Page 19 of Hellbound

She gave up around nine to face the day. As she padded half-naked through her studio in search of clothes that didn’t stink, darkness gathered in the corner of her eye. Equally curious and reticent, Marian turned to inventory the dark shadows that joined her earthside today.

Her shifty companions simmered at the end of the hall, under her unmade bed, and in the empty nooks of her cramped kitchen. They’d appeared shortly after her expulsion from the Remnant, but unlike the nightmares that followed out of Hell that night and into the day like hands around her throat, the small shadows mostly kept their distance. Sometimes they moved and inevitably wound up convening in some distant corner, taking the shape of a small creature Marian might have called mammalian had it possessed any consistent features. Often, they did nothing at all and diminished as the day stretched on, so Marian resigned to ignore them. She brushed her teeth over the bathroom sink while the black blobs skittered across the medicine cabinet mirror like spiders. They’d become a frequent enough sight that they no longer triggered her flight instinct.

Whatever. She needed to cash her check.

The weather hadn’t quite decided what it wanted to be when she set off for the bank. Ominous gray clouds hovered on the horizon while an easterly wind made the palm trees sway dramatically in the parking lot. The threat of more rain hung in the air, and Marian was too hungry to care that she’d left her apartment without a jacket.

She stumbled through the transaction with the bank teller and walked away with the cash she needed to stave off eviction for a few more months. Marian pocketed a couple of twenties for groceries on her way back. She shoved the larger bills in an envelope and stuffed it into her landlord’s lock box. It felt messy and less-than-legal—much like her cocktail napkin rental agreement—but the laird of the three meth labs stacked on top of each other that Marian called “home” could be very forgiving when she paid in cash. It was a miracle the giant Albanian man hadn’t kicked her out months ago for all the back rent she so often owed.

She contemplated spending the rest of the day nursing her post-death hangover in bed when her stomach growled painfully.

Right, she groaned, thinking of her empty cabinets. Food.

She escaped the market with a single bag of groceries and a few dollars to her name. The bag was woefully light despite how much it cost her. The correct thing to do was march straight home and eat the packet ramen she’d bought, but the way back took her past a fast-food joint, and she’d earned a cheap burger after doing something so responsible as grocery shopping.

The sun had just mustered the strength to peek through the clouds when Marian walked out of a Burger King with her lunch. The gray overhead parted to reveal a pocket of brilliant cerulean sky. She fixated on the blue as she tried to forget for a moment how much she loathed this concrete city. Weariness tugged at her limbs, so she parked herself at one of the painted tables beside the play place to eat.

She perched at the edge of a bench, her groceries flush beside her as she licked ketchup off her fingers and watched the cars fly through the intersection. She was about to start on the burger when a familiar voice turned the fries in her belly to lead.

“Marian? Jesus, you look like dog shit.”

The voice shredded Marian’s calm like tissue paper. She craned her head around to find a Nordic man in his late forties with a mop of tousled blond hair and watery blue eyes glaring at her. Off-brand street wear and a comically long gold chain hung from his lanky frame as he stalked toward her.

“Not now, Greg.”

But Greg Bjernsen marched right up to her to block her view of the sky with his spindly body. A very naive, very lonely Marian once found him attractive instead of grotesque. Now all she could think about was how he looked like a scarecrow cosplaying Eminem.

Like most of her mistakes, she found Greg on the internet via a message board for people who claimed to have entered Hell. The first time Marian met Greg in person, he regaled her with the tale of his first death totally unprompted. He’d died after a botched attempt at autoerotic asphyxiation left him clinically dead for four and a half minutes. He’d have stayed dead if the escort he’d hired to watch him hadn’t been trained in first aid. He told the story to Marian with glee in his eyes, and Marian wasn’t sure why.

That should have been her first clue that Greg was as much a liability as he was a resource. The escort thing was fine; Marian hoped the woman was living her best life. No, it was how Greg delighted in telling Marian, a stranger, about his sex life.

He stuck his face in hers as if the concept of personal space didn’t exist.

“Now’s good for me. You line up some work yet?”

That’s when the stench hit her. A mix of weed, refuse, and something acidic. Marian scrambled off her bench.

“Sort of.” She touched her hand to her nose as she backed away. “You smell awful, dude. What’s wrong with you?”

Greg followed, his long strides eating up the space she’d claimed for herself. Bile bubbled up the back of her throat.

“I’m doing a cleanse.”

“Is it a shit and piss cleanse?” She shoved the burger back into the paper bag, her appetite gone as nerves and that awful stench turned her stomach into a war zone. Marian shot a sideways glance at the parking lot. She didn’t want to do this here.

“I saw you at the Presidium.” Greg said with a sneer. “You made a deal with Vale, didn’t you?”

“Wait,” Marian balked as she cycled through guilt, confusion, then anger. “You followed me?”

Greg waved her question away.

“Calm your tits, I was just looking out for you. You’ve been MIA for weeks, and I happened to be in the area. You should be fuckin’ thanking me, honestly. So, what’d that cocksucker have to say? What’s the gig?”

Mr. Vale didn’t make deals with Greg anymore. He hadn’t for years, and neither Mr. Vale nor Greg would say much about why. But hearing Greg call Vale a “cocksucker” made her want to slap the ever-living shit out of him.

Greg had spotted for her once. There’d been no hawkish supervision afterward, no complimentary hot drink or chauffeur waiting to take her home. Elio hadn’t provided those things either, but Elio never laughed at her when she hobbled away, shivering and muttering after a dive. Unlike Greg.

Marian fumed quietly as she considered her next move. She’d be lying if she said she hadn’t thought to tap Greg to help her find this key. But Greg admitting to following her raised a new red flag that squashed any notion Marian had of trusting him with this.