K Stewart: A Devil in the Details

No matter how I glared at the little device, it refused to offer up any more of its secrets. I was finally obliged to answer it.

“Hello?” Retrieving an elastic tie from my desk, I gathered my shoulder-length hair into a ponytail. I was still getting used to the shorter length, but the longer hair had become a liability.

“Dawson. Good morning.”

I winced and held the phone away from my ear. “Ivan?” With that thick Ukrainian accent and booming baritone voice, it couldn’t be anyone else. I could barely make his words out over the unmistakable clamor of an airport in the background.

“ Tak. It is much good to be hearing your voice.” The man had been traveling in and out of the United States for the better part of thirty-five years, and his English was still horrible. I loved it.

Out of habit, I checked my desk calendar. “I don’t have to check in for two more weeks, so to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Rosaline was to be calling me.” I frowned and had to wait for the next part of his statement for clarification. Okay, maybe the broken English wasn’t so much fun, sometimes.

“And?”

“And she is not to be hearing from Miguel for two weeks past.”

Translation, for those who don’t speak “Ivan”: Rosaline had called, and she hadn’t heard from Miguel for two weeks. I frowned harder. Sure, the business takes us out of contact sometimes, but I have never failed to call my wife for two weeks straight. If I ever did, I’d never be able to come home again. She’d kill me.

“Did he miss his check-in?”

“ Ni, not yet. But it is to being most unusual for him.” Ivan sounded worried. I think that bothered me more than anything. When the old man is worried, deep shit is going down.

“And his weapon wasn’t delivered to you?”

“ Ni. Have you to been speaking with him? Did you know of his most recent mission?”

“I haven’t talked to him in a couple months. Rosaline doesn’t know where he was going last?”

“I am to be flying into Mexico City later today. I will be finding out what I can.”

“Yeah, Ivan, keep me posted. Let me know if there’s anything we can do from here.”

“The phone lines there are not to being stable, and they are not to having a connection to the Internet. Perhaps I will to be having you relay messages to Grapevine, when I am able to be making contact?”

“Yeah, I can do that. Hey, you be careful down there, okay?”

“ Tak, I will be doing that. May God be keeping you safe, Dawson.”

After we hung up, I wondered if all these blessings were going to jinx me.

We called ourselves champions. I didn’t choose the name; it had been that way longer than anyone could remember. We shared no race, no country, and our reasons were as varied as our backgrounds. Men-and women-like us had been fighting the good fight for millennia.

Some were warrior-priests, tied to the church. Some were holy men, shamans who drew power from the land. We were mercenaries, and monks, and everything in between. We battled with blades and hammers, pipes and bats-whatever we had that we were comfortable with. Most-in fact all save me-also had that little something extra. Call it faith; call it voodoo-the religion doesn’t seem to matter. Hell, even the atheists of the group have it. There is magic in the world, and it gives a champion the ability to hold his own on a mystical level.

Except me. I’m the mule of this circus. No wonder they keep expecting me to drop dead at any moment. I could feel magic. I know when it’s present. But trying to touch it myself is like grasping at smoke. It goes right through my fingers.

I picked up the clear crystal from my desk, turning it over in my hand. It was small, a perfectly shaped quartz. It was marred by a single milky flaw in its depths.

Ivan gave it to me years ago. He insisted my magic wasn’t gone, just dormant, and when I finally found a way to reach it, I would see some sign in the crystal. So far, it hadn’t even twitched. Day after day, it lay on my desk, flawed and inert-like me. Sorry, Ivan.

Sometime before I became a champion, back when I was still chasing cheerleaders in high school and sneaking beers from my parents’ fridge, a champion named Ivan Zelenko decided he was tired of fighting that good fight alone. Using the technology that was still in its infant stages then, he set about finding all who had fought Hell’s minions and won.

He found us through newspaper clippings, hospital records, village legends. I can only imagine what it was like for the first person he contacted, having this enormous stranger appear on his doorstep. I wonder, did he just come right out and say, “Excuse, please, you fight demons?” The thought always made me chuckle, but it was most likely the truth. Ivan wasn’t known for subtlety.

He worked for years, doing research, traveling, gathering us all. He connected men and women from all over the world with others who understood the things we could never explain to those closest to us. With Ivan keeping track, never again would a champion’s death go unnoticed, his soul lost to the blackest abyss. Never again would one of us die unremarked and unknown, our deeds fading along with our memory. We were tagged and catalogued, like any other endangered species, our names and locations held in one secured database called Grapevine. When one of us disappeared now, at least someone would know.

Ivan never talked about his life before being a champion, and you don’t really ask things like that. If I had to guess, I’d say he was military. The dramatic side of me says KGB, but there’s no way to know. I do know that he has survived longer than any currently living champion, with more kills under his belt than several of us put together. Now easily into his fifties (hey, I’m not asking him his age, but you can if you want), he doesn’t fight anymore. But he still watches after the rest of us, a combination of drill sergeant and father.

My fingers traced the framed picture on my desk. Frost-haired Ivan stood on one side of a bride and groom, towering over them both, his shoulders as broad as two of me. Mira and I stood on the other side of the dark-haired, dark-skinned couple. Both were smiling at each other more than at the camera. The photographer had captured Rosaline’s wedding veil fluttering in the breeze, as if it might suddenly spring to life in the photograph. Miguel gazed down at his new wife, dark eyes glowing in that way unique to a man in love.

“She is everything to me, Jesse. I could pass to Heaven happily, knowing I had been in her presence for only a few moments. To have her as my wife… God has blessed me.”

At the time, I had chalked Miguel’s poetic sense up to a young man’s true love. But now something seemed darkly prophetic about those words, and they settled somewhere low and cold in my gut. It was the place where disaster lurked, where misfortune was quite comfy. Mira called it premonition, insisting that it was my one claim to magic. I called it common sense, and I just couldn’t bring myself to believe in a happy ending for this one.

Leaving my den for the bedroom, I chose the day’s attire carefully, mindful that I was meeting a client. My blue jeans had no holes in them, and my black T-shirt said I’M A GEEK in big white lettering. The sleeves were short enough to show off the tattoos down both biceps, each one a string of kanji quoting the first two lines of the Tao Te Ching. “The Way that is spoken here is not the eternal Way. The name that is spoken here is not the eternal name.” The outfit was complete with the combat boots that had no visible bloodstains. Dress to impress; that’s my motto.

Mira had managed to capture Hurricane Annabelle, and the redheaded imp was currently seated at the kitchen table with chocolate pudding smeared from ear to ear. “Daddy! Hugs!” Those fudgy fingers reached for me, and I had to laugh despite the pall that had descended over my day.