Echo City

by Layla Lawlor

  Welsh. Of course, that was his accent—like in Torchwood. The dog named Arian leaned his head against my leg, and I scratched his neck with a little more confidence. "Do you have any with red collars?" I asked.

  "That would be Crythulad," Gwyn said—or at least that's what it sounded like. "Why?"

  "I saw a dog that looked like this recently. It had a red collar." Arian lolled his head against my leg in doggie bliss, leaving a soggy patch on my jeans. Rhosyn looked, I thought, faintly ashamed to be a fellow dog. "Are they a rare breed?"

  "They're not AKC registered, if that's what you mean." Gwyn appeared around the end of the science fiction stacks and leaned his shoulder against a row of book spines. Arian greeted him with idiot delight, while Rhosyn sighed in a long-suffering kind of way and laid her aristocratic head on her paws. "I breed them for my own hunting kennel. There are other dogs with similar bloodlines, Irish wolfhounds and such."

  The Master of the Wild Hunt, and lord of the Welsh underworld, Muirin had said. Oh no. Oh dear. I tried petting Rhosyn, very cautiously. She seemed unimpressed. "Do you, um ... really hunt with them?"

  "I do," Gwyn said. "But not recently. Ah, you don't want that." He whisked away the book of Irish mythology that I'd stuck in top of my book bag, hoping to continue my quiet research project on Muirin. This close, I could see that behind the small round glasses, his eyes were clear and sharp and green as grass. "It's nothing but poor retellings. I've a decent translation of the Táin you might like."

  "Um, sure." Helplessly I tagged along, trying to gather my thoughts. "You weren't in the vicinity of Ithaca yesterday, by any chance, were you?"

  "Ithaca?" He looked over his shoulder at me, arched a brow. "Any particular reason?"

  "That was where I saw the dog," I said. "It was with a lady named Lily."

  "I know several Lilys. Not an uncommon name." Gwyn turned the corner into another equally narrow aisle crammed with piles of unsorted books. "Ah, it starts here ... Bear in mind whenever you're dealing with the early literature of the so-called British Isles that these are translations of oral traditions written down many years after Christianity. There is nothing like an unbiased and original source extant today."

  "Excepting certain persons' libraries ..." Taliesin said behind us.

  Gwyn waved a dismissive hand. "Certainly not to be purchased. Nothing that was written down—" He broke off and looked toward the door, his body suddenly tense.

  I looked, too. I couldn't tell if it was just my imagination that the light seemed to have dimmed outside the window. There was an ominous feeling in the air, like the heaviness before an impending thunderstorm. The air itself felt thick.

  There was a brisk knock at the door.

  Gwyn sighed. "Now? I find his timing suspicious." He dropped his hand from a row of bent and cracked spines, looking more annoyed than worried. "Taliesin, see her out the back, would you?"

  Taliesin nodded and touched my arm. "Time to go, gentle lady."

  I looked over my shoulder as Taliesin ushered me, delicately but with a certain amount of haste, to the back of the shop. Gwyn was reaching for the door, but it opened before his fingers touched the handle to admit a man who was—large. Not so much fat as solid and wide. He wore an old-fashioned suit, barely containing a burgeoning belly under a heavy beard. He was going a little bald on top, and he carried a cane with a gold head.

  The electric lights in the shop flickered and dimmed.

  "An honor," Gwyn said coolly. He did not step back, which meant the newcomer could not enter the shop without having to shove him out of the way.

  Taliesin tapped my shoulder and quietly opened a door at the back of the bookstore. A naked, guttering lightbulb illuminated a set of metal stairs leading upward.

  "It's come to my attention that you haven't been paying your tithe." The big man's voice was rich and deep, and it seemed to fill the small bookstore, rolling through the shelves to every corner.

  Gwyn laughed, a sharp, startled bark. "You? Demand a tithe from me?"

  "By the law we both obey."

  Taliesin planted a hand in the small of my back and pushed me gently but firmly through the door. I glanced back once more, just in time to see the big man with the cane look past Gwyn, straight into the back of the store, straight at me. His eyes were blue. As Taliesin closed the door, the last thing I saw was those eyes.

