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New York is a murderer’s paradise.
Death is a currency as much as dollars. It’s a city soaked in blood, on the edge of a country drenched in it. There’s blood in the groundwater in America. It feeds the crops. Not that her homeland was any cleaner.
New York is a haunted house. Every street corner and alleyway is home to ten or twenty or two hundred ghosts, disposessed of their bodies by the four lovers: envy, rage, greed, passion. They’re the real killers, the only ones in town.
You often can’t see all the ghosts there are. But she tastes them on the winter air, smells them when she opens up the cash-packed suitcases that serve as payment. And on her nightly catwalks, when the sun is gone and has taken the humans with it, she hears their wails in the wind.
Being a contract killer, greed is naturally her lover of choice, though she’s dabbled in the others before. Her clients are all driven by greed these days. When her aim was just beginning to drift over from monsters to humans, there was the occasional spurned spouse or malicious local politican, but as she climbed, the avaricious CEO became the only client worth taking.
Calico has no interest in moral bargaining. There’s nothing worse than a deluded assassin, denying what they are. Murder is actually quite an honest business if you do it right; it might, in fact, be the most honest thing in the world. She is not a force for good, if such a thing exists. She has seen the forces of evil, met some of them, and she is not that either. She is simply a force, and it is a better thing to be than to lay there like a stone, inert, acted upon but incapable of action itself.
She has her boundaries, of course. Children, nurses, cat lovers. Professionals have standards. If you aren’t careful in this line of work, if you don’t have boundaries, your humanity will get away from you, and then there will be no one left to enjoy the fruits of your labour. Calico has placed her humanity in an ornate box with a neat little bow and set it on a high shelf somewhere, to be unwrapped and savoured once she’s retired. Until then, she keeps emotions out of it, stays loyal to her lover, cleans up her messes, takes good care of Ava, and waits for the Big One to come along.
The Big One comes along.
The retirement contract, the Last Job You’ll Ever Need. A sum so absurdly large she could triple the lavishness of her lifestyle and not dream of spending it all. She knows her client is good for it, too. They have war money. Federal contract money. Fairfax money.
The job’s not even a challenge. The target shuns protection of all kinds, hates bodyguards, is quick to abandon limousines for long walks alone in the street. Calico trails them for weeks, watching from the rooftops and the alleyways, learning their routine, their habits, learning more than she cared to ever know.
Her target is seventeen years old. They attend Blackmore. A child, arguably, but turning eighteen in a few weeks. A boundary skirted is not a boundary crossed.
Her target is engaged. She follows the fiancée for a while, wondering if she’ll be a problem after the job is done. Her worries are unfounded. Mina Ha’s true love is envy. The moment her target is dead, they will cease to be rich, and thus will cease to be of interest to Mina.
Calico must learn her target’s true love. She looks for greed and finds none. She looks for rage. She finds some. Adolescent, perhaps weakened by self-pity, but it is there. Her target’s true love is rage, and it will be the death of them. It always is.
Her target is angry at many things. The Father. Their circumstances. New York. The police, the mayor, the dean of Blackmore — substitutions for the Father. Her target is bitter for one so young, but they are clear-eyed, and Calico suspects they hear the ghosts in the wind as well.
One night, on a catwalk along her target’s usual route, following from the rooftops, Calico is nearly killed. She is crossing a plank laid between two buildings when she steps onto a spirit rune. There is a flash of purple light and a small but violent explosion of burning soul. She reacts just in time to not burn up, but the plank shatters and she plummets into the alleyway.
Another assassin, she thinks as Ava’s body is battered by the hard steel railing of the fire escape on the way down. They heard about the job and want it for themselves. She lands on her paws, but then collapses onto her side, tail still smouldering. She meows pathetically.
She can take a night off. There’s no rush to this job. Once she has the strength, she will pick herself up, drag herself home, draw a warm, pleasant bath…
Someone enters the alley. If the other assassin is here, she is a dead woman. She has a desparate card to play, a shadow trick, but if they know her tricks, it matters little.
It is not the other assassin. It is her target.
