CHAPTER 31: I'LL TAKE IT

  CYPRUS ALLEY—NOVEMBER 20th, 1992 | LATE MORNING

  ?

  “I’m not kidding around here, Kessler. Where we’re going—it’s dangerous.”

  Cameron rolled his eyes. “Yeah. I’m sure it is.”

  Leroy put the car into park, nearly shooting Cameron out of his seat. He’d parked the SUV just outside of some shoddy storefront at the tail end of Cyprus Alley, right on the corner where it intersected with Garland Height’s proper. Cameron had to squint to even read the sign: SILVIO’S W RES

  “Silvio’s Whores? Dangerous?” Cameron asked, half-scoffing.

  Ever since they’d started this contract, Cameron was doubtful of Leroy’s capacity to do anything right.

  All that they’d survived up until this point was either by the skin of their teeth or by some stroke of luck—and it made Cameron wonder just how infamous Leroy really was. Back at Sterling Yard, Sean Malley and Arnie Goodbrother talked about him like he was a verifiable boogeyman. The kind of guy you don’t mess with. That was only part true. On one hand, his arbiter was skilled. Strong, even, and not even Cameron could deny that. But on the other end? He was about the luckiest asshole Cameron had ever met, deftly avoiding life-ending scenarios. If God was real, he had favorites, and demon contract or not, Leroy Waters was one of his stars.

  “Wares, Kessler. Silvio’s Wares,” Leroy said, shaking his head. “And that’s not what I’m talking about. Come on. Let’s go.”

  Cameron exited the car and followed Leroy into the storefront. The fog was just as dense as it was the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, and as he watched Leroy enter the hole-in-the-wall of a shop, all he could think about that moment they shared with Gideon, sitting on the step asphalt like Three Musketeers. For all of the trouble Gideon had caused—and patronizing as the asshole was—he didn’t seem all too bad. As the bell attached to the door rang out, he wondered if the guy was alive, dead, or locked up in some dungeon by Bishop Hargreeves.

  “Oh! Leeeeeroy Waters, how the hell have you been?”

  Another face worth remembering. Manning the shop was a short, stubby man with an olive complexion, with thinning hair that was greasily combed over the side of his head. Given the name of the sign, Cameron assumed the man to be Silvio. He wore a New York Yankees jersey, had a clunky silver chain depicting an 8-ball, and had on cargo shorts that nearly touched the ground. On his feet were sandals ripped straight from what Cameron could only imagine to be a tourist trap of a shop in some beachside town far, far from Brinehaven.

  “Come here, come here, you big bastard,” Silvio said, crossing over towards Leroy to embrace him.

  Cameron almost laughed. The height difference sure was something.

  Leroy returned the embrace, albeit, with some awkwardness to his stature. “Hey, Silvio.”

  “And who the hell is this kid, eh? You catch a stray off the street or somethin’, L?” Silvio crossed his arms and nodded towards Cameron.

  “Cameron. Cameron Kessler,” Cameron said curtly.

  “My underarbiter,” Leroy clarified. “Look, Silvio, I won’t keep you busy. Just need a few things.”

  “Busy? You see anyone else in here, eh? The chutzpah on some of my regulars, too, L, I’ll fuckin’ tell ya’,” Silvio huffed, gesturing all around with his hands, “Just last week I had Mary Rubwright tell me my bundle deals aren’t selling for a reason, and that same broad tried stealing one right off my shelves!”

  Silvio’s Wares was a hodgepodge of everything Cameron had seen, all put together in a singular spot: an emporium of odds and ends, guns in display cases, potions and elixirs for sale, cheap artificed trinkets. He even sold tee-shirts, mugs, antique dishware, and a collection of hats. It was far from a black market, with all of the fixtures of open-commerce you’d find in any other shop. A cash register, the smell of stale coffee. Framed permits on the walls, all of which cited his full name—SILVIO LIEBERMAN—and confirmed the legality of his business.

  “Well, tell you what, Silvio, you write me an arbitration contract and I’ll make sure Mary gets hauled in,” Leroy joked.

  A wheezy laugh escaped Silvio. “Hah! Now, what is it you need?”

