Voodoo Shanghai, page 5
If there was a peace point in our lessons, that was it.
“I can only get basic bindings to stick to cotton and linen. Wool is easier to work with for complicated bindings.”
“You wouldn’t be my first apprentice to prefer dead animal material to plant.”
Okay, that was not the image I wanted wool to conjure…“But since the amount of Otherside leaking out was minimal, I figured a basic siphon for Otherside would do the trick.”
Gideon glanced up at me. “That would be nowhere near strong enough.”
“Which is why I added five.” I pointed to the five separate circular bindings I’d added to each wool blanket. Each one filtering a small amount of Otherside back across the barrier. “I still had some residue that made it through, but the second blanket—”
“Solved that problem.” Gideon nodded to himself. “Simple, but surprisingly effective in this instance.” He turned his attention back to the three mirrors I’d been working on, nodding at them. “The work is adequate for the clients purchasing these. One of them is local, and I would like you to deliver it in person, but not with the cloak.” He shot me a sideways glance, one I couldn’t quite read. “I don’t feel this particular client needs to know about your knack for cobbling together unorthodox bindings. You know the local soothsayer, yes?”
I swallowed, my stomach churning. “Samuel Richan?” I muttered. Yes, I knew who he was.
Samuel Richan was a very successful Seattle art dealer. Late forties, early fifties, not an unattractive man, fashionable, white hair short and carefully groomed, lean, average height and physique. He’d had an uncanny talent for picking art trends ahead of the curve and championing little-known artists who eventually broke out into international and commercial markets. I’d recently—and accidentally—found out why he’d been so successful: it was because he was a soothsayer.
Just like mediums and other practitioners, soothsayers bind Otherside and wrangle ghosts. It’s a rare occurrence, but every now and then a ghost gets confused and starts jumping through time, a bit like getting on and off the train without knowing your stop. If you could find one of these ghosts and add direction to its nonsensical jumps, you’d have a hell of a fortune teller—provided, that is, the ghost could find its way back. That’s where a soothsayer comes in. Soothsayers bind a ghost’s soul to their own skin through Otherside-laced welts. It’s an unpleasant business that turns the ghost into little more than a shell, one of the reasons Nate tried so hard to stay under the radar. Soothsaying is the closest thing the paranormal community has to the black arts. I could argue that sorcery isn’t innately evil; though it can be used for nefarious purposes, it doesn’t exist for that purpose. But soothsaying? The point is to torture ghosts to get what you want. It doesn’t get much more dark arts than that…
I had a hard time keeping my voice even. “Samuel Richan runs Gallery 6,” I said. It was an art gallery near the convention centre, an area where the cost of rent would be astronomical. My one run-in with Richan at Club 9, a month ago, had rapidly devolved into threats. His mostly, telling me things about my future that would send me screaming to my own death and an open threat to bind Nate and hand him over to the highest-bidding record company…
I’d avoided Samuel since then.
If Gideon sensed my discomfort, he ignored it. Or didn’t care. “Good. Deliver these two by the end of day tomorrow,” he said, indicating the mirrors intended for Samuel. “There is no rush and no need to draw attention to yourself. Choose a time when traffic around the gallery is low.” He threw me another pointed stare. “If anyone is in the gallery, the mirrors are an artistic endeavour, yes?”
The prospect of seeing Samuel again made my skin crawl, but I nodded. This was part of my new job with Gideon. Saying Gideon was morally nebulous would be putting it mildly. I’d known making deliveries to some of his more…unsavoury clients was inevitable. Gideon’s services didn’t come cheap, and Richan was one of the few who I imagined could afford them.
Why is it always the morally depraved who achieve financial success?
Never mind, I knew the answer to that too…
“We’ll pick up again tomorrow,” Gideon continued. “Five p.m. sharp. In the meantime, read the soothsaying chapters in Advanced Practitioning Theories.”
More soothsaying? “Gideon—” I tried.
“What?” The sharpness was back, and that pinched expression. The one I imagined Gideon had perfected over his afterlife existence. The same one that promised violence and cruelty.