She hisses at them. They approach anyways.
“That was a bad crash, little one.” Their voice is gentle. “Let me take a look at you.”
She hisses again. The job will become infinitely more complicated if they recognize Ava. But there’s nothing she can do. She is too weak to run away. Slowly, cautiously, Arin approaches her, their hands open, signalling: I mean no harm.
“No need to be scared. I wish I had a treat for you.” They kneel in front of her, inspecting her injuries. “Doesn’t look like you broke anything. Maybe I should still take you to a vet…” She hisses at that and makes a clawing motion. “...alright, alright. I think you’ll be fine.” They scratch her under the chin. Calico had given Ava plenty of chin scratches. This was the first time she experienced it for herself. She understood now.
Arin stood up, giving one last pet behind the ears. “Good girl, aren’t you? You’re a good girl.” They turned and left the alley.
Her target likes cats. Likes them, but does not love them. A cat lover would have taken her to the vet anyways, risked the scratches. Another boundary skirted.
The day of reckoning arrives. The prep has been complete for at least a week, and Maximilian is getting fidgety, but she insists upon waiting for the birthday. No one would accuse her of killing a child.
Besides, she had something else to take care of. A cheeky rune-setting assassin who wanted to cut in on her job. They weren’t going to cut in on anything any more.
On the day of their eighteenth birthday, Arin Fairfax leaves the celebration early, sneaking out of Fairfax manor through a back passage. They duck out of sight from a pair of chefs on smoke break, sprint across the grounds, and slip through an opening in the fence, out into the city. There’s a suitcase under their arm.
The suitcase was not part of her preparation. Are they running away? That could be ideal. Her target disappearing themself. She’d have to bring back some proof of death, of course. For now, she stalks from the rooftops.
They venture out from Hudson Yards, crossing from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, each one poorer than the last. She gets a better look at the suitcase. There’s something glowing inside, peeking out through the razor-thin crevice. It clicks into place. They’re not running away, not yet. They’re stealing from their father.
They arrive on the wrong side of town, and Calico watched her target stroll into a grimy pizza parlour that doubles as a front for the Curator, the second-biggest fence in Manhattan. A collector of magical artifacts. Her target is going to try to sell it, whatever it is, and use the money to run. It’s a terribly stupid plan. A Fairfax in the streets would be dead within a few months. Calico is really just hurrying things along.
She descends to street level, and that’s when she realizes she’s being tailed. Binoculars in a car one block over. Someone is watching her, from as great a distance as they can. This is not another assassin. It’s her client, trying to make sure she does the job properly. Fair enough. Calico doesn’t mind an audience.
There’s a bell on the door, ringing every time someone enters or exits the shop. Calico waits for someone to leave and slips inside before the door can shut, her tail nearly catching on it. She darts underneath a four-top table, hidden and silent. Arin is there, clutching the suitcase, nervous, sweaty hair falling over their eyes, looking so young.
There’s only one employee, a burly half-Ixian with tattoos covering their biceps, standing in front of an unused stone oven, glaring at Arin. Calico finds her moment and slinks past both of them, into the back of the establishment, quiet as the dark.
She does not need to go far. She almost crashes into the Curator, smoking a cigar, speaking to someone over the phone, leaning over a filthy ingredient station.
A name like the Curator evokes a certain amount of class, which always fades upon meeting him. He’s an upjumped thug, a fence who sold out his suppliers to OSIC for a jump in tax brackets. He’s muscled and hairy, dressed in a horrible gold-and-purple suit. Another man is standing by, bald and bulging, more muscle by the looks of it.
She creeps into a dark corner and listens.
“The supplier’s here, yeah. It’s not what you said it’d be, though. They don’t want to sell the dough. They wanna… I dunno. Free whatever’s trapped inside. Let it into the Hudson. Kid says they’ll pay, but not if we hurt it. …Yeah. No, I agree, too messy. Here’s the thing though.” He takes a long drag on his cigar. His voice is an ashy growl. “Kid’s been marked for death. I’m serious. Daddy Fairfax has been shopping around for fixers. Payday s’posed to be crazy high. I’m thinking I take the supplier in the back, show them the new oven. Collect on a, uh, pizza order… you know, collect on a bounty that isn’t ours. Keep the dough for ourselves. Get paid twice. …Alright, move your ass. I’ll close up shop.” He hangs up, turns to a pile of pizza boxes and begins digging through them, emerging at last with a revolver. He spins the chamber and begins to load in bullets.
