Dead Witch Walking (4 page)

“It was for four weeks! You went to Alaska for the midnight sun!”

Her thin black eyebrows bunched, and she reached to arrange her owl’s feathers. “Half the rent, half the utilities, half of everything is my responsibility, half is yours. I bring in and do my business, you bring in and handle yours. If need be, we work together. Like before.”

I settled back, my huff not as obvious as I wanted it to be, since there was only the cushy upholstery to fall into. “Why?” I asked again.

Her fingers dropped from her owl. “I’m very good at what I do,” she said, not answering me. A hint of vulnerability had crept into her voice. “I won’t drag you down, Rachel. No vamp will dare move against me. I can extend that to you. I’ll keep the vamp assassins off of you until you come up with the money to pay off your contract. With my connections and your spells, we can stay alive long enough to get the I.S. to drop the price on our heads. But I want a wish.”

“There’s no price on our heads,” I said quickly.

“Rachel…” she cajoled. Her brown eyes were soft in worry, alarming me. “Rachel, there will be.” She leaned forward until I fought not to retreat. I took a shallow breath to look for the smell of blood on her, smelling only the tang of juice. She was wrong. The I.S. wouldn’t put a price on my head. They wanted me to leave. She was the one who should be worried.

“Me, too,” Jenks said suddenly. He vaulted to the rim of my mug. Iridescent dust sifted from his bent wing to make an oily film on my coffee. “I want in. I want a wish. I’ll ditch the I.S. and be both your backups. You’re gonna need one. Rache, you get the four hours before midnight, Ivy the four after, or whatever schedule you want. I get every fourth day off, seven paid holidays, and a wish. You let me and my family live in the office, real quietlike in the walls. Pay me what I’m making now, biweekly.”

Ivy nodded and took a sip of her juice. “Sounds good to me. What do you think?”

My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I can’t give you my wishes.”

The leprechaun bobbed her head. “Yes, you can.”

“No,” I said impatiently. “I mean, I need them.” A pang of worry had settled into my gut at the thought that maybe Ivy was right. “I already used one to not get caught letting her go,” I said. “I have to wish to get out of my contract, for starters.”

“Uh,” the leprechaun stammered. “I can’t do anything about that if it’s in writing.”

Jenks gave a snort of derision. “Not that good, eh?”

“Shut your mouth—bug!” she snapped, color showing on her cheeks.

“Shut your own, moss wipe!” he snarled back.

This can’t be happening,
I thought. All I wanted was out, not to lead a revolt. “You’re not serious,” I said. “Ivy, tell me this is your twisted sense of humor finally showing itself.”

She met my gaze squarely. I never could tell what was going on behind a vamp’s eyes. “For the first time in my career,” she said, “I’m going back empty-handed. I let my take go.” She waved a hand in the air. “Opened the trunk and let them run. I broke regulations.” A closed-lipped smile flickered over her and was gone. “Is that serious enough for you?”

“Go find your own leprechaun,” I said, catching myself as I reached for my cup. Jenks was still sitting on the handle.

She laughed. It was cold, and this time I did shiver. “I pick my runs,” she said. “What do you think would happen if I went after a leprechaun, muffed it, then tried to leave the I.S.?”

Across from me, the leprechaun sighed. “No amount of wishing could make that look good,” she piped up. “It’s going to be hard enough making this look like a coincidence.”

“And you, Jenks?” I said, my voice cracking.

Jenks shrugged. “I want a wish. It can give me something the I.S. can’t. I want sterility so my wife won’t leave me.” He flew a ragged path to the leprechaun. “Or is that too hard for you, greenie weenie?” he mocked, standing with his feet spread wide and his hands on his hips.

“Bug,” she muttered, my charms jingling as she threatened to squish him. Jenks’s wings went red in anger, and I wondered if the dust sifting from him could catch fire.

“Sterility?” I questioned, struggling to keep to the topic at hand.

He flipped the leprechaun off and strutted across the table to me. “Yeah. You know how many brats I’ve got?”

Even Ivy looked surprised. “You’d risk your life over that?” she asked.

Jenks made a tinkling laugh. “Who said I’m risking my life? The I.S. couldn’t care less if I leave. Pixies don’t sign contracts. They go through us too fast. I’m a free agent. I always have been.” He grinned, looking far too sly for so small a person. “I always will be. I figure my life span will be marginally longer with only you two lunkers to watch out for.”

I turned to Ivy. “I know you signed a contract. They love you. If anyone should be worried about a death threat, it’s you, not me. Why would you risk that for—for—” I hesitated. “For nothing? What wish could be worth that?”

Ivy’s face went still. A hint of black shadow drifted over her. “I don’t have to tell you.”

