Swift and the Black Dog Read online

  Swift & the Black Dog

  By Ginn Hale

  Published by:

  Blind Eye Books

  1141 Grant Street

  Bellingham WA 98225

  blindeyebooks.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in

  any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the

  purpose of reviews.

  Cover by Dawn Kimberling

  This book is a work of fiction and as such all characters and situations

  are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual people, places or events is coincidental.

  Copyright 2015 Ginn Hale

  By Ginn Hale

  Chapter One

  “We were just kids,” Jack muttered.

  Shafts of afternoon light speared through the blinds, illuminating the hard angles of his lean face. He exhaled a cloud of pale blue smoke and ignored the glare of the well-dressed diners seated at other tables. In a moment a maitre’d would appear and smoothly suggest that he remove himself from the building.

  Then, inevitably, David would intervene, flashing his ministry badge and pronouncing Jack’s full name a little too loudly, a little too officiously. A halting apology would be offered and followed by requests for autographs and photos. Behind it all Jack would hear the whispers.

  That’s Jack Swift?

  God, did you see his hand?

  He looks like some ragman from the Bone Ledges.

  I’ve heard he’s a queer.

  Lifting his scarred hand, Jack drew the smoke down to ring his fingers. Let the surrounding diners see that the ragman in their midst was a wizard. They didn’t need to know which one. Any wizard was too much trouble for most decent folk.

  And indeed suddenly all eyes were averted. All except David’s, but then David hadn’t been paying attention to him in the first place.

  He sat across from Jack in a tailored blue suit, clinking his gold ministry ring against the side of his fourth emerald gin. He liked the gin, David did. Liked that and girls. But he couldn’t handle either well.

  “It was fun though, wasn’t it? Rachael says it was all a lot of laughs back then,” David said.

  “Sure. It’s fun to kill a tyrant when you’re just kids,” Jack replied quietly.

  It hadn’t been, really. It had been agony—bloody, ugly agony. But not at the start. At first it was a challenge—him and his pals defying night-curfews and breaking open the lightning vaults. It had been heart-pounding, wild fun, like fucking in a falling plane. But then the Fireguard had caught wind of them and they’d learned what it was to bleed. They found out just how quickly they’d abandon one of their own to the dogs if it bought the rest ten more minutes to save their own sorry asses.

  But those stories didn’t sell theater tickets or glossy books. Certainly, didn’t make for the pretty child-heroes people liked to think had liberated them. And David wasn’t asking because he really wanted to know. He wanted to be reassured that Jack wasn’t going to become an embarrassment, like Beadle had.

  It never did for child-heroes to grow up into faggots, dykes and trannies.

  “Rachael says it was fun, then it was fun. Hell, maybe we should crash the palace again for old times’ sake.” Jack couldn’t help the menace in his tone, but David didn’t seem to perceive it.

  “Of course it was.” David smiled and Jack knew the other man was thinking of the latest film version of the revolution where all the blood had been cherry syrup and the twenty-two year old trollop playing Rachael had waggled her tits and giggled like a stripper.

  “Look, Swift, I know it’s hard to put the glory days behind you.” David clinked his ice obtrusively at a passing waitress. “But you’re not a ruffian on the street anymore. You’re a hero of the Republic, a grown man who has a responsibility to be a role model for our youth. You understand what I’m saying.”

  “You want me to get a hair cut?” Jack suggested.

  David frowned at him but said nothing while the waitress took his glass. For a moment David’s gaze followed her ass as she walked to the bar to refill his gin then he returned his water-blue gaze to Jack.

  “I’m talking about the big picture here, Swift.”

  “I won’t quit the smoke,” Jack told him flatly. He had too much magic wrapped up in the rhythm of burning paper, striking matches and the slow exhale of poison.

  “No. The Ministry of Health understands that they’re part of your image. Part of the whole devil-may-care package of our Jack Swift…. Your Way, isn’t that what you wizards call it? Your Ways?” David flashed a smile at the waitress’ cleavage and took his drink from her manicured hand, with a little too much overlap of fingers. Jack noted her shudder at the contact. He felt some sympathy, having earlier shaken that frog-belly soft hand.

