This is another prequel to Ravenshore’s Nightmare, set about three years earlier. The novel mentions an incident with detective Bollart and a sewer elemental a couple of times – so here it is!
___
“You’re godsdamn lucky you can’t smell this, Frank,” Kat said to her gun, fighting and coughing to control her gag reflex. “You’d better keep quiet or I’m throwing you in.”
Raw sewage still actively spewed from drains and access holes around the intersection, sputtering and bubbling across the pavement in thick slow-motion ripples under the wheels of delivery trucks and in runnels down streetcar rail channels.
Kat, at least, arrived after the initial blast; she tried not to think too hard about the implications of the muck oozing and dripping down vehicle windows, blackstone walls, and streetlight shields which heat-dried the brown-green splatter to burnt-overripe stench. Witnesses to the event raged, cried, and puked at Protectorate officers who wouldn’t let them leave the cordon until they’d provided testimony.
“What did you say?” asked the woman in front of Kat.
“Oh, uh, nothing, sorry,” Kat said, and focused on the two maintenance workers who’d called her down here. She shivered despite the humid summer sun, wished she had her coat.
The man, tall, was still covered head to toe in stained and dripping hazmat gear; the only sliver of visible skin was around his eyes, behind his goggles where he’d wiped off enough of the shit he’d been submerged in to see. The woman, shorter than him but taller than Kat, had stripped her protective gear to the waist, having carefully folded down the waterproof coveralls to keep the inside clean in case she needed to seal up again. Her unwieldly portable radio, on her inside belt, buzzed with the voices of city workers trying to arrange for emergency cleanup.
“When you called me, you said this was all caused by a ghost?” Kat asked.
The man said something, muffled to incomprehensibility behind his heavy mask.
The woman appeared to want to nudge him with her elbow, but thought better of it. “Sorry, it’s hard to understand through the suit. Yes, we think it’s a ghost. Not sure what kind, we don’t know how that all works.”
Kat considered trying to explain a few general categories, but things could get weird so she decided not to bother. “That’s why you called me.”
The man said something again, waved his arms, forcing Kat to duck as drippings flew from his fingertips.
“Just stop,” said the woman, then she turned back to Kat. “Look, you weren’t our first choice. There’s Protectorate officers and city contractors who deal with ghosts who are way easier to get approved on the budget, but we already asked them and they couldn’t turn anything up. We’re getting kind of desperate.”
Kat looked down the street to the east and nodded at the large industrial-looking building at the end of the road. “Because this is awfully close to the old city’s sewage treatment plant?”
Both the workers nodded. “For weeks now we’ve had clogs and backups, getting worse and closer to the plant. If we have to shut down wastewater treatment, emergency valves re-route straight into the bay.”
Kat grimaced. The waterfront was disused and dilapidated thanks to the ever-present storm off the coast, but she doubted the stench would politely contain itself to the bay, especially when the nightly fog rolled in. “Okay, that would be a problem,” she agreed. “So what do you need me to -”
“Hey!” A gruff older man’s voice rang clear and angry across the intersection. From the opposite corner, Detective Bollart stomped through the muck, splashing sewage up the bottom and back of his long leather greatcoat. A much younger officer in standard blue-and-black mail followed, stepping gingerly.
Bollart strode right up to Kat and jabbed a finger at her face, practically up her nose. His face was lined and ragged and scarred, and even over the sewage she could smell tobacco on his breath. “This is a restricted area.”
Kat snorted. “It’s a street corner.” The younger officer tried not to smile at that.
Bollart bared half his teeth. “It’s temporarily restricted for your fucking safety. Who let you in here? Give me a name so I can report them, and then get the fuck out.”
The maintenance man mumbled something muffled and stepped toward Bollart, his hands extended. The detective stepped back, unwilling to be touched by those brown-wet gloves.
“She’s with us,” said the woman. “We asked her to deal with the ghost that caused this.”
“I don’t care,” Bollart shouted. “You’re not Protectorate, city staff, or a witness. Get. Out.”
The tall man, still muffled by his mask and coverings, said something and made some gestures. The woman nodded at him, then turned to Bollart. “And if she’s a city contractor assigned to this incident?”
Bollart squinted and screwed up his face. He took something from a pocket, put it in his mouth, and made sloppy wet chewing noises. He turned away and stomped off to yell at someone else. The younger officer gave Kat a palms-up shrug and hurried off after him.
