EVERY JOB HAS ITS HELL DAY. That day where you realize you're just not getting paid enough for what you deal with. The day where you want to quit every 5 minutes. For office workers it's the dreaded Monday. For customer service slaves it's Fridays and Saturdays when all the assholes are out and your life becomes that much more hollow. When I worked at the sex toy shop, aptly named The Dungeon, we got hordes of horrible drunken gay couples buying poppers and acting like asses. Oh, and the straight people getting into dildo fights. For film production it's that last few days of shooting when everyone is sick and tired and actors walk off set to get drunk. True story. For being a stagehand, it's the Load Out. Once the concert is wrapped up you gotta disassemble and haul all that crap you spent days setting up in a matter of hours. And for being a witch it's when the higher ups get their machinations in motion. You're the cog in a machine that is running full speed ahead. You work in someone else's designs with no idea of the big picture. It all started off big with a hit. That's right, a hit job. As in murder.
The just-before-noonish I come down groggy and looking for coffee. I sleepwalk my way into the living room with the happy couple perched on their thrown-couch. They blurt out some shit at me but I'm nonfunctional. I scratch my head and say “come again?” I don't know what I was expecting but instead Jer-Bear and Greg have dropped all pretense and just openly ask me to kill a dude. Wow, so much for Seattle's legendary subtlety and passive aggressiveness.
“You know who Andras Thaddeus is?” asks Gregory.
“Weirdo who dresses like a cowboy?” I roll my eyes thinking about the beefy muscle head. He looks like a gay body builder who is trying to be extra Bear-y for a bear convention. The kind of doofus in his 40s trying very hard to come off like a macho man. A bad joke like everyone in the Seattle goth scene.
“Yuuuup.” Says Jer-Bear who shares my overly exaggerated eye roll.
“Well, he's got a few bad habits,” Gregory starts up, “for example; waving his guns around scaring the shit out of his roommates; taking women home who are in the midst of a panic attack or some kind of episode and getting them high on everything as 'therapy;' selling drugs at the goth club. Need I go on? Well, tonight he's threatening to kill one of his roommates. Our friend Gwen Lindsey. Maybe because he's a high drug dealing psycho, maybe because he found out she's part of The Family. Either way, see what you can do to get her out safe and get him out of the picture. Anything goes, kid, anything...” Gregory emphasizes it with a big head roll like he's heard a bad joke.
“Fuck him up, girl” adds Jer-Bear.
And just like that the morning goes back to normal. The happy couple start taking bong rips and flip on the boob tube to binge some show. I get my coffee breakfast and start formulating a plan. I wish I could say this is the first time I've killed someone. Sadly, it isn't. Or I think it isn't. I never stuck around to see what happened after I bashed that kid's head into a fender. I shut the memory out of my mind as fast and tightly as I can. I push it down. In its place I make room for a new thought. I think long and hard about how I'm going to get away with murder. Again.
I never needed a reason to hate Andras Thaddeus. Him being a friend of Emily is enough. She'd pretend to flirt with him in front of me in this laughably ham-fisted-ly way. Of course he was completely oblivious to it. A pathetic attempt at trying to make me jealous. Anyone who's a friend of Emily is no friend of mine. Hurting Emily, even by proxy, is Christmas coming early. Taking out one of Emily's friends, and most likely her drug dealer, will be gottverdammt sweet. I have half a mind to make him send her a suicide note to fuck her up. Really traumatize her. But Emily is a sociopath and would probably laugh it off in private and play the victim in public.
Chapter 7
THIS JOB REQUIRES a trip to West Seattle. It's weird there. Bad weird. Worse than regular Seattle weird. This is where people in self imposed exile go. Today's a bad day to assassinate someone. I'm supposed to hang out with this acquaintance of mine, Astrid. We were gonna get high and fuck around the Pike Market but that will have to wait. I don't want to blow her off though. People here are full of shit but Astrid once said if I ever killed someone she would totally help me hide the body. She's def dealt drugs in the past so legality isn't a breaking point for her. We've talk about people we'd love to see die. I ain't gonna clue her in but I genuinely wonder if she knew would she actually help? Two birds one stone! Only one way to find out.
