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  “And now we leave—”

  But noticed one of our number had remained silent. One of our voices had gone missing.

  “Sixth?” we hissed.

  The Sixth pressed the woman Rose harder into the wall and made a framed motivational poster SUCCESS go sideways at the fierce motion.

  “There is no time to lose,” we said. “She is not the Gift. Remember our purpose.”

  With a quivering gasp, the Sixth pushed down his pants to pull free his sex. His left suspender fell askew over his dense deltoid muscle.

  “Sixth!” we warned. “You have forgotten us.”

  “It’s a matter of moments, comrades!” he rasped.

  That was it. He wasn’t within us. He had broken away, become separate, no longer within the Assembly.

  The Tenth caught him at the back of his neck.

  “Oh!” He laughed out at first and then screamed, realizing where his brain had derailed from us. “I beg mercy! Please! I just wanted someone while here. We shall all feel it. Let me have this.”

  “There is no me,” we told him.

  The Tenth hoisted him off the ground.

  “MERCY!” he shrieked.

  With the loss of connection from the floor, the Sixth’s skull caught fire and his skin peeled back like a wind tossed tarp. The exposed skull radiated white amid the flames. The skin shredded and the ends caught with hot embers like thousands of funeral incense sticks. They glowed hotter, slipped down, and surged with red electricity and black smoke. The Sixth’s body exploded into spinning silver particles that expanded and pulled inward, into nothing.

  There was only silence then. But it was momentary.

  With a tremendous ripping sound, a wash of red stretched over the wall. The new Sixth emerged from the corridor shadow. The male body that appeared was larger, with African skin, though no less bloody than the Sixth before him. His gore-oiled handlebar mustache and untamed afro looked reminiscent of the Third Precocious Age, but this one’s past was no matter.

  We were him.

  He was us.

  For as long as he could ever dream to be.

  * * *

  The banshee’s scent was stronger coming from another apartment, not the apartment of our Gift, but instead lingering at a stranger’s threshold. There was also a dangerous smell, one that bled through all dimensions at once. It would make us lose connection not only here, but everywhere. Sea water.

  It was obvious the Gift and the banshee had been in this other apartment as well, and stayed longer for some reason. We wagered the purpose for their stay in the stranger’s apartment would ultimately reveal their location. If it didn’t, we had little choice otherwise than to investigate.

  We would use caution here with the scent of sea water so near. It was nothing to play loosely around. The First and Third took axes from a corridor shadow and went brutally at the door, trading off whacks. Shouts surfaced from the other side, growing louder as large hunks of wood splintered and ripped away.

  We consider the smell. It was somewhere low, possibly in the floor, in the worn brown carpet. It’s not seen and there isn’t much, but the risk of stepping into it would be too high.

  “Grab the hooks,” we said.

  The Fifth cleared the remainder of hanging wood debris. In the apartment a Korean couple hunkered in a corner. Both looked to a hallway, their foolhardy escape plan.

  The First pulled a grappling hook from another corridor shadow. We had little time to admire its weight and smell the old death on its steel, and so we hurried to the doorway.

  The man screamed an order to the woman, possibly his wife. She protested in their language and shook her head like a stubborn child. He grumbled something and cast his eyes back on us, his bewilderment as to why we hadn’t entered the apartment all too clear. We caught the muddled scent of the Gift on one of them.

  The Seventh leaned inside, taking the grappling hook from the Ninth. It made us anxious, how exposed we were to the hidden sea water. This might have been a trap set by the banshee. Caution. We could only use disciplined caution.

  The hook, gleaming, heavy, hypnotic black on black, iron, steel, metal, hated love, we all agreed was and would always be our favorite tool. So many uses. So many beautiful memories. The Seventh cast it out. The married couple tried to run but misjudged the hook’s path—it struck the floor just ahead of the man—the Seventh yanked it and swept the man off his feet, catching just below the right knee.

  “Bae!” the woman wailed.

  The Seventh ripped the man across the room, sending him through a TV tray set up with a bowl of soup. The bowl scattered and broth and noodles rained down on the man as he kicked and clawed at the carpet for purchase. The man wasn’t even near us and we could already understand he wasn’t the one possessing the smell. It was the woman.

