Chapter Nine: Partner, Pawn & Pupil
"Mister Warner, your four o'clock is here," Vince's assistant said over the speaker.
Vince sighed. He looked between the three of us, three teenage girls, one of them claiming to be his cousin. Three girls who'd just used some pretty advanced magic to kill… dispel… whatever we'd just done to Dr. Heirophant, the Gangling Man. He sighed again and pressed the intercom button.
"See if Ms. Ross can meet with them. I've got some things to deal with in here."
Damn straight he did. Cousin Vince righted an upturned chair, had us sit down, and spilled the beans.
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Vince didn't know Dr. Heirophant well, having only met with him twice - he gathered the man, if he was a man, was pretty high up in the establishment, if it was an establishment. But he'd met with some of the other Gangling Men (or 'pale men', as most people called them) before. The first time was in the moments after his successful criminal defense of his cousin, Martin Warner, a man wrongly-accused of a very serious crime. The two of them were still in the state building, jubilant and shaking hands right outside of the courtroom - Martin had just invited him to a party - when Vince got a message from Chuck Garcia at work:
--Major VIP client needs representation ASAP. Willing to give double billing hours, but must be done NOW.
"Shit... I'll catch up with you later, Martin. An urgent matter with a VIP client's come up and I need to put in a few hours to get this thing on ice. Have a toast to me, yeah?"
Vince proceeded to the Kovacs & Garcia law firm, in which he was an associate and a rapidly-rising star. Of course he wanted to celebrate with Martin - it was a big win, and it would likely get Vince some media coverage (some positive and some negative, but all of that sort of publicity was good publicity)… but if Vince wanted to be a big shot, he had to act like a big shot, and that meant taking clients at a moment's notice. He went right up to Chuck Garcia's big office on the 13th floor, where he found Chuck with Fran Kovacs, the other partner in the firm, and two very odd men. He assumed they were cult members of some stripe, very pale and dark clad with Mennonite-looking hats.
"Oh, good! Gentlemen, this is Vincent Warner, probably… definitely our best trial lawyer, and one of the best in the country," Fran said. Sharp-eyed and close to sixty, she was the senior partner of the firm and she knew exactly how to tug at a client's purse strings.
"You are Warner," the shorter of the two said. "Warner the Silver-Tongued?"
"Um… just Vincent," Vince said. "Vince if you like. Vince Warner."
They shook hands - the pale man's hands were cool and dry, like he'd expect the hands of a reptile to be. The man's eyes were black and beady, the whites barely visible. It was incredibly off-putting… but they were clients, well-paying clients, and it was his job to please clients. Especially the well-paying sort.
"What can this silver-tongued lawyer do for you gentlemen?" he chuckled.
And they told him. Or, rather, they showed him, conjuring a contract - seemingly out of thin air - with the shorter man pulling a bone-white needle out of his skin. Vince glanced at the contract… and it was totally non-enforceable. Some sort of blood-pact, whatever the fuck that was. When he told the men that 'blood pacts' were not legally binding, they both laughed - strange, shrill ululations that somehow raised their creepiness factor.
"Perhaps not legally-enforceable," the man said. "That is your area. That is why we want you - you will do a thing for us, and we will do a thing for you. This is how our sort of contract works."
"In that case, what are you offering me?" Vince asked.
"With the amount of business these men are offering to bring in, this is too big an offer to refuse," Chuck Garcia said. Fifty and happy and fat, Chuck was renowned for turning clients down if he didn't find a client's business interesting… so these two strange men must have had a compelling fucking case load. "You do this for us, and Fran and I have agreed to make you partner. Kovacs, Garcia & Warner. You take the cases of Dr. Turnscrew and Professor Optimate and whatever other clients you can handle. You'll have a small team of associates working beneath you - four or five to start - and then you grow your work just like Fran and I did."
Vince mulled it over. "And if I don't?"
"Then we have to let you go," Chuck said gravely.
