Chapter 3: Hostile Negotiations

Loyd held his opponent by the legs and smashed would-be-street thug number two off the dumpster with enthusiasm. He had paused mid-thrashing to inquire what the large metal container was called, and thug number one had obliged by naming it, with fear in his voice and confusion on his face as to how someone didn’t know what it was called.

Jim had started running away from the club as soon as he had exited the building. Loyd approved the initiative of his servant acting expediently once his needs had been made known. The two would-be thieves had been overtaken by Loyd and thrown into a nearby alley with mild exclamations of surprise and alarm by some of the bystanders on the street.

The reward of being a courteous conversationalist and helping to educate Loyd was that the first thug had only broken both arms in the confrontation, and the second had attempted to impune the honor of Loyd’s long-dead mother. She had been a cunt, but nobody else would bash her in Loyd’s hearing.

“Great, now I need new boots.”

Loyd stepped off the feebly moaning mass that had been thug number one. Tap dancing on the fellow’s face had been challenging. Loyd had to break all the man’s limbs before he stopped struggling, but the footwork effectively conveyed that his mother was not to be mentioned. It had also blood stained Loyd’s boots and legs to the knee.

He looked to thug number two, caterwauling to the heavens as he leaned against one alley wall. Loyd sized the man up and decided the pants and boots would work for now.

“Sorry, I’ll be relieving you of your boots. It seems the anger has made me chattier than a reasonably worldly nun at confession.”

Loyd ignored the screams and began tugging off the man’s boots. At least this one had some stones. The wounded thug had hardly soiled himself at all during the one-sided beating. He stifled his screams with difficulty, ending in a manly groan.

He spat at Loyd,

“You don’t know what you’ve done, mister. We work for the Aa-a-arizona. Mayor won’t take kindly to you roughing up his boys.”

Loyd snorted,

“I doubt the good mayor does anything good for little boys, not if he employs our dear Dr. Jerkyl. And I don’t care if you work in Arizona. We’re in Nevada.”

“That’s not-”

“Yes, yes, I know. Shut up and listen.”

“Jesus, did you kill Frank?”

Loyd looked at thug number two, Frank, evidently.

“No, at least he’s still breathing. Now, if you want to survive long enough to get Frank some help, shut up. I have a message for Mayor Cragin.”

Thug number two listened to Loyd's monologue with gritted teeth and agony-filled eyes. Then, finally, Loyd asked him to repeat the message.

“Are you fucking serious? You didn’t stop talking for at least two min-Aggggggggh!”

Loyd casually crushed the ankle of thug number two’s unshod left foot.

“I will kindly ask you not to say any iteration of “you talk too much.” Instead, I’ll simplify the message. I will arrive at his office at eight o’clock. My name is Marshal Loyd. We will discuss how his more unusual clientele will be managed in the coming days, weeks, months, years, and probably decades. I expect him there promptly, as that is his place of employment anyway. Now, what is the message you will deliver to Mayor Cragin?”

“You’re a Marshal? How can you do this as a marsh-”

The man’s voice faded to a whimper as Loyd raised his leg to crush the other barefoot. Loyd paused, waiting.

Thug number two, voice scratchy from barely suppressed pain, repeated the general gist of what Loyd had said. Loyd forgave the man the details as it was coming up on midnight, and humans tended to lose faculties quickly under pain and exhaustion. He had gotten the critical part, eight o’clock.

Loyd left the alley, pushing through the crowd gathered at its mouth. But, unfortunately, the humans blocking his path didn’t seem interested in stopping him from leaving.

‘Violence has its own magic still, good. Did the screams reach the club?’

Once again badly whistling, he strode back to the Arizona club to collect his horse. One of the large doormen inside the bar had taken a station outside the door. Loyd nodded politely to the man as he mounted the horse.

The brutish man said nothing, nodding back at the skinny man he was now glad he had not had to tussle with inside the club. The doorman was flanked on one side by another group of three rough-looking men who scowled at Loyd. Loyd gave his customary disturbingly thin smile from atop his horse.

