The Stringer Read online

  I stood on the thick carpet that felt crusty and stiff under me, my throbbing fingers in my pockets, and hesitated. It was strange. No one had been in the apartment for decades, and you could feel it, the emptiness, the shock of movement forcing jellied air back into motion. The place looked like a museum, smelled like the back alley of a butcher shop, and my skin crawled.

  There was nothing. Of course there was nothing. I was shaking a little, my fingers throbbing and my newest wound bleeding slowly, the bandage damp and clinging on by sheer determination. This had been our last, best idea.

  There had to be something. There had to be something.

  There was: a dead girl in the tub.

  The bathroom was small, covered over with a black-and-white tile design made up of tiny little squares, dozens of which had popped from the walls. There was more water damage in here, a humid feel, the ceiling sagging downward as if filled with brackish, rusty liquid. The smell was bad, trapped in the tiny confines. There was an ornate pedestal sink with brass fixtures and a small, basic-looking toilet with a pull-chain flush, the water tank on the wall above it. The mirror had darkened, black spots clouding the silver, one on top of the other until it was a dark, phantom mirror, something that grudgingly reflected you but only after running you through smoke and clouds.

  The tub was a big old claw-foot, the porcelain yellow, the brass fixtures matching the sink. There was no showerhead.

  The girl was young and naked, lying on her side with her knees drawn up to her belly, her skin milky, blue veins visible. She had short dark hair and looked almost peaceful curled up on the bone-dry bottom of the tub. I looked around; the place appeared deserted, but someone had been here within the last few days to drop off a body. I stood there, listening, as it suddenly seemed entirely probable that someone had crept into the place behind us.

  Mags knelt down and peered at her, cocking his head. “She’s been bled, Lem.”

  I blinked and looked at him. The words were just sounds, and then meaning snapped into them and I stepped over to stand next to him, looking down at the girl. He was right. She had the translucent look to her, drained cleanly, every drop of blood sucked out. I knelt down next to him and reached in to push some of her short dark hair aside, squinting down at the wound on her neck. It was clean and minimal, familiar.

  Mags had the clean-slate cheer of the dim-witted. He crouched there serenely, certain that I would solve this little problem for us. That I would roll her over and discover some ancient cash, or jewels, or discover that she wasn’t dead at all. Mags’s faith in me was sometimes invigorating, more often exhausting. Mags could survive on rage and profanity; he didn’t need to eat. I thought of him as a pet sometimes, a monstrous kitten I’d picked up and let sleep in my pocket one night, and now—when I looked at his plump, blood-engorged face and twitchy, murderous hands, I felt a stab of horrifying affection—Mags was my responsibility.

  I was thirty-three years old and I was wearing the sum total of my worldly possessions, and recently, decisions I’d made when I was fifteen didn’t seem so fucking bright anymore. We all thought we were special—all of us, every fucking Trickster all the way up to the fucking enustari, we all thought we had the edge. And maybe we did. But here I was, dopey from blood loss and begging the universe for a handout.

  I stood up and fished my switchblade from my pocket, pressing the button and hearing the familiar, horrible snick of the blade flashing out.

  “What—” Mags said, barking the word like he meant it as declarative: What!

  I unfolded my left hand and drew the blade across my palm, just deeply enough to draw a thick, slow ooze of blood. The pain, as always, shivered through me like poison, and I sucked in a breath, tensing. I’d cut myself millions of times. I had faint white scars on both hands, my arms, my legs, and even my stomach. I did it immediately and without thought, letting my underbrain run the show.

  Blood dripped from my clenched fist as a hot icy rash of fire spread over my palm. Closing my eyes I imagined the glow, saw the faint blue light in my mind, and on the beat of my heart I whispered the spell. The blood sizzled away midair, consumed, and my wound was dry and open, aching.

  A wave of dizzy weariness swept through me. As a damp line of blood oozed into place on my palm, my hand was engulfed in a soft blue glow that made Mags look like he was made of shadows. Puke mounting in my throat, I knelt down and resisted the urge to put my forehead against the cool porcelain tub. I stretched out my arm to hold the eerie light over her. Instantly, a complex pattern of symbols, like invisible tattoos, faded into visibility on her skin, covering all of her. I knew without checking that they were under her hair, too, inside her earlobes, on the webby skin between her fingers.

  “Fuck,” Mags breathed, the word now a plaintive exclamation. “She’s marked.”

  I stared down at the runes for another second. They were complex, and I didn’t have time to pick through them and compare them to my memories, to what my gasam had taught me. I knew a few things right away: I knew the runes would Ward her from any other magic I might try to cast, resisting all but the most bloody and powerful spells, and I knew this meant she was part of something way out of my league.

  I studied her face. Sixteen? Twenty? It was hard to tell. Curled up in the tub, she looked peaceful. Young. There were old bruises on her arms. A crust of snotty blood around one nostril. I looked at her feet. Was relieved she was barefoot. For a second I remembered canvas tennis shoes, pink marker. The sound of a girl shivering, her bare arms bruised just like that.

