Stranger with No Candy
The day I met Crawford I was thirteen.
My name at the time was Johan, which I did not particularly like but which mattered very little because I was in the habit of changing names every few days. Johan d'Este I called myself, and I lived in luxury on the streets of Berlin.
I was the rebellious prince of a tribe of thieves and gypsies and whores, was myself the best thief and gypsy and whore there was. My crown was a length of golden damask ripped from a drapery in an abandoned house I'd camped in once, tied over my forehead to keep my hair out of my face. The liquid-fire mane was inconveniently easily spotted when I practiced pocket picking, but whatever money it lost me and trouble it caused me there it more than made up for when I needed to be charming or prostitute myself.
Occasionally I prided myself on the fact that, should I suddenly find myself bereft of my peculiar talent, I could have made my living as a whore without the slightest trouble.
Other times I was merely happy to have it, so that I might avoid pain and starvation and other such unpleasant sensations by tapping into the mind of someone sufficiently close. It would have been oh-so-lovely to be able to give their thoughts a firmer nudge than what little I could manage before their minds merged too much with mine for me to be able to command even my own thoughts properly, but what I had was still better than nothing.
"Joseph," someone called then, a voice rather definitely different from any I had heard before. For one it pronounced the Anglo-Saxon name I'd worn last week with an accent that was confident with the word but not British – not European at all, judging by my vast experience of dialects, collected over an, albeit short, lifetime in the global capital of Germany.
I turned, searching the crowd behind me for the speaker, eyes rowing fast over their faces even as my expression and the tilt of my head spoke of practiced lazy grace. There was no doubt as to who had called; I scanned the busy men and the shopping women and the whining children, but the one staring levelly back at me from across the cobbled street was the only one who mattered. Fairly tall, short dark hair, crisp suit. He'd have looked like one of the would-be business-men who tried so hard to establish a respectable aura in daylight that they paid twice the money of a regular customer when they went to Cabaret at night, had it not been for the set of his shoulders and face, the delicately cynical twist of his left eyebrow that marked him as a man of world. I'd had ample practice recognizing it.
"Joseph Krauzer," he said, not speaking loudly, but enough so and with enough distinctiveness for the sounds to float to me.
I wasn't quite certain why I went to him – then again I wasn't even certain why I'd stopped when he first addressed me, because I forgot my aliases almost as soon as I came up with new ones, and I'd only been Joseph for two days.
People watched me as I made my way across the packed street, the shopkeepers watchfully, the women scornfully or with pity, the men with disdain or desire. All the while the stranger's gaze lay on me inscrutable. I came to a stop with more distance between us than I would normally have allowed to separate me from a man I might probably like to rob or bed or both. It was as though I considered him predator rather than prey, despite the normalcy of his style and the lack of knife-shapes beneath his clothing. I didn't like feeling skittish, but I never ran away before I had what I wanted.
"Who are you, mein Herr?" I demanded in a hot whisper, speaking English since I figured he was likely American and they liked the locals to know their language, adding the last phrase in German because foreigners seemed to find it so wonderfully kinky.
"No one you would know of," he dismissed, then added after a short moment's apparent thought, "Crawford."
"How do you know of me, mein Herr Amerikaner?"
"A little bird whispered in my ear. Well, a street rat, rather."
"And what would they have happened to whisper?" I inquired, wondering if I ought to thank or kill the tattletale. Of course, in order to do either I'd first need to know who'd spilled, and this man who called himself Crawford… his mind was closed. Strange, that. I'd have preferred to let my soul overlap with his over doing it with one of my fellow street rats, because the chance of the American being high, on alcohol or otherwise, was much slimmer, and my talent had a tendency to lose itself in stoned minds. Hence I let a tendril of thought caress the inside of Crawford's head – only to find it gliding uselessly over a flat, dark, cold surface, as though his mind was caged in beyond walls of thick dirty ice.
"Nothing suitable for a discussion on the street," he replied, smiling thinly.
Oh. They'd said I was a great fuck, then. True enough, though I wondered if that was something I wanted to try with someone whose mind I couldn't mesh with – I couldn't read him to see what he wanted, nor could I chose to indulge in his sensations of bliss and conquest in order to ignore what my own body was put through.
"I'm sorry, Herr Crawford. I have an appointment." I'd been with enough Englishmen to speak their language fluently, but my German-British accent sounded odd compared to his solid American pronunciation.
"I rather doubt it," he said and, to my utter surprise, grabbed hold of my wrist. "This won't take long. It's not your body I'm after."
"What else would you want?" I sneered, testing his grip none too subtly. It had startled me that he'd be willing to touch me like this, put a perfectly snow-white glove around the rag-reminiscent green fabric covering my arm out here in the street, but my reflexes had taken over, I'd whipped away to run. And even so he'd caught me.
That was impossible.
I was… oh, damn, forgot the name again… I was Johan d'Este, and I simply was not caught. Immune mind or not, this man should not be able to counter my speed and unpredictability, two talents nursed well on the street.
"For the moment, a bit of your time. I'll compensate you if you want."
"Got candy, stranger? Sorry, my mom told me not to take it."
"If you had been in the habit of listening to your mother, I doubt you'd be here," he said, rather coldly but with an amused tint to his expression.
Fucker.
"What the hell do you want from me?" I demanded again, not quite going so far as to trash in his grip. Yet. "No one buys time from me, what the fuck do you want? My hands? My mouth? My ass? Sorry, I'm not selling them to you. Let go now or I scream."
"I told you, I do not want your body."
"Then what the fuck –"
His eyes should have been cold and creepy and crazy, but they were just brown and nearsighted. He said, "I want your soul."
I raised my eyebrow. My soul, huh? Well, I'd never had much use for that myself, now had I?
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