Echo City

by Layla Lawlor

  "Not really," I said. "Sort of. Yeah, it kind of does."

  "Good. Now, you take her up while I find somewhere to stash my wheels. People told me not to bring a car to Manhattan, but I'm glad I didn't listen, because where would the rest of you be without me?"

  I slid Irmingard out of the backseat into my arms. She was light as a toddler. "Millie, I can't just walk into the lobby with her. She's obviously not human and I don't have glamour, remember?"

  "She does," Millie said, nodding toward the small figure in jacket and trucker cap leaning on the wall outside the gleaming glass doors with a cigarette in her hand.

  I sighed and carried Irmingard over to her. Behind me I heard the T-bird's tires squeal as it peeled away from the curb.

  "I heard you had an eventful evening," Muirin said, flicking her pale gaze across both of us. I felt the gentle fizzing on my skin that meant we were once again cloaked in glamour.

  "Oh, you know," I said. "The usual. What's a tiger?"

  Muirin opened her mouth.

  "The Shadow New York kind," I said hastily.

  I thought I detected amusement in her eyes. "You're talking about Tammany Tigers, right? I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that. They're not so dangerous if you avoid bringing yourself to their attention, which I suppose was too much to hope for."

  "Wait a minute. Tammany Tigers aren't—I mean, weren't—" High school history was years ago and I couldn't remember what Tammany Tigers were off the top of my head; all I remembered was that they had something to do with Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. But I was fairly sure that they were not actual tigers, let alone tigers that could King Kong up the side of a hotel.

  "Shadow New York is a place of ideas, Kay. They're an idea. A very real one."

  "That's what we fought in the woods, isn't it? A Tammany Tiger?"

  Muirin sighed. "Yes."

  "I thought you didn't know what it was."

  "I'd never seen one before," she said, a bit testily. "They aren't supposed to be able to manifest in the human world. Apparently there are a lot of things not quite right these days."

  "If there are Tammany Tigers, is there a Shadow New York version of Boss Tweed?" Because if so, I was pretty sure I'd seen him. And, worse, he'd seen me.

  Muirin's eyebrows went up. "He runs Shadow New York. Some say the Tigers are in his employ." I could hear the capital letters when she said it. "Stay away from him," she added, and stubbed out her cigarette on the wall. She nodded at Irmingard, who hadn't stirred throughout our conversation. "Bring her upstairs."

  The brighter lights in the lobby were not kind to Muirin. The last time I'd seen her look this run down was when Bill died. I waited until we were in the relative privacy of the elevator before asking, "Do I want to know how things are going with the Gatekeepers?"

  Muirin sighed and leaned against the mirrored wall. "It is what it is."

  "Muirin," I said, "I get that you're not really into emotional over-sharing, but this affects me too."

  She studied me under the harsh lights of the elevator, and as the door opened on Seth's floor, she said, "You're right."

  "I am?"

  "You are. And we will talk. But for now—" She jerked her chin at the kobold in my arms. "Seth should look at her. All I can tell is that she's been drained of energy. I know a little healing magic, but this kind of healing is beyond my skill set."

  "You healed me after I was poisoned. Well, after you poisoned me, to get technical about it."

  She tapped on Seth's door. "With tincture of unicorn horn, which I had on hand. You might heal others with aspirin and bandages, but that doesn't make you a doctor."

  Seth took Irmingard from Muirin and laid her out on one of the couches in the living room. I watched for a few minutes, but there was nothing really to see, just Seth touching her wrists and forehead and neck, while having a murmured conversation with Muirin. I went looking for the bathroom.

  It was as palatial as I expected based on the rest of the apartment. The gigantic hot tub had potted plants on its marble-tiled edge; that's the kind of place it was. I splashed water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror, as if I could see all of today's events—the wonder and the fear—written on my features. But it wasn't there; I looked like me, just tired and a little shocky.

