Unleashed

by John Levitt

  But there was clay there, too, bags of it, and that I can work with. The first thing I needed to do was buy some time. That’s always the case—every time you really need a moment to come up with a clever spell or elegant solution to a problem, something’s just about to rip your heart out. So first things first—block the door and keep it from getting in until I was ready to deal with it.

  I grabbed a lump of clay and threw it toward the door. Then I poured some talent into it, expanding both its properties and its size, until the entire door was covered with a thick, gluey coating. More energy, not quite heat, but a magical analogue. It was like having a giant kiln operating at unheard-of temperatures. In seconds, I had the door layered over with a hard shell of baked enamel.

  She didn’t even try to open the door. She hit it full force like a grizzly separated from her cubs. The door splintered, and the hardened shell I’d so cleverly constructed shattered like a vase dropped on a stone floor. Shards of hardened clay flew everywhere, and then she was inside, standing in front of me, finally in her true form and glory.

  She stood on two legs, like a bear, six and a half feet tall. She was thick, long fur covered her, and long claws grew from the ends of powerful arms ending half in paws and half in hands. Her muzzle was narrow and elongated, like an anteater’s, with an almost perfectly circular mouth like that of a giant lamprey. Useful for sucking out the brains of her victims, I would imagine. A long snakelike tongue flicked in and out the mouth, and when she opened it a double row of teeth gleamed wetly. Where the hell was Victor?

  Lou took one look and dove under a workbench, hiding behind a rolled-up tarp. I scrambled behind one of the sharp metal sculptures, putting some cover between her and me. She made a keening sound and reached out with those half-paw-half-hands, hooking a claw over one of the metal struts of the sculpture. Lou came out from under the bench and bolted past her through the ruined door and was gone. So much for the faithful dog defending his master to the death.

  The sculpture toppled with a crash, and then she was scrambling over it to get to me. I reached out with talent to the fluorescent light fixture and diverted the flow of electricity into the metal sculpture. The effect wasn’t much; fluorescents don’t use much current, but it was enough to make her howl and jump away as if she’d landed on a hot stove. She stumbled back and tripped on a pile of scrap wood in the corner.

  Without thinking, I reached out and gathered up the wood, using one of the metal sculptures as my pattern, and fashioned a creature of my own, one to rival even her. It was tall and spindly, but full of jagged wooden edges and sharp points, and it projected an aura of power and menace. Several of the wood pieces were studded with nails, and I turned those into jaws capable of rending flesh. It was a golem, insensitive to pain, neither alive nor dead, and a formidable creature indeed.

  Not really, though. It was all bluff. At heart it was nothing more than random pieces of wood, and one good blow from her paw would scatter it over the room. She didn’t know that, however. I moved it toward her and it creaked noisily forward like a clockwork monster in an old horror film. The bluff wasn’t going to work for long, though. She automatically backed away until she came up against a wall, and I could see her tensing for a desperate spring.

  But the distraction worked. I took my chance and was out the door in two seconds. I was halfway down the corridor before she figured out the golem was no real threat at all, destroyed it, and came after me again. She was no more than fifteen feet behind me when I heard a volley of high-pitched barks from up ahead, and then the door at the other end of the hallway flew open and Lou came charging through, followed closely by Victor, Glock automatic in his hand. I stopped short and plastered myself against the corridor wall, giving Victor a clear shot.

  The sound of the Glock going off in the confines of the corridor wasn’t nearly as loud as I’d expected. More of a flat cracking sound, a quick series of pops that seemed almost harmless rather than lethal. But that was deceptive.

  The shape-shifter jerked, stumbled, and went down snarling. She got back up to her feet, took a few more hesitant steps, and crumpled to the floor again. Victor ran right past me up to where she lay and put two more shots into her head from close range. She jerked twice, quivered, and lay still.

  I expected doors to fly open at any moment, questioning heads to appear, and horrified screams to start echoing through the hallway. None of that happened. Maybe there was no one in the building right now, or maybe anyone working there was too immersed in creative throes to notice. Or more likely, they had developed a finely tuned sense of urban self-preservation, and well understood that when you hear gunshots in the hall, sticking your head out of your door to see what is going on is not the smartest thing to do.

  But now we had another problem. We were standing in a hallway next to the body of a monster out of a Hierony mus Bosch painting. Somebody was bound to wander in before too long, and we could hardly leave it there to be found. Victor had obviously been thinking the same thing. He straightened up from where he had been crouched down examining the body.

  “We need a tarp,” he said.

  I remembered the tarp I’d seen in the sculpture room, under a bench. I ran back, squeezed through the ruined door, and pulled it out from under the bench where it had been stashed. We spread it out in the hallway next to the shape-shifter and rolled her onto it. Then we rolled it a couple more times until it was covered up. The shape-shifter was hidden, but now it looked exactly like what it was: a tarp containing a dead body.

  Victor bent over the tarp, made some gestures, and tensed with effort. The tarp shimmered briefly and then I was looking at an old spruce tree, like something left over from a long-ago Christmas. It was a perfect illusion—the needles were brown halfway along their length, and little piles had apparently fallen off and onto the floor. The man has ability.