  Just as the door swung to, one of the dogs darted through and joined me on the steps. Green collar: Arian. The door clicked shut behind us. The light bulb stabilized and brightened.

  "Wait!" I said, startled. I'd thought Taliesin was coming with me. I reached out a hand and touched the door. There was no handle on this side, no indication that it could be opened at all—nothing but metal covered in cracked olive-drab paint. From this side, the door looked like it hadn't been opened in years.

  Arian trotted up the stairs to the edge of the pool of light. Another bulb came on above him, and the one over me started to dim.

  I turned my back reluctantly on the door, swallowing a surge of claustrophobia mixed uncomfortably with acrophobia—I'm not good with heights, and I had a bad feeling the stairs went up a long way. "Is that what you guys do?" I asked the dog, climbing the stairs to join him as the light bulb in front of the door went dark. "Guide lost strangers around the city?"

  Arian grinned at me cheerfully, his tongue lolling from his mouth. He ran up the next few steps with little thumps of his shaggy paws, glancing back at me often as if to see if I meant to follow.

  Having little choice, I did.

  We climbed a seemingly endless series of stairs, Arian leading the way. When I looked up or down, the stairs vanished in darkness, but there was always a flickering light bulb just above or below us. We passed a few landings with metal doors, all of them padlocked. My calves and thighs began to ache. Finally the stairwell ended at a door that said ROOF ACCESS, with a rusty chain looped through an unlocked padlock. I looked at the dog, then at the door. "End of the road?" I asked, but Arian responded only with his idiot doggy grin.

  I unwrapped the chain, then listened at the door. I could hear nothing from the other side. I pushed it open a few inches and peeked out. Light from the bulb in the stairwell dimly illuminated what appeared to be a public restroom—a men's room, no less. I was outside the row of stalls, so I could see that it was deserted as well as unexpectedly clean, by public restroom standards. The floor was dry, the graffiti on the walls faded. There was no water in the toilet bowls, only rust stains.

  I waited a moment. No one came in. I could feel the floor shudder slightly underfoot—a passing subway train? Bus? Otherwise it was quiet and still. Post-apocalyptic, almost.

  I looked down at my guide dog. He swished his tail and jumped through the doorway, claws clicking on the restroom floor.

  "Safe, huh?" I used my bag of books to prop open the door, giving me light and also a way back in case I needed it, then located the light switch by the sinks. A single flat fluorescent panel fluttered dimly to life. The outer door was locked, but only with a deadbolt that I was able to throw from the inside.

  I cracked it open and looked out into a blue-and-white tiled corridor that was plainly part of the subway system. People hurried past, kids with backpacks, tourists in T-shirts, a cluster of twenty-something girls dressed up for a party. A couple of them glanced at me, but no one seemed to care. I leaned far enough out to discover that the other side of the door was nondescript but for an EMPLOYEES ONLY sign.

  Someone had once told me that most of the restrooms in the New York subway system had been closed down in the 1970s. However, the crowd looked reassuringly normal. Everyone was solid and dressed for the modern world. I was pretty sure I was back in ordinary New York ... somewhere.

  I closed and re-deadbolted the door to keep from being bothered. Arian was exploring the restroom dog-style, sticking his nose into stalls and sniffing curiously at the toilets.

  "So now what? Do we go out there or stay here?"

 
; No reaction from the dog. I went to retrieve my bookbag from the door to the stairwell. Without the bag holding it open, the door swung shut with unexpected force. I lunged to catch it and was a little too late. The clang of the slamming door echoed painfully through the restroom. Arian gave a single startled bark, also terribly loud.

  "Hey, quit it!"

  Arian swished his tail apologetically and went to poke his nose into one of the dry toilets.

  I put my hand on the recently closed door. From this side, it looked like a perfectly ordinary maintenance closet door. It opened easily at my touch.

  Instead of the stairwell, I was looking out onto a fire escape, similar to the one we'd climbed down from Seth's apartment. Rather than facing the park, this one fronted onto a street of small, shuttered shops. The colorful sky still wheeled above them, but it cast no light between the little stores; the streets were full of murky shadows, and though I saw no people anywhere, I felt as if unseen eyes were watching me from each and every shadow. A breeze ruffled my hair, smelling of city streets and that crisp dead-leaf smell that seemed to pervade Shadow New York, but there was something else under it, a reek of corruption and dead things.

