Alone now Isaac began to rethink his options. “Well Ms. F., that was the last of them. How about I just roll the jar out to you and call it a day?” He had no intention of giving it up but wanted to keep the killer talking and possibly distracted.

“Sorry my dear boy,” Ms. Feckle said, ever so politely. “But the terms were presented at the onset of this encounter. If my lord had wanted to negotiate, he would have sent a diplomat.”

“Not an assassin.”

“Correct.”

Isaac sighed, looked at the fly. It had stopped chewing and now seemed to be almost smiling. He shook the jar, enough to bounce the smug insect off the sides a few times to teach it a lesson.

Satisfied with the bug punishment, he leaned around the counter and telekinetically pushed the apartment door shut, but without a knob, it only bumped and then slowly started to swing back open. He needed something to secure it.

Glenn’s body lay just a few feet away. It would be hard to move such dead weight, but at least it was dead. Telekinetic magic was hard to use on living things, as life forces were naturally resistant. With Glenn’s soul dearly departed, it was now just a matter of heft.

Isaac concentrated, moved a bit at a time. Flopped one arm, then one leg, pushed him like a rolled-up carpet to the door, and jammed him against it. The thump alerted the killer because she immediately pushed on it, in vain, as it was jammed by now-useful dead Glenn.

A shadow fell across the gunshot hole as Ms. Feckle peered in. “You’re only delaying the inevitable.”

Isaac dug through the kitchen, snatched out every sharp piece of cutlery he could find, and tossed them onto the counter. The door shuddered as the killer put either a shoulder or boot into it, nudging Glenn’s body across the floor. Isaac adjusted each knife, blade tip aimed. Ms. Feckle was strong, amazingly so, alarmingly so, and she pushed again, moving one hundred fifty plus pounds of dead Glenn aside. The killer stepped into the room.

The only exposed skin on Ms. Feckle was her face. A black long coat, black boots, black gloves, topped off with a black pillbox hat, concealed the rest. Unusual attire for sure and it only made her alabaster skin seem that much brighter. The woman’s skin wasn’t just pale or even albino. It reminded Isaac of the statue of David. Black sunglasses obscured her eyes, which Isaac just guessed were brazenly inhuman. The ridiculously oversized handgun she carried shined silver with speckles of fiery red that sparkled like burning cinders.

“I don’t suppose you’ll do the polite thing and identify yourself?” Ms. Feckle asked.

Isaac responded by flicking his fingers, like one would do with wet hands and no towel, over the laid-out cutlery. Each flew off the counter, rocketing missile-like across the room.

Feckle moved with speed. She sidestepped a couple and swatted another aside with the barrel of her cannon. But she couldn’t avoid them all as several tore through her jacket and found skin.

No. Not skin. The knives bounced off her with a metal on stone clank. All her dodging about did have one aggravating effect, however. Ms. Feckle’s pillbox hat had fallen from her head and ungraciously rolled in several wobbly circles. Her head was as white as her face and completely hairless. Not just lost-her-hair bald but mannequin-head bald.

Ms. Feckle stared at her hat. It was hard to read her expressions, but Isaac assumed this one hovered between anger and disbelief. “My offer of a relatively painless execution is hereby rescinded.”

Maybe the statement was meant to be threatening, to make Isaac panic. Instead, when the killer bent to retrieve her headwear, Isaac telekinetically smacked it and sent it spinning away from her reaching hand.

This really seemed to frost Ms. Feckle and she stood up, ramrod straight, hand cannon ready. But Isaac had already aimed his own. He fired his pistol—his comparatively tiny, tiny pistol—and scored a hit dead center in her forehead. The strike snapped her head back, sent her stumbling, but more like she’d been punched, not just had her brains blown out. Her sunglasses fell, landed next to the hat and she raised a gloved hand to the wound.

Her forehead looked like a damaged windshield, with a series of small cracks spreading web-like from the impact point. And now, with her glasses removed, Ms. Feckle glared at him with bloodshot, irritated eyes. They moved bizarrely, rotating in their sockets without the muscles of her face chipping in, as if in a mask, constantly irritated because there were no lids to soothe them.

Isaac swore. Ms. Feckle was an automaton—an artificial construct brought to life via nefariously awesome sorcery. He wasn’t really sure of the specifics. There were lots of different ways to create such beings—craft a stone body with a smattering of human organs and imprison some kind of soul or spirit within it was his assumption. High-level shit to be sure and certainly not to be trifled with.

He hopped over the counter and ducked into a bedroom. He slammed the door and crossed to a window that looked out onto a fire escape. Ten floors up. The automaton could move much faster than him, so trying to escape via ten levels of stairs wasn’t going to work. Instead, he took the ladder up, swung one leg over the ledge onto the roof just as Ms. Feckle kicked the bedroom door off its hinges.

“Courier? Where are you?” she called out in her annoying, even-steven voice.

