Chris Holm - The Wrong Goodbye

“Getting there,” I managed. “You?”

“Right as rain.” Fwack . “This bitch keeps trying to show me something,” she continued. “I can feel her rattling round my brain, trying to trick my eyes. Sucks for her they ain’t worked in years.”

“That’s my baby!” Gio cheered, though when I looked at him, I found he was facing in the wrong direction, his eyes buried in the crook of one elbow.

“Now, you boys got a job to do. I got this chick.”

“You sure?”

“Hell yes, I am. I’ma teach her a lesson for hitting on my man.”

Gio protested, but he was no help to her down there and knew it. So reluctantly, he came with. Since Abyzou had relieved us of our ladder, we were forced to take the stairs. I’d hoped we’d already avoided —or, in the case of Abyzou, triggered —any protections Danny’d enacted, but if I’m being honest, I knew damn well we hadn’t.

Each floor was separated by maybe twenty steps, with a landing in the middle. The stairwell was molded concrete, with no handrails, no windows, and nowhere to hide should trouble come. We crawled forward in utter darkness, worried with each movement some fresh hell would be unleashed. It wasn’t until we reached the landing I realized Danny’d been cleverer than that. After all, he didn’t need to kill intruders —just delay them. And this latest ploy of his would do exactly that.

See, that last flight of stairs leading up to the third floor was not so dark as the preceding stretch —and with thousands upon thousands of shards of skim to illuminate it, why would it be? Danny’d never struck me as one with much facility for magic, but it looked for damn sure like he’d been studying. God knows what trap he’d rigged up at the base of the stairwell, but summoning Abyzou had been a nifty trick —and this was no slouch, either. Countless shards of needle-sharp skim hovering in the stairwell, aligned like molecules in a crystal, each one aiming a pointy end our way. Each of them was so small, its glow was almost undetectable, but together, their faint phosphorescence reminded me of whitecaps on a moonless night, or of an early morning fog.

“We have to go back,” I said. “We have to find another way.”

“There is no other way,” Gio said. “We got no ladder. We got no time. The cops’ll be here soon, and you can be damn sure Danny knows it. Which means he’s gonna make his move, and quick. Here, take this.” Something hit me in the darkness. It was Gio’s bowling shirt. His Bermuda shorts followed shortly after.

“Uh, Gio —are you naked?”

“Relax, dude —I still got skivvies on.”

“If there’s a plan here, I’m not following.”

“Use my clothes to cover your exposed skin.”

I shook my head, and then realized he couldn’t see me by the skim’s pale half-light. “Gio, this won’t work. Skim’s too sharp. If you had a leather jacket, maybe, but even then there’d be no guarantee. And if I get so much as pricked, it’s lights out.”

“You don’t get it,” he said. “I got better than a leather jacket —I got me .”

“Gio, no. I can’t let you do this. You’re not among the living anymore —which means you’re not immune. This shit will knock you for a serious loop. I got dosed with a single shard, and I damn near didn’t come back. God knows what this many will do to you.”

Gio sighed, steeling himself. When he spoke, his voice was calm. “I ain’t worried about coming back. Long as my lady’s here, I’ll find my way. And as for God, I sincerely hope he’s watching.”

He was up before I could stop him. A short, fat man in boxer-briefs streaking wild-armed up the stairs, and screaming bloody murder all the while. The unlikeliest badass I’ve ever seen —and that includes his sightless lady-friend.

I had no choice but to follow after.

The shards of skim reacted like a swarm of killer bees when the plane was broken, homing in on him with laser precision. Each pinprick brought with it a bead of blood. Each shard that disappeared beneath his flesh dimmed the staircase slightly. Soon, there was no light left in the stairwell, save that which flickered like distant lightning within his flesh.

The flight was ten steps long. He made it five or six before he fell.

Then he was gone, swallowed by the skim’s forced slumber, and I was through.

The set-up of this floor was different from the other two. For one, half the damn ceiling was missing. Broken concrete exposed steel girders and night sky, and afforded me a glimpse of the storm clouds coalescing above us, blotting out what few stars pierced the city’s glare. On one distant hunk of crumbling concrete across the roof from where I stood sat a gathering of crows, their outline disconcertingly like that of a hunched old man.

This floor was also the only one to feature any internal construction. Metal studs framed out what looked to be a second, smaller pentagram before me, oriented opposite the one laid out by the perimeter of the building such that its outermost points touched the innermost of the larger one.

Two pentagrams set at odds to one another. Good and evil. Profound and profane. I wondered which the larger represented. I suspected I knew the answer.

Plastic sheeting was tacked over the metal studs, blurring the star-shaped room beyond from view. Beyond the plastic, candlelight danced, the light it cast through the plastic putting me in mind of a lantern’s glow.

I pushed aside a sheet of plastic and stepped into the room.

“Sam,” said the stranger with Danny’s accent, “so nice of you to join us!”

Us.

He said us .

Which made sense, on account of he wasn’t alone.

She was slight of build, and stunning in all the obvious ways. Sun-kissed hair spilled down over shoulders both shapely and deeply tanned. A spaghetti-strapped tank top of heather gray barely contained a pair of breasts just this side of ostentatious. A glimpse of midriff peeked out above a skirt that started so low and ended so high, in simpler times it would’ve caused a riot. Her legs gleamed with reflected candlelight, and went all the way to the floor.

In her hand, she held Psoglav’s skimming blade.

I turned my attention back to Danny, who was wearing a strapping lad of twenty-five or so, with pale blue eyes and teeth so white they seemed to glow. He looked unperturbed by my arrival. In fact, he appeared the picture of confidence in his yarn-dyed linen shirt and khaki shorts, a pair of leather sandals on his feet. “Who’s the skirt?” I asked him. The gnawing feeling in my gut told me I already knew.

“Who’s the skirt?” she repeated back to me, her crisp Balkan accent an added barb to her mockery. “Honestly, Sam, is that any way to greet an old friend?”

Ana . I should have known. All the magic. All the planning. Danny never could have managed this without her.

I took a step toward them. Danny raised a hand and waved at me a ludicrous revolver. Seriously, the thing was so big, Dirty Harry would’ve thought the thing excessive. And the way Danny was holding it, he was just as likely to break his wrist as hit me. But I knew him well enough to realize his carelessness was affected. He could put a round in my chest at twice this distance. So I stopped moving. Stayed put.

“That’s a good chap,” he said. “You’d be wise to stay outside the circle, or I fear I’ll be forced to get quite cross.”

I eyed the circle. I hadn’t noticed it until he’d called attention to it. The last one I’d seen was alder ash, the sacrifice of the trees’ lives enough to protect an entire building from the underworld’s reach. This one was smaller, only ten feet across, and made from blood.

“Yes,” Danny said, “the loss of life required for this little parlor trick, and the one you encountered downstairs, is unfortunate —but I assure you, I had the good grace to get the poor indigent who unwit tingly donated it nice and pissed on decent whisky before I tapped him. In all likelihood, it was a better death than he had coming.”