Brackenridge Loans and Curiosities

You don't ask him what happens at a thousand.

You mean to. You wake up on Day 5 with the question already in your mouth, and you go up to the roof with two coffees again, and he turns to you with that look of polite readiness, like a man waiting for a verdict.

And you chicken out.

Because Quint is on every local channel now. Because your phone has forty-one notifications from people who used to come to Raike's pop-ups, half of them asking if you're okay and half of them calling you a psycho. Because somewhere in the night you realized that the prize for a thousand souls is something that matters to him a great deal, and you're not ready to know how much your soul is worth to the man sitting next to you.

So you ask the other thing. The one that matters more.

"Clause nine," you say. "Is there a way out of this contract?"

Malakai is quiet for a while. A tugboat moans out on the water.

"Yes," he says at last. "Three, that I know of."

Your heart lurches. "Tell me."

"That wasn't the question." He says it softly, not smug. "And I'm the wrong person to explain them. I'm the other party. Anything I say about your exits, you'd be right not to trust." He glances toward the bar three blocks away, its chimney just visible over the rooftops. "Ask Lazlo who reads contracts in this neighborhood."

"Lazlo? My boss Lazlo?"

"Your boss Lazlo," he agrees, "owns a baseball bat with salt packed into the handle. Ask him."

Lazlo does not look surprised when you ask him. That's the worst part.

He's restocking the well before opening, and he stops with a bottle of rye in each hand and looks at you over his glasses, and then past you at Malakai, who is waiting by the door with his hands in his coat pockets like a very expensive umbrella.

"I wondered," Lazlo says quietly. "When he started coming in. That stool's been empty a long time." He puts the rye down. "Philomena Brackenridge. Pawnshop on Aliceanna, green door, the one with the brass owl. Tell her I sent you." Then he reaches out and squeezes your shoulder with his big hand, which he has never done once in four years. "And kid? Take the afternoon."

Brackenridge Loans and Curiosities smells like dust, lemon oil and old pennies. Every surface is covered: mantel clocks, fishing reels, a stuffed heron, trays of wedding rings under glass, a jar of what you hope are marbles. A bell over the door jangles when you come in. Malakai has to duck under a hanging birdcage.

"We're closed," says a voice from behind the counter.

The woman who stands up is maybe five feet tall, with a long white braid over one shoulder, cat-eye glasses on a beaded chain, a cardigan buttoned wrong and a cane she immediately uses to point.

At Malakai.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," she says. "Your Highness." The sarcasm could strip paint. "Wipe your feet. You track brimstone."

"Mrs. Brackenridge," Malakai says, and he actually wipes his feet. "It's been a while."

"Forty years isn't a while. Forty years is my knees." She turns the cane on you. "And you're the girl who gave her soul away for a man who wears his chef coat to the grocery store. Lazlo called. Sit down, Ava. Give me the instrument."

You sit on a stool between a cello case and a box of doorknobs. Malakai hands over the scroll with both hands, carefully, like it's a sleeping animal. Philomena unrolls it on her counter, weights the corners with a ship in a bottle and three brass doorstops, puts on a second pair of glasses over the first, and reads.

She reads the whole thing. It takes forty minutes. Nobody talks. Once Malakai shifts his weight and she says "don't," without looking up, and he stops.

Finally she takes off the top glasses.

"Well," she says. "It's tidy. He always was tidy." She taps the parchment with one bony finger. "Here's what you've got, honey. Listen, because I'm only saying it once, and then I'm charging you."

She points.

"Clause thirteen. Inside your home and on your body, he does what you say. That's not a courtesy. That's law. You say stay out of the bedroom, he stays out. You say don't touch, he doesn't. You say get out of my sight, he's gone. He breaks that clause, the instrument's in breach, and a breach is bad news for him."

You look at Malakai. He's looking at the floor.

"Clause twenty-seven. Rescission." She taps again. "You can undo this. You return the benefit whole, before the thirtieth sunset. Whole means whole. And it has to be done by a human hand. Hell doesn't undo its own work. You'd have to make that cheating boy as well-off as he was the night before your birthday, by your own doing."

"How?"

"That's your problem. I'm a notary, not a fairy godmother." Another tap. "Clause twenty-one. You get one Hearing. Once, before the fortieth sunset, at the Crossing, in front of the Auditor of the Court. You argue that the instrument's no good, and if you're right, it's torn up." She looks at you over the remaining glasses. "Drunk won't do it. They don't care that you were drunk."

"Then what will?"

Philomena's finger moves down the scroll, slow, until it stops near the bottom.

"Clause thirty-three," she reads. "No Collector shall solicit, lure, or provoke a wish. An instrument so obtained is void, and the Collector who obtained it is unmade."

The shop is very quiet. One of the clocks ticks louder than the others.

"Unmade," you repeat.

"Not killed," Philomena says. "Killed is something you get over, where he comes from. Unmade is nothing. No soul, no ash, no name."

You turn around.

Malakai hasn't moved. That's what you notice. Not a muscle. Not a breath. He is standing among the mantel clocks with his hands in his coat pockets and his face perfectly calm, and he's so still that the dust in the window light seems to be moving around him instead of through him.

Then he blinks, and smiles at Philomena, and says, "It's a very old clause. Nobody's invoked it in two hundred years."

"Mm," Philomena says.

She charges you forty dollars. On the way out, while Malakai is ducking under the birdcage, she catches your sleeve and pulls you down so her mouth is near your ear.

"Three things he can't do," she whispers. "Lie, break his word, or cross salt without asking. Remember all three, honey."

It's dark when you get home. The fog is back. Malakai walks half a step behind you, the way he always does, close enough to touch and never touching.

You turn onto your street and stop.

Someone is sitting on your stoop, under the dead porch light. A woman in a navy windbreaker and sensible boots, black ponytail with a streak of gray, chewing gum like she's angry at it. She stands up when she sees you. Something gold flashes on her belt.

"Ava Moretta?" she says. "Detective Dorota Wasik, Baltimore Fire Investigation. You got a minute to talk about Raike?"