Last rites, p.3
Last Rites, page 3
Whoever ran Exquisite Corpse had tried to mask the smell of newly reclaimed real-wood flooring and fresh paint with copious amounts of wrackrath and sage, but the scents leaked through. Even the most prestigious body galleries were less than two years old. PCM hadn’t existed before that. I’d contracted it at the forefront of the disease, just in time for my premature death to be tragic and romantic, but too early for the miracle cures that humanity inevitably found for these sorts of illnesses.
Except no one seemed to be working hard enough for a solution to PCM yet; they were all busy looking for what had caused it. Maybe because no one important in an organization with any power had presented with it yet. If Carina had come down with beautiful corpse plague, you could bet your barnacles the Guild would’ve been looking for a cure.
Maybe the Guild had already found a cure, but one higher-up Head Scribe Fishdick Cuthbert was withholding it until the untimely death of the most gorgeous and greatest thief in history as revenge for said thief making him look stupid.
Or maybe ol’ Cuthy just wanted me to wonder if they had the cure so I would dig a little more recklessly through their archives and files and give away my current location. At any given time, I had six to twelve apps broadcasting my wristpiece’s location from different places across the Revived Earth just to keep things interesting, but what if the Guild hired a technomancer who could trace them back to the real me somehow? Cuthy had been known to stoop to breaking Guild law before when he thought it would show me up.
I shook out my shoulders, trying to banish the feeling of being watched. I was getting paranoid, that was all. There was no way for Cuthbert to think that far ahead of me. Besides, I would’ve found some mention of a cure while combing the Guild’s archives and files. Not even a Guild Council member could’ve kept that secret completely under wraps. Some bleeding heart siltbrain would’ve made a stink about not releasing it when so many people were dying.
I wandered through the displays, letting my sneaks thud on the reclaimed wood and dropping in a squeak now and then for good measure. Everybody else seemed to want this place to be sacred and silent, so it was extra satisfying to disturb the peace.
To a careless onlooker, the jeweled bodies probably appeared the picture of glamour and wealth, but my acute perception told me the real story: a scantily clad woman with pouty lips and high cheekbones hunched in the posture of someone who hadn’t adjusted to her sudden weight loss before she bit the big one. A guy almost within shouting distance of my ruggedly handsome features had the rickets-curved shin bones of malnutrition and the hollow cheeks of addiction.
I stopped in front of the coffin of an aquamarine-skinned beauty in the Rare Finds section, her flawless face and body ruined by the slatted gills down her neck. The metal plaque in the glass said that she was the first-known case of the plague jumping species from humans to muties. The gallery had probably paid a hefty price to whoever slogged through the sewers to find her.
Another Rare Find coffin held a guy whose eyes had crusted over, tiny sapphires glinting in his irises. He was the only body with open eyes that I’d seen so far.
To his right was a tiny coffin containing a golden-haired little thing with rose diamonds glistening in her pink cheeks. I’m not great with kids’ ages, but I put my guess somewhere around six or seven. Her plaque just called her Unnamed Young Girl. Probably sold by a junkie parent in need of emberdust money.
“Tragic, isn’t it?” a breathy female voice asked over my right shoulder.
I turned around to find one of those chic morbid types with pale skin and wide, smoky eyes watching my face intently. Like all the rest of the gothic-lovers, she was draped in black lace and pagan tribal symbols.
For a split second, she flashed through my mind rendered in diamonds and heirloom-cut onyx. But a second glance showed that she wasn’t infected. Beneath the makeup, her skin was bumpy and hormonal.
“More like a literal diamond mine for anybody with a set of picks.” I produced one of the custom burglary kits I always keep somewhere on my person and waved it under her nose. “I’m casing the joint.”
“You’ve got it.” Her smoky eyes stroked my cheekbones, lips, and jaw. Her breathing shallowed out. “You’re beautiful.”
I scowled. “I was born this way, honey. It’s natural, not some fishshit plague.”
