About Nate Scott – a fantasy novella by Ruthanne Reid

SOME SECRETS SHOULD STAY BURIED.

CHAPTER ONE: LOVELY EYES TOO BRIGHT

He’s here? What the fuck? 

“Night?” says Nate Scott, my only competition in this town, a rich puzzle I have yet to figure out, and the last person I expected to find on this stakeout.

A stupid little-kid part of me wants to go, That’s my name, don’t wear it out, but I am a grown-ass man. “Fuck off, Scott.” Well. That was more grown-up.

He makes that face he always does around me: aggressively neutral, like he’s hiding whatever he feels so hard that it’s turned the inside of his head of ice. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

I flip him the bird. 

“Very helpful.” He glances right.

There’s the window. The only window positioned just right to see in the asshole’s apartment. Every other window is covered, guarded, watched by cameras and analyzed by AI.

I got in here because my AI is better. Nobody can beat Cassilda. I don’t know how the hell Scott did it. “How did you get in here, anyway?”

The pretty bastard just smiles. “Trade secret.” And he winks.

That felt weirdly flirty, which seems highly unlikely, so I give him the old eye-roll. “Fine. Keep your secrets, and watch from somewhere else.”

“That shouldn’t be necessary. In the spirit of good sportsmanship, let’s look together,” he says, and pulls out a little mother-of-pearl case with nano lenses, which is a pretty big concession, and I’m mad about it.

Our vision has to be natural in this biz, whether our eyes are magical or not. Nano eye-enhancement and gene alterations are illegal for run-of-the-mill citizens, which makes portables like these are fucking valuable. 

And rare.

And expensive. Rich bastard, is Nate Scott. I give him my best hard-case look. “I’m working for Chastity.” Which is a big concession, too, but also part of my new and hastily created plan to make him understand what a bad idea this is.

Scott understandably winces. “Ah.”

“Yeah. Ah.”

“Our employers are at odds, aren’t they?”

“Cousin? Brother?”

There go the eyebrows: picture-perfect surprise, delivery guaranteed. “You know this family well, I take it?”

“Yeah. Went to school with half of them, which is why I know she’s full of shit. Your turn.”

“The aunt.” He opens the case and takes out a rectangular lens, paper-thin and precious, then offers it to me again.

“Miriam? What’s her stake in this?”

“I suspect the same as yours.”

This fucking family. “Hidden will, mysteriously giving her all the power instead of anyone else, absolutely what poor Chad really intended when he exited so messily from this mortal coil?”

His lips twitch. “Got it in one.”

Damn it. I was already hesitant to take this case, and now it’s just getting more complicated. “If this is family, who needs enemies?”

Scott sort of snorts. A cut-off laugh. Point to me. 

He glances back at me, standing beside that lone window. “Let’s work together. I want your thoughts on this mess. I’ll share anything I have. This one’s big enough to use the extra hand.”

I glance at him. “I’m not even sure why I took the case. You think it’s bigger than it seems?”

“I have an instinct for this kind of thing.” He looks at me. “I don’t know what’s happening, exactly, but this isn’t about secret wills.”

Honestly… I think he’s right. The Waites are nut-jobs, notoriously, and Chad did kind of explode on their front lawn.

The cops swore was a weird suicide. Chadwick left a note and everything. My gut say it’s hinky. So does Scott’s. I’ll bet my money on his pony any day.

I will also pretend real hard I never thought that phrasing. “Is that why you took the case?”

“No.” He turns away, and now he sounds a little mad. “I don’t know why I took it, either.”

It does seem awful pedestrian for him. The Waites are rich, but Scott gets clientele with entire clothing lines in their name. “Heh. What if the whole family did it? Went out and hired a shit-ton of Kin detectives, and there’s a crew of us from out of town, staffing every window and watching Arcibus through binoculars.”

He laughs. “That sounds like a nightmare.”

“A circus, at least. You sure you want to work together?”

“I’m sure. This is a weird circumstance, Night.”

Fair enough. “I see the reasoning in it. Okay, here’s the deal, Scott: you screw me over, and I’ll never work with you again.”

He smiles again—got a whole repertoire of those things, and I’m gonna have to take notes—and says, “Let’s build the bridge, then, one stone at a time. It’s a pleasure working with you.”

“You haven’t done it yet. Also, I don’t know the last time they used stones to build bridges.”

He laughs lightly and holds out the lens.

This is bizarre. Either he actually likes me and my crappy humor, or he’s working the room. Whichever it is, I’m gonna work his toys. “Deal.” I take the lens. Cassilda?

You’re good to go, boss, she says, having already analyzed the thing I’m about to hold up to my fucking eye. 

