Blood Engines(32)
“Wow,” B said. “Pretty smart. Except he couldn’t fuck.”
“I never said it was a flawless method,” Marla said. She glanced up the stairs. “I should go up and introduce myself. You know Finch. Is he the type to listen to a reasonable request?”
B shrugged. “Sure, I guess. He doesn’t take shit from anyone, but he’s always struck me as a reasonable guy. I used to think he was great, super-nice, to throw these parties in his house, but I didn’t realize he had ulterior motives…still, sure, he’ll listen to a reasonable request.”
“Good,” Marla said. “That’s good to hear.” She cracked her knuckles. “We’ll see how he handles un- reasonable requests, then.” She went up the stairs to Finch’s door, leaving B below.
6
Marla hesitated outside the door. She still had her boots on, and they were ensorcelled so that she could kick down just about any door that wasn’t reinforced with iron, but did she really want to go in hard? Finch was the chief sorcerer of this city for the moment, and he was sitting on top of a geyser of sexual energy right now—maybe she shouldn’t mess with him. He’d come down to the party eventually, after all.
She frowned and shook her head, then slapped herself hard on the cheek. Her head cleared. Finch had some sort of a self-confidence-deflation spell going on up here, probably to get rid of anyone who managed to wander up accidentally. Screw that. Maybe if he hadn’t tried to cut her confidence out from under her, Marla would have simply knocked, but Finch’s subtle little mood-altering spells pissed her off. She lifted her foot and kicked the door, just below the doorknob, and after a sharp snap the door swung open.
Finch was in the small bedroom beyond the door, standing up and fucking someone who leaned over the bed. Both Finch and his partner looked up when the door opened. Finch was a big, hairy guy—he could have been a lumberjack or a professional wrestler, though his brown beard was neatly trimmed, and the guy he was riding was…
Not human. His skin was grayish, his eyes mere depressions in his head, and as Marla stood watching he disappeared, shredding apart into wisps, leaving Finch standing empty-handed over a plastic-covered bed smeared with gray slime.
“Oh, nasty!” Marla cried. “You fuck ghosts?” She’d heard of ectoplasmophilia, though it was, to say the least, a rarefied taste—it took a lot of power to give a ghost enough substance to make penetration possible. Most of the sorcerers Marla knew, generally as morally relativistic a group as one could imagine, found the whole idea appalling, akin to bestiality, though personally Marla thought it was more like fucking dead animals. Ghosts couldn’t technically consent, true, but they were only just barely conscious, just a psychic heat-signature left over from someone’s death. Marla didn’t think ectoplasmophilia was particularly immoral. She just thought it was gross.
Finch took a white hand towel from his bedside table and wiped gray goo off his cock. “Shut the door,” he said quietly.
Marla kicked it shut behind her, and it actually closed, though it didn’t exactly hang straight on the frame anymore.
Finch stretched his arms over his head, then cracked his neck. “I wish you’d come in ten minutes later,” he said. “I would’ve been finished, and then I wouldn’t be starting this conversation filled with quite so much rage.”
Marla rolled her eyes. “Like I knew you were going to be shagging Casper. I thought you’d be sitting up here cross-legged in a mystic circle, collecting sexual energy.”
Finch shrugged. “None of that energy is going to waste, I assure you. And you disapprove of my sexual practices, Ms. Mason?”
She wasn’t surprised he knew her name. Since he hadn’t tried to kill her yet, she’d assumed he must have some idea who she was. “I don’t disapprove, exactly, any more than I disapprove of watching someone eat roadkill. To each his own. I just think it’s disgusting.”
Finch nodded thoughtfully, walking to a small closet. Marla tensed, but Finch just took out a thin red robe and put it on, tying the sash carefully. “Every sorcerer, apprentice, and low-class alley wizard in this city knows that if they betray me or hurt me, I’ll bring them back from the dead and rape their ghosts. It’s a surprisingly powerful deterrent. Even though most profess belief that the ghost is just a collection of metaphysical dead skin cells, not in any sense the soul of an actual person, they still don’t want me to get my spirit hands on their ghosts.”