  “Pasteurized demon blood. Bullets,” Cameron said aloud, withdrawing his Reign 18 out from under his brown denim jacket.

  “Oy! The safety on for that thing, you little prick!? Don’t go waving that thing around, Christ!” Silvio exclaimed, waddling over to him and practically shoving his forearm straight down. “You do that in a place like the South End, they put a bullet in you, you damn fool.”

  “And they put two more in people for less. Get your hands off me,” Cameron scoffed, shrugging Silvio off.

  “Take it easy, both of you,” Leroy said.

  Silvio huffed and leaned up against the display case that functioned as a front counter. “You shake a man’s hand, too, before you do business with him, that’s how these things go, Carmine,” Silvio said, extending a reluctant hand.

  “Cameron. It’s Cameron,” Cameron said, firmly grabbing hold of Silvio’s hand and shaking it. “Now do you have what we need, or not?”

  “Cameron! What is that, English? Scottish? Good Scottish name, probably,” Silvio nodded.

  Leroy exhaled. “Silvio.”

  Silvio smiled a wide smile and made his way behind the counter, smiling wryly to himself all the while. “Oh—hah! Excuse me, I got a serious case of jabbering about a whole bunch of bupkis, hah. Sorry, L. So ah, you want what, a couple of magazines, some p-blood? Easy, done. What else?”

  “More than a couple. Let’s go with five magazines,” Leroy said.

  Cameron raised a brow. Leroy did mention that wherever they were going was dangerous, but five bullet magazines? It almost seemed excessive. “You never told me where we were going, Leroy.”

  “The Pines,” he answered.

  Cameron felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, and though brief, a pang of dread washed over him. As a kid, he’d heard things about the Pines—none of them good. As far as he knew, it was still within the limits of the Commonwealth, but it wasn’t in the city itself. It was about as far from the South End you could be, and befitting of its name, was indeed a massive forest of tall pine trees that stretched as far as the eye could see. Pines, mountains, creeks. Nature’s bounty in all of its glory, and fog so dense that you could hardly see in front of yourself.

  And other things. Worse things.

  “I’ll throw in a sixth one, free of charge, yeah? For your own safety and peace of mind, young Carmine,” Silvio said, clicking his tongue. “And Leroy, you still using that dusty old P89? You know I could hook you up with somethin’.. better. Bit more reliable. A man in your line of work, you oughta have the best—”

  His antics brought Cameron out of his head and anchored his awareness back onto the stubby, greaseball of a man. “Cameron. Not Carmine. Cameron. C-a-m-e-r-o-n."

  “If I make it through this next contract, Silvio, I'll have the dough for whatever new piece you want to sell me. For now, I’ll do eight vials of p-blood. Four for each of us, Kessler, so use it wisely. And don’t double-dose unless you absolutely need to. In general, don’t double-dose at all,” Leroy said, pointing a finger. His tired eyes spoke for themselves, and it confirmed Cameron’s suspicions. Bishop Hargreeves had almost certainly given him two doses last night. “It won’t be like what Hughes went through, but the next day, it’ll be the worst hangover of your life. Worse than worse.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Cameron retorted.

  Blood-curdling screams, groans of agony; the stench and smell of sinew and muscle rebuilding itself. The thought of Hughes on three doses of that putrid stuff pushed Cameron’s stomach up and shot a tremor through his hand, prompting it to shake. He leaned forward and grabbed hold on the edge of the display case. That was three doses. Absent an example or a memory to draw from other than that, Cameron suspected two doses would ravage his body one way or another.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Leroy sallied up to the front counter and withdrew his wallet, mulling over the payment with Silvio. It sounded more like haggling than anything else, and while that didn’t come as a surprise to Cameron, Leroy’s insistence on lowered prices after Silvio had already agreed to throw them a free bullet magazine prompted a smile on Cameron’s face. That was the Dockside in him, Cameron figured, or maybe he was just cheap. Probably both.

  Leroy held a finger up towards the end of their parley and ran to what Cameron presumed to be a bathroom. The sound of his vomiting was hardly something that could be ignored, and Silvio smiled to himself, muttering something under his breath.

