The Nimble Man m-1

by Christopher Golden

The man had a round little keg of a beer gut and his slumped even when standing, but his eyes were bright and intelligent. He only looked the part of the fool. Even now there was something in his voice that suggested that he knew there was something unusual, even unnatural, about Clay Smith, but he would say no more about it.

  "You weren't supposed to," Clay told him with a smile.

  Brodsky processed that a moment, eyes narrowing. Then he nodded. "You find anything?"?"Yes. Your perp."

  Closer to the front door, the plainclothes detective cleared his throat. "Sergeant, what the hell is this?" He strode toward them, shoes rapping the pitted wood floor. "Where the hell did this guy come from?"

  The detective was pale, with dark circles beneath his eyes. He had probably not been drinking yet today, but the stale smell of alcohol exuded from his pores. There were sweat rings forming under his arms and the white shirt looked rumpled as though he might have slept in it.

  "Lieutenant Pete Landry, meet Clay Smith," Brodsky said. "He's here to help."

  The Lieutenant's nostrils flared and he stared at Clay. "You're him."

  "Yes."

  "He's got a lead on the perp," Brodsky offered, making a game attempt to defuse the tension.

  "Oh, he does, huh?" The Lieutenant rolled his eyes and reached into his shirt pocket to pull out a pack of cigarettes. He tapped one out, dragging the moment, and fished into his pants for a lighter. When he snapped it open and set fire to the end of the cigarette, he gazed at Clay through the flame, then clicked the lighter shut.

  "So, give, genius. Who killed Travaligni and the kid?"

  Clay did not smile. Instead, he stared at the wretched, silently screaming ghosts that clung to Pete Landry, tearing at him with insubstantial fingers. Trav the bartender was there. And the kid. But there were others as well. An attractive, middle-aged woman, a thug with cruel eyes, an old man whose spectral body seemed contorted somehow.

  "Come on, Lieutenant," Clay said. "You did. You killed them."

  The hand holding the cigarette to Landry's lips shook and dropped away from his mouth.

  "Christ, Clay!" Brodsky snapped. "What the hell are you — "

  "The kid had something on you, saw you do something else you shouldn't have been doing. Or maybe he was a runner for you. What are you supplying on this block, Pete? Crack? Heroin? He pissed you off, this kid. And the fool bartender, he should've slept in, just this once, but his work ethic wouldn't let him."

  The other uniformed officers had begun to slide toward them now, drawn by the words and by the way the air in the bar had grown suddenly heavier.

  The Lieutenant hesitated only another moment, then put the cigarette to his lips again and took a long drag as his colleagues watched him in confusion and doubt. He let a plume of smoke out the side of his mouth and then glanced around at the uniforms.

  "Who the fuck does this guy think he is? Come in here, making accusations like that."

  Clay glanced at Brodsky again. "I doubt he used his police issue. But I also figure he's arrogant enough not to have dumped the gun he did use. Check under the seats of his car, maybe the trunk, I think you'll find it. I also think if you check his hands you'll find residue."

  Lieutenant Landry snorted and shook his head, tendrils of smoke rising up to the fan spinning above them. "You got some balls, you. But you watch too many movies."

  Brodsky wasn't gaping anymore. The look on his face had gone from incredulous to darkly inquisitive.

  "Then you won't mind if Gage and Caleb over there take a look in your car, right Lieutenant?" the Sergeant asked.

  The man laughed. "Damn, boys, y'all can do whatever you want." He nodded toward the two uniforms in question, gestured toward the door. "Go on, boys. Have yourselves a time."

  They hesitated only a moment, then glanced at Brodsky, who nodded once. Then the two cops went out the door at a run.

  "Jaalisa," Brodsky said, "you want to take a look out the door at the car across the street?"

  The prostitute did not seem at all tired anymore. Her eyes were wide and her chest rose and fell as though she were breathing for two. She stared at Pete Landry for a long moment and he took a long drag on his cigarette, its tip burning red in the darkened bar. Jaalisa shook her head.

  "No, sir. I don't think I do."

  The Lieutenant cleared his throat again, drawing Brodsky's attention. Clay watched as he took a step nearer the sergeant.