I sighed. And we’d been doing so well at veering away from violent tendencies…
But this time I dug in my heels and stared right back. Soothsaying is the practice of binding ghosts—forcing them to do a practitioner’s bidding. Yes, you can do fantastical things with a ghost who can trip through time, giving you stock market tips, but it also drives the ghost completely batshit insane. If you are looking for a way to torture the dead, that is it.
I set my jaw and pushed on, despite the flicker of gold and black in Gideon’s eyes. “Can we, I don’t know, maybe lay off the evil soothsayer stuff—for now, I mean? At least until I’ve got a better grasp—”
Gideon didn’t give me a chance to finish. He let out a long-suffering sigh and turned his attention back to the third mirror. “At what point did we ever agree to call soothsaying evil?” He sounded more annoyed than angry.
For a moment, I was flustered. “I—ah, it’s soothsaying. The binding of ghosts for nefarious deeds?”
“And who says it’s always for nefarious deeds?” Gideon said without looking up.
“Um—everyone? How would you like being bound?”
Gideon tsked, and I gritted my teeth as it echoed through the Otherside I still held in my head. “I can think of a good many reasons why a ghost would need to be bound. You’re naive.”
There was only so much I would take from the ghost. “I know exactly what a soothsayer does, thank you very much. Hell, I’ve even had run-ins with a few—”
Gideon ignored me and headed for the kitchen. He reached my stove and retrieved one of my frying pans, holding it up…The one I used for bacon. It had seen better days…and at one point in time had a full coat of Teflon. “So this frying pan is evil.”
“What?!”
He held it up over his head with two of his fingers, as if it weighed no more than a feather—which was deceptive. He wasn’t actually picking it up—not like we do. He was using Otherside and sorcery to manipulate the world of the living. It always unsettled me just how easily it came to the sorcerer’s ghost.
“This frying pan clearly burns as much as it cooks—more so, from the looks of it—probably mixing in all sorts of carcinogens with your food. Therefore, by your account, it must be evil.”
Oh, for the love of…“Of course not. It’s a cooking utensil, for Christ’s sake. It’s not the same thing.”
“Ah, so a frying pan is a tool?” Gideon disappeared and reappeared right in front of me. Still holding the frying pan, I noted. He leaned in, his eyes edging towards a more dangerous shade of black than I’d seen in days. “It’s exactly the same thing,” he said, his face inches from mine, the words biting, tinged with Gideon’s personal brand of cruelty—and cold. I shivered as the Otherside wafting off him chilled the air.
I wasn’t backing down. “At best, soothsaying is a shortcut to torture something you need out of a ghost. At worst, it’s a way to enslave them—”
Gideon interrupted me. “Soothsaying is a tool present in any good practitioner’s arsenal—nothing more, nothing less. How it’s used is at the discretion of the practitioner, and therefore the blame for your perceived good and evil lies with them. An awful lot of people use guns to kill each other, but guns aren’t inherently evil.”
“And there are a lot of people who would disagree with you on that.”
Gideon placed the frying pan on the kitchen table and turned his full attention back on me, eyes narrowed. “But I don’t think you do. You know as well as I do there are people who deserve to be killed for their actions. You don’t think that some ghosts don’t deserve a similar fate?”
I swallowed. I could see that Gideon was losing his patience, but before I could stop myself, I said, “I sure as hell can think of one ghost who—”
“Oh, get over yourself, Kincaid! You know I’m not nearly that evil or despicable. I barely rate malcontent on your small world scale. No, your problem is that you hate that I’m right. And you know that I’m right. Under the right circumstances, you would have no issue letting someone die for their crimes.”
I knew I should take a big breath, calm myself and take a step back. “Let’s hope I never have to find out.”
I could have said more—I wanted to argue. But there were many things Gideon and I would never see eye to eye on. If I picked a battle over every single one…In some ways Gideon was like Lee. There were things that were so deeply entrenched in Lee’s mind from her old life…Gideon, I’d discovered, suffered from a similar blind spot.