“I’m not stupid,” I said, trying to hide my disquiet. “How do I know you aren’t going to start practicing again?”

Clearly insulted, Ivy stared at me until I dropped my gaze, chilled to the bone.
This,
I thought,
is definitely not a good idea.
“I’m not a practicing vamp,” she finally said. “Not anymore. Not ever again.”

I forced my hand down, realizing I was playing with my damp hair. Her words were only slightly reassuring. Her glass was half empty, and I only remembered her taking the one sip.

“Partners?” Ivy said, extending her hand across the table.

Partners with Ivy? With Jenks?
Ivy was the best runner the I.S. had. It was more than a little flattering that she wanted to work with me on a permanent basis, if also a bit worrisome. But it wasn’t as if I had to live with her. Slowly I stretched my hand to meet hers. My perfectly shaped red nails looked garish next to her unpolished ones. All my wishes—gone. But I would’ve probably wasted them anyway. “Partners,” I said, shivering at the coldness of Ivy’s hand as I took it.

“All right!” Jenks crowed, flitting to land on top of our handshake. The dust sifting from him seemed to warm Ivy’s touch. “Partners!”

“D
ear God,” I moaned under my breath. “Don’t let me be sick. Not here.” I shut my eyes in a long blink, hoping the light wouldn’t hurt so much when I opened them. I was in my cubicle, twenty-fifth floor of the I.S. tower. The afternoon sun slanted in, but it would never reach me, my desk being toward the middle of the maze. Someone had brought in doughnuts, and the smell of the frosting made my stomach roil. All I wanted was to go back home and sleep.

Tugging open my top drawer, I fumbled for a pain amulet, groaning when I found I’d used them all. My forehead hit the edge of the metal desk, and I stared past my frizzy length of hair to my ankle boots peeping past the hem of my jeans. I had worn something conservative in deference to my quitting: a tuck-in red linen shirt and pants. No more tight leather for a while.

Last night had been a mistake. It had taken far too many drinks for me to get stupid enough to officially give my remaining wishes to Ivy and Jenks. I had really been counting on the last two. Anyone who knows anything about wishes knows you can’t wish for more. The same goes for wishing for wealth. Money doesn’t just appear. It has to come from somewhere, and unless you wish not to get caught, they always get you for theft.

Wishes are tricky things, which was why most Inderlanders had lobbied to get a minimum of three-per-go. In hindsight, I hadn’t done too badly. Having wished to not get caught letting the leprechaun go would at least allow me to leave the I.S. with a clear record. If Ivy was right and they were going to nack me for breaking my contract, they would have to make it look like an accident. But why would they bother? Death threats were expensive, and they wanted me gone.

Ivy had gotten a marker to call her wish in later. It looked like an old coin with a hole in it, and she had laced it on a purple cord and hung it about her neck. Jenks, though, spent his wish right in the bar, buzzing off to give the news to his wife. I should have left when Jenks had, but Ivy didn’t seem to want to leave. It had been a long time since I’d had a girls’ night out, and I thought I might find the courage at the bottom of a glass to tell the boss I was leaving. I hadn’t.

Five seconds into my rehearsed speech, Denon flipped open an manila envelope, pulled out my contract, and tore it up, telling me to be out of the building in half an hour. My badge and I.S.-issue cuffs were in his desk; the charms that had decorated them were in my pocket.

My seven years with the I.S. had left me with an accumulated clutter of knickknacks and outdated memos. Fingers trembling, I reached for a cheap, thick-walled vase that hadn’t seen a flower for months. It went into the trash, just like the cretin who had given it to me. My dissolution bowl went into the box at my feet. The salt-encrusted blue ceramic grated harshly on the cardboard. It had gone dry last week, and the rime of salt left from evaporation was dusty.

A wooden dowel of redwood clattered in next to it. It was too thick to make a wand out of, but I wasn’t good enough to make a wand anyway. I had bought the dowel to make a set of lie-detecting amulets and never got around to it. It was easier to buy them. Stretching, I grabbed my phone list of past contacts. A quick look to be sure no one was watching, and I shoved it out of sight next to my dissolution bowl, sliding my disc player and headphones to cover it.

I had a few reference books to go back to Joyce across the aisle, but the container of salt propping them up had been my dad’s. I set it in the box, wondering what Dad would think of me leaving. “He would be pleased as punch,” I whispered, gritting my teeth against my hangover.

