The Last Smile in Sunder City (The Fetch Phillips Archives #1) - Luke Arnold Page 0,56

I could see the candlelight that flickered in the windows where the unemployed Dwarves were still squatting. I knew the names of the factories from my time as an errand boy but now, they all looked the same: façades blasted by time till the bone showed through. When the magic dropped out of the machines, the textile mill was abandoned along with all the others.

Old air was trapped inside. Burnt and thick with the memories of livestock and dye and little old ladies hunched over the loom. The stray reams of wool and cotton that were hanging from broken hooks had become the foundations upon which a thousand opportunistic spiders had sprouted their creations. Twisted arteries of silk wound their way from the floor to the rafters in tight cylinders and sheer webbed sheets. It was easy to see the path Pete had cut through the factory. Torn strands parted in ragged archways from the entrance into the darkness. I stepped my way through, twitching and slapping as things tickled the back of my neck. Soon, I could no longer tell which itching was paranoia and which was the real thing, so I gritted my teeth and ignored them all.

The flame in my hand danced in the dead air. In the corner of the enormous warehouse was the foreman’s office. The glass was fogged over with grime but the lamplight from inside forced its way through.

When I pushed the metal door open and stepped into the office, neither of the figures inside made a move. One, because he would have recognized my smell the moment I stepped into the building. The other, because his brains weren’t exactly in his body. The red-haired teen had a hole in his head larger than the lame piercings he’d slashed into his jacket. His pockmarked skin had lost its insipid pink and was now turning a sickly gray.

The injury was a hard one to identify. A few blows to the skull, that was clear, but his jaw was making a unique statement: broken, dislocated and almost wrenched out of his face. If I had to guess – and I suppose I didn’t have to – I would say that someone held him by the chin, their fingers in his mouth, and drove the back of his head into a wall till they were holding pink jelly.

Pete was sitting on his hairy ass with his back against the wall and his head facing down.

“I’m sorry, Pete,” I said, stepping slowly over to him. “I never woulda thought he’d come after you.” Pete lifted his uneven eyes. “So what’s the plan? You can’t just leave him here?”

“Nope. This isn’t where it happened anyway. There’s a trail from an alley in Swestum if anyone cares to look, and if it leads them to the body, I’m done. He’s covered in my scent from his toes to his tonsils.”

I swatted a spider from my sleeve and a few uncomfortable questions from my mind.

“So, it’s bone-saws and burlap sacks?” I asked, hoping he knew it was a joke.

“The canals are swollen and kicking up their guts right now. There’s a good chance anything we throw in will find its way back to shore. I know another place just out of town.”

All of a sudden, I got really, really tired.

“Not the pit.”

He nodded. “The pit.”

There was plenty of old cloth to wrap him in and plenty of rope to tie him up. While I went about turning the remains of the redhead into a human burrito, carefully covering the parts that were still oozing liquid, Pete was searching in the back of the old motors that once powered the industrial sewing machines. In his Human left hand, he held an old soup container. With his dog-like right, he wiped the remnants of coal and oil from the machinery and collected them in the tin can. The whole scenario was packed with too many things I didn’t like, but once you go out to dump a body you don’t go home till you or the dead are buried.

Pete filled his container with black muck and left me waiting while he slunk out through the cobwebs and into the night. I’d hated the way the redhead had talked while he was alive but it was nothing compared to the way he talked when he was dead. We sat with the spiders and silence saying too damn much to each other.

The puttering of tired pistons rumbled down the side road. I got down