“You say something, boss man?” Martinez managed to speak again, this time without an accompanying crumb shower, though the yawn at the early morning hour ruined the effort.

“Nothing that need worry you,” he replied. Through dozens of assistants across the years he’d learned that nice or curt, it never mattered. What mattered was what their brains could handle. After that prerequisite, his manners were irrelevant. And abrasiveness was so much easier. So much more the natural human state. With everything else he fought with in his life, being nice to people when he didn’t need to be…

The other man shrugged the snappish response away easily.

… point.

Martinez shoveled in the last of the donut and pulled out a liter of Mountain Dew he’d somehow managed to fit into a pocket of his oversized, thread-bare coat. He started to untwist the cap before he spoke again. “Man, what the hell. Dude’s like a human stick of butter.”

Early, even for you, Martinez… been asleep yet?

“So, what we got here, boss man? Spectral phantasm? Werecreature?”

Adrian glanced toward one end of the tunnel and then the other, noting the uniformed officers keeping anyone from entering. Lips sardonically stretched. Facing away, as ever, well out of earshot. They can head into the squalor of Cabrini-Green and face the worst horrors that humans can inflict on each other, yet they flinch like schoolgirls watching their first horror film whenever I walk by. They use me to get what they need when it comes to the darkness and the places they won’t tread, but they won’t even look me in the eye. Won’t even shake my hand. But who am I to complain? I use them equally as well. Mutual parasitic whores. The image swelled the bitter smile further.

“Maybe it’s an undead,” Martinez continued yammering. Always yammering. “I keep asking, and you’re never telling. But yeah, could be undead. That’d be cool. Wait, wait,” Martinez said, his mangy beard quivering with excitement, glasses above his blotchy cheeks almost fogging with exhalations. “An unbound spirit?” he softly breathed, as if it were a holy prayer over rosaries at a pew on Sunday.

Adrian shook his head slowly. Where in the world did Martinez obtain such information? He knew to the word exactly what he said around his assistants, especially once they’d been around long enough for him to start mentally referring to them by their names (though he never deigned to voice them). And something as dangerous as an unbound spirit? Never. “Too many movies,” he finally said.

“Huh,” Martinez responded, eyes blinking as he mentally stumbled to a halt, his childish glee fading under confusion.

“Too many movies. Such creatures do not exist.”

A knowing look replaced confusion, a child convinced he’d caught an adult in a lie. “Right. Sure. What ever you say, boss man.” He took another giant swig of his teeth-killing sugar water and then waved the bottle like a laser pointer, his voice a cable infomercial salesman at three in the morning, deep into the hundreds. “But I’m looking at a corpse that died in no human way. Explain it.”

Adrian stood perfectly still, his smooth, angular face a pale slate statue to house his dual-colored eyes. Martinez ’ arrogant smile slowly faded, and he gulped several times under Adrian ’s piercing blue/brown gaze before his eyes fell to the floor.

“I explain to no one,” Adrian spoke, voice never wavering off its even keel-all the more powerful.

“Didn’t mean anything by it, boss man. Just, well, something killed this guy. And it ain’t normal.” The last almost a mumble.

Yes, you did. But he didn’t respond, knowing that despite his distaste, he needed the repugnant man. He reached inside his posh coat. Pulling out a silver-threaded pouch, he unwound the drawstrings and dipped fingers into the hideously expensive rare metallic dust mixture. With practiced ease he rewound the cords one handed and slipped the pouch away. He then stretched out his hand and waggled his fingers over the body with ludicrously over-the-top showmanship that almost brought pink to his ears despite the years (why, for the love of all that is holy, why?!) until he caught Martinez ’ eye. Then he flicked the sparkling dust into the air; he ignored the gleeful, anticipatory look that swept the other man’s face.

Adrian cleared his voice to cement his hold on his audience of one; he struggled to concentrate. Such moments always invoked childhood memories like incantations to raise the unwanted corpses of the long dead. Of make-believe games with his little sister when they wished to keep their parents ignorant of their talks even when in their presence and the made-up language that became so much more; of hide-and-seek in the back woods when he lost his mind for some time, his spark of talent found and the spirit world revealed; endless time spent honing his craft by trial and error, and all the lonely, desperate years to find someone, anyone, like him. He fought to keep a darkly sarcastic laugh from tearing free at the ludicrousness of it all. He pulled his thoughts back to the moment, all too aware of the dangers of letting his concentration slip. He spoke forcefully, the alien tongue rolling easily off his, a guttural snarl that clawed at the walls and dimmed the harsh electronic lighting. The glittering dust pulsed as though in sympathetic vibration to a monstrous, unheard heartbeat that filled the universe. Susurrations of unfelt wind wafting down the long subway corridor, twisting the dust into a vortex of microstars squeezed into a miniature black hole. He clenched his fist and barked out the final words, the vocal sounds like claws tearing up out of his throat into existence. Abruptly the dust strobed in a pyrotechnic flash of unearthly fury that threatened to etch their shadows into the tiled walls like Nagasaki victims from that long ago nuclear blast: hell’s own flashbulb.

In that instant time ground to a stop as the footprint from the astral plane lay revealed to his trained senses. The last several days lay juxtaposed in a mind-numbing snarl, like thousands of photos developed onto the same film stock. As each living entity moved through the mundane world, they left a trail, a smear of their own life essence. An indelible mark on the underpinnings of existence and the realm of spirits and so much more: the astral plane. While it faded with time, he’d taught himself to read such signatures, more pure and sure than any biometrics of fingerprints, eye-scans and DNA samples. He concentrated, quickly stripping away layer after layer of the mundane masses moving about their inconsequential lives, completely unaware of the world beyond their own. The sheer volume took some time, but he knew it was all subjective; hours might pass in the astral plane, and yet it was all just an eyeblink.

He abruptly found the layers for when the man appeared. Late last night, not a soul in the tunnel- strange, for a Saturday-hands deep in coat pockets against the cold as he climbed down from the Red line stop and began to make his way toward the Blue line. Features tired but resolute, marching toward a destination only he could know. If the man still lived, Adrian might expend more energy-even if only Martinez were present, the energy drain was not significant-and follow the trail to his living essence, perhaps tweezing out additional details of feelings and thoughts. But the trail ended messily in a hazy, indistinct glob, like a badly fuzzed image on those late-night cop shows Martinez loved to watch, where the producers only haphazardly paid lip service to a citizen’s right to privacy.

A frown pulled at his features. Deaths-even non-mundane deaths-always left a clean break as the life energy evaporated back into the astral plane, like a rope smoothly cut. And in such deaths a multitude of details could be found. Almost too easy for Adrian and his skills. But this? This was altogether different. No details at all, just an… opacity… almost as though… no, that could not be possible.