Chapter 28: Back Home

Frankie

We buried Benny before we went anywhere.

Rosella chose a place where he could have complained about the shade.

She stood beside the grave with her hands folded and listened while Aldric spoke. When it was her turn, she said Benny had been a difficult man, a good husband, and a terrible judge of when he needed another blanket.

Then she stopped.

Mara went to her.

I looked at the earth until I could look at something else.

Later, I gave her his message.

Tell her I came back for them this time.

She closed her eyes.

“I know,” she said.

That was all.

* * *

The town needed everything: food, repairs, lists of the living and the dead. Somebody had to decide which orders no longer existed and which jobs still needed doing in the morning.

The fortress gates stood open. People kept approaching them as though someone might announce it had been a mistake.

Dren organized the guards who remained. Brannik, with his ruined hand bound against his chest, directed crews disabling the markers. Rosella opened the tavern kitchen. Anyone standing around got a knife and a pile of potatoes.

She had the biggest pile herself.

I gave Brannik the accounts and the keys to the cash box.

“If something needs spending, spend it.”

“You are learning,” Brannik said.

“Don’t get sentimental.”

“Then stop making it difficult.”

The doorway had gone quiet after Thrak spoke. Brannik shut the crossing before anything could come through, but the connection remained in the old exchange circle.

Liora asked me to roll up my sleeve. The pale curve she’d examined in the tailor’s room now shone through my skin. Another line had joined it.

“The knot has opened,” she said.

She traced the new line without touching it. I remembered Thrak’s hand against the edge of the doorway.

“That’s how he held it?”

“The exchange paired you,” she said. “Two displaced lives. Two addresses. Breaking the heartglass released the power caught in the original spell.”

“Can we open it again?”

“Briefly. With preparation. And close it from either side once we set the anchors.”

“Can he stop us?”

“He can defend the far side.”

I looked at Vincent’s ring.

“He will.”

* * *

Mara packed without discussing whether she was coming.

When I asked if she needed anything, she considered me for a second.

“A description of what to expect.”

“Noise. Smoke. Too many people. Most of them think they’re in charge.”

“So a larger fortress.”

“With worse weather.”

Aldric came too. His arm was strapped. He could walk and hold a sword, which he considered an adequate definition of fit for travel.

I disagreed.

He looked at the blood still showing through my shoulder bandage.

We stopped discussing it.

Liora brought thread, scissors, and the certainty that unfamiliar magic was a professional insult she intended to investigate. Hobb brought his hammer and asked whether Chicago had decent beer.

“It’s illegal.”

He stared at me.

“You should have mentioned that before I agreed.”

Brannik stayed with the anchor. Rosella stayed with the town.

Before we left, she put bread and a little packet of dried herbs into my bag.

“Find tomatoes,” she said.

I couldn’t tell whether she was joking.

“I’ll try.”

* * *

Thrak had guarded the warehouse.

Apparently he hadn’t heard what a paladin could do to his help.

Aldric stepped through first.

Light filled the room.

The dead nearest the opening fell. The ones farther away staggered, their bindings pulling against something they had never encountered in Chicago.

I followed with the Thompson. The dead beyond Al’s light came apart in brief white flashes.

At the loading door, somebody pulled the bolt from the other side.

A familiar voice said, “This way, you dumb bastard.”

Lou.

“Out,” I said.

We went.

No speeches. No waiting for Thrak to arrive and explain the trap. Hobb dragged a crate across the doorway behind us. Liora set the little anchor plate Brannik had made inside my bag, preserving the route home without leaving it wide open.

The portal folded shut.

We reached the alley as gunfire started inside the warehouse.

Nobody followed far enough to see which direction we took.

For the first time in months, I stood in Chicago rain.

It smelled terrible.

I almost cried.

I knew which way the river lay without looking. Knew the corner where the streetcar squealed and the tobacconist who’d give me credit if I told him to put it on Vincent’s account.

I took a step toward Bellafonte’s before I remembered.

