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The lopsided cardboard box landed heavy atop its stack, dolly clattering on its sprung wheels as Lamont Toucey winced and waned from garage to car and back.
Doc Worth's lean frame staggered up from the cab at the front curb and drifted down the gravel driveway, silent.
Lamont took his rest, elbow on the top box, to watch Worth zombie-shuffle his way up the short wooden steps of the house's back porch. "Your shift on deliveries," he called out. "It's December already."
Worth waved a hand, flashing skin that was dirty and bloody and pale.
"Hey," Lamont left his boxes, gaining the steps quickly after Worth as the back door was rattled open under a grimy set of keys. Lamont scooped a grip under the strap of the heavier looking bag as Worth fell to his knees and then face-planted right there on the kitchen linoleum. "Very mature," Lamont drawled, rolling his eyes as he set the rucksack atop the cluttered kitchen table, grimacing as it squeaked under the weight.
Luce flipped his middle finger in Lamont's general direction, colorless forehead pressed flat into the cold linoleum.
"Didja get that thing for Louey?" Lamont took a chair at the table and sipped from a mug of cold coffee, pulling a face before splashing the coffee over his shoulder to land in the sink.
"Nyeah," Worth grunted, shoulders hitching under a sigh.
"So who kicked you in the balls? I mean, heh, finally?" Despite the animosity of his nagging, Lamont's heavy black eyebrows were creased in concern, the thick ropes of his arms braced over the paper litter of the kitchen table as if to receive bad news.
Worth just shook his head, nose grinding into the floor. "Don't wanna do deliveries," he huffed. "Always turns into housecall. Fuggin' hate housecall."
"Maybe if you didn't introduce yourself as 'Doc' Worth, our customers wouldn't ask you to inspect their mysterious rashes."
"Who 'our'?" Worth droned, voice stuffy from his position. "It's yer uncle's operation, Mont. Y'said you was gettin' out, Mont. You said you was gettin' out two fucking years ago, Lamont fucking Toucey, but here we are." A labored groan. "I'm too old fer delivery. Gonna slip a disk. Blow a knee. Rupture a nut."
"You're a lazy junky, is what you are," Lamont reminded loftily. "How's that going, then? Your ah, heh, your progress. Opiates still helping you sleep?"
"Nope." Worth sniffed hard, sucking in a breath and lifting his head, body boneless as his chin settled to the clammy floor, a snake on its favorite rock. "Carved some runes in the between-place; those seemed ta work. Can't make it so topside, a'course."
"Of fucking course," Lamont agreed, thumbing through a few leafs of papers.
"It's clearer, Mont," Worth continued quietly, watching the steel-toe set of workboots at the end of Lamont's stout legs. "Just woke up from sommat was so clear, felt like I was there. Like I held all the memories of the past that led up to that point, even. Rillfuckinrill." A wet mumble, "And I was sleepin' fine."
"So you did good," Lamont guessed, sitting back, frowning. "What's the next step?"
"I ain't do good," Worth corrected mournfully. "Clairvoyance is just a crap side-effect of the higher awareness I'm gonna need ta draw proper runes. Gotta get ter the point as I can hone and aim that shit," A thumb and forefinger form a gun, pointing at a cat wandering haughtily past. "Blam." The cat rubs against Worth's knuckles, but skitters off soon as that dirty, bloody hand tries to stroke its head. Worth drops his hand with a damp smack, blowing a raspberry.
"Explain." Lamont stands, gathering used dishes from the table and kitchen countertops.
"That's all there is to explain, fatness. Ya see things that turn out ta be real, it just means yer inna place. Like ya finally reached the road and can sometimes peek inta the cars breezin' on by yer elbows." Worth struggles onto his side, sighing noisily as he shrugs his duffel off and sinks back to his stomach. Lamont kicks Worth's feet out of the way so he can close the back door against the winter chill. Worth realizes he hadn't even been shivering, the beds of his fingernails gone purple. "Now I gotta learn how ta walk that road, how ta carve into it, not get distracted by all th' stories goin on in them passin' cars goin left and right, forward an' back."