I broke eye contact and searched the suddenly interesting floorboards. “Look, I’m not saying I won’t do it. All I’m asking for is a break from soothsaying. There has to be something else we can work on—”
“No.” He said it with such force and finality I couldn’t help but step back, and I silently cursed myself for pushing him. “I’m willing to accommodate your sensibilities to a limited extent. Deliver the mirrors to Richan and make yourself available to work tomorrow evening. Bring the remaining mirror and have the chapters read.”
And though the words weren’t spoken, a threatening silence hung in the air between us, and the bindings on my wrist, our deal, glowed menacingly.
Or else.
And then, without so much as a goodbye, Gideon dispersed, back to the Otherside or wherever the hell the sorcerer’s ghost went.
Well. That had gone well. I refilled my tea and slumped into one of the kitchen chairs that perfectly matched the new table. It, unlike my tea, blazer and satchel, was not a splurge. It was a 1960s red and chrome Arborite number that Nate had found thrown out in an alley. We’d had an “accident” with my previous wooden table courtesy of the wraith that had been stalking Nate. Not only had we flipped it over to use as a barricade, but it had been frozen in the process. The legs had snapped shortly after. In one of his more industrious moments, Nate had decided to replace the table…
With something he’d found in an alley.
Nate insisted it was a collector’s piece. I wasn’t quite buying that. I mean, I’ll admit there was a kind of kitsch appeal, and Arborite doesn’t chip, though the red surface had faded and the vinyl seats were worn in spots. But, throwaway piece or vintage showroom gem, the table didn’t wobble and I didn’t think tossing it over or freezing it would put a dent in it. Not that I planned on having any more ghosts stalk my apartment, but after two incidents I like to be prepared.
Besides, its aged quality matched the 1960s linoleum kitchen floor that had turned a permanent yellow sometime in the 1980s and grey with ground-in dust sometime in the 1990s.
And yet my landlord would figure out some way to pocket my deposit.
I folded my arms on the table and lowered my head. Why did I keep letting Gideon get the best of me? Was it fear, or was I letting my temper get in the way of stringing together a coherent and convincing argument? I’d never let Aaron get the best of me like this—not even when I’d first started working for the SPD.
Or was I the one in the wrong this time?
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to work on ghost binding and soothsaying; the issue was that I didn’t think I could. Everything about ghost binding made me sick to my stomach. And despite Gideon’s arguments, it was wrong…
I didn’t think I could bring myself to make it through another lesson—mentally or physically.
And I still had to deliver the two mirrors to Richan—that was another can of worms.
Why couldn’t Gideon get that? No, Gideon got it. The ghost just didn’t care.
So absorbed was I in my latest predicament with Gideon, I didn’t notice Nate when he returned. Not even when he cleared his throat.
“K?” Nate said.
I didn’t lift my head even as I felt the Otherside chill telling me Nate was on my left. I preferred to wallow in my own misery. Maybe if I don’t answer him, he’ll take the hint that I want to be left alone…
“Okay, here’s the thing, K. I may have been eavesdropping.”
Nope. Nate was not going to take the hint…I raised my head to find Nate sitting across from me, his hands steepled in front of him on the table. The ghost made a face as he searched for the right words.
“And while I don’t disagree with anything particular you said, Gideon scares the shit out of me.” He pronounced each word slowly, as if I were an idiot and not one of the best practitioners on the western seaboard. He turned his steepled hands so the fingers were all pointing at him. “And I greatly, extremely question your dedication to keeping us alive— Okay, well, you alive, me not so much, but, you know, continuing my ghostly existence—”
Oh, for Christ’s sake…“Not this again, Nate.” I grabbed my tea mug and headed for the stove. I didn’t need this. What I needed was sleep. Where was my hot water bottle?
Nate appeared between me and the kettle.
I ground my teeth. “Nate, out of the way.” He knew I wouldn’t walk through him. I wasn’t going to ghost myself this late at night—it was creepy and I was too damn cold.
