Magic City

by Paula Guran

  “You saw him with another kid?”

  “Well, it wasn’t you, obviously,” Vick said. “But we had to be sure.”

  “But it was a boy,” Cassandra said. “He was walking him down the subway steps—forcing him along. Oh . . . we should have followed. We should have followed but we were scared!”

  “You were scared,” Vick said. “I just didn’t want to be stupid.”

  “Oh, Vick, we should have gone down there! He wouldn’t have done anything with all of us watching! And our Invisibles to help us!”

  “Vick’s right,” Inchy said. “The Invisibles aren’t enough.”

  He held out Leafjacket and let them all bear witness to the tattered bloodstained book. There were no questions . . . just shocked silence. “Garvey and I found him in the library. And I saw that man in blue there, too. I think you’re right about him.”

  “Here’s what we have to do,” Mina said. “First we find Garvey, then together we go after the man.”

  Her eyes were so bright and clear now. Inchy found himself looking to her for the plan, for real answers. She was so much smarter than he ever felt, but usually she just hid that, pretended she wasn’t . . . but she was using it now. He felt proud of her.

  “Us?” said Cassandra with audible dread.

  “Niall and Clyde are dead,” she said. “That’s too many already. If this man’s hunting us, then only we can stop him.”

  “Alone?”

  “We’re not alone. We’ve got Invisibles. And that makes it our job, because somehow he can kill them. How do you make a cop believe that, huh? No, it’s up to us.”

  “What do you think, Inch?” said Vick, staring hard at Inchy. But Inchy looked over at Mina. “I think she’s right,” he said. “We should listen to her.”

  Mina looked from face to face, then took out her glasses and gazed into the murky lenses.

  “Glimmish?” she called.

  The lenses exploded in her hands. Shining dust shattered from the plastic frames. Mina shrieked and dropped them. She stumbled back against the wall and stared at the broken spectacles and wailed: “What’s happening?”

  At that moment, the Invisibles came unbidden. Pearlywhite sharpened and solidified, bright in the night air. The twins’ twinned Invisible climbed from their lockets and clasped itself into a single form. Catseye rose spinning and singing from Vick’s pocket, its lighthouse gaze swerving over all of them, casting its rays over the streets and the grimy walls. Cassandra’s little deity came out and stood on her shoulder and whispered in her ear and Cassandra’s eyes grew even wider and more terrified.

  “Children,” said Pearlywhite. “There is danger greater than you know. It hunts us all tonight.”

  “Oh, god,” said Cassandra. “Where’s Garvey?”

  “Glimmish was looking for him,” Mina said.

  The pain in her face was worse than anything she’d shown on hearing of Niall’s death. Inchy could only imagine what it would mean to lose an Invisible after losing everything else in this world. But surely, while Mina still lived, there was some chance of restoring her friend.

  Unless, as Pearly said, the lives of the children were of no consequence.

  He had assumed the death of the kids had caused the death of the Invisibles. But if it was the other way around? What if the kids were only in danger because something hunted the Invisibles?

  The world spun; the fever suddenly gripped him, and he found his teeth chattering so hard that his jaws clenched tight. No one else seemed cold . . . why wasn’t anyone else shivering tonight? Chills swept him, and he couldn’t separate them from fear. Something was paralyzing him. He fought to shake it off, to take action, but he was having trouble even breathing.

  “Inchy, man, come on!” Vick was saying, and Mina was pulling at his hand but he couldn’t respond . . . he couldn’t come with her. They were all yelling at him to run and he wasn’t sure why. He tried to swim up out of the fever dream, but by the time he broke free . . .

  They were gone.

  They were gone, and Officer Cat was standing over him, holding his arm with one hand, feeling his forehead with the other. “Inchy? Don’t run from me, boy. You come with me now and no fooling. This is serious. You come with me for a little while, and if you still don’t want my help getting you off the street, well, that’s your decision. You need to get in the car right now. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  He looked once more to see if there was any trace of the others, to see if they were perhaps peering out at him from the shadows, or up from the Pit, but no—they were gone. Something was very wrong with him, but that was just the tip of it all. The wrongness went deeper than that. It went all the way down.

  “Come on.” She guided him toward the car. He thought she was going to put him in back, in the cage with no door handles, but she helped him gently onto the front seat, next to her. He sat there listening to her radio going, looking at the shotgun set up in its mount by the steering wheel. And when the lights started streaming across the windows he couldn’t tell if they were moving or if it was the fever again.

  “You have a seriously high fever, Inchy. There’s a virus going around. Leave it untreated a couple days and it could kill you. God only knows what inoculations you ever got. Your mother wouldn’t want this for you, Inchy. She’d want someone looking after you, don’t you think? Especially now. When none of you should be out there, not with all this evil going on.”

  “Perhaps that would be best,” Pearlywhite murmured, in Inchy’s ear. “A doctor.”

  “No, Pearly—I can’t,” Inchy said. “I have to help find the man. We have to stop him. Save you and the others. If I go with her, to . . . wherever . . . they might take your homebase away.”

  There, he’d said it—what he’d never said aloud before. The biggest reason he didn’t want to leave the streets: he could lose the pearls and that’d mean losing Pearly.

  “What’d you say, hon?” Officer Cat asked.

