Pay Dirt Read online

  “The hell?” I muttered. It was like some kind of antique doubloon, but I didn’t recognize the language written on it.

  What was it doing here? Had Habi dropped it in his haste to escape? What would a bottom rung ghoul like him be doing with something like this?

  A shrill beeping broke the silence of the dark bathroom. I started, nearly dropping the coin. It took me a second to realize that I wasn’t under attack. My phone was just ringing.

  When I saw my sister’s name flash up on the screen, I decided that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

  “Hey, Alice,” I answered. “I know, I know. I’m on my way.”

  2

  I missed dessert. Figures.

  Alice was giving me an earful before I’d even taken my shoes off. She stopped briefly when I pointed out the bump on my head, but it was only a temporary ceasefire.

  It wasn’t entirely undeserved. It was Early’s birthday dinner, after all, and seeing as he was my mentor, I probably should’ve made more of an effort to show up on time.

  When my dear sister finally stopped haranguing me, I went in and said hello to everyone. It was a full house. Early, the birthday boy, was there of course, still getting the crumbs out of his long wizardly beard. My friend Lilian had come too. She gave me a grin to let me know she’d heard how much trouble I was in. If there was one thing Lilian truly enjoyed, it was seeing me suffer.

  Valerie, my sister’s wife, had a rare night off from work. She was a surgeon at the local hospital—she’d probably cut out the bit of bowel that ghoul had been chewing on. She and Alice were opposites in almost every way—where Alice was built like me, Val was tiny and petite; where Alice was pale-skinned, Val was dark; Alice was a homebody, while Val was a workaholic and a bit of an adrenaline junkie. But they had the solidest damned relationship I’d ever seen—and they made a nauseatingly cute couple to boot.

  Some people have all the luck.

  It was past the twins’ bedtime, so naturally they were bouncing around the dining room like they were made of Flubber. I took one of the boys under each arm and swung them around a little until they were good and dizzy. Giggling, the two four-year-olds squirmed out of my grasp and continued on their mad rampage.

  Alice shook her head in exasperation. “I told Val we shouldn’t have let them have ice cream.”

  With the chaos Val and Alice’s boys were unleashing, it was almost possible to miss the third child in the room. Michael was younger than the twins, only two years old. But he was also a very different sort of kid. He sat on Early’s lap, watching the twins run around with wary eyes. His dark hair was so thick it looked like a wig. He was a quiet kid, especially around people he didn’t know. Which, at this stage, was pretty much everyone.

  A few months back, Michael had looked very different. He’d been taken from his crib by a goblin sorcerer, turned into something deformed and hideous. Early and I, with the help of the town hag, had managed to reverse the physical changes the sorcerer had wrought upon him.

  The emotional changes, though, those were a different story.

  The boy’s real parents were both dead now. They’d done terrible things in their son’s name, and in the end that had cost them everything. That had left us with a problem: what to do with the boy?

  Turning him over to the usual authorities wasn’t really an option. It would raise too many questions among the Unaware—never a good thing. It needed to be dealt with discreetly, but after all the poor kid had been through, we wanted to make sure he had a normal, stable childhood, as much as that was possible.

  So we’d approached Alice and Val. It was a hell of a thing to dump in their laps. For a while I wasn’t sure they’d go for it. The twins were enough of a handful as it was. As far as I knew they considered their family complete. To suddenly become parents to a traumatized two-year-old on top of everything else, well, I’m guessing there were a few long late-night discussions between them.

  But in the end, they’d fallen in love with Michael. He didn’t have the twins’ rambunctious nature, but he had a kind, sensitive soul that was clear to anyone who spent any time with him. Alice and Val had taken him in, made him part of their family. So Michael Mills became Michael Turner-Wakefield.

  All things considered, I think that was a pretty good outcome.

  “I better get this one to bed,” Val said, taking Michael from Early. I gave the boy a grin as Val carried him past, but he just studied me carefully, weighing me with his eyes. The kid had a way of making you feel small.