  But this was still good.

  The Seventh caught the man by his ankle and pulled him into the air, careful not to drag him through the sea water at the threshold. Upside down, Bae yelled to his wife, but she screeched back at him. The Seventh dropped him into the hallway. He flopped there a moment before we pulled him to his feet and slammed him into the side wall.

  The First leaned into the apartment, his lips and ours peeling into a senseless grin. He motioned for the woman to come forward. She started to move and Bae reprimanded her—cut off almost at once with the Seventh squeezing his throat between powerful fingers coiled in crusted blood.

  “Bae,” the woman sobbed, and hurried to the doorway. The Seventh eased his grip and the sound that escaped the man was amusingly melodramatic. We tittered and closed in around the threshold.

  The First snatched the woman’s hand and pulled it to his nose. The scent there filled all of our nostrils. We detected a similar smell in the room. A laundry basket near the couch. A pile of folded clothes were stacked there, newly laundered but still possessing the smell, if an earthier version. The banshee must have blended out Jared’s natural scent and further muddled it with an attracting color. How very cunning of the bitchwhore.

  This would take more study.

  The First sniffed again, his nose, our noses, going rubbery, and nostrils all flaring with volcanic red intensity.

  The man’s foot snapped up and his work boot slammed into the First’s face. We all flinched, pulled rudely from our analysis. Our hands simultaneously touched our stinging jaws and we tasted murder, enjoyable pieces of pink and red on our tongues.

  The Tenth pulled a machete from a slanting corridor shadow and we chuckled at our own breathless excitement.

  The First huffed in more of the odor. It was complex but even getting some distinguishing marker would provide a general location in the city. The muddling had been well executed.

  Banshee filth!

  The Seventh brought the gasping man forward, while we toyed with his wife’s body.

  “Money!” Bae said. “And let her go from here. Money—”

  The Tenth stuck the point of the machete at the man’s lower right eyelid.

  “In my bedroom. Money. Yours. Please!”

  The blade gently creased the skin in a vermillion stroke. The woman’s face was locked in a micro-expression, on the verge of screaming. We mimicked her cowardice, the deliciously stupid expression rolling across our ten faces in a cascade. In the next moment we were laughing so hard we almost lost ourselves again. The First had stopped his sniffing. The Tenth carelessly dragged the machete down and neatly split Bae’s mechanic jumpsuit, his hairless, pale chest bursting into view.

  The sight of bare, clean, unspoiled flesh gave us pause and restored our resolve. The Tenth drew the blade just to the orbit of the man’s dark red nipple. The edge rubbed there, summoning blood from below. Bae ground his teeth as the nipple lifted onto the blade. Two picked up the severed piece of flesh and licked it. He passed it on and we all took turns licking it, even the First, between his sniffs of the Gift. A steady stream of blood leaked from the wound, but Bae was brave. Through spit and teeth and
burning eyes, he just wanted us to let his wife go. He had no idea the blessed things we would do before we let them both die.

  And like that! The First caught the scent and put his fist up and out. He pointed it in the direction of the Gift. Somewhere to the southwest. This would guide us. Not to find Jared but to define the cage we would make for him and the banshee.

  The Fourth tossed the nipple at the man and we hissed a serpent’s laugh.

  We had to leave now. There was no time for further amusement. We had fantasies on the brain though; oh, pleasure, how overwhelming it might have been to skin the couple just to see how pretty their muscle fibers were. Then we could have built a bonfire and roasted the skin. Snacked. Fed it to them as well. Watched the disturbed realization of how flavorful your own flesh really was…

  But we could do that with our Gift, for the next hundred years and beyond that if we hadn’t grown tired of him. He was ours forever. Ours to share and to have. He was married to us. No moving into the light, no death, no leaving the dungeons of the Deeper Unseen, only bliss with our rotten caresses. All of our Gifts had special chambers in our endless heart. It made us want to revisit the others, the passion clouding our mission.

