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Neither one of them bothered with pleasantries. Mort paid the bill and carried one of the six packs back outside. Tristan usually drank out the back, and today was no different. He led Mort around the rear where upside down crates waited for them between piles of old tires and barrels of whatever.
He sat down, cracked a beer, and took a long draught. Mort sat beside him, saying nothing.
“So. Why are you in town?” Tristan asked the question when he had swallowed.
“I have nowhere else to be.”
“I feel that,” Tristan said. The cold beer was starting to make him feel better. It was weird. He hadn’t planned on being here to see the sunny afternoon, but he was suddenly quite glad he was. Nothing had materially changed. He was still deeply miserable, but the moment of intense crisis had passed, and there was a distraction from the morass of his own internal state.
In the bright light of a desert afternoon, Tristan inspected the face of his new friend. Mort had quite thick dark hair, and the kind of face that was difficult to place in terms of age. He could have been twenty, or perhaps forty. At some angles, he seemed young, but when his dark gaze met Tristan’s, there was an agelessness to it. Actually, there was a complete lessness to it — lessness not being a word until that very moment, when Tristan felt the void he had always felt inside him somehow now regarding him from the outside. It was a more comforting sensation than one might expect. All his life, he had felt a certain distance and difference from the people around him, like he was living in a world not quite the same as them. He did not feel that with this guy. He felt a kinship.
“If you’re looking to crash somewhere for a while, I have a spare room,” he offered. “You’re welcome to use it.”
“Very generous,” Mort intoned. He did have a very resonant, deep voice. He sounded like someone much larger. It was hard to tell what kind of build he really had. The hoodie he wore was oversized. He could be muscular underneath it, or he could be a skinny little guy.
“Alright. What do you want to eat? I’m hungry. The station has chimichangas. They’re not bad. They’re not good, either. But I haven’t cooked or shopped in weeks. So.”
Mort fisted a handful of bills from his roll and handed them over. There had to be at least a couple hundred bucks in Tristan’s hand now.
“What do you want for all this? Are you going to ask me to suck your dick later or something?”
Mort looked back at him with dark eyes, giving nothing away. “That does not seem appropriate, given the circumstances.”
“Then what do you want for this?”
“You said I could stay with you, did you not? I am compensating you for some of your hospitality.”
Mort
Mort watched as Tristan disappeared back around the corner to get them some food. It was so easy to make a human happy. Money for food, money for beer, that’s all Tristan needed for now.
The comment about dick sucking had not slid off him as easily as he had pretended it did. There had been a moment of frisson, a point at which he could have invited such attentions. But he had no intention of buying them.
As soon as Mort was completely alone, he heard a dark whisper on the wind.
“Interfering is against the rules. Quitting is one thing, but you know this is going to bring enforcement down on you. Your job is to conduct souls, not save them. Get up and leave now, before you get the pair of you into deep trouble.”
“Leave me alone, Anubis,” Mort hissed back. “I know what I am doing.”
He heard Anubis chuckle, fainter now.
“You never know what you are doing.”
2
Tristan stepped back through the front door of his home, walking past the rope still hanging with a half-noose in it from the porch rafter. He was chewing on his second chimichanga, and feeling something like normal, which for him was extraordinary.
It had been too long since he went for a walk with someone and just talked. Mort didn’t say a lot, but he was a very good listener. Tristan had told him everything, about how he fucked up his life, and how his mama had gotten sick and left him the house, and how now he didn’t have enough money to pay for it because he kept being fired from jobs, and there weren’t that many jobs in Solitude anyway.
“So anyway, they said if they ever saw me again, they’d…”
He stopped talking abruptly.
There was a demon at the kitchen table.
A red creature slowly dripped something like sulphur and lava onto the floorboards, but somehow didn’t catch them alight. It locked eyes with him and leered, a sharp, fanged smile. Sometimes Tristan mistook people for demons, but this wasn’t human. It was too angular and too hungry. It smelled like rotten eggs, instantly putting him off his food.