"Hey though, that's pretty exciting." Lamont stocks the dishwasher, pulling the cat out from its spot licking plates. "You're still running delivery, Madame Zelda. I have coursework I need to catch up on."
Worth grunted, defeated. "Wifi in the breakroom got canceled when O'Leary's little prollem introduced the goddamn negaverse to our wiring."
"Negaverse?"
"Dunno the word fer it," Worth grumbled. "But it cut our electricity bills down to a quarter, so I ain't had Hanna clean us out jus' yet. Prollem is, portals don't ground when they're bein' cast out from a wifi router. Real inter-dimensional clusterfuck, that."
"We still got broadband, though, right?"
"No hookup in the office isself. Yeh'll hafta get a splitter."
"Or just take the router from upstairs and plug it in downstairs."
Worth struggles to his elbows, squinting, "An' rob me of Gilmore Girls on the widescreen? Fuck you will. Shell out fer a splitter, fatass."
"You won't be watching your junk dramas, Lucy, you'll be making deliveries."
"Man's gotta convalesce!" Worth protested, fist thumping his chest then fingers splaying out to indicate the floor on which he had just collapsed.
"You never gotta convalesce," Monty reminded, suspicious now as he slapped the dishwasher closed and turned the dial, wiping down the counter with a stained rag. "And you only watch vanilla feel-good ladyshows when you've been dumped."
Worth struggles to his hands and knees, a bendy scarecrow trying to prop itself back up in its corn field as he stands, dusting himself down. "I think I'm gonna help Hanna more in th' field," he changes the topic willfully, tugging both his packs across the kitchen floor with muffled scrapes and heaves.
"Who's gonna make deliveries?" Monty sternly protests. "We got the Monday contract; that's an entire territory ta provide for now!"
"I dunno," Worth grumbled, as sincerely put out with his own physical incompetence as Lamont ever could be. "We got a raise, didn't we? Hire someone." A lightbulb; "Someone what has a foot on both sides, and can carry shit for days 'cos he's fifteen fucking years old. Shit, there's a twerp like that what mighta been job-huntin' none too subtly under Cross' radar, yeah? You met him, right, real desperate kid from the docks?"
"Veser's nineteen, and he's already got a job, and how do you never hear Hanna like seriously I want to learn how to tune him out so I'm not so stuffed with all this gossip. Feels like I know more about his life than I do yours."
"From the docks," Worth stressed. "The name 'Hatch' even ring any bells, or 'm I the only one obligated ta remember shit around here?"
Lamont's nose wrinkled. "Susie Amaker married Giovanni Hatch two generations ago, Worth. Even if Susie Amaker's Godmother was Gretta DorGrey, none of those names hold the pull they used to."
"Well you remembered them, didn't you? The stories? Name like that kid's, and now with those teeth?"
"You could hire anybody and call him an Amaker kid, doofus. Or a Hatch."
"But how many of them kids had they pappy's names in the papers fer suspected murder, all popularizing the old gossip all over again? And they pitchurs?"
Lamont rolled his shoulder, uncomfortable. "Where did that kid even come from? Cross brought him 'round, right? Think he knew?"
"Underground always runs in tight circles, Mont, you know that." Worth lets his bags drop outside the kitchen door, pulling a cigarette from a pack on the counter. "Hanna was on the case. About his mum."
"Right." Lamont chewed his thumbnail, but eventually nodded. "Yeah, all right. See what he's making at his job, first. Maybe don't ask him directly, maybe go through Hanna," Apprehensive, now, because Lamont was Lamont and made a habit of underestimating everyone around him but especially kids and especially Worth's finesse, Worth owning a rather teenaged emotional maturity, himself.
Worth was shuffling from the kitchen, then pulling his bags towards the stairs.
Lamont stood in the kitchen doorway, dish rag tucked in his crossed arms, one ankle crossed over the other. "So who dumped you?"