“I think the new guy likes you,” said Frank. “You should get his name.”
Kat slapped her holster. “What did I tell you?” She wasn’t sure smacking the holster actually did anything to the ghost bound in the gun, but it seemed to get his attention.
“What?” asked the maintenance woman.
“Nothing,” Kat growled. She’d never get used to this pain-in-the-ass ghost haunting her revolver. She still tried to leave home without the gun some days, but it never worked. “Show me how to get into the pipes so I can deal with this sewer ghost.”
The city workers brought Kat over to a manhole still oozing shit. She gagged once, twice, three times, and managed to hold herself together.
Oddly, the nearby sewage retreated, pulling back down into the opening, leaving the ground almost clean.
“That was weird,” Kat said, frowning.
“It always does that,” said the woman. “Whenever we go to work on the blockage, it clears up on its own. We can’t figure it out. It’s like the ghost is toying with us.”
Or trying to communicate, Kat thought. She’d dealt with a few ghosts that weren’t strong enough to speak. Power didn’t seem to be the issue here, of course, not with the magnitude of the… effects. At least it was somewhere to start: observe, analyze, find a way to communicate.
She stared into the black-on-black of the hole in the cobblestone street. She was not looking forward to this… but there weren’t many cases for her this month.
Kat unshouldered her backpack, hesitated to rest it on the ground that had, seconds ago, been ankle-deep in sewage. She shook her head, held on to the pack, fumbled to pull out her own set of waterproof coveralls, gloves, mask and swim goggles, and a roll of duct tape.
“I hope that’s good enough,” said the city woman. “Sorry we don’t have spare gear for you.”
“It’ll have to do,” Kat sighed. She suited up, for the first time in her adult life glad she wasn’t wearing her mother’s old bomber jacket. The coat was safe at home, zero chance she’d risk ruining it in the sewers. Without it, she felt she was freezing in the summer heat. A lingering consequence of her death and revival last year. She shivered again, clenched her jaw and shoulders against it.
Kat gave her wrists and ankles each another clumsy extra-tight wrap of tape, hoping the suit would stay sealed against her rubber gloves and boots. She’d only brought gear she could afford to throw in the trash at the end of the day. Plus the revolver, heavy and chrome, the hip holster annoyingly tight inside the coveralls. She couldn’t get rid of the damn gun no matter how hard she tried – and she had tried, throwing it in the trash, the sea, the storm, a smelter hot enough to destroy it – the haunted revolver always showed up again, even after she literally watched it melt. She just had to hope that if she dropped it in the sewer, it’d be clean when it reappeared.
Kat stared at the circle, the top rungs of the iron ladder barely visible. She took a step forward, and the two workers each took a step back. Kat frowned. “What? You’re not coming?”
“Nnnwwww,” said the man, which Kat took to mean no way.
“Why not?”
The woman cringed. “The ghost… slimed… some of the guys.”
“But you’re all sealed up?”
The woman shook her head. “Dragged them against walls and pipes till the suits ripped, then got inside.”
“Oh,” Kat said after a long pause.
“Don’t worry too much,” the woman said, “They’re okay, and it hasn’t happened to everyone.”
“But I’m on my own anyway.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
Frank laughed. Sometimes, rarely, being the only one who could hear him wasn’t that bad. No one could join in and agree with him.
She pulled on her hood, secured her swim goggles, and tightened her respirator. Kat stood over the hole, breathing deep of the bayside air that was… well, not fresh, but a lot better than what she’d be dealing with for the rest of the day. She steeled herself, turned around, and knelt for the ladder.
“Hey! You are NOT going down there on your own!”
Kat looked up. Bollart jogged toward her, his stupid grizzled-sailor-type face pulled into a scowl.
“I don’t care if someone declared you a city contractor today,” Bollart grumbled, “You do not get to mess around with sensitive equipment unsupervised.” He pulled on some rubber gloves of his own. “Gimme that tape.”
Behind her mask, Kat gaped. “You’re coming with me?”
“Believe me, I really wish I could send anyone else,” Bollart growled. “Union says officers need hazmat training for sewer work, so I can’t make the rookies or patrols do it. Detectives, of course, do get hazmat training. Lucky fuckin’ me.”
“Lucky you,” said Frank. “What a nice date.”