Good. It won’t stab me or spell me or something weird, then. Thanks, doll. I look through. Yeah, Scott buys the best. It’s perfect magnification and flawlessly synced, tracking electrical signals from my brain through my optic nerve to let me look where I want and when. This is so much better than binoculars. Oh, and what a view I have… “There’s the bastard.”

Arcibus Waite, the lens informs me in polite white text, but I already knew. More gray than brown now, his blue eyes bright and accusing, he’s wearing a bathrobe and possibly nothing else. 

He looks human, too. Believe me when I say he is not.

We Kin are a mixed bag. We look human most of the time, but we’re all human with something else, enough generations in that we’re genetically stable and (usually) mentally okay. Hell, we’re our own People and everything, on the Great Wheel of the Mythos, but just like any group of sapient beings, there’s folks you can trust and folks you can’t. The Waites are proof of that.

The Waites claim to be an old Kin family, fucking ancient, and also claim to be servants of some utterly unknown god who’s never shown up or so much as left a holy book with new morals. Yeah. They’re a wee cult unto themselves, and they’re really close, thick as thieves, but also horrifically abusive. The shouting in that home is unreal—which doesn’t excuse anything, but at least might explain why Chastity is such a bitch. 

Her bullying… well. I don’t think about it much, and that’s for everybody’s safety. The Waites are awful. Bad enough to invite a ten-year-old kid to dinner just to make him stand so they can laugh at how poor he is, without prospects. It was not fun going to school with these people, but at least I only accepted their invitation to horrible dinner a couple of times.

I was ten. I was lonely. I had no family. What do you want?

I knew the guy who died. Stubborn, evil old man, was Chadwick Waite, the kind who’d see a cat run over and laugh about it for weeks, but he was fully devoted to his family. He’d do anything for them. A suicide spell seems so unlikely.

He still got super dead, though the cops insist it was not murder.

Anyway, it’s Waites against the world, ladies and gentlemen, everybody all-in—which is why when the patriarch Chadwick died four days ago and sixteen fucking wills appeared along with rumors of the “real one” remaining unfound, things got a little wild.

The wills are already weird because nobody uses fucking paper anymore. It’s too expensive. The Waites apparently looked at that price tag and said, hold my beer. Ah, but then it got weirder! 

See, Chad blew up. 

He used some kind of kill-the-caster suicide spell, laid out in the note he left, but what matters here is that stuck to his hand, torn and bloody, was the corner of yet another will. It was part of a sentence from page twenty-six of this damned document.

The sentence on that fragment was almost the same as the sixteen contradictory wills all on file—which, by the way, the old bastard somehow notarized on the same day and same hour and same minute, just to make my life hard. Those sixteen wills each gave something different to each of the kids, but all had one thing in common: Arcibus, Chadwick’s brother, is in charge of everything. Executor. Land owner. Got the manor, the stocks, the country club, all of it.

The scrap in Chad’s hand said shall not be granted. In every other version, it says, shall be granted. That little “not” would cut Arcibus out. That’s enough to put everything in doubt. 

I got hired by Chastity, the eldest daughter, to try to find the “real” will. The job would all just be ordinary gumshoe work except for the patriarch exploding real good, and her apparent lack of care.

Those two were close when she was a kid. I remember that. They really loved each other, but she doesn’t seem broken up at all. I guess everybody grieves differently. Which I choose to think instead of she doesn’t care her dad is dead.

That’s the thing, you know? I take cases that actually affect people. Missing kids, spouses stealing money, that kind of thing. This… I dunno. This is just rich people getting more rich, and I don’t know why I said yes.

Still, I did say it, and I will get to the bottom of it. I dunno if I’ll find the new will, but someone knows something, and with enough of those somethings, I can put the truth together. Just my luck Scott’s here doing the same thing. Maybe we’re more alike than I thought.

“What’d ya think of their ancestral claims?” I murmur as I watch Arcibus, zooming in to see what he’s looking at—an old-ass actual printed book, paper gone yellow, print faded. As he turns the page, flakes from the cover drift to his desk like literary dandruff.

Crazy. I’d have that thing behind glass, and only touch it with gloves. What’s he doing?

“I found them concerning,” he murmurs back, which is a good response. “They’re not a safe thing to claim.”

“Far as I know, no god’s confirmed it, anyway.”

Scott scoffs. “Confirmed it? Gods aren’t in the business of confirming anything except when they want something.”

Little bitterness there, Scott? Interesting. “Eh. You’re probably right. Not that I’ve ever met one.”

“I have.”

I glance at him.

Scott keeps watching Arcibus.

“Really?”

“It’s not that impressive,” he murmurs. “I had a… I met Surtr. It’s complicated, and led to nothing, for what that’s worth.”

Surtr! Big guy. Giant. Makes fire or ice babies, if the rumors are correct. “Damn. That’s a heavy hitter, though.”

He just shrugs.

