Broken Contracts, page 3
Carol was head of household, but as a barcoded indent, she wasn’t in a position much better than him. Someone on the outside cared enough to vouch for her, that was all. It didn’t buy anything in here.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he relaxed slightly. The honeycomb of facilities that made up the slave quarters were always marginally safer than the upper levels, mostly because owners never came down here. He still held to his presentation, keeping his posture straight and his eyes down. At this point, it was first nature rather than second.
It was quiet this time of night. Most people were in the common area, or in their bunks. The small laundry room was deserted. Two of the washers had laundry sitting wet and, after a moment of consideration, Micah switched them over.
He didn’t need to. It wasn’t his job. He’d even gotten in trouble for it once—not here, but with a former owner. The house had a relatively small staff, but they were well cared for, and the maid had scolded the hell out of him for making her look bad. In retrospect, he didn’t blame her for being possessive of the placement.
Here, though, it didn’t seem to matter so much who did what, as long as everything got done right.
So he switched them over, then stripped out of his soiled clothes and left them in the hamper with the others.
The far wall had the cubbies where clean clothes and linens were stored, and Micah dug through a bin for one of the clean XL T-shirts.
The showers were two doors down the hall, so Micah didn’t bother dressing before heading over. He carried the clothes with him, leaving them on the bench by his locker.
It was a misnomer, really. “His locker.” It didn’t lock, and it wasn’t his. The things inside it weren’t his, either. They were the toiletry items assigned to him, subject to change if it was determined he needed to look or smell differently. Right now, the interior was fairly empty. Slate didn’t care for makeup, and Micah’s hair didn’t need more than a standard black elastic to keep it out of his face. That left soap, shampoo, and conditioner, all the same French brand name, all the same rich honeyed vanilla scent.
Micah liked it. Vanilla was good in the winter. It was a warm smell. One of his former owners had been in favor of strong peppermint for the holiday season. Fortunately, Micah had only spent one winter with her before being sold on in the autumn.
He gathered up the bottles and headed for the showers.
Surprisingly, the ones here had stalls. The stalls didn’t have doors, but they did at least have walls. Someone was in the first, a woman, judging by her ankles, and Micah didn’t look at her as he headed for the cubicle in the back corner.
Bracing himself, he turned the water on.
The maximum temperature could best be described as lukewarm, but at least the pressure was good. The idea was to keep them from dawdling—which made sense, as long as the water didn’t dribble out too weakly to properly rinse.
Not being able to get conditioner all the way out was the worst.
Turning into the spray, he let the water fill his mouth, taking several swallows before dipping his head to wet his hair. The cool water felt good on his throat, even as it stung the small wounds on his back and thigh.
Taking a breath, Micah looked down at himself.
It wasn’t as bad as it felt. The little stick had hurt like hell, leaving marks that were dark but thin. The marks from the ropes were already fading, and that helped a lot.
And for all the soreness of his body, he knew he’d borne it well. He’d lost control for just a second at the end—oxygen deprivation was one of those things that couldn’t be ignored forever—but for the most part, he’d done a good job. Slate seemed relatively easy. He wanted a metered, reasonable reaction to his treatment. It was difficult to have no reaction, but almost worse had been the owner who couldn’t bring himself to deliver more than a playful swat but still wanted Micah to sob and howl and beg. That had been . . . challenging, to say the least.
But Slate had seemed pleased with his performance, for the most part.
Micah’s face flushed red, remembering the slap, the admonishment for the wanton way he’d gone about it at first. He’d miscalculated there; his new owner wasn’t looking for a mutually enjoyable romp with a slut. The impressive wall of bondage toys had made that evident. But Micah’s second gamble had paid off, because Slate wasn’t looking for a rape fantasy, either. He didn’t want to force himself on someone unwilling. Micah needed to pretend he liked it.
Micah could fake that. It was a bit of a challenge, getting hard when he wasn’t interested, but he’d had enough practice to pull it off reliably now. Even in the middle of worse things than Slate had done.
Micah smiled to himself, a bit of the anxiety slipping off his shoulders. He knew what his new owner wanted, and he could do it. He knew he could. He’d done well. His owner was happy with him.
It was going to be fine.
Micah finished washing quickly, cleaning the blood and come from his body the same way he had a hundred times before. Drying off, he caught his reflection in the mirror.
The S pattern up his side was remarkably clear. Gently fingering the welt, Micah felt something warm settle in his belly.
It wasn’t the first initial on his body—Arabelle’s signature A was tattooed on him, after all, and that was a hell of a lot more serious than a stupid bruise. But that was more of a maker’s mark.
This . . . this felt more like a mark of ownership. Which it was, in a way. Slate did own him. But still . . .
Getting dressed, Micah found himself smiling as he brushed against the darkening letters.
After all, people only wrote their names on things they wanted.
April 2012
“No outsiders,” Slate said, not looking at the interloper accompanying his guest.
Jeremiah Locke blinked. “He’s a bodyguard.”
Slate tried, and failed, to apply the response to the statement. He didn’t open the door further. “No. Outsiders.”