“It seems you gentleman have heard the new law in town. I will clarify the details of it for you. Here it is. Are you ready?”

Loyd waited for a response from any of the brutes. When none was forthcoming, he gave the law a name.

“Don’t.”

As Loyd rode off toward his next destination, one of the men muttered,

“Who rides a horse anymore?”

Loyd ignored the comment with apathy at the forefront of his mind. The concerns and opinions of a human were of little note unless that human was useful to him…or Loyd needed to make an example.

He imitated the man with an annoying little boy voice,

“Who walks anymore? I just use a horseless carriage that I don’t understand, uuuh.”

Loyd pretended he hadn’t used such an infantile series of words instead of turning the man to ash and dust. He had other more important things to do with his arcane might.

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‘Yes, that’s it. Not important at all.’

Loyd seethed at the injustice of being unable to indiscriminately slaughter every human in the city without consequence. He needed the dam completed soon, not just for his rightful and warranted vengeance against any perceived slight.

Loyd’s gloriously mounted travel to Old Hu’s Oriental Warehouse went uninterrupted until he was a block away. A brothel he was passing seemed very busy, judging by the sounds coming from its upper-story windows. Then, a shout that was out of place, or should be coming from a business of ill-repute, rang from one of the windows.

“Marshal!?”

More angry shouts with cries of alarm echoed from within the bordello. Loyd didn’t anticipate a happy reunion with anyone who might recognize him in this new body. He drew a six-shooter from a holster and laid it along his leg to conceal it from casual glances.

The swinging doors slammed to either side a moment later as a familiar-looking lady of the night rushed out.

“Marshal! Mistress Mother, it’s good to see you again!”

“Lillian? You’re still around? How’s your father?”

Loyd swung the pistol up and took aim between her pretty eyes, cocking the revolver’s hammer. A scream sounded out from the second floor.

“Wait!”

“Why?”

Loyd did not pull the trigger. Lillian’s mouth went up and down in an attempt to reason with the Lich before her. A man who casual murder viewed with an uneasy sense of rashness at work.

“I recognized you and immediately presented myself to be useful?”

Loyd stared down at the succubus from his horse, frozen as only a dead man could be. The only thing moving about him was a gentle rise and fall of his legs from the horse breathing beneath him. He uncocked the pistol and then holstered it.

“Very well, as you are offering yourself to be used. What do you know of Old Hu’s Oriental warehouse?”

“Where have you been? Things around here have gotten out of hand without you reigning in the more…avaricious brethren of the dark.”

Loyd rolled his dusty eyes in their sockets at the succubus’s insistence on not being as useful as she claimed. He slowly reached toward the pistol again. Lillian paled.

She didn’t know what kind of ammunition Loyd had in the pistols, nor did he. That random confidence man had sanctified silver, after all. He should probably check the pistol at some point.

‘Sometimes a bluff is good enough.’

“It’s a block down. Reputable at holding onto items of interest of the stranger persuasion. Ran by something from the far east.”

“I don’t know what he is, never met him, but reputation has him pegged as a dangerous one to cross. Rumors say some trouble has been plaguing his place of business the last few weeks. Folks are having trouble getting their things out of storage. Kids have been going missing around here too. Bad business, I say. Unprofessional…”

Loyd dismounted the horse as she finished. He handed her the reigns.

“Do something with this. I’ll handle whatever’s going on at the chinaman’s place. He will not perform such practices in my town.”

Lillian wasn’t fool enough to think Loyd cared about the missing kids. She was sure the Lich only cared that whatever was running the store wouldn’t give up whatever cursed item would bring the dead man into his shop.

Loyd let her keep her delusions. He had carefully constructed a purely ruthless persona while maintaining his law. It was beneficial to him. None of his residents needed to know his proclivities towards children.

‘How unseemly would it be if they knew that children were to be protected because they needed to be.’

Lillian nodded assent, turning to deal with one of her coworkers that rushed from the building half-dressed to deal with the man that had pointed a gun at her. She calmed the woman with only a few words, then took the horse’s reigns.