  “Look, I’m just going to come out and say it, all right?” David turned his attention back to Jack after the waitress made her escape to another table.

  “Really wish you would.”

  “You and Rachael.”

  “Me and Rachael what?” Jack asked, though he already knew. He knew and dreaded it. Hell, Rachael would dig up the ivory gun and fire the five names of death into Jack’s heart if someone suggested it to her…he hoped.

  “Rachael’s a good looking woman and you’re…. You’re single.” David took another dive into his gin as if it would cover the gaffe. Jack just laughed. A ring of smoke rose around his fingertip, feeling hot as a live wire. Tantalizing electric charges jumped inside the tiny gray cloud, flickering like distilled lightning. It only took a little electricity to stop a heart, a tiny lightning strike that would leave only a small burn scar on Jack’s right hand. One of many.

  But he was done with that. Now the smoke was just a habit, a prop, a toy he played with to keep his mind out of the real clouds and away from that far fiercer fire.

  “It would be the match of the century,” David said. “You know, comrades and lovers stuff.”

  Jack did know, but only because he’d seen it. Rachael and Amelia had been all that, certainly done it better than he ever could have with the men he’d knocked around with. No, Rachael and Amelia had been the real thing all the way up to death do us part, and then Rachael had eaten the ashes.

  She and Amelia were one, forever and always.

  “That’s not going to happen.” Jack kept it simple.

  “Why not?” David asked in a whisper, which told Jack that he knew exactly why not.

  “Have you run this by Rachael?” Jack demanded.

  “She’s the one who suggested it,” David responded.

  Tiny tongues of lightning flicked between Jack’s fingers like nervous snakes tasting strange soil.

  “That’s not possible,” Jack said. Not for the Rachael he knew, anyway.

  “I spoke to her again this morning—”

  “Where?” Jack demanded.

  David smiled a nervous, darting smile, like he knew that it ought to be slapped off his face.

  “She hasn’t been well,” David began but didn’t go on.

  Jack felt the blood draining from his face. Oh, those familiar words. The same ones offered to him for Beadle’s absence and then six months later his body lay in a lovely golden casket.

  “Take me to her.”

  Chapter Two

  Godscliff, the immense city-state, rose up either side of the winding jagged canyon in steppes and terraces. Eight hundred years of wizardry and engineering defied gravity and the relentless erosion of the wild river below. But nothing altered one law of nature: shit always flowed down.

  Jack could see it all so clearly from his airplane seat.

  Workhouses, apartment blocks and factories crowded the lower terraces,
and beneath each terrace, cascades of sewage spewed from huge pipes. Shit, piss and flat tires rained down the mountain walls to fill the river below. Just over the filthy water, the Bone Ledges of the west bank jutted out, affording hook-and-pole scavengers a last chance to make use of the refuse, corpses and trash abandoned by the rest of the city. Fires smoldered all along the ledges, where scavengers incinerated bones to produce the ash needed to craft the fine porcelain that graced tables fourteen thousand feet above, in the Ministry Palaces.

  Now, the stench and steam of the lower terraces lay so far below the airplane that the iron bridges spanning the Red Chasm River looked like spider webs, spun to entrap all the silver airplanes that darted and dived from the profusion of landing strips populating the higher terraces.

  Up here, in mid-air, all that filth, rubber and refuse became distant, glittering minutiae. Here, an airhostess in a short skirt served Gold Label brandy and the security men standing at the cabin doors smelled like hundred dollar cologne.

  These were not the heights Jack remembered. Certainly not the smoking, shrieking wrecks he’d brought down the last time he’d been this far up in the clouds.

  He held his drink, but didn’t trust it. In the leather reclining seat across from Jack, David snored into a satin pillow. The airhostess looked quietly pleased. Jack assured her that he needed nothing else and neither did David.