“You don’t need a fucking bodyguard, you pretentious dipshit!” came a voice from inside, and Slate closed his eyes, taking a deep breath through his nose. The voice belonged to Lucas Coffey. At barely twenty-eight, he was more than ten years Slate’s junior and acted half that. He was impulsive, asinine, unintelligent, and the owner of the largest collection of magical texts in the northern hemisphere. Slate couldn’t figure out how he did it. Most books he’d tracked down were owned by people who wouldn’t give them up for love or money. Coffey had very few personal virtues, but as a collector he was unrivaled.
“I’m going to have him assassinated,” Locke said in a quiet, almost cheerful voice. “As soon as the election’s over. See if I don’t.”
“I’ll plead the fifth,” Slate replied in a monotone. “Your man can wait in the staff area. I’ll call someone to look after him.”
The man in question might have objected to being lumped in with staff, but Locke waved him off before he got the chance.
“I’m not being paranoid, you know,” Locke said, stepping into the meeting room. Slate closed the door behind him. “I’ve gotten three credible threats on my life since the campaign began. If I didn’t trust your warding, I’d have declined the invite.”
“Your lover works in law enforcement,” Slate said, re-examining the bundle of connections expanding from Locke’s body to make sure the statement was still true. “If the resources of their agency can’t keep you safe, I don’t think one guard with a stun gun is going to tip the balance in your favor.”
“That’s not public knowledge,” Locke hissed, glancing around to make sure no one was within earshot.
“I didn’t plan to change that,” Slate answered, resisting the urge to take a step back. He didn’t know who the lover was, for one thing. Just that they existed. That connection, as much as his political ambitions, made Locke one of Slate’s more valuable allies. He had no intentions of making any enemies, especially not in the name of spreading gossip.
“See that you don’t,” Locke said in a low voice, before a mask of congeniality fell over his features and he went over to greet the others.
There were five of them tonight, out of a rotating group of perhaps twenty. They were all carefully chosen—ostensibly by one another, though Slate knew better. The connections in this room formed a perfect roulette curve, one only he knew the full extent of. He’d invited the first three on the pretense of a card game, then proposed the idea of a magical order as though it had occurred to him on the spot. The three had suggested others—exactly the others Slate had predicted. They, in turn, brought their own connections.
And so it went.
Slate looked around the well-lit dining room. The center of the room had been cleared—it was where they’d do their magic. Around the outside were bookshelves, his own meager attempt at building a magical library. At one end of the room was the table set with the supper that his guests had theoretically been invited to. At the other, the backlit bar that they’d actually gathered around.
“All right, what are we doing tonight?” Coffey asked. There was a cut-crystal glass in his hand, almost completely filled with a large spherical ice cube.
“We should try the alchemy again,” Locke said immediately. “Just a few ounces of gold apiece, and we’d be able to—”
The group erupted in groans. Of the six of them, Locke was the only one still interested in ways to generate assets. For his part, Slate’s income grew too fast to make alchemy a worthwhile hourly pursuit.
“I had to throw my suit out after last time,” Coffey complained. “The smell of sulfur wouldn’t come out.”
“I think the alchemy fused the stink with the fibers,” the man beside him added. That was Ryan Stewart, an architect from the West Coast. Tall, broad-shouldered, very much Slate’s type if it weren’t for the roiling bouquet of connections bursting from every inch of his body.
Stewart’s work with elemental magic was unparalleled. When he was nine years old, a wildfire had torn across his town, leaving a line of damage half a mile wide. It hadn’t burned Stewart’s house, if you believed the legend, because he’d taken his sidewalk chalk and simply asked it not to.
As an adult, the houses he designed did not burn. They did not flood, they did not blow away, they did not collapse when the ground shook. The warding was built into the walls, the tiles, and even the landscaping of his extremely eclectic designs. And until someone figured out how to separate his functional decisions from his artistic ones, he could write his own checks.
“What do you suggest, then?” Locke asked, a little bitterly. Slate frowned. Locke was souring further on the other members with each meeting. He wouldn’t cut ties with any of them—no, a politician didn’t burn bridges over something as petty as open disrespect—but he might stop attending.
Perhaps there would be a campaign contribution in Slate’s future. That would smooth things over for a few more months.
Or maybe he should stop bothering with the gatherings altogether, Slate thought tiredly, looking over the assembled group. He was reluctant to give up the idea as a whole. He’d hoped that maybe magic could help him find something in a world that otherwise felt as compelling as a crayon drawing. It had been a simple matter to find connections that would put the world’s magical resources in his hands, and the result was . . . well. It was less than spectacular.
“I think we should try learning to fly,” Coffey suggested, and Slate’s laugh was hidden under another cacophony of groans.
“You and your superpowers.” That was Mark Mercia, the oldest of the group by at least a decade. His long gray hair called to mind a wizened mage, and not by accident. Mercia had a weekly show expounding on exciting new magical breakthroughs, peddling youth and vitality to America’s middle class for six easy payments of only $19.95. Most of it was bullshit, which wasn’t uncommon among those who sold magic. What made Mercia special was the ability to sell magic that was transparent bullshit. A liar could fool any man once. A con man could fool him twice. Mercia was still fooling people after thirty years, and Slate deeply wanted to know how.