"And we will take your gift," Turnscrew said. With a wave of his hand, a cyclone of papers and package wrappings swirled across the room, hitting against the far window with a whoosh of air and a scattering of office debris. "We have ways of doing this. Unpleasant ways, but we can do it. You will be without a job and without your gift - you shall never win another case again. What ever will you do when the crutch you've unknowingly relied upon your whole life is gone? I cannot say. But it is never pleasant."
Could they actually do that? Vince had no idea. But he did know that these two creeps had Fran and Chuck scared, and Chuck rarely scared… and Fran never scared. She was as tough as they came. But these guys clearly had some sort of supernatural ability that Vince didn't comprehend, and for all he knew they could kill him with voodoo or turn him into a worm. And he couldn't abide by a sudden downturn in his career - he'd just started getting serious with Fabiana… he thought she might be the one, and he didn't want anything derailing that. So, yes, perhaps it was self-serving, but who could blame Vince for not wanting to bite off way more trouble than he could chew?
"Fine, I'll do it. But my name's going up on the building next week. Where do I sign?"
+++++
One didn't simply sign a magical contract. One committed to it - and failure to honor the contract was a lot more unforgiving than a breach of contract lawsuit. Vince sensed this as he blotted his thumb to the paper and it flashed away in a pop of flame. He sensed the power of the contract smothering him in its grip, and he knew that he would be truly and terribly fucked if he ever reneged on the pale men.
And what these strange men wanted was even stranger - while Vince still did some amount of courtroom work for them, mostly getting contracts enforced or voided by court order and having corporations exchange huge amounts of money over deeply esoteric intellectual property law, a lot more was getting people to sign the contracts provided by the pale men… and the contracts weren't necessarily of the legally-enforceable sort. For instance, one of the first contracts was for Matt Warner and Matilda Warner-Bayes, his aunt and uncle… Martin's mother and father.
He visited them at home - it seemed a lot more appropriate than having them come to his 13th floor office, which was still mostly-unfurnished. He visited them and he brought the contract. It was four days after the trial, and nobody had seen Martin since that party. Some people vaguely remembered him stumbling out of the party with two strippers in tow, but nobody could quite recall exactly what had happened. And after that, it was like he'd dropped off the face of the earth.
Matt and Matilda were understandably worried. They'd filed a missing persons report as soon as they could and were posting crap all over social media. They had a thousand fliers with Martin's face printed out on it and were preparing to plaster West Palm Beach with his smiling mug. They were beside themselves with worry when Vince came in with the contract.
"This contract… what is it?" Matilda asked, glancing the thing over. "It doesn't even make sense?"
"This contract protects Martin against any civil liability in the Amanda Bryce case," Vince said. This was technically true, but it wasn't the gist of the contract at all… it was another of the strange, magical things that Dr. Turnscrew had given him with no further instructions beyond who was to sign it. It had within its pages a number of odd and moving symbols that probably did nothing good.
"So… if we sign this, nobody can sue Martin?"
"Not you or Martin, not for the Bryce case. You're protected."
Matt Warner smiled and clapped Vince on the shoulder. "Thanks for doing this, Vince. You're a good kid, and you know we think the world of you."
Well… that was definitely one way to get him to feel like shit. Vince had come over to fuck his aunt and uncle over in some vaguely-realized magical way, and they were thanking him for it. He pulled his pen out of his pocket and handed it to Matt, who dutifully signed. After a moment's hesitation, Matilda did likewise.
"So… what, exactly were you here for again?" Matt asked.
"Um," Vince said, folding the contract into his folder. "I wanted to see if I could help with those flyers."
"Flyers?" Matilda muttered. She reached to the stack and picked a paper up, her face turning to a confused frown. She turned it over to see if the other side said something different but, being meant for stapling to telephone poles and what have you, it was blank. "This… that's… Martin?" she said. "Why's he on a flyer?"
It was always odd to watch the effects of these contracts. They weren't all-powerful, but they were very convenient for his clients. In this case, it hadn't erased all memory of Martin from the Warner parents. They'd simply forgotten to worry about him. In fact, they'd barely ever think about him at all, simply smoothing over their thoughts with any of a dozen other pressing issues. Vince would cancel the missing person claim, and nobody would ever think to worry about the missing Martin. Well… Vince had another dozen or so people to have sign the memory contracts, but after the parents and the Warner siblings, anything else was icing on the cake.