Kat tried to decide how to respond, then shook her head and tossed Bollart the rest of the tape. Probably better to say nothing than say she also wished he could send anyone else.
She clambered down the ladder one-handed, heavy military-style flashlight pointing the way. She stepped off the rungs onto solid blackstone, near-dry, and swept the light first one way, then the other. The arched tunnels were tight; she’d have to crouch a bit with the low ceilings and it would be difficult to follow the ledge and avoid stepping into the putrid flow of stirred-up muck. Some kind of black mold grew in the gaps between stones and bricks, especially on the ceiling at the top of the arch.
With the conditions on the street above, Kat expected the tunnel to be completely flooded and violent with a storm surge of sewage. But… no. It all seemed as normal as sewers could look to someone who’d never been in the sewers.
“Could be worse,” Frank commented.
Kat wrinkled her nose, touched at the seal of her respirator. “It is worse. Really hoped this mask would work on smell, too.”
“I’m so glad you killed me and I don’t have to be alive for this,” said Frank. “Not that I’d want to be anywhere near you if I was alive. Which I’m not. Because you killed me.”
Kat clenched her fists so hard she almost worried her short fingernails would pierce her gloves. She closed her eyes tight and forced herself to breathe. Kat felt bad enough all the time, couldn’t forget even if she wanted to. Even in her sleep… And still, Frank just had to remind her, make her feel worse. “Frank,” Kat said, her voice shaky, “Could you -”
“What?” Bollart dropped down behind her. Crouching, his long coat gathered at his feet. “What’d you say?”
Kat steadied her breathing, sighed again. “Nothing.” She looked past Bollart, then at him. “You don’t have a mask? Or goggles?”
“No,” he said with a grimace. “Better be quick.”
Kat looked left, then right, shrugged. “Okay, let me try something before we go any further. Quiet, let me concentrate.”
She closed her eyes and tried to breathe deep, which wasn’t easy in the rotten atmosphere of the tunnels. She ignored Frank and held her arms out, pausing when her left encountered Bollart’s chest – she glared at him and he stepped back with a roll of his eyes. She focused again, imagined being at the centre of a colossal invisible box. Slowly, with a few grunts of great effort, she pictured the walls of the box shrinking, closing in, pressing together. Containment, a barrier ghosts couldn’t cross, drawing the target in the sewers toward her.
Five minutes later, panting, Kat saw and heard and felt nothing but exhaustion. No ghost.
“What was all that about?” asked Bollart, his face unable to decide whether to look impatient or amused.
“That was supposed to force the ghost toward us so I could see it, talk to it, and deal with it,” Kat gasped.
“And it didn’t work because…”
Well, she wasn’t sure. She’d only been doing this since her death and revival about a year ago, when she’d started to be able to see and talk to more ghosts than just Frank. Kat assumed her ghost powers were all related to her status as living dead, along with her permanent chill and inability to sweat, but she hadn’t exactly tried to push ghosts around before she could see them.
She’d encountered a few ghosts who were too strong for her (or, according to Frank, she was too weak). This didn’t feel like a strength issue, though – Kat didn’t get any sense that the sewer ghost was resisting. “Either this ghost works differently from the ones I’m used to or we’re not close enough yet.”
Bollart shifted from foot to foot. “Okay. And? What next? Hurry it up.”
Kat shrugged, looked back and forth again, and headed in the direction of the sewage treatment plant.
It was slow going. Pipes and outlets threaded along the walls or jutted out. Some of them spat wastewater at unpredictable intervals. Kat was not interested in inspecting the waste to see what kind it was – she just avoided it as best she could.
Frank was in fine form, commenting on everything. Kat wasn’t sure whether and how much he could see, whether he was bound to or in her gun, but today it seemed he was able to observe quite a lot.
She did her best to ignore him. Shortly after she died, Kat tried to ban Frank from talking to her at work, but once he figured out there really wasn’t anything she could do about it, she couldn’t get him to stop. Especially around other people, where he knew Kat didn’t want to look like a lunatic yelling at a gun. At least he usually had the sense not to distract her in dangerous situations.
And picking her way through the sewers could be a dangerous situation: Kat already slipped twice and had to grab pipes for support, one of which was for hot water and scalded her right through the gloves. But still Frank wouldn’t shut up. All Kat could do was ignore him. She wasn’t going to let Bollart think she was hearing voices.
