“Why are you pretending to be an OtherOps agent?” she asked.
I’d already introduced myself for real, and I gave her a tight smile at the question. “If I’d shown up and told the secretary I was a reaper, you wouldn’t have seen me.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you’d assume I was either here for a client or for the secondhand soul. You wouldn’t have wanted to talk to me about either. Reapers might have some pull, but nobody says no to OtherOps.”
She sniffed, took a sip of her coffee, and then held it in both hands to hide their trembling. Despite her condition, she still had sharp eyes, and she managed a stern, disaffected air. “You’re not wrong. I suppose I shouldn’t report you, considering the circumstances.”
I heard Maggie laugh in the back of my head. She’s an arrogant old broad. Should you point out that if she reports you she’ll go down for soul fraud?
I don’t think that’s a thing, I told her.
It will be if she calls OtherOps on you.
“I appreciate that,” I said to Judith. “This secondhand soul – what can you tell me about it?”
She hesitated before answering. “I’ve suspected that it was killing me since I first got it.”
“And how long have you had the soul?”
“Four months or so.”
“And how long until it started to do this to you?” I asked, gesturing at her emaciated body.
Judith shook her head. “I started to feel strange within a week. The physical changes became apparent after a month.”
“If you suspected something was wrong, why didn’t you just call the guy you bought it from and ask to have it removed?”
Judith rasped a chuckle. “Denial, I suppose. I wanted to believe I was just sick. Do you know what it’s like to not have your soul?”
“I wouldn’t, no.” A better reaper might have injected a little sympathy into their voice. With my background, I have a hard time relating to anyone who willingly makes deals with the Other. “But I’ve heard it starts to hurt after a while.”
“Not hurt,” Judith explained. “Not exactly. You just start to feel… empty. Like a shell. It’s like a really bad breakup, where no amount of joy can fill the void left behind. Nothing – money, food, sex, power, thrill. Life becomes tasteless. I sold out to LuciCorp fifteen years ago. I paid immediately. None of those damned deferment plans that eventually find the reapers at your door. It took almost a decade for the emptiness to hit. After a while, it was all I could think about. Then…” She gestured to the pile of dead imps. “One of these little bastards showed up at the office and offered to sell me a used soul. Claimed it would feel just like my old one, and I’d be back to normal within weeks.”
“How much did you pay?” I asked.
“Five hundred grand.”
Maggie let out a low whistle.
I said, “I’m looking for the people who sold this to you. Did I get them all?” I certainly hoped not. If I had, I’d just killed everyone who could tell me where to find the rest of Ferryman’s missing souls. I was pretty sure I was in the clear, though. Imps rarely act on their own.
“No, no,” Judith answered. “At least, I don’t think so. I don’t actually recognize any of those… gentlemen. I only let them in because one knew that I was sick and claimed he could help me.” She scowled into the distance, her eyes hopeless. “They were going to kill me.”
That was interesting. “How do you know?” I asked.
“They talked about it. I could barely fight back. They said they were going to repossess the soul they sold me, then slit my throat. They would have killed Robert, too – gotten rid of us and then sold the soul to the next poor sap.”
I assumed Robert was her secretary. “Imps are gossips,” I told her, “and they’re savage little bastards who tend to be low on the food chain. Whenever they get a chance to lord over others, they do. Do you know who their boss is?”
Judith shook her head. “I paid in cash. Dropped it off at a warehouse in the Flats.” She tried to get up, and I had to help her to her feet. She teetered over to a filing cabinet and came back with a scrap of paper. “That address.” She leaned heavily against the wall, staring at the covered corpses, and I thought I saw a flicker of life – of anger – in her eyes. “I’m going to leave town for a while.”
“Probably a good idea,” I answered. “People will be here to clean all this up in ten minutes. You’ll want to make sure that your secretary – Robert, was it?”
“Yes.”
“That Robert doesn’t tell anyone about this. It’s best if he keeps thinking I’m OtherOps, but if OtherOps does show up for some reason… well, I was never here.”
“I understand.”
“Good.” I felt around my lower canines with my tongue. I could still taste some blood from where they’d split the gums. It was painful, but a good kind of pain. The berserker in me enjoyed the sight of the bodies in the corner, relishing the memory of putting down five of those creepy little fuckwits. The human part of me felt vaguely ill. I’m a good reaper partially because I’m dangerous, yes, but I’m not an assassin or a thug. Without Maggie’s urging and that troll blood in my veins, I would have moved a little more cautiously – maybe even left an imp alive for Maggie to question. I felt foolish.
I exchanged cards with Judith and stepped outside just in time to see Ferryman’s cleanup squad enter the office. There were over a dozen of them – all human, as far as I could tell, and the group included janitors, a butcher, carpet men, and even a couple of guys wearing the shirts of a local glass company, here to replace the one frosted glass wall I’d shot out in my little rampage. I stepped around them and headed into the hallway, where I wished, not for the first time, that I followed in the footsteps of almost everyone else at Valkyrie and smoked. It might have relieved some of my tension.
You don’t seem too hot right now, Maggie said.
I just killed five people.
Imps.
Yeah, imps. They’re not human, but I’d still feel bad if I hit a dog with my car. Besides, I should have left one alive.
Move too slowly, and that one might have gotten the drop on you.
I snorted. She was right, of course. Always shoot first and ask questions later when it comes to a room full of hostile imps. But I still didn’t feel great about it. I’m taking the rest of the day off. I’ll call a friend of mine at OtherOps and find out who owns this warehouse. Then we’ll hit it first thing in the morning.
Chapter 6
The warehouse at the address Judith gave me was empty.
I stood just inside the open door of a truck loading bay and gazed across thirty thousand square feet of breezy concrete lit by morning sunlight streaming in through broken pane windows near the ceiling. Taking a quick walk around the open space, I found a bit of trash, plenty of dust, and no evidence that anything of substance had been stored here for some time. I returned to my truck and dialed Judith, who picked up on the second ring.
“I’m at the address you gave me,” I told her. “When you dropped off the money here, did you actually go inside?”
“I did.”
“Was the warehouse being used for anything?”