  Something caught Cameron’s eye as he ventured further along the display cases. There were guns, of course, and knives, and second-hand artificed objects for sale, but of everything in front of him, only one thing stood out to him.

  Inside of a small cage was a floating, wispy orb.

  A sprite.

  Cameron lowered himself, squatting down to get a better look at it. It wasn’t composed of the same pink-purple flame as Mercedes, but instead, of a kind of white, milky energy with a subtle green tint. It had a different consistency, too, and if he had to put it to words, Cameron might best describe it as a ball of wind spinning round and round.

  It had an eye of its own, ethereal and unblinking, that stared at Cameron almost expectantly.

  “Silvio," Cameron said.

  Leroy had returned by then, and was in the middle of tearing Silvio a new one over one thing or another. Cameron hadn’t been paying much attention. “—.. I’m not doing any less than three hundred dollars, L, and even that is being generous, you schmuck! What I’m giving you is a goddamn bargain, and if you don’t like my prices, you can fuck right off and go somewhere else! I was going to throw you a bargain deal, too, if you did decide to circle back and buy a respectable damn gun, but you can kiss my generosity goodbye!” Silvio leaned over the counter and pointed a finger right in Leroy’s face.

  “Silvio! Where’d you get this?” Cameron tapped the glass in front of him, and nodded towards the sprite.

  “Eh? That little thing? An old witch sold it to me, said she was cleaning house or somethin’ before she moved to Halifax up north,” Silvio said. “You want it?”

  “Yeah. How much?”

  Leroy shot him a glare, and Cameron returned it.

  Silvio took note of that, and raised a brow. There was a subtle shift in his expression that Cameron only half-believed that he saw to begin with. What began as a guarantee of another sale turned into something else, and Silvio waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll throw that sucker in for free, Car—Cameron. Thing has been sitting on my shelf collecting dust for years now anyways. Overpriced, most of them said! Can you believe it?”

  Cameron glanced down at the small price tag attached to the cage, and his eyes widened. “One-thousand, five-hundred dollars? That’s the going rate for a sprite?”

  “No,” Leroy said. “It’s closer to three. This is the one time you’ll ever hear me agreeing with Silvio on pricing for anything. Whoever told you that, Silvio, sure was stupid. Or cheap. Or both.”

  “Yeah, ah-huh, reminds me of a certain someone,” Silvio said sourly. “But I’ll take back what I said if you give me the three-hundred, L. Six bullet magazines, eight vials of p-blood, and a goddamn sprite! You won’t find a deal like that anywhere else for the rest of your days, you old dog. Now, shake my hand, give me the money, and get outta’ here. You got better things to be doing than loitering around in this shoebox.”

  Leroy shook Silvio’s hand with a wide smile, and then removed several wads of cash from his wallet to hand to him.

  “How do these things work, Silvio?” Cameron asked.

  A pang of guilt flooded through his body. In all the years he’d known Mercedes, he’d never thought to really ask her much about the sprite; and only really understood it to be some kind of pet. One you didn’t have to feed, clean up after, or do much with at all. All he could say with certainty was that they blinked at the first signs of danger, and when they were let out of their cages, they’d rush towards the danger to try to undanger it.

  Silvio, with his back still turned to Cameron, had been putting together all of the wares, taking them out from his inventory and placing them out on the counter for Leroy to grab hold of. The magazines came in a stack secured by plastic strips, and the vials of pasteurized demon blood were contained in a black, zipped pouch.

  “Witches summon em’ and trap em’ through their rituals, pacify them, in a sense, and force their little eye-things shut,” Silvio explained. “Then, on the witch’s command, when they cause the eye to open, it’ll bind itself to whoever it first sees.”

  “This thing must’ve seen countless people, then,” Cameron said, confused. “Wouldn’t it have, what, bound to someone already?”

  “No,” Silvio said, turning around to wave a knowing finger. “The witches make the cages too! All special-like, ah-huh. Won’t lie to you and say I know more than that, but what I do know is that the sprites have to be out of the cage when they look at you for the first time.”

  Cameron set his jaw. “Alright, so, has this thing ever been bound before, or?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it doesn’t work?”