"No-one," Worth snapped, struggling under the weight of both bags as he mounted the narrow stairs. "Mind yer business, dimplefuck." Worth's clomping footfall ascended the stairs and Lamont paused for the slamming of a bedroom door before returning outside, to finish the day's deliveries.
Lamont would be manning the clinic again that night, too, keeping himself awake by Hanna's runes most likely - the rechargeable, humming ones he'd given Worth for contusion patients. That was the first rune Worth had tried to replicate; a healing one, a sustaining one, carved into a little domino brick for ease of access.
The heroin use had actually started after Worth had met Hanna, even though Worth had been fighting tooth and nail for sleep since before the start of med school, and had most assuredly been addicted to any variety of pills before even the thought of med school, thanks to the trend among the wealthy to medicate away the vagaries of the teenaged brain. Still, there had been no greater drug than that of knowledge, and no better pusher than a guy whose knowledge was both vast and rare, and so Worth had been landed with the misfortune of helping Hanna Faulk Cross from the edge of death, and has suffered under Hanna's gratitude ever since.
The whole setup made Lamont uneasy; and while he did own a degree in endocrinology, Lamont Toucey did not own a degree in black magic, or white magic, or any kind of magic for that matter, and some hidden part of him held a deep terror for these things but especially for these things once they came anywhere near orbit of Lucian Worth's ruthless curiosity.
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Hanna told lies.
Hanna told kind lies and Hanna lied by omission and sometimes Hanna told very bold, very contradictory lies to the same person, in the same breath, and was believed. For all of Hanna's good intentions, his honest actions blew up in his face regularly, but. The lies never seemed to crumble, or fail, or sour his friendships, or dissolve by time into harmful little truths.
Hanna told absolute lies, and by the time the truth was poking its cold wet nose into everybody's lives, nobody remembered that it was Hanna who had tried to throw the blanket over that particular beast in the first place.
They were just friends, him and that grocery bagger at his dayjob. She wasn't even his type. He had a busy schedule, and couldn't really hang out with her. Spot the lie. She was too young. He was ageless, ancient, getting older and older by the day, and all the people around him who hadn't peered into the corners of the universe in which he'd peered, they were just too young by that lack.
Even Doc Worth was young to Hanna, because he was so innocently selfish and hilariously single-minded and transparent, like woo man, be less subtle. Doc Worth was 37. Hanna felt ten times that age, some days.
If you looked close, you could tell. Hanna held intimate knowledge of generational music - what was the year Queen had taken the rock radio scene by storm, for instance, and how would a seventeen year old have memorised every lyric on every record to follow since. Sometimes he spoke of concerts as if he'd been there, dreamy-eyed and somber. He looked like a teenager. His ID said 24. His birth record said 63. Spot the lie.
Get it? The beast. It's name is Spot, and it presses its cold nose into the small of your back or the heel of your palm and you startle, because once you meet that beast you see its truths, under the quilt, and either its tail will be wagging or its teeth will be bared. Spot, the lie. Spot, the truth.
The same beast.
Different blanket, maybe.
"Dude!" Hanna piped, teeth large and eyes wide, a happy grimace. "I've tried your cell and your e-mail for the past week, man. You're waaaay overdue from your vay-cay. You know the police found my card in your apartment? Your publisher called it in, missing persons. Good for her, I mean." Hanna nods, triumphant, speaking into his laptop screen while Ashleigh Wong carefully tucked a birth certificate back into the file box in which he had discovered it.
Conrad's fingers hover over his laptop's keys, expression screwed into one of horrified confusion. "Hanna," he chokes. "I was just about to try to proxy to the states. How did you..." A weak breath, resolve steeling. Conrad didn't look exactly kept, nor did he look distressed. He wore blue and black and linen-white, and had a bit of a stubble, and his haircut was different, but he looked fine. Fed and alert, a little annoyed maybe.
