, wondering if he had actually killed someone last year. It was such a faint thing now it could have been a dream more than a memory, a loose fragment of wishful thinking.

He had a dinner of warmed up canned ham and beer before the t.v. set, watching Christmas specials that verged from inane to insulting, drifting into an alcohol fueled, dreamless sleep in his recliner.

Then something woke him up.

He wasn’t sure what at first; he woke groggy, alcohol still fogging his brain, but something in him was insisting something was wrong. He got up, listening hard, and thought he heard a scratching noise at one of the back windows. He must have been dreaming - there was no way it could happen two years in a row.

Still, he got up quietly and grabbed his shotgun from the gun rack in the hall, glad that most of the lights were dim or off. He didn’t want this crackhead to see him first.

But when he reached the back bedroom, still unlit, he saw regular movement outside the window, and up and down blur of a shadow, and although his initial impression was that it was a huge man with some kind of lever, he realized it was just a pine tree being agitated by a violent wind. When the hell had that come up? It was clear earlier, not a cloud in the sky.

Now he heard a weird noise at the front door.

It was a scratching sound, dry bones on concrete, and then it seemed to echo around the house. No, not echo, repeat; things were scratching one every wall and window, a dry scrape, skittering noises like the claws of rats, or maybe the scritch of a thousand fingernails on the wall. What the hell ..?

The wind was howling now, he could hear the roof groaning under the strain, and he checked the kitchen, glancing out the window in the back door.

There was something out there.

It was big, and his first thought was it was an elk or something, but the antlers were wrong, smaller and without spectacular branching. His eyes adjusted to the moonlight, and he could see it was some kind of shaggy deer, with a red ribbon around its neck; a ribbon with silver bells. What, was there a petting zoo around here? Did it get loose in the storm?

The house shook as the wind roared, and the front door slammed open with an explosive bang, making him jump and grip his gun so tight he almost shot a hole in his own fucking wall. Son of a bitch, hadn’t he dead bolted that thing?

He crept out towards the living room, the wind sounding like a distant, drawn out scream, and he approached the open door warily, his heart trip hammering in his chest. He had no idea why he was afraid, until he realized the air blowing into his home had a familiar smell.

The septic pit, the stench of decomposing shit and dirt, but with something else beneath it, a meaty smell, like offal and blood, and something rotted and sweet. A dead body; a rancid corpse.

He was within ten feet of the door when the man appeared.

Jeremy didn’t wait to identify him, he just pulled the trigger, the stock braced against his right hip. But the telltale jerk of the gun never happened - the gun fired, but all that came from the barrel was a bright spray of maggots, pink and squirmy as they splattered on his hardwood floor. “What the fuck..?!” he exclaimed, torn between rage and abject confusion.

But the man in the doorway was the most shocking thing of all.

It was the man he shot last year, in all his decayed glory. Maggots roiled in the open wound of his stomach, and squirmed in the empty sockets of his eyes, and he pointed a skeletal finger stripped off all flesh. “You -” he croaked in a sepulchral voice, as black beetles poured out of his mouth, glistening through a rotted hole in his cheek.

Okay, he was dreaming; he had to be dreaming. This wasn’t real.

He backed up slowly as the corpse staggered forward on uncertain legs, half of them stripped up of flesh and muscles and clothes, although it looked like his clothes had lasted much better than everything else. The red velvet remained mostly intact, although the white fur around his collar was brown with clots of dirt and shit, and worms wriggled out of the folds of muddy clothes, littering the floor with each halting step. “You’ve … been … a … naugh-ty…boy …”

He shook the shotgun, emptying the maggots out of the barrel, and flipped it in his hand so the stock was out, then took a batter’s stance. In those movies, you hit zombies in the head, right? Destroy the head and the things died. And the thing wasn’t moving so fast, so it would be a snap. Or, in its case, a splat.

But then something struck him in the back, hard, and he tasted electricity in his mouth as his spine snapped in half and he collapsed to the floor, no longer feeling anything below his waist. Even before he looked up, he saw hooves in his peripheral vision, and knew that that damn deer had gotten in the house. Had the back door blown open too?