I go to a cafe on Cap Hill to gather info on my mark as I work best when chugging coffee. I look up every detail of Andras Thaddeus. For starters that's a bullshit social media name. His legal name is Andrew Taylor. Guess Andrew isn't much of a cowboy name. I find his address and his work info. I look up all the publicly available intel relating to him; social media accounts, emails, blogs from over a decade ago, court records, everything. I have a pretty good idea about his life from all this. He works at office on Pill Hill. His job is a classic 9 to 5 except he works 8 to 6 for some reason. The second he's out of work he does a quick run to his to grab his drugs. Afterwards he hits the clubs to sell them, duh. If not, he'll either go grocery shopping or to a low key bar for a minute. Tonight he's RSVP'ed to a show in the CD. So he'll def grab some drugs before going there. A plan begins to ferment in my mind.
I catch the Light Rail down to the Westlake stop and hitch it to The Market. I keep an eye out for my accomplice to be. Astrid is part indigenous alaskan, short, and usually covered in paint from her art studio. She has a rich tech daddy to float her while she works on her art. As such she's got oodles of time to kill. We get along like peas in a pod. That said I wouldn't count on her. The last thing you can do in the Puget Sound is count on anyone for anything.
I spot her by the donut shop in the market. I remember back when I first moved to Seattle. There was this cute, queer punk chick with dreadlocks who worked there. Now it's another boring WASP at the counter. The city has been purged of it's weirdos. Astrid and I are a dying breed.
“Hey friendo!” Astrid waves to me.
“Hey hey hey. Didn't keep you waiting too long?” I ask as if either of us cared.
“Not any longer than usual.”
“Hey, I got a weird question for ya?” I ask “How much do you know about scene drama? Specifically at The Machine Shop?”
“I hear things but I try to mind my own business.” Shrugs Astrid as we walk along the promenade.
“You know about Andras Thaddeus?”
“Oh yeah, Andrew? He's got the alien tattoo and always dresses like a cowboy? It's a really stupid look. Yeah, his roommates complain about him and he's friends with Christine Death... oh, sorry, you're archenemies. No mentioning Christine.”
“Nobody is friends with Christine Death,” I recite from memory. “If Christine was a ice cream flavor....”
“... she'd be pralines and dick.” Astrid finises my sentence for me.
We walk and talk for a bit before I venture enough to ask the question.
“Hey, would you be willing to drive me to and from a place, no questions asked?”
“Are there drugs involved?” she perks up.
“No duh. I'll cut you in 50/50.”
“Hell yeah, friendo.”
You can't put a price on a good friendship.
Me and Astrid temporarily part ways and she agrees to pick me up at a retirement home in an hour. I have a quick errand to run and then we'll be ready for action. The plan is slowly coming together. Spike his drugs while he's at work and watch him keel over at the party. No way a dude like this goes to any party without doing a line first or popping something. With Astrid as my driver I can avoid getting clocked by the city's Orwellian surveillance network. Well, you know what they say. No plan survives contact with the enemy.
*****
ONE OF THE PEOPLE I run errands for in The Family is this old Russian dude. He fought in the original Afghan war for the Soviets. He's spry and always up for trouble. I like him. He lives at the polish retirement home just east of Hilltop in Cap Hill. I remember wandering around that area a lot after me and Emily's breakup. I walked endlessly just to numb the pain. I get to his place and it takes him about 5 minutes to come get me at the door.
“Come in, come in.” He beckons.
He's lost almost all his accent since he's lived in the US so long. The second the wall fell he booked ass to Seattle and never looked back. He brings me around to his garden in the courtyard. He's not supposed to be planting his own flowers but they let him slide cus he's old and the flowers look nice enough.
“You know, your outfit reminds me of how people used to dress on The Hill. Back in the 90s when grunge was big,” he recalls with some pride.
“Most def.”
“Back in the day the real punks would chase those posers away. Back when the Broadway mall was an actual mall and not just that QFC. When the fake punks would walk by in their fancy doc martens the street kids would chase them out.”
