Fitz stopped in his tracks, turning suddenly, and lifted the camping light in my direction, his eyes wide. He suddenly sucked in a deep breath.
I stopped and blinked at him.
Everyone around Fitz had gone quiet and completely still, reacting to his obvious fear with the instant, instinctive stillness of someone who had good reason to fear predators. Fitz stared down the hall uncertainly, moving the light as if it might help him see a few inches farther.
“Hell’s bells,” I said. “Hey, kid. Can you hear me?”
Fitz reacted, his body twitching a little, his head cocked to one side, then the other, as if trying to trace a faint whisper of sound.
“Fitz?” whispered the little kid with the knife.
“Quiet,” Fitz said, still staring.
I cupped my hands over my mouth and shouted. “Hey! Kid! Can you hear me?”
The color had already drained out of his face, but the second call to him got another reaction. He licked his lips, turned away quickly, and said, “Thought I heard something, that’s all. It’s nothing. Come on.”
Interestinger and interestinger. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my duster and paced along beside Fitz, studying him.
He was maybe an inch under six feet tall, but taller than all the others with him. He couldn’t have been seventeen, but his eyes were decades older. He must have been surviving on his own for a while to have had so much composure at his age. And he’d known at least a little about the way a practitioner could use blood to send all kinds of mischief and mayhem at his enemies.
He had scars at the corner of his left eye, like a boxer—except boxers collected them on both eyes, and they were spread out, scattered around. These were all in a relatively tiny space. Someone right-handed had punched him in the same spot irregularly, repeatedly. I’d seen Fitz’s speed. He hadn’t tried to get out of the way.
Hell’s bells. We’d just been hit by Oliver Twist.
It took Fitz and the gang about five minutes to make it to what had once been a shop floor. It was open to the thirty-foot ceiling. There were skylights—translucent panels on the roof, really—and the place looked like something out of an apocalypse movie.
Equipment sat neglected everywhere. The motorized assembly line was still. Cobwebs stretched out, covering everything, coated in dust. Empty racks and shelves gave no clue as to what was made there, but several steel half barrels were scattered around an open area halfway down the shop floor. They had been filled with flammable scraps, mostly doors, trim, and shelves that must have been scavenged from other parts of the building. Ragged old sleeping bags were scattered among the fire sources, along with trash sacks of what I guessed were meager personal belongings.
One of the low barrels had a metal grate over it—a makeshift grill. There was a man crouched over it. He was thin, practically skeletal, and wore only a pair of close-fitting jeans. His skin was pasty and white. His smooth head was covered with crude-looking tattoos—symbols of protection and concealment from multiple traditions of magical practice, completely encircling his skull. He needed to shave. His patchy beard was growing out in uneven lumps of brown and black and grey.
There were several cans of beans and chili sitting on the grill, presumably being prepared for Fitz’s gang, who looked painfully interested in them. The bald man didn’t give any indication that he knew Fitz had arrived until the group had been standing silently for a full five minutes. Then he asked, “Is it done?”
“No,” Fitz said.
“And where are the guns?”
“We had to ditch them.”
The bald man’s shoulders clenched, suddenly stiff. “Excuse me?”
Fitz lifted a hand to touch his fingertips to his left eye, a gesture that struck me as unconscious, instinctive. He lowered it again quickly.
“There was an accident. The police were coming. We had to walk out and we couldn’t carry the guns with us.”
The bald man stood up and turned to face Fitz. His eyes were dark, deep-set, and burning. “You lost. The guns. The guns I paid so much for.”
“The guns were already lost,” Fitz said, his eyes on the floor. “There wasn’t any sense in all of us going to jail, too.”
The bald man’s eyes blazed and a scream exploded from his chest. There was a horrible, rushing, bass- thrumming sound in the air, and an invisible force struck Fitz full in the chest, knocking him back ten feet before he hit the concrete floor and tumbled another ten.
“Sense?!” the bald man screamed. “Sense? You don’t
Fitz lay on the floor, body curled defensively, and didn’t even try to lift his head. He was staying down, hoping not to provoke Baldy any further, his expression resigned to the fact that he was probably going to suffer more pain in short order—and that there was nothing he could do about it.
“It was simple!” Baldy continued, stalking toward the young man. “I gave you a task that men with their veins and noses full of drugs execute routinely. And it proved too great a challenge? Is that what you are telling me?”
Fitz’s voice was too steady to be sincere. He was used to hiding his fear, his vulnerability. “I’m sorry. The Rag Lady was there. We couldn’t have gotten any closer. She’d have taken us. We had to hit them and run.”
Baldy’s rage vanished abruptly. He stared down at the young man with no expression on his face and spoke in a gentle voice. “If there is some reason you believe you should be allowed to keep breathing, you should share it with the class now, Fitz.”
Fitz had a good poker face, but it had been a long night for him. He started breathing jerkily. “The idea wasn’t to kill them, you told me. The idea was to make sure that no one pushes us. That we push back. We showed them that. We accomplished the mission.”
Baldy stared at him and did not move.
I saw a bead of sweat on his brow. “It isn’t . . . It’s not . . . Look, I can get the guns back. I can. I marked where we buried them. I can go get them.”
Baldy glowered down at the young man and kicked him in the belly. The blow was offhand, absentminded, almost an afterthought. He seemed to reach a conclusion, and turned around to go back to the grill.
“Food’s hot, boys,” Baldy said. “Come eat up.”
The gang moved forward nervously. After a moment, Fitz began to rise, being careful to make no sound.
There was a sudden, puffing sigh of displaced air. Baldy’s shape blurred from the grill back over to Fitz, sending one of the young gunmen flying sideways. Baldy was suddenly slamming a hard right to Fitz’s head, his fist moving almost too quickly to see.
The hit sent Fitz to the ground. I was close enough to see the scar tissue around his eye break open, blood trickling rapidly down the young man’s cheek.
“Not you, Fitz,” Baldy said, his voice gentle again. “I don’t give food to dead men. Eat when you have corrected your error.”
Fitz nodded, without looking up, his hand pressed to his head. “Yes, sir.”
“Good lad,” Baldy said. He wrinkled his nose as if there were a mild stench in the air, and spat, mostly on Fitz. Then he turned to walk away.
The kid looked up at Baldy with murder in his eye.
I don’t mean that Fitz looked angry. You hear a lot about “if looks could kill” these days, but there just aren’t many people who
Killing’s messy. It’s frequently ugly. And if something goes wrong, it can be wretched, seeing another being in