Her tongue darted out and wet her bottom lip. “Do you think it would transmit to me if we...” She grinned and let the suggestion trail off.
“It’s called fucking,” I said. “And speaking of fucking, where the fuck is your mother?”
“If I could find somebody willing to roleplay her, would that get you excited?”
“Is this some kind of idiotic suicide ploy or are you just a pre-necrophiliac? Did you used to nail patients in the terminal unit before PCM existed?”
“There’s a plush lounge in the women’s restroom.”
I glanced down at her stomach. If she’d even given me a glimpse of snowy pale tummy in all that black lace, I would’ve been in without even thinking twice, but she’d doubled down on showing leg, shoulder, back, and enough cleavage to drown in.
“You’re not my type.” I let my eyes roam over her curvy frame one more time and curled my lip in disgust. “You’re not even in my class. Get lost.”
She stuck around for a little while, maybe waiting for me to change my mind, but I ignored her. Sex wouldn’t have been enjoyable then anyway. Not after the incredible fiery orgasm of the PCM fits. Once you’ve felt that kind of pleasure, even sex loses its draw. Either she was too dumb for all the interviews with terminal patients gushing over the PCM fire to have let her in on that little fact or she thought she could give it a run for its money. Either way, she’d lost touch with reality.
After she finally slinked off to find prey with less self-esteem, I started to see the rest of the women and some of the men in the Exquisite Corpse for what they were. Necro-lovers. People who wanted to frot up against death, feel the rush of a running clock. Money changed hands with the gallery directors, and glass-front coffins opened. I wondered what the turnover rate was on the bodies. It was illegal to buy and sell corpses in Emden, but you can’t make people stick to the law in a city with as much money as Ad’brum’sarl. Everybody’s got their price, and the people of the Gem City have more than enough cash to pay it.
The glare on one coffin caught my eye, projecting my reflection onto the body inside.
Someone was bound to buy my corpse after I died. I was the kind of luxury product impossible to keep on the shelves. No one could look into my chiseled, devilishly handsome face and turn away unaffected. If my eyes crusted over open like the guy in the Rare Finds room, my price would triple. What precious stone could possibly capture the depth and beauty of my perfect black coffee eyes with their ring of darkness around the iris?
You mean my eyes, Lorne whispered in my ear.
No, I mean mine. Our eyes are nothing alike.
Lorne’s had been the black, cold eyes of a shark, with a smile to match. Mine were warm and inviting with the sort of smile you could get lost in, or stormy and dark with fathomless depths to plunder, whichever served me best at the time. Lorne had been able to disguise a lot of things about himself, but he could never change his eyes like I could. Women wanted me more than they had ever wanted Lorne, and as an added bonus, I didn’t torture and murder them.
Maybe you’re a little bad like me, the garbled voice of Annabel Lee said.
Maybe I was. At least when I was dead, the Van Zandt blight on the Revived Earth would be gone for good. Lorne’s legacy destroyed, his dreams of a father-son serial killing team wiped out forever. That had to be worth something.
I looked into the dark eyes of my reflection. Maybe Carina would buy my body. I could leave her a message on a dead man’s switch telling her where to find it, to be sent once my brain waves had shut down for forty-eight hours. No matter what they tell you, forty-eight hours is beyond the capabilities of even the best necromancers to resurrect with the original soul attached.
And Carina would want me back, possibly with enough desperation to hire one. Her hunger for me was a part of herself she couldn’t fully deny. Like a domesticated black onca, the predator was still inside, just below the surface, waiting for a chance to unleash itself.
I pulled up our message history on my wristpiece. Set up the terms for a dead man’s switch. But then I just stared at the blinking cursor.
What do you say to someone who knew they should’ve been yours?
“Excuse me, sir.” Another woman, this one wearing a dark dress much classier and less dramatic than the gothic widow chic of the necrophiliac. She stood far enough away to retain a respectable personal space, but close enough to allow her to speak in low tones. She had soft green eyes the color of celery, and her cinnamon skin was splotched in places with ragged pink-cream blemishes. “The gallery is closing in ten minutes.”