"Thanks Uncle Matt, aunt Mattie… I should be going," Vince said.
They saw him to the door. "Thanks for stopping by, dear," Matilda said. "It's always good to see you, even if you don't have a reason for coming by."
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Vince was of a mixed opinion about his new arrangement - obviously, the money was good. It was better than good - it was phenomenal. He proposed to Fabiana on a yacht off of Key West, and she accepted, and then he considered buying the yacht. For the most part, the work was boring, but it wasn't necessarily bad. Not all of it - esoteric contracts and getting people to do things that they probably should've been doing to begin with.
His least favorite part of the job was, ironically, criminal law. That had never been his wheelhouse - less money than corporate law. But as much of a natural as he was in the courtroom, Vince always got a thrill out of the theatrics of criminal defense, especially for a good cause like Cousin Martin. The problem was that he didn't really do good causes anymore. For instance, the night that Dr. Heirophant had turned up at his condo out of the blue - the first time he'd ever met the man (if he was a man) - and given him a case, to be covered starting in two days' time.
"Our friend needs representation," Heirophant said. "You will clear his name."
That client turned out to be George Singer, a former investment banker who'd, at some point, gone off the deep end and founded a cult, holing himself up in a compound out in the everglades. The feds had tracked him down on human trafficking charges, and he'd been found there with five men and fifty women and girls, many of them underaged and the victims of sex trafficking. George was a bad dude. He was into expensive wine, occult rituals, and teenage girls, preferably multiples at a time. There was a pretty airtight case against the guy, and Vince wasn't sure if even his substantial gifts could get the guy off… he'd hoped they wouldn't, but they had, and he'd felt like shit about it. And when he saw George and Rowan Bryce shaking hands outside the courtroom, Vince knew he'd just helped evil win the day.
He found himself doing that more and more, helping corporations and people who had done pretty horrible things - from toxic waste dumping to patent theft to, in one case, getting the guy who'd helped George Singer with trafficking women in from Eastern Europe and Asia - a guy who'd probably trafficked hundreds of other women for sex work - off scot free.
Vince started drinking, and he was miserable, but he hid it well. It wasn't hard for him to hide - he was a convincing guy and an inveterate liar, so he just lied about being miserable, too. Fabiana saw through it, and she urged Vince to stop, to retire, to do anything aside from the job that was making him so miserable.
"I don't care about the money, Vince… we can get more money, but you can't buy yourself a clean conscience. I'm worried about you, babe," she said. She was good - too good for him. Caramel skin, amber eyes, and the biggest heart of anybody he knew. Vince would do anything for her.
And from their 24th floor penthouse condo in Palm Beach, they could see across the water to West Palm Beach and out across the Atlantic. "I know," Vince said. "I know I have to do something. We'll save up, and then we'll go somewhere else and we won't have to worry about any of this."
"No," Fabiana said with uncharacteristic forcefulness, and she tossed the TIME magazine with Vince's face on the cover to the coffee table, and she pointed at their article on him:
Is Justice Dead?
How One Exceptional Lawyer Casts Doubt on the American Justice System
"This is you, baby. You broke the system. And everything in this world is balance - that means you fix it. You help assholes like that Singer guy escape justice… so you'll have to do the opposite three times over - get good people out of jail, put bad people in there."
"That's not the kind of lawyer I am. I have obligations…"
"Then you become that kind of lawyer. You get your obligations straight," she said. "Promise me you will."
And Vince promised her, but he wasn't sure what he could do. He'd signed a blood pact with the pale men, and in exchange for prestige and power, he'd given them control over him. They could take his job and they could take his gift, and then what would he have? He'd have Fabiana, but he couldn't offer her the things she deserved. Even if she insisted she didn't care about those things, she deserved them.