  "Things ain't never gonna be the same for you after this, Johnny," Landry said, the words a grim promise. "Not ever. And this asshole's not going to find the Quarter real hospitable either. You embarrass me like this? Make a fool out of me? You're the damn fool."

  Brodsky's partner, the only other cop still in the bar, had moved toward the door to watch Caleb and Gage. When he spoke it was so low as to be barely audible, and yet the words resounded through the bar.

  "Son of a bitch, John. You might want to look at this."

  The moment Brodsky glanced over at him, the Lieutenant snapped the strap off of his gun and slid it out of the holster with swiftness borne of years of practice. He brought it up, taking aim at Brodsky's temple. The sergeant was the nearest armed man. It only made sense that Landry would take him down first, Clay second, the cop at the door third. The hooker likely didn't even enter into his homicidal logic.

  Clay moved with stunning speed, putting himself between Brodsky and that gun. The Lieutenant fired, the report echoing through Charmaigne's. The bullet tore through Clay's chest and lodged in his vertebrae, trapped there. He winced at the pain but already he was changing again. This time, however, there was no cat. Not even the human face of the man the people of New Orleans knew as Clay Smith. He could have taken the face of any man in the bar just by touching one of them.

  Instead, he showed Lieutenant Pete Landry his own face. His real face. His clothes were gone, save for a scarlet ceremonial drape around his waist that hung nearly to his knees. Clay towered over Landry, nearly nine feet tall and as broad as two men across the chest. His red-brown flesh, from hairless scalp to bare feet, was damp and soft and run through with cracks.

  "Go on, asshole," Clay rumbled, "shoot me again."

  Wide-eyed and hyperventilating, the asshole did.

  Clay ripped the gun out of his hand, breaking three fingers, and grabbed Landry by the throat, trying his best to avoid meeting the grateful gaze of the murderer's ghosts. He did it for them, but he could not withstand the sadness in those eyes.

  He squeezed the Lieutenant by the throat until the man's eyes rolled up to white.

  "Step away from him," Brodsky demanded.

  Clay glanced over, saw that the sergeant had drawn his own weapon. He let Landry drop, gasping, to the floor and looked down at Brodsky. He smiled, and he knew it was a grotesque smile.

  "John, my friend, you want to know how I track killers? I'll tell you over a beer some time. If you want other answers about me…" Clay paused and took a long, calming breath, staring into Brodsky's eyes. "Trust me when I tell you, you're not alone."

  With that small, gasping noise he changed again, from towering clay figure to copper-furred cat. Brodsky shouted after him. The uniforms were all cursing, wondering what the hell was going on. Caleb and Gage had just stepped back inside with a small pistol in an evidence bag. One of them stooped and tried to stop the stray as it ran out the door, but he was too slow, too clumsy.

  The cat darted into an alley, past a Dumpster, then along other streets until it came once again to Rue Dauphine. As it passed beneath the shading branches of a tree that grew up from the sidewalk, the cat disappeared and was replaced by Clay Smith once more. He had no bullet wound. Not even a tear in his crisply clean navy blue T-shirt.

  He cut through to Bourbon Street and fell in amidst the swirl of tourists, the loud shouts of hucksters, the jazz band playing "When the Saints Go Marching In" on the corner. Clay hated Bourbon Street, hated the cheap, carnival atmosphere of it, but he had walked that street at least once every day since he had
come to live here. It was alive and vibrant and filled with color and at least for a handful of minutes it could make him forget the things he could not remember.

  As he passed by a restaurant that was serving breakfast he heard people hushing one another inside. There was something urgent about their manner and so he ducked his head into the restaurant and saw that everyone waiting for tables had stopped to watch the newscaster on the television above the bar.

  The visual cut away to a scene of the New York skyline.

  Blood was raining from the sky.

  Though the subway tunnel was abandoned, the roar of nearby trains thundered throughout the underground. The air was dry and chalky and there on a platform unused for decades, Doyle felt the shimmer of magic, as though their every breath disrupted cobwebs of time. This was a sensation he had felt recently, in the foyer of the brownstone where Yvette Darnall and her fellow mediums had died to keep Sweetblood's secret. This place had been frozen in time, had been hidden away from untrained eyes.