I glanced up, sending my gaze over the ugly yellow partitions. My eyes narrowed as my coworkers looked the other way. They were standing in huddled groups as they gossiped, pretending to be busy. Their hushed whispers grated on me. Taking a slow breath, I reached for my black-and-white picture of Watson, Crick, and the woman behind it all, Rosalind Franklin. They were standing before their model of DNA, and Rosalind’s smile had the same hidden humor of Mona Lisa. One might think she knew what was going to happen. I wondered if she had been an Inderlander. Lots of people did. I kept the picture to remind myself how the world turns on details others miss.

It had been almost forty years since a quarter of humanity died from a mutated virus, the T4 Angel. And despite the frequent TV evangelists’ claim otherwise, it wasn’t our fault. It started and ended with good old-fashioned human paranoia.

Back in the fifties, Watson, Crick, and Franklin had put their heads together and solved the DNA riddle in six months. Things might have stopped there, but the then-Soviets grabbed the technology. Spurred by a fear of war, money flowed into the developing science. By the early sixties we had bacteria-produced insulin. A wealth of bioengineered drugs followed, flooding the market with offshoots of the U.S.’s darker search for bioengineered weapons. We never made it to the moon, turning science inward instead of outward to kill ourselves.

And then, toward the end of the decade, someone made a mistake. The debate as to whether it was the U.S. or the Soviets is moot. Somewhere up in the cold Arctic labs, a lethal chain of DNA escaped. It left a modest trail of death to Rio that was identified and dealt with, the majority of the public unaware and ignorant. But even as the scientists wrote their conclusionary notes in their lab books and shelved them, the virus mutated.

It attached itself to a bioengineered tomato through a weak spot in its modified DNA that the researchers thought too minuscule to worry about. The tomato was officially known as the T4 Angel tomato—its lab identification—and from there came the virus’s name, Angel.

Unaware that the virus was using the Angel tomato as an intermediate host, it was transported by the airlines. Sixteen hours later it was too late. The third world countries were decimated in a frightening three weeks, and the U.S. shut down in four. Borders were militarized, and a governmental policy of “Sorry, we can’t help you” was instituted. The U.S. suffered and people died, but compared to the charnel pit the rest of the world became, it was a cakewalk.

But the largest reason civilization remained intact was that most Inderland species were resistant to the Angel virus. Witches, the undead, and the smaller species like trolls, pixies, and fairies were completely unaffected. Weres, living vamps, and leprechauns got the flu. The elves, though, died out completely. It was believed their practice of hybridizing with humans to bolster their numbers backfired, making them susceptible to the Angel virus.

When the dust settled and the Angel virus was eradicated, the combined numbers of our various species had neared that of humanity. It was a chance we quickly seized. The Turn, as it came to be called, began at noon with a single pixy. It ended at midnight with humanity huddling under the table, trying to come to grips with the fact that they’d been living beside witches, vampires, and Weres since before the pyramids.

Humanity’s first gut reaction to wipe us off the face of the earth petered out pretty fast when it was shoved under their noses that we had kept the structure of civilization up and running while the world fell apart. If not for us, the death rate would have been far higher.

Even so, the first years after the Turn were a madhouse. Afraid to strike out at us, humanity outlawed medical research as the demon behind their woes. Biolabs were leveled, and the bioengineers who escaped the plague stood trial and died in little more than legalized murder. There was a second, subtler wave of death when the source of the new medicines were inadvertently destroyed along with the biotechnology.

It was only a matter of time before humanity insisted on a purely human institution to monitor Inderlander activities. The Federal Inderland Bureau arose, dissolving and replacing local law enforcement throughout the U.S. The out-of-work Inderlander police and federal agents formed their own police force, the I.S. Rivalry between the two remains high even today, serving to keep a tight lid on the more aggressive Inderlanders.

Four floors of Cincinnati’s main FIB building are devoted to finding the remaining illegal biolabs where, for a price, one can still get clean insulin and something to stave off leukemia. The human-run FIB is as obsessed in finding banned technology as the I.S. is with getting the mind-altering drug Brimstone off the streets.

And it all started when Rosalind Franklin noticed her pencil had been moved, and someone was where they ought not be,
I thought, rubbing my fingertips into my aching head. Small clues. Little hints. That’s what makes the world turn. That’s what made me such a good runner. Smiling back at Rosalind, I wiped the fingerprints off the frame and put it in my keep box.

There was a burst of nervous laughter behind me, and I yanked open the next drawer, shuffling through the dirty self-stick notes and paper clips. My brush was right where I always left it, and a knot of worry loosened as I tossed it into the box. Hair could be used to make spells target specific. If Denon was going to slap a death threat on me, he would have taken it.

