Story #1: Amaranth

Hey, guys! Since it's (technically) Tuesday now, it's time for our first story post! I apologize if it's a little confusing; I was wrestling a bit with the prompt and my inspiration came in the form of a scene from a novel idea I'm in the process of organizing. Hopefully the writing quality will be satisfactory regardless. So, for now, Dylan signing out; well, signing out except for the following wall of text.

Title: Amaranth

    “What do you call it?” DeLaney asked.
    “What?”
   

    “Your, ah, business.”
    “I call it business,” I said. “What else?”
    “I don’t know.” He swiveled back and forth in his chair, his eyes never leaving me. The light played over his glasses, flashing and dissipating, making his eyes gleam like sapphires. “Dreamcatchers have quite a reputation,” he said.
    “And you don’t?” I countered. “What do you call your business?”
    “Business,” DeLaney said coolly. “What else?”
    Silence stretched for a moment between us. DeLaney kept swiveling in his chair, and it made this sort of creaky noise that was starting to give me a headache. I scratched at my pant legs, just for something to distract me. It didn’t work very well.
    “It’s just, you know,” DeLaney mused, still watching me, “most people have this image of Dreamcatchers. Big, burly, gruff - a killer’s look in the eye. You look like you could be a schoolmarm.”
    He looked like he was about to laugh, but he caught himself and made it out like a cough. I felt myself frowning, fingers straying towards the gun in my pocket, but I stopped the impulse dead. Keep it professional.
    “Do you want to make a deal or not?”
    “Of course I do,” DeLaney said. “Always. What’ve you got?”
    I pulled my duffel bag from behind my chair and rustled around in it for a minute, trying to find the little glass vials through all the packing paper. You’d think they’d have made glass stronger by now, what so it couldn’t break so easy. I hate packing paper.
    There. That’s one. I closed my fingers around the glass and changed it over to my other hand, then kept searching.
    “So,” DeLaney continued, “who did you get this time?”
    “Two hookers, one of them white and the other looked like some kind of mulatto, or maybe an Asian. It was dark, and the bouncers were coming, so I couldn’t really tell.” I stopped to think for a second, my fingers twirling through the packaging stuff, trying to find needles in a haystack. “Then one more.”
    “One more?”
    “Yes.”
    DeLaney kept swiveling in his stupid, corking chair. “Would you stop that?” I snapped. The ache in my head was getting worse.
    “What?” he asked.
    “With the chair. Stop with the chair.”
    He stopped swiveling the stupid, corking chair. “Fine,” he said, his voice a little testy. “Are you going to tell me what your third catch was?”
    “I don’t know what she was,” I said. I found a second vial in the packaging and slipped it into my other hand. The glass clinked together; it sounded like a toast at some kind of fancy party. I wondered if maybe I should play number three off as a joke.
    “We can find out,” he said.
    “I know.”
    “You look nervous.”
    I slapped myself inwardly. That was practically rule number one, keep the emotions off the game board. No use lying, though.
    “It was an unusual capture.”
    “How so?”
    “She, well - she asked for it.” My fingers brushed against the third vial. I scraped at it with one fingernail, painted scarlet, the same color as the vial’s contents. “Like, she actually came up to me and begged.”
    “So it was easy,” DeLaney said. “I don’t see the problem.” He leaned forward onto his desk, an ugly oblong thing painted the nastiest shade of blue-green. “Free money, right?”
    “I guess,” I said.
    “You didn’t even have to put up a fight.”
    I shook my head. That wasn’t it. Usually all it took was a few quick shots - silent, deadly, from the barrel to the neck in a blinking second - and the fight was over. Done with. This felt wrong. I told DeLaney so, but he just laughed.
    “Free money,” he repeated.
    “If you say so.”
    “Look,” he said, “what’s your name?”
    I remained silent.
    “Yeah, okay,” he continued. “Whatever. Look, your job is to put down the target and extract the good stuff. And you’re great at it, so I hear - your stuff sells high on the market, anyway, and that’s all that matters to me. I trust you, but I don’t get why you care if you get some free business.”