Mara caught my sleeve as a motorcar splashed past the mouth of the alley. She’d gone still, watching the lights move away. Beyond them, a streetcar bell clanged.

I put my arm around her.

“Takes some getting used to.”

“I had not expected it to be so loud.”

“Gets quieter.”

Lou looked back at me.

“When?”

“Work with me here.”

Mara laughed under her breath. Her hand found mine inside my coat.

I held it as we followed him.

* * *

The city had changed.

Not all of it. Streetcars still ran beyond the river blocks. Shops opened. Men argued about weather and money.

Walking corpses down by the river? Terrible. Now you buying the paper or standing on it?

But near the docks, people moved with their heads down.

Dead men stood at corners in good coats. Chalk marks identified shops that had paid. Doors stayed shut after sunset. At one crossing, a skeleton wore a policeman’s cap over a bullet hole in its forehead.

Hobb looked at it.

“Is that normal?”

“Not the cap.”

Lou led us toward a room above a closed tailor’s, hands in his pockets. Once we were out of sight of the warehouse, he looked back.

Then he stopped.

“Frankie?”

“Yeah, Lou.”

He came back and caught me by both shoulders, studying my face like somebody might be playing a trick on him.

“You look like hell.”

“Good to see you too.”

He laughed once. Didn’t seem to know what to do after that.

I pulled him close. He thumped my back hard enough to remind me about the shoulder.

Inside, Lou told me how Vincent had died. He’d stayed with him until it was over.

I sat on the bed while he talked. Mara stood beside me with a hand on my shoulder.

“Thrak thinks you’re still working for him?” I asked.

“I am working for him.”

He took out his cigarettes, then put them away again.

“Somebody’s gotta answer the telephone when Vincent’s wife calls.”

“How’d you know where we’d come through?”

“He’s had that warehouse watched since he sent the ring. Told me to keep the living men out of his way if you came.”

“Good instructions.”

“I thought so.”

He looked at Aldric.

“That light trick. You can do it again?”

“Yes.”

Lou nodded and pulled a scrap of paper toward him.

* * *

Mercer arrived an hour later.

Lou had been talking to him.

Usually I’d have had an opinion about that. With corpses directing traffic, Lou was entitled to make a few calls.

Mercer stopped in the doorway.

He looked at me, then at Hobb, Liora, and Aldric.

“You have been difficult to locate.”

“I left town.”

“Apparently.”

His eyes settled on the paladin’s sword.

“And you are?”

“Aldric Valehart.”

“Thomas Mercer.”

They shook hands and studied each other before turning their attention to me.

Oh, this was gonna be wonderful.

“He brought you?” Mercer asked.

“Eventually.”

“Was he cooperative?”

“Intermittently.”

“That sounds right.”

I looked at Mara.

“There are two of them now.”

She smiled at that.

Mercer took off his coat.

“Tell me what happened.”

He interrupted less than I expected while I told him about the other world.

Walking corpses apparently broadened a man’s willingness to listen.

* * *

We needed a safe place nearer the river.

I knew a printer named Kowalski who owned a cellar with two exits and disliked the Bellafonte organization enough to help damage it.

Oughta have told Mara why he hated us before she saw his hand.

Kowalski opened the door, saw me, and tried to close it.

I kept my hands at my sides.

“Please,” I said.

That stopped him more effectively than my foot would have.

His right thumb sat crooked against his palm.

Mara noticed. Kowalski caught her looking.

“He did that,” he told her.

The alley went quiet.

“I know,” I said.

Mara looked at me.

“Why?”

“Vincent wanted to know who was printing handbills for a rival crew. Kowalski wouldn’t say.”

“Because I didn’t know.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Kowalski watched my face.

He expected the excuse I’d given him the last time we discussed his hand.

“You told me criminals hurt criminals,” Mara said quietly.

“Sometimes I told myself that too.”

She didn’t look away.

I made myself stay where she could see me.

