Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

“In the side table drawer?” The old man squinted down the sights of the big revolver.

Silent and dark as a shadow, she stepped out of the kitchen behind Atherton and touched the stun gun to his neck.

ZZZZZT!

The old man spasmed, dropped the gun, then fell and twitched in place a bit.

“AIEEEEEEEEEEE!” shrieked the banshee. Then, to Rivera, “Hello, love.”

Rivera fell to a crouch as he drew the Glock and leveled it at her chest. “Back,” he said. He moved to the old man and checked his pulse while keeping the Glock trained on the banshee.

“That’s no way to treat someone who just rescued you.”

“You didn’t rescue me.” Rivera moved the big Smith & Wesson away from Mr. Atherton, and shuddered. It was a.41 Magnum and would, indeed, have splattered parts of him all over the wall if the old man had shot him. “You might have killed him.”

“And he might have killed you. He’s fine. Catchin’ a bit of a nap is all. I’ve your wee box o’ lightning here if you need to give him another buzz.” The banshee clicked the stun gun and a bolt of electricity arced between the contacts.

“Put that down. Now. And back away.”

The banshee did as she was told, grinning the whole time. The old man let out a moan. Rivera knew he should call an ambulance, but wasn’t sure how to explain why he was here.

“Why are you here?” Rivera asked.

“Same as I told you, puppet, harbinger of doom. Usually death, ain’t it?”

“I read about your kind. You’re supposed to call hauntingly in the distance—‘a keening wail,’ they said. You’re not supposed to just appear out of nowhere zapping old people and screaming like a—”

“Like a what? Like a what, love? Say my name. Say my name.”

“What doom? What death? Mine? This guy?”

“Oh, no, he’ll be fine. No, the death I’m warning of is a right scary shit, innit he—a dark storm out of the Underworld, he is. You’ll be wanting a much bigger weapon than that wee thing.”

“It was big enough to stop one of your feathered sisters,” he said.

Rivera lowered the Glock. Actually, it was smaller than the fifteen-round 9-mm Beretta he’d shot the Morrigan with when he’d been on active duty before, nearly half the weight, only ten shots, but more powerful—it was a man-stopper. What did she know about the size of a man’s weapon, stupid, sooty-assed fairy anyway.

“Oh, you shot one of those bitches, and you still draw breath? Aren’t you lovely?” She batted her eyelashes at him coyly. “Still, won’t do for him what’s coming.”

“So you’re not here to warn of some general rising of forces of darkness and—”

“Oh, there’s those, love, to be sure. But it’s the one dark one you’ll be wanting to watch for—not like that winged dolt, Orcus, what came before.”

Rivera hadn’t seen it, the huge, winged Death that had killed so many of the Death Merchants. Charlie Asher had seen it torn apart by the Morrigan before they came for him.

“This one is worse?”

“Aye, this one won’t come bashing through the front door like Orcus. This one’s sneaky. Elegant.”

“Elegant? So you’re not part of the dark rising, you’re just here to warn me, I mean, us?”

“Appears so. Unsettled souls attract a bad lot. This city of yours is a whirlwind of ’em.”

“Like here, in this house?” Rivera was hoping. Maybe she could help.

“No, love, no human souls here ’cept yours and old Smokey’s there.”

Rivera looked down at Mr. Atherton—his shirt collar was smoking from where the stun gun had arced. He patted the ember out.

“So that’s why he could see me…” He looked to the banshee, but she was gone, leaving behind the smell of damp moss and burning peat. Somehow she’d managed to grab his stun gun as she left.

“Fuck!” said Rivera, to no one in particular.

Astudy in sadness: Sophie Asher—sitting at the picnic table by the edge of the playground, away from the other kids, denied access

to friends, laughter, and fun, condemned to watch from afar like some exile—was in a time-out.

He walked across the playground with something between a limp and a soft-shoe, as if there were brushes playing rhythm on a snare drum under his steps. He was tall, but not too tall, thin, but not too, dressed in different shades of soft yellow from shoe to hat, the latter a butter-colored homburg with a tiny red feather in the lemon-hued band. He sat down across from Sophie and swung his long legs in under the table.

Sophie saw him, but didn’t look up from coloring her ponies. He was wearing sunglasses on an overcast day, which Aunt Cassie would explain as him protecting his retinas from UV radiation and which Aunt Jane would explain as him being a douche.

“I don’t think you’re allowed to be here,” Sophie said. There was no gate into the playground, and he hadn’t come through the building, past the nuns.

“It’ll be all right,” said the yellow man. His voice was friendly and he sounded Southern. “Why so sad, peanut?” He smiled, just his lower teeth showed, one of them was gold, then he matched her pout to share her sadness.

“I’m in a T.O.,” said Sophie. She glared over her shoulder at Sister Maria la Madonna con el Corpo de Cristo encima una Tortilla, the Irish nun, who had stripped her of her recess and exiled her to this cold limbo by the fence. The nun returned her gaze with a stern, tight-lipped resolve—mime anger. The nun didn’t seem to see the man in yellow at all, which likely was something else she would be stern about.

“How’d you do to get yourself in such a fix, peanut?”

“I told them I had to go home to go to the bathroom and they said no.”

“You have bathrooms in the school, don’t you?” He said bathrooms with an f instead of a th, which she liked and decided that’s the way she would say it, too, from now on.

“It was number two,” she said, putting down her crayon and really looking up at him for the first time. “I don’t do number two away from home.”

“So you got shy dookie. That’s okay, I had that, too, when I was little. Shoot, bitches need to respect a person’s habits.”

“That’s what I said. But they’re all anti-Semites.”

“Y’all lost me, peanut. This a Catholic school, right?”

“Yeah, I go here because it’s by our house, but I’m a Jewess.”

“You don’t say?”

“And an orphan,” Sophie added gravely.

“Aw, that’s sad.”

“And my dogs ran away.”

He’d been shaking his head to the rhythm of the sadness of her story, but he stopped and looked up when she mentioned the goggies. She missed them. She didn’t feel safe without them, so she was acting out, that’s what Auntie Cassie would say.

The man in yellow whistled, a long, sad oh my gracious note. “You got shy dookie, and you an orphan?”

“I’m like Nemo,” Sophie said, still nodding, lots of lower lip to show her tragedy.

“You don’t say, you the captain of a submarine?”

“No, not that Nemo. The clown fish.” Her daddy had been a huge nerd and had taught her about Captain Nemo and the Nautilus, but she meant the real Nemo.

“Shoot, that the saddest story I ever heard, Shy Dookie.”

“That’s not my name.”

“That’s what I’m gonna call you.”

Sophie considered it for a moment. It could be her hip-hop name. Her secret hip-hop name. She shrugged, which meant, “Okay.”

“What’s your name?”

“You can just call me the Magical Negro,” said the man in yellow.