Broken Contracts, page 14
“It’s because you hold the stress in your neck,” Micah said, not needing an explanation. He’d been working with Gino for two months. He did it every time.
“I’m not.”
“You definitely are,” Micah countered. On Gino’s other side, Ralph chuckled. Gino threw a french fry at him.
“So are you coming out with us or not?” Justin asked, ignoring them.
“I can’t get too deep into it,” Micah said, almost apologetically. They didn’t ask why. When Slate was home, Micah was on call. The kind of on call that didn’t leave a lot of prep time.
“That’s fine,” Gino said, around a mouthful of chicken. “We promise to keep you pretty, if you return the favor.” He winked.
Micah gave him a sarcastic grin, and Gino laughed. Justin ate his food. He was the one who’d given Micah the black eye, when Micah had asked. Justin had been weird about it for a week or two, but Micah had shown him some of the worse marks Slate gave him, and Justin had gotten over it.
It wasn’t like Micah’s ongoing bruises were any kind of secret, like they were in some other houses. In some places, the medic would come and set Micah right before he was even allowed to leave the bedroom, and everybody pretended they didn’t know.
Here, Micah pretty regularly had marks—a limp, a split lip, a ring of bruises around his throat. At least, he did when Slate was home. Bearing them was Micah’s job, and he didn’t complain about it.
He considered it, sometimes. Turning the mundane irritations of his job into funny stories like the maids or the security team did . . . but down deep, he knew better. His life was different from theirs because he was different from them. That was why they were indentured, while he’d been made into a slave.
So Micah kept his complaints to himself and did his job. And sometimes, doing his job meant getting a black eye to provoke his owner into using him. So he did that.
“Nobody could make you pretty, Gino,” Micah said, and there was a twinge of uneasiness in his stomach for the half second before Gino laughed.
The security team were lifers, but in . . . not quite the same way as the others. They had a comradery to them that the rest of the staff tried their best to avoid. A couple of them had talked about serving together . . . but Micah wasn’t sure if they’d served their country or time. Even money, the answer was both.
They spoke to each other in the form of casual insults. It was easy enough to replicate, but it still left Micah slightly on edge. It was dangerous ground to walk, and he wasn’t sure what a misstep would cost him.
Justin and Ralph started arguing about something, clearly picking up a discussion from earlier, and Micah turned his attention back to his food. It wasn’t bad here at all. The grilled chicken and french fries were joined by fresh grapes, and broccoli in a delicate cheese sauce—most likely a recipe the kitchen staff were testing out on them.
Micah had gotten there first but finished eating last. The security teams tended to eat food like someone was going to take it away from them, a habit Micah didn’t ask about and they didn’t explain.
That done, they went outside.
Micah liked being outside. He liked it enough to ignore the constant nagging feeling that it wasn’t allowed. It wasn’t forbidden. No one here had told him he couldn’t go outside. And he was just in the side courtyard, with guys from the security team, of all people.
They laughed and joked with him, but Micah harbored no illusions; if he slipped away into the woods, they’d bring him back in whatever state they could manage.
Not that he would. But some others might, and that was why the staff weren’t typically allowed outside unless they had something specific they needed to do.
Training counted as something specific, Micah reminded himself, as he sat on the manicured grass to stretch.
Gino sat beside him, mimicking his motions, enduring the mockery of his teammates when his attempts fell far short of what Micah was capable of. It wasn’t Gino’s fault. Micah had been going through the same set of stretches and bodyweight exercises since he was twelve. Gino was trying to get back levels of flexibility that Micah had never lost.
Gino didn’t need Micah’s help. He was in decent shape, especially for a job where a gun, a taser, and a radio were going to carry more than their share of the work. No, Gino copied Micah’s routine because Gino wanted to look like Micah did.
And Micah was happy to help him, because he wanted to be able to disarm an opponent like Gino could.
