“I’m not sure. I just went up to the office on the left.”
I spotted a small staircase off to one side of the truck loading bay. It led to a windowless manager’s door. “Hold on for a moment, please,” I told her. I ran up the stairs and tried the knob. It was unlocked. I flipped on the lights. The room inside was just as empty as the warehouse. “Any other details you can remember?” I asked Judith.
“I gave them the money. They used one of those mirrors to give me that damn soul, and I left. I think there were three or four imps inside having lunch at the time. There really isn’t anything else.”
That’s all she knows, Maggie confirmed in the back of my head.
“Understood. Thank you.”
I hung up and called my friend at OtherOps. Justin and I go back longer than me and Maggie. I like to call him a desk jockey because he hates leaving the office, but he was a capable agent and third in command at the Cleveland OtherOps office. My call went to voicemail, but he rang back almost the instant I hung up the phone.
“Alek,” he said, “you get anything at that warehouse?”
“Nothing. Everything is unlocked, and the place is empty.”
He snorted and said, “I got in touch with the owner this morning. Turns out she rents to anybody willing to pay cash up front, no questions asked. Her last tenant was human, but she doesn’t have much of a description: male, six feet, blond hair.”
“That could be me,” I said flatly.
“Yeah, she wasn’t very helpful. She did say that they still have three months prepaid on the rent. Someone was there, but it sounds like they cleared out before you could reach them.”
Human, huh? Maggie said. So the imps definitely aren’t working alone.
Sure sounds like it. We just need to find out if this human is another henchman or the big boss.
You make it sound like a video game.
Don’t shit on the ways I keep my life interesting, I told her.
I said to Justin, “Any word on who hired that necromancer to rough me up?”
“Nothing,” Justin replied. “The kid won’t say a damn word to anyone at the station. I’ve got our sorcery specialist talking to him right now. Hopefully I’ll get a little more out of him at some point.”
“I appreciate it.”
There was a pause from the other end of the line. “You, uh, gonna tell me who you’re after this time? Is it teeth? You’re always chasing teeth.”
“I don’t actually do that many teeth these days. The Tooth Fairy is semiretired, and Jinn Enterprises has scaled back their Midwest operations.”
“Blood?”
“Nope.”
“So are you going to tell me?”
“Sorry, client confidentiality. But I’ll buy you a beer next week if you’ve got the time.”
“Deal.”
I hung up and stared at the warehouse, feeling more than a little annoyed. Ferryman was wrong about one thing: that souls didn’t have any value in this life. Judith had paid half a million for that secondhand shit. I had plenty of smoke – five dead imps and a half-dead lawyer – but no actual fire. Someone in town was running a very lucrative scam with Ferryman’s missing souls, and if Judith’s run-in with the imps was any indication, people were going to start turning up dead sooner rather than later.
You think they’re packing up business? Maggie cut into my thoughts.
Maybe, I replied. They abandoned the warehouse with three months’ worth of rent already paid. People don’t close up when business is good.
So either business is bad, Maggie said thoughtfully.
Or, I replied, they know that someone has caught on to their little scheme.
I tried to work through a dozen different angles. It could be someone inside one of the soul collecting businesses, maybe a disgruntled or ex-employee. It could be an Other, like Maggie, who had limited omniscience and smelled trouble. It could even be a reaper gone bad. There were too damn many possibilities. I cursed Ferryman for bringing this to me instead of OtherOps and got back in my truck.
Where to? Maggie asked. We’re kind of out of leads.
I looked at my hands on the steering wheel, running my eyes over my tattoos. The facsimile of Grendel’s claw on the back of my left hand made the skin itch, dormant sorcery wanting to come to life. I considered going back to visit Zeke. I owed him a slap for siccing that necromancer on me, and he might be able to nudge me in a new direction. There’s still one good option, I told Maggie.
What are you thinking… Oh, no. I don’t think that’s a good idea.
I started the car. I don’t either. But I’ve got a job to do, and Kappie Shuteye is the only one who might know what a bunch of imps are doing working for a soul thief.
Alek…
I cut her off. It’s my next move. If you don’t like it, go read a book.
The words came out a little harsher than I intended, but I still remembered her anger at the necromancer. I get bossed around so much by Ada that I really didn’t need it coming from Maggie too. This job was starting to give me tension headaches – not to mention that fact that it had already forced me to kill five people. I needed to move quickly and decisively.
Still, I wasn’t above admitting – to myself – that Maggie might be right. After all, Kappie Shuteye is the imp king who sold me to Ada twenty years ago.
The term imp king sounds more impressive than it actually is. It would be more accurate to say something like imp mob boss, and for some of the people who’ve inherited the term, even that might be generous. All imp kings operate a little differently, but most of them amount to little more than a union overseer for their kind in a certain region. Their underlings bow and scape and pay their membership dues, and in return the imp king finds them steady work in his own ventures or hires them out to whoever is willing to pay for a little sleazy muscle.
Kappie Shuteye is imp king of northeast Ohio, but that hasn’t always been his job. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, he sat on the board of directors of a company called Paronskaft. Their specialty was buying firstborn children in return for magical favors. In the reaper business, we call the children rumpelstiltskins, or skins for short. Paronskaft basically ran a slave trade until they were shut down in the late ’80s. As far as I know, I was one of the last children sold by Paronskaft before OtherOps shuttered them for good. Kappie was the one who arranged the deal.
The last time I saw him, I broke his nose.
I pulled off the highway at a place called Brecksville, and pretty soon I turned into the parking lot of an old, run-down elementary school in an overgrown part of town that had once been a community of trailer parks. It looked like the school had been crumbling for decades: most of the windows were broken, the brick facade was barely in one piece, and the parking lot itself could barely be called concrete anymore. Despite the empty look of the place, there were at least a dozen cars parked in the teacher’s lot around back, including a couple of flatbeds and an entire semitrailer. A team of imps loaded the semi with plastic-wrapped pallets of indeterminate origin. They all stopped to stare as I pulled up and parked.
I got out and leaned against the hood of my truck, letting the imps size me up for a moment. I took out my phone, pretended to scroll through it, and snapped a photo of the group, which I emailed to Nadine – a little insurance policy in case Kappie decided he wanted to rough me up for breaking his nose. “I’m looking for Kappie,” I finally called to them.