I’m no mind-reader, but I think there’s… regret? Embarrassment? Something. I want to dig in—gotta know, you know? But if I did that, I’d be stepping over an unspoken boundary. So I hold back for now, and point at Arcibus. “What’s he reading, anyway?”

“The King in Yellow,” Scott says. “I saw the cover as he opened it.”

“Huh. Really? That’s fucking weird,” I say, peering closer. 

Scott looks at me. “Why?”

“Because that family only reads ‘true’ texts with real magic. It’s a whole thing. No Hardy Boys for these people.”

“No…”

“Hardy… uh. Book series for little boys from centuries ago. Just boys solving crimes, having adventures. Would serve them way better than what they usually read.”

He gets a funny little smile. It’s so pleased; it’s so satisfied, the kind of look you might see on the face of a man who’s been digging for treasure and finally found some. “Another one of your old-fashioned facts?”

I gesture at myself. “I’m full of them, pal.”

He laughs softly, but it fades as he looks back at Arcibus. 

I zoom in.

… make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile send my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o’clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Silvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: “To think that this also is a little ward of God!”

I don’t know why that made me shudder. I mean… it’s nothing. “Anyway, yeah, I read that book.”

“Did you, now? What’s it about?”

“I don’t really remember? I was a kid. Definitely pre-teen. To my memory, it was… vague. Sort of cosmic horror before the genre existed, you know? But barely.”

“Barely.” He is amused.

(Arcibus turns that one page back and forth, back and forth… what’s he looking for?)

“Yeah. I don’t think we ever saw the King in Yellow. There was a guy sure he was emperor of America and went nuts; there was like… a pool that turned people into statues? A few other spooky tales. Rotting guys, death. Tragedy. Then it all turned into poems and love stories, and I really lost interest.”

Scott laughs. “Not much of a romantic?”

“Not when it’s insipid.” Arcibus turns that page back and forth, back and forth. “Anyway, it only matters because Lovecraft read some, and used a bunch of passages, developing the lore further. Then all the folks who came after him did the same, and boom, a literary masterpiece. I mean. We both know what was really going on there.”

“Cultural osmosis,” he says. “And sometimes, real gods sneaking things in.”

Which is true. Cthulhu’s real. Fortunately not in our dimension and deeply misunderstood. “Yep.”

“That’s a fair amount of information from a book you read decades ago.”

“Well, I wanted it to be something it wasn’t, so I was mad at it.” I laugh softly. “Emotion attached to something usually makes it easier to remember.”

“That is true.” He frowns, peering through the lenses. “Something on those pages is holding his attention. I can’t figure out what it is.”

Page back. Page forward. Page back. Page forward.

Scott looks at me, completely deadpan. “I think he might be a little weird.”

It’s my turn to laugh quietly, sort of a huff. “Didn’t know you could be funny, Scott.”

So fucking deadpan, those pretty eyes not even widening. “Only for you, Night.”

“Yeah, yeah, save it for someone who cares.”

He winks, but that grin fades damn fast. “Blood,” he says quietly.

I zoom in. A single thumbprint on one page. “That wasn’t there a second ago. He cut himself?”

“I don’t know.” 

We’re both peering. “It looks like blood. Might not be, too. Need a sample before I can say for sure.”

“You’re right,” he says. “We need to get in there.”

There’s urgency in his tone. “I mean, we both need to anyway, but he’s home right now. Why?”

“A feeling.”

I get those, too. Kind of a necessity in this line of work. “Okay. You got a plan to do it? Because if you do, I got errands I wouldn’t mind doing in there.” 

“Trade secret,” he says, which is yes, but, and I have to assume that means I’m on my own to get inside. Fine. Cassilda and I can pull it off.

Old Arcibus is still flipping that page back and forth, back and forth. There are more prints on that book now, slowly soaking in like he’s watering them, and the pads of his fingers are red. Something fucked up is happening here. “Yeah, he’s not okay. Do we call it in?”

Scott bares his teeth—a surprisingly feral look, and hot damn it works on him. “I don’t know.”

“Me, nei—”

Arcibus stands, pulls out a long, thin thing knife like a letter opener, and stabs himself in the throat.

Arterial spray. He stands there, expressionless, while it spurts all over his damn desk.

“What the fuck! Cassilda, emergency!”

On it, boss. Message sent: mark has self-harmed, is bleeding out.

Good girl. “We gotta—“

Scott looks at me. “Trade secret.” And the motherfucker disappears. Sinks into the floor like it’s a hole, vanishes before my fucking eyes (which he gazes into the whole ride down like he really wants me to watch him doing this).

Motherfucker! I look through the lens again. 

Scott’s there, in the room. Behind Arcibus. Reaching for the knife.

