by Layla Lawlor
She grinned. "We taught you the music key, didn't we? No one else has figured that out yet."
"How does that work, exactly?" I asked. "You just sing? I can tell it has to be a song from the time and place you're going to ..."
"First you need to find a soft place. That's the difficult part," Lily said. "That's why we mark them. But, yes, then you sing. There's a personal element to it; the songs are different for each person. You think of where you're going, using the song as a focus, and concentrate and go through."
"How do you learn—" I began, but just then the door opened and Madame St. Clair swept into the room. It could only be her, because Lily rose swiftly to her feet, her body language deferential. I followed suit, unsure what else to do. Taliesin alone remained seated, but he dipped his head to her politely.
St. Clair was tall, but her powerful presence was more than just her height. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and a long, sheer 1920s dress with a fur coat over the top, swishing around her hips. Strings of pearls wrapped her long brown throat and peeked from beneath the coatsleeves.
"Kay Darrow," she said, but it was more of a statement than a greeting, and I wasn't sure whether to answer. She tossed her small clutch purse onto an end table—it made a heavy clunk—and opened the door of a carved cabinet that turned out to contain a well-stocked bar. "Was there any trouble?"
"I rescued her from a pack of Tigers," Lily said. I noticed that her grip on the stem of her wine glass had become tight.
St. Clair paused in the act of pouring herself a glass of whiskey. "Did they drain you?"
Lily shook her head. "I'm all right."
St. Clair's hot, intense eyes roved from Lily to Taliesin. "Poet."
"Madame," he said, dipping his head.
"We need to talk business. James will show you the way out."
"I know the way." Taliesin smiled and rose. He set his empty glass on an end table. "A pleasure to see all of you ladies again."
After he left, there was a brief silence. I realized I had forgotten to give him my package for Gwyn, but it was too late now. St. Clair knocked back a long swallow of the whiskey before she said to Lily, "What did they want? Her? Or just out for blood and life, as usual?"
"I don't know," Lily said, and looked at me. In fact, both of them were now looking at me.
"I don't think they were after me specifically," I volunteered. "Millie—that's the friend who was with me—tried to open a door to Greenwich Village and the Tigers came out of it."
"They'll be clustered around the Village like flies on a turd, I'm sure," St. Clair said. As genteel and well-dressed as she was, the casual obscenity jarred strangely. She topped off her glass and, leaving the cabinet open and taking the whiskey bottle with her, threw herself casually into the chair across from me. "Kay Darrow. You have a weapon, I hear, that can kill Tigers."
"I killed one, once," I said. I glanced at Lily. "Is it ... hard?"
St. Clair's laugh was harsh. "Hard? It's nearly impossible. They can heal bullet wounds, blunt trauma, being thrown off a building, just about anything. Pump them so full of lead that they can't get up and then chop them into pieces—that'll kill them. Usually. Light weakens them and drives them off, but even that doesn't kill unless it's true sunlight, the sunlight of the mortal world. But Lily says your sword can draw the life out of Tigers the same way they pull the life out of people."
"It did once," I said. "It's very old, and, uh, kind of magic. It can cut through anything."
Avarice kindled in St. Clair's eyes. "Where is it?"
"Back in the real world. Millie told me not to bring it here. She thought it would make me a target." And with the sword out there, they'd have to let me go if they wanted it. I was glad all over again for Millie's foresight.
Although a question nagged the back of my mind: Did she know people are looking for it?
St. Clair let out a sigh and topped off her glass again. "A weapon that can kill Tigers. Sunlight in a blade. Can anyone wield it, or just you?"
"Just me," I said, but as the words left my mouth, I remembered how guardianship of the sword was passed along—by the death of its previous owner. Oops. Don't give them ideas, Kay. "I mean, mostly just me. And a few others. But mainly me."
"So we need the sword and you." Her eyes raked my skin. She was a woman who could turn you inside out and read your entrails without touching you. "The sword alone won't do."