He looked up into the face of what had to be a reindeer, snot dripping from its flared nostrils as it pawed the floor restlessly, like a bull eager to gore its tormentor, and Jeremy suddenly realized that the song had it all wrong. His nose wasn’t red - his eyes were.

“And … naugh -ty … boys…” the corpse of Santa rasped, grabbing him by the hair and yanking his head up painfully, the lower half of his body a dead weight. “…go … to … hell.”

Rudolph stamped his hooves on the floor, and it sounded like jungle drums.

*****

Jeremy was found in late January, after a freak, heavy snowfall had blocked most of the roads out and killed electricity for days, making Sheriff Mullet do what he called his “rounds”, checking on all the disgruntled loners, misguided nature lovers, and freaky militia people who lived in the lower elevations.

The insects had been at the body for what seemed quite a long time, which was extremely puzzling since most of them hadn’t come out of hibernation yet, and those that had had been killed by the cold snap. But the maggots and beetles that had nested in the remains of Jeremy’s body seemed quite fat and happy. It also looked like a horse or maybe a big deer had wandered in at some point, as he found muddy hoof prints on the kitchen linoleum.

But none of that was the strangest thing about the murder scene. No, the thing that Mullet would never get over, not for the rest of his life, was the fact that the killer hadn’t just lopped off Jeremy’s head, but the sicko actually bothered to gift wrap it, and put it under Jeremy’s tree.

What kind of freak would do something like that?

The End

Merry fucking Christmas.

She took Shan back to her place, even though it was unlikely the Triad had any interest in cleaning up Fixer’s fuck ups - it just seemed safer, and besides, Shan really didn’t want to go back to his place at the moment.

Z realized how truly misanthropic she had become when she realized that it felt weird and wrong to have someone else in her place, even if it was Shan. At least Satan seemed to feel the same way, although she generally liked Shan. Christ, she had something in common with a grumpy ass cat - wasn’t this a sign that she should put a gun in her mouth and get it over with?

While Shan sacked out on the couch and fretted, she went in search of a blanket. It was weird that she had just about everything you could name - she even had an old gas mask in her footlocker, epi-pens full of synthetic adrenaline and atropine, but a spare blanket? All she could figure is that she was ready for a personal war, but not something as pedestrian as having a guest over.

By the time she dug one up - it had protected her crossbow in the move - he was already asleep, with Satan perched on his chest, looking like she would pounce on his face if he dared to snore. She tossed the blanket on his legs, and retreated to her bedroom, figuring Satan would alert her if there was trouble. Calicos were pretty vocal about being disturbed, along with being short tempered. (Again, like her. Damn!)

She tried to sleep, but found it difficult. After a few pointless, wasted hours, she decided to hit the all night diner that was just a couple of blocks away. It was almost dawn, so the hung over had mainly gone home or passed out, and while she chased greasy scrambled eggs around her plate, the newspaper was delivered.

She wasn’t terribly surprised by the headline, calling it a “nightclub massacre”, but only three people were shot and killed, which wouldn’t even qualify as a drive-by in the States (no wounded; the three people who were shot were dead by the time the cops showed up, which backed up the fact that they were Triad - the real professionals rarely made mistakes like Dooley had). Of course, with Gilbert’s shooting previously, this was starting to look like a “wave” of violence, but she was sure it was over now. Fixer fucked up and he was dead, end of story. It was unlikely that they even knew about the loose threads that Fixer had left behind, up to and including Dooley, who was probably happy he had turned himself into the cops now. Or maybe not - if the Triad knew he was tied to Fixer somehow, there might be someone in the general prison population who wanted to prove himself to the Triad, and would be leaked his name as a “test”. Still, he was more likely to survive inside than he would have been if he was out and they knew who he was.

None of this bothered her. If you wanted to play in the big leagues, you had to be prepared to face the consequences of failure, and most of those were some variation of torture and death. But she didn’t know how Shan would handle it; he had no familiarity with this part of life. She could hide the paper from him, but he’d find out eventually. How would she break it to him?

Man, it wasn’t her job to break this shit to him. He was an adult, and he could live with it, whether he liked it or not.

She had a couple of bites of her eggs, more of her home fries, paid the bill and left, leaving a substantial tip behind. She was never sure how much she should tip, but she always left a lot, as service jobs were the shittiest jobs you could have, even if you did get paid a decent wage, which you didn’t. She had no idea how anyone could work with the public, day after day, and not kill every single fucking person who gave them shit.