  We could hear the soft whimpers of the couple behind us. They held each other tightly, thinking we’d left them out of mercy. Stepping into this world’s dizzying sunshine, we laughed at this idiocy, nearly on the edge of tears.

  Chapter 7

  Jared

  Jared tried to ignore his sore legs. He wasn’t used to this much physical activity and his leg muscles weren’t the only thing reminding him of that; his heart had done those strange staccato beats a while back, which made him see snaps of light across his field of vision and brought a queasiness into his stomach that stretched to his throat and guts. He wondered if he’d make the entire trip to the beach.

  The sun had ascended in the cloudless sky and the day had become ruthlessly hot. The banshee didn’t seem to perspire, despite the weather and being in a skintight jumpsuit, while Jared had to knuckle stinging pearls of sweat from his eyes almost constantly. As they passed a pet store and he spotted some aquariums, he thought back to the Kangjuns.

  “So salt water hurts them?” he asked. “The Assembly? That’s why you spilled the fish bowl, wasn’t it?”

  “You’ve finally caught on. Good job, sweets. And let’s say salt water slows them down, but no more. They are sensitive to it because if it is, in fact, actual sea water from the Paled Ocean, it’s beyond dangerous for them, and me.”

  “It’ll kill you and them?”

  “It’ll erase us from every possible reality. Even the smell of fish gets our guard up—if we were to come in contact with it, our bodies would break apart as energy and travel on, like all living things. Death for the Assembly happens almost as rarely as for banshees, and most of the time for them it’s self-inflicted. I’ve spoken with banshees that presided over the deaths of Assembly members however.” The banshee nodded with some occupational interest only she could appreciate. “Fascinating circuits of energy that release, from what I hear. I’d love to see it, but never have. Sorry, talking shop here.”

  Jared smiled faintly. “That’s fine, Banch. So then, the ocean is my only safety from them?”

  “Yes, if you’re submerged in it long enough they won’t want you as a Gift anymore.”

  “They’ll never come back? The sea water’s effects are permanent?”

  “Yes, so it is.”

  “I should be good then, because I’ve been in the Pacific Ocean before, many times as a kid.”

  “But you didn’t have the mark of the Gift yet,” Banch explained. “Any past contact was masked by that. You received the mark a week ago.”

  “And what if I’d taken an unexpected beach trip before they got to me?”

  “They knew you wouldn’t visit the beach—they’ve read the chain of events from the time of the mark until your death, and so did I…”

  “Just as well, I don’t care for the beach.”

  Banch lifted one of her pretty glittering eyebrows. “You don’t? You always paint the ocean though.”

  Jared shrugged. “I’m good at painting the ocean.”

  “And seagulls.”

  He snorted. “You know me well.”

  “That I do. Better than anyone.”

  “Ouch!” Jared bent and rubbed his kneecap.

  “Tender?”

  “Doing fine.” He continued on. “Thank you for protecting the Kangjuns.”

  Her eyes flitted over with tenuous caution. “I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety. I can only do my best. I have no idea what the Assembly’s next two grants could be. They could ask to kill others, they could ask for any manner of weapon from our dimension, or they could simply ask for passage through a corridor shadow and show up right here and now.”

  “Why don’t they?”

  “There’s no way to know they would succeed or not. The Assembly rarely does things that aren’t calculated for specific results. Right now they don’t have a firm lock on your scent, so they would need to guess where to show up and that might waste one of their grants. They won’t do that until they’re very desperate, which is why the closer we get to the beach, the more dangerous and aggressive they will become in attempting to capture us.”

  “I understand… but isn’t there a way we can take their attention away from other people? I mean, this is about me. Not my friends.”

  “I’m sorry. If it makes you feel better, I don’t see any reason for them to kill anybody.” Banch sighed darkly after another moment. “On second thought however, I had no idea they’d do it the first time. That was decidedly unexpected.”

  “Thanks, I feel way better now.” Jared kicked a broken piece of concrete off the sidewalk.

  “Well, take it as it comes, Mister Kare. The truth is a bomb filled with either beautiful confetti or rancid manure. And nobody has control of when the bomb explodes.”