I had no idea what to say to that. I was acutely aware of how isolated I was here. The Gatekeepers were my backup, in theory, but no one knew where I'd gone. No one would be coming to get me out.
A light touch on my shoulder made me jump. Lily withdrew her hand. She looked upset. "Madame, she came here under my promise of amnesty. My word."
"And so she shall have it. For now." St. Clair extracted a small gold case from her coat pocket and shook out a cigarette, pinching it between two of her long fingers. "Did Miss Taylor tell you that we are in a war, Kay? Boss Tweed's influence reaches to every corner of this city, our world. His Tigers slay us. He steals our energy, the stuff of our very lives, in order to support his corrupt empire and consolidate his control." She hesitated, then said bitterly, every word bitten off with awareness of its weight and heft: "He seeks to own us."
Her words had a deep resonance that seemed to reach into my chest. Harlem. 1920s. We were not so long out of chains here, I thought, and the world teetered under me.
"What do you want from me?" I asked quietly. "Did you bring me here to ask for help, or because you want the sword, or—what?"
St. Clair blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke, haloing the nearby lamps. "That's actually a very good question," she said, addressing the lamps rather than me. "What can I offer you that would make it worth your while? Name a price."
Taken aback, I said, "I—I'm not sure." Kay Darrow, supernatural mercenary? Floundering, I fell back on the only authority figure in my life who might carry some weight here. "I have to talk to Muirin. She's my teacher, and the sword is technically hers. I can't promise anything without consulting her."
There. Polite yet non-binding.
St. Clair's sharp eyes scraped over me. "Well played. The sword remains in the other world where we cannot touch it. We have no leverage on you. Let me put it to you like this, then."
She leaned forward, and I found myself leaning forward too, drawn by the force of her personality like a flower toward the sun.
"We are in a fight for our very survival," she said quietly. "It is not merely Shadow New York that's at stake. Tweed's recent actions, his terrible greed, have twisted the very fabric of reality underlying this city. If he continues as he has been, I do not know what he'll become, but the reverberations will be felt on the other side, too."
"What do you mean, twisted the fabric of reality?" I asked, curiosity overwhelming my fear of her. "I know there have been unusual things happening in our world—strange magical phenomena. Could those be caused by this?"
"That and more," she said, and leaned back in her chair, smoke twisting into eldritch shapes around her head. "Lily, take her. I've said my piece. We're done here."
Once we were outside, Lily said, "You handled yourself well."
I had to lean against the wall until my legs stopped shaking. "I feel like I just ran a marathon."
"I wouldn't have let her hurt you."
I was doubtful of this, but kept it to myself. "Is it true what she says, about Tweed affecting reality on my side as well as here?"
"I don't know," Lily said. "Madame St. Clair keeps her own council. This is the first I've heard of that. But I do know that the Tigers have been much more active lately, and more neighborhoods have been going dark."
"Like Greenwich Village?"
She shook her head. "No. We did that. It's the only thing we can do—severing neighborhoods from the rest of the city, isolating them in the between space. Otherwise Tweed sucks all the light and the life out of them. They become dead things, husks of what they once were."
No wonder s
o many of the neighborhoods I'd been to were such riots of blazing light—holding at bay not only the Tigers, but their own destruction. I wondered if that chill, dark street outside the SoHo gallery was one of those dead neighborhoods, and that bitterly cold street full of snow.
"How does he think he can keep it up? Won't he run out eventually?"
"Hard to say. Maybe that's what Madame means, that he'll leave this city a barren wasteland and move on to yours. But if he does, it's going to take him many years to do it. Shadow New York is more vast than you can imagine."
"I need to talk to the Gatekeepers. And—what time is it? I have to pick up someone from the airport soon."
"Time on the surface?" Lily looked surprised. "I have no idea."
My phone claimed it was 4:10, for whatever that was worth. No service, unsurprisingly. "I really have to get back. I left my car at Floyd Bennett Field. Can you take me there?"