  When I got out, I found that Taza and Felipa had shown up, bearing pizza. I sat with my back against the wall and tried not to drip cheese on the plush white carpet. By now I was starting to adrenaline-crash hard. The conversation in the room flowed over me, and when Felipa took me by the elbow and guided me into one of the bedrooms, I didn't put up a fight. She pushed me onto a huge bed with a snow-white, incredibly puffy bedspread. It was like sinking into a cloud.

  Felipa helped me slip off my shoes. "You may have to double up, depending on how many people end up crashing here."

  I managed a reply that sounded something like "Nrgh," and sank face-first into the pillows.

  At some point during the night, I blinked my stuck-together eyelids and squinted at the dim room. A meaningless, abstract black-and-white pattern on the back of my eyeballs resolved itself slowly into a sleek modern chair with a crisp, framed woodcut above it. I was at Seth's, I recalled. I felt too heavy to move, suspended half-in and half-out of my hazy, disturbing dreams.

  There was a quiet sound near me, a hushed dry ghost of a sound, and I turned my head slowly without raising it from the bed. I was too exhausted to be properly frightened. A sharp bright slash across my retinas, like a lightsaber blade, turned out to be the crack under the door once I managed to get my brain to accept the room in its proper orientation. I could hear quiet voices outside the door—the party hadn't broken up yet. But that wasn't what had woken me.

  The realization that I was not alone in the room made my whole body jerk, the way you do when you're falling asleep and then twitch yourself awake again. Millie was sitting on the floor beside the door, with her back against the wall. One knee was crooked up, and her blonde head was bent over it as she leaned forward. She'd stripped off her left sock and spread her bare toes in the little bar of light gleaming under the door. With one hand, she held her foot steady; with the other she carefully angled a small bright object that reflected the light: a syringe.

  I'd heard of people shooting up between their toes, but I'd never actually seen it before.

  I wasn't aware of making any noise, but Millie raised her head. Her eyes gleamed in the dim light like a cat's. "It's all right, Kay," she said, very softly. "Go back to sleep."

  I didn't have the willpower to resist that idea.

  When I cracked my eyes again, sunlight was streaming into the bedroom through half-open blinds. My body had the all-over-achy feeling that comes from sleeping heavy and deep, with bonus aches and pains from recent swordfighting. My hip throbbed, and when I touched it, I could feel the heat of the bruise even through my jeans. I felt rumpled and sticky and desperately in need of a shower.

  When I sat up, someone next to me rolled over and groaned. I nearly jumped off the bed, but all I managed to do was wrench my sore body enough to make me whimper.

  "Morning," Millie said. She stretched lazily and gave me a sleepy grin. "Was it good for you?"

  After a startled, panicked moment, I registered that she, like me, was fully clothed and lying on top of the covers.

  "Your face," she giggled, sitting up. "Not that I'd throw you out of bed, Kay, honestly, but we've only just met. I'm not that fast. And I smell coffee."

  With that, she rolled out of bed. I watched her go, dazed. Amelia Earhart had just propositioned me? What the heck.

  But I remembered what I'd seen last night: that blonde head bent forward, the startling white gleam of her naked toes and the needle slipping between them.

  My sleep-fogged brain wasn't up to doing anything with it, though, so I merely checked to make sure the sword was nearby—and it was, lying beside the bag of books from Gwyn's bookstore, which had apparently made the transition from Millie and Irming
ard's hotel while I was asleep—and then stumbled off to the bathroom.

  Splashing some water on my cheeks and running my wet fingers over my scalp made me feel a little more human. One bonus to super-short hair, besides being easy to care for and—in my opinion—rather chic, was that it didn't look slept on, even in the absence of TLC. Speaking of the TLC my body wasn't getting, the bathroom had floor-to-ceiling mirrors beside the tub, so I inspected my hip. It was swollen and visibly bruised, deep blue-purple against the warmer brown. I pressed my fingers gently around the edges, probing for the sharp pain that might mean something was broken. I didn't find anything like that, so I stole a couple Tylenol from Seth's medicine cabinet, and then limped out in yesterday's clothes to face the day.