  Until now.

  "Doyle! Why don't you get what we came for?" Eve snapped.

  His gray brows knitted together as he turned to glare at her. Her jacket was torn: the demon's claws had ripped through suede and cotton at her shoulder and blood was seeping into the fabric. The thing towered above her on the platform, its footfalls cracking the tile floor with every step. Even as Doyle glanced at Eve, the thing Sweetblood had set here to guard his hiding place bent once more and lunged for her. Distracted in that moment by her ire at Doyle, Eve could not avoid its ridiculously long arms and the demon snatched her by the throat, one of the sharp protrusions on its arm cutting a gash in her face that flayed her cheek to the bone.

  She snarled in pain, latched onto its wrist with both hands, swung her legs up and braced them against its body, and then used that leverage to break its arm. The grinding snap of bone echoed across the platform. Eve dropped to the tile and rolled away from the guardian, then turned to glare at him.

  "What the fuck are you just standing there for?"

  Doyle smoothed his coat. His own wardrobe had thus far suffered only the veil of dust that hung in the air and covered every surface.

  "Merely wondering if you might be bleeding less if you concentrated on what you were doing rather than policing my own actions."

  He raised an eyebrow as the demon raced at her again, roaring, cradling its shattered arm. Then he turned away, leaving her to the battle. Eve's face would heal, as it always had. All of her wounds would disappear. That was the gift and curse of her immortality. In comparison, his own extended life was merely a parlor trick.

  Since the moment they had left Yvette Darnall's brownstone he had been trying to sense the power of Sweetblood. When they had entered Grand Central Station he had known they were on the right track. Had anyone but Sweetblood cast the glamour that hid the guardian's true nature, Doyle would have seen right through it. Not that it mattered now. The trail had led him here, to this platform, to the door that now stood before him.

  Or perhaps not.

  Though to Eve it seemed he was merely standing there, Doyle was searching for the emanations of the magic Lorenzo Sanguedolce had used to hide himself away. At first it had seemed to lead through that door, but now he frowned deeply, knitting those eyebrows once again, and turned to focus upon the tiled wall to his right. A tremor went through him and he felt something tug him, as though he were a fish who had just taken the bait. Quickly he strode across the platform.

  Eve hissed loudly and Doyle glanced over to see her on the demon's back, her legs wrapped around it from behind. Its protective spines stabbed into her but she held on tightly as she tried to reach around to claw out its eyes. For just a flicker of a moment her gaze caught his but he ignored the continued accusation in her eyes as he approached the far wall.

  Doyle felt his skin prickle and the hair rise on the back of his neck. His stomach clenched and he was forced to pause a moment to avoid spraying vomit all over the floor. With a flourish he crossed his wrists and then spread his arms in front of him and some of the magical seepage that had infected the air around him dispersed. Sweetblood did not want any visitors. It was too late for that.

  "You must not disturb the mage!" the demon bellowed in its hellish, grinding voice.

  Doyle whipped around to see it lunging for him, but in that same instant Eve plunged two long talons into its right eye. The sound was sickening and a spray of viscous gray fluid spurted across the cracked tiles.

  "You're missing the point, Fido. Someone's gonna wake the old bastard up. Better us than the alternative," Eve snarled.

  The demon shrieked and tried to reach for her, then threw itself backward, crushing her between its own body and the floor, impaling her on those terrible spines. Eve screamed.

  Doyle ignored her.

  He reached out toward the tiled wall. His fingers traced lines in the decades of dust and grime that had accumulated there. Despite Sweetblood's magic, this place had not been entirely untouched by time; not like the brownstone. Doyle thought this was all part of the ruse, part of the cover, in case another sorcerer should have gotten this far. He saw through the glamour as others might have, but he was skilled enough also to see past the diversion.

  With a glance over his shoulder he saw that Eve was choking the guardian, though her own blood pooled on the subway platform. He saw the door that he had been about to enter and wondered what lay beyond it, what peril Sweetblood might have placed there to dispatch seekers who came too close to discovering his location.