  As the others started clearing up, I picked over the carrion left by the rest of the tribe. While I filled a plate with cold meat and vegetables, Early came over and raised his bushy eyebrows at me.

  “Quite a bump you got there, boy. I take it Habi didn’t want to give up the fetish willingly.”

  “Something like that.”

  He stood up on tip-toes, peering at the injury. “Better let me clean it up.”

  I’d already cleaned myself up the best I could before I arrived—it didn’t pay to show up to dinner covered in dried blood. But I followed Early into the living room anyway and sat down on a couch with my plate in my lap. He got out his kit and started seeing to the cut.

  “Sorry I missed your birthday dinner, old man,” I said as I ate. “How old are you now, anyway? 103? 104?”

  “You know, one day you’ll be my age—if you’re lucky—and you’ll have to put up with some disrespectful youngster needling you all the time.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, but you’ll be dead by then, so you won’t be able to say you told me so. Hey.” I reached into my pocket and held up the gold coin that I’d found in the train yard bathroom. “Happy birthday.”

  He paused for a moment, then took the coin from me. His eyebrows drew low as he turned it over in his hands.

  “Where did you get this?”

  I told him what had happened at the train graveyard. He didn’t look at me as I talked. He just kept studying the coin.

  “Any idea what it is?” I asked. “Some ancient coin or something?”

  “I don’t think it’s a coin,” he said slowly. “Looks more like a medal to me. Or a token.”

  “Token?”

  “The mark of some secret society, perhaps.”

  He handed it back to me, then finished up with the cut on my head. I felt him applying some kind of paste. It was weirdly cold, but it took some of the pain away.

  I tapped the coin—or token, or whatever. “This language. You recognize it?”

  “Doesn’t look like any human language I know of. It’s not goblin script. Not vampire, either, but some of the symbols are similar. Could be a secret language to go along with the secret society.”

  “Hell, everything’s a big damn secret in this town, isn’t it?”

  “That’s how we’ve survived so long.”

  I frowned, studying the gold circle. “Problem with a secret is that it makes people curious. And now I’m curious.”

  “Take it to the hag. She might know.”

  I grimaced and pocketed the coin. “I’m not that curious. Maybe I’ll put it on the mantelpiece. Might make a good talking point.”

  As Early finished patching me up, Lilian appeared in the doorway and tossed a tea towel at me.

  “Come on, big guy. You’re up.”

  Lilian had brushed her hair in honor of Early’s birthday. She had a sharp smile to go along with the rest of her. She was built like a set of steak knives held together with wire.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked, holding up the tea towel.

  “What do you think? We’re on dishes.”

  “You know, I don’t think it’s fair to make me do dishes when I didn’t get to eat.”

  “You’re eating right now,” she pointed out.

  “Hardly counts. It’s cold.”

  “Are you going to get up or am I going to have to make you?”

  I grumbled a few more seconds and then stood up. Probably wasn’t a go
od idea to see if Lilian would follow through on her threat. She could do things. Things that weren’t entirely normal.

  Truth be told, I didn’t mind washing the dishes, at least not with Lilian. I always enjoyed shooting the shit with her.

  Our situation was…complicated. We’d been on one date—the result of a bet—but it’s a little hard to really get anything going when the girl you’re trying to woo is a reanimated corpse.

  Yeah, yeah, get your necrophilia jokes out of the way. I’ll wait.

  Lilian was a revenant—she’d risen from the grave in search of vengeance against whoever had killed her. Except she’d run into the town hag on the way, who’d used her power to suppress Lilian’s quest for revenge and turn her from a mindless monster back into something resembling human. Only trouble was that the hag had had to wipe Lilian’s memories to do it. She didn’t even know who had killed her anymore.

  As I watched her soaping up the dishes with long, slender hands, I wondered whether she ever still felt the urge for revenge. It wasn’t something we talked about often.