That wasn’t quite accurate. Micah could disarm like Gino. He wanted to be able to disarm like Justin could, and helping Gino was Micah’s ticket into the arena where those lessons were on offer.
Justin wasn’t interested in looking like Micah, mostly because he never would. His hands and arms were scored with scars, and though he always sparred with his shirt on, Micah had no doubt that his chest and back were more of the same.
Micah knew the shape of those scars. They came from dropping your guard, from failing to anticipate. They came from blocking wrong or being too slow to block at all.
Micah had had scars like that once, given to him by the same people who’d taught him how to train his body with nothing but determination and its own weight. They were the ones who had taught him to fight, preparing him for a life like Justin’s.
A life Micah’s looks had spared him from.
Justin’s job had been to fight people. Specifically, to win fights against people. For owners like Slate, there was money to be made when their slave could win fights.
Micah couldn’t win. The best skill he could claim was that he very rarely lost.
He could dodge. He could block. By the time they’d changed his training, he hadn’t been so much as nicked by an opponent’s knife in more than two years.
But he hadn’t managed to land against anyone else, either.
Micah’s cheeks colored, and he pulled himself back into the present. In the real world, he was sitting on the grass with the soles of his feet pressed together, his hands reaching forward as far as he could stretch them. The skin of his arms was pristine, the mistakes of his youth washed away when his owners had deemed them unsightly.
In Justin’s case, no one had bothered. His scars didn’t interfere with his duties—not the ones on his arms, not the mottled red patch that stretched from his jawline to his temple.
Maybe that scar was why Justin didn’t fight anymore. Why he was here, teaching Gino and Micah and Ralph how to spar.
He didn’t ask why Micah was already so good.
And Micah didn’t tell him.
November 2013
Slate supposed that, after everything else, he shouldn’t really have been surprised that Coffey kept a vampire in his basement.
The creature was bound in a straightjacket lined with silver, hissing at the gathered visitors through a thick layer of plexiglass. Its face was too long, the bones too jutting and cruel to ever be mistaken for human.
Slate stared into its red eyes and took another sip of his drink. People milled around him, taking in the various parts of Coffey’s menagerie. Tonight was a grand unveiling, the first time Coffey had deemed it safe to allow others into his sanctum.
Since the gateway had opened, the people around Slate had begun revealing increasingly disturbed proclivities to the group. And since the gateway had opened, no one—except for Christopher—had walked away.
“How do you feed it?” someone asked, and Coffey waved noncommittally.
“The staff take care of it. I think the medic gets blood from them. And from the Gestalt, of course.”
“It can drink the blood of other creatures?” Slate asked, genuinely curious.
Coffey shook his head. “As far as we can tell, the Gestalt’s body parts are human. Once disconnected from his power, they act just like any other body part.”
It took Slate a beat to realize what he meant by disconnected. The woman wrinkled her nose, stepping away from the two men to feign interest in a different display. There were plenty to choose from.
Apparently, Slate wasn’t the only one hiding things underground. Coffey’s estate, a beautiful manor on the banks of a placid lake, had a full paranormal menagerie hidden beneath it. The large subfloor was filled with circular cages made of iron or acrylic, and inside each one was a monster.
Or an animal, Slate thought, noticing a leopard curled up in the center of its display. Plenty of normal beasts mixed in with their more paranormal counterparts. Animal, vegetable, or spirit, Coffey seemed less interested in the taxonomy of his specimens and more interested in whether he was legally prohibited from owning them.
“The wings, though,” Slate said carefully. “They aren’t human. There’s magic in them?”
Coffey scowled. Slate was being delicate in his questioning, but they both knew the purpose of his question. An angry red line still crossed Coffey’s cheek where the Gestalt had slashed at him with the quill. It had missed his eye by an inch.
The doctors had tried healing it, of course, but by the time they’d gotten to it, the feather’s magic had already accelerated his healing, closing the wound. Four months later, Coffey hadn’t yet managed to find a descarring method that would touch it.