  With a blink of his eyes and a flick of his wrist, Doyle cast a spell that shattered the tiles on the wall. They showered down in fragments, revealing a stone wall behind them that he doubted had been part of the original plans for this location. A tiny smile passed over Doyle's features and he laid his palm upon the stone.

  "Lorenzo," he whispered. "Can you hear me? Some choices are not yours to make. Your power can't be allowed to fall into the wrong hands." Doyle closed his eyes and summoned magic from a well of power he had accumulated within him over the years. Images like shards of broken mirror glass tumbled through his mind, of family dead and friends left behind, of grief and the wonder of discovery, of a man he once had been, and the trifle his meager efforts at entertainment seemed to him now.

  This work, laboring in the shadows between the darkness and the light, was what mattered.

  " Tempus accelerare," Doyle whispered, and his fingers went rigid as power surged up his arm. It ached to the marrow and he gritted his teeth. Friction heated the palm of his hand where it lay against the stone wall.

  And the stone crumbled away to nothing in front of him.

  There was an alcove behind it, a space in the wall perhaps ten feet high and equally broad. Within that recess was a block of amber, like a massive slab of rock candy. It was honey-gold with hints of red, and through it, Doyle could see a distorted view of the man encased within. Sweetblood's eyes were closed, his expression peaceful, as though he lay in a casket rather than frozen in a trap of his own creation. Though dulled by whatever substance encased him, Sweetblood's magic crackled like electricity in the air within that recessed chamber.

  "Time to wake up, now, Lorenzo," Doyle whispered. "No matter how reluctant you may be."

  The ground shook beneath his feet. He heard the sounds of Eve and the guardian in combat, the snorting, rasping of their breathing. He smelled Eve's blood and the fetid ichor of the demon. Trains rumbled elsewhere along the New York subway system, their growling echoing in the tunnels. But Doyle had stopped registering any of these things as he stared through that amber slab at the features of his former mentor, the man for whom he had searched for decades. A mage with enough power to scar the face of the world.

  It was only when Eve screamed his name that Doyle realized something had gone terribly wrong. On instinct, he manifested a magical energy charge from his fingers as he spun around to see what had alarmed her. Even as he did so, they were already leaping up o
nto the subway platform.

  Corca Duibhne. The Night People.

  They were lean creatures with taut, ropy musculature and skin the color of rust, shaped like humans but no larger than a girl in her early teens. The Corca Duibhne were stealthy and swift, able to merge with shadows and creep along seemingly sheer walls. All of them, male and female, had black and spiky hair and eyes so oily-dark that they seemed nothing but pits of shadow in their heads. They had been called The Night People in a time when the only stories about them were told in a fearful huddle around the village fire. Yet now they had adapted to the modern world. They wore human clothing and sported bits of silver in their ears and noses where ordinary people might have piercings.

  But the Corca Duibhne were not ordinary. They were not human.

  Doyle began to shout for Eve but his voice faltered as he saw the Night People overrun her and the demon guardian Sweetblood had chosen to protect his hiding place. Both had been weakened by their combat. The guardian had a shattered arm and had been blinded in one eye. Eve was bleeding from multiple wounds, her clothes sodden with sticky scarlet, and the Corca Duibhne were strong and fast and far too many. She was ferocious and nearly impossible to kill, but Eve would not be of any help to him at the moment.

  "Damn you, Lorenzo," Doyle muttered. "This is your fault."

  The Night People lunged for him, first three, then seven swarming over Eve and the guardian to rush at Doyle. But he knew they weren't really racing at him. Their goal was behind him. Doyle placed himself in their path and he could feel the hole in the wall behind him, the magic that pulsed from the amber slab in which Sweetblood was encased. The Corca Duibhne gnashed their jaws, baring teeth that were jagged and cruel, and their oily eyes focused on him.

  "Don't be an idiot," snarled the one in the front, its voice low and insinuating.

  Doyle had waited long enough. He raised both hands, palms outward, and azure light flashed from his fingers throwing blue shadows on the high walls and a cerulean glow out into the tunnel. A wave of magic traveled with this light and the force of it slammed into the Corca Duibhne, cracking bone and ripping flesh, throwing the nearest of them sprawling across the floor in a tangled heap. But there were too many of them still swarming up from the subway tunnel.