The Stringer Page 5

  She smiled at me. It was a warm, sad smile, the sort of smile your grandmother might offer when she was about to push you off a roof or shoot you in the head. Then she spoke a torrent of Words, a rapid-fire series of syllables that exploded in the room, burning up the river of gas. I was flung down onto the floor, arms and legs spread, my scream locked in my throat. I couldn’t move. I’d never felt this kind of power, this wanton waste of someone else’s lifeblood. I did the only thing left to me: I listened. I tried to remember.

  One of the Bleeders dropped to his knees with a thud, then fell forward.

  I remembered the girl in Hiram’s house. Shivering, looking down at her canvas sneakers. I remembered Hiram ordering me to bleed her, to get used to it, and I’d recoiled from the tiny flow of gas in the air, someone else’s life, gorgeous and revolting. I’d thought I knew what it felt like to steal someone’s life, but I’d been wrong. This was murder. This was power. And there was no difference.

  The old woman spoke the Words, and I felt my existence being pried open, something wedging its way into my mind. And still my scream was lodged in my throat, choking me.

  6.

  I CAME TO SLOWLY, swimming up through a haze that sucked at my thoughts and sent them spinning down unexpected tangents. And then I was even more confused, because I wasn’t lying down, I was walking, already in motion. It was a bright, chilly day and I was walking briskly down the street as I woke up, swinging my arms and making an incessant tuneless humming noise.

  I mentally flailed, trying to seize control of my own limbs. Nothing happened. I kept walking. I kept swinging my arms. I kept humming. It was like I was a passenger in my own body.

  And then I became aware of Lugal.

  It was like someone was standing too close to me, breathing on my neck, hands in my pockets. Or like someone was with me in a small room, but I couldn’t see them. Or like a story I once heard from an old duffer sitting at the bar at Rue Morgue who told me how he woke up several times a week unable to move or speak or open his eyes, and often remained that way for hours.

  I could feel my lungs, my leg muscles, working; I hadn’t walked this fast in a long time. I was practically running, and my anemic, malnourished body wasn’t happy, but the fucking demon kept me motoring forward. I knew it would push my body like a machine, making me move as fast as it needed me to, for as long as it needed me to, until I dropped dead. Lugal, I thought, was a better class of demon, and the old lady had inserted it into me while I was still alive. I had a feeling Fallon would be impressed by me when he saw me.

  I knew the neighborhood: Lower East Side, slowly gentrifying but still scuzzy, the sort of place where ancient rotten tattoo parlors sat between newly renovated wine bars. It was riddled with Tricksters. Little Magicians like me, we liked rich drunk people, and a neighborhood like this was infested with them at all hours of the day, ideal folks to cast a Charm mu on, a Glamour, sometimes both. I kept a lookout for someone I knew, someone who I might find a way to signal, though I didn’t have any clue how.

  Peculiarly, the streets were empty for the middle of the day, like everyone was inside watching television news and refreshing web pages. There were sirens in the air, more or less continuously, and as the demon moved me down the sidewalk, two cop cars raced by in quick succession, lights flashing.

  I stopped in front of a bar with no name, a narrow storefront with a single BEER sign lit up red and flickering. A jolt of panic went through me, because I knew this place. If it had an official name, I didn’t know it. But if someone said they were heading to the bar to buy some Bleeders, everyone knew they were headed to this shithole with the walls covered in doodles and signatures and doggerel, this shithole where the Brokers sat all day and night, their little notebooks at the ready, their sad inventory seated in the back.

  Only big shots had Bleeders, permanent blood bags. If you weren’t enustari, and you needed a lot of blood, or needed it fast without having to engage in fifteen separate insane negotiations with crazy, desperate people, you came downtown and found a Broker.

  Bleeders were curious people; at the higher levels, owned by enustari, they lived well. They were rich and well cared for, well fed and worried over—in exchange for the odd chance of being bled to death. Most were devoted. They loved their masters and mistresses, somehow—perhaps helped along by a premium-grade Charm spell.