Isaac clambered onto the roof, ran left, then straight, then right, then stopped. Nearby roofs were all either too far to jump or were just wide-open surfaces that would make it easy for Ms. Feckle to pick him off. He had dead-ended himself.

“You should have gone down, courier,” the automaton called from the fire escape. “Now you have farther to fall when I throw you.”

The black pillbox popped into view, then the pale face, as Ms. Feckle ascended the ladder. One hand came over, then the second. At this range, he’d probably be turned into a red mist by the enchanted hand cannon. No time to do anything but something brash. He had to end this quick and nothing was faster than falling.

Tucking the fly jar under one arm, he reached into his Everbag and produced a plastic baggie of maple tree seeds, the V-shaped whirligigs popular with children. On each seed, very delicately, he’d inked magical symbols, so faint one could barely see them.

Ms. Feckle had topped the ladder, steadied herself with one hand, and brought the gun to bear with the other. Isaac charged, tearing open the baggie, carefully grabbing each seed, as all were instrumental in the upcoming spell. He leaped, threw his body into the assassin, knocked her loose from the ladder, and sent them both into free-fall off the roof. As soon as he cleared the ledge Isaac chucked the seeds into the air, save one, which he clenched in a fist.

Surrounded by helicoptering seeds, he began a whirling descent, while the alabaster woman dropped like a rock. It was a spell Isaac had hoped to never attempt, as it allowed only for complete success or being flattened on the pavement. He wasn’t exactly floating like a feather and he spun faster than he’d imagined. Fast enough to completely disorient him, sending his world into a dizzying blur until a rough landing in the alley below proved hard enough to stun him.

When he regained his senses, the alabaster woman already stood over him. Ms. Feckle had fared worse. Her precious hat and glasses were gone, and her head was literally covered in cracks. Isaac met the horrible, bloodshot eyes. No, Ms. Feckle was looking elsewhere, to the magician’s left. When he followed the gaze, he saw the shattered jar.

“Nothing for me to return. Flown off or smashed like any insect.” Ms. Feckle sounded almost disappointed. “I suppose both our masters will be angry.”

Isaac said nothing, only nodded, lips tight.

“Still not going to introduce yourself?”

Isaac shook his head.

Sirens could be heard now, distant but closing.

Ms. Feckle holstered her weapon. “Lord Belial may have different plans now, maybe involving you. Who knows how these devils scheme and plot eh?” She said it like she and Isaac were work chums, bitching about their bosses at the water cooler.

Isaac’s shoulders slumped at the mention of the powerful being, but he kept his mouth shut.

“Maybe if we meet again, you’ll work on your manners and be more polite.” The killer turned away, moving slowly down the alley, limping on a twisted leg. A black limousine awaited her on the intersecting street. A man in a dark suit stood by its rear door. Ms. Feckle clambered clumsily into the vehicle, saying something to the man, who ran down the alley towards Isaac. The magician tensed, ready to defend himself, but the servant instead retrieved the hat and sunglasses.

“Oh shit,” the man said, holding the glasses by an arm to reveal cracked lenses. “Now I’ll be shopping forever to find Feckle a new pair. She’s so picky. Thanks, asshole,” he said to Isaac and hurried back to the car.

Isaac stood and waited for the limo to pull away, tapping a foot impatiently like a fellow in line to take a very desperate piss. When it did, he immediately opened his mouth, reached in with two fingers, and pried the fly off his tongue. He’d scooped it up from the shattered jar, amazed that it wasn’t smushed, and hid it in the best and easiest place available. It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the evil little thing had chomped into his tongue and ground its nubby little teeth back and forth the whole time Ms. Feckle had been talking to him. He had barely kept a straight face. He found a cup with a lid in a nearby dumpster and dropped the fly in.

***

By the time he made it back to the hotel, he was running a fever and doubled over with cramps. The dresser was soon filled with empty water bottles from rinsing his aching tongue and he desperately wanted to collapse into sleep. But he forced himself to stay awake. The moment the fly had bitten him he had known there would be consequences and being asleep was not the way to face them.

In the corners of the room, in the open closet, and under the bed, he could now hear the shadows move. It was a disconcerting sound, like a susurrus of eels sliding across each other. After several hours he could see their movement in his peripheral vision, like undulating masses of tentacles. The fever intensified and hot and cold flashes tore through him. He was breathing through his nose, his tongue too swollen to open his mouth. More than once he started to pass out, to fall back into the comforter, succumb to the fatigue of whatever infection coursed through him. But he knew that could be the end of him. Shadows didn’t like to be known. He couldn’t sleep until he’d outlasted them.

The hours tick-tocked by as he sat in the middle of the bed, legs crossed. And just before dawn, the shadows relented, brought to heel, and at his first simple command, they snaked out and crushed the empty water bottles, one by one. Isaac smiled, telekinetically whipped open the blinds, and dropped into sleep bathed in sunlight.