"Royn is having secret meetings with a person who is probably the tax man."
Eknie slammed a pile of papers onto the table.
"Here are all the places he has frequented, the times, the people along with their names, everything."
"You have been thorough," Ted said. "I suspect he has to disappear. It would be a damned shame if he relapsed and the paw got a hold on him again. It would be extremely easy to do, you know."
"The same stuff he deals out to others." Eknie nodded. "That is terribly ironic and I want to see that happen. Please tell me it'll happen soon. I do not fear many things, but I do fear taxes."
"Then you just have never been rich enough," Ted quipped. "The tax man can be bribed, but I would rather follow your advice and keep murdering and bribing as minimal as possible. I would love to deal with this the easy way, but we will keep within certain bounds. An addict relapsing and dying will raise no eyebrows. However…the high and mighty…bureaucracy…those people we need to be careful with."
Ted set out to spike Royn's coffee. It was time to wake up for those who worked the night shift.
Ted almost got caught, but a trick, some sleight of hand, saved his face. Royn did not suspect anything.
It occurred to Ted that Eknie was not here to witness Royn's death, and he should not witness the passing, either. Firstly, there was nothing to see. Royn would just slip into an eternal slumber. It was a discontinuation of breathing that would happen. Nothing fun. Nothing flashy or even especially painful. Secondly, the more time Ted spent around dying people, the more suspicion he would gather around himself.
He did not want that right now.
The tax man was not at his throat or grabbing his wallet – yet. Ted did not even know why he was so strongly against doing the necessary paperwork. Perhaps tax evasion was just a habit for him. In any case, he had to swallow his pride, but the true, mystical nature of the cult made it harder to lie that it was all about safety. He hated paperwork with a burning passion. He did not want to give away any inklings of spiritual or pseudo-spiritual practices in the cult. Ted was puzzled. He would just say that it was an intense charity organization to keep the populace too busy for petty crimes.
This, however, was not night shift stuff.
There had been a fight earlier. A recovering drunkard was being stitched.
The nurse attending to him was Junior.
"Hello, cor," the man said.
"Hello, Junior. You are doing good. Will he recover?"
"Sure, but he needs to stop drinking before he turns yellow."
At least Junior had some sensibility in him.
"It's on my list to make them all stop doing it," Ted promised. "How are you? How is your father doing?"
"I don't know about my old man." Junior shook his head and tucked the blanket over the sleepy drunkard. "Whenever he sees me, he just wants to talk about me and how well I am doing. But me, I'm doing just fine. Really busy nowadays, these people, they want me to come back. They thank me."
Apparently, demanding praise had been a foreign concept to Junior before joining the Society.
Ted had to hold back, he wanted to talk about all those leeches that would give up validation for a promise of something given to them in return, but it would have been much like trying to teach a rock about the joys of literature.
Junior simply lacked the capacity to entertain such abstract thought patterns.
"You're doing the good work," Ted repeated to the nurse and went outside to smoke his irritation away.
Junior ran after him.
"Cor…"
"Hm?"
Ted lit his clove cigarette. "You want one?"
"Yes, thank you, please, cor, I have heard they purify the lungs. I have…"
Junior hesitated for a moment. He shifted his weight from one foot to another, accepted the cigarette with trembling hands and lit it with Ted's matches. Only after three deep drags he spoke again.
"I have been…having dreams, cor. Of the sun. Do you think I am making progress, cor?"
Ted asked the nurse to elaborate.
The story was so different from how Ted had always seen the solar deity that he even doubted whether it was the same entity at all. However, certain details and symbols matched, and therefore, Ted did not interrupt.
Junior spoke of a glorious thing that had filled him with a feeling of power and divine light. He claimed to have seen all the secrets of the known universe, and some things previously unknown, too, but he had merely forgotten them all once the dream had ended.
This made Ted think that Junior had seen nothing at all. The solar deity was toying with the nurse, it was feeding him ideas and emotions that would make it easier to fall into the final trap of the sacrifice by choosing to bear the mark of the sun.
"You are on the right path," Ted lied, and the lie came out easily, just slipping through his lips as another thing that he had to say in order to get what he wanted.
"You should be progressing to the next level," he said. "I know I can't do everything for you, but if money is tight for you at the moment, I can chip in when it comes to your membership fees. Just keep this to yourself. We have some members that still cling onto, hm, conventional images of meteorology. We don't want to give them a spiritual shock too early. I think…I think you just might have the kind of light that will eventually pierce the eternal storms."
Junior felt validated, Ted knew that much, and he himself felt safe. He had achieved everything he needed that night – just a few more drunkards and they would break the number of two hundred cultists.
Ted found Royn dead in a park while searching for new recruits.