Currency of Souls

* * *

The sun is down.

On a post in the parking lot at Eddie’s, opposite one of the formerly broken windows, stands a raven. He caws and bobs his head at my approach, but I don’t know whether the greeting or warning is meant for me, its own reflection in the smoked glass, or if the bird is a familiar of the woman inside. It makes little difference, I suppose.

I open the door and step inside.

The smell of soot and smoke rushes to greet me like the extension of a ghost that can’t wait for me to join it. The room looks smaller than it ever has before.

Gracie is on her knees, both hands clamped around a sponge soaked rusty brown by the blood that has gathered in a wide ragged circle beneath a toppled stool.

“Vess,” I say, and she looks up. Her face is wan, and sweaty, her eyes narrowed as she tries to focus on my shadowy form. Cadaver, and people like him, like me, I have found, are not friends of the light.

“Come to gloat?” she asks, returning to her labors.

I let the door swing shut behind me. “There’d be little sense in that.” I suppress a shudder. It horrifies me every time I speak to hear that grated hollow whisper, though I am not dependant on that ugly little microphone for volume. Eventually, perhaps, but not yet. “It would be as pointless as cleaning up the blood of a man to hide it from me when I’m standing right in front of you.” The voice is my own, of that I am sure, but the throat through which it has to pass certainly is not.

Gracie’s scrubbing slows, her hair obscuring her face. I am struck by the desire to brush it out of her face, a lingering impulse from not-so-better times, but that brief surge of need is enough to confirm what I already know. I am still here. I am still me. Somewhere.

At length, she ceases her cleaning altogether and raises her face, tilts her head a little. Sniffs the air. “How did this happen? What did you do?”

“Fate is a fickle thing,” I tell her. “Which is why we are told to never put our faith in it, never to rely or depend on the chips falling where we want them to. It doesn’t work that way, and only a very desperate woman would try it.”

She smiles, sits back on her haunches, brushes the damp hair from her brow. Her eyes are like beetles nestling in bleached wood. “So you know then?”

“I didn’t, until the change. Until I was allowed to know.”

“That old bastard,” she sneers suddenly, rising to her feet. “He cheated me.”

“You’re hardly in a position to cry foul.” I step further into the room. The light from the hurricane lamp on the bar flutters. Shadows writhe.

“Fuck you.”

“Was a time,” I start to say and grin.

She stares at me for a long moment, her breasts rising and falling rapidly beneath her sweat and bloodstained dress, and slowly, slowly, a smile begins to crawl across her face. “But you’re him now, aren’t you?” she says. “You’re not just a pig-fucking Sheriff stuck in a rotten vessel. You’re him, which means you can do for me what he wouldn’t. What he was supposed to do.”

“Tell me why I should do anything for you.”

“Why else are you here? You know who I am and you want rid of me. I understand that, and I even promise not to hold it against you. We can consider the old contract null and void and start anew, what do you say? You give me what I want, and I’ll give you what you want.” She lets the fingers on one hand trail over her breast. An unconvincing look of lasciviousness crosses her face. “What do you say? I remember how you used to look at me, how you studied me.”

“Does life mean that little to you?” I ask her, ignoring the proposition. “That you’d sell so much of it for your own gain?”

“Spare me.” Contempt overwhelms her face. “Why should I be condemned to stay here because of a mistake, because of one small error I made tryin’ to escape that rapin’ bastard? Should I have shut my mouth and done nothin’?”

“You killed Gracie. You killed an innocent woman. Sacrificed her to get out.”

“I did her a favor.” The mention of her crime is apparently sufficient motive for her to drop the act, and so she does, even as the words continue to come. Her hair ripples, shortens, darkens. “She was miserable, just as much Eddie’s prisoner as I was. She hated me, and I her. She’d never have trusted me if I told her I’d take her from here, and she’d have been right.” Her skin turns stark white, cheekbones pressing against the skin as it tightens to suit the rounder shape of her face. “I would have taken her home to Toyko and sold her to the men who crave such bargains. But it never came to that. There was never much chance to plan anything.” Her accent has changed, become clipped, sharper, the lips forming them leaner. “Eddie made his own mistakes, and often. One of them was to accompany me home to meet my family.” She smiles proudly. “My family did not take to him. They put on quite a show for my American husband, and when he came home, he was quite mad.” Though she’s still wearing that drab gray dress, the body inside it has changed. It’s thinner, smaller, the breasts mere nubs beneath the material, the arms stick-like.

“Gracie—you—said you didn’t come home with him.”

“Not at first, but neither my family nor I were content to take his mind. They wanted to see him die through my eyes. So a week later, I came back, only something had changed in him, something we hadn’t foreseen. Whatever magic we’d done to his mind, it negated my magic. I couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t influence him. I was powerless. He was a raging beast, and he beat and raped me before I could think of a way to stop him. And then he tried to kill me.” Lian Su’s smile fades. She slowly turns her head to face the window, but her eyes are still on me. “In the moment of death, I left my body, and took the daughter’s, trapping her in mine. Too late I realized what I had done. The mark I had carved was still on the little bitch’s chest, and it was a hex I could not undo from the inside.”

“And here you are.”

“And here I am.”

“While Gracie rots in a freezer on the bank of the Milestone River.”

Her smile returns. “She liked the river. And her father took her life. Not me.”

“He thought he was killing you.”

“I’m hardly to blame for his short-sightedness.”

“And what about your family? Why not summon them?”

“Because of what he did to me. His violation was a lot more severe than even he—had he still possessed the faculties required to compose such a thought—even knew. He made me a victim, an unclean one, prone to vengeance of a basic kind: Human violence without magic, without influence. This is forbidden. I am either a majo, or a human, and whichever I choose is the way I must be.” Her face wrinkles in disgust. “And I have been forced to play as one of you for long enough.”

I approach her, taking my time. “And what if you get what you want. What then?”

“I will leave.”

“And go where? It doesn’t sound as if you’d be welcome at home.”

“Home is a small place. I am not tethered to it. I have survived on my own since I was fourteen. I can do so again.”

I walk past her and take a seat at the bar. She follows, a smile on her face that tells me she knows she’s going to get exactly what she wants. “One for the road?”

I nod silently.

“You shouldn’t look so glum, Sheriff. Is it all right to call you that now that you’re…in costume?”

Another nod, but I’m barely listening. What I’m doing as she pours me a tall glass of whiskey, is fingering through someone else’s memories, namely my predecessor’s seemingly limitless information about everyone in Milestone. It doesn’t take me long to summon up Lian Su’s callous visage, and in the time it takes her to put the cap back on the bottle after pouring her own drink, I know she’s been lying to me again.

“It’s a game,” I tell her, my fingers moving toward the glass. Old habits die hard, I guess.

I expect her to deny it, though at this stage of our little tete a tete, it would be silly. But she doesn’t. Instead