Wicked Harmony

Chapter 1 Sin

Five years later

I t turns out disappearing is easy enough. You just hop on a bus and then pay by cash wherever you go next. Never telling anyone your real name or sticking in one place long enough for anyone to notice you. You work shitty dead-end jobs or find work that’s dodgy enough not to leave a paper trail and you live in a dank basement with six other desperate people sharing a single bathroom.

If I thought my new life would start when I left The Path behind. I was dead wrong.

Turns out, disappearing is easy enough. Staying invisible is the hard part.

For that, you need a new identity. That way, you can get a bank account and a proper job, and an apartment that doesn’t need to be condemned by the health department. And that shit is expensive.

I discovered pretty quickly that four of my fellow basement dwellers were also looking to get new identities and to make their fresh starts. I’m not sure if any of the others were on the run from a cult. But who knows? We weren’t exactly forthcoming with the details of our past lives. Mostly, we all tried to avoid each other as much as possible.

It was a long eighteen months living there. The basement was always damp. The walls. The floors. Even the air. Seriously, it was like trying to breathe soup through a straw. There were always damp socks and bras hanging in the shower for some unknown reason. I’d have to shift them every time I needed to use the bathroom.

The tiny galley kitchen we all shared always smelled kind of musty, and every time I used the microwave, there was a bowl of soup inside. No matter whether it was seven in the morning or midnight. Someone was always reheating soup. I don’t know what that was about, and I didn’t ask. It was one of the irritating mysteries of living in the basement.

Eighteen months. That was how far into my depressing new life I’d gotten before I could save up enough money to afford to pay the woman who created fake IDs for all of us.

I figured I’d pay her a bunch of money and never hear from her again. What I didn’t expect was for her to change my life.

Her name was Elara and she was a bit of a weird one. I never saw Elara dressed in anything other than a housecoat and sweatpants and this massive hat that almost covered her eyes.

In the week leading up to her actually handing over my freshly minted identity, she messaged me every single day. And while you might think she was clarifying things or ironing out kinks in my new identity, you’d be wrong.

She was sending me memes or funny pictures. Or updates on things her dog was doing right at that moment.

I didn’t really engage, other than to smile at the goofy faces her dog pulled.

I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t.

Then, when we were doing the handover, she narrowed her eyes at me and at the shithole I lived in.

“You know, I went to a town this week that’s totally coo-coo banana pants,” she said, completely unprompted. “You’d love it there, especially if you want to disappear properly without risking catching a lung disease. ”

“Uh huh,” I replied, nervously fingering the cash in my pocket. “You’ve got the ID, though, right?”

“Bro. It’s been the weirdest fucking week of my life.” She flopped down onto my bed and leant against the wall before grimacing at how damp it was. “You need to get the fuck out of this place, Sinjin.”

“Uh, Sinjin?”

“Your new name.” She beamed at me, showing a gleaming gold tooth. “You like it?”

Then she handed over my ID and my fresh papers. All of them stating my new name.

Sinjin Murphy.

“Isn’t... Sinjin a man’s name?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Who gives a shit? I thought it sounded pretty cool. Plus, it was as far away from your old one as I could get. Saint to Sin, see?”

I just stared at her, not knowing quite what to say. She seemed so damn proud of herself and I guess she’d filled the brief. I figured I could live with it being a man’s name if it meant no one from my old life could find me. By that point, I’d already cut off all my hair and bleached the shit out of it. A special little ‘fuck you’ to the Herald and his dumb ideas of modesty I’d been stuck with since I was a teenager.

“Bro,” Elara continued. “I saw this ad for a dog online, right? The owners said he was an ex-fighter, all mangled and shit. Only had one ear and a leg that was messed up. I thought to myself, hey, Morris gets lonely when I have to leave the house, so why not get him a friend, right?” She paused expectantly, like she was waiting for me to respond, so I nodded cluelessly.

“Right.”

She grinned at that, apparently satisfied. “But then I get to the meeting point and I don’t know how I knew, but I could just feel it. This was no normal dog. He was twice the size of Morris and he’s a big boy.” She paused again and I nodded because her dog looked like it could eat you with no trouble.