  The plane’s engine purred through walls of mist as it rose. Jack felt the ascent in his blood. Nearly ten thousand feet up and still rising. He rolled balls of smoke over his fingers as if he were toying with the supple cumulus clouds that slid across the plane’s sleek wings. Through a pink-glazed portal Jack watched the land of a high ledge spread out below. Dwarfish gardeners looked up from the manicured terrace that had once been a cloud forest full of thorn trees and leopards. Now exotic gazelles and deer grazed within topiary mazes, awaiting their sporting executions.

  And on the ledge above the Minister of the Interior’s hunting garden stood the Perpetua Sanatorium. The plane alighted there on a private runway and the airhostess took Jack’s untouched drink without comment.

  The sanatorium walls were the color of onion skin and were guarded by clean young men in crisp uniforms. Each of them cradled a black machine gun like it was a lady’s handbag. Jack guessed that they’d hefted and shot those guns plenty of times in the neat stalls of firing ranges. But meeting their eyes as he passed, he knew that not one of them had seen their bullets grind a man into meat.

  They smelled like infants to Jack.

  The fleet of pretty little nurses who staffed the reception desks and wandered the sanatorium halls reminded him of all those albino rabbits stage magicians pulled out of their top hats. They needlessly multiplied as he was escorted deeper and deeper into the heart of the sanatorium. And they watched Jack—their uniform dark eyes peeking from beneath identical blonde bangs—like they knew he could stuff them back into the satin darkness from which they’d come.

  Gardenias and sweet alcohol perfumed the pearly gold halls, but beneath that lay a dry, vegetal aroma of feed and dung. David requested and was supplied with another drink. He gave a nurse a sloppy smile, and the four security men escorting them averted their eyes as David made a clumsy grab for the woman’s breast.

  “Quick little minx.” David grinned when the nurse darted behind a desk. “That’s the sort of thing a man ought to go after, Swift! You know what I mean? Pussy.” He drew the last word as if he couldn’t stand to let it get out of his mouth.

  A grimace crossed the face of one of their armed escorts. Drunk as he was, David still caught it, but apparently didn’t understand its cause. He turned on the guard and waved his soft white hands at Jack.

  “Do you know who this man is?” David demanded. “Do you? This is Jack Swift. Yes, Jack fucking Swift! You can’t smirk at Jack fucking Swift, not even if he’s dressed like shit and he smells like a sewer! He’s a national hero! You can’t criticize a fucking national hero!”

  Jack wanted very badly to make David kiss the cement at that moment. One of the guards seemed to see that in Jack’s face. For just an instant their gazes met over David’s head.

  And there was something in the young man’s expression, a little spark that made Jack suddenly think of Beadle—not the dead thing he’d been in his casket but alive and teasing him with that elusive, amused smile, daring him to do his worst.

  For the first time in years, Jack felt his pulse skip like his heart was laughing. And feeling as stupid as the first time he’d laid eyes on Beadle, Jack let the old power surge and prick over his fingertips.

  He tapped David’s back, felt the electric crack and sear, and David went down. No one even moved to catch him as his unconscious body belly flopped onto the marble floor. His glass hit, spilling ice and liquor, and bounced from his grasp but didn’t break. David would have a hell of a hangover when he came to.

  The nurses stood at their desks, staring. An amber call light began to silently blink from the far wall.

  “Never could hold his drink.” Jack only spared David’s prone body a glance, feeling both alarmed and pleased at his own sudden actions. He didn’t want to look at the guard again and yet he found himself meeting the man’s gaze and enjoying the quick smile that spread across his lips.

  “Don’t think he broke anything important.” Jack turned to one of the dozen nurses now creeping in from the complex of corridors and doorways. “Take care of him, will you?”

  The nurses watched him and then nodded as one.

  They were rabbits and this was their warren, Jack realized. That disturbed him far more than David’s fallen body. Creatures had been the Tyrant’s Way. Attack dogs transformed into gape-mouthed human forms and stuffed into uniforms. Rats teeming the streets in the bodies of child-snitches. Sharp teeth and bright eyes hidden in human flesh, those had been his assassins, spies and soldiers.

