“Mi dealer's casa es su casa,” Jacob said, gesturing expansively to the double-wide trailer with the sagging flooring and scent of mold.

“Two nights,” the woman on the sofa said. Reese was slender, with a gun holster bearing pistol over a baggy t-shirt and jammies. Her skin sported a rather terrifying amount of tattoos. “If you don’t get out by then, I’ll bury you out back.”

Tom had a hard time looking away from the woman’s prodigious ink. It always makes me wonder what people like this will look like when they’re old grannies. It took him a moment to realize she was staring back in a less-than-friendly way.

Tom found something else to look at.

“What’s with the kid?” She glanced at Jacob, her feet up on the table.

“He got caught pirating a movie and now he needs to hide from the full force of the FBI,” Jacob said with a winning smile.

The dealer snorted. “Fine, I don’t care. But if it causes me any trouble, you’re out on your ass. Check this out.”

She turned on the TV and let out a bray of laughter as a grainy recording of Mr. Fluffybottom tackled three alarmed cops to the ground one after the other, mauling them lightly before stealing their wallets.

It was being played on loop, on national television.

Tom glanced over at Jacob, who winked.

Jacob had no idea how to get access to a police station’s recordings, but he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who would be happy to embarrass the police. Seemed like it had panned out.

He looked at the wad of twenties, fifties and hundreds on the coffee table that they’d used to pay Reese for the hideout. It had come from the very officers the cat had robbed, their wallets discarded outside the station.

Man, I’m really in some deep shit now.

Actually, there might not be many laws for escaping custody via animal attack. A clever lawyer might be able to convince a jury Tom fled because he was afraid of the animal and didn’t believe the cops were capable of protecting him, which was partially true.

It’d be more believable than him having a trained cougar, anyway. If all he had to do was deny association and throw Mr. Fluffybottom under the bus, well, that was the skeleton’s job in the first place.

He just needed to let the heat die down so he didn’t get shot on sight.

He could feel Mr. Fluffybottom lurking nearby in a stand of trees, about twenty feet off the ground, perfectly motionless, and nearly invisible in the shade of the foliage.

I can’t believe Mr. Fluffybottom stuck, Tom thought, shaking his head.

The news program that had been looping Mr. Fluffybottom’s Greatest Hits changed to security footage of a man robbing a gas station at swordpoint while pocketing huge handfuls of candy bars. The tired clerk just stepped back with a bemused expression and let the LARPer leave.

“Alright, lemme show you around,” Jacob said, catching Tom’s shoulder and dragging him away from the TV, down a hallway and into a cramped bedroom that looked like someone had painted the walls with vomit.

Once they were out of earshot, Jacob started talking in a hushed voice.

“Okay, here are the ground rules. Number one: Do not mention the cash in the truck in Reese’s presence. If you do, she’s practically obligated to take it from us. And number two: Don’t ever insinuate that she’s in any way weak. Don’t offer to help her reach something on a shelf, or ask if she likes a girly TV show. If you do that, you’re putting her in a position where she has to kill you in order to maintain her reputation. If she doesn’t maintain her reputation, some other wannabe waltzes in and kills her. So your best bet is to never talk to her or about her unless your words are chosen very carefully.”

Tom stared at Jacob. “You serious?”

“Yup. There’s your cot. There’s the shitter. Don’t lean on it or it’ll tear out of the floor. Have fun.” He clapped Tom on the shoulder and turned away.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m off to buy some guns!” Jacob said brightly as he tromped back out to the living room.

A moment later, the dealer’s shitty white sedan coughed to life and Jacob drove out of the trailer park in it.

Tom watched him go for a moment before he turned toward Reese. The woman was skipping through channels looking bored.

“Do you have a wide, flat space I could use to make some spells?”

“Do I look like a fucking dumbass Wiccan to you? You think because I got tats I’m some idiot airheaded teen bitch who wants to play make-believe with daddy’s money?” Her hand edged toward her gun.

Rule number two: Don’t talk to or about Reese unless your words are chosen very carefully.