Even though she was.
Maybe better to try drowning out Frank instead. “You know anything about this sewer ghost?” Kat asked Bollart. Her voice echoed down the tunnel, muffled a bit on its way back.
“A bit,” he grunted. “Shouldn’t be telling you this, but I want to get out of here fast, so: wastewater plant has been finding traces of drugs in the sewage. Didn’t think it was related, but when we got the city maintenance guys to go back through all the reports, the drugs and the ghost seem to have started around the same time.”
“Drugs and a ghost?” Kat frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I know.”
“I guess,” Kat thought aloud, “It could be a ghost that’s somehow related to drug crime.”
“No deaths or murders match the timeline,” Bollart said, then stopped to cough and gag at the stench. “As far as we know.”
“Hm. What about -” Kat slipped mid-sentence, her boot sliding on something squishy. She flailed her arms, bashed her wrist against the wall, fell –
A rough impact on her back as Bollart’s hands shoved her back up. His feet splashed into the sewage; he’d stepped in to keep Kat on her feet, and he was in it up to his knees, long coat half-floating on the surface. “Ah, shit,” Bollart groaned.
“Literally!” Frank laughed.
“Sorry,” Kat said, a little surprised to find she meant it. “I have a coat I didn’t bring today in case – well, I’m sorry about yours.”
“It’ll be fine,” Bollart said in a gruff tone that may or may not have been sincere. “Got some people back at the station who work magic with the laundry.”
“Oh. Good.” Kat felt a stab of jealousy. There were some relatively simple spells for cleaning and repair, but she’d never been able to do those herself. Having someone else do it for you was a lot more expensive than regular cleaning… unless you had union benefits and staff on site. Which Kat didn’t.
She turned the beam of her flashlight on the ledge where she’d slipped. She’d crushed a… black mass of some kind, a sort of bulge in a longer fiber. Shiny, oily black, different than the island blackstone that made up this older portion of the sewer system.
The mass pulsed slightly. Kat took a step back. “Ew,” she said, and scraped her boot on the stone. Not that it’d help much.
“Don’t whine to me about stepping in something icky,” said Bollart from his position knee-deep in sewage. He didn’t bother trying to climb out, must have decided he’d be better off getting magically cleaned up later.
Kat frowned, wanted to make a face at him, but there was no point with her goggles and mask. Still, there was something about that black stuff… She poked at it with the toe of her boot. “It’s connected to something,” she said, and followed black offshoots with her eyes, protruding from the popped mass like… like wet webbing, maybe. Like slimy slug trails? Like something disgusting.
“Let me see.” Bollart sloshed forward, leaned into Kat’s flashlight beam, squinted at the black stuff.
“You’re not worried you’ll get infected?” Kat asked. She touched her mask, made sure the seal was as tight as could be.
Bollart grunted, followed the black lines with his eyes. “Sure. But the job perks include priority health care.”
“Pretty irresponsible to take unnecessary risks and then push your way to the front of the line,” Kat mumbled.
“I think,” said Bollart with a nasty glare, “That the more time we spend down here, the more likely we are to get sick or injured. That’s an unnecessary risk.” He stomped away through the muck, following the black webbing.
Maybe it was selfish, but Kat couldn’t help agreeing. Even Frank kept quiet; maybe the sewers were wearing on him too, somehow.
Kat followed, hunched over, hurrying to keep up without slipping on more of the oily black goo. Its lines clung to the wall, followed the mortar between bricks. The rest of the fungus and lichen ecosystem avoided and grew away from the black stuff, which seemed to thicken as Kat and Bollart pushed deeper into the sewers. In some parts of the tunnels, the architecture seemed to change, but vaguely, as if the tunnel passed through another structure that was walled off long ago. Even older parts of the old city, or maybe even parts of the original town before it became Ravenshore.
They came to a sort of dome-like hub where several tunnels converged. The largest tunnel, heading south toward the waterfront, was bricked up, the flow redirected east to where the treatment plant was built some time after the original sewers. At least, Kat was pretty sure those were south and east.
She clambered onto some iron grating, somewhat rusty, but not in the important places, she hoped. Those glistening black tendrils came from every tunnel, and they all plunged into the sewage in the hub.
“Hey, maybe you should come up out of that stuff,” Kat said to Bollart. “I think the black… whatever… is all connected here.”
