Брайан Макклеллан - Uncanny Collateral

Okay, I told Maggie, he’s getting on my nerves.

I need answers, she responded sharply.

It was the closest to a command that I’d ever gotten from Maggie, and it kind of annoyed me. “We should establish something really quick,” I said, holding up a finger at the kid.

The necromancer licked his lips. He had a nervous glint in his eye, like he’d finally realized that if I knew what a draugr was and wasn’t reacting with fear, he might be in trouble. “What?” he demanded.

“Do you know who I am? Not, like, in a pretentious way. I’m just curious if you know who I am or what I do for a living.”

“I don’t care. All I know is that you carry the jinn. That’s all I need to know.”

Is he powerful enough to be this arrogant? I asked Maggie.

Powerful enough? Sure. But he can’t be more than nineteen, so he probably doesn’t have the chops to use his power.

Him first, then.

“Let’s start with names,” I said. “I’m Alek.” Reaching across the table, I snatched him by the hair and slammed his face into the tabletop.

The draugr moved fast enough that one snatched me by the arm the moment its master’s head hit the table. With a quick motion, it planted its feet, grabbed me by the shoulder, and yanked. Draugr are strong , and if I were fully human, it would have ripped my arm off entirely. As it was, I let out an undignified gasp as I felt my arm get pulled out of its socket.

My bottom canines transformed almost instantly, turning into thumb-sized tusks that ripped painfully through my gums and jutted from my lower jaw. The troll berserker in me took over, and I was out of the chair in the blink of an eye. The tattoo of Mjolnir flared to life on my right fist, glowing like the embers of a fire, and I slammed it into the draugr’s stomach hard enough to rip through the desiccated, sorcery-strengthened skin and out the other side.

I took a punch from the other draugr, which sent me staggering into a chair and going down in a heap with the fellow I was now wearing as a bracelet. Someone in the building screamed. I landed hard, rolled on top of the undead, and pulled out its willowy spine. The creature dissolved into dust beneath me.

The second draugr grabbed me by the shoulders and squeezed. I could feel its powerful fingers begin to push through my skin, and I groaned at the pain. I got to one knee, grappling the creature around the middle and lifting it off the ground. I took us both across the middle of the Starbucks. Draugr first, we went through the glass snack case and tumbled into the prep area.

The draugr’s sunglasses were knocked off, and I stared into empty pits that had once housed eyes. It howled at me angrily, thrashing, and wrapped one bony hand around my left wrist. I punched the creature in the head, my Mjolnir tattoo giving off tiny sparks of sorcery. Its neck snapped back, and it howled at it me again. Reaching up, I grabbed an espresso machine and pulled it down onto the creature’s chest.

The damn thing finally let go of my wrist. It struggled, trying to push the machine off it, and I got to my feet and brought a boot down on the creature’s forehead – again and again. Bone crunched under my heel, and the body finally dissolved in the same way the first one had.

I staggered back, wiped my forehead, and noticed that the employees were cowering in the back room, watching me with eyes wide. “Give me a minute, then call 911,” I told them.

I stepped through the shattered snack case and walked over to the necromancer. The blow I’d given him had put him out cold, but he was beginning to come around. I lifted him by the back of the neck and put him on the ground, rubbing his face in the dust of his draugr, then flipped him over so I could see his eyes.

Tell me if he tries anything, I said to Maggie.

I slapped him until he began to sputter. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“It’s Nick, damn it! Stop hitting me!”

“Nick the Necromancer. That’s adorable.” I slapped him again, then grasped him by the chin. My tusks were still out, and I didn’t bother to force them to retract. His eyes widened at the sight of them. “Look, Nick, you asshole, you don’t bring draugr into a Starbucks on a Saturday afternoon. Demigods don’t pull that kind of shit! There are Rules. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’ll show you who I am,” he growled.

He’s going to try and cast some kind of decaying spell on you, Maggie warned.

I broke two fingers on his right hand. That should keep him distracted. I let him scream for a few seconds. “All right, Nick, tell me who sent you after me.”

“Go to hell,” he gasped.

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not gonna sit here and torture you all day, Nick. I work for a living. Tell me who you are, or I call OtherOps.”

He just stared at me balefully, so I got up and shouted to the employees. “Call 911. Tell them a necromancer and two draugr just jumped a reaper agent. They’ll patch you through to the right place.”

“You’re a reaper?”

I looked back down at Nick. The cold, calculating necromancer was gone, and in his place was a nineteen-year-old kid who knew he’d just fucked up – big time. “Yup. I deal with shit like this all the time. Whoever hired you either had no idea who I am or threw you straight to the wolves. Gonna tell me a name?”

He frowned, and I could see in his eyes that he considered it a moment before shaking his head.

“At least tell me how you found me,” I said. “Do you have a tracker on my car?”

He hesitated for a moment before speaking. “Zeke called me when you arrived at his place this morning. I followed you from the pawnshop, and I’ve been watching you for the last couple of hours.”

“Zeke, you greedy piece of shit,” I muttered to myself.

I tried to warn you about him, Maggie said.

Oddly enough, I couldn’t summon any real anger. This kind of shit was in Zeke’s nature. It would be like getting mad at a dog for eating the bagel you dropped on the floor. Eh, he did warn me, I told Maggie. And he knew I would be able to handle the kid. “See, that wasn’t too hard, was it?” I said to Nick. “You can make this easier and tell me the name of whoever hired you. I might even forget to press charges.”

Nick remained silent.

Let me at him, Maggie whispered in the back of my head.

No.

What do you mean, “no”?

I mean no. I can feel how pissed you are right now. If I touch him with your ring, you’ll kill him.

Maggie muttered to herself angrily. I ignored her, put my boot on Nick’s chest, and waited for OtherOps to arrive.

“And you’re sure you’ve never seen him before in your life?”

“Never,” I assured the OtherOps agent who stood beside me in front of the Starbucks. I watched over his shoulder as Nick was loaded into the back of an OtherOps paddy wagon. The OtherOps agent was a middle-aged bureaucratic type, yawning at the destruction caused by the draugr, pen poised above his notepad.

“He claims you have some sort of property of his,” the agent said, “but he wouldn’t elaborate further. Do you want to comment on that?”

So Nick hadn’t told OtherOps what he was after. That shouldn’t surprise me. If this was a legit recovery, I would have been confronted by the cops and not some punk necromancer mercenary. I let my eyes wander back to the agent, then down to his name tag. “Agent Lindberg, I have absolutely no idea what that asshole is talking about. I’ve dealt with a lot of nutters in my job, and he’s just about as crazy as they come.”

“He seems pretty sane to me.”