How in hell did he do that? Okay. I came here hoping to learn something, and I sure did. I can roll with it. 

I tear downstairs, out of the building, not trying to avoid cameras or AI on this run because my location before the wounding is gonna be real damn important for innocence’s sake. Across the street, startling robot traffic. Through the door, ignoring the porter’s barbaric yawp, past the circular desk where worthless security hangs out to hit on employees (a circumstance I was gonna use to get in later, but that’s out of the picture now), and I shout at them, “Send the ambulance to Waite’s apartment!” and I hit the stairs.

Being Kin has its benefits. No human could comfortable run up twenty-three floors and barely be out of breath, but I can. I’m tearing down the hall (and I hear shouts behind me and sirens outside, all of which is good), and to his door.

Locked? Ain’t fucking around with this today. Bam, a bit of firepower, a little hint of the heat that rests in me, and the door flies open, hinges smoking and twisted.

Arcibus is on the floor, Scott kneeling over him to apply pressure that hopefully won’t stop the ass from breathing. “Hide the book.”

Nothing like possibly incriminating myself, but he’s got blood to deal with and I got sticky fingers. Book closed, quick spell to seal it from being sniffed out or staining me or anything else, and I stick it in Arcibus’ overstuffed shelf where it blends right in.

None too soon, because that’s when emergency services arrive. 

By emergency services, of course, I mean bots. When the People of the Sun stepped in to fix our fuckups and make the planet habitable again, they made a few suggestions that, happily, my government has followed. One of those? Keep the humans in the hospitals, and the robots in the streets.

They can get to an emergency way faster than anybody (except Scott, apparently, and we will be having words). The Fey got involved in programming our emergency services because ours were all in shreds, and the result is a thing of beauty. They even figured out how to design these bots so we’d trust them. Too small, and we don’t think they can help. Too large, and we’re afraid. Instead, they’re sort of dog-like with extra arms, friendly, familiar.

The Small Language Models fixed the rest of the problem. Their AIs don’t try to do everything; they’re focused on one purpose, making them efficient, unbiased, and very well-informed. 

I love the past, but I am damned glad I didn’t live through that whole Large Language Model thing, centuries ago. It really fucked the Ever-Dying over as a society. All those data centers, hogging water and everyone’s private lives, polluting everything—yeah, they got switched off and dismantled, and I can only be glad I wasn’t around to deal with all of that.

Anyway. 

Scott got here in time. Arcibus isn’t dead. At least not physically. He’s dazed as fuck, or pretending to be, and as they give him a transfusion and seal up his wound, he doesn’t respond in any way. No reply. No acknowledgement of anyone speaking to him. According to Scott, he was utterly docile and just… lay down when tugged in that direction. Fuck.

Between that and Chadwick blowing up, the bots make the reasonable decision he can’t be left alone or he might do it again, so they’re gonna take him down to Central hospital.

“Obviously, we still haven’t found the will,” says Scott. “We certainly didn’t expect Mister Waite to self-harm in this moment, but I’m deeply glad we were watching when he did.”

“We’ll need your recordings,” says the robot theoretically in charge.

“Of course. We can transfer them now.”

So obviously, his is scrubbed and safe to go on record already. Only problem is we didn’t have a chance to collude on what parts are scrubbed and what parts remain.

Evidence like this is tricky nowadays. Sure, it’s fucking illegal to fake evidence, making up shit that didn’t happen, but the law’s murky about editing evidence. Say that’s illegal, and loads of personal information gets shared that has nothing to do with the issue at hand. I think back; yeah, if they prefer a request of full discovery, I’ll be fine. Just embarrassed. Cassilda, you got it?

All discussions of a more personal nature are removed. The recording is safe to transfer.

Well. Either Scott and I are on the same page here or we’re not, but there’s no way to know until they say we’re good to go, or “suggest” we come down to the station. Thanks, doll.

Arcibus still hasn’t spoken or responded to anything. His pupils don’t even dilate anymore. I got some real worries about that. 

“You’re free to go,” says the bot, and just like that, we’re out on the street.

We stand there, looking about as different as two guys can—me in my centuries-out-of-date (but still fabulous) trench and hat, him in a white, tailored cloak and suit he could take on the catwalk and get applause. 

Are we done working together? “Well, this was a shit-show,” I say.

“Want to split lunch?” says Scott like we’re buddies.

I would say no because I got work to do, except he’s got a little trick I could use. I need to get back in Arcibus’ place. I need to get that book, and I need to search everything… and so does he. “Sure. Anything affordable over here?”

“Hell if I know,” he says so deadpan, and I don’t even know why it’s funny, but it is.

Nothing to see here. Just two funny guys, looking for lunch and not at all planning a B&E in a blood-sprayed apartment. No problem.

Related Novella: The Almost-Wedding of John Barron Grey

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