“We’ve pulled out enough feathers to stuff a fucking mattress,” Coffey muttered, casting around, probably trying to change the subject. “If there’s any inherent magic in them, it’s nothing we’re able to detect or use. Oh, this should look familiar.”
Coffey drew Slate’s attention to the side, where an acrylic pillar was partially filled with water. Perched delicately on the surface was a familiar figure.
“Is it the same one we summoned?” Slate asked, inspecting the translucent elemental.
“Who knows? They all look the same. Not really important, is it?”
Slate wondered again what drove Coffey to amass things in this way. It wasn’t a need to collect—collectors cared about the hoards they built, saw value in each scrap and shred they managed to tuck away. Coffey didn’t. His joy was found in the acquisition.
It was why he’d snatched up the Gestalt, laying claim to him on the basis that he owned the slave whose body the creature was currently riding. Christopher had been the one to summon it, but gods knew he wasn’t about to mount an argument. And Slate owned the portal, as far as anyone was concerned, but he had no interest in keeping the thing cloistered in his basement. Godfrey was the one most interested in it, and he was more than happy to move his operations into the more specialized facilities that Coffey offered him.
It was the Gestalt that Slate had come to see, and it was toward those facilities that Coffey guided them now, stopping here and there to make small talk with the other guests. Maybe that was Coffey’s drive: to show off. For all his ignorance about what he had, he did have detailed and interesting stories about how he’d gotten them.
It took the two of them nearly forty minutes of socializing to reach their goal: an unassuming door painted to match the wall around it. It wasn’t locked, but a large man stood beside it, perhaps less casually than he appeared. By the time Coffey finished chatting with him and actually opened the door, Slate was almost ready to give up and go home.
Not that any of his homes had much appeal these days. That was why he was here, after all.
Coffey held the door open, and Slate stepped into the darkness. Immediately, motion lights clicked on, spotlights illuminating the figure in the center of the room. This wasn’t the room where Godfrey did his work—white, sterile, tools on trays arranged around a stainless steel table. No, this was where they kept the creature when he wasn’t in use. A dark cell, designed to display.
The angel was kneeling, his back bent, his palms on the floor. His dark, messy hair fell across his downturned face. His wings were limp at his sides, feathers splayed on the dusty floor. Even in their current state, Slate could see the evidence of magic in them, in the colors that flickered across the interlocking circles on the barred surface.
“He’s been ordered not to move,” Coffey said, his voice laced with resentment. “He’s good at wriggling through loopholes, but that one seems to work.”
“He’s not breathing,” Slate observed, giving the wretched creature a wide berth as he circled it.
“I suspect his heart isn’t beating, either,” Coffey replied. “It usually does, though it doesn’t seem to actually hurt him when it doesn’t. Godfrey thinks his body runs off magic.”
“What’s Godfrey feeding him?” Slate asked.
“He doesn’t eat. So . . . nothing, as far as we can tell.”
For all Godfrey’s experimentation, the Gestalt’s naked skin was remarkably unmarred. His hands were perfect, with no evidence of the fingers that had been removed. The only sign of what he’d been through lay in a ladder of short, parallel scars leading up the side of his rib cage.
“His ownership marks,” Coffey explained, noting Slate’s interest. “They don’t heal. Everything else we do to him vanishes like it was never there. Hell, Godfrey tried giving him tits once, they just—”
“Spare me,” Slate said, wrinkling his nose.
Coffey produced a small pocket knife from somewhere and handed it over. “Mark him, it’s the only way to be safe.”
Slate quickly crouched and used the blade to make his mark below the others. The Gestalt, true to his orders, did not even flinch. A single drop of blood welled, then broke and rolled down his side as the wound faded shut.
“I have a theory,” Slate said, watching it thin into a small white line. “I don’t think the feathers are magic at all. I think there’s a simpler explanation for why your scar won’t heal.”
“Do tell,” Coffey said dryly.