When she got back to her place, the sun was up and shockingly bright, and Shan was up himself, making a mess in her kitchen. “Where do you keep your coffee?” he asked, peering up into an empty cupboard.

“I don’t have any coffee.”

“What? What kind of freak are you? They don’t drink coffee in Australia?”

“They do, but I don’t. I don’t like coffee.” She closed the cupboard, nearly shutting it on his face, and he turned to her with a sad frown. “Does this mean I have to go down to the Tim Horton’s?”

“Probably. Take this with you.” She shoved the newspaper in his hands, and returned to the living room to hang up her coat. When she had finished doing that, he had come into the room, staring down at the front page, losing color in his face.

“Oh shit,” he gasped, sitting down heavily on the couch.

“The good news is we no longer have to worry about the scheme working.”

He looked up at her sharply. “That’s not funny.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

She sat on the arm of the nearest chair and waited for more. He finished looking at the paper and folded it up, tossing it on the coffee table like he couldn’t wait to get rid of it. The moment of silence stretched out, the street noises from outside filling the gap, until he asked quietly, “Did we do that?”

“No. Remember how Dooley said we were all dead? Well, they were, yeah. They fucked up a job for the Triad, and believe me, nobody does that twice. Think of them as psychotic capitalists.”

He considered that, resting his chin in his hands, staring at the carpet. “So it wasn’t hyper … hypo …”

“Hyperbole?”

He nodded vigorously. “That, yeah. But how can you be sure?”

“They arrived immediately after Mule delivered the bogus e. They wouldn’t have had time to test it. They just showed up before they could have even called anyone. Dooley said they had to have it by midnight or they were dead. It was after midnight.”

He scrubbed a hand through his hair and sighed heavily. “So even if we did nothing, this would have happened?”

“Yeah. We didn’t kill Fixer, Shan; Bennett Gilbert did. That’s what you call irony, or maybe karma. Who the fuck knows?”

Shan didn’t say anything, just looked away, as if the stripes of sunlight on the carpet were suddenly fascinating. The lingering silence was broken by the ring of the telephone, which made them both jump. She let it go to her machine, as she knew exactly who it would be, and Shan looked at her curiously. “Shouldn’t you get that?”

“Hell no, it’s probably Ness.”

“Elliott or Loch?”

She scowled at him, but knew it was a good sign if he could still be a smart ass. “A client, a fucking annoy one. I haven’t had a chance to give him his disc and close the case.”

Shan stood up, rolling the kinks out of his shoulders. “Well, I’m on my way home … it’s safe, right?”

She nodded. “The Triad have no idea who you are.” She’d actually gone by his place and checked it out; there appeared to be no surveillance, and Shan’s apartment looked completely untouched.

“Well, if it’s nearby, I can drop off Ness’s disc if you want, save you the problem from dealing with him.”

“Thanks, but it’s really out of your way.” But she considered it a moment, and asked, “You doing anything in a couple hours?”

“Doubt it. I don’t have to work ‘till eight.”

“Okay. How ‘bout I swing by and pick you up then, and you can help me bug the shit out of him.”

He gave her a thumbs up. “It’s a date. Do I have to dress up special?”

“Just look like a brainless thug.”

“So, normal then?”

She wagged a finger at him like a pent up schoolteacher. “Now now, no self-effacing. You just disarmed a bomb, remember?”

He scoffed, rolled his eyes. “I shoved it in a sink.”

“Still counts.”

“Eh. Thanks for lettin’ me crash on your couch.”

“No problem, but don’t make a habit of it.”

He headed for the door, but she heard his footsteps pause half a minute before he finally asked, “Does it get any easier to live with?”

What did he mean? The fact that people died every day, especially if they were boneheaded, two bit thug types? She had no problem living with it, although that could have been her problem in the first place. To really fight your opponent, you had to know them, and sometimes you became them, which she knew was probably her problem, and the reason she had to leave MI-6 in the first place. But those were more things he didn’t need to know.

“Yeah, it does,” she told him, and hoped, for his sake, it wasn’t a lie.

The End