  I slammed the door and stood with my hand on it for long moments while my heart rate returned to normal. Arian's claws clicked up behind me and he pressed his head against my leg.

  I ruffled his soft ears. Science means repeating your experiments and comparing the results, I told myself, and cracked open the door again.

  This time, it was dark within. I stared at regimented rows of narrow hanging objects, my brain not quite able to resolve them into anything I recognized. I had to reach out and touch one—soft fabric, sliding under my fingertips—to realize that I was looking at the inside of a closet, with women's dresses and men's suits hanging in neat rows. Light filtered down from a dim louvered strip at the top of the closet door. Listening, I heard soft music, scratchy in the way of a record player rather than a CD, playing a brassy tune from the '30s or '40s.

  I closed the door with less panic this time. So I could indeed go back to Shadow New York, but I had no way to know where—or when—I'd come out.

  Good to know.

  Meanwhile, there was no way out but forward. I unbolted and opened the restroom door—and Arian was past me like a shot, bounding through the pedestrians toward the stairs up to the street. I called his name with no response. By the time I made it to the top of the stairs, he'd vanished.

  Hopefully he knew where he was going.

  I was startled to discover that darkness had fallen outside—warm, steamy, and damp. Had I really been gone that long? While I pondered this, my phone vibrated.

  "Kay, good. You're back," Muirin said without bothering with pleasantries. "Where are you?"

  "Uh ..." I looked around for street signs, and then resorted to my phone's location finder. "I'm at Park Avenue and 116th. I—"

  "Someone will pick you up. Wait where you are."

  "Someone?" I asked, but she had already hung up.

  Chapter 6

  When a late-model red Thunderbird with Arizona plates pulled out of the flow of traffic and honked, it took me a moment to realize that it was here for me, and a moment longer to recognize the bomber-jacketed strawberry blonde who was driving.

  "Remember me? Millie. We met earlier at Seth's apartment," she called through the rolled-down window.

  I unbuckled the swordbelt before climbing in. Getting into a car while wearing a scabbard is even worse than trying to do it in a long skirt.

  "You can put your sword in the backseat if you like," Millie said.

  "You can see it?" I'd been meeting so many people who could see the sword these days that I was going to start forgetting everyone couldn't.

  "Oh," Millie said. "It's one of those sorts of things, is it? Yes, I can see it."

  With a grin, she reached over and tweaked something out of my hair. I had completely forgotten Taliesin's maple leaf; somehow, through all of that, it had remained tucked behind my ear. Millie put it in her car's change tray under the dash.

  "So what do you think of Shadow New York, Kay?"

  I groped for words. "Amazing," I said. "Incredible."

  Millie laughed and pulled into the stream of evening traffic, cutting off a bus. The rain had stopped, but the streets were still wet, glistening under the city lights. "It is, isn't it? You could spend a lifetime there, ten lifetimes, and never see it all. They say such things of the real New York, too, and of course they're not wrong, but Shadow New York is even more so. It's not just one city, but all the New Yorks that have ever been."

  "Do you always come out in a different place than you went in?"

  "It depends on which door you use. Some are fixed points, on either this side or the other. Some are fixed points on both sides, like the one from Seth's apartment to Central Park, but those are very costly to set up—Yeah, up yours too, buddy!" She honked back at a taxi. "You took the restroom exit, right? I know that one."

  I nodded. "I tried opening the door to see if I could get back, but it was different every time. Is there any way to predict where you'll come out on the other side?"

  "Not from there," Millie said. "That one is fixed on this side, but free-floating on the other. It's all right if you need to cross over in a hurry, but it's risky. Much better to find someplace like Seth's apartment with reliable entry and exit points. I can show you a few other—Hang on." She made a wild turn, weaving through traffic, and got us pointed back downtown before saying, "I guess you guys are spending the night, right? I know Seth wants to interview you, but they were breaking up for the night when I left."