Tom paused, taking a moment to collect his words and carefully sift through them.

“I’m the Wiccan dumbass,” he said carefully. “I just need a flat spot.”

She narrowed her eyes. “There’s a sheet of plywood leaning up against the wall in the backyard. Knock yourself out.”

“Thank you,” Tom said, picking up the plastic tote. They’d taken out the gold coins and the cash before coming in, leaving everything else inside. The Soul Engine was still in there, along with the can of Flex Seal they’d used to conceal it in a thin coating of black rubber.

And the two crypts Mr. Fluffybottom had brought him. Tom pulled one out and eyed the strange cylinder with a disk around the edge, stamped with odd runes.

The cougar was too clumsy to steal the entire box and carry it several miles, and he’d been too busy focusing on where Ken might emerge from the wall next anyway.

But he was smart. He had batted two crypts that had spilled out of the box hard, tumbling them dozens of feet away from the box itself.

When Ken finally got away, he must’ve used his crypt to slip through Mr. Fluffybottom’s paws and make a clean getaway.

Minus those two.

Now I gotta figure out what they do, Tom thought. He had called Grampa and warned him about psycho cops on his cell before tossing it. Grampa was old and crafty enough to lay low for a while, so Tom would do the same.

That meant he had time to study his new book.

Metaphysical Vocabulary and Material Spell Synthesis

He’d get into that, but first he wanted to touch bases with his exclusive agent. She might have some helpful external insight about the crypts.

Tom’s caulk gun was almost halfway empty, so he made a mental note to have his henchman pick up some ducks from a butcher. Mr. Fluffybottom could grab the sticks he’d need to burn.

Having minions really does make things more convenient, Tom thought as he started dialing up Ilspeth 89.

***Later***

“You must be Tom Graves!” an absolutely stunning woman said, smiling at him from the hologram in the center of the plywood slab.

“And you’re not Ilspeth Eighty-nine,” Tom said, voicing his concerns.

“Ilspeth Eighty-nine no longer works with us,” she said, steepling her fingers. “She did, however, pay me quite a tidy sum of soul-pulses to cover her absence and aid you, specifically, to the best of my abilities. I’m contractually obligated to do anything for you as long as you don’t terminate your agreement with her.”

She put way more emphasis on the ‘anything’ than she’d really needed to.

Tom smelled a rat, but he didn’t know if there was anything he could do about it.

“I need information about crypts.”

“Crypts are material spell phrases with integrated soul engines at their core.”

“They have soul engines?” Tom said, brows rising.

“Indeed. They aren’t properly sized for an industrial application, but they are a fine product for self-defense on the battlefield, where constant death keeps them topped off. Would you like to purchase one?”

“No,” Tom said, peering at the rubber-coated gold. “What’s their efficiency?”

“Our newest designs boast an efficiency of eight soul pulses per soul, but an older model might be as low as five.”

Tom raised a brow and poked his homemade soul engine with the gauge.

4.7

One soul pulse to contact the Outsiders, so it had been five point seven when he initiated the call. It had increased twice that he’d noticed, so two people had died in the hospital over the last day.

Tom’s actual efficiency had been two point eight five, rather than the three point two four he’d calculated.

That meant he would have to process…

Tom scratched some math in the dirt. A hair over twenty-one souls per month. If a hospital experienced a modest mortality dry spell, Tom was up shit creek.

An efficiency of five…at minimum? Sign me up.

Sixty divided by five… twelve souls. That was a much more sustainable number. And if the efficiency were eight…

He did a bit more math.

Seven and a half souls a month. I think I could even turn a tidy profit with the more efficient crypt.

“Can crypts be used purely as Soul Engines?”

“In a pinch, I suppose,” the demon said with a shrug. “Just snip or file off the spell phrases. You’d have to have a pretty awful, shitty homebrew engine made by a complete amateur for a crypt to be better.”

She blinked, looking Tom up and down. “I mean, I’m sure yours is fine?”

“No, you had it right,” Tom said. “How many Spell pulses can a crypt store?”

“How big is it?” she asked.