This is a curious twist. She has competition.
Well, she won’t for long.
Calico pounces, extending her claws and dragging them down the Curator’s leg, tearing his gaudy suit pants to shreds. He yelps in pain and spins. She darts past and bursts out of Ava’s spectral form, rising up to human size, directly behind the Curator. She wraps a sleeved arm around his neck and holds Sweetest Lie at his temple.
“On your knees,” she says to the other man, the bruiser.
He doesn’t listen. Instead, he swings a bat at her.
She waits for the last moment and then disappears, pulling the shadows over herself like a cloak. The bat sails straight through her and collides with the skull of the Curator, making a terrible cracking sound and knocking his hideous golden fedora to the filthy kitchen floor. He slumps to the floor, firing his revolver into a stack of pizza boxes in the process..
She hates when people don’t listen. The bruiser looks around wildly, confused and terrified. There’s a hanging lamp in the kitchen that was bumped by the bat, and now it swings back and forth, flinging shadow everywhere. She’s all around him. Now she’s behind him. Now she’s flesh and blood and Sweetest Lie is aimed centre of mass. Now there’s a silenced pop and a hole in his chest.
The half-Ixian from the front has heard the gunshot and arrives into the kitchen, but she has no time for him, because Arin would have heard it all too. The half-Ixian charges and she’s a cat again, bolting between legs to the front.
Sure enough, Arin has rushed out of the building, and is now charging down the adjacent alleyway, satchel in hand. She turns and darts back into the kitchen, through the discombobulated half-Ixian’s legs once more, out the back entrance. She peers out from behind a dumpster and sees Arin, dead center in the narrow alleyway, looking back and forth at the two streets on either side, the two ways out, caught between. New Yorkers heard the gunshot and the smart ones ran, but the rest are gathering, gawking at the pizza place.
Calico spots the Fairfax car out on the street, the glint of binoculars inside. Her client is watching.
On the other side, men are staring, smoking cigars. Iron on their hip. That way lies mobland. Gangsters and street criminals, not associated with the Curator but wise enough to spot someone running from a bad deal with something very valuable in their hands.
Two worlds, two ways, two deaths for Arin Fairfax.
It’s noon. The clouds shift and the sun hangs overhead like a police searchlight. Her target squints and shrinks, helpless and hopeless and practically glowing. Resignation fills their face. Surrender to death. Seventeen is really so young. Eighteen too. A day hardly makes a difference.
Calico defelinates, a human once more, crouching behind a dumpster in the narrow sliver of shadow cast by the building’s edge. She can take the shot from here. Complete the job, complete her career, never have to kill another soul again. If she waits even thirty seconds the walls will close in. The alley will be swarmed, her chance will be gone, and Arin will die at some other pair of hands.
A third way appears in her mind. She dismisses it, then brings it back, because she has to figure out why she hasn’t taken the shot yet. Sweetest Lie is in her hand, pointed directly at Arin Fairfax’s heart, the seconds are ticking away, and she hasn’t taken the shot.
In her own head, she knows what’s happened. She curses up a storm. It’s the first or second or third rule of contract killing, one of the few that’s not present in monster hunting.
Don’t over-familiarize. Get only as close as you need to take the shot. There’s a possibility, however slim, they will stop looking like a target in your mind. There’s a possibility they will begin to take the shape of a human being.
Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. She thought she was past all of this. Now the shelf had crumbled and her humanity was in pieces on the floor and she could only sweep it up and toss it out or choose to save a single piece.
She still hasn’t taken the shot.
There could not be a worse possible time for this to happen. She looks at the last job she’d ever need to take. She glares at Arin Fairfax and knows she doesn’t want to watch them die.
