Crime Spells

“You say something, boss man?” Martinez managed to speak again, this time without an accompanying crumb shower, though the yawn at the early morning hour ruined the effort.

“Nothing that need worry you,” he replied. Through dozens of assistants across the years he’d learned that nice or curt, it never mattered. What mattered was what their brains could handle. After that prerequisite, his ma

The other man shrugged the snappish response away easily.

… point.

Martinez shoveled in the last of the donut and pulled out a liter of Mountain Dew he’d somehow managed to fit into a pocket of his oversized, thread-bare coat. He started to untwist the cap before he spoke again. “Man, what the hell. Dude’s like a human stick of butter.”

Early, even for you, Martinez… been asleep yet?

“So, what we got here, boss man? Spectral phantasm? Werecreature?”

Adrian glanced toward one end of the tu

“Maybe it’s an undead,” Martinez continued yammering. Always yammering. “I keep asking, and you’re never telling. But yeah, could be undead. That’d be cool. Wait, wait,” Martinez said, his mangy beard quivering with excitement, glasses above his blotchy cheeks almost fogging with exhalations. “An unbound spirit?” he softly breathed, as if it were a holy prayer over rosaries at a pew on Sunday.

Adrian shook his head slowly. Where in the world did Martinez obtain such information? He knew to the word exactly what he said around his assistants, especially once they’d been around long enough for him to start mentally referring to them by their names (though he never deigned to voice them). And something as dangerous as an unbound spirit? Never. “Too many movies,” he finally said.

“Huh,” Martinez responded, eyes blinking as he mentally stumbled to a halt, his childish glee fading under confusion.

“Too many movies. Such creatures do not exist.”

A knowing look replaced confusion, a child convinced he’d caught an adult in a lie. “Right. Sure. What ever you say, boss man.” He took another giant swig of his teeth-killing sugar water and then waved the bottle like a laser pointer, his voice a cable infomercial salesman at three in the morning, deep into the hundreds. “But I’m looking at a corpse that died in no human way. Explain it.”

Adrian stood perfectly still, his smooth, angular face a pale slate statue to house his dual-colored eyes. Martinez ’ arrogant smile slowly faded, and he gulped several times under Adrian ’s piercing blue/brown gaze before his eyes fell to the floor.

“I explain to no one,” Adrian spoke, voice never wavering off its even keel-all the more powerful.

“Didn’t mean anything by it, boss man. Just, well, something killed this guy. And it ain’t normal.” The last almost a mumble.

Yes, you did. But he didn’t respond, knowing that despite his distaste, he needed the repugnant man. He reached inside his posh coat. Pulling out a silver-threaded pouch, he unwound the drawstrings and dipped fingers into the hideously expensive rare metallic dust mixture. With practiced ease he rewound the cords one handed and slipped the pouch away. He then stretched out his hand and waggled his fingers over the body with ludicrously over-the-top showmanship that almost brought pink to his ears despite the years (why, for the love of all that is holy, why?!) until he caught Martinez ’ eye. Then he flicked the sparkling dust into the air; he ignored the gleeful, anticipatory look that swept the other man’s face.

Adrian cleared his voice to cement his hold on his audience of one; he struggled to concentrate. Such moments always invoked childhood memories like incantations to raise the unwanted corpses of the long dead. Of make-believe games with his little sister when they wished to keep their parents ignorant of their talks even when in their presence and the made-up language that became so much more; of hide-and-seek in the back woods when he lost his mind for some time, his spark of talent found and the spirit world revealed; endless time spent honing his craft by trial and error, and all the lonely, desperate years to find someone, anyone, like him. He fought to keep a darkly sarcastic laugh from tearing free at the ludicrousness of it all. He pulled his thoughts back to the moment, all too aware of the dangers of letting his concentration slip. He spoke forcefully, the alien tongue rolling easily off his, a guttural snarl that clawed at the walls and dimmed the harsh electronic lighting. The glittering dust pulsed as though in sympathetic vibration to a monstrous, unheard heartbeat that filled the universe. Susurrations of unfelt wind wafting down the long subway corridor, twisting the dust into a vortex of microstars squeezed into a miniature black hole. He clenched his fist and barked out the final words, the vocal sounds like claws tearing up out of his throat into existence. Abruptly the dust strobed in a pyrotechnic flash of unearthly fury that threatened to etch their shadows into the tiled walls like Nagasaki victims from that long ago nuclear blast: hell’s own flashbulb.

In that instant time ground to a stop as the footprint from the astral plane lay revealed to his trained senses. The last several days lay juxtaposed in a mind-numbing snarl, like thousands of photos developed onto the same film stock. As each living entity moved through the mundane world, they left a trail, a smear of their own life essence. An indelible mark on the underpi

He abruptly found the layers for when the man appeared. Late last night, not a soul in the tu

A frown pulled at his features. Deaths-even non-mundane deaths-always left a clean break as the life energy evaporated back into the astral plane, like a rope smoothly cut. And in such deaths a multitude of details could be found. Almost too easy for Adrian and his skills. But this? This was altogether different. No details at all, just an… opacity… almost as though… no, that could not be possible.