His eyes darted up at her, then down, and Bollart scrambled backward, then up onto the grating. His movement, and the coating on his feet and legs dripping through the grate, churned up the scent so that it was somehow even worse. Kat gagged once, twice, and recovered. Barely.
“If it’s so terrible, why don’t you just leave?” Frank asked. There was exasperation in his tone, like he was sick of Kat being sick of this.
Did he have a point, though?
Kat took every job she was offered. It took years to build a reputation as a P.I., especially in her more niche area of ghosts, spirits, and dreams. And no matter how good she was, sometimes there just wasn’t enough work to go around, so her rent and bank account weren’t always in the best standing.
Still… at the moment, she was alright. Financially, anyway. Not much work this month, but it paid fine. It would have been better to think about before she’d climbed down into the sewers, but maybe just this once she could drop a case and hope the next few months would be –
“Hey, it’s doing something,” Bollart said. “Swing your light over there.” He pointed at a narrower west-branching tunnel.
Kat obliged. She couldn’t see what he meant at first, but just as she was about to ask, she spotted it. That tunnel’s black slime tendril, formerly flat on the wall, thickened substantially. It pulsed, a bulge running from somewhere down the west tunnel’s darkness toward the hub, like a cartoon vacuum sucking up something big. As Kat watched, the other branches narrowed, almost too slowly to see, shifting more of the black mass toward that western branch.
“Think you can grab the ghost here?” Bollart asked.
“Let’s find out.” Kat closed her eyes, breathed, brought her hands together slowly. A few minutes later, she was panting again – to no result. “I guess not. Still don’t know why.”
“Well, that’s…” Bollart stopped, snapped his fingers. “Oh, I got it. This thing reminds me of a slime mold.”
Kat made a face she was grateful the detective couldn’t see. “A what? Ew.”
“It’s sort of like a fungus that can move. Slow, real slow, but almost like a mold that can hunt.” Bollart took a careful hop off the grate toward the tunnel, looked back up at Kat, and said “I had one in my basement once” as though that explained everything.
From under Kat’s coveralls, the sound not muffled at all, Frank made some exaggerated retching sounds. “What do you think it’s hunting?” he asked.
“We’d better go after it,” Kat said. She reached into her coveralls, careful not to get any muck inside, and reached for her revolver, the polished chrome reflecting the flashlight beam in broken glitter. The moment she touched the gun, a violent chill and shiver wracked her body, her body never failing to remind her of what she’d done with it no matter how hard she suppressed that nightmare. It’d been years since she’d kept it loaded, but it worked on ghosts anyway.
Kat looked Bollart up and down. “You armed?” Kat asked.
“The usual spells,” he grunted.
Right. Everyone who wanted to join the Protectorate trained in a few spells, like a stun bolt, for non-lethal law enforcement and protection. Kat knew all about the many careers closed to her because she’d never been able to cast the most basic children’s spells. Most people could learn, if they were willing to spend years on it. Kat simply didn’t have that option, and she often resented her disadvantage. What few things she could do, like dreamwalking and dealing with (non-Frank) ghosts, she did with difficulty and the wrong ways.
“Hey,” said Bollart, snapping his fingers. “Pay attention. I said I’m going back for a squad. Standard Protectorate spells won’t do squat to a ghost, and I’m even less thrilled about our chances if this mold or the drugs are involved. You can either wait here and tell me if anything’s changed when I get back, or you can come with me and take a break from this shit.”
“Sure,” Kat said. “I’ll wait, watch for intel. Better to know more before going in.”
“All right,” said Bollart with a nod. “Fine.” He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“Okay,” Kat said.
“Don’t move a muscle.”
“Fine.”
“You’ll be right here when I get back.”
“Yep.”
“If you go anywhere without me and you break anything, I’ll arrest you.”
“Okay.”
Bollart squinted at Kat one more time, clicked his jaw, and tromped off back the way they’d come in.
When he was out of sight, Kat climbed down off the grate and followed the west tunnel where the mold-trail was thickest and still pulsing.
“Great,” Frank sighed. “That’s what I thought.”
“We agreed to do this fast,” Kat said.
“No, Bollart said to do it fast, and I tried to convince you to give up on this one. I don’t remember agreeing on anything.”
With Bollart gone, Kat didn’t worry about being overheard. “I thought about leaving. I just don’t want the sewage treatment plant to blow up so I can’t flush the toilet or take a shower.”