Vitiligo. A large patch of discoloration covered the left side of her face from eyebrow to mid-cheek. My fingers twitched and curled into my palm, already feeling that smooth, exotic flesh.
“Thank you for the notice.” I let my wristpiece drop and put on a brooding, tragic expression. A lost soul whom the right woman could save. Her pale green gaze darkened immediately in response. “Who can I speak to about donating my body?”
Jubal
I PRESSED MY NOSE TO her scarred cheek, feeling the softness of those pink blossoms against my face, drowning in them. She tasted like glowing embers and plasma from the surface of the sun. I could never get enough of her to be satisfied.
Glinting flame swirled around us, a blast furnace of oranges, reds, magentas, and flashes of white. It burned away the rest of the world and left just the two of us and our perfect hunger. Powerful. Predatory. We destroyed each other, died together, and were reborn as nothing but fire, all impurities seared away. Everything from my old self was gone. Emerald sparks popped with her approval as she sank her hands into my burning flesh.
“Shaney.”
I blinked, startled to come out of the PCM fit so abruptly. The loss of that perfect burn ached. It left a cold spot inside my soul and an emptiness in the pit of my stomach. The back of my eyes prickled with threatening tears.
Some cinnamon-and-cream-skinned woman sat across my hips, staring down at me.
“What?” The dagger lodged in my throat made my voice hoarse.
“My name is Shaney,” she said. “You called me Carina.”
I swallowed, trying to force the sharp edge down. “You misheard me. I called you Spilt Cream because of your patches.”
It wasn’t my cleverest work, but the abrupt mood shift did the trick. Her thin black brows met in the middle over her nose, and her arms came in to hug her gorgeous cinnamon-and-cream breasts.
“What do—”
“What do I mean? I mean you’re strung together like a mismatched quilt, Shaney, which is a real shame because if your skin was all one color, you’d be halfway pretty.”
Her green eyes blinked rapidly. “I don’t—”
“I wish you wouldn’t speak,” I interrupted, grabbing her hips. “If you’d keep your mouth shut, I could concentrate on trying to forget what you look like long enough to blow my load.”
She should’ve told me to fuck off right then, but her self-esteem was even worse than I’d been hoping. She was going to let me keep going. Bile crept up the back of my throat.
I shoved her off and got dressed. My joints ground and resisted the motions, unwilling to let me forget that even when I didn’t feel the PCM, it was busy building calcifications inside my body.
The gallery director stared down at the floor, her luscious little milk-splashed tummy rising and falling with shallow breaths.
My whole body ached with the need to run my palms over that patchwork velvet again, but I ignored it, burning the image into my brain instead.
“I know you’re hurt and scared.” Her voice came out in a low whisper. “It’s okay.”
I tried to think of something worse I could say to her, some insult that would ruin her life and make her question every choice that had led her to this moment, but nothing came to mind.
“Lorne would’ve torn you apart.” I transferred an insulting load of money into her account, filling in the memo space with Grief Counseling. “Believing some fishshit sob story about dying of PCM. I made that up to get laid, genius. It was all a lie.”
She looked at me like she couldn’t figure out what I was. Which was true, she couldn’t. Most people don’t have the frame of reference required to come close. Carina’s probably the only one who’s ever been in the same solar system as me, let alone the same species classification.
“But you didn’t make it up,” the cinnamon-and-cream beauty whispered.
I stopped with my hand clutching the door handle. In the reflection of the frosted glass, the gallery owner hugged her arms tighter around her breasts.
“I know what it looks like. I’ve been working here since Exquisite Corpse opened, and I was a volunteer on a terminal ward before that. Your eyes...you’re terrified. The ground’s sliding out from under you and you don’t know what to do or where to grab.”
I threw back my head and laughed until I felt sick. “Somebody’s been reading too many tragic romances.”
There was a soft intake of breath as if she was going to say something.