  Jared hung his head and felt even more nauseated than he did a moment ago. If something had happened to his friends, he didn’t know if his heart could take this anymore, not after learning about those people at the laundry mat. Not after losing mom. Then dad.

  Banch rubbed circles in the small of his back. “I will also say this though: I haven’t sensed any changes in the death schedule.”

  “So maybe the Assembly didn’t track us to the Kangjun’s apartment?”

  The banshee’s mouth twisted.

  Jared stopped and shook his head at her. “No, Banch, tell me.”

  She caught him under the elbow. “They need to get to us quickly. I’m certain they have one focus right now. Let’s just hope for the best, okay?”

  “Bae and Eun Sun…” Jared felt like a zombie as they hurried along past a cacophony of a family pizza parlor, clattering dishes, videogames, and hooting kids.

  “Don’t despair until there’s a reason. Really, you have no idea. Do you know how lucky we are the Assembly hasn’t found us—”

  Banch threw her arm across Jared’s chest and halted him. She studied the distance with dazzling panic in her sapphire eyes.

  “What?”

  “They’ve found us,” she said.

  Down the street a massive pile-up of cars had occurred at the intersection. Jared was about to suggest this might only be a traffic collision, but his eyes tracked another pile-up on the western avenue. He spotted yet another pile-up to the south. He didn’t see anybody around the smoking heaps of metal however. Jared tried to second-guess the situation. How could she be certain this was them?

  “They’ve sealed off all routes to create a perimeter.” Banch searched around frantically. “I can use a Swell. Damn it to hell, but I didn’t want to have to do this so soon… later maybe, but good hell, already?” She groaned and pulled him into the graffiti adorned threshold of a long closed medical clinic.

  He lowered his voice. “Use a what? A Swell?”

  “It’s another scream. It’s matter-based
, not dimensional, so we need to find a better position, and it’s toilsome and I therefore need a place to recover. Indoors: this bright sun will make it impossible to regain my strength afterwards. Where does your friend Kaitlin live again? To what direction?”

  “I… I’m not really sure how to get there. I usually tell the bus driver the cross streets, Grand and Peyton.”

  Banch scrubbed at her face and checked the streets again, watching for them. “God, Jared, you’ve known Kaitlin forever and you don’t know the damn direction?”

  “I’m bad with that! Sorry!”

  The banshee chewed on her thumb momentarily. “Her apartment is near that organic grocery store, right?”

  He nodded. “Right.”

  She stood on her toes, as though it might help her vantage over the office buildings and banks. “I believe it’s to the south then. Damn it, shit, I hope it is.”

  “Wait, we can’t involve Kaitlin in this too! We have to do this Swell thing to another place? Can’t you take us to the ocean?”

  “It won’t get us that far and there’d be no place for me to heal.”

  “Then some other place—”

  “Listen to me.” Banch touched his face, her hand like warm velvet. “We can’t take a chance with someplace random, not after a Swell. I’ll be a mess and you will need help while I regain myself. Trust me.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll leave something special to protect her, okay?” Just then Banch’s eyes went wide with alarm.

  A group of individuals slid over the hoods of wrecked cars down the western street. There were possibly six—no, ten of them, as they emerged. All were at least over six feet tall, some nearing seven. At first sight their bare chests looked covered in red-brown camouflage, but as the sun played off their skin, it appeared to be blood, dried and fresh.

  Although they were unique to each other, the Assembly felt like one organism sliding up the street. Three of them came forward, shoulder to shoulder, one with the face of a lion and dirty, stringy gray hair, another bald with pointed bat-ears and a blood saturated goatee, and the last with such emaciation his head resembled an alabaster skull with waxy red lips. Beyond them, the next had the look of a rotund Adolf Hitler marinated in gore, flanked at his sides by three others: a spiked red Mohawk man with swirling black tattoos over his lanky frame, a fierce warrior with an overgrown afro and lengthy handlebar mustache, and a man possessing crazed hazel eyes and unruly hair like chestnut stratus clouds.