  And now wary animal gazes followed Jack again.

  “I need to see Rachael Keys.”

  A nurse led him and the guards followed. Jack felt them staring at his scarred hand and walking at just a little more distance from him. The guards, at least, were human men. Jack could feel that, just as he knew the fine-boned blonde in front of him was a half-wild hare. But who had stitched her and her sisters into these new demure bodies and what had they done to his Rachael?

  Jack knew which room held Rachael even before the door was opened to reveal a chamber of brilliant light, surgical steel and porcelain-white bedding. In the midst of so much illumination and reflection, Rachael was a darkness that drank in everything: light, heat and sound.

  During the revolution they had called her the Shadow of Death and even Jack hadn’t crossed her then. But now she looked like faded velvet, laid out flat and bleached to a dusky gray.

  “Jack.” She hardly mouthed his name and he went to her. Seeing her like this scared him almost enough to want to touch her, to hold her. Rachael opened her eyes and Jack saw the warning in her glance. He stopped at her bedside and shoved his hands into the tattered pockets of his overcoat.

  “You look like shit,” Jack said.

  “You’re one to talk,” Rachael whispered. Then she drew in a deep breath and Jack could feel her dragging feebly at his life. He didn’t fight her and only felt the briefest moment of weakness in his knees. Behind him, his escort of armed guards swayed. One went to the floor. Two others hit their knees and that last one—the one with the quick smile—staggered back to the door. He slammed it shut, as the final brilliant flickers of life were drawn from his collapsed comrades.

  Rachael looked only a little better. Her dull eyes had turned from gray to obsidian.

  “You need more?” Jack asked and he could see that it pissed her off. She never asked and he should have known better than to offer.

  “Shut the fuck up, will you? I don’t have time for it.” She turned her head with great difficulty. “That fuck-up David actually found you for me?”

  “I found him. Hadn’t
seen you in any of the newsreels for two months. Started to worry,” Jack told her. “David said some crap about you wanting to make me your blushing bride.”

  A snort of laughter escaped Rachael and she shuddered like it hurt her.

  “Better than an S.O.S., that,” Rachael replied. “I knew he’d pass that on to you…. Stupid prick actually thought I’d gone straight. Like any wizard ever could. I knew you wouldn’t make that mistake. You’d know it was all wrong.”

  Jack nodded.

  She looked so different, so small and sick. Even when he’d seen her in the newsreels, made up like a doll and standing next to Peter under a Ministry of Security banner she hadn’t looked this tamed, this defeated.

  “You want me to get you out of here?” Jack asked.

  He saw hope in her expression and he reached to lift her from her cocoon of white blankets but Rachael caught his hand. Her fingers felt cool as snakeskin.

  “You can’t just carry me out, Jack.”

  “What? You’ve gotten too fat to lift?”

  “Pull back the damn blankets.”

  And all at once he was afraid to do as she said. Suddenly he could smell blood and sickness in the bedding. He gripped the downy comforter and the soft blankets and drew them back.

  A gold spike jutted from Rachael’s belly, its shaft impaling her naked body like a pin holding a butterfly to a display. Not even the Tyrant had broken wizards like that.

  “Who?” Jack could hardly speak. His hands shook like the blankets they gripped were electrified.

  “Don’t be a cunt,” Rachael warned him.

  “Peter?” The gold spike. He should have known the moment he saw it but he didn’t want to. Peter was one of their own. A sick shit and a fucker, but one of them.

  “He’s Minister of Security and he’ll know you’re here any minute,” Rachael said. “I need you to keep a promise you made me.”

  “No.” Jack dropped the blankets and stepped back from the bed.

  It had been sixteen years, but Jack knew exactly what she meant. The first rewards for them had just been advertised. Huge red numbers had been printed below a grainy photo of Jack’s wild laughing face.