Authors: Ferrett Steinmetz
K
-Dash
and Quaysean curled up in the hotel bed, hands on each other’s bare hips.
Their lovemaking had been predictably explosive. That was something they’d counted on ever since the first time they’d laid eyes on each other – seconds after they met, they both knew they were meant to fuck. Though it had taken a few months of sizing each other up before they allowed that to happen. Revealing yourself as gay in the gangs they ran in had a cost – more fistfights, more disrespect. So they both made sure they were on the same page.
And when they fucked, it had been carnal magic. Each worshipping the other’s hard muscular body, reveling in each other’s firm grips, propelling each other to pleasure.
But what neither had counted on was the tenderness.
They cuddled every night, stroking skin, taking pleasure in this gift of vulnerability. Other gangbangers in Oscar’s crew spent their earnings on huge televisions, flashy cars, chunky gold jewelry; K-Dash and Quaysean made secret reservations in the best hotels.
The hotels were their addiction, escaping the constant chest-bumping gang lifestyle to go places nobody expected you to throw down. They’d all but given up their apartment, letting their friends crash there rent-free, luxuriating in the freedom of waking each morning to a scrubbed bathtub and freshly laundered sheets.
Quaysean’s phone rang. Not his real phone; the burner phone Oscar contacted them on. Quaysean slapped K-Dash’s stomach to wake him up, then answered the call.
“Yeah?”
“
Yo, man, you OK?
”
Quaysean covered the phone and mouthed:
Not Oscar
. K-Dash leapt to his feet, threw his holster on.
“We’re fine,” Quaysean said. The worried phone-voice was Li’l Deets, Oscar’s probable second-in-command. Oscar’s hierarchy was nebulous at best, as he had found giving people explicit org charts encouraged internecine warfare – but Deets was high on the list. Deets resented having to check in with Quaysean and K-Dash, because Quaysean and K-Dash were the only people who Oscar had entrusted the ’mancy-fueled wing of his organization to. “Should we be fine?”
“You should be dead.”
Quaysean leapt to his feet. K-Dash tossed him his pistol. “That a threat, or a signal?”
“Your fuckin’ apartment burned down an hour ago, man. Oscar’s hotel burnt down, too. Oscar is ashes.”
“…dammit.” Quaysean swiped his index finger across his throat:
Oscar
. K-Dash raised his eyebrows and mouthed:
Did Paul do it?
Quaysean shook his head –
not enough information
.
“Maybe he’s not dead.” Little Deets sounded angry enough to pick a fight. “You tell me. I know nothin’ about ’mancy, but two buildings burnt down sounds the fuck like magic to me.”
“We’re rushing to no conclusions.”
“
Rush
? Oscar had all the connections! And you want to–”
“Here’s what you’re gonna do,” Quaysean told him. “You’re gonna check with your inside men with all our rivals: the Balaguers, the Cournoyers, the Ortiz contigent. You work your angles; we’ll work ours. Then, once we got all the info we can get, we’ll sort it out for you.”
“Motherfucker, I don’t know anything about magic! You share! This ain’t the time to keep your turf!”
“Fool, I didn’t ask you about ’mancy. Now do your fuckin’ job.”
Quaysean hung up. K-Dash packed their clothes in their suitcase, then they headed out for breakfast. Both knew if that psycho Rainbird was on the warpath, their best bet would be to stay in public.
K-Dash sipped his coffee, muttering: “It’s a hit.”
“A stupid one,” Quaysean agreed.
“Dude looked up our apartment address from our records, saw some Hispanic dudes curled on the bed, said ‘must be them’.”
“And burned it.”
They both frowned:
That doesn’t sound like Paul
.
They liked Paul. Paul hadn’t had to share his ’mancy with them, but he always let them watch. Paul gave them goofy grins whenever he caught them holding hands, encouraging their romance. Paul tried to get his daughter to warm up to them. Little things, stupid things maybe – but it was enough that K-Dash and Quaysean didn’t want to think him capable of a putting out a hit.
But Paul had been working with that Payne dude, and Payne was pretty damn cold.
They ate eggs while they waited for Li’l Deets to call them back.
“I got your damn info,” Li’l Deets snapped. “It’s fuckin’ Cournoyer. Word on the street is he’s moving to get his own ’mancy. Some massive hit’s going down this afternoon. Half his boys are in the hospital, the other piled into a van headed to upstate New York. Now will you tell me what the hell is happening?”