We got the cellar because Mercer asked, not because Kowalski forgave me.

I paid the rent through the agent and left enough extra to cover damage if the dead found us.

“For the cellar,” Mercer said when I handed him the money.

“Yeah.”

“Just the cellar.”

“I heard you.”

* * *

That night, Mara sat beside me on an upturned crate.

Above us, the printing press had stopped. Rain ticked against the cellar window.

“There’s more,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Than what happened to Kowalski. Things I did before I ever heard of your world.”

“You’ll tell Mercer?”

“Yeah.”

I worked a loose splinter off the edge of the crate.

“And you. If you still want to hear it.”

She took the splinter out of my fingers before I could put it through my thumb.

“Of course I do.”

“You didn’t know all of it when—”

“When I told you I loved you?”

I nodded.

“No.”

There it was.

She put her hand against my face and made me look at her.

“Frankie, I did not follow you through a hole in the world to give you up in a cellar.”

I closed my eyes. Her hand was warm.

“But you will tell me,” she said. “I want to know the man I love. Even the things he finds difficult to say.”

“I’ll tell you.”

She moved into my arms. I held her with the good one and rested my cheek against her hair.

Upstairs, the press started again. The crate was uncomfortable. My shoulder hurt like hell.

She was still there.

I held her until she lifted her face.

“You ought to sleep.”

“So should you.”

“I might, if you would stop trying to bear the entire building on your back.”

“It’s a small building.”

She laughed softly and kissed me.

I took off my coat and put it around her shoulders. She leaned against my arm while we waited for the others.

After a while, Mercer came down with a map of the river district.

Liora spread the binding tokens we’d taken from the warehouse beside it.

Lou returned with the night’s duty roster and a box of ammunition.

“Stole the roster,” he said. “Paid for the bullets. Didn’t want anybody asking questions in the wrong place.”

He marked the doors, the living guards, and the places where Thrak kept his binding tokens. He knew when the warehouse emptied and who would suddenly remember an appointment if Lou told him to.

Then he put twelve crosses in the bonded store across the yard.

“Living gunmen,” he said. “Alarm goes, they come through the back and close the alley.”

Right behind Mara and Liora. Twelve men who wouldn’t care whether we’d cut a piece of magic string.

“Can you keep ’em out?” I asked.

“I can send ’em to the south wharf. Tell ’em there’s another party coming off the river and Thrak wants it stopped.”

“They’ll hear this fight.”

“Sure. And they’ll hear me tell ’em the Boss has it handled.”

Mercer moved his pencil to the wharf. “We can meet them there.”

Lou shook his head. “Don’t show yourselves till they’re clear of the store. One fellow gets back to a telephone, Thrak starts asking questions.”

“And if he asks you?” I said.

Lou looked at the map. “Then I keep him talking till you get upstairs.”

I’d spent years telling him where to stand. Apparently he’d been looking around while he was there.

He lent Liora a small pistol. I unloaded it and showed her the safety, the sights, and where to keep her finger until she meant to fire. She practiced working it empty while we argued over routes.

“Close enough to strike with a chair,” I told her. “And don’t expect it to do your thinking.”

“An unusual tool in your profession, then.”

Lou laughed.

I took the compliment as intended.

Aldric blessed the fresh ammunition while Lou watched. I kept a few of the remaining rounds from Brannik’s box beside it. Both kinds caught the same faint light.

Lou picked one up.

“You couldn’t have brought him to the Blue Canary?”

“You oughta see the bill for the trip.”

He returned the cartridge to the table. When we settled the plan, he put on his hat.

“Gotta get back.”

Mara looked up.

“He’ll let you leave again?”

Lou’s mouth moved in something that wasn’t quite a smile.

“He thinks I learned my lesson.”

He opened the door before I could ask what lesson.

A federal agent, a paladin, an elf, a dwarf, and Lou. In a cellar I wouldn’t have been allowed into without the federal agent.

Vincent would’ve had something to say about that.

I pulled the map closer.