“More wolf than dog, really,” she kept going. “Plus, he had this look in his eye like he could see right into my soul.”

Another pause, waiting for my response. “Uh, right?”

“Anyway, turned out the guy was a fucking shifter in his animal form. That shit was messed up.”

I blinked at her. “They... tried to sell you a person? Did they think you wouldn’t notice when you woke up one day to a naked guy at the foot of your bed?”

“I don’t think they gave a shit, bro,” Elara replied. “Anyway, I did some digging and made a few calls and wound up in this town a couple of hours from here. It’s quiet and I’m pretty sure every person there is hiding out from something. They had a bunch of shifters from similar situations. It’s called Willow Ridge. You’d fit right in.”

The crazy thing was... I listened. I moved out a couple of days later and followed Elara’s instructions on how to get to Willow Ridge.

By that point, anything would have been better than staying in the basement any longer.

And so I wound up moving to a tiny town where mostly everyone keeps to themselves, so their secrets stay hidden.

No one knows me here. No one bothers me.

It’s boring as hell, but I’m safe.

Or at least I thought I was.

I GOT A JOB AT THIS little shop—Grizz’s Little Oddities—as soon as I moved to Willow Ridge and I’ve worked here ever since. We sell mostly junk. Vases and trinkets and random crap no one could ever want or need.

I don’t sell much at all. Mostly, I spend my time in the back room and fix up any of the stuff people in town bring to me. I spend hours here every day, trying not to go insane listening to the wall of ticking clocks someone decided would make a good decorative feature for the shop. So long as no one from Corporate notices how big a money pit this place is, I’ll put up with it.

The town is quiet and slow as molasses. Most people keep to themselves and that’s the way they like it. Me included. Most of the shifters around here are those that escaped the illegal fighting circuits. A lot of them had been trafficked and now live quiet lives. They keep to themselves and live in these enormous houses so they don’t have to socialize with anyone else. I guess trusting people after what they’ve been through is no simple task.

Is it worse here than living in a cult? No.

Is it also better than living in a smelly basement? For sure.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not bored out of my mind here.

Today, I’m fixing up a slow cooker for Old Mr Henderson, who owns the hardware store down the street. He used to fix his own stuff, but his eyesight isn't the best anymore. So whenever I get my hands on his stuff, he’s already patched it together a half dozen times, and I have to reverse engineer his creative solutions before I can ever find the real problem.

I’ve always loved taking things down to their parts and then building them back up again.

It’s weirdly soothing, knowing that it’ll all fit together in the end.

Unless it’s a bad day, like today, where there’s a bastard little screw that I keep knocking off the tabletop and my fingers feel like a bunch of sausages crammed into a glove.

“Stay put, you little shit.”

There’s a chance I’m tired and hungry and should take a break.

Which is probably why I’m not at my best customer service self when someone rings the bell a minute later while I’m crawling around on the floor with my ass in the air. I scowl, hoping the person goes away. Maybe I can just hide out under my bench and they’ll get the hint.

“Excuse me, are you Grizz?”

I keep my eyes still focused on trying to find that damn screw, mentally noting that I should probably invest in a ‘do not disturb sign’. But usually, my face and general demeanor are enough to communicate the message.

Whoever’s ringing the bell doesn’t let up. Instead, she clears her throat loudly and rings the fucking bell again. I’m tempted to shove it in a drawer or tape it so it doesn’t work. It’s something the business insists on having, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to be accessible to people barging in here when I’m trying to work. Even if I’m not actually doing the job they pay me for. It’s not my fault no one wants to buy anything from the selection of crap that’s on the shelves.

“Excuse me? I was hoping you could help me?”

“You’re Grizz?” she asks.

I don’t answer, instead focusing on the miniscule wire in front of me through my magnifying glass.

I’m categorically not Grizz from the Grizz’s Little Oddities chain of shops. She can see that from the picture on the sign that sits right beside the store's name. I’m not the smiling redheaded spellcaster. But I don’t think Grizz would mind too much if I claim her identity for the moment. Mostly because I’m convinced she doesn’t exist. She’s one of those PR creations, like the homely witch behind Mrs Surecrust’s famous pies. Although, personally, I always found Mrs S to be shifty-looking. Her eyes are a little too bright on the boxes of her pies and it makes you wonder exactly what kind of meat she’s putting in them.