He likes to talk about how alternative Seattle used to be. It's one of the reasons I like him.
“Good, too many kids playing poverty tourism. We need more of that.” I concur. “Say, I have some serious work for The Family. Hardcore stuff. They said you could help me.” I lie.
“Say no more.” He nods and smiles. It's a grim smile. He goes a bit melancholy.
“Well, I need something poisonous.”
“They always send the young ones out like this.”
He tuts his tongue in disapproval and maybe looks a little sad. I don't think 33 is young but whatever.
“I got what you need, kid, but let me teach ya a spell first. Might save your ass. I kept this one to myself since I was in Afghanistan. Got me out of that desert alive, you know. Old spell from the motherland. It got my grandfather through World War 2 as well. Call it a real family tradition. Maybe even an ancient one. Hell, it could go all the way back before the Rus infested Russia. It's kind of like how the Chinese pushed out the real Japanese people in the six hundreds. Say, you look a bit Chinese. Did your family immigrate too?”
“One fourth Korean, actually.”
I feel all kinds of uncomfortable and my skin starts crawling.
“Don't know much. My dad cut off his parents. I'm kind of the tofu burger of Koreans. Just look like the real deal from the outside but no meat on the inside.”
I don't like talking about my ethnicity and I don't like talking about my family. If I put sunglasses on then no one can tell I'm not European. This is why I never take them off. I'm white enough to pass. I talk with my therapist a lot about my self hate. As a kid I used to just glare at myself in the mirror. So far away and yet so close to being white. I block out all the racist shit that I heard as a kid. A few years ago this meth head was screaming racial slurs at me from a bus stop. I keep my sunglasses on all the time since. Despite all these bad vibes I forgive the old man. He didn't know and old guys always fuck up.
I just came to see if this dude had any poison. I don't expect much of people. I didn't expect him to give me anything else. Fate intercedes when we least expect it. It's usually the people we least suspect to be the ones to change our lives. This is the moment I went from being a disposable pawn to something more. The moment that saved and ruined my life. At the time it felt like I had struck gold but now I know better.
He gives me the fucking winning lottery ticket of spells. I don't know why he did it. Maybe to brag? Maybe he thinks I'm cute? Maybe to look out for another outsider? Maybe he knew I would be the kind of person who's always in the shit.
How do you describe something you don't fully understand? You can talk through what happened like you're giving an eyewitness account. A play by play of the events as they unfurled, as you saw them, according to your faded memory. You could wax poetic about the emotions of the moment to cover up that you don't know shit. Even worse, you could philosophize over it like an absolutely pathetic nerd. No. I don't think I'll do any of that. Instead I'll just say what it does and what I was warned of, and a little of what people have told me since.
Remember how gaining magic is that “nature abhors a vacuum” shit? Horror vacui in latin. There's a balance between your tangible, corporeal form and your ethereal, magical shadow. A kind of duality. Ying yang, positive negative, the arcane and the flesh. They balance each other out in a weird way. Well sometimes you can use one to fill in for the other. Cannibalism uses the flesh to fill in for the magic. This spell, this ritual I underwent, uses magic to fill in for the flesh. As in if I get wounded, it transfers what magic I have to heal it. A backup of my body stored in the in between. It's permanent but I need to keep my system all magicked up when bad shit happens. If I get too badly hurt when I'm all dried up then no magic means no flesh replacement. He warned me not to get exsanguinated either. It's not a catch all spell. It doesn't counteract other spells. It won't bring me back from the dead. Getting tossed into a volcano is game over. It's not invincibility, it's just survival.
The ritual, like all of them, was dull. Despite this I memorized it. Wrote it down with excruciating detail. This wasn't something I wanted to just let slip between my fingers. And just like that it's over. Back to business as usual. He gives me the poisonous powder he has in stock. It's made from arcane plants only witches can see, as you would expect. He informs me it will make the victim's death look like an OD. My target gets off work at 6pm and it's 3pm now. Plenty of time to break into his place, dust his shit, then sit back and watch. I give the old man a hug goodbye and sit outside twiddling my thumbs. Astrid pulls up about 10 minutes late and we make a break for West Seattle.
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