Free Poison Sleep by T. A. Pratt Page A

There
was
—chief sorcerer and protector of the city—but it was a little early to get into all that with Ted. “I need somebody to help me deal with the mundane shit, drive me around, keep things organized, make calls, etc. You can crash at the office for a couple of days, then we’ll get you set up in an apartment in the building where I live. You can stay right next door to me, I just need to get some of the junk cleaned out of the rooms. It’s not fancy, but it’s better accommodations than Dutch Mulligan’s grate. Your salary won’t be huge—what I gave you today, every week or so—but your housing will be taken care of.”
    “What about time off?”
    Marla stared at him. He glanced away from the road at her, then back to the road, then back at her. “What?” he said.
    “Haven’t you had enough time off lately, Ted? If you need a few hours here and there to deal with personal shit, yeah, we can talk about it. I’m not inflexible. But this isn’t a 9-to-5 job. It’s an
all the time
job. I sleep about four hours a day. I can teach you some techniques so you can get by on that little sleep, too. You’ll need it. If you don’t like the gig, you can go back to your life of leisure.”
    “I’ll give it a try,” Ted said, though whether he was thinking of the wad of cash in his pocket or the cold months of winter that still stretched ahead, Marla wasn’t sure.
    “I don’t mean to be harsh,” Marla said. “But I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings. I need you to
lighten
my load, not complicate things.”
    “Is there any possibility for, ah, advancement in this position?”
    You’re the personal assistant for the most powerful sorcerer in Felport. How much more advanced do you
want
to get?
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll see how you handle this. If you last a month, we can think about your future.”
    Ted parked on the curb in front of Langford’s lab, a low, unassuming building that blended in nicely with the various doctors’ offices on the same street. Langford was a doctor, too, sort of.
    Marla buzzed the door, and it clicked open. She was surprised—Langford had a bunch of insects with their senses jacked into his own consciousness that he used for surveillance, but Marla had expected the cold to keep the bugs inside. Then she noticed the glass lens set in the wall. An ordinary camera. Trust Langford to build in redundancies. She went in, followed by Ted, who carried the shoebox holding Genevieve Kelley’s effects.
    The inside of the building was one large, cluttered room, all the interior walls knocked down. Metal shelves stood on all sides, and various long workbenches and lab tables were arrayed at seemingly random intervals throughout the room. The back wall was covered in stacked cages, from Chihuahua-sized to one that could have held a couple of mountain gorillas, though all but one were empty. A yellow-eyed coyote paced the length of the cage, and Marla wondered if it was a skinchanger or just an ordinary animal. Langford sat at a stool before a workbench scattered with shiny metal components, soldering something and humming to himself. He might have been sitting that way for hours. He liked to work, and as far as Marla could tell, he didn’t like doing much else. He was a weird guy, with a tendency to stare at people like he was thinking about dissecting them, but he was fast and effective, and Marla counted on him. He was probably as powerful as any of the city’s most prominent sorcerers, but as far as she knew his interests didn’t run toward city management, big business, or organized crime, so he didn’t take a hand in governing.
    “That’s not Rondeau,” Langford said, not looking up. “New apprentice?”
    “He’s Ted, my personal assistant,” Marla said. “Listen, I need a rush job.”
    “You always need a rush job,” Langford said. “Your personal assistant knows not to
touch
anything, right? I know Rondeau had to learn that the hard