  We grabbed the corner of the tarp and pulled it along the hallway and out the door.

  “I’ll get the car,” Victor said. “Watch the body.” He disappeared around the corner of the building.

  “Try to make it back this time,” I called after him.

  With a little effort I could cut through the illusion and see the tarp, bulging in the middle. I watched it anxiously, afraid beyond reason that it would start to move. I was sure the shape-shifter was dead, but that didn’t stop me from obsessively checking every few seconds.

  I was starting to get nervous when Victor returned. I didn’t think there was going to be enough space to cram the body into the small trunk—a BMW M5 is not a family sedan, after all. But she hadn’t stiffened up yet—that takes a number of hours—so we were able to force it in with some judicious pushing and folding. Squishing sounds could be heard from under the tarp as we squeezed her in, which made me queasy. Once we got the body stowed securely we drove slowly away, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  “Okay, where the hell were you?” I said as we drove away from the shipyard. “That thing almost got me, you know.”

  “That was unfortunate. Just after you walked down the driveway I got a call on my cell. From Eli. He said to wait, he was almost at the front gate and it was crucial to meet him there.”

  “And you just left me to fend for myself?”

  “He said you’d be in no danger. He had Ruby in sight.”

  “That’s insane. What was he doing here? And how the hell did he know where we were? And why—” I broke off. Victor turned his head and favored me with a quick glance, and didn’t answer. “Oh,” I said, after a few seconds.

  “She was a perfect mimic. A voice is even easier.”

  “How did she get your number?” This time I didn’t have to wait for Victor’s look. “Oh, right. She had it from when she was Ruby. She had all the info she needed, including your cell number.”

  “I should have realized,” said Victor. “The number came up on the display as blocked, which should have been the tip-off it wasn’t really Eli calling. But it wasn’t until Lou
came tearing up the road that I knew I’d been had.”

  That’s about as close to an apology as Victor’s capable of.

  “What are we going to do with the body?” I asked.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said. We drove in silence the rest of the way until we finally reached my house. I turned to him before I got out.

  “One thing still bothers me. When Ruby was at your house, the shape-shifter was at Morgan’s house at the same time. How did she pull that off? Did she leave for a while? Was she around where you could see her the entire time? Did she split herself in two somehow?” The minute I said that, I got it.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. Victor looked at my face and knew I had something.

  “What?” he said.

  “Think back. Think of what we saw in Ruby’s apartment. The mattress.”

  I flashed back to the scene there, the mattress in the living room with two piles of torn sheets and two piles of wadded-up blankets and sheets and two indentations. Victor looked off into the distance as he did the same. His visual recall was as good as mine, possibly better.

  “Two of them,” he said. “Goddamn it. There are two of them.”

  FOURTEEN

  I CALLED MORGAN TO LET HER KNOW IT STILL wasn’t safe to come back, but her phone went straight to voice mail, and her message box was full. She hadn’t called me, either, which was a bit worrisome. Ruby had been taken care of, but what about the other? Still, as long as Morgan stayed away, she should be safe.

  Meanwhile, I had a message of my own—an unexpected gig. The booker at Rainy Tuesdays had called to ask if I was available tomorrow night. I was. I needed the money; even with shape-shifters roaming the streets, rent still comes due every month.

  The club’s scheduled draw, the Scott Harkins quintet, had unexpectedly cut short their tour and abruptly canceled. Thus the call. I haven’t worked hard enough at self-promotion to be a headliner and I probably never will, but I did have enough of a local reputation to be on the short list as a fill-in. I was even getting enough of a name that occasionally people came out to specifically hear me play. Who’d have imagined?

  I called the booker back and assured her we were ready to go. Then I started making calls, and it took until the next afternoon to get hold of everyone. Dave’s always the easiest—he’s a family man and he returns calls, especially if there’s a paying gig in the offing. But Roger is liable to be off skateboarding and he keeps temporarily losing his cell phone. And Bobby Clemens, whom I wanted to add, is drunk half the time and can’t be bothered to check his messages. But I finally got them all on board.

  It was nice to be setting up at Rainy Tuesdays again. There are other clubs that are more fun to play, but few classier and few that pay as well. Of course, there’s Yo shi’s. They’d opened up a sister club in San Francisco, not yet quite with the cachet of the Oakland original, but it was getting there. But I’d been temporarily banned from playing there after an unfortunate situation that was none of my making. Nothing official, but effective. It would blow over. Things always do in the jazz world.

  Rainy Tuesdays sits in the middle of the Mission District. Ten years ago the Mission was still a sketchy enough neighborhood to discourage nighttime business, but these days the main danger a patron faced was getting scalded by an errant latte. It’s a nice space—medium-sized, very trendy and hip, lots of small tables, and a great sound system to pipe the band’s music into the front room.

  The long curved bar with its black leather rail at one end has taken on an iconic status in only a couple of years, and other places are starting to copy the look. They’d recently softened the original industrial retro look, adding some color and giving the place a warmer feel. They’d kept their trademark logo—an umbrella with three rain-drops, done in blue neon tubing. The stage is still a bit too small, because they want to squeeze in as many tables as possible. But it’s raised only about half a foot, and the nearest tables are close enough to almost touch the players, giving it that intimate touch. Jazz was never meant for the stage or the concert hall; originally jazz was club music, meant for people who dance and drink and party. And the best jazz hasn’t abandoned those roots.