"Okay, can I get you to call your people so they can tell the manhunt to cool it? I got questioned... Aggressively."
"How is this - " Conrad's visage in the chat screen warbles as he lifts his laptop to inspect underneath. "Hanna, I haven't even plugged in the ethernet cable. I haven't even turned this thing on."
"Nah, you know what?" Hanna chuckles. "Just come on home, man. You could fit if you go bat."
"Fit where?"
Hanna rolls his eyes. "The screen, man. Aren't you paying attention?" Hanna leans forward, waves, then sticks his hand through the black square of his screen.
Conrad looks green, but pinches the bridge of his nose and holds up a finger. "Hold on," he grumbles. "You WILL explain this to me, later, but first I need you to take something." Conrad tosses a brass bangle through the wobbly green-edged portal that had opened in his laptop screen the moment he'd sat down to (again) attempt contact with the outside world (or, failing that, work on overdue and no doubt canceled commissions). "And you will tell me why Veser didn't just tell the police that I was, I dunno, tax dodging overseas or something."
Hanna caught the bangle, jerking his hand back, and could not break eye contact with Conrad. "How did you get this."
Conrad rolled his eyes. "What do you mean."
"They don't sleep. Djinni. How did you get this off him."
Something in Conrad's usual venomous glare shutters, a flame long doused. "They... nap. If they're tired out. Djinni." A shifty glance around the room, as if to check for witnesses.
"Did you bite Noah?"
"What in the hell," Conrad rasped, quietly exasperated. "No. I'll... I'll tell you when you're older."
"WHY is everyone saying that?" Hanna rages, shaking his laptop.
Conrad huffs, fang poking out over his lip. "What's the deal with my publisher thinking I'm dead. Why didn't Veser cover with the Police. Is everything okay over there?"
"Well, like nearly IMMEDIATELY after the police searched, uh, yourentirecondocomplexburntdown, and Veser kind of isn't talking to Police at all ever if he can help it," Hanna waved dismissively. "So, okay, not only are you a missing persons, but also suspected for arson and honestly to be fair, I tried to tell you about Djinni. I fucking tried. Did I tell you? Noah would try to keep you? Didn't I tell you to call me at the FIRST FUCKING SIGN?" Hanna's rage is startling; it overpower's Conrad's confusion and alarm and ice-hot dread. "Didn't I tell you it would be greedy for your attention, because you could see its true self?"
"Er," Conrad interrupted the tirade, "You did not tell me - what - what was that? True sel-" Conrad recalls Noah's large, friendly nose, the long fingers and wide palms, like a man denied the wheat and mutton to grow to his full height, the smiling but depthless eyes and very real, very flawed body, pitted and pocked and blemished across the shoulders and back, where a century's worth of whip-cracks might have fallen. Conrad had just thought his tastes ran a little dark, maybe. That he might have appreciated a body with landmarks and history on it, instead of a smooth unbroken -
Hanna slaps his forehead, then bangs the bracelet on the table at which he is sat. "Oh my gosh," he breathes, and here you can see an era where 'gosh' is the height of emotional distress, and you might wonder if the papers belying Hanna's age aren't a second or even third plagiarism. Hanna has just solved a three-and-a-half-week question he'd had since seeing Conrad off at the airport. "Oh, fuck me. Nobody told you. You didn't know."
"Know what?" Conrad snipes, leaning in closer to the screen, smelling the laundry and the cooking and the rotten undercurrent of magic in Hanna's apartment.
"That Genie, dude," Hanna croaks. "He's not your ideal." Voice small, regretful, "Did you think that? Did Noah tell you that?" Quieter, "Is that why you left?"
Conrad searches Hanna's face as if he'd just been told that it was all a joke, that his apartment hadn't been cosmically destroyed, that the Police didn't think he was dead or a fraud or - Conrad laughs, long and loud and relieved, and has to duck out of view to compose himself.