  But even at the lower levels, like the folks a Broker would find for you, there was something odd. A willingness to die. An eagerness, maybe. To be part of something bigger. To literally give yourself to something.

  I struggled to stop my body. I put my back into it, such as it was, trying to worm my hands onto the controls, to assert myself. The panic returned, burning through my thoughts. It was worse than being paralyzed. I was moving, I was whole—I just wasn’t in charge.

  Lugal took notice of me.

  The sensation was unsettling and drove the panic and desperation out of me, replacing it with a skin-crawling terror that froze me. Lugal was enormous. It was an intelligence, heavy and dense, crushing me under it. Feeling that invisible gaze on me was like having an elephant lowered onto my mind one excruciating millimeter at a time. It filled me, pushing me into the corners, compressing me until I wanted to scream.

  And then it punished me, lighting me up. The pain was real, it was physical, caused by the entity that now had ownership of my body. It built and built until I was ready to cry, to beg, to pass out, if any of those options had been open to me. It was educational, too. Lugal had full fucking access. My memories, my skill set, my reflexes—everything I was or could be was available. I was a puppet in every way.

  When it lifted and returned to its own business, the relief was visceral. I remained in the dark corners of my own existence as my body strode into the bar, and I made no effort to do anything further.

  The Brokers straightened up as I walked in. There were six of them, sitting at the bar with their notebooks, their well-licked pencils marking up accounts.

  “Who’s this, then?” one of them asked.

  They all peered at me.

  “Vonnegan,” said a round, bald black guy with bright red gums sitting far back near the taps. “Chelsea.”

  “Who’s your gasam?” asked a third.

  “Bosch,” another answered, and everyone laughed.

  “That fat bastard,” said the round black guy, chortling. “Careful, gents, this one might be here to lift your wallets!”

  “What can we do for you, then, Vonnegan?” a tall, older woman said. She was wearing a pink housedress and fluffy pink slippers, blue-tinged sunglasses and a white shawl. She opened her notebook, which had the puffy, squished look of paper that had fallen into water, and clicked a cheap ballpoint pen, hovering it over her notebook.

  No Normals walked into this bar, that was obvious.

  Again I dived for the controls, seeking them far off in a dark room I’d never been to, vast and unexplored. Not this, I thought, trying somehow to communicate with the presence that had taken over my body. Anything but this. I didn’t bleed people. But here I was, about to contract for some Bleeders. And based on the sense I had of Lugal, of this alien, inscrutable power that animated me and pulled my strings, I thought it very likely that none of those Bleeders would survive the experience.

  Outwardly, I stood there, immobile and silent as Lugal turned its attention inward and sought me out, chasing me down in the shadows of my own subconscious and taking hold, dragging me painfully out into the harsh, burning invisible light of its unblinking eye, and I felt the will, the immense, implacable will. This was what it meant to be controlled, possessed, owned, whatever you wanted to call it.

  It began dragging words out of me.

  One by one, it formed a sentence, pulling it from me like rotten teeth. I did my best, struggling to cloud my thoughts, to confuse it, to offer up incorrect words.

  “Blood,�
�� I heard my voice say. “Bleeders. As many as you have, I’ll take.”

  I shrank from the demon’s presence, exhausted, a failure. It was tempting to just curl up mentally and drift, let it happen.

  The Brokers looked at one another. Housedress reached up to slide her glasses down the bridge of her nose, then looked around. “Fucking idimustari wants every piece of meat we got!”

  A wave of gentle laughter rippled through the room.

  “Listen, Little Magician,” she said, turning back to me. “I dunno what kind of asshole your gasam is, but trust me when I say whatever Love Cantrip or check-kiting bullshit you’re pulling together, one of our prime Bleeders is all you’re gonna need. You might wanna hear about our fractional plans, too, go in with a couple of your little friends, spread the cost.”

  Lugal reached down into me and yanked up a word. “All.”

  “Maybe he was sent to deal with some of this shit,” the round black Broker said, nodding at the televisions above the bar. Hell was breaking loose. People had been gunned down in Times Square. A dozen folks had been pushed in front of trains—my old pal Landry/Balahul hard at work, no doubt—and an explosion uptown had turned a block of brownstones into a war zone. A crawl of text along the bottom of each screen implied other ongoing disasters.