Lily smiled and touched her headscarf, as if to tip an invisible hat. "Certainly. It won't be a direct route."
"I can do indirect, as long as you get me there before Grandma's flight gets in and my mom blacklists me forever."
"We never had time to talk about that earlier," Lily said as I fell into step with her. "Your grandmother is my daughter. I can't even imagine it. I fell in love and married in your world ..." She trailed off, her eyes wide and eager, looking forward into a future she would never experience, a past I knew so little about.
"Your husband's name was Oscar Reade." I tried to remember anything I'd ever heard about him. He'd died when Grandma was a young child. "He wasn't from here, uh, the real New York, I mean. I think he was some kind of farmer. You moved to Ohio—I don't know why." Oh. Duh. "Actually, I could ask Grandma. I'm going to see her soon anyway."
"I'm not still alive in your time," she said.
"No. I'm sorry." I had never asked Grandma how her parents died, and now that I'd met Lily-Bell, I found that I wanted to know even less. It was too sad. All I had of my great-grandparents were those slim volumes of poetry—oh! Which she wouldn't know about, if they were published after her time.
"You wrote poetry," I said. "Two books of it. I still have them."
"I did?" She looked happy.
"Do you write poetry here?"
"Of course I do. But publishing ..." She waved a hand around us, at the eternal evening sky, the busy crowds of solid shapes shoulder-to-shoulder with the transparent and transient. "There's no future here. No past. Just ... now."
"Did you ever want to leave?"
She stopped, bringing me to a halt as well. "Kay, I can't. If I stepped into your world, I'd melt like snow under the summer sun. Some of the Tigers have started going through, but none of us know how."
"But—I saw you in my world. When I first met you."
Lily shook her head. "I wasn't. The gateway in the woods overlaps this world and that one. I could not have stepped outside its walls."
"I've been to another place like that," I said, thinking of Seth's apartment, how it was both here and there at the same time. "I didn't know, then."
"Oh! That reminds me." She fished in her pocket and brought out a large, old-fashioned iron key, which she pressed into my hand. "In case you need to open that door, the one where you met me. It's a shortcut from the Finger Lakes area to Shadow New York. One of several such."
The key was heavy in my palm. "Is there a song for that door?" I asked.
"It's not that kind. Just a regular door. So be wary; the Tigers use them too."
"What about you? Don't you need this?"
"I rarely need to go that far from the city." She smiled. "I'd rather you be able to come visit us whenever you like."
We threaded between the people on the sidewalk. Above us, colors rotated through the sky, but it never moved deeper into evening—and never would. What was it like to live here? I wondered. Did people sleep? Did time pass at all for them, or was it like an endless sunset-colored dream?
Time travel, except not really. I wished I could experience true night in this place. It must be different from a city night in the time I came from—less neon, less electricity, less everything. Quieter, like the suburban streets where I grew up. I wondered if you could look up and see the stars.
But of course, even if night did come here, it would have to be as brightly lit as the day, to keep the Tigers at bay.
Lily took me back to the same door we'd arrived through, but this time, she hummed a different song, a folksy-sounding one I didn't know. Rather than coming out in Central Park, we emerged at the edge of a small park with heavy old playground equipment. Two slightly transparent moms in '70s bell-bottoms were pushing their kids on the swings.
Lily pointed across the playground. "There's a door in that apartment building—the green door—that leads to Floyd Bennett Field. One of the regular doors, not one of ours."
"You never told me how you know which songs to use."
"It doesn't matter." She whistled a few bars of the one she'd been humming—I didn't recognize it, but it had a peppy, up-tempo, kiddie-song sound to it. "Something that's appropriate to wherever you're going, that sums up the place in your head. You'll find that some of our doors can get you more easily to certain locations than others—you might have to take the journey in stages, as you would through the regular doors. But it's generally faster."
"And no one else knows about this?"