  “I don’t know,” Silvio said, laughing. “Hah! Maybe that’s why that one witch dropped it off here. You’ll have to let it out of its cage and find out. If it’s already bonded, it’ll zip out and away, and spend the rest of its life trying to find whoever that might be. If there’s someone, that is.”

  “So, you sweeten a deal with something that might be worthless, and you’ve been trying to sell something that might be worthless for years,” Cameron said. He turned to Leroy. “That make Silvio stupid, or cheap, or both?”

  Leroy tipped his hat to Silvio. “None. Just smart, if you ask me. Before we head out, Sil, you got something for uh—”

  Silvio waved a dismissive hand. “Nay. You want a hangover cure, you see an alchemist. Anyways, look, kid, do you want it, or not?”

  Cameron stared at the sprite. Within its ethereal, green-white mass of an eye, he watched as the small gusts twisted and turned in on each other. Mercedes was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. Anger pooled in Cameron’s features, and he tried in earnest to hide it, but couldn’t. In front of him was another reminder of why he was putting up with all of Leroy’s bullshit; the jobs, the skirmishes, hell, living with his friend’s murderer.

  There were times where he felt like it never happened at all, and the quickness of all of these changes hitting him like a freight train had dulled him—stifled the anger that he’d relied on for so long, pushed it down. But that, Cameron knew, is where it had to be. It had to cook. It had to fester. The hearth needed tinder and kindling, and it needed years worth of it. It was a price Cameron had to pay, and it was one he needed to live with.

  “Yeah. I’ll take it,” Cameron said. His eyes settled onto Leroy. “For her.”

  ?

  “You just gonna’ sit on that thing till’ you need to use it, or what?” Leroy asked.

  Garland Heights brought the worst out of him, Cameron noticed. They had been stuck in traffic for the better part of the last hour, waiting for red lights to turn to green, and moving at a snail's pace between the swarm of cars trying to get where they needed to be. Static buzzed through the radio between the lyrics of AC/DC’s ‘Thunder’, courtesy of 107.1, the Smitten Mistress.

  Cameron stared at the sprite, which floated absent-mindedly in the small cage Cameron held in his hand. “I’m thinking.”

  “About?” Leroy asked.

  “What Silvio said. There’s a chance that this thing has already been bound.”

  “Probably is.”

  Cameron stared at the eye of the sprite, and hovered his hand over the small cage’s opening. Leroy hadn’t noticed him open it. A gust of air forced him back in his seat and caused every loose piece of trash in the front of the car to twist and turn, and Leroy very nearly crashed the car. With the windows closed, the sprite darted back and forth, rebounding off the dashboard, the control console, and the closed windows.

  “Kessler, what the fuck!?” Leroy exclaimed, trying to take control of the wheel.

  Rubber burned. The brakes on Leroy’s SUV squealed as the car came to a sudden halt. A chorus of car horns honked at them, drowning out the static of the radio and the shouts of displeasure from a set of very unhappy drivers. Leroy’s hand hovered over the inside door handle.

  “Wait!” Cameron said, pawing through the air.

  The sprite averted his every attempt, and moved with a deftness that he hadn’t seen before. When he thought he’d grabbed hold of it, it was to the side of his hand, above it, or below it.

  “I’ve got half a block yelling at me, Kessler, I need to open the damn door,” Leroy said.

  “Just give me a second,” Cameron insisted. “I’ve almost—”

  Cameron’s hands clasped shut around the sprite. It pulsed and thrashed within his palms with enough force to send him against the door of the car. With a groan, he gritted his teeth and tightened his grasp.

  He opened his thumbs up just enough to create a small hole and remembered Silvio’s words: sprites have to be out of the cage when they look at you for the first time. He pressed his eye into the opening in his hands, and with nowhere else for the sprite to go, it was forced to look upon him with its single ethereal, milky-green eye. In a singular instant, it settled. Monsoons of power were reduced to the faintest of wafts, cooling over Cameron’s fingers. The sprite stared at him and he stared back, and a smile forced itself onto Cameron’s face.

  “Got it,” Cameron said.

  LEROY WATERS

  CAMERON KESSLER

  SILVIO LIEBERMAN

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