She led the concerned coworker and horse around one side of the building, still talking to the woman. Lillian’s would-be rescuer glanced fearfully over her shoulder at Loyd, who tipped his hat to the pair as they disappeared around the corner. Sometimes courtesy was called for.

Loyd walked a block down and observed his destination from under a streetlamp across the road from the place. It was a sizeable wooden-sided building. That was not surprising as warehouse was in its name. However, the older facade of the entire structure seemed out of place, with the brick buildings on either side of the street leading up to it.

Loyd failed to purse his lips in consideration again and thought through his options. If Jim had been honest and responsibly dutiful, any supplies he might have left in his office were inside that building. He chose a spell from his repertoire that didn’t require anything but a soft mutter and a simple gesture,

“Detect magic.”

The building bloomed with color along all of its walls, with a heavy concentration near the doors and windows of the entrance. Loyd’s patchy, corpse-quality ragged eyebrows raised. That was interesting.

If the walls showed magic that extensively but nothing within the wooden walls was visible, the proprietor had gone to the trouble and expense of sheathing the interior walls in magically scripted metal. Divination magic, it looked like.

Besides his detection spell being capable of easily penetrating wood of significant thickness, no one would script directly onto plain wood. It was too fragile. One broken plank and the entire circle would be disrupted. This had taken money, patience, and an obscene amount of time. Loyd considered the other wards on the doors and windows.

‘A simple warding against forced entry, but with a powerful deterrent of… transmogrification? Would that…Yes. It would turn someone into a chicken. Huh, then one could eat the intruder after. No need for cleanup if you can eat. Nice.’

Loyd’s estimation of the threat he may be dealing with rose. The typical natural magical abilities he was used to dealing with amongst his former residents were not much of a challenge, with a few notable exceptions. Actual magical skill was rare. Loyd decided courtesy may be his best approach to start, and sometimes it worked.

Walking to the entrance, he knocked politely on the door and waited patiently. He looked through the glass on the door to see a hulking figure behind a counter with a closed door behind it. The bored-looking figure was slouched with one hand propping up his giant head as he browsed a book that was open in front of him on the counter.

The oversized man looked up from his book. Their lips twisted in distaste. He waved a beefy-fingered hand at the open sign resting against the glass in front of Loyd. Loyd entered the shop confidently.

“If you can’t read the sign, you probably don’t have business here. So what do you want, dead man?”

Loyd paused before he replied to the man.

“If that was a threat, you need more lead up or to brandish a weapon. Bored detachment only works if you have shown how dangerous you can be. If that was a comment on what I already am, it lacks detail. Let us start over as if we can get by with not insulting each other. You have a book to return to, and I have other business to attend in the morning. My name is Marshal Loyd. You have some of my possessions in your storehouse placed here by my deputy, Jim.”

The man looked at him briefly with scrutiny before snorting. He closed the book in front of him, leaned under the counter, and placed the giant iron-studded club he had retrieved on the counter next to his book. A ripple of light passed over the man. Then, as the light faded from his skin, it revealed a figure with redskin, a singular black horn jutting from under his wild black hair. Proud and sharp-looking tusks protruded from either side of his mouth. Sharp claws drummed idly on the handle of the iron-studded club next to him.

The oni used his other hand’s claws to rapidly tap the counter next to his book. A flashing series of symbols appeared under the quick-moving digits. Loyd felt the wards behind him shift into a new pattern. They interlocked with other unseen wards along the wall behind the oni, blocking the exit from the room with an ominous humming.

His voice came out a guttural snarl,

“You stand before Oni Shuten-dōji. I will use your bones for my next soup stock, dead man. Jim hasn’t been a deputy for a quarter century.”

“Much better delivery. That’s the spirit. I don’t care if you are only a shitting dog. My effects will not be kept from me longer than this conversation.”

Loyd winced internally.

‘So much for courtesy. Threats will get you threats.’

The oni’s eyes widened at this insult and burst out laughing delightedly as he leaped over the counter at Loyd, club swinging with a savage whistling of wind toward Loyd’s rotting skull.