The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy by Trent Jamieson Read Free Book Online Page A

me tell you now, they won’t be gentle.”
    “I’ll get home, and we can sort this out.”
    “No,” she shakes her head stridently, “you don’t want to go home. They’ll be there. I went home, and it was the last mistake I made. I can’t tell you how angry it makes me, to have died this way.”
    I look at her more closely; she’s starting to fade a little. I need to bring her back. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were a Pomp, Lissa? I found you on Facebook last night.”
    “I’m surprised it took you that long,” she says.
    “Well, what with the shooting, and the running, and your appearing and disappearing… I’m a Pomp, not a detective. And then I had a lot to drink.” The hangover’s circling again and, in the busy street, everything’s starting to tilt into the surreal. Lissa gives me a look that could pass as sympathetic but for the edge to it. Her gaze holds me and, stupid as it is here and now, I’m thinking how beautifulshe is. My kind of beautiful—and I’d never really been aware that I’d had a kind of beautiful before I met her. Why now?
    “I’m sorry,” she says, “but death is… confusing. Painful, scary, everything moves so fast. I was shifting from Pomp to Pomp. With the first one I was fine, not that it helped him—knife to the back, horrible. But by the time I got you—and I wasn’t controlling who I ended up with—I was rather…scattered.”
    “But how did you shift from Pomp to Pomp in the first place? That’s not possible is it?”
    “Look, I was desperate, and dead, Steven. Who knows what’s possible?”
    “How long has this been going on?”
    “I know about as much as you. Two days at least. You saw me those first times. I was confused. You grounded me.” She swings her face close to mine. I could just… I mean I want to… Those lips. There’s a charge shooting up my spine. An ache I thought I’d never feel again.
    Enough.
    “That’s my job. You know how it is,” I say, and step away. She doesn’t. How could she? Lissa is so far out of my league. I’m actually feeling a little lousy about not recognizing her from the start, because I
did
know her. Not personally, but enough that I realize that I recognize her. There aren’t that many Pomps working in Australia. “You work in Melbourne.”
    “Um, I
used
to work in Melbourne,” she says slowly. “No one does, now. They’re all dead. There’s a whole Night of the Long Knives thing going on.”
    I must be looking at her blankly because she slows it down even more. “You know, the Night of the Long Knives? Hitler gets an out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new attitude and kills his Brown-shirts’ leaders—”
    I clear my throat. “I know about Nazis. I’ve got the HistoryChannel, watch it all the time. You think this is an inside job? It doesn’t make any sense.”
    Lissa regards me with those striking green eyes of hers, and I’m feeling stupid. “Think about it, Steven.”
    How can I think about anything when she’s looking at me that way?
    “Anything else doesn’t make sense,” she says. “Whoever’s doing this has to understand our communication system, our computers. We don’t outsource any of that.”
    We stop at the corner of George and Ann, waiting for the lights to change. Big trucks and maxi-taxis roar by, dragging curtains of dust and diesel fumes. I don’t hear the phone, just feel it vibrating in my pocket. Number Four, the LCD says. I show it to Lissa. She looks from the little screen to me, and back again.
    “You better answer it.”
    I don’t know what I’m going to hear, don’t know if I want to hear it. I lift the phone to my ear. “Yes?”
    “Steven?”
    Finally, someone I know. “Morrigan, thank Christ.” In the background, above Morrigan’s voice, the One Tree creaks. Morrigan is definitely in Number Four.
    Words pour out of me. “I tried to get into work. The door was locked, wouldn’t shift, and then the door was something else.” I sound like a