Vince had been working through what to do about three months ago when Dr. Heirophant approached him again. Heirophant only approached Vince for really important things - otherwise, it was Turnscrew or Optimate. Vince got the impression that the guy, a creeper among creepers, was pretty high up in their pecking order. Whenever he appeared with multiple other pale men, they always deferred to him. This time, Heirophant had very unusual news, indeed.
"Your cousin, Martin, is returning," he stated in his strange hiss of a voice. "You are to void all of the contracts pertaining to him and see these new ones executed. Do this within the week - this is our time frame. Swear to me you'll do it."
"I swear I'll do what I can - that's a lot to do in a short time."
"Swear it."
"I've sworn what I can," Vince said - the pale men weren't too upset if you were firm with them, so long as you were honest. "I'll see that it's done if it's possible for me to do so - we're talking a dozen contracts and thirty or forty people. Some of them interact, so we'll have to tease that out. And I'll need to know…"
"The details do not concern me. You'll do it? Good. I shall consider it done. Report through our usual channels when you've finished my task."
And, just like that, Martin popped back into the world, seemingly none the worse for his disappearance. As far as Vince could tell, he was the genuine article - he remembered everything that Martin ought to have remembered and nothing that he oughtn't remember. He had a new job, a new condo, and opportunity for romance - everything that might have made him happy. And Vince could tell his cousin was miserable - Vince knew how to spot a kindred spirit. Martin was even more miserable than he was (which was pretty bad). It might not have been as bad as helping a human sex trafficker escape justice, but it made Vince feel even worse because Martin was family. In a drunken bout of self-pity, he broke down and told Fabiana about it - he'd never told her about Martin's disappearance.
"You did what?" she asked him, far more calmly than he might have expected.
"I… I helped them disappear my cousin. They gave me contracts… weird contracts, magical I think… I swear I'm not crazy, baby."
"I didn't say you were crazy," Fabiana said coolly. "I believe you… and I want you to tell me what you did."
He'd been telling her. He'd been telling her for months, though maybe not in words. And he finished telling her, this time plainly, everything from the first contracts up to his latest task of meeting up with Martin once or twice a week to keep tabs on him. The list of things he was to look out for was pretty unusual and pretty precise: You are to report any sudden changes in size or appearance, including the sudden appearance of tattoos, as well as changes in behavior, including sexual habits, basic temperament, and style of movement. You are to report any strange memories, such as having lived a different life, had different friends and lovers, or having lived in different places…
It had gone through about twenty items, all of them seemingly devised by some kooky conspiracy theorist or schlocky writer. So he'd been meeting with the poor guy, his cousin, back from god-knows-where, and watched him get progressively more and more miserable.
"How could you do that to your own family?" Fabiana asked, and she asked I with an accusatory spit of venom, far angrier about the whole affair than Vince had expected her to get.
"I had to… babe, they have my balls in a vise here. I can't get out of this account…"
"Vincent Warner, I thought I knew you," his fiancée said - she was angry and she was crying. And she was using his whole name… that was bad. "If you're too weak to do the right thing here… too weak to choose family over career and to choose right over evil… I don't think I can be with you. I'm sorry, but this isn't going to work."
"What?" Vince said, his body suddenly feeling very remote, as if he were witnessing his life crashing down on a television show rather than in the here and now. "Babe, I…"
"Don't babe me. I'm leaving, Vince. I knew you were going to do great things, but I didn't think those things would be evil." Hands shaking, she slid a card across the table. "This is my card. If you ever manage to extricate yourself from these evil… things and need help, tear this card in half, and I will know."
"Is… is this a joke?"
"It's not a joke," Fabiana said, and she crouched down to kiss him on the forehead. "Goodbye, Vincent Warner."
Woah. Vincent's fiance was a witch? What a (not-)coincidence!
There are no coincidences in magic!
@OvidLemma Of course not ^_^
You help assholes like that Singer guy escape justice… so you'll have to do the opposite three times over
Hmmmmm....
This is my card. If you ever manage to extricate yourself from these evil… things and need help, tear this card in half, and I will know.
Aha! A witch!