    I could tell him it was too easy, but then I figured I’d just sound like some big corking prick. So I just said, “I don’t know.”
    “Well, how about you let us worry about it, then?” He glanced down towards where my hands were buried in the duffel bag. “Find them yet?”
    My fingernail was still scraping at the vial. I quit fooling around and pulled it out of the bag, then set the three bottles on the desk between us, their little labels facing towards DeLaney. I was still thinking about the woman who had come up to me on the street yesterday, somehow knowing what I was there to do, begging me to kill her.
    What kind of person am I for doing it? What kind of person would I be if I didn’t? Or does it even matter, since I barely know who I am except for who I should be?
    I looked out the window as DeLaney eyed the crimson powder in the vials hungrily. His blue eyes were nearly level with the desk now; he was crouched in his chair like some black-suited predator, looking through his glasses like they were scopes on a rifle.
    “This is pure stuff?”
    “As pure as it gets,” I said.
    DeLaney leaned back in his chair and threaded his fingers together. “It looks good,” he said.
    “It is good.”
    “Mmm.” His fingers struck out a desultory rhythm on the arm of his chair. “How much?”
    “Ten thousand,” I said.
    DeLaney’s mouth twitched. “That’s high.”
    “You said it yourself,” I reminded him. “ ‘Your stuff sells high’ - that’s what you said. It’s good Amy, and people know it. They’ll pay you more if you pay me more. Everybody wins.”
    “Theoretically, I could take it. I could kill you right now and take it.” His pale face was like dough in the whitish light of the room, his eyes tiny gems encrusted in it with rusted blood.
    “You could.”
    DeLaney grunted. “You’re not scared,” he said.
    “No. If you killed me, it’d be bad for business. We both know that,” I said. “So are you going to pay or not?”
    DeLaney’s fingers stopped picking their tune. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m going to. You said ten thousand? Right.” His fingers fiddled with a key and a drawer nearby. “The stuff is getting more expensive by the day, I swear.”
    “You’re paying for a life,” I said. “Life isn’t cheap.”
    DeLaney just grunted again. “If these aren’t good quality,” he said, “I’m hunting you down.”
    “They are good quality.”
    “I know,” he admitted, looking very unhappy about it. “Amaranth is a wonderful drug, but so many people damage it in the extraction.”
    He hoisted a little lockbox onto the desk and pushed it towards me, then proceeded to hold each vial up against the light and watch it glitter. It refracted a mural of red across the walls, so they glowed the color of blood, like they were built of rubies.
    “This is the very essence of someone’s soul,” he said, almost seeming to marvel over it as if it were something new. “Isn’t that something, how we humans are so voraciously greedy that we see it fit to extinguish a life just so we can relive it ourselves?”
    “A crying shame,” I said, counting DeLaney’s money.
    “It really is. It’s terrible.”
    “It is,” I agreed.
    “Absolutely abominable.”
    “The mind reels.”
    DeLaney set the vial down and examined me from across his ugly desk. His blue eyes were deep and thoughtful, slowly panning across my face like searchlights. “Does it ever bother you, what you do?”
    “It’s business,” I said.
    “Don’t I know it?” DeLaney sighed and pushed himself up from his chair with one final, groaning creak. “That’s all it is, in the end. A game of lives, one stamped out and another illuminated.”
    I regarded him carefully. “It’s what we do,” I said.
    “Of course.” He smiled sadly. “It’s only good business.”
    I remembered the woman again, her dirty fingers scrabbling at my boots, looking up and begging, hardly even human anymore. She was something less, something uglier and more primitive, something I think could be a part of every one of us, deep down where we’ll probably never see it.
    All ten thousand was there. I packed it into my duffel bag and stood. “That’s all it’s ever been,” I said. “Good business.”