Busted Flush

Double Helix

THE WORDS OF A TALEBEARER

ARE AS WOUNDS

Melinda M. Snodgrass

I’VE LEFT THE MOISTURE- LEACHING heat of Baghdad for the steaming heat of Kongoville. The tropical heat makes me wish I could strip off not only clothes but skin as well. What is it about the British that we seek out such dreadful climes in our pursuit of empire?

Exhaustion has left my mind feeling like a gray blank. I wasn’t sure I could effectively picture one of the rooms of the palace so I gave myself more room by picking the garden. The night air is filled with the sounds of insects and frogs. I wonder if one of those deep ribbets is Buford out grazing on bugs. I giggle.

It dies when I hear the distinctive sound of a gun being cocked. Whirling I see one of the Leopards, his eyes glittering in his dark face. The gun is coming up. He recognizes me before his finger tightens on the trigger. The barrel drops, and I can feel my knees trembling with released stress. The wash of adrenaline is ebbing, taking with it the last of my energy. I grope in my pocket, pull out a Black Beauty, and toss it into my mouth. It seems monstrous passing down my throat. I have to cough before I can ask, “Où est John Fortune?”

He takes me.

Fortune is slumped in a large armchair, dressed only in boxers, staring blindly at the insects circling the table lamp. Sweat gleams on his bare chest, and forms drops in his sideburns. Sekhmet humps beneath the skin of his forehead like some grotesque tumor. I wonder how Curveball feels with this voyeur present at every tender fuck.

“Lilith,” he says as if remembering who I am.

There’s an overstuffed ottoman near his feet I sink down onto, and feel the leather stick to the moist skin of my calf.

“We’re getting some blowback from the Caliphate,” I say.

“What does that mean?”

“That annoyed locals are shooting at us.”

That makes him straighten. Suddenly another soul is looking through his dark eyes. It’s old and cold and I recognize a kindred spirit.

“They have brought it upon themselves.”

“Yes, well, that may be the case, but however naughty they are or pure we are, bullets are still lead and they still kill. As DB nearly found out.”

“What?” The decibel range goes high and the young man is back.

“Bullet to the chest. Fortunately his vest sucked most of it. But it was a near thing.” I pause for just the right amount of time. Cast down my eyes, then look back up at him. “Kate seemed very concerned. She was still with him when I left to report to you.” I pause again. “Oh, she said to give you her love.”

There is again that strange snapping shift in the eyes, and Fortune’s voice rasps as he says, “You are an evil thing. Dark and—”

My lips skin back in a smile. “John, dear, do exert a little control over your senile mummy.”

Fortune seems like an inexpertly controlled marionette as Isra tries to propel him out of his chair, and he struggles to stay seated and composed. There’s something so wrong and disturbing about this symbiosis that I find myself taking a step back. Fortune was supposed to have the power of Ra, the power of the sun itself, but it was taken from him when his father cured him of the wild card. Sekhmet was to be the handmaiden of Ra. Two powers wedded to form a whole. But Fortune is just a nat, which makes them only half of what they were meant to be.

Thank God. Fortune’s self-righteousness melded to Isra’s vindictiveness would be a truly terrifying prospect.