My fingers found the heavy smoothness of my dad’s pocket watch. Nothing else was mine, and I slammed the drawer shut, stiffening as my head seemed to nearly explode. The watch’s hands were frozen at seven to midnight. He used to tease me that it had stopped the night I was conceived. Slouching in my chair, I wedged it into my front pocket. I could almost see him standing in the doorframe of the kitchen, looking from his watch to the clock over the sink, a smile curving over his long face as he pondered where the missing moments had gone.

I set Mr. Fish—the Beta-in-bowl I had gotten at last year’s office Christmas party—into my dissolution basin, trusting chance would keep both the water and the fish from sloshing out. I tossed the canister of fish flakes after him. A muffled thump from the far end of the room pulled my attention beyond the partitions and to Denon’s closed door.

“You won’t get three feet out that door, Tamwood,” came his muffled shout, silencing the buzz of conversations. Apparently, Ivy had just resigned. “I’ve got a contract. You work for me, not the other way around! You leave and—” There was a clatter behind the closed door. “Holy shit…” he continued softly. “How much is that?”

“Enough to pay off my contract,” Ivy said, her voice cold. “Enough for you and the stiffs in the basement. Do we have an understanding?”

“Yeah,” he said in what sounded like greedy awe. “Yeah. You’re fired.”

My head felt as if it was stuffed with tissue, and I rested it in my cupped hands. Ivy had money? Why hadn’t she said anything last night?

“Go Turn yourself, Denon,” Ivy said, clear in the absolute hush. “I quit. You didn’t fire me. You may have my money, but you can’t buy into high-blood. You’re second-rate, and no amount of money can change that. If I have to live in the gutters off rats, I’ll still be better than you, and it’s killing you I won’t have to take your orders anymore.”

“Don’t think this makes you safe,” the boss raved. I could almost see that vein popping on his neck. “Accidents happen around her. Get too close, and you might wake up dead.”

Denon’s door swung open and Ivy stormed out, slamming his door so hard the lights flickered. Her face was tight, and I don’t think she even saw me as she whipped past my cubicle. Somewhere between having left me and now, she had donned a calf-length silk duster. I was secure enough in my own gender preference to admit she made it look very good. The hem billowed as she crossed the floor with murderous strides. Spots of anger showed on her pale face. Tension flowed from her, almost visible it was so strong.

She wasn’t going vampy; she was just mad as all get-out. Even so, she left a cold wake behind her that the sunlight streaming in couldn’t touch. An empty canvas bag hung over her shoulder, and her wish was still about her neck.
Smart girl,
I thought.
Save it for a rainy day.
Ivy took the stairs, and I closed my eyes in misery as the metal fire door slammed into the wall.

Jenks zipped into my cubicle, buzzing about my head like a deranged moth as he showed off the patch job on his wing. “Hi, Rache,” he said, obnoxiously cheerful. “What’s cooking?”

“Not so loud,” I whispered. I would have given anything for a cup of coffee but wasn’t sure it was worth the twenty steps to the coffeepot. Jenks was dressed in his civvies, the colors loud and clashing. Purple doesn’t go well with yellow. It never has; it never will. God help me, his wing tape was purple, too. “Don’t you get hung over?” I breathed.

He grinned, settling himself on my pencil cup. “Nope. Pixy metabolisms are too high. The alcohol turns to sugar too fast. Ain’t that fine!”

“Swell.” I carefully wrapped a picture of Mom and me up in a wad of tissue and set it next to Rosalind. I briefly entertained the idea of telling my mom I didn’t have a job, deciding not to for obvious reasons. I’d wait until I found a new one. “Is Ivy okay?” I asked.

“Yeah. She’ll be all right.” Jenks flitted to the top of my pot of laurel. “She’s just ticked it took everything she had to buy her way out of her contract and cover her butt.”

I nodded, glad they wanted me gone. Things would be a lot easier if neither of us had a price on our head. “Did you know she had money?”

Jenks dusted off a leaf and sat down. He adopted a superior look, which is hard to manage when you’re only four inches tall and dressed like a rabid butterfly. “Well, duh…She’s the last living blood-member of her house. I’d give her some space for a few days. She’s as mad as a wet wasp. Lost her house in the country, the land, stocks, everything. All that’s left is the city manor on the river, and her mother has that.”

I eased back into my chair, unwrapped my last piece of cinnamon gum, and stuck it in my mouth. There was a clatter as Jenks landed in my cardboard box and began poking about. “Oh, yeah,” he muttered. “Ivy said she has a spot rented already. I’ve got the address.”

“Get out of my stuff.” I flicked a finger at him, and he flew back to the laurel, standing atop the highest branch to watch everyone gossip. My temple pounded as I bent to clean out my bottom drawer.
Why had Ivy given Denon everything she had? Why not use her wish?