  “Fucking terrorists,” someone muttered. “We should all get together and donate the Bleeders and fucking show ’em who’s boss.”

  “Bad idea,” another said. “Unless you wanna explain everything the next day when we’re all over the goddamn screens everywhere.”

  I heard the Old Bat back at the house: Hiding, like insects. Don’t cast in public! Don’t be noticed!

  Housedress stared at the TVs, then looked at her peers again, sighing and making a note. “All right, kid. You got the scratch to cover that?”

  To my amazement, my hand went to my pocket and produced a thick wad of cash, easily enough to keep Mags in hot dogs for years to come. I’d never seen so much money in one place. The Broker stared, and then one by one her peers all looked up, catching the scent, and they stared, too. Tricksters like me didn’t usually wander in with actual money. Usually idimustari wanted charity, the kindness of strangers.

  “That why you’re here, kid?” Housedress asked. “Buying Bleeders for your gasam and his pals, gonna save the city?”

  Lugal didn’t know how to respond to that, so my body just stood there, proffering the cash. After a moment she turned and had a whispered consultation with everyone. Then she turned back to me, looking down at her notebook.

  “We got fifteen you can have right now, standard rates, triple kill penalties. We can get ten more in—” She glanced back, and signals were passed forward from the Brokers. “In two hours.” She looked up at me, expectant.

  Lugal pushed the money toward her and repeated its favorite word: “All.”

  7.

  AS WE ALL WAITED for the saddest assholes in the world to arrive, Lugal managed to maneuver me to sitting at the bar. The televisions continued to disgorge new calamities: murders, bombings, buses crashing into buildings. The Old Bat was getting busy, trying to tear down the modern world until everyone was huddled around fires and ready to worship the old gods—which she obviously thought were the ustari.

  As a Trickster, I knew that was hilarious. Ustari had caused so many of the world’s disasters, pulling a string and bleeding out a tribe, a village, a city, an entire population in order to cast their spells. We weren’t gods. We were an infection, an infestation, and we fed on the people who hadn’t discovered the Words, the power of sacrifice. And we worked hard—like the cowards we were—to keep everyone ignorant. If everyone knew the Words, even enustari would have to start working with their hands, like suckers.

  Outside, police and ambulances raced by every little while, filling the air with strident panic. I found myself waiting, trapped inside my own body, for the lights to flicker and fail. That would be the next step, the power going off.

  An intelligence like Lugal wasn’t well versed in acting appropriately in social situations, so it had me sitting very still, staring straight ahead. The Brokers buzzed and whispered, both about me and about the disasters that were spilling out of the TV sets. I was crushed into a tiny corner of my own consciousness, paralyzed and mute, and panic kept nipping at my heels.

  I realized with a start that my body was taking deep breaths. I was hyperventilating.

  In the mirror across from my body, I looked calm and steady. Creepily steady. I thought about the complexity of running a living human body like a puppet—a living body with a resident consciousness, namely me. The instruction set had to be huge. As opposed to Balahul and the corpse of Mr. Landry, which just required inhabiting an empty vessel, Lugal had to deal with a nervous system if it wanted to appear alive, if it wanted to pass all the smell tests. Lugal wasn’t sending me on a murder spree, like Balahul had Landry doing. It was trying to use me as a Trojan horse. Get some Bleeders, then pick my brain and force me to cast something ugly, contribute to the attack, undermine the world.

  I wondered if the Old Bat was planning to ride in on a broomstick and save the world with a seriously bloody biludha—a major ritual of some sort. Maybe that was her plan—kill the world, then become its hero?

  I concentrated on slowing my breathing. Told myself to relax. Pictured Mags sleeping, his face going through a complex series of expressions as he dreamed amazing things.

  And my breathing slowed down.

  Not much, but it was a little control, a tiny corner of my wiring that Lugal hadn’t been able to take over.