  Dave, the bass player, and Roger Chu, the wunderkind on drums, had become my go-to guys, and this time I’d added Bobby Clemens. Bobby was the finest organ player in town, one of the best anywhere, actually. He didn’t work as often as he should, because frankly, he was a total asshole. Unless he was drunk, and then he couldn’t play. The only reason he ever got a gig at all was that he was just that goddamned good. But he did manage to suck most of the joy out of playing music, simply by his very presence and attitude.

  But I thought he’d work out for us. Dave is so laid-back he can get along with anyone, and Roger lives in a world all his own. The only thing that matters to Roger is the music—except for his skateboard. And it’s hard to insult someone who doesn’t even realize they’ve been insulted. When Roger’s not playing drums he’s mostly in an impervious teenage fog that nothing penetrates.

  Bobby and I get along fairly well, considering. He never hassles me, not because I’m so easy to get along with, but because he’s slightly afraid of me. He’d once seen something he wasn’t supposed to, when a couple of street thugs tried to rip off my guitar one night. He’d managed to convince himself he’d been high that night, but there was just enough doubt remaining in his mind to treat me with a certain amount of caution and respect. Whenever he started getting out of line, I’d throw something minor his way, like quietly turning the ice cubes in his drink blue, then red, then back to normal. He never could be sure if it was real or not, and that certainly put a damper on his aggressiveness.

  The draw that evening was light, since the original show had been canceled, but we were all on our game. For the first time in a long while I put everything out of my mind, refusing to worry about such mundane issues as carnivorous shape-shifters. My playing was assured; my lines inventive and flowing. Roger was a monster on drums, as usual, and the sound of Bobby’s B3 Hammond was so sweet that it makes every tune seem to groove even if it really doesn’t. So temporarily life was good—right up until the moment I noticed who had taken a seat behind the first row of tables. Our curly-headed friend, the Wendigo.

  I immediately went on autopilot, comping behind Bobby’s solo without even paying attention to what he was doing. No one in the audience noticed, but Bobby did. He started to throw me a dirty look, but quickly changed it to neutral and puzzled when he saw the look on my own face.

  The Wendigo ignored me, focusing on Roger playing drums. He hunched forward, drumming his fingers on the table, jerking with a little tic every time Roger hit the snare.

  Maybe he was just here to listen to an up-and-coming drummer. Maybe he wasn’t here to cause any trouble. Maybe he was just a jazz fan. And maybe pigs really can fly.

  We played a couple more tunes before I signaled for a break, a little early. I wiped down my guitar, unhurriedly, watching the Wendigo out of the corner of my eye. He seemed totally at ease, striking up a conversation with a couple of women at a nearby table, throwing back drinks like the original party boy. I quietly sidled over to his table and sat down. He turned to face me, feigning astonishment at my sudden presence.

  “Ah, Mason. How good of you to come down and mingle with the hoi polloi.”

  I was in no mood for snarky humor. He’d managed to turn a great evening into a bad one in two seconds, just by showing up.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “What, I can’t go out and hear some music, just because I’m not like other people? I thought you’d be more tolerant, being a musician and all.” I wasn’t buying it for a moment.

  “What do you want?”

  “Well, for starters, how about an intro to that drummer? He’s incredible.” I got up from the table and started to walk away. “Now, hold on,” he said, grabbing at my arm. “You’re right. I didn’t just come down for the music. I came here to help you.”
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  “Of course you did,” I said. “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “No, really.”

  “And in return?”

  “You’ve still got some more of those stones. At least a couple; you didn’t hand them all over the last time.”

  “You’re really hooked on them, aren’t you?” I said.

  “You’ve become a junkie, basically.”

  “And whose fault is that? You’re the one who introduced them to me.”

  “So I did. I’ll just have to live with the guilt, I guess.”

  “It’s not just about the magic; it’s about the music,” the Wendigo said. “Surely you can understand that. You see, I discovered that with them I’m a great drummer. Without them, just very ordinary.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “You might as well be mainlining crystal.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Music’s important, in a way that other things aren’t. You know that. How do you think you found me in the first place?”

  “I was following a vision, as I remember.”

  “Sure, but a vision just tells you what may happen, and where. It doesn’t tell you why. It’s the creativity that connected us—yours and mine.” A philosophical Wendigo. What next? “Anyway, I thought I’d trade you some more information for the rest of those stones. I know you’ve still got a few of them left.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “You’re a junkie. You’d say anything for a taste. Information from you would be worthless.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll tell you, and you decide if it’s worth it or not. If so, then you give me the stones. If not, you don’t. Fair enough, right? You see, unlike you, I’m the trusting sort.”

  “Right,” I said. We sat looking at each other for a minute. “Well?”

  “Well, you managed to kill the shape-shifter that was causing so much trouble, I see.”

  “We did. How did you know that?”