Category: serial fiction

an episodic Vivian Locke occult noir

Sunny Day Parasol Co.

Epilogue

This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

The Meridian Club had been a monument to high-stakes vice; now, it was just an open wound catching the city’s freezing rain. Red and blue police lights pulsed through the ruptured doorway, casting long, fractured shadows across the pulverized baccarat tables and the sea of abandoned chips.

In the dead center of the devastation, Cross stood up from the gray ash and dusted off his suit.

an episodic Vivian Locke occult noir

Sunny Day Parasol Co.

Case File #15: Absolute Zero

This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

Kogan’s lead ampoule shattered under my bandaged knuckles. The purified salt and cold iron filings scattered across the green felt, but the dead quicksilver didn’t just spill… It leapt. It shot from the broken glass like a liquid soul, violently drawn to the impossible shape of the Black Sulfur token.

It hit the velvet exactly as Cross’s rotting entropy and Gallow’s crushing stasis slammed into the table.

The ignition didn’t produce a fireball. It produced an execution.

an episodic Vivian Locke occult noir

Sunny Day Parasol Co.

Case File #14: Lead Comes to Dinner

This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

Cross’s amused smile vanished, replaced by a look of ancient, profound annoyance.

I sat dead still in the crushing quiet, my breath shallow and held tight. The dull, rhythmic ache from the deep cuts on my left hand from the shattered neon glass was a sharp, ordinary pain, the only thing anchoring me against the impossible physics tearing the air apart. My bandaged fingers held steady over the lead ampoule, caught in the dead center of a hurricane where absolute stasis was locked in a brutal collision with pure, corrosive entropy.

an episodic Vivian Locke occult noir

Sunny Day Parasol Co.

Case File #13: Quicksilver

This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

“I’ll pass on the gin,” I said, keeping my posture relaxed but ensuring my right hand rested casually near the slit in the midnight blue silk. “It dulls the reflexes, and I prefer to keep my head clear when I’m collecting a fee.”

Cross’s smile didn’t waver. He leaned back, his tailored suit seeming to absorb the harsh glare of the chandelier above us.

“Fair enough. Though I notice you are traveling remarkably light for a retrieval job, Miss Locke. Tell me you didn’t leave my property sitting in the back of that rented hack you took from the Brass Canary. It would be a terrible shame to lose our investment to a common cab driver.”

“I wouldn’t insult either of us by being careless,” I said. My left hand, wrapped tight in fresh white gauze, went to the velvet clutch resting in my lap. My burnt fingers brushed the velvet, feeling the unnatural, freezing weight of Kogan’s ward humming against the escrow token.

an episodic Vivian Locke occult noir

Sunny Day Parasol Co.

Case File #12: The Devil’s Doorway

This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

The scalding water of the club’s cast-iron shower felt like an exorcism. I stood under the sputtering spray until the hot water tank coughed its last, watching the black, sulfurous grime of the past eighteen hours… Had it only been eighteen hours? …swirl down the drain like a broken promise.

I stepped out into the humid, cramped bathroom and dried off with one of the thick, luxurious towels The Canary kept around — one of several small luxuries afforded the employees who worked the club. I winced, tracing the deep, clean glass cuts across my left hand, then carefully redid the bandages. A girl gets used to the sight of her own blood in this city.

Margot had left a dress hanging on the door. Midnight blue silk, the kind that whispered promises. It was cut on the bias to cling like a second, dangerous skin, but with a slit high enough to allow a full, unimpeded draw from a thigh holster. I strapped the heavy snub-nose to my leg, the cold steel a comforting anchor against the soft fabric, and slipped the silk over my head.

A sharp knock rattled the frosted glass of the door.

an episodic Vivian Locke occult noir

Sunny Day Parasol Co.

Case File #11: A Dress to Catch

This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

I carefully wrapped the impossible token back into the velvet and shoved it deep into my coat pocket. The brimstone receded, swallowed by the scent of old fryer grease.

Leviathan’s Cross was the mark of the Meridian Club. They wouldn’t let a banged-up, worn-out gumshoe like me past the bouncers at the door of that upscale joint in a hundred years, let alone to the back room where I could suss out which of the fat cats was my likely Johnson and shake them down.

an episodic Vivian Locke occult noir

Sunny Day Parasol Co.

Case File #10: Brimstone

This is a serialized story. Start with Case File #1 here.

The flat edge of my hook pick slid into the narrow crack. I braced my knee against the hull’s sickening rock, the whole procedure a grim reenactment of the dentist who’d torn a wisdom tooth from my jaw last year. The relief at the time, when it finally came, was probably the whiskey talking. It sure as hell hadn’t been in the dentist’s technique. My ribs ached for days afterward.

The square panel popped loose with a wet, suctioned thwack, spitting out a blast of freezing, diesel-slicked air. It hit me in the face like a fistful of brass knuckles, carrying the rotten-egg stench of the river water sloshing just beneath the deck.

I plunged my good right hand into the darkness, steeling myself for the shock of freezing bilge. My fingers didn’t find water; they found cold, dry iron.