“What do you expect from the baby of the group?” Locke muttered, and Coffey lifted a glass to him, making a face.
“I think we should have familiars.” The voice was quiet, but Slate would know it anywhere.
Christopher Plant was standing back from the others, his empty hands shoved deep into his pockets. He was Slate’s age, but his posture, combined with a small frame, made him look younger. Noticing that people were staring at him, he hesitated to elaborate.
“What?” Slate asked, gesturing at him to continue.
“Familiars,” Christopher said again, a little louder. “Mages used to have them. Magical creatures who would bolster their powers, teach them arcane magicks . . . you know. Familiars.”
The room was quiet for a moment, and then Mercia laughed.
“Okay Merlin,” Coffey said. “And what kind of magical creature are you looking to summon?”
“If you’re lonely, you can just buy a cat,” someone sniped.
“How do you propose we do it?” Slate asked. Unlike the others, his comment wasn’t sarcastic. Christopher flushed red in a way Slate found slightly appealing, adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, then pulled the strap of his messenger bag over his shoulder.
He opened the bag and, at first, Slate thought it was empty. Too empty, somehow. But then Christopher reached inside and pulled out a book. Old, leather bound, remarkable enough to have its own web of connections.
And one of those connections, Slate couldn’t see.
It was the same not-see pooling in the belly of his newest acquisition, the slave he’d picked up barely a month ago. Micah.
It couldn’t be a coincidence.
He tried to keep his face neutral as Christopher opened the book, holding it out for the others to see. “It says that they tried to open doorways, portals to other realms, and that sometimes, when successful, creatures would come through.”
“Those are stories,” Mercia began, but the others were less dismissive now.
“Sounds incredibly dangerous,” Stewart muttered.
“How would you even begin building a binding spell for a completely unknown creature?” Locke asked, but his voice was speculative rather than disparaging.
“It doesn’t mention any binding spells,” Christopher admitted. “Apparently they found the creatures to be generally amiable and cooperative.”
“Think I can trade my wife for one?” Mercia asked, and Locke guffawed.
“Can I see that?” Slate asked, gesturing for the book. Christopher handed it over, seemingly happy to have someone take his suggestion seriously.
The tome was open to an old, hand-drawn illustration of a circular doorway. The place it led to was only darkness, but from the crosshatched shadows emerged a number of chimeric creatures: tigers with hands, people with the snouts of bears, even a large fish whose mode of ambulation wasn’t made evident by the drawing.
Slate refocused his eyes, examining the book’s energy. The connections thrummed. Christopher, obviously. A number of people who Christopher had outbid, who still coveted it. Weak threads to prior owners, one of whom had stolen it from another before selling it on.
And the dark one, the empty connection, the not-there that led . . . nowhere.
Slate focused harder.
Not nowhere. A not-somewhere. A not-somewhere hidden in the earth, buried beneath a building in the forest that felt . . . like . . .
“Let me see,” Coffey said, grabbing it from his hands. Slate barely noticed. He was picturing a hunting lodge, an inn, somewhere he knew . . .
For some reason all he could think of was a business he owned in upstate New York. A twenty-room bed-and-breakfast in . . . Rome? Sparta? Something like that. He stayed in it three times a year while traveling and the rest of the time it ran at a tidy loss that his accountant assured him was beneficial to his taxes.
Why would the book ever have been there?
“These are just stories,” Coffey said, flipping through the brittle pages. “Fairy tales.”
“I think there’s some truth to them,” Christopher protested, and Slate nodded.
“I can see something there,” he said. “But I’m not sure what.”
“I can feel something too,” Christopher said. “Something different.”
Slate watched the book being passed around, and pondered. If Christopher felt something, that was promising.
Of the six of them, Christopher was the least obvious addition to the group. He made his money in stock trades, unassisted by magic in any way that anyone could see.
Well. Anyone else.
Christopher had a Gift, one that thrummed through every connection he made. In terms of raw power, there were few who came close to matching him. Slate knew this, though he wasn’t entirely sure that Christopher did. He’d certainly never mentioned it.
That alone would have made him a worthy addition, but that wasn’t the real reason Slate had invited him. Christopher didn’t have Mercia’s fame or Locke’s influence or Coffey’s manic need to collect things. No, Christopher was a member of the club, primarily, because he was the only person Slate actually wanted to spend time around.
“Well look, there’s a summoning spell,” Mercia said, landing on a page of instructions.
“That’s for a water spirit,” Stewart said, reading it sideways. “Not an overly difficult summoning, but it’s not going to be much use to you once you have it.”
“Let’s try it,” Coffey said immediately. He checked the enthusiasm of the group. “Unless anyone else has a better idea?”
No one did, and so the spell ingredients were quickly assembled—spring water in crystal goblets brought up from the kitchen, single points of quartz aligned in a starburst, and in the center, a large glass salad bowl half filled with salted water.
Stewart inscribed the warding on the bowl in grease pen, copying the book’s instructions with only a few minor alterations. He insisted that they were an improvement, and the others took his word for it.