“You hate showers anyway.”
“I do not hate showers, I told you, I just don’t need them as much since I stopped being able to sweat like a normal -”
She turned another corner, and there was a light ahead, a circle of electric lamplight from above. From up there somewhere, Kat heard a voice mumbling frantically. The black stuff glistened, still thickening, its trail reaching up toward the light under the rungs of a wooden ladder – not city maintenance equipment.
Kat snapped off her flashlight. From the hub, if the bricked-up tunnel had been south, and she’d gone west, with the twists and turns… she’d be nearish the waterfront, probably under some old warehouses.
“This could be dangerous,” Frank said.
He didn’t bother to whisper because no one else could hear him, but Kat brought her voice down as low as she could. “Why would you give a fuck what happens to me?”
“Since you died the first time and I started worrying about what happens to me if you die again. Especially down here. You die and drop me in sewage and I’m fucking trapped in this forever.”
“Fine, I’ll go upstairs,” Kat hissed.
Tentatively, ready to pull back, she leaned toward the light, looking up. There was a shadow above, a person, doing something she couldn’t –
The slime mold pulsed, thickened, detached from the wall and reached up and out of the sewer opening. A man above shouted.
Still only one voice. Kat caught the wobbling ladder, braced it against the rim of the hole above, and climbed as fast as she could. She swung to the side, almost slipped off the ladder, to dodge the flailing mold arm, spongy-wet in the electric light.
She scrambled to the surface and found herself in a warehouse, mostly empty, bare electric bulbs caged to wooden beams and pillars. The mold arm enveloped a small container, probably a box or crate. Next to it, a man frightened pale was catching his breath, another paper-wrapped package on the floor behind him. He swore when he saw Kat.
She leveled her gun at the man. “You know what this is?” she asked, tilting her chin toward the gun.
“Yes,” he said, and he held his hands up, away from his pockets.
“That’s one up on Frank,” she muttered. With the stranger intimidated motionless, Kat ripped off her goggles, mask, and hood. A violent shiver ran from her shoulders down her core; either cold or a reaction to pointing her gun near a living person. She motioned toward the mold and whatever it was wrapped around. “What’s all this?”
“It wasn’t supposed to go this far,” the guy said, sweat beading down his face. One eye twitched as a drop got in.
“What wasn’t?” Kat demanded.
“We just thought, if we could get the sewer spirit hooked, we could control the sewers, and no one else would have a chance to… It just, it wants so much more than we…” The man stopped, his mind finally catching up to his mouth. He frowned. “Who are you? Protectorate?”
Kat didn’t respond. Let him assume while she pieced it together. “So you’re a criminal or gang member – what, a drug runner? Smuggler? Small time, but you… want a monopoly on sewer access, so you’re getting the… sewer spirit… sewer elemental… addicted to drugs you control? Is that it?”
The guy tilted his chin up. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“I’m the one with the gun,” Kat said, and she waved it at him.
But her arm twitched, her fingers went weak, her breath caught in her throat. She looked down the barrel and instead of the stranger in the warehouse, she saw Frank on the rooftop.
The man must have noticed her hesitation. He lowered his hands. “You’re not Protectorate,” he said. “They don’t have guns.” He looked at the hatch, back up to Kat. “And you’re here alone.”
Shit, Kat thought. Fuck.
“Hey,” shouted Frank. “Get a grip.”
Right. A grip. Her hand tightened on the revolver, she pulled the hammer, and her whole arm trembled, too visibly.
“Whoah whoah whoah,” the man said, hands up again. “Look, this’ll work out, we just need another week to stabilize the shipments and -”
“The damage,” Kat said. “The sewer breaks. That was the elemental trying to get your attention? Because it wanted more drugs?” Between them, the mold sucked at the package and burbled, extended a tendril toward the second package.
“Yeah, but, see, in another week we have the cash together and -”
“We don’t have a week! You’re here right now because you saw what it did today, right? And you had to feed it?” Kat asked, and the man nodded. “It’s been causing more and more damage to get you to feed it more, and it’s working toward the sewage treatment plant. You really want to leave half the city without toilets?”
The man lowered his hands again, his eyes on Kat’s trembling arm. “I don’t think you’re going to shoot me,” he said, and he pulled a knife from behind his back.
