George Martin - Suicide Kings

“You too, Ana.” Her dress looked expensive. It even matched the blue in her earrings.

She reached up to give him a quick hug. Wally dwarfed her. “Gosh,” he said. He returned the hug, gently.

He looked into the restaurant, where white-coated waiters carried trays, pitchers, and bottles between the tables. They looked like photo-negatives of Wally, except not as large. Inside, the clink of cutlery chirped through the murmur of conversation. Unfamiliar faces, unfamiliar voices. A sad feeling crept over Wally.

He went inside with Ana. The maitre d’ greeted them. He didn’t bother to ask if they were on the guest list; everybody knew Rustbelt and Earth Witch, two of the Committee’s founding members. He paused in the act of ushering them toward the hors d’oeuvres when he noted the gouges Wally’s heels left in the floor. The pencil-thin mustache quivered on his lip. He sniffed. But he didn’t raise a fuss. His establishment was full of aces.

Not that Wally knew many of them. The Committee wasn’t like it had been in the beginning. It was much bigger nowadays. Which was good, really, since it was becoming more international. No longer just a bunch of kids from some dumb TV show. It felt more professional, but also more sterile. He’d met a few of the newer members in passing at other Committee functions-Garou, Noppera-bo, the Strangelets. One of the new guys, Glassteel, nodded companionably at Wally as he passed; they’d worked together in Haiti. They made a pretty okay team, though Wally had liked working with DB the best, and DB was gone now.

Most of the guests had congregated around the long tables where the appetizers had been laid out, near the windows overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Wally munched on miniature hot dogs bathed in fancy ketchup while eavesdropping, trying to find a conversation he could join. The battle in the Sudd dominated most of the conversations. Wally had seen a blurb about it on one of those big stock-ticker things in Times Square during the cab ride to the Empire State Building.

“The PPA has overstretched itself,” declared Snowblind in her elegant French-Canadian accent. If silk could talk, thought Wally, it would sound like Snowblind. “There’s no need for the Committee to involve itself. Once the Caliphate regroups, this will be over quickly.”

Brave Hawk shook his head. “Not if Ra gets involved. Old Egypt doesn’t have much use for the Caliphate.”

Wally didn’t have much of a head for political discussions, and truth be told he wasn’t all that keen on Brave Hawk anyway. So he wandered farther down the table, where the hors d’oeuvres included grapes, smelly cheese, and pear slices marinated in port wine. Those were pretty good.

Tinker and Burrowing Owl argued about the World Court. The pending war crimes trials of Captain Flint and the Highwayman were almost as divisive an issue as the fighting in Sudan. Burrowing Owl thought it was a meaningless show trial; Tinker thought both men deserved to be tried before the world. “Oy, Rusty,” said Tinker. “What do you think?”

Wally shrugged. “Um…” What did he think? “I think they did a real bad thing, killing all those folks. But I think they did an even worse thing by making that poor little boy do it.”

Burrowing Owl frowned. “Yes, but what about sovereignty and jurisdiction?”

Wally sighed, wishing it was time to sit down and eat.

Jerusha Carter’s Apartment

Garden District

New Orleans, Louisiana

Her cell phone chirped before the bell on the microwave went off. That puzzled her, since it was an hour earlier where her parents were, and they would usually still be sitting at the Thanksgiving table at this point. She picked up the cell from the entrance-hall table, glancing at the number on the front.

It wasn’t her parents; it was Juliet Summers. Ink. Strange. She knew Ink, of course, but they certainly weren’t close.

“Hey,” she answered. “Ink. What’s up?”

“Jerusha? I need your help.” There was someone shouting, no, cursing in the background. A woman. “That’s Joey. Those scumbag LaFleurs convinced a judge to give them that court order. They’re gonna pull the plug on Michelle.”

Jerusha was shocked. Michelle Pond-the Amazing Bubbles-had been lying comatose in Jackson Square for more than a year, since the day she saved New Orleans from destruction by absorbing the blast of a nuclear explosion. For the past six months, her estranged parents had been fighting in court to obtain a court order allowing them to terminate their daughter’s nutrition and hydration.

Jerusha could not believe they had actually won. “If they do this, what do the doctors say will happen to Bubbles?”

“No one’s certain,” said Ink, “but their best guess is that given the massive amounts of nutrients that Michelle has been consuming every hour, and with a body as dense and heavy as hers, the results would be very quick. Her bodily processes could begin to deteriorate almost immediately-increased heart rate, blood pressure, organ failure. Death in no more than three hours, maybe sooner.” Ink sighed. “Or maybe she’ll just starve to death.”

On Thanksgiving. The LaFleurs had a ghastly sense of irony, Jerusha thought. “What can I do?” She was no lawyer. The Committee had no legal standing within the United States.

“You can help me stop Joey,” Ink replied. “She’s gone crazy. She’s pulled up every halfway fresh corpse in the city, and some that aren’t so fresh. She says she’s going to kill the LaFleurs as soon as they show their faces in Jackson Square.”

Hoodoo Mama. I should have known. Joey Hebert had been born angry, as far as she could tell, and being turned down by the Committee had not improved her disposition.

“She won’t listen to me,” Ink was saying, “and you’re the only one in New Orleans who might have the power to stop her before someone gets hurt. But you gotta get down there quick. You hear me?”

The shouting in the background continued. Joey, Jerusha realized. Then Ink was yelling back. “ Damn it, Joey. Calm down, girl. You’re gonna bust an artery.”

The phone went dead. “Ink?” Jerusha said.

Nothing.

She flipped the phone shut. The microwave bell rang in the kitchen. She could smell the turkey.

Jerusha put her phone in the pocket of her jeans and grabbed her keys.

The Clarke Household

Barlow’s Landing, Massachusetts

“I see,” margaret Tipton-Clarke said, in a voice that meant she didn’t see at all. “So you’re… dead?”

Jonathan Tipton-Clarke, or Jonathan Hive, but most often Bugsy, had known that bringing his girlfriend to Thanksgiving dinner was going to be tricky. He hadn’t appreciated the full depth of the issue. His mother kept asking difficult questions. His older brother Robert and sister-in-law Norma were scowling over their plates of cranberry sauce and turkey like sour-faced bookends without the books. The twin sisters were grinning with near cannibalistic delight. It just wasn’t going to be a good night.

Ellen was very pretty-thin, blond, dressed in a dark charcoal item that clung in all the right places without seeming slutty. It, like all of Ellen’s best dresses, had been designed especially for her by the ghost of Coco Chanel. The cameo she wore at her neck looked like it had been picked to go with the outfit more than the other way around. Just to look at her, she fit perfectly with the Tipton-Clarke family decor. Classy, expensive without having neon “nouveau riche” on her forehead. The earring was maybe a little bit off, but that was really nonoptional.

True, she was almost two decades older than Jonathan, which would have been a little weird all on its own. More the issue was that she wasn’t exactly his girlfriend. She was the ace who could channel the spirits of the dead. The dead like his girlfriend.