Markfeet

She couldn’t care less about crime but by god does she hate the deaths. The city breeds people faster than it breaks them, but only just.

Markfeet

She cracks wise: “Not much sympathy there, I suppose.”

Forensics either doesn’t get it, or, more likely, doesn’t think it’s funny. “Not that I can tell, no. That’s not terribly surprising. Lots of ways to erase that sort of thing, now that every third gashlycrumb is full of our methods. Melt it down and make it into something else, like a bowl, maybe. Or soak it in vinegar, bury it below the tideline.” He shrugs. “Never more than middling useful, anyway.”

She turns her back on the blood, shuts out the conversation from the stewards going through the correspondence. It’s a beautiful day, which seems to be a trend lately. No one ever dies under low’ring skies; should make the trainees memorize that, give their empty heads something to hold on to. Some magicians go wheeling past on their bicycles, hardly sparing a glance for the crowd pressed against the window. Well, they wouldn’t, would they? Just more grist for their labs, sooner or later.

Who did you love, she asks the silent corpse, and wishes for the thousandth time that necromancy weren’t so damn unreliable.

Merrily We Roll Along

Sitting in the bar afterwards, they fall to arguing about process.

“Me, I don’t go in for all that bullshit, all that herbs and blood and words bullshit. I just lay into ’em. I don’t need anything except for the evil eye, this fuckin’ eye, man, just this bloodshot fuckin’ eye and a clear day and that’s it. All the rest of it? All that fuckin’ bullshit that you do? That’s all bullshit, that’s just you messin’ with yourself.”

“Ah, what the fuck do you know? What can you do? Stall a car engine, cause a coronary, jam an atm? That’s amateur hour horseshit. Horseshit. You got no scope, like, there are rules to this shit, man, and they’re not just there to jerk you around. People have thought about this shit, man, there are reasons stuff works or it doesn’t. You’re, like, it’s like you’re trying to play the guitar and you don’t want to learn jack about chords or… or, like, the mixolidian scale or whatever the fuck it’s called–“

“Man, fuck your rules. Genius doesn’t need lessons.”

Family Has Risen Against Family

Guns, knives, chains, bats; rosemary, salt, willow bark, menstrual blood, bible verses. Hung with spells, weapons, prayers and ammunition, we set out upriver to ruin somebody’s night. They kept me at the back of the pack (“Hoodoo’s gotta keep to the rear,” Markfeet said, “where nobody can fuck with you. You put the whammy on them and we’ll do the rest.”), hemmed in between bruisers and bullygirls, bodysweat and the electric crackle of magic.

We crossed the bridge on Maplewood that was the edge of our territory — it’s always running water that does it, although sometimes where there isn’t anything close you get overlapping zones where things go haywire. That’s always fun. Anyway, we crossed the bridge like I said and as soon as we stepped off the other side I could feel the other whammier looking around. So that was my first job, keep us hidden.

I’m good at that, so we made most of the way there before we were actually spotted in meatspace. Nothing I can do about that, and who’d expect me to? Gunfire, swearing, then we were waded in among them and it was fists and knives and broken noses and bones instead of bullet holes and bleeding out.

I could just make the other one out on top of a watertower. That was bad — that’s a lot of stored power in those things, but those are the breaks. I kept throwing more his way, the whole badluck potluck, just trying to keep him from whammying us. I lost track of where we were or how we were doing, but eventually one of the Razor twins grabbed me and we flew back down across the river, whooping and hollering the whole way.

Markfeet had grabbed a hand for me, which was excellent luck. Not a bad night, all things considered.

Markfeet

Romance is a decaying orbit in these stories, and marriage a landing — although whether on land or sea is up to the characters as much as the author. There’s that air of glorious inevitability about it, extra-human forces dragging and pulling and a glorious jewel crouched there at the bottom, the toad in gravity’s well.

Well, indeed!

Such an accepted law that it’s not even necessary to show the actual landing anymore. Or even the reentry. The god of love neither speaks nor remains silent. A look in the eye, an untimely (and unrelated!) blush, a comment by a third character (usually a child), and, well, the happy ending is implied. A history of unhappy relationships, parallel tracks, the lack of other single characters (a big clue!), so on, so forth.

So our cosmonaut, let’s say Lourdes Markfeet, spiralling down towards the big fat globe of Bruce Skin. They’ve earned this pyrokinetic equalization of velocity and vector — between the two of them they’ve solved seven murders, prevented two international incidents, and fought off fourteen (fourteen!) alien invasions. They work well as a team, and there are worse things to build a marriage upon, though studies have shown that relationships formed under stressful circumstances, like wars or college or being framed for murder, seldom hold up when the stressor is removed. But you never know, right?

Through the viewscreen, the planet looms. Markfeet braces herself for contact.