  I pushed the memory away, angry at myself. I hadn’t bled this girl. I hadn’t done anything.

  I looked at Mags. His big, flat face was crunched up in thought, and I knew I had to get him out of here before whoever had done this came back. I snapped my hand out like I was throwing something and the blue light sizzled away, leaving us in the faint light of the candle. I reached down and dragged him up by his collar.

  I’d thought about turning around. A moment of crazy affection for Mags outside the door and I’d thought maybe sleeping out in the open one more night wouldn’t be the worst thing ever. Now I knew what the Worst Thing Ever looked like. Or at least the tip of that black iceberg.

  “Come on,” I said, pushing him toward the door. Mags could fold me into complex patterns and not break a sweat, but he was tame.

  “What’s up, Lem?”

  I kept pushing him, urging him to go faster, imagining the owner of that corpse walking in the door and finding us—and whoever had marked her was a fucking deep well of trouble for any Trickster or normal person caught here.

  We are not good people.

  We rushed through the hall and back into the first room, as sealed and stultifying as ever, the candle guttering in front of us and throwing odd shadows everywhere. My heart was pounding as I urged the big cocksucker forward, almost throwing him through the door. I didn’t bother putting things back the way they’d come; the important thing was to not be here anymore.

  In the hall, I spun and pulled the door shut behind us, my fingers still throbbing. I squeezed my sliced hand again and opened my palm to reveal a nice smear of greasy blood; I wrapped my hand around the doorknob, took a deep breath, and whispered a Cantrip to replace the Wards we’d broken and not noticed in our haste to get inside, the syllables—not Words, really, just sounds—welling up automatically from memory. It was all about patterns, rhythms. You could find ways to cut the Words down, just like any language. You could say Please pass me the salt or you could say Pass the salt and they meant the same thing. It was the same with magic. You could cast a spell with fifty Words, you could cast the same spell with five Words, if you knew what you were doing.

  I’d always had a way with the Words.

  Another wave of tiredness settled into my bones, and I staggered a bit, holding onto the doorknob. When I’d steadied again, I took my hand away. The door looked
exactly as it had when we arrived. No one who walked by would ever notice anything out of the ordinary . . . unless they had a trained eye and specifically knew to look for something.

  I took a deep breath. My heart was ragged in my chest, and I felt shaky and light. I reached into my jacket and extracted an old, soiled handkerchief and started wrapping it around my hand.

  “C’mon, Mags,” I said, turning for the stairs.

  He hustled to walk beside me. “What’s the matter, Lem?”

  I didn’t pause. I could hear thick leathery wings in my head, too close. “Deep magic, Mags,” I said, pushing open the door to the stairs. “Deep fucking magic.”

  Read the entire Ustari Cycle!

  The main story!

  We Are Not Good People

  * * *

  Down and out in New Jersey.

  Fixer

  * * *

  In Mags' own words. . .

  Last Best Day

  * * *

  Time keeps on slipping. . .

  The Boom Bands

  * * *

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JEFF SOMERS began writing by court order as an attempt to steer his creative impulses away from engineering genetic grotesqueries. His feeble memory makes every day a joyous adventure of discovery even as it destroys personal relationships, and his weakness for adorable furry creatures leaves him with many cats. He has published nine novels, including the Avery Cates series of noir science fiction novels from Orbit Books; the darkly hilarious crime novel Chum from Tyrus Books; and, most recently, tales of blood magic and short cons in the Ustari Cycle, including the novel We Are Not Good People, the novella The Stringer, and the upcoming novellas Last Best Day and The Boom Bands from Pocket Star Books. He has published more than thirty short stories, including “Ringing the Changes,” which was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories, 2006; “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through,” which appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, edited by Charlaine Harris; and “Three Cups of Tea,” which appeared in the anthology Hanzai Japan. He also writes about books for Barnes and Noble and About.com, and about the craft of writing for Writer’s Digest. He lives in Hoboken with his wife, The Duchess, and their cats. He considers pants to always be optional.

  FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Jeff-Somers

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  THE USTARI CYCLE

  We Are Not Good People

  “Fixer”

  The Stringer

  “Last Best Day”

  “The Boom Bands”

  THE AVERY CATES SERIES

  The Electric Church

  The Digital Plague

  The Eternal Prison

  The Terminal State

  The Final Evolution

  STAND-ALONE NOVELS

  Lifers

  Chum

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Pocket Star Books eBook.

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  Pocket Star Books

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Jeff Somers

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Pocket Star Books ebook edition August 2016

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  Cover design by David G. Stevenson

  Cover photos © Odor Zsolt/Shutterstock (tunnel), © Georgii Shipin/Shutterstock (street scene), © Tatiana Tigris/Shutterstock (sparkles), © Roman Globa/Shutterstock (standing man), and © Ostill/Shutterstock (squatting man)

  ISBN 978-1-5011-4140-9