  “I spent half the day out in the forest,” she said, “chasing down a new herd of spriggans to refill Alcaraz’s cages. And I still got here on time. So what’s your excuse?”

  I recited the story again, this time trying to breeze past the bit where the goddamn roof fell down on my head. It didn’t fly.

  “Wait, wait,” she said, laughing. “That’s how you got hurt? You didn’t get into a fight, the ghoul didn’t hit you with anything. The roof fell on you.”

  “You don’t have to look so happy about it. I could’ve been killed. That place is a deathtrap.”

  “Bad luck to be standing right under it.” She was still grinning. It was like she found my pain funny or something.

  I finished up the story—a little reluctantly, since there was only so much mocking my fragile ego could handle. She frowned at the ending.

  “So what happened to the ghoul?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Ran off, I guess. I wasn’t going to spend all night chasing him down.”

  “You think he was really in trouble?”

  “Well, he wasn’t cursed, I know that for sure. When he first came to me, I tested him six ways from Sunday. True curses leave traces on a person. He had nothing.”

  “Doesn’t mean he wasn’t in some other kind of trouble.”

  I stopped drying the plate I was holding and shot her a glare. She looked up.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’m not Habi’s babysitter. I’m not responsible for every idiot in this town who gets themselves into trouble.”

  “Never said you were.”

  “If Habi wanted my help, he shouldn’t have stolen from me.”

  “No arguments here,” she said, turning back to the dishes.

  I continued to glare at her. “You’re trying to make me feel guilty.”

  “I’m trying to wash the dishes.”

  “Habi will be just fine,” I insisted.

  “I’m sure he will be.”

  “Good.”

  “Good,” she agreed.

  I stared at her a moment longer, then turned away and finished drying the plate I was holding. “Good.”

  It wasn’t my responsibility. It was as simple as that.

  Suddenly, a black and white blur slammed into the window above the sink with a heavy thud. Lilian shouted in surprise and I damn near jumped out of my skin. The plate slipped from my hand and smashed on the edge of the bench top.

  The sound drew footsteps from the living room. “Everything all right?” Early called out.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.” I looked at Lilian. “You okay?”

  She nodded, standing on tiptoes to peer out the window into the dark outside. “Just startled me. Was that a bird?”

  “Think so.”

  “Is it alive?”

  I didn’t answer. It had hit the window at a hell of a speed. There were little bits of black fluff from its feathers stuck to the glass, along with a small spot of blood.

  Alice came rushing into the room, the boys hot on her heels. “What is it?”

  “Bird, I think,” I said. “Probably broke its neck. Hit the window pretty hard.”

  “Cool!” the boys said in unison.

  Alice shot me a dirty look, then ushered the boys out of the room. “Come on, Ozzy broke a plate in there. You don’t want to get cut.”

  I picked up the few fragments of plate that’d hit the floor, threw them in the trash, and made for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Lilian asked.

  “If Alice finds the boys playing with a dead bird tomorrow morning, I’m sure she’ll find a way to blame it on me.”

  “Good point,” she said, drying her hands and following me out to the backyard.

  It was getting cool outside, but at least the yard was sheltered from the worst of the wind. Clouds crept across the sky, snuffing out the light of the moon. Still, with the light streaming through the kitchen window, it was easy enough to find the bird lying in the garden below.

  It didn’t take a vet to figure out the bird was dead. Its head was twisted off to the side, and one of its wings was bent back almost double.

  “Poor bastard,” I said as I stepped off the patio and went over to the bird. Its ruffled feathers fluttered in the breeze.

  “It’s a magpie,” Lilian said.

  She was right. “Do magpies usually fly after dark?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Weird.” I frowned, then shrugged. “Better get rid of it, I guess. I’ll go find a plastic bag.”

  “Wait, what’s that?” Lilian pointed.

  “What’s what?”

  “There’s something underneath it.”

  She crouched down and grabbed the dead bird. With her bare hands. My sister would’ve had a heart attack if she’d seen.