  Reflected in the mirror across the bar, a dilapidated old yellow school bus pulled up outside, belching black smoke and sagging in the middle in a way I was pretty sure buses weren’t supposed to sag. The door opened, and it began disgorging the saddest motherfuckers I’d ever seen in my life: our Bleeders.

  Blood was blood. The skinny, scowling men and women who crawled gingerly off the bus looked to be suffering from any number of diseases and afflictions, several of which I didn’t doubt had been contracted within the last hour while riding on that very bus. These, the saddest people in the world, marched into the bar, shuffling past us with watery stares and twitchy, nervous expressions. This prompted my puppet master to heave me up off the bar stool and follow them to the rear of the joint, where the Brokers were checking off figures in their notebooks.

  “All right, Vonnegan,” Housedress said, licking her pencil. “Twenty-five top-flight cows ripe for milking. You wanna inspect them before you haul ’em off?”

  I wanted to slap her, all of them, these fucks who pretended that if they didn’t know exactly what some asshole was going to do with twenty-five miserable, desperate Bleeders—and you could do some fucking damage with that much gas—then they weren’t responsible. But my rage didn’t matter, because Lugal suddenly reached into my brain and split it open, searching for a spell. And not just any spell, a spell of consequence, a spell that would rip a hole in New York and grind up whatever fell in, and then there’d be more blood, more gas in the air, a chain reaction of bleeding and spells feeding on that gas, swirling together while everything boiled away.

  Lugal pushed. It wanted a spell, a real spell, something heavy. But the joke was on it: I didn’t know any real spells, because Hiram had never taught me any.

  THE RITUAL THAT made you someone’s apprentice—more formally, the Ritual of Urtuku—is like every other piece of magic: It can be an endless haul of a biludha, complete with theatrics and fires and robes and shit, or it can be over in fifteen painful minutes with you lying in some fat old bastard’s tub bleeding more than you’d ever imagined possible, light-headed and nauseated and definitely, definitely regretting most of your life decisions.

  For all his pompous bullshit, Hiram Bosch was too impatient for the robes and the fires. When he agreed to take me as his apprentice, he bonded me in the fuckin
g bathroom, muttering a slur of syllables I couldn’t quite catch while I bled out and wondered if I’d just killed myself for his delight. For one horrifying moment I was somehow aware of Hiram’s heartbeat—lurching and flabby—superimposed on my own, and then it was over and my wounds had healed and Hiram handed me a bucket and a rag and told me to clean up my own bloodstains. From that moment forward, I could feel Hiram. He was a presence in the back of my brain, usually easily ignored but always there. And that connection, that invisible line between us, prevented me from going too far away from my gasam, and it allowed my Master to inflict pain on me when he was displeased.

  Hiram was a grouchy motherfucker. He was always displeased.

  He was also forgetful. He always forgot to feed me, and any food I scored for myself had to be shared with Mags, who I’d been tacitly given as part of my apprenticeship. Hiram also repeated his lessons, going over the same ground over and over and becoming enraged when I pointed that out to him.

  Hiram taught me one major spell. Just one. It was an amazing spell he’d written himself called the hun-kiuba. It stopped time. Back then, I’d been excited, thrilled. Hiram wasn’t much fun to be around, but he was teaching me. One day in and I had a split lip, but I’d learned more about magic than I’d ever imagined I would. I felt like a fucking sorcerer.

  Hiram never taught me anything that big ever again, though I got plenty more split lips when I forgot to scrub the bathroom, or touched one of his stolen trinkets, or was found loitering within five feet of the safe in his closet. As I slowly came to realize that Hiram and I were idimustari, Tricksters, Little Magicians, I learned that you had to steal everything, including knowledge.

  So I started paying attention, and every time Hiram cast a spell, I stole it.

  The Words fascinated me. This secret language, just syllables, noises, but combine them with blood in the air and they could do anything. Rework reality, fool people, hurt people—as with any language, the only limit to what you could sculpt with blood and Words was your imagination. I picked them up fast; if I heard a spell once, I knew it, and if I had some time, I could improve it, make it shorter, faster, more powerful.