But it’s hardly up to her at this point. The world is demanding the death of Arin Fairfax. What she could she possibly do?
A pair of rats scurry out from underneath the dumpster, making for a sewer grate. An idea forms.
Against every instinct ever honed in a long and fruitful career, Calico makes the tiniest of micro-adjustments to her aim and calls out to her target.
“Kid,” she calls from the shadows. Arin turns to her but can’t see her, still blinded from the sun. “Don’t ever try to get rid of that case again. It’s your only advantage from here on out.” Disguising one’s voice is a basic trick of the trade. She adds rasp and gravel and throws in a little New York for good measure. “This is the end of you. Arin Fairfax dies today. Tomorrow someone else wakes up. They will hide and steal and kill just to eke out the barest shadow of a life. Trust no one, not even yourself on a desperate day. Keep emotions out of it. Clean up your messes. Keep the case safe. Good luck.” She shoots them in the chest.
From this distance, the heart may as well be the broad side of a barn. Laughably easy to hit. Easier still to miss.
Arin collapses to the floor. People scream. There are sirens in the distance, responding to the earlier gunshot. Someone nods at her from the Fairfax car, she’s sure. She doesn’t check. She waits until people rush forward, the crowd starting to swallow them up, then she grabs the kid’s unconscious body and melts into shadow. She was never there.
A day or five after their eighteenth birthday, they wake up somewhere very strange. It’s dark and dank and smells horrendous. It’s not even the burning pain in their chest that woke them up. It’s the smell. They wonder distantly if they’re in hell.
Their mind is cloudy with pain and what must be a bad dream. The party, the pizza place, the strange voice in the alley. But the pain is real. They try to make something out in the darkness. They’re on a sheetless mattress laid out in a small enclave of a room. There’s a tiny stream of water running through it, entering and exiting the room through circular hatches. It smells like sewage. Are they under the city somewhere..?
They look around at more of the refuse. There’s discarded medicinal canisters — a lot of them — and a sewing kit. They gingerly touch a hand to their chest. Whoever stitched them up was certainly not a doctor.
There’s a small circular table nearby, surrounded by milk crates used as chairs. The table is covered in half-empty bottles of beer and a ratty deck of cards. The suitcase is propped under one of the milk crates. Someone is using it as a height booster.
There’s a long rumbling noise, then a splashing, and two figures emerge from one of the circular gateways. It’s too dark to see, but one of them is tiny, the other massive.
“H-they’re up! I told you they didn’t need a real doctor, Maurice. Your hands are as precise as they are powerful.”
Maurice — the big one — doesn’t respond.
They cough. It hurts. “Um, where am I?”
“You’re in your new life, kid.” Something thwacks them softly in the face. It’s a newspaper. They glance down at it.
NEW YORK ORACLE
FAIRFAX HEIR DEAD AT EIGHTEEN - BODY GOES MISSING AFTER CROWD WITNESSES FATAL STREET SHOOTING - KILLER AT LARGE
Keep the case safe. Words flash through their mind, hazy, mixed with fear and concussive trauma. Arin Fairfax dies. Someone else wakes up.
They try to sit up on the mattress and don’t quite succeed. They look around the tunnel, trying to absorb something from their new home.
“It doesn’t look like much, I know,” the little one speaks again. There’s jovial ease in his odd accented voice, like they’ve already been friends for years. “But this just temporary. The main base is slightly larger, and almost doesn’t smell. There’s a television, even, though the reception comes and goes. Maurice and I are going to take care of you. You’ll see. I’m Krill, by the way.”
They swallow. Trust no one, not even yourself on a desperate day. “Who…” Speaking is difficult. “Who brought me here? Someone saved me.”
Big and little exchange a look. “Kid,” the little one says again, “we have no idea. You were dumped in one of our tunnels with a note and a bit of cash, and that suitcase, which I’m sure is around here somewhere. Maybe you have a guardian angel. Or maybe you just got lucky somehow. Who knows?” Krill grins. “New York is a kinder place than people think.”