#mus.linnaea

“Nah, yeah... Nah, yeah, I understand… Thanks for the update.”

I abso-fuckin’-lutely do not understand.

Major’s in the fucking hospital? Major? Gabriele was pretty clear about the distinction, so what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Is Major... Back? Did he find a way to get rid of... That other guy? Is what I’m doing right now a complete mistake?

There’s a muffled cry from behind me.

“Oy, shut the fuck up!” I yell at the girl tied up in the backseat of the car.

Okay, I reckon this might look problematic as, but this girl probably did the same thing, if not worse, to my best friend just a few months ago. I wouldn’t have tied her up and boxed her nose if she didn’t bloody deserve it.

“People will be looking for me,” Linnaea whimpers.

“What people? Nobody even knew who you were when I went asking around. Do you even have friends?”

“Fuck you,” she retorts. She’s probably choking on her blood because I can hear the mucus and bubbles warping her voice and it’s fucking gnarly. Linnaea gurgles and I hear her hock the biggest, wettest loogie known to man.

“Oy, cut it out!” I hiss. “This car’s a rental!”

“Fuck you,” she mutters back.

I check the GPS and we’re still thirty minutes away. Not really sure where I’m going, but the guy messaged me to meet him at this address. I think it’s a motel but there was no website, so your guess is as good as mine.

I peek back at Linnaea in the rearview mirror. Her eyes flicker open and closed. She looks like she’s about to pass out.

“Hey,” I call back. “Hey, you better not pass out. You might choke on your blood and I don’t want a corpse in my rental.”

“I’ll die if I want to, fuck you.”

“No, you will not!”

“Killer.” I hear Linnaea hock another loogie onto the floor.

“Oy! You wanna hiding? I told you not to spit in the car!” Fuck! How do I even get blood out of upholstery? JTT probably knows. I’ll have to come up with an explanation for how it got there. Or maybe not, JTT is kind of an airhead.

“Where are you taking me?” Linnaea mumbles from the back seat.

“Uh,” I hesitate. “I don’t know, a motel?”

“What do you mean you don’t know? What’s on the GPS?”

“I don’t know, I just put in the address the guy sent me.”

“What guy?” Linnaea pauses. “Are you… Working with someone?”

“Oy, I told you to shut up!” Fuck, this girl’s sharp.  Shouldn’t have said anything.

“You’re collabing on kidnapping me?”

I sigh. It doesn’t matter if she knows, right? “All I’m gonna say is I’m not the only bloke you pissed off lately.”

I hear Linnaea’s breath quiver and it makes me feel gross for a second, like I’m committing some sort of crime.

“You’ll be fine,” I assure her, even if I don’t know if that’s the case. “He really specifically told me to bring you alive, I reckon he’s not trying to hurt you.”

“Then why did you punch me in the face?”

“Because you bloody deserved it,” I mutter back.

I don’t know if it’s because she’s panicking or because it’s getting too hard to talk with her bloody, mucousy throat, but Linnaea finally shuts up.

The rest of the drive is filled with silence and it’s kind of annoying because I start to wonder again if I’m really doing the right thing. I mean, I have a killer in my backseat. And a fucking necromancer. That’s witch shit. That’s not natural.

And yet I still feel guilty for bringing this girl—who murdered my best friend—to a total stranger that I met out on the beach one time. I mean, how do I know that he’s not actually gonna kill her? Sure, he told me that he was a demigod and seemed to know an awful lot about stuff, but that didn’t mean I could trust him, did it?

Then I remember his offer.

“I can bring your friend back.”

How did he know? I hadn’t told anybody what Major—no, Lucien—said to me on the street that day. How could he have known? And was he telling the truth?

There’s only one way to find out.

“You have arrived at your destination,” my phone chirps. I roll up into the parking lot of a dingy motel. The kind a middle-class accountant might rent a room at to fuck their also-married-and-unhappy accountant coworker. The kind where you’d find an old needle sticking out of the bathroom garbage bin. The kind where someone might go to murder someone else.

I see the dude standing outside one of the rooms at the end of the long building and park right in front of him. He stares right into my headlights and I notice for the first time that his eyes are a deep, unnatural purple.

“If I do this for you, you’ll get Major back, right?” I had asked him on the phone last night.

A full cup of coffee in a bookshop

where Linnaea pored over ancient literature

until the smell of old paper stained her hands.

How long could he remain afloat among the dead?

If only she could offer to suffer in his stead.

A warm cup of coffee in a bookshop

where Linnaea pored over ancient literature

until the smell of old paper stained her hands.

Perhaps the goddess of crossroads and witches

for guidance of manners of demons and liches?

A murky cup of coffee in a bookshop

that Linnaea poured over ancient literature

until the smell of old coffee stained her hands.

It flooded the pages, washed over the tomes

and the words sunk beneath the surface like bones.

An empty cup in a bookshop

where Linnaea wept over ancient literature

until the stain of old coffee set in her jeans.

Time was too precious, more so with each day,