  "Good morning," Irmingard said cheerfully. She was sitting on a high stool at the kitchen island, swinging her short legs, next to Muirin who had her head bent over a plate. As far as I could tell, Irmingard appeared to have recovered completely from yesterday's events. Muirin, I wasn't so sure about.

  Seth, in the kitchen, waved a spatula at me. "Pancakes, eggs, bacon, fresh-squeezed orange juice, coffee. Help yourself. Plates and glasses over the sink."

  I realized I was absolutely starving. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been this hungry. I collected a plate and speared a couple of pancakes from the platter on the countertop, then joined Irmingard and Muirin at the kitchen island. "Are you okay?" I asked Irmingard, sliding onto the stool next to her.

  She nodded. "I just needed to recover my body's energy. I didn't realize I'd used so much while I was covering us. It's like trying to hold your breath. You'd pass out before you're in actual danger."

  Muirin shared a glance with Seth. "We don't think it was just you," Seth said. "The Tiger might have pulled it out of you. Kay and Millie were also unusually depleted."

  "We were?" I said through a mouthful of pancakes. But I thought about how hard and completely I'd crashed last night. I'd been tired, sure, but there'd been no reason for me to go out like I'd been up for three nights straight.

  "And now the Tigers are manifesting in the mortal world." Muirin rubbed between her brows with her thumb, and got up to scrape her mostly-uneaten pancakes into the trash.

  Millie wandered in with a cup of coffee. I caught myself watching her closely for signs of—well, I didn't even know what I was looking for. What were the warning signs of drug addiction? Just what exactly had been in that syringe? Maybe I needed to think outside the box. It could have been anything from heroin to insulin to some sort of magical age-delaying drug that I'd never even heard of. Even an immortal might suffer health effects from living over a hundred years.

  In any case, she looked fine today. She gave me a smile and threw an arm around Irmingard's small neck, kissing her on top of her lank hair. "How are you feeling?"

  "I wish people would quit asking me that. I'm fine. I hear I missed most of the excitement, though."

  "Eh. Skathi showed up before the fun really started. I didn't even get to shoot anything." Millie brightened at the sight of the pancakes. "Ooh, yes."

  Muirin was moodily flipping through magazines in the living room, so Millie took Muirin's vacated stool and heaped her plate with more food than someone her size could possibly eat. "Did I miss anything?" she asked, slathering her pancakes with ludicrous amounts of butter and syrup.

  Seth shrugged, wiping down the countertop with a damp cloth. "Just some chatter about last night. I think it's another indication of what we were talking about yesterday—" He paused briefly, with a glance at me, and went on. "Unusual activity, creatures in places where they're not normally found, magic behaving in ways it's not supposed to ... things of that nature."

  "I still think you're exaggerating the scope of the problem," Millie said. A cat leapt into my lap. I pushed its head down when it began to sniff my pancakes. "It's not really an issue for us to deal with—as a group, I mean."

  Irmingard nodded. "Millie and I, we haven't really seen much of anything."

  "But you've been out West for years," Seth said.

  "So that just proves it's localized. The only people who've really noticed a problem are the ones operating in this area—you and Muirin, mostly."

  I couldn't help noticing I'd been excluded, but I couldn't really take offense; I had only been a kinda-sorta part of the Gatekeepers for two months, after all.

  "Well, New York is my home ground, and I'm telling you I've definitely noticed things behaving differently here," Seth said. "My magic's become unpredictable, and over the last couple of years there's been supernatural activity in Manhattan on a scale I haven't seen in the entire time I've lived here. Last night is the first time I've seen a Tiger on this side of the two cities, but Muirin fought one upstate, so I don't think it's a good idea to write this off as a strictly local phenomenon. Something can easily start out local and spread."

  "Do you have territories?" I asked, breaking into the conversation. They all looked at me as if they'd forgotten I was there.

  "Gatekeepers, you mean?" Millie said. "No. We just go where we're needed." She smiled and playfully flicked her fork at Seth. "Having said that, he's sort of ... the protector of New York, I guess you'd say."