  "I wasn't planning on being gone overnight. I don't even have a toothbrush."

  Millie flashed me a bright grin. "No worries! I already told Muirin that you two can stay with us. Irmingard and I have a suite with Taza and Felipa—we figured that if we're going to be in Manhattan, we might as well enjoy it. We can fit two more people easily, if you don't mind doubling up with someone. We have two king-sized beds and a sleeper sofa."

  I'd wanted to meet the Gatekeepers; now I was on a sleepover with some of them. My life felt like a runaway train with no brakes. "Thanks," I said, and meant it ... mostly. "That'd be great."

  Millie's hotel wasn't just any hotel. It was the Marriot Marquis, located on Times Square. She dropped me off outside the lobby and then went to park the car, or get someone to park it for her, or however that worked in a place like this.

  If I'd felt underdressed for Fifth Avenue, here I felt like something that had been scraped off the sidewalk. I ran my hand over my ultrashort hair, buckled my swordbelt, and then marched my rain-damp, hoodie-wearing self inside. I found a chair to sit in while I waited for Millie. I got a couple of looks from the desk staff, but no one tried to run me off.

  I called Fresca to let her know I wouldn't be home until tomorrow evening.

  "And I'll have to call in sick to work. Or something. You know, I don't think Muirin has a good grasp on the whole concept of having a job. Supposedly she has her own business, gravel trucking or something, but I'm starting to wonder how she ever makes any money at it."

  Fresca laughed, and the sound lifted my spirits, all the way down at the other end of the line.

  "There you are!" cried Irmingard's high, sweet voice. "Millie called to let me know you'd be here." I looked up and saw, as she crossed the lobby towards me, that she was wearing a glamour. I could see it hover thinly about her, the guise of a plump and pretty brunette about Fresca's height, in a gold-colored dress with a swishy calf-length skirt. Underneath it, of course, she was still the spindly-limbed little person I'd met in Seth's living room.

  "Gotta go," I told Fresca. "Full report tomorrow. Promise. I have so much to tell you."

  Irmingard caught my hand. "We can go up to the room and drop off your stuff, and then let us buy you a drink! Taza and Felipa are going out tonight, one can't stop them, but Millie and I don't have plans. We can be sad and single together
! You're over twenty-one, right, that's the drinking age here in the States, isn't it?"

  "Yes to both," I said. A whole whopping eight months over.

  I left the bag of books in the common room of their suite, but kept the sword; it didn't feel right having it out of my sight. I splashed a little water on my face and resisted the urge to ask Irmingard to use her magic and glam me up for the bar. I'd just have to deal with being a little underdressed.

  ... Or maybe a lot underdressed, I thought when I got there. Everyone in sight was dressed to the nines or, at the very least, wearing stylish, skintight jeans very unlike my old ones with the paint stains. From now on I was taking an overnight bag with me everywhere.

  Millie joined us at the bar as the bartender brought my Tequila Sunrise and the two Heinekens that Irmingard had requested. Millie had someone else with her, the pale Valkyrie with the wheat-blond hair who'd been inspecting the bookcase at Seth's apartment. Skathi, I managed to dredge up from the depths of my brain. I had been paying attention after all. Skathi was even taller than I'd realized at Seth's place. At 5'9", I'm taller than most women I know, but she towered over me, even perched as I was on a high bar stool. She must be close to seven feet tall. I'd never seen a woman that tall before. Heck, I wasn't sure if I'd met anyone that tall.

  "Look what the cat dragged in," Millie announced cheerfully, sliding onto a bar stool next to me. Irmingard handed her one of the Heinekens. "It's a regular girls' night out. Or in. But we really must go out properly later. We're in New York, ladies."

  Skathi introduced herself to me. "Kay," I said. "I'm with Muirin, I guess."

  "Everyone knows who you are," Millie said. "Well, everyone who was at Seth's, anyway."

  "Awesome," I muttered, trying to hide behind my Tequila Sunrise.

  Millie nudged my arm. "It's okay. The organization, if you can call it that, is pretty small, so we're always curious about somebody new. Besides ..." She winked. "Us humans have to stick together, with all these magical freaks around."