“Well then, Ms. Grizz, I’m hoping you can help me out. I’m looking for someone who I’ve heard lives in this town. I was directed your way, but perhaps my information is wrong. ”

I raise an eyebrow, satisfied with how things are lining up on the device in front of me. It whirrs and clicks and I get about two seconds of pure satisfaction before the feeling fades as I realize I now have nothing to distract me from having to talk to this woman.

Attempting my professional, customer service face causes her eyebrows to shoot up and mild panic to enter her eyes, so I quickly go right back to my usual slight frown.

I guess the faster we can get this over with. The faster I can return to my tinkering and the endless ticking clocks on the wall to my left. They tick-tick-tick away, driving me halfway out of my mind, but apparently they’re a bestselling item in other Little Oddities shops across the country.

I don’t know what other shops are doing differently, but no one’s ever bought a clock from me.

“The person I’m looking for is proving difficult to track down, but I’ve heard they retired here to Willow Ridge.”

My first proper look at the woman tells me a lot about her. She’s wearing a very expensive-looking suit and crazy high heels, an even more expensive watch, and carries a briefcase that looks like it’s just bursting with important documents.

She’s a bigwig. Or at least she thinks she is.

I wonder if she thinks that I’m the local friendly tinkerer and shopkeeper, ready to spread gossip and produce service with a smile.

Only two of those things are true. I like to keep to myself, and I wouldn’t want to know anyone else’s business if you paid me.

Comes with the territory of being an iceberg that cut myself off from social contact even before I escaped from my past life.

“They used to go by the name of ‘Saint’, but it seems like the name retired at the same time they were. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of them?”

My chest fills with ice at her words and I have to fight to keep my expression neutral and my breathing steady .

It might make me sound like an old cop from one of those detective TV shows, but that’s a name I’ve not heard in a while.

Five years, to be exact.

Five years since I packed up my old life and moved as far away as I could. Quit being Saint Madison and became Sinjin Murphy.

My mind goes a mile a minute. I wonder how the hell this woman found me. She doesn’t look like someone that works for the Herald—she’s not slimy enough to work for the man who, according to his own words, created me and was going to reap the rewards.

I was his miracle. His secret weapon.

But if this woman doesn’t work for the Herald, I can’t think of anybody else who would be looking for me or who would even be familiar with my old name.

She clears her throat again and I recognize that I probably should have answered by now. A whole awkward thirty seconds have passed with the two of us just staring the other down.

“No. Never heard of them,” I croak.

Fairly certain I couldn’t be less convincing, but that doesn’t mean that she’ll know I’m the person she’s looking for.

“Ah, well, they were fairly well known for a hot minute a few years back. Pretty famous in certain circles.”

“Uh huh.” I channel all the disinterest I can muster while my mind works frantically, trying to work out how I can find out who this woman works for and what she wants, without revealing myself.

“Well, thank you for your help. If you think of anything that might aid in my search, that would be greatly appreciated.”

She slides a business card toward me, over the worn wooden counter. My brain’s still grappling for ideas about how to get information out of her, but all that winds up coming out of my mouth is a croaked ‘okay’ .

She takes this as a dismissal and raps the counter once with her knuckle, before gathering up her briefcase and heading out of the shop.

Shit.

Once she’s gone, I try to return my focus to the list of jobs I have left for the afternoon. My hand shakes as I pick up my to-do list and I try to push down the rising panic. I’m hardly swamped with things that need fixing, which is lucky because I can’t get my concentration to stick on any one thing.

I’m too busy mentally spiraling.

I have this undeniable feeling to run. Get out while I still can.

I got out once and there’s no way I’m going to be dragged back into The Path. Not when it’s only just hitting me that I might have spent years away from under the Herald’s thumb, but I’ve been wasting that freedom.

Was it only an hour ago I was lamenting being bored in this nothing of a town? Past me was an idiot.

Present me needs to make an exit strategy, and fast.