Page 33 of Shaman

Fox leaned down as they swooped in, catching a shouting, disoriented Daniel under the arms with both hands. “You,” he barked at Alec, and as agreed, Alec caught the man’s flailing hands and secured them with a zip-tie. Then he and Fox dragged him deeper into the apartment.

Ian shut and locked the door behind them.

Ghost flipped the latches on his Kobalt case to reveal a matte black Smith & Wesson, and the suppressor he’d already screwed onto the end of it. Weapon raised, he led their party down the hall and into the gorgeous cream-on-cream living room of the apartment, where Rebecca stood caught, phone in her hand, silent scream distorting her face.

“Drop the phone,” Ghost told her, gun pointed at her head.

Her hand went limp and the iPhone hit the carpet. She looked terrified, eyes wide with panic, pulse fluttering in her throat. She was petrified.

Ian had been petrified, once. When he was twelve, and traveling to America in a shipping container, suffocating and swamped with the stink of the other unwashed boys around him, choking on the smell of shit, and piss, and fear sweat.

He’d been petrified the first time he realized that people like Rebecca and Daniel Breckinridge would pay to fuck him.

Petrified when he’d watched a tiny, bone-thin boy named Kev get dragged down a hallway in a club, used by a fat, sick man who didn’t care that he cried, and bled, and was only a baby.

And just like that, he wasn’t petrified now. No. His hands stilled, and his nerves settled.

He reached up and whisked his hat off, let her see his face, rewarded by the little gasp that escaped her lips when she saw that it was him.

“Tie them up,” he said, crisply, and he wasn’t Ian Byron anymore: artist, dancer, scared, stolen boy. He was Shaman. And he’d come to collect on the debts owed him.

~*~

A calmness had settled over him, and now he had total control over his emotions. Aloof, composed, haughty. All the things that made his clients squirm.

The Breckinridges might have squirmed if they’d been able. They were tied hand and foot to a pair of kitchen chairs that Ghost had dragged into the living room. They weren’t gagged; Fox and Ghost both held guns on them, and shouting would have been a waste. The TV played news footage of their exposed scandal: blurry cellphone videos, anonymous statements, financial records, interviews with old friends and neighbors who claimed they’d always known something wasn’t quite right with the couple. Their families were hiding from the press, and the whole thing was spinning wilder and wilder out of control, the way these sorts of things always did.

“Now,” Ian said, clenching his gloved hands together loosely behind his back as he paced back and forth in front of the two of them. “It would appear I have you at a disadvantage.” He gestured to the TV. “I think I’ve beaten you at your own game, yes?” He turned to face them.

They didn’t respond – of course they didn’t. Daniel’s eyes leaked constantly, raw and red from the pepper spray; his lips trembled as he breathed through his mouth, sniffing occasionally because the spray had burned his sinuses, too.

Rebecca’s tears were the type born of fear; they’d carved stark tracks down her face, through her makeup, long streaks of mascara dripping off the edge of her chin and jaw.

Ian sat down on the sofa across from them, appreciating the firmness of the cushions, the softness of the fabric. It didn’t look or feel as if anyone sat on it regularly. Behind the couple, the sky loomed slate gray, pregnant with snow, a few fat flakes drifting past in fits and starts.

“Do you know what a shaman is?” Ian asked them, tone one of conversational boredom. “Did you know that was my stage name at the Nest? Yes, of course you did. You paid to have me.” He smiled with all his teeth.

Rebecca snuffled and hiccupped.

Daniel twitched, hands testing his bonds, but slumped back into submission when Fox gestured at him with his gun.

“A shaman,” Ian continued, “is an intermediary between the world of the living, and the spiritual realm. A go-between. Someone who can communicate with spirits – the good, and the evil. I guess you could say that a shaman is a magician, of sorts.” He smiled again, and knew it looked terrible. “Certainly lots of men found another plane, or saw the face of God, when they were coming down my throat.”

Someone – Alec, he thought – hissed a tiny, distressed sound.

Daniel grunted a protest.

“Oh, does that offend your sensibilities? I suppose the people who buy a few hours of a boy’s time for their own pleasure don’t like to be so uncouth as to actually discuss it.”

“Ian,” Ghost said, quietly, voice careful.

“It’s fine. I just want them to know, first. When people do the things they do, they need to understand why it’s wrong.”

A feather-light touch landed on his shoulder. Alec. A slow press, like he knew that anything sudden would set Ian off. “Babe.” Not a plea, but an encouragement.You can do this.

Ian took a deep breath he hadn’t known he needed. “A shaman,” he continued, “is a powerful person. It wasn’t fitting back then, when you knew me. Not then. But now.Now. I’m the powerful one here.” He gestured between them, their dynamic, this current situation. “Powerful people can hurt you. So it pays not tofuck them over. Literally. Or figuratively.”

The two of them looked at the floor, at the table, at Ian’s knees, even his face in darted snatches, but never at each other. There was no love there, no seeking of comfort.

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