“Gloomy is Sunday with shadows, I spend it all…”
Dimitri sidled up next to him. It had to take some serious guts to come that close with the morbid vibe coming off of him strong and hard. Stirling turned down the volume on his phone so he could hear what Dimitri was saying.
“You have to stop this,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Wish I could, but it’s only through a grant from the Sterling Haig Foundation for the Black Arts that’s this little shitstorm is possible. I need to fix it.”
“They-will-kill-you,” said Dimitri, only spacing out the words so Stirling could tell he was really serious.
“Yeah maybe, but in the meanwhile, other people are dying for my fuck-up. Can’t have that.” He turned the volume back up on Lady Day and rolled his shoulders.
“My heart and I have decided to end it all…”
Dimitri gave him a pleading look. Stirling shrugged and walked a few paces away before raising his arms above his head. He dropped any remaining mental blocks on the cold pressure inside of him and let it all out. There was a collective gasp from the room as the full force of his unrestrained aura pushed against them. Black cables wove themselves from his fingertips and coiled around his arms. Dense white ice fog ran down his arms and over his body. He needed to finish this fast, he was beginning to shiver under his jacket from the cold.
“Soon there’ll be candles and prayers that are sad, I know…”
“I am Kingsford!” he roared to the room which grew noticeably more silent. “Lord of Barbeque! Sworn enemy of the Lacto-Vegan Illuminati!”
He even had the attention of the corpses now as they turned from their fight to regard him with their smirking, bloody faces.
He faced the attackers and shook out his jacket cuffs and hovered his hands over his hips in a gunfighter stance. Where could you find a decent tumbleweed when you really needed one one?
“Eat char-grilled death!”
He snapped the black cables from the hip at the nearest ghosts, six-shooter style. “Pew! Pew! Pew!” The remaining ghosts fell to his whipping black cables in seconds.
“Let them not weep, let them know that I’m glad to go…”
The customers watching from the edges of the room couldn’t see the ghosts, but they could see broken bodies that had been fighting only seconds before, slump motionless to the floor as he snapped black cables out at them.
The blood-splattered woman in torn jeans looked both pissed and relieved at the same time as she stood panting amongst her vanquished foes. He gave her a jaunty two fingered, ‘it’s all in a day’s work’ salute to his bag.
“Ma’am,” he said, before vaulting over a broken chair to reach the mound of silent invaders who had at last subdued the mini-dragon.
“Death is no dream, for in death I’m caressing you…”
One of the attackers, a middle-aged man with a gut that sagged over his belt like the bow of an oil tanker, rushed to block his path. He had somehow yet to be damaged in the fight with either the dragon or the improvised Strangefellows defence squad.
Stirling raised an arm, “Taste my whip, impudent cur!” he shouted, when a startling change came over the man’s face. For the first time, Stirling saw something other than a shit-eating grin on the face of one of the attackers. The new emotion was anger, this guy looked really, really pissed. That was interesting.
“With the last breath of my soul, I’ll be blessing you…”
The man’s lips began to move and Stirling held up a finger while he pulled out an earbud so he could hear. As the earbud came away, much of the song’s metaphysical weight went with it. The chill settled more deeply into Stirling’s body and he clenched his muscles to stop himself from shivering.
“…should have accepted my offer and come to work for me,” the man was saying. “You would have been rewarded beyond anything you could have imagined.” He spoke in an accent that Stirling thought probably started as Scots.
“Huh?” Stirling asked, lowering his hand a fraction.
“We could have changed the worlds, but instead you chose to work against my designs, you chose to spurn me.”
“Spurn you? Buddy, nobody talks like that. I don’t even know you.” He raised his whip again.
“But I know you, carver,” the man continued.
It took a second, but then it clicked, “Oh! You’re that shit-blister that’s been going around stealing my ducks!”
“Indeed.”
“And you killed my customers!”
“Yes.”
“You burned down my workshop, you fat fuck!”
“Yes, I di…”
“And you stole my notebooks!”
“Yes….”
“And Rag and Bone! You hired those two ass-clowns to fuck with me!”
“Enough! Yes, I did all of those things. Work for me or you will join your ghosts, those are your choices.”
Stirling waggled an index finger at him. “Naa, I don’t think so.”
“And why not?”
Stirling held a hand in front of himself and lazily swung one of the black filaments around in a circle, giving the movement a bit of pelvic action to drive home the point. The corner of the fat man’s eye began to twitch.
“Because just like the rest of these assholes,” he said waving a finger around the room, “you’re wearing your ghost on the outside.” He reached up to replace the earbud.
“Is that what you think?”
Stirling paused with the earbud in his fingers half-way to his ear and made a little head-nodding motion at the ghost who was standing just to the left of them. “Well, yeah, he’s standing right there.”
The ghost grabbed it’s spectral balls and lifted its chin at him. “Bite me, asshole,” it said in a Bronx accent.
