The Last Smile in Sunder City (The Fetch Phillips Archives #1) - Luke Arnold Page 0,114

is nothing to be done. We little folk had magic in our bodies. Without it, something inside does not know how to work.” He put a hand on the case that held the false horn. “I found a new doctor. A Warlock who told me that there is magic in certain things. He said that a horn is a piece of pure magic and if I bring him one, perhaps he can put some of that power back into me.”

I bit my tongue to stop myself from saying the first thing that came into my head—that he was a gullible fool who was only making things worse for himself. If he was sick, then the last thing he needed was to be out in the cold on a night like tonight, looking for a piece of the impossible.

I couldn’t keep my mouth shut for long.

“Warren. You know that’s ridiculous, right?”

He didn’t say anything. Neither did the woman. So, I went back to taking out the bolt and tying up the wound so the woman could at least put some weight on it when we walked back to town. The Werecat and the Gnome didn’t say anything else, and I finally learned to do the same.

We were back in the guts of Sunder City around midnight. Warren paid me what I was owed, and sulked home. Then it was just me and the Cat.

“How’s the leg?” I asked.

“Terrible.” She groaned for extra effect. “Lucky for you.”

“Why lucky?”

“Because I have a swelling desire to kick you in the teeth.”

She said it casually, but I believed her.

“Well, I wouldn’t try it. In your state, you’ll do more damage to yourself.”

“As I said: lucky.”

When we hit Main Street, she told me she’d be all right on her own. I suppose she just didn’t want me knowing where she lived. I was fine with that. I was freezing and fresh out of painkillers, so I wanted to be fast asleep before the medicine wore off.

“Make sure you get a real doctor to look at that,” I said.

“No shit. I can probably catch an infection just by looking at you.”

She meant it as a joke, but she wasn’t too wrong. My building hadn’t had hot water since the fires went out. In winter, it takes a stronger man than me to wash every day.

“But thanks,” she said. “If I had to be shot my someone tonight, at least it was a guy who was willing to patch me up afterwards. What’s your name?”

“Fetch Phillips. Man for Hire.”

She shook my hand and I felt the tips of those claws rest against my skin.

“Linda Rosemary.”

The night had worked out about as well as it could have. She’d tried to put one over on us, we’d caught her out, she’d gotten an injury in exchange for our wasted time and we all got to go home to bed. It was fair, somehow. Fairer than we’d come to expect.

She walked up Main Street, one hand resting against the wall, and I thought she’d given me just the right amount of trouble as long as I never had to deal with her again.

But Sunder City makes a few things without fail: hunger in winter, drunks at night and trouble all year round.

2

The piss in my chamber pot was frozen.

I hadn’t really been sleeping, just scrunched up, wearing every item of clothing I owned, pretending I was dead until the sun came up. But even the sun was cold and gray. There was more color in my frozen piss than in that gray, far-away sun.

I slipped out of bed and forced my double-socked feet into my boots. When I first moved into my office/apartment/icebox, I’d liked the idea of being on the fifth floor. The view was high enough to make me feel like I was looking over the whole city, and the fall out the Angel door would be hard enough to kill me if I dived out of there head first. It’s just one of those little touches that makes a house a home.

Sunder was a sprawling city, though not particularly tall. That meant that my building made an impressive lookout, but it also caught the full force of the wind. The breeze came in through cracks around the windows and the gaps between the bricks. It even forced its way into the room below and came back up through the floorboards. I was going to patch the place up when I had the time. Just like I was going