  On the ground beneath the magpie, dirty and speckled with bird blood, was a piece of paper folded into an envelope. It was bent and crimped at the top. Almost like the magpie had been holding it in its beak.

  It was a crazy thought, but then a lot of crazy things happen in this town.

  Lilian glanced at me, her expression mirroring my own. She picked up the paper.

  Something slipped out from inside the envelope and landed in her palm. I got a glimpse of gold.

  And then Lilian reared back, hissing like she’d been burned. The envelope and the thing it contained both fell to the dirt as Lilian stumbled back, her hands raised to shield herself.

  “Lilian!” I rushed to her side, grabbed her by the arm. “What’s wrong?”

  She looked at me. Something dark and smoky moved behind the whites of her eyes.

  My throat felt suddenly dry. I’d seen that smokiness in her eyes only once before. It wasn’t something I wanted to see again.

  I suddenly realized her flesh was ice cold against my palm. Numbness crept up my arm. I opened my mouth to shout, but the breath froze in my chest.

  Lilian’s mouth dropped open wide, so wide it looked like her jaw had unhinged. With an unholy screech, she slammed her palm into my sternum.

  It felt like I’d been shot. Her blow sent me flying backward and onto the grass. I gasped for breath, the wind gone out of me. Skinny-as-a-rake Lilian, knocking me off my feet with ease. It didn’t seem possible.

  At least the numbing touch of her skin was fading, though it still felt like my fingers had frostbite. I looked up and found her eyes fixed on me. Except it wasn’t the eyes of the Lilian I knew.

  She took a step toward me, then stopped, her eyes slamming shut. With a shout, she curled her arms around her chest and shook her head, like she was fighting against herself.

  “Take it away!” she roared.

  “What—”

  “Take it away!”

  My eyes went to the thing that’d dropped out of the paper envelope. Scrambling along the grass, I grabbed it and shoved it in my pocket.

  But not before I confirm
ed what I’d first suspected. The thing was gold, circular. The twin of the coin I’d picked up in that bathroom not two hours ago.

  What the hell was going on here?

  As soon as the coin clinked against its sister inside my pocket, the tension went out of Lilian’s muscles. She slumped to the ground in a jumble of limbs, one hand pressed to her forehead. A low groan left her lips.

  “Lilian?”

  I started toward her, but she threw out a hand, warding me off.

  “No!” she said sharply.

  I froze. “What is it?”

  “Just…just stay back. Keep that thing away from me.”

  “Okay. Okay.” I took a few steps back, turning so my body was between her and the coins. “I’m staying back. See?”

  “What the hell was that thing?” she panted.

  “I was hoping you might be able to shine some light on that. It looked like it was burning you.”

  She shook her head, her eyes screwed up tight. “Not burning. But…” She opened her mouth a few more times, but she couldn’t seem to find the words to explain herself. “I nearly lost control there. The hag’s spell…I can’t…I can’t…”

  At that moment, Early burst out of the back door, looking ready for a fight. He stopped and looked around, appraising the situation.

  “What happened?”

  “Hell if I know,” I said.

  Lilian swallowed, then started to push herself shakily to her feet. “I need…I need to see the hag. Now.”

  “I’ll drive you,” I said.

  “No!” she snapped, and then she shook her head and spoke in a softer tone. “No. Thanks, Ozzy, but I can’t risk…” She sighed and looked at Early. “Early, do you mind?”

  “Of course,” the old man said. “I’ll get my keys.”

  He shot me a questioning look as he went back inside, but I didn’t have any answers for him. By the look on Lilian’s face, I wasn’t sure she did either.

  “Slim,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know, Ozzy. I don’t know.”

  There was a deep sadness in her voice. I wanted to go to her, hug her. But I kept my distance like she’d asked.

  Turning away so I didn’t have to look at her, I returned to the bird. The more I thought about it, the more confused I got. The magpie had been carrying that coin when it hit the window. Bringing it to me, maybe? It’d be a hell of a coincidence otherwise.