Stirling jabbed his whip hand at the ghost, white must dripping down from his hand. “Oh, you don’t want to tempt me, tubby.”
The fat man smiled a tight-lipped smile. “You aren’t the only one who has a way with ghosts anymore, boy.”
Stirling watched in surprise as a pair of phantom limbs reached out from inside the fat man’s physical body. They were spindly, skinless, and the rust colour of old blood. Exposed muscle and tendons looked like an illustration straight out of a demon’s medical text. Veins of familiar black pulsed the length of the arm. If he needed any further confirmation that his magic had been used to create these things, it was in those veins. They were his magic, he could feel it.
Without warning, both phantom arms lashed out, rough black claws sinking into the fat man’s ghost and held him fast. Fingers pushed deep into the ghost’s shoulder and wrenched back, tearing ghostly flesh before drawing a silvery chunk inside its physical body and out of sight.
The fat man’s ghost screamed like an injured animal and fell to its knees, grabbing for its ruined shoulder.
“Fuck!” the ghost howled, “It hurts!”
Stirling took a step back. “Holy shit!”
The man gave him a greasy smirk, “Now you see, I…”
“Pew!” Stirling shouted, and with a snap of his whip, the fat man’s tortured ghost popped out of existence with a sigh of red mist.
Unlike the others, this body didn’t immediately collapse when its ghost was gone, but just looked at Stirling blandly. “For your own sake, for the sake of your few friends, and for the sake of all these people,” he said gesturing to the room around them, “reconsider your decision. You don’t have much time and even fewer places you can hide. Everyone here fears you, and make no mistake, they will cheer and raise their glasses to the one who kills you.”
With that, he adjusted the fall of his pants and sat down in a nearby chair. “Until next we meet.” His eyes closed and his body slumped like a marionette with its strings cut.
“Everyone here fears you,” Stirling said to the body in a mocking imitation of the man’s voice while reinserting his earbud. “You don’t have much time,” he added with false gravity before kicking over the chair. “Fuckwit.”
Billie Holiday had wrapped up Gloomy Sunday and Johnny Cash was well into his cover of Trent Reznor’s Hurt. Hurt was good, but it didn’t hold the same metaphysical mass as Gloomy Sunday, but it was possible to drain a song of its charge if he used it too often. Stirling had the feeling he might need to be careful with the few songs he’d found that could contain the power he needed.
Though the invaders were keeping the dragon pinned, some of them now disengaged and turned their smirking faces to begin walking in his direction. By this point, none of them were without some kind of injury. The dragon might have been pinned, but when something with that much mass was writhing around, injuries were bound to occur.
It suddenly occurred to Stirling what the little grin made these walking turds look like. They all had the exact same expression Martin Shkreli wore on his face in online pictures. Martin Shkreli, the douche who jacked the price of Aids medication by fifty-six times in order to squeeze the last dime out of sick people. That made this so much easier.
Light and sound dimmed as Stirling snapped out his black cables in a series of light-stealing whip cracks. He wasn’t a ninja or anything, but he had range, space to move, and Martin Shkreli to imagine in the place of walking corpses. They didn’t stand a chance.
In under half a minute the dragon was free, and between the two of them, they made short work of the remaining invaders. While Stirling cracked his whipcords and popped ghosts into red mist, the dragon spread its wings to separate the invaders from customers. It batted at the few attackers that made it past Stirling’s whips and occupied them until Stirling could arrive to deliver the coup de grace.
As the last of the animated bodies collapsed to the floor, quiet spread through the room interrupted only by the moans of the injured and dying. Most of the patrons were clustered around the back wall staring at him in a mixture of shock and horror. The gothy-looking kids he’d noticed on entering had phones out and were pointing the camera lenses at him. Shit.
The dragon eyed him and hunched down keeping its position between Stirling and the rest of the people there, going so far as to half-spread its wings again.
“Really?” he asked it, hugging himself tightly and shivering. “I just saved your scaly ass,” he chattered, gesturing with a hand that still had heavy ice smoke flowing off of it.
He forced his mental barricades back up, one at a time. The black filaments slowly evaporated from his fingertips and his creepy vibe dialled itself back down from eleven. He shook the coldness out of his fingers and glanced at the crowd, all eyes were on him. He could see Sue, Sam, and even Dimitri gaping at him with pale, shocked faces.
He straightened the bag on his head. “Great place you’ve got here,” he began, trying to keep the shivering out of his voice. There was a full steaming mug of coffee on a nearby table that had somehow avoided being overturned. Mana from freaking heaven. He took it in numb fingers, tilted his charcoal bag away from his lips and gulped it back. The warmth felt indescribably good going down.
“The coffee’s really top-notch,” he said in a more normal voice. There was an even longer silence. “Well, it’s been a long night, make sure you all tip your serving staff and find a safe ride home. Tis’ the season, right?” More silence.
He tossed a few bills on the nearest intact table and said, “Sorry about the mess,” and walked out the door.
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