Nate held his hands up. “Look, all I’m asking, K, is that you try to be nice to him— Shit! Get back here—”
I wasn’t about to pull another globe of Otherside tonight to make Nate move, but I did duck around him. “Seriously, does Gideon have you on his payroll too?” I asked. There was my water bottle. I began filling it with the still-hot kettle water. “I mean, he has no problem buying everyone else off—”
“Of course not!” Nate shouted, something he almost never did. “Jesus, K, I’d never—you know.” He scuffed his red, ghostly Converse shoe against the dusty kitchen linoleum and glared at me. He even managed to produce a scuffing sound. Which meant he was being sincere.
I took a deep breath. “Okay, Nate, that was too much. I’m sorry. You would never sell me or yourself out to Gideon. You can’t begin to fathom how infuriating that ghost is. He won’t listen to a damn—”
“K, he’s saved both of us! Twice—no, three times now. You from drowning when that crazy poltergeist Anna Bell tied you under the pier and Randall’s fire, and then me from Cole and…well, me.”
I leaned against the counter and closed my eyes. It was the one part about my whole arrangement with Gideon that for the life of me I couldn’t square away. Gideon was a selfish, usurious ghost—who profited from selling the living and dead the things he knew they couldn’t—and wouldn’t—refuse. He’d done it to me.
And Nate and I had been tiptoeing around my issues with Gideon for two weeks now. “Nate—” I started. What was I protesting exactly? Gideon or my own damn decisions?
“I mean, what if—and just consider this for a second—what if Gideon’s not as evil as you think he is? Hunh?”
I shot him a look over my shoulder, and Nate held out his hands once again, as if readying to fend me off. Me.
“I mean, he sure as hell doesn’t act like a poltergeist,” Nate said.
I spun on him. “You just said he scared the crap out of you!”
Nate threw up his hands. “Everyone scares the crap out of me, K!” He started to count off on a translucent hand. “You scare the crap out of me, Gideon scares the crap out of me, Lee scares the crap out of me, and on a really bad fucking day Aaron scares the crap out of me.” He shuddered. “It’s that whole cop thing. Face it, K, I’m a fucking coward, all right? But.” I watched as Nate hedged his answer. “Here’s my point. I might be terrified of the fucking sorcerer’s ghost, but I don’t think he’s actually evil. I just don’t get the whole malicious intent vibe that poltergeists give off, all right? Trust me, I know what evil feels like, and he’s not it.” Nate paused and levelled his ghost-grey brown eyes at me, pleading. “I don’t think you should hold a grudge. I mean, forget the soothsayer thing, you go to every fucking lesson with him like you’re going to war, it’s like you can’t help yourself, and I’m not sure you see—Oh, for fuck’s sake, K, come on!” Nate shouted as I grabbed the filled water bottle and headed for my bedroom, only stopping to snatch my bag from the couch.
“It’s not up for discussion, Nate.”
Nate managed to appear in front of my bedroom doorway and block it. “Why? Why is it not up for discussion? K, you know I have a huge fucking point here. I know I don’t make that many of them, but here we are—”
I unleashed all the fury and rage that I felt towards Gideon, all the pent-up anger that I’d been doing my damnedest to keep under wraps while I made it through his lessons. “Because he tried to strangle me! The first memory I have of that damned ghost is him accusing me of stealing and wrapping a hair dryer cord around my neck! Do you have any idea what that’s like? Do you have any idea how often, how many times in my life, the first contact I have with someone is being accused of something? Because of what I am? And now, I need to stand there most nights of the damn week and take more of his crap?” I stood there fuming at Nate. I hadn’t been this angry about something in years, and it felt so good to let it out.
Nate just stared at me. He was usually an open book, but right now, for the life of me, I couldn’t fathom what he was thinking. “Okay, K,” he finally said in a quiet voice, and floated away from the door frame, shoving his hands in his jean pockets. “I get it. I don’t understand, but I can imagine it really, really sucks. I see the way people treat you. I know you think I don’t notice how the cops, clients, even Aaron sometimes treats you, but I do…” He trailed off and pursed his lips. “If that’s the reason, I can understand the why.” He turned one of his rare serious looks on me. “But I don’t think that’s it. Not all of it, anyway.” He searched for words. “I think in this case you and Gideon might have more in common than either of you wants to admit.”
