Page 44 of King Among the Dead

“By the time I was a teenager, times had settled into the current pattern. Life was difficult, but hadn’t it always been. Only it rained all the time, everywhere, and the land withered. There are reasonable scientific explanations for this on the nightly news,” he said with a dismissive wave. “Don’t think it was the wrath of the heavens. Never think that the Atmospheric Rift was a ripping in the fabric of the world, and that forces we aren’t ready to face had come down to join us.” His tone was mocking, bitter.

She shut the book. “But conduits are real, and there’s a new one. At least one. You saw it.”

That earned her a small, deeply pleased smile. “Exactly.”

~*~

“You must understand: anytime there’s a catastrophe of any kind, holes open up in the power structure of a place, and there are always actors ready and able to step in and fill those holes. When the government was at its weakest, during and right after the Rift, the gangs and crime families of every major metropolis took over,” he said the next afternoon, today’s textA History of Organized Crime in the United States. “Those organizations took control, and they never gave it back, despite what the politicians would have you believe. And those organizations are very, very good at using terror and tragedy to line their pockets.”

“How did you get involved with Tony Castor?”

“Oh, well.” He rubbed the back of his neck, and then flopped down in his chair, legs stretched out to the side, miles long in old, tan corduroy. “That’s a long story.” When she only stared at him, he took a breath and said, “Fine.”

He laced his fingers together over his knee, rested his temple against the high back of the chair, and told her a story.

A story of a spoiled, wealthy boy at what remained of an all-boys school upstate post-Rift, rain lashing high, Gothic windows, professors tense, rumors always swirling and changing. Post-Rift was a time of hushed conversations in dark corners, furtive looks, and worry, always worry. A darkness lay over the world that had nothing to do with the charcoal cloud cover, and which infected all of them. Happiness – what was that?

At Beck’s school, when he was fifteen and stupid, happiness had come in pill form, small, and white, and oblong. They called it heavensent, and half a pill could leave you lying dreamily in the back stacks of the library for a few hours, fascinated by the slow movements of your own hands. A whole pill sent you flying through fields of color and sunlight, and you inevitably returned to yourself in a completely different room from which you’d started, sprawled sometimes across a stranger’s couch, being slapped and hissed out and called a junkie and told to get the fuck out.

“My parents found out I was using,” he said, “so they cut me off financially. They paid for tuition, and meals, and that was it. But I was addicted, so I found ways to get more of it. That was how I became indebted to the Dellucci family.”

Not as big or as powerful as the Castors, but big and powerful enough. Enough to ruin the life of a teenage boy hooked on their pills.

“They detoxed me,” he said, a wry twist to his lips. “That was – disgusting. When I could keep my food down, and walk a straight line, they set me up with a challenge – one that I met, and then some. In five years, I became their top enforcer. No more school, no more family. I was disowned.”

“Enforcer?”

He lifted a hand and made an eloquent gesture, one that left her imagining a knife handle spinning between his fingers, the blade winking. “The worst part, I suppose,” he mused, “is that I was never ashamed of the killing. I rather liked it.” He said it as casually as someone might reveal a favorite ice cream flavor. Shrugged. “It was a life. The Delluccis fenced heavensent for the Castors, and I cut throats for them. I had what I needed to live comfortably. The world was a shithole. What else was there?”

His gaze cut toward her, sudden and bright. “And then I was ordered to escort a group of our dealers when they went to Castor to restock.”

He described a night black with low clouds, rain pounding on the roofs of black imports, and the black nylon of umbrellas. An old warehouse belching steam and smoke; a slot in the doorway where eyes peeped through at them, and demanded a password. A factory setup: women and children bagging and bottling pills with monotonous focus, sweat sliding down their temples; the building was hot, monstrously so, and shirtless mean streaked with filth fed coals into a furnace – atop which perched a small, barefoot child with tangled hair, and burning white-blue eyes.

“Do you know how they make heavensent?” he asked, tone deceptively mild. “It’s opium, synthetic binders – and conduit blood.”

She felt her mouth fall open, and closed it, swallowed. She’d heard of heavensent. It was still in circulation; it had been offered to her, once, a boy extending a grubby palm, three long, white oblong pills cupped like something precious. She hadn’t been tempted: to be out of her own head and unconscious was to invite Tabitha’s violence.

“But…the Rift was still closed,” Rose said. Her mouth felt dry. “The conduits were gone.”

“Most of them. The Rift was closed, yes, and there sat a conduit, pricking his finger and dripping blood down into a vat. Tony Castor was using a conduit to control the vices of this city, and telling the conduit all of it was a means to a divine end: ridding the world of the unworthy.”

“Holy…shit.”

“Exactly. I asked Dellucci about it later. If he’d known, if he cared. He feigned ignorance.

“I wanted to kill it. I wascurious. Could an angel be exorcised? What happened if you killed the conduit? Would the angel heal it? Would the angel be forced out? I had so many questions. Mostly I wanted to know if its presence would draw other conduits. What would happen if another Rift opened, and the slaughter began again? I think that’s what Castorwanted, and why not? The smaller the population, the greater his power over what remained.”

He shook his head, rueful. And then grew serious, his expression etched with pain. “And then Simon reached out to me.”

He’d lost so much weight that Beck hadn’t recognized his own brother. Stomach cancer, stage four. The doctors said he might last another month, maybe two. He’d stood wavering on his feet in Beck’s small, bleak living room, wrapped up in multiple scarves and their father’s old wool coat, buttoned to the throat.I can’t bear the pain anymore, brother, he’d said, tears glimmering in his eyes.It hurts so much, and I just want it to stop.

Beck had driven him home when it became apparent that Simon didn’t have the strength to drive himself. Had been shocked, struck dumb, by the knowledge that their parents were both gone. Uncertainty and stress had given their father an early stroke, Simon had explained, as they made their way laboriously up the stairs, and then their mother, unable to bear the grief, had swallowed a bottle of morphine with a glass of wine, and ended it. Simon had found her in the tub, limp and pale, foam on her lips. He’d turned in time to make it to the toilet before he’d vomited – and then vomited for days, until a trip to the doctor had revealed his condition, already beyond treatment.

“I left him with enough marijuana to get him through the next two days, and promised to get him more. He wanted the heavensent – he was begging me, pleading and sobbing. I didn’t realize he’d already been taking it – that he’d gotten hooked. If I’d known…” He trailed off, staring blankly at the far shelf. “When I didn’t give it to him, he went to buy from Castor. He made the mistake of telling Castor about his condition.” His jaw clenched, and he didn’t speak for a long time.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said, gently.

He jerked a nod. “That – that’s good. Good.” Another nod. An exhale. “That was how I met Kay. When I found out about Simon – when I went for Castor – his general was there, his top one. And the general’s wife.”

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