I cut in before she could. “Sister, when I die, no one’s going to mourn. The only tears will be shed at my glass coffin for the sheer unadulterated beauty of the corpse inside.” I jerked the office door open and breezed out, slamming it behind me. “That’s all I ever was.”
When I made it back out onto the street, the acid sleet had turned to rain and Ad’brum’sarl’s City Aroma Control was working overtime to mask the stink of pollution and underground mutie encampments. My driver idled in a parking space just up the block.
I climbed in back, shuddering at the sudden temperature change. The heat was blasting in the car, but after the PCM fire, it was a far cry from warm enough.
“Back to the Olmict’s, Jemaine!”
Jubal
CARINA WAS EITHER ASLEEP or pretending to sleep when I got back to the penthouse, her lips slack around the breathing tube and her long black lashes flush against her mahogany skin. Being trapped inside her head for so long must’ve been exhausting. I imagined the black treble hooks of energy twisting and popping in my muscles, screaming to get out of a body completely unable to move.
That’s coming your way soon, Lorne said.
I stopped dead in my tracks, dripping rainwater onto the carpet.
Lorne preened at having caught me off guard. You don’t think those folks at the body parlor died first and then crusted over, do you? Calcified, immobile joints, jewel-encrusted body. Your brain will have enough nutrients to survive days, maybe weeks afterward. A sparkly prison cell made for one.
“No one can catch me but me.”
In that case, congratulations. You finally got you. And it wasn’t the blubber-induced sleep-apnea smothering I always said it would be.
I giggled and shook my shoulders out.
“Not for lack of trying,” I said, looking over the remains of the meal I’d eaten earlier. I didn’t remember being that mean to the bacon and remoulade, but the plate was practically licked clean. “Should’ve topped it off with a few dozen chocolate cookie crunch bars.”
I had a case of the packaged snacks on the counter next to the pop-up wet bar, but the stock was dwindling a lot slower than it should’ve been. Now that the sweet treats were a way to stay alive rather than a threat to my gorgeous complexion and heart-stopping good looks, they didn’t hold much appeal. It’s probably the same way for anything you have to do instead of shouldn’t do.
Rather than eating a handful while I was thinking of it, I grabbed the food cart and shoved it back into the dumbwaiter. I was getting sloppy about picking up after myself, too. Probably my beautiful brain cycling down, trying to shut off on me. So far as anybody knew, deteriorating cognitive function wasn’t a symptom of PCM, but the odds weren’t good that anybody else with the plague had the level of intelligence required for their brain to be aware of its own demise.
My eyes landed on the bottle containing the last swallow of Time-water on the nightstand. One hour’s worth of standing outside of the regular flow of time. What would happen if I took that last drink, then used Carina’s knuckgun to shoot myself in the head? Would the bullet fire or would the explosion in the cap hold off until time restarted? Would it fire but not kill me until everything went back to its regular flow? Would I have time to sit around and rethink my decision?
“The electricity’s about to go out.” My kigao’s wide, burning blood eyes pleaded with me.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “I’m not going to kill myself. Blow my head off and mess up this work of art? I think not.”
“The electricity’s about to go out.” She spun in a slow circle, eyes never leaving my face, while the impurities that made up her body boiled and burned.
A knock at the door sent my pulse racing. My gut clenched.
“So that’s why you’re here,” I told the kigao.
Whoever it was knocked again. Not the sharp thump of law enforcement. With Iceni’s lady boner for me, I’d been expecting an eventual visit from the Guild.
This was light. Hesitant. But if my kigao was there, no less dangerous.
Sweat dampened my armpits and rolled down my spine into my asscrack.
“Who do we have behind door number one?” I asked around the frozen grin on my face.
If the knocker was waiting until my shadow moved behind the fishbowl peep screen so they could open fire, they were in bad luck. The day I checked in, I had hooked my wristpiece up to the peep screen as a precaution against that very tactic.
Keeping my feet planted firmly in the penthouse bedroom, I pulled up the screen tie-in and checked the feed from the hall.
