For the next sixty years, Algonquin had ruled the DFZ like an empress, forging it into a magical nexus of unbridled human greed. But the magic wasn’t done coming back. The first night had been the most explosive, but the background magic kept creeping up slowly as the decades rolled on. Eventually, the ambient power got so high that it birthed a new god: the Spirit of the DFZ itself.
The ensuing battle for control of the city had leveled Detroit yet again. In the end, Algonquin got booted back to her lakes, and the new goddess claimed control. That was twenty years ago. The DFZ had rebuilt herself bigger than ever in the years since, and she wasn’t alone. The tipping point of rising power that had created her—now known as the Second Crash—brought many other gods as well. Some were old, like Algonquin, and some were new, like the DFZ, but they were all powerful, and an inordinate number of them were gods of death.
No one knew how many death gods there were exactly, but their presence meant that doing anything disrespectful to a dead body, especially stealing, was a very bad idea. Death gods weren’t forgiving as a rule, and here in the DFZ, the most magical city in the world, they were at their strongest. That cybernetic hand might be worth a thousand at auction, but the curse I’d get for taking it would cost me a lot more, so I left the hand where it lay and focused on digging through the dead man’s underwear drawer, hoping against hope that he’d hidden something of value beneath all his tighty whities. I’d just moved on to his shirts when I heard someone say my name.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. Thankfully, Sibyl was on it, swirling my cameras to give me eyes in the back of my head just in time to see a young black man with a rather sketchy-looking tomcat on his shoulder walk through the bedroom door.
“Peter!” I gasped, clutching my poor chest. “Don’t do that to me!”
“Sorry, Opal,” he said apologetically. “I tried to knock, but the front door was gone.” A smirk spread over his face. “Not that I should have expected anything less, seeing it was you.”
“Hey, I don’t always take the door off,” I said grumpily, eyeing the folding stretcher he was carrying under his left arm. “But what are you doing here? Broker said he was sending a disposal detail.”
“He called in for one,” Peter said. “But when I heard that the victim had been dead in his apartment for a month and no one noticed, I volunteered to take care of him.” He reached up to pet his rangy cat. “He seemed like our kind of fellow.”
When he put it that way, it made sense. Peter was a priest for one of those new death gods. Specifically, he’d dedicated himself to the Empty Wind, Spirit of the Forgotten Dead, which definitely included our guy.
“Do you need help getting him out?”
“I can manage, thanks,” Peter said, leaning over to let his cat jump down. “Once we commit the body, he’ll get a lot easier to move. The Empty Wind takes care of his own.”
From anyone else, that would have been a cryptic thing to say, but Peter made it sound like a blessing. That was how he always talked, though. He came to the Cleaner auctions sometimes to buy up units he claimed belonged to the Forgotten Dead. Auctions were always a circus, but even when everyone else was shouting, Peter never raised his voice. He didn’t have to. The moment he bid, everyone else shut up. Broker claimed it was all superstition and rallied us to bid higher, but he made his living taking a cut off the top of our auctions. He also didn’t understand. I hadn’t either before I’d started Cleaning. I’d thought the DFZ was just a crazy city with a mind of its own, but get down in the Underground where people are really desperate, and you see things. I didn’t worship the Empty Wind like Peter did, but I didn’t doubt for a moment that he was real, and spooky as that was, I was happy our dead guy had a god to care about him, since no one else seemed to.
“I’ll just keep going, then,” I said, turning back to the drawers. “Let me know if you need help.”
“I will,” Peter said. “Thank you, Opal.”
There was power in those words. Gods had long memories, which meant being nice to priests was always a good idea. I would have helped him anyway, though, because I liked Peter. Priesthood aside, he was a genuinely good guy. Those were a rare commodity anywhere, but they were nigh unheard of in the DFZ. That made me eager to stay in his good graces, even if it meant hauling a dead guy up two flights of stairs.
Thankfully, it didn’t come to that. Peter didn’t ask for anything. He just knelt beside the dead man, whispering promises of eternal remembrance in his calm, deep voice while I dug through the drawers. It was so peaceful, I didn’t even flinch when a grave-cold wind rose from nowhere, sweeping the heavy, putrid air out of the apartment. I was still appreciating the cool when I heard Peter unfold his stretcher and start loading the body.
That broke the spell real quick. Turns out, month-old corpses make horrible noises when you move them. Frantic to distract myself from the nightmare soundtrack going on behind me, I picked up the pace, shoving my hand below the bed, the only place in the apartment I hadn’t searched yet. I was groping blindly through the dust bunnies when something sharp stabbed into my finger.
“Ow!”
“What?” Peter said, stretcher clattering to the ground.
“Nothing, nothing,” I said, yanking my arm back to cradle my smarting fingers. “Just being an idiot.”
A total idiot. I’d been so eager to take my mind off the goopy biology behind me that I’d broken the number-one rule of Cleaning: never put your hand where you can’t see it. Luckily, I still had all my fingers, but the first two were burning like they’d been bitten by a wasp rat. If my gloves hadn’t been so thick, I would have suspected there was an actual critter under there, but not only was the rubber still whole, my skin looked fine when I yanked my glove off, which meant it wasn’t an animal that had bitten me.
It was a spell.
My face split into an enormous grin. Moving at the speed of greed, I dropped to my stomach and wiggled under the bed, using my headlamps to spot the culprit: a warded box tucked into the gap where the bed’s leg met the wall. Not stupid enough to get bitten a second time, I reached into my bag and pulled out my tongs, using the rubber-coated grips to grab the box and ease it out into the light.
What came out was a metal container slightly larger than a shoebox and absolutely covered in the same bizarre chicken-scratch custom spellwork as the front door. Some of the markings were still glowing from where the spell had zapped me, but unlike the ward on the front door, which could have done who knew what, even I could see this was a security spell. Complicated, powerful, but still just a safe at the end of the day, and if there was anything I’d learned from a year and a half in this business, it was how to crack a safe.
“Oh, yeah!” I said as I pulled magic into my hands. “Come on, loot box!”
Since Peter was here, I had to keep my magic toned down, which meant it took me five minutes to crush the first lock and a full ten to crack the next. By the time I reached the final one, Peter had our dead guy wrapped in a dignified sheet on the stretcher. He was clearing a path through the living room to the front door when the warded box in my lap finally clicked open.
Completely forgetting my earlier lesson about sticking parts of myself where they shouldn’t be, I tore the lid open and shoved my hand inside, grabbing for whatever magical treasure had to be in there. Given this guy’s obsession with ancient magic, I was hoping for something really good: a legit alchemical relic, ancient spellwork tablets, old enchanted glass.