Had he guessed there were no bullets in the cylinder? Could he see the empty chambers from over there?
“Kat,” said Frank.
“I’ll do it,” she said, and moved her finger closer to the trigger, but, unable to stop thinking of Frank, she knew the threat was as empty as the gun, and she didn’t know what would happen if she pulled the trigger.
The man held the knife toward her, dropping into a loose stance like he actually knew what he was doing.
“Kat,” Frank said again.
“I’ll fucking shoot you!” Kat shouted, her voice shrill.
The man stepped in, jabbed his knife forward.
“KAT!” screamed Frank.
The knife speared into her, pain ripping across her body like when she’d had her heart attack – but she’d twisted at the last second, reacting to Frank’s voice. The knife was in her upper arm, then it was out, then it was coming at her again. Red-hot pain lanced through her, almost but not quite welcome through her perpetual chill. She dropped her gun.
On instinct Kat tried to grab the knife with her uninjured arm and he stabbed the blade straight through her palm. More pain. She’d lost control of her voice; noises were coming out and there was nothing she could do about it. Kat pulled her hand away and dropped to the floor, halfway intentional. She lashed out with her legs, kicked the man in the shins; she hit her mark and he grunted, fell to the concrete alongside her.
Kat kept kicking. It was all she could focus on. One good hit meant maybe she could do more. Her arms were useless, blood everywhere. She cried and kicked, landed another hit between the man’s legs. His breath left him and he curled up in a ball.
She scrambled to her feet, trying not to use her hand or her arm. She slipped in her own blood, fell back to the floor, smashed her forehead on concrete. Dazed, she rolled over, looked up, the warehouse light bulbs doubling in unfocused haze. Daze. Haze. Daze haze haze daze –
A scream, a wet sound of crunching through something unyielding.
Kat blinked, focused, tried to sit up, gasped as she put too much weight on her stabbed hand.
“Stay down,” said Frank from… somewhere. From her hand. The gun was in her hand. The one that wasn’t stabbed.
She lay back down and closed her eyes.
“No, Kat, lie down, but stay awake.”
She closed her eyes harder.
A rough pair of hands pulled Kat up by her shoulders. “Hey,” said a silhouette. It snapped its fingers. “Hey, you alright?”
The silhouette resolved into detective Bollart.
“Sent the rest of the squad into the sewers, but they didn’t see you so I went around and I heard you scream,” Bollart said. “Where are you hurt? There’s too much blood, I can’t -”
Bollart pulled away, too fast, a gulping uff escaping his throat.
Kat forced herself up, screaming to drown out the pain. She gripped her gun, the wrong hand for it, but what else could she do.
She turned, more blood running down her arm and off her fingers, to find Bollart half-engulfed in oily black – the slime mold. It dragged him toward the sewer hatch, red with bloody splatter and bits of cloth and skin. Bollart kicked and tried to scream, but there was no air in his lungs.
Kat raised her gun, aiming for the slime, but she wasn’t sure if her ghost-killing power would hurt Bollart – she’d never fired it at a living person, and she couldn’t shoot without risking a hit on Bollart, especially with her vision still fuzzy. She threw the revolver away, and instead scrambled to grab the second package, still wrapped in brown paper.
The mold arm pulled Bollart toward the sewer hatch. Lucky for him, he was oriented correctly, and it only scraped his ear halfway off as the mold dragged him down into the sewer with a thick splash.
Kat gulped and gasped, looked down the hole. The ladder was gone.
She dropped in.
She landed hard on black stone. Her ankles twisted out from under her, slipping in a puddle of the stranger’s blood, and her legs split in opposite directions. She gasped, this time unable to scream, and her weakened arms nearly dropped the package – but held on.
Something thrashed under the surface of the sewage. An arm burst out – Bollart’s – and was again dragged below.
“Hey!” Kat shouted, “Is this what you want?” She hefted the package. “Go and get it!”
Kat hurled the package as far as she could through the pain, crying out again to fresh spurts of blood. But the splashing slowed, and a wave rushed away down the tunnel toward the package.
With a grimace, Kat plunged the un-stabbed hand into the sewage, fumbled around until she felt leather. She grabbed the coat and hauled up, feet braced against stone, gasping and screaming until –
Bollart’s head broke the surface. He gasped and flailed his arms, splashing Kat with dirty water and muck and chunks. One-handed, she helped pull him to his feet, at least as much as she could while keeping her wounds away from the sewage.