“Because he chose not to let it,” Slate said, regarding the scar he’d left on the angel. “It’s why his body does two different things: The first mark on him forms a covenant. He can heal it, but not remove it. But I think, for the others, he has a choice. Heal to scar, or heal as though nothing happened. Am I right?”
The Gestalt was still as a statue, his dark eyes fixed on the ground.
“Answer him,” Coffey ordered. “Truthfully.”
“I can choose how to heal,” the Gestalt rasped as the bands encircling him flashed.
“And you chose to heal the wound you inflicted on my friend,” Slate said, standing. “You chose to leave the scar, to make it resist our magic.”
“Yes,” the Gestalt said. His mouth curled into a bitter smile. Coffey raised his hand to his cheek, fingering the red pucker.
“You little shit,” he snapped, and before Slate could move, Coffey buried his foot in the angel’s naked stomach. “You absolute fucking waste.”
The creature gagged, collapsing onto one elbow before the edict not to move froze him again.
Slate caught Coffey by the sleeve, tilting his head to indicate a retreat. He had more to say, and he wanted to say it where the Gestalt couldn’t hear him. This was the conversation he’d come to have. The revelation of the scar had come to him two days ago, at three thirty in the morning, as he stared down at a page he’d read often enough to recite in his dreams.
They left the angel crippled on the floor, stepping back out into a solitary corner of the main menagerie.
“There’s a wider implication here,” Slate said, his voice low.
“Do you think he can remove the scar?” Coffey asked, and waved down a passing slave. The slave was dressed, so to speak, in an elaborate net of leather straps. They were laced into a tray in a way that allowed him to serve drinks despite having his arms bound tightly behind him. It didn’t do much for Slate, but he did appreciate the craftsmanship. Coffey took someone’s drink, then shooed the man away.
“I severely doubt it,” Slate answered, once the slave was out of earshot. “His healing magic wouldn’t be any different from a doctor’s.”
“Fuck—”
“I’m more interested in the fact that he was able to do it,” Slate continued, undeterred. “It means he can work magic on humans. No incantations, no circles, no nothing. He has inherent magic and he can use it on us.”
“I want another one,” Coffey said, and Slate wasn’t sure the man was following the conversation properly.
“What’s wrong with this one?”
“What’s—” Coffey gestured to his face. “Look at me. Look what he did to me.”
“You think a second one’s going to be better?” Slate asked, raising an eyebrow.
Coffey gave an exaggerated shrug. “This one . . . you remember how he was at first. Damn near brain-dead, couldn’t get a damn thing out of him. We were cutting fingers off to bring his autonomous motor functions to his attention, and it took him weeks to get any kind of movement, to say nothing of language, and the whole time Godfrey was doing experiments with poisons and acids and who knows what the fuck else . . . so he’s kinda . . . combative at this point.”
“And you think you might have better luck with a softer touch.”
“Well, it’s worth checking, at least, right?” Coffey said, and there was something desperate in the tone. “The plan was never to make just one.”
Slate gave a long exhale. Clearly, he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Coffey. Which only left . . .
“I want to talk to him,” Slate said. He didn’t expect resistance, and he didn’t get it.
Coffey only nodded, distracted. “Sure. Whatever you want. But I’ve got the next couple picked out. Since I know I’m getting them back, now.” He gestured to one of the hospitality slaves threading their way through the crowd. “That one, actually.”
“Mmm,” Slate said, not looking. Coffey waved down a passing guest with a comment, and Slate took the opportunity to edge away, toward the guarded door. Coffey didn’t call him back, and the posted man didn’t protest as Slate slipped inside.
The Gestalt hadn’t moved, of course.
Slate took a moment to admire him. He was a beautiful specimen and had been even as a human. With the addition of the wings, he was a work of art, truly. Not in the way that Micah was a work of art—Micah’s body was crafted, honed, made to look the way it did through deliberate effort. This creature . . . this creature simply was beautiful. Inherently, the way a sunset was beautiful.
