But even at the lower levels, like the folks a Broker would find for you, there was something odd. A willingness to die. An eagerness, maybe. To be part of something bigger. To literally give yourself to something.
I struggled to stop my body. I put my back into it, such as it was, trying to worm my hands onto the controls, to assert myself. The panic returned, burning through my thoughts. It was worse than being paralyzed. I was moving, I was whole—I just wasn’t in charge.
Lugal took notice of me.
The sensation was unsettling and drove the panic and desperation out of me, replacing it with a skin-crawling terror that froze me. Lugal was enormous. It was an intelligence, heavy and dense, crushing me under it. Feeling that invisible gaze on me was like having an elephant lowered onto my mind one excruciating millimeter at a time. It filled me, pushing me into the corners, compressing me until I wanted to scream.
And then it punished me, lighting me up. The pain was real, it was physical, caused by the entity that now had ownership of my body. It built and built until I was ready to cry, to beg, to pass out, if any of those options had been open to me. It was educational, too. Lugal had full fucking access. My memories, my skill set, my reflexes—everything I was or could be was available. I was a puppet in every way.
When it lifted and returned to its own business, the relief was visceral. I remained in the dark corners of my own existence as my body strode into the bar, and I made no effort to do anything further.
The Brokers straightened up as I walked in. There were six of them, sitting at the bar with their notebooks, their well-licked pencils marking up accounts.
“Who’s this, then?” one of them asked.
They all peered at me.
“Vonnegan,” said a round, bald black guy with bright red gums sitting far back near the taps. “Chelsea.”
“Who’s your gasam?” asked a third.
“Bosch,” another answered, and everyone laughed.
“That fat bastard,” said the round black guy, chortling. “Careful, gents, this one might be here to lift your wallets!”
“What can we do for you, then, Vonnegan?” a tall, older woman said. She was wearing a pink housedress and fluffy pink slippers, blue-tinged sunglasses and a white shawl. She opened her notebook, which had the puffy, squished look of paper that had fallen into water, and clicked a cheap ballpoint pen, hovering it over her notebook.
No Normals walked into this bar, that was obvious.
Again I dived for the controls, seeking them far off in a dark room I’d never been to, vast and unexplored. Not this, I thought, trying somehow to communicate with the presence that had taken over my body. Anything but this. I didn’t bleed people. But here I was, about to contract for some Bleeders. And based on the sense I had of Lugal, of this alien, inscrutable power that animated me and pulled my strings, I thought it very likely that none of those Bleeders would survive the experience.
Outwardly, I stood there, immobile and silent as Lugal turned its attention inward and sought me out, chasing me down in the shadows of my own subconscious and taking hold, dragging me painfully out into the harsh, burning invisible light of its unblinking eye, and I felt the will, the immense, implacable will. This was what it meant to be controlled, possessed, owned, whatever you wanted to call it.
It began dragging words out of me.
One by one, it formed a sentence, pulling it from me like rotten teeth. I did my best, struggling to cloud my thoughts, to confuse it, to offer up incorrect words.
“Blood,” I heard my voice say. “Bleeders. As many as you have, I’ll take.”
I shrank from the demon’s presence, exhausted, a failure. It was tempting to just curl up mentally and drift, let it happen.
The Brokers looked at one another. Housedress reached up to slide her glasses down the bridge of her nose, then looked around. “Fucking idimustari wants every piece of meat we got!”
A wave of gentle laughter rippled through the room.
“Listen, Little Magician,” she said, turning back to me. “I dunno what kind of asshole your gasam is, but trust me when I say whatever Love Cantrip or check-kiting bullshit you’re pulling together, one of our prime Bleeders is all you’re gonna need. You might wanna hear about our fractional plans, too, go in with a couple of your little friends, spread the cost.”
Lugal reached down into me and yanked up a word. “All.”
“Maybe he was sent to deal with some of this shit,” the round black Broker said, nodding at the televisions above the bar. Hell was breaking loose. People had been gunned down in Times Square. A dozen folks had been pushed in front of trains—my old pal Landry/Balahul hard at work, no doubt—and an explosion uptown had turned a block of brownstones into a war zone. A crawl of text along the bottom of each screen implied other ongoing disasters.
“Fucking terrorists,” someone muttered. “We should all get together and donate the Bleeders and fucking show ’em who’s boss.”