“They’re gonna kill our ’mancer.” Quaysean hung up again.
K-Dash was first into the bathroom, but they both piled into the stall together. K-Dash got out the salt shaker of Flex they had left, snorted a pinch – all they needed to locate Paul, according to the letter of Paul’s contract. Paul had intended for only Oscar to find him, but realistically anyone with a snootful of Paul’s contractually restricted Flex could track him down.
K-Dash’s eyes glowed, literally
glowed
, in a way that Quaysean found quite arousing. “He’s in upstate New York, all right.”
“His phone’s going right to voicemail.”
“No signal out there.”
They pondered their options. Paul wasn’t critical to Oscar’s operations; he was significant juice, no doubt, saving Oscar’s men from accidents that might lead to drug busts, but they’d gotten by without Flex before and could do so again.
Slightly more troublesome was what their place in the new organization would be. They’d already pissed off Li’l Deets. But if they dropped everything, went back to conference with Deets, they’d be fine.
But Paul was a friend.
“He has a daughter,” K-Dash said, concerned.
“And Valentine.”
“Maybe Valentine’s gone already. Payne didn’t like her. I think this is Payne pulling up stakes. He
really
didn’t like us being involved.”
“So Payne gets Oscar’s biggest enemy to put a hit on Paul.”
“Who sucks at guns.”
“And is miles away from help.”
“And then Payne gets to blame Paul’s death and ours on a rival gang, which probably plays pretty well in his organization.”
Quaysean already knew what they would do, foolish as it was, as one of many reasons he loved K-Dash was K-Dash’s irrational loyalty. Few men had watched K-Dash and Quaysean kiss, and Quaysean doubted that Paul knew what an honor that was to witness their affection, but that didn’t fucking matter.
“He’s hours away,” Quaysean objected. “Even if we drove top speed, we’d never get there in time.”
K-Dash flipped through his notepad, the one that held the contract Paul had signed to activate his Flex. He tapped the words.
The party of the first part would like authorization to use your Flex to speed like a madman… on a wild, nonfatal drive through New York.
“I love you,” Quaysean said.
They kissed. K-Dash’s tongue vibrated with the electric tang of ’mancy.
M
r Payne was right
about one thing
, Paul thought.
This sure is a boring drive
.
He’d cranked up his best 1990s hip-hop, but the scenery was tedious: a lone highway snaking among forest-covered mountains. The exits held paltry little places, towns too small for even a Denny’s to survive; just a diner of uncertain origins and a grubby gas station that closed at nine in the evening.
Paul consulted his notes to find the proper exit; the mountains were so high, his GPS was dead weight here. The roads eroded from asphalt into pebbled dirt, curving around deep woods to deposit Paul at his destination:
Mr Payne’s drug laboratory.
It didn’t look like a drug lab, but then again Paul had enough experience to know that Flex labs that
looked
like drug labs got busted quick. This shuttered-down gas station would have been antiquated in the 1960s – back in the days when selling candy bars was advanced marketing, and no self-respecting gas station wouldn’t change your oil and fill your tires. There was a bay big enough for one car to pull into – or would have been, if it hadn’t been tacked over with plywood.
It was an absurd place for a gas station, but Payne had never intended for it to be successful as a gas station.
Paul pulled around the two holes out front where the pumps had once been, parking the car in the back. A sturdy door was locked with three separate padlocks, to keep the local kids out of mischief.
Paul unlocked them, feeling desolation.
He clicked on the lightswitch – fluorescents flickered on. He’d entered by the cash register area, where once someone had rung up gas sales – a tiny alcove barely big enough for five or six people to wait in line, assuming five or six people had ever gathered here simultaneously.
There was a thick hardwood counter the cashier had once stood behind – a solid chunk of rain-darkened maple. Paul had little doubt the original owner had built it himself, and would have been proud to see it survive all these years.
Probably would have been saddened by the plywood over the broken windows, though.
Paul walked through the swinging door to the garage, seeing the usual accoutrements installed by Payne’s handymen – the desk with fresh legal pads, the alembics, the hematite.
What he did not expect to see was his daughter, crying.
“…Aliyah?” He scooped her up in a hug. She grabbed him tight, crying harder; his entrance had triggered a cascade of emotions.