"Nope." She winked at me. "Just us—the resistance, I mean—and a few people we've helped, but not many. So you're part of a select group now. Keep it under your hat."
"How do you know you can trust me?" I couldn't help asking. "I mean, I know you can trust me, but you don't."
"I suppose I'm going with my gut, that's all." She hesitated, and suddenly looked less self-assured and more like her apparent age, a young woman only slightly older than me. "May I ask you a question, great-granddaughter?"
I nodded.
"I've only met a few people from the real world," Lily said. "You're the first I've met who wasn't white. It's been a century for you—so hard to imagine that—and I'm curious ... are things better now?"
My mother would have been able to answer that question in an instant. Of course it's better. But my mother had raised me in a mostly white North Chicago suburb, and she'd made her entire life an exercise in fitting in. I'd been raised that way too. I had never really questioned it until I left home; I'd internalized my mother's entire ethos that what happened to me was my fault, that the way people reacted to me was something I could entirely control.
Get good grades, Kay. Don't let your hair look messy, Kay. Don't be like those people, Kay.
I thought of the place I'd just seen, the thriving arts scene and the well-dressed men and women, the palpable sense of hope everywhere, even attenuated by time and distance. The people here would have no trouble at all understanding my mother's world. Many of them had probably grown up in it.
"It's better in some ways," I said. "And in other ways, you wouldn't believe how far we still have to go."
Lily nodded slowly. "Well," she said, "still a lot to be done, I guess," and I had a sudden glimpse of how Grandma Geraldine might have turned out the way she had, my free-spirited grandmother who'd marched for civil rights and lived on every continent. Lily held out a hand, and I shook it. "It was a pleasure to meet you, great-granddaughter. I wish I could advise you about working with Madame St. Clair and the rest of us, but it'll have to be up to you. We could really use your help, and whatever else is true of her, Madame does pay her debts. But this isn't your fight."
"I'll talk to Muirin. And I'll think about it. That's all I can promise right now."
Lily nodded and gave me a little salute, touching the tips of her fingers to her temple. After I had crossed the playground, I looked back. She was gone.
The green door was easy to find, though it took me back to a different part of the old airport than where Millie had brought me through; I stepped out through an access door in one of the abando
ned hangars. It was almost five according to my phone. If that was accurate, I'd still be a little late picking up Grandma, but not too late.
My car was parked where I'd left it, but as I got close, something about it seemed off to me. When I realized what it was, I started running.
The driver-side window gaped as dark as a missing tooth. Someone had broken it. Arriving with my heart in my throat, I saw glass glittering on the driver's seat and the floor. The interior of the car was, as usual, awash in old newspapers and fast-food wrappers, which made it difficult to tell what had been stolen. But even at first glance, I could see one thing that was missing—the very worst possible thing.
The sword was gone.
Chapter 13
My first reaction was blind, unthinking panic. I sat down hard on the pavement and leaned my back against the car door, breathing slowly until my vision cleared and I could think again, at which point I remembered what I should've done first.
You can sense the location of the sword, dummy. Try to focus.
I closed my eyes and concentrated. Normally, I could identify the sword's direction as readily as some people can point north on command. But it wasn't working this time. I did have a faint, blurry sense of sword, but I couldn't identify a distance or direction. Either it was very far away, or whoever had taken it had done something to block me from being able to find it. Which meant the thief was no ordinary carjacker, unless the sword had gone into a snit over being left behind and decided to bond to some other random schmoe.
The knowledge that the sword was still somewhere, just not here, made the panic ebb a little. Along with my improved mental clarity came an abiding sense of relief. It's gone. And I didn't even have to do anything. I had wanted the sword out of my life since I first felt its ice-cold claws reach into my belly. Now it was.
Except ... someone had taken it. Someone who could see or at least sense it.
"Miss?"
I jerked; my first instinct was to reach for my hip, which only reminded me once again of the sword's absence. Still sitting on the pavement, I looked up at a woman in a Park Service uniform bending over me.