Hanna, understandably, wears a mask of concern and despair, wrinkles showing just above his nose and in the deep trenches of his expressive frown. "Well, whyyydon't we just go ahead and turn bat and come on through, yeah? I promise this portal is vampire-friendly, and I covered the window before I set this up, so -"
"Oh this is brilliant," Conrad gasps, straightening, wiping at his eye. "Oh Jesus. Oh thank Christ."
"Religious epithets... those are a good sign, yeah?"
"Oh Hanna, you have no fucking, bloody, fucking idea," Conrad dissolves to shaking chuckles, collapsing to his elbows. "I'm not fucked. I'm not some mindless rage-machine or emotionless serial killer or sad waste of human material." Another relieved recovery from his laughter, head shaking, awed. "I'm just too fucking impressionable. Ugh. Hah. Hah." Muttering, in a small voice like announcing the winner of a brannnd neww carr, "I'm not damaged, I'm just asexual." Conrad ducks, laptop lifting, fingers skittering over latches and releases. "I'm going to pass my hard drive through, then my luggage, then I'll follow and we can pour some gasoline through and toss a match over and burn what's left of this laptop, yes?"
"Um," Hanna blinks, feeling a little relieved now, too. "Yeah dude, go for it. I mean I kinda wish we could rescue your laptop because these portal things are not easy and that was my last cairn stone and I had to hire some skeezy trolls from the darknet to even track your IP, which was SO NOT EASY, none of it, but especially convincing the memory of connection to feed through the transporxal reality of -"
"Wormholes are difficult science," Conrad interrupted in a growl, shoving through his phone, his keys, a stack of shirts he'd rather favored during his tour. "Got it." In went the bare necessities, Hanna leaning out of view to pile such atop the single crumpled armchair. "I tried to call you the minute my passport went missing, but every time I picked up my phone, I -" Conrad bit back his next word, rethinking, gingerly handing over the box of his laptop's hard drive. "Hrmh. Got distracted." His neck purpled, ears gone dark. At least Noah had been somewhat naive over technology, even if that meant more a sweeping blank on the city's power sources rather than simply dropping Conrad's phone in the toilet.
"Hey dude, nobody blames you," Hanna takes the hard drive, setting it gingerly atop the table. "Did you have a good time, anyway? Before things mighta gotten creepy?"
"I did," Conrad admitted, tugging his linnen cossack up by the collar and raising his arms to shrug out of it, lest his wings get tangled. "Heavy vampire scene in Cairo. Really friendly town to all sorts of undead," he added, poffing into bat form and landing gracefully atop the keyboard where normally he might have face-planted. "Must be the polytheism in their history." Conrad's glasses are carefully folded and passed through the portal, claws to hands, and Hanna reached through to snag the clothes while Conrad took a careful look around the dust-swept hotel room (the sand storms had raged unnaturally since Conrad 'broke up' with Noah, but much of the biblical weather had stopped cold after the 'reconciliation', the bangles that lent Noah agency over his own wish-fulfillment either sinking in a river, cemented at a construction site, mailed to Russia to be forgotten in an imports warehouse, or handed to the wizard who had crafted it, presumably to be destroyed outright).
Conrad then clambered from one laptop keyboard atop the next, smacking his tiny fanged mouth as he righted himself. "I taste pennies."
"That'll go away," Hanna assured, markering a rune onto the back of his hand, tossing a small blue fireball through the screen's portal to land on the laptop keyboard all the way back in Cairo. Slowly, eventually, the portal began to wobble in the fire, the fumes of burning plastic drifting subtly through.
Conbat watched the orange flames warp and feed on the keys of his old laptop, hugging the cool metal of the hard drive under his wings. "Noah lied to me," he piped, sinking further atop the table, slumping from a too-long-sustained tension. "Thank god and little greeen fucking apples, that shitbird lied to me."
"Heh," Hanna shakily sat back, supremely disappointed to watch the portal (stable, usable, totally not a window to a hell dimension!) destroyed, but glad to have undone something he suspected was yet another blunder of his. "I guess I know exactly what you mean, man."