“Shit,” said Bollart, and Kat couldn’t help but laugh.
She swayed and stumbled. Okay, maybe the laugh wasn’t just… maybe she should sit down.
Bollart’s eyes widened. “Whoah, okay. Just wait a second, there’s a ladder in here. Let’s get you out.”
___
“You got damn lucky.”
Kat sat at the back of an ambulance, her legs dangling out over the street. Paramedics knew those cleaning spells Bollart mentioned earlier. Made sense – their job was easier when they could see everything and the wounds they worked on weren’t covered in grime. Kat was just grateful to not be, well, covered in grime. They told her she lost a lot of blood, but since Bollart got them here quickly enough for triage magic to work, she’d recover fully in a couple of weeks, as long as she took things easy.
“You hear me, Kat?”
She closed her eyes and let her head roll toward her shoulder. “Yes, Frank, I hear you.”
“Good. Because the only reason you didn’t die today was luck that the moldy sewer elemental thing dragged knife-man away when it did. You can’t go around threatening people with an empty gun. Not everyone’s an idiot.”
“Like you?” she asked.
He must’ve been able to tell her heart wasn’t in it, because he ignored her comment. “If you’re gonna be getting in knife fights, you need to keep the gun loaded and actually be willing to use it.”
Kat sat up straight, focused her eyes toward the sunset’s glow on the storm at the mouth of the bay. She trembled, and not from her freak low body temperature. “Are you saying I should have shot him? After what happened the last time I -”
“No,” Frank sighed. “No, I’m not telling you to shoot people.”
Kat settled, trying to control her shaking, and leaned against the side of the ambulance, watching the storm churn. She couldn’t bring herself to shoot anyone again. Still, despite what she’d said, Frank wasn’t a complete idiot. She did need a better way to protect herself than a bluff that would fold the second anyone called her on it.
She had her dad’s rapier at home. She’d been taking fencing lessons with Nilo for years now, and he even said it would help her defend herself, but since she’d been able to afford somewhere to live, she stopped carrying the sword.
Maybe it was time to start again.
“Hey.”
Kat looked up. Bollart leaned against the other side of the ambulance, not looking at her, also watching the storm.
“Thanks,” he said, grudgingly, as if it hurt him. “For saving me.”
Kat shrugged, didn’t say anything.
“I guess I owe you,” he said, even more strained.
“Okay,” Kat replied.
They lingered in silence together for a few minutes.
“So,” Kat said, “The sewer elemental…”
Bollart cleared his throat, settled back to his usual gravelly voice. “You’re going to tell me to let it go, right?”
She shifted, grimaced a little. “I mean, I…”
“I know, you have a history with the city elemental, so you probably -” Bollart paused, sniffed his coat, looked at it narrow-eyed. “And from what you told me, this sewer spirit does sound like the victim here. I just don’t know if the plumbers’ union and the council can be convinced to suck it up and move on from all the attacks and damage.”
Kat didn’t have much to say to that, so she nodded and leaned her head against the ambulance wall.
Bollart straightened, adjusted his coat. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’m glad you’re all right.”
Kat could sense there was more coming. Better get it over with so she could go home and have a few strong drinks. “And?” she prompted.
“And you should have stayed at that fuckin’ intersection like I told you.” He spat it out, releasing a spite he must have been holding on to for some time. “I was just a couple of minutes behind. You were reckless. You almost got yourself killed, and maybe that smuggler would still be alive to interrogate if you hadn’t distracted him. The sewer elemental is still out there, it’s still hooked on drugs, and we don’t know what gang was feeding it. That’s a hell of a lot of work for me and my guys that could’ve been avoided if you’d just been the tiniest bit more patient.”
Or, Kat thought to herself, if she had her rapier, she could have fought back and captured the smuggler alive. But what she said aloud was “Okay. Sorry.”
That seemed to deflate Bollart a bit. He jabbed a finger at her, growled “I don’t want you on any of my cases ever again,” and he stormed off.
“Shut up, Frank,” Kat sighed preemptively.
“I didn’t -”
“You were going to.”
“But -”
“You were.”
“…Yeah.”
Kat checked her bandages, picked her way out of the cordon, and shuffled her way home to find her dad’s rapier and Palawan dark whiskey.
Leave a Reply