Chapter Two
“I gotta get going,” Jack says, finally stopping trying to keep up with me even at half speed. “You done for the day after this?”
I nod. “Yeah. Once I’m done running.”
“You work out harder than anyone I know,” he says. “Are you going to keep that pace up for a full hour?”
I just nod. There’s sweat dripping all down my body, and I know I’ll have to clean off the machine when I’m done. But I don’t think I’m going to do any more actual working out after this. After this, it’s a quick shower and then home for an early night.
Stewart wants me to come in tomorrow morning. I hate mornings. They are where good times go to die. Left to my own devices, I usually wake up around eleven or twelve; plenty of time for me to get to work. Tattoo parlors aren’t open in the mornings. My shift goes usually from one until eight or nine—realistically, from one until I am finished for the day. Some days I have clients booked solidly until almost midnight, other days I am out of there in time to catch the dinner rush. Of course, that means less money, which is bad. And which brings me right back to seeing Stewart.
The Office doesn’t pay all that well, but they do pay. They do make it possible to make ends meet, and make it so I don’t have to cast spells to make my landlord forget that I live in my apartment for a month or so until I can catch up on the rent.
If I really wanted to, I could probably live there forever without paying, but that’s a little bit immoral. Also, I bet he’d eventually try to rent the place out again, and then I’d be evicted for sure. Not something I want to test out. Rent is like taxes; just fucking pay it.
There’s something distinctly ironic about lighting up a cigarette as soon as you step outside of a gym. A friend of mine once pointed out, though, that exercise is basically putting stress on your muscles, harming them so that they will rebuild stronger. And a cigarette is basically putting stress on your lungs, harming them—so maybe they will rebuild stronger. It’s a great false analogy, and is why he always called smoking his cardiovascular workout for the day.
Smoking isn’t my cardio. But then, I’m not going to get poisoned by all the carcinogens in cigarettes either. That all gets absorbed and neutralized by my alchemist tattoo, the same one that saved my life a few weeks ago when some dickwad necromancer tried to poison me—and with coffee of all things. The nerve. I didn’t feel bad at all when I broke his nose. And I didn’t feel bad when I heard he’d been sentenced to a Binding.
A Binding is just what it sounds like. The same way they bound up my fire, the Office decided to bind up his magic. But his entire magic. Mine wasn’t a punishment; it was for protection, both mine and other people’s. So mine was done with a tattoo. His will be done, or has been done, with a brand.
Branding magic isn’t all that different from tattoo magic. Both involve symbols and sigils in their spellwork, both are incredibly painful, and both are pretty much permanent. The difference, really, is that tattoos are only skin deep. They bind the magic within a person, continuously having some effect or another. A brand is as much on the spirit as it is on the skin, and might as well be bone deep. I doubt they actually branded him down to the bone, as the infection would probably kill him, but I don’t know; that’s not my department.
My tattoo stopped my fire from manifesting every time I got excited, scared, or angry. His brand is going to stop him from using magic of any kind ever again. He’s going to spend the rest of his life knowing that magic is out there, knowing what can be done with it, and being completely unable to do it himself.
Also, I think there’s a prison sentence in there somewhere. Even if he didn’t kill anyone himself—and I can’t be sure he didn’t—he did try to kill me three times, in pretty rapid succession. So attempted murder and assault at least, that should keep him behind bars for a few years. Ah, justice.
I don’t know the details. I didn’t have to know, and I didn’t care to. My handler, Stewart, took care of all the details. He’s good like that. He reduces the work I do for the Office to simple jobs that I can do, as much bounties as actual cases, and he takes care of most of the paperwork for them. Not everyone is as lucky as I am. But then, others get paid as if it’s a full time job, whereas I am just a consultant, more or less.
It didn’t used to be like that. There was a time when I worked for the Office full time. I was little more than a hunter then; it was basically my job to kill rogue supernatural creatures. If you were drawing too much attention, being too careless, or just generally getting out of hand, the Office would send me. I wasn’t there to negotiate, I wasn’t there to set you straight, and I wasn’t there to chitchat. If the Office sent me out, someone was going to die.
But that kind of work really wears on you. Never mind that it gave me the kind of reputation that left most people unwilling to be in the same room as me; just the fact of being a hired gun really weighed on my conscience. I told myself it was okay, that I was just killing things that were otherwise going to kill people, but it didn’t change the fact that I was a killer.
What’s that saying? If you kill a killer, the number of killers in the world remains the same. So yeah, kill a lot of killers, and the net number of killers goes down. But you still become a killer. And be they vampire, banshee, goblin, or ghoul, they’re still people, deep down. They still have families, they still beg for their lives, and they still scream when you kill them. And those screams started following me around until I just couldn’t do it anymore.
Stewart actually thought that was a good thing. He told me that being bothered by killing, that needing to move out of that department and into something else, was a sign that I was a good person, that I had a more evolved outlook on the world. Real killers, the kinds that have no remorse and are just as much a problem as the things they take out, those killers stay on the job for years or even decades. I made it about ten months. Granted, I had twenty-three confirmed kills in those ten months, but I never got used to it. I never liked it.
I like what I do now much better. I still have to kill sometimes, but it’s not often. Now, I’m more an investigator type. Now, my showing up is a good thing. I’m your second chance, your warning shot. I’m usually there to help you stop being a bad guy and start flying under the radar, so that someone like the old me never gets wind of your existence.
I have a badge, sort of. I didn’t need one before; just being sanctioned was enough, and it didn’t take long before all the authority types—the real ones, not the mortal ones—knew who I was. Now, though, I have to carry a badge.
But we keep ourselves secret from the regular human world, such as it is, so I can’t just carry an actual badge. I don’t have any real police authority. Can’t commandeer a car, can’t hold someone on suspicion, any of that stuff. I also don’t get free donuts, but that’s probably for the best, even with my metabolism.
So my badge is a blank card. It’s not really blank. Anyone supernatural will see the card and know what it means.
If I am fully sanctioned with the card, then all bets are off. Anything I do in pursuit of justice is given a carte blanche. In fact, that’s the whole point of the badge. A blank card. Carte Blanche. Get it?
It’s power that I could pretty easily abuse, but it comes at a price. If I’m not sanctioned, I’m just as responsible as anyone else. I can protect myself, but not much more than that. If the Office doesn’t have my back, then I have no more protection than your average citizen. They don’t go after people who kill people in my position the way the mortals go after cop killers. The only time I have that protection is when I’m actually on a sanctioned case.
It’s a give and take situation. And it’s a bluff that works more often than not. And it’s way better than being a killer for hire.
Like I said, been there, done that. Threw away the t-shirt.
I get into my car and decide to just head home for the night.
I start my car, and there’s this weird ticking. I notice it about half a second before the car blows up. My thought process is still trying to figure out what the ticking is when fire engulfs the whole car, and it is lifted off the pavement several feet before smashing back down, a burned-out husk that used to be my primary means of transportation.
© 2026 Joe Weinberg
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