Tom held up the Flex Seal-coated bauble so the Outsider could see it.

“That looks like a fifty-pointer,” she said, nodding.

Fifty soul pulses was less than Tom needed to gather each month.

“Can I pay my loan in smaller installments more than once a month?”

“Of course!” the Outsider said, reaching off the side of the hologram and fiddling with something. “I’ll forward you a planar address with your loan’s information. Simply create the spellwork, then place an object with soul pulses on it, and the pulses will be removed and applied to your debt.”

“So streamlined,” Tom said, impressed.

“We aim to please,” she said with a brilliant smile.

“If you wanted to put in a little extra effort, you could even file off the spell phrases on one of your crypts and stamp the address into the gold. That would allow you to carry your loan repayment device around with you, rather than a fixed location.”

“I just might do that.”

“I also want to point out that either one of those Crypts would satisfy a large portion of your debt, should you wish to sell them.”

Tom thought about it for a second.

“Can you use them as collateral for a missed payment? I’d rather not give them up right away, but it would also be nice to not have to be afraid of getting my soul sucked out of my body without warning.”

“I can do that,” she said, tapping off the side of the screen. “Is there anything else?”

Tom briefly considered the dog-eared chapter in his book.

“How much does it cost to hire a, em…quality of life Outsider?” Tom asked, feeling a bit guilty, like Lily was watching him disapprovingly from beyond the grave.

“As demand is fairly high, they can cost between a hundred soul pulses a month, and several thousand. They also offer lump-sum lifetime contracts, which can cost millions of soul pulses, and are usually reserved for emperors and royalty.

“Would you like to hire one?” she asked, giving him an expectant look that made his guts roil with conflicting emotions. Still, how he felt didn’t matter, since there was no way to afford one anytime soon without mass murder.

“Nah, just curious. How much is Ilspeth Eighty-nine paying you to work for me?”

“Three hundred soul-pulses a month, pre-paid for the next three years.”

Tom blinked, doing a little quick math. “That’s over ten thousand.”

“Indeed.”

“Why did she do that?”

“She didn’t say, but in my experience, we Outsiders don’t pour soul-pulses away for no reason. They are more than just money to us, after all; they are our lifeblood. If she hired me to take her place, it was because it created a better opportunity for her elsewhere.”

Tom thanked her and dismissed the conjuring, a piece of papyrus fluttering out of the middle of the circle. The address of his loan.

Tom studied the runes, then eyeballed the crypt. It would take tools he didn’t have right now to scribe the runes on a crypt.

He’d have to add them to the list of things for Jacob to pick up, alongside the goose fat.

Tom stood, still studying the address. If he had his cell phone, he’d take a picture, but if he had his cell phone, he’d already be back in jail, so Tom had to carefully fold the papyrus and put it in his pocket.

He turned back toward the dilapidated mobile home and spotted Reese on the back porch, her jaw slack. Now that Tom had been warned about Reese’s character and driving motivation, he could understand how she would react a little better.

“Thanks for the plywood,” he said, nodding to her on the way into the house.

“No problem,” she said, a mask of indifference settling across her face before she headed back inside.

Gushing over real magic might be perceived as weakness, so she couldn’t allow herself to do it, and as long as Tom didn’t bring it up, she wouldn’t ask any questions.

She collapsed back onto the couch, staring at the news and only occasionally glancing towards the back door while Tom grabbed a Post-it off the fridge and wrote his henchman a shopping list.

Once he was done with that, Tom sat down in the empty La-Z-Boy by the window and opened up his new book. He hadn’t gotten through the dedication before he caught Reese staring at him.

Tom carefully adopted a neutral tone. “What’s up?”

“We call that the suicide chair, because it frames the back of your head right in the window,” she said.

Tom glanced behind him and saw that his head was indeed in the center of the window, which faced the parking lot. But the sunlight beaming directly on his skin and on his book was impossible to pass up.

“It’s fine. My demon is watching the parking lot,” Tom said, glancing at the stand of trees hiding Mr. Fluffybottom before returning his attention to his book.

Reese raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment further.