Page 4 of Sinner's End

Human. Mortal.

I never said anything, and he hasn’t asked. But it’s hard to hide that my blood isn’t the claret hue of the rest of his race. Not that he’ll oust me. There’s no reason for him to screw his cash cow into the ground before I’ve run my course in benefiting him.

Plus, he won’t find a payday greater than my drug.

I sigh. “You want to test it again, don’t you?”

“I won’t fuck with our distribution.” He shrugs, rolling heavyset shoulders and cracks his neck. “Or I can take double.” Alonzo taps the little timer and twists the dial.

A groan rips from my throat and I manage to conceal the wince that follows. Fuck me, being human is more of a pain in the ass than advertised. Maybe sunlight isn’t worth it after all.

But it is.

I nod slowly, collecting my thoughts as my mortality drains from my veins. I’ve never stopped to see how much it takes for this body to bleed out, but I can’t die. I was aware enough to add that clause into my bargain. I might be a flaccid meat bag for a short period, but I can’t cross over until my penance is due. Which means that no matter what happens to me, I am stuck living in this realm for the next sixty years.

It seemed so simple a deal but the look inhiseyes told me I should have been more cautious of signing away the only real life I would ever be likely to claim before I returned to my eternity of servitude. Freedom wasn’t real. Everything was a facade. Fake, fake, motherfucking fake.

“Fine. I suppose you have a subject in mind?”

Alonzo’s thin mouth covered in sparse, unmanicured hairs splits in a truly horrific grin, and that’s before he breathes. “I’ve got just the man. Actually, he reminds me of you.”

“There’s no one like me.” I inhale carefully as he backs up, fixing me with an unsettling stare.

“Well, not quite like you. More like what you’re not.” He laughs, the high-pitched sound unbecoming his endless girth in a duplicitous, psychotic sound that echoes around the cavernous room.

“I see.” I relax, but my heart, that traitorous organ I cannot control, thrashes wildly in my chest. Sweat gathers beneath my hairline and trickles along my spine in an itchy, unreachable path.

Who said being human was a joy? Lying fuckers.

Alonzo has guessed at more than I expected. I will have to be more careful. If he realizes he can overpower me, turn me into a pump for the forgetfulness drug, I’ll be more of a prisoner than I already am. That deal really sucks from this point of view. Then his words register.

“What do you mean, like me?”

Alonzo backs off, slipping a dirty knife from his belt and trailing it along the stone walls that remind me forcibly of home. “He’s like you, just … bats for the other team.”

The door to the old asylum’s shock room closes with me its only inhabitant, locked to a chair the twisted mind of a human designed for the devious pleasure of watching others suffer.

Beside me the little timer ticks the seconds of my mortality away and I count the pints of my sins collected in tiny vials.

****

My arm throbs beneath the little plaster decorated withtiny pink daisies. Alonzo swears it’s the only box he could find, and I plan some extra playtime for him in the afterlife. Not that he gives a shit, the man can’t think further than his next payday, and his expenses eat through his stipend well before the next rolls around.

I stride through the double doors toward my office, the only plushly appointed room in this godforsaken place where the sun rarely shines.

That’s the other part of my bargain. To live in a place not of my choosing. While I imagined a sandy paradise for my travels, what I earned myself was nine decades in a mostly sunless city. Portland, Oregon, was where I landed. It looked all right, hell, I can even see the water from the top of the abandoned building beneath the almost constant cloud cover.

I just can’t get to it.

My limits end at the edge of the asylum’s grounds and spread as far as that cloud cover allows on the other side of the city, terminating at a house that borders an old graveyard, its turrets overlooking the hallowed ground.

Sinner’s End.

It’s not even abandoned. A pair of not-so-innocent sisters lives there, and my drug has started to worm its way into their social lives. Ekeing away at their fears and replacing their petty concerns of social canceling into a recklessness that drives them directly into my path. One girl is just like the rest of her tribe—vapid, thoughtless, concerned only with herself. The other is … different. Not that I care for a child barely out of her swaddling rags, even when her moans roll through the quiet grounds while her dead rest in their earthen graves.

My father’s sense of humor carries into the overworld, and I don’t care for it a fucking inch.

And so, I turn my attention to the parts of my life I can control.I’m becoming more like them every day.Too damnmuch. Soon I’ll be chasing skirt and breeding a blonde human woman, for fuck’s sake.

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