  "Not in any formal sense," Seth said. "I live here, so it's in my best interests to make sure things run smoothly. I'm not the only person in the city with magic who does that. It's the responsible thing to do when you live in a place."

  "And your contacts have been reporting unusual sightings?" Muirin asked, listening in.

  Seth nodded. "They have. This is the first I've heard of Tigers at large in the city, however." He glanced at me. "I'm actually curious if it could have something to do with the O'Connor sword."

  "How so?" I asked. Muirin went alert, like a prey animal pricking its ears at a rustle in the bushes.

  "I'm not entirely sure, but the only reports we have about them so far come from you two. Kay, could you get the sword, please?"

  I was done with my pancakes anyway, so I fetched the sword from the bedroom and laid it on the countertop. Contrasted against Seth's high-end decor, the battered scabbard and leather-wrapped iron handle looked even more brutally utilitarian. Seth leaned over to study it without touching it.

  "From what Muirin tells me, the sword was able to kill the Tiger you fought upstate."

  "Yeah," I said. "It just kind of ... pulled it in, I guess. Like it was sucking the life out of it."

  Seth pitched his voice for Muirin's benefit; she was still listening from the living room. "Is that how it normally works?"

  "It's capable of drawing energy, yes," Muirin said. "Normally it uses its wielder as a conduit and power source."

  "It acted a little different in the woods, though," I said. "Like ... brighter? Muirin, did it look different to you?" Even as the words left my mouth, I realized it was a sort of challenge. I didn't know if she could see the sword the way I could.

  Muirin simply shook her head without explaining. It felt like I'd scored a point in a game I hadn't even realized we were playing. A sharp stab of guilt twisted my stomach into a hot little ball of unhappiness just about the size and shape of a candy heart. Seth took another look at the sword and then began clearing dishes away.

  While we'd been talking, the apartment had slowly filled with other people, picking up breakfast and mingling in the living room. They drifted in from the other bedroom, through the front door and over the balcony. Taza was impossible to miss in a banana-yellow suit and a matching hat with huge clusters of red and orange flowers around its crown. Felipa was with him, comparatively sedate in a light beige dress that set off her coloring fetchingly. Skathi and the redneck-looking guy, Rob, from yesterday were also present, as well as two more people I hadn't been introduced to yet: both men, both white, but otherwise different in every conceivable aspect. One looked like something out of a thirties gangster movie, a big blond bruiser type, his massive shoulders straining against the crisp lines of his old-fashioned three-piece suit. The other
was a nondescript-looking guy of medium height with glasses. I'd overheard enough of the conversation to pick up that they were being referred to as George and Wolf, respectively. (Or maybe it was Wolfe? I wasn't sure if it was his given name, last name, a nickname or what. With this group, I didn't even want to speculate. I decided to think of him as Wolfe because the alternatives made me nervous.)

  "Wow," Irmingard said, stuffing the last piece of bacon into her mouth and speaking around it. "I haven't seen this many of us in one place in awhile."

  "Since Taza and Felipa joined us, probably," Millie said. "They're among the newest." She poured herself another cup of coffee. "Or, no, probably Daniel. He's not here today."

  "I wasn't there for that," Irmingard said. To me, she added, "We don't get new people very often."

  "I got that impression." I looked around at the living room again. Ten people, counting Muirin. Eleven counting me, but I wasn't sure that I counted. "There really aren't many of you, are there?"

  "This is about half of us," Millie said. "So, no, I guess not. And we only have three of what you might call big guns."

  Irmingard laughed. "That's what Millie and I call them, anyway. And two of them are here today: George and Skathi. That's something you don't see every day, either."

  "Big guns?" I asked.

  Millie nodded and refreshed my coffee along with her own. "They're the ones who can handle pretty much anything by themselves. For most of us a fight is serious business. For them, not so much. Like I said, there are only three of them. There's Skathi—you saw how easily she took care of that Tiger yesterday. And George, and Epona, who isn't here."

  "And the rest of you?"