She crawled with flux. She must have gained it fast-travelling here – and that weighty flux-load indicated she felt guilty about coming here, so guilty the universe amplified her self-hatred. Despite that, her bad luck had yet to cause the roof to collapse on her head, which made Paul happy; Rainbird, creepy Rainbird, had taught her to control her flux.
“Malik Reles,” she said. “Look him up.”
“What?”
“
Malik Reles
, Daddy! You can find anyone! You have to find him and see if he’s OK!”
“Sweetie, I... I’m about to brew some Flex. I can’t afford any bad luck going into this. Can it wait for later?”
“
I need to know!”
Paul suppressed a groan. Aliyah was so wound up, the only way to calm her down would be concession. And while he usually drew firm lines whenever Aliyah threw a tantrum, maybe telling her what she asked for might reveal the cause of her concern.
He unpacked a fresh Bic pen from the stockpile, scrawled requests for information on a legal pad.
“Does he live in New York, sweetie?”
“I think so.”
Fortunately, it was a fairly unique name, so Paul could narrow his requests down. He whistled with relief when the legal pad morphed into a hospital record, not a death certificate.
“He’s not OK,” Paul grimaced. “Records say he fell off a dock. He broke his skull, and has internal bleeding. They’ve…” Paul tried to think of a better way to put it, but Aliyah would know if he lied. “They’ve put in an induced coma – a super-sleep – while they try to figure out how to fix him.”
Her cheeks were raw with tears. “Will they?”
“Honey, I’m a bureaucromancer, not a doctor. And the doctors don’t know. Though the prognosis, it’s… it’s not good.” He sat her on the desk, wiped her nose with his handkerchief. “Now. Why?”
Aliyah cried into her hands.
“Aliyah.” Paul tried to sound reassuring. “It’s OK.”
Her sniffles stopped. She hitched in a deep, shuddering breath, like she was about to jump off the diving board for the first time, squeezing her eyes shut. Then she opened them, staring earnestly at Paul:
“Do you think I should have killed Anathema?”
It’s finally coming out
, Paul thought, glancing at the bag of hematite.
I wouldn’t have chosen today to lance this wound, but… this is good
.
“Sweetie.” Paul took her hands in his. “You didn’t have any choice.”
Her forehead furrowed in frustration. “But
should
I have killed her?”
“If there was another way for you to stop Anathema, you would have done it. She was... she liked hurting people. She thought killing was how people proved they were
better
than other people. And you didn’t even know you had ’mancy then. I don’t think you could... I don’t think you had a better way, sweetie.”
She punched him in the chest, furious. “
That’s not what I’m asking!
”
“What, you want to know whether – whether I thought Anathema deserved to die?”
“Yes!” she said, exasperated.
“
Nobody
deserves to die, sweetie.”
“
She
did. She hurt people. You said she liked it. And she... she made it so the only way I could stop her from stabbing you was to kill her. You said so! So she deserved it.”
Paul shook his head. “Sweetie, it’s… maybe we have to kill sometimes. But killing, it… it hurts our heart. You know that. You feel bad, don’t you?”
She slammed her fists against her knees. “
No
.”
“So if you don’t feel bad, what do you feel?”
“I’m mad at
you
!”
“Why me?”
“Because you tell me killing is wrong! You tell me it’s what bad people do! And then you don’t kill
anyone
, and they come back again and again with bigger guns, and you make it so other people have to hurt people to protect
you
!”
She couldn’t breathe fast enough to keep up with her anger. Paul reached out to hug her; she slapped him away. But when he backed away to give her more space, Aliyah clasped his hand to her face, rubbing her cheek against his palm.
“And I
liked
it,” she whispered. “I
liked
hurting people. Except now maybe I don’t and you’re making me hurt them to save you and that makes
you
a bad man, Daddy, you’re a
bad man
…”
What the hell did Aliyah do?
Paul wondered.
Tires crunched on the gravel outside.
“And nobody loved Anathema!” She flailed at him. “Nobody’s going to love me because you made me hurt people, and I’m just as bad as her, I’m just as bad as her…”
The tires could wait a moment. As could the people getting out of the cars outside. He grabbed her hands.
“You listen here, sweetie,” he told her. “I will always love you. You know why you’re not bad as her? Because you want to be good. And even if you were as bad as her, you are my daughter and I will never
ever
leave you.”
That’s when the bullets ripped through the plywood window, smashing into Paul’s skull.