2
The piss in my chamber pot was frozen.
I hadn’t really been sleeping, just scrunched up, wearing every item of clothing I owned, pretending I was dead until the sun came up.
I slipped out of bed and forced my double-socked feet into my boots. When I first moved into my office/apartment/icebox, I’d liked the idea of being on the fifth floor. The view was high enough to make me feel like I was looking over the whole city, and the fall out the Angel door would be hard enough to kill me if I dived out of there head first. It’s just one of those little touches that makes a house a home.
Sunder was a sprawling city, though not particularly tall. That meant that my building made an impressive lookout, but it also caught the full force of the wind. The breeze came in through cracks around the windows and the gaps between the bricks. It even forced its way into the room below and came up through the floorboards. I was going to patch the place up when I had the time. Just like I was going to get a haircut and stop drinking and sew up the holes in my trousers before they completely fell apart.
The cuts to my face had been worse than I’d thought. The morning after my trip to the stadium, I’d asked Georgio, the owner of the café at the bottom of the building, to put in some stitches. His shaking hands only made the blood flow faster so I told him to forget about it. Four days had passed since then. Now, I had four red-brown lines down the right side of my face and was hoping they wouldn’t scar.
I didn’t have my own bathroom. Hence the chamber pot. I picked it up and opened the door to the waiting room and almost bumped into a woman. She was standing there, caught out, like she’d just changed her mind about knocking but hadn’t gotten away fast enough.
It was Linda Rosemary.
She was wrapped up in the same set of sensible clothes she’d been wearing the other night: red overcoat, houndstooth scarf and a black, woolen beret off to one side. The first time I’d seen her, it was night and she was covered in snow. I hadn’t noticed how tired and broken everything was. On her hands she wore thick, black gloves that favored warmth over dexterity, and there was a flush in her cheeks that complimented the mist coming out of her mouth. Her eyes fell on the cold block of ice I was holding out between us.
“You making coffee?”
I lifted up the pot, attempting to hide the contents.
“Yesterday’s. It’s gone bad.”
She wrinkled up her nose. “Smells like piss.”
My embarrassed smile revealed the truth in her statement. We both stood there for a second with awkward expressions stuck on our faces.
“You… want to come in?”
She took a long, painful beat. Her eyes wandered from my face to the chamber pot to the office behind me. My bed was still down from the wall, unmade. There were dirty glasses on the desk and a trail of ants passing crumbs across the floor. I’m not sure what they’d found because I hadn’t had a meal at home in weeks.
Linda stood rigid with indecision, like when you try to feed a wild animal from your fingers and it has to fight against all its natural instincts if it wants to take the food. Eventually she said, “What the hell,” to herself and stepped inside.
She limped a little as she entered, then wiped down the clients’ chair with a handkerchief. I ran around behind her, stuffing dirty underwear and tissues into my pockets.
“After the other night,” she said, “I asked around—”
“One moment.”
The Angel door was behind my desk. A remnant of the old days when the world was magic and a few lucky souls might arrive at your house by a set of wings instead of the stairs. I pulled it open and the wind hit me in the face like a hired goon collecting on a loan. I put the chamber pot out on the porch, wiped my hands on my coat and closed the door again. When I turned around, Linda’s face was full of regret.
“Sorry,” I said. “I rarely have guests so early.”
She pulled a pocket watch out of her overcoat.
“But it’s—”
“I’m sure it is. How’s the leg?”
“Stitched up like a sailcloth. How’s your face?”
“I think there’s still some of it stuck under your fingernails. Isn’t it fashionable to file those things down?”
She unwrapped the scarf from around her neck.
“I detest that custom. Werecats only trim their claws when they’re around other species. My ancestors made their home in the icy hills of Weir. We had our own kingdom. Our own rules. Now that the Coda killed all that, I’ve been forced to come here.”
I couldn’t stop my eyes from wandering. Her skin was smooth, and every movement she made was graceful. Her teeth, though she barely showed them, all seemed to be accounted for.
“If you don’t mind me saying, Miss Rosemary, you came out of the Coda pretty darn well.”
It wasn’t exactly a compliment and, from her expression, she didn’t take it as one.
“My sister died halfway through the transformation with her brain trying to be two different sizes at once. My father’s face was inside out. He lived for a week, silent, being fed through a straw till something in him snapped. There were twenty of us in our house. I cared for all of them, for as long as I could, till I was the only one left. I walked away from my home and eventually ended up here. I know that I’m one of the lucky ones, Mr Phillips, but I’m sorry if you don’t find me jumping for joy.”
There was a long pause as she let her story sink in to my thick skull. Outside, the wind picked up. The chamber pot scraped along the porch and slid off. A few seconds later, there was a clang down below and someone shouted a few obscenities to the sky.
Her expression never changed. When all was quiet, she continued.
“After the other night, I asked around about you. Heard some interesting stories.”
“Really? Nobody has ever accused me of being interesting.”
Not exactly true. The story of the Human who escaped the walls of Weatherly to join the Opus does have a few exciting moments. Not quite as juicy as the sequel, when that same kid handed the most prized magical secrets over to the Human Army. Then there’s the big finale, when the Humans used those secrets to drain the world of magic.
“I’ve been trying to work out what it is you do,” she said. “You’re not a detective. Not a bodyguard. Then someone told me that you investigate rumors of returning magic.”
I flinched.
“I don’t know who told you that, but they’re wrong.”
That rumor wasn’t just wrong, it was dangerous. Everybody knew that the magic was over and there wasn’t any way to bring it back. My job might be a strange one, but I certainly didn’t go around selling pipe dreams to dying creatures like she’d tried to do with the Unicorn horn.
“Apparently you found a Vampire a few months ago,” she continued. “A professor who managed to find his strength again.”
I wanted to lie, but the shock on my face had already given me away. Nobody was supposed to know about Professor Rye, the Vampire who turned himself into a monster, and nobody was supposed to come knocking at my door looking for answers.
“Not exactly.”
“I heard that the Vampire found a way to turn back the clock. He unlocked his old power and you’re the one who tracked him down and discovered how he did it. You know a secret that the rest of the world would kill for,” she put her hands on my desk, tapping her claws against the woodwork, “and I want to know what it is.”