Secondhand Souls Read Online Free PDF Page B

chill over himself as Rivera came in. Then—
    “Oh, hell no! Get your ass right back out that door.”
    “Mr. Fresh,” said Rivera, with a nod. “I think I need your help.”
    “I don’t do police work,” said Fresh. “I’ve been out of the security business for twenty years.”
    “I’m not police anymore. I have a bookstore over on Russian Hill.”
    “I don’t sell books either.”
    “But you still sell soul vessels, don’t you?” Rivera nodded to a locked, bulletproof case displaying what appeared to be a random collection of records, CDs, tapes, and even a couple of old wax cylinders.
    To Minty Fresh, every object in the case glowed a dull red, as if they’d been heated in a furnace, evincing the human soul housed there, but to anyone but a Death Merchant, they looked like, well, a random collection of recorded media. Rivera knew about the Death Merchants. He’d first come to the shop with Charlie Asher when the shit had gone down, when the Death Merchants around the city had been slaughtered and their stores ransacked for soul vessels by the Morrigan—“sewer harpies,” Charlie had called them. But now that Rivera was one of them, a Death Merchant, he could also see the glow. Minty had sent him the Great Big Book of Death himself.
    Fresh said: “Y’all read the book, then, so you know you shouldn’t be here, talking to me. You know what happened last time Death Merchants started talking. Just go back to your store and keep collecting the objects when they come up in your calendar, like you been doing.”
    “That’s the thing: I haven’t been collecting soul vessels at all.”
    “The fuck you mean, you haven’t been collecting them at all?”
    Minty Fresh made a motion with his hands of leveling, as if he were smoothing an imaginary tablecloth of calm over a counter constructed of contemporary freak-out. With concerted effort now, and lower register, he said, “Never?”
    “I bought the date book, and a number two pencil,” Rivera said, trying to accentuate the positive. He smiled. In the background, Coltrane improvised a boppy, playful riff around “Summertime” ’s sweet, low-down melody. “The names and numbers showed up on the calendar, like the Big Book said they would? But I didn’t do anything about them.”
    “You can’t just not do the job. Someone has to do it. That’s why they put it in the book, right in the beginning, right by the part about not having contact with other Death Merchants. You just ignore the Big Book, shit gonna get muthafuckin’ freaky up in here.”
    “It already has,” said Rivera. “That’s why I’m here. A woman appeared in my shop, not exactly a human woman. A dark thing.”
    “The Morrigan?” Minty could still see the Morrigan’s three-inch talons raking the wall of a dark subway car where she had confronted him. He shuddered.
    “Different,” said Rivera. “This one didn’t have any bird features. She was just pale—dressed in black rags, like a shroud. I didn’t see any claws.”
    “How you know she wasn’t just a raggedy woman?”
    “She disappeared. Puff of smoke, while my partner watched. Locked door. And she told me. She said she was called Bean Sidhe. Had a really thick brogue, I can’t say it the way she did.”
    “ Banshee ,” said Minty Fresh. “You pronounce it banshee .”
    “That makes sense,” said Rivera. “She did a lot of shrieking. You’ve seen her, then?”
    “Until ten seconds ago I thought the banshee was a myth, but I recognize the description. My ex—woman I know—did a lot of research on Celtic legends after that last—”
    “Then you know what she’s doing here?”
    “Not being a detective like you, I can only guess, but I had to guess, I’d guess she the sound the Underworld make when you throw shit in its fan.”
    Rivera nodded, as if that made sense. “She did call herself a ‘harbinger of doom.’ ”
    “That’s all I’m saying,” said Minty.
    “There’s more,” said