  Inchy didn’t reply. She shook her head, thinking he was delirious.

  Then she made another noise, deep in her chest, and it filled him with foreboding. He felt Pearlywhite suddenly rearing back, winding up into thick tense coils of smoke that brushed the back of his neck and caused his jaw to clench. The cruiser slowed. Looking up, Inchy saw the lights above the 97th Street subway station, the plaza around the entrance. He peered up over the edge of the window, saw a cluster of cop cars thrashing their lights against the night, beyond a wall of bodies—the crowd that always clotted around the lights as if summoned to an impromptu carnival. Officer Cat rolled down the window to talk to a cop who stood by a taut stretch of yellow police tape. Inchy unbuckled his seat belt and got his knees up on the seat to crane past Officer Cat. The other cop pointed, and the gesture seemed to cause the crowd to part. Suddenly Inchy could see what everyone was looking at.

  Three other cops and a woman in an ambulance attendant’s uniform were standing over a limp, awkwardly skewed shape that was somehow ground into the pavement. Inchy recognized the suit jacket instantly, although it was hard to make sense of the shape that filled it. The only thing that made any sense was the hand, with upturned fingers, and the golden gleam of a ring with no jewel at its center, which therefore failed to catch the light. Garvey’s ring, Garvey’s suit . . . Garvey.

  Officer Cat got out of the car. “Stay there, Inchy.” She said that, but then she made no effort to stop him when he slid after her and slipped out through her door before it slammed. He felt like an Invisible himself at that moment, a wisp of smoke, merged with Pearlywhite. He walked beside her through the crowd, no more noticeable than her shadow.

  “Oh my God,” she was saying. “Not . . . not another?”

  Inchy tried not to look at what was left of Garvey, but there was movement on his friend’s body. Life . . . some stirring of life. His heart leapt. Garvey!

  A crumpled face of blood-soaked fabric looked at him with hollow mouth, hollow pleading eyes. Slink raised itself slo
wly from the bloodied jacket, inching down to the ground. For a moment he thought it was coming to him and he knelt to snag it, hoping the detectives wouldn’t notice—because there was no way they would let him have it. But instead, Slink seemed to gather itself for a last burst of movement. It pulled itself taut and poked a wadded limb toward the mouth of the subway station, back in the shadows where the lights had been shattered out. It was pointing at . . . at what?

  Far back in the shadows, the pouchy face drifted away. The ice-chip eyes glinted and started to fade, but not before he saw the hunger in them.

  “There he is!” Inchy burst out, grabbing Officer Cat’s wrist.

  “Inchy? What are you doing here? Get back to the car! Get back now, I’m telling you!”

  “Don’t you see him? He’s getting away! Oh, he’s getting away! That’s the man! He’s been in all the other places. We seen him all over!”

  “Inchy, you’re sick, you’ve got to get back . . . and you shouldn’t be seeing this.”

  “Just look, Cat!”

  She glanced back at the subway station, but it was too late . . . the man had been only the dimmest trace if you knew where to look for him, if you’d already seen him before. She thought he was raving from fever. The fever raged in him, true, but her blindness and his frustration were making it worse. His face felt unnaturally smooth and dry, hard and hot. Like burning bones. As if the skull had caught on fire inside him and burned its way out through his skin.

  “Listen to her, Inchy,” Pearlywhite said quietly. He didn’t know what to make of that. Pearly sounded genuinely scared. It was the raw form of what he’d heard in Pearly’s voice that morning, when going after Clyde’s homebase. What he’d taken for a threatening tone was Pearly being afraid, facing something that could actually end Pearlywhite’s existence. He hadn’t known there was such a thing, but Pearly had known. The Invisibles weren’t what he’d thought them to be. So much had changed in one day.

  She looked back at him, and he knew she’d seen nothing.

  “There’s no entrance there, Inchy,” she explained patiently. “This whole side’s been closed off for repairs. Gate’s closed. Now—”

  Her pistol was staring him in the face. Inchy saw his hand going toward it, a slip of pale smoke, invisible.

  “—I want you to get back in the car—”

  “No . . . ” Pearly whispered.

  “—and stay there while I get some things straightened—”

  “ . . . Not alone . . . ”

  And he flicked up the snap with his thumb, dug in and grabbed the butt, had it out of the holster, still invisible, moving like a breath of hot wind, unstoppable. Or so he felt himself to be, though Officer Cat was screaming at him and grabbing at his arm, already aware that she had lost him. He could feel Pearlywhite frowning down on him. In a way that was the hardest part: doing something against Pearly’s wishes. But he was committed now. He was running, stooping to snag Slink as he went, stuffing the bloodied rag down into his pocket. The other cops lunged at him but Inchy was white mist, unstoppable. He flew down the subway entrance, past the point where he’d seen the fat man standing, feeling both strangely energized and as if he might spin into oblivion at any moment.

  Behind him, Officer Cat shouted, “Hold your fire, damn it, hold your fire!”

  Then Inchy was leaping five stairs at a time down the trashy hole of the subway entrance. The floor-to-ceiling gate was closed and padlocked, just as she’d said—but it was bent back at one corner. There was an opening just big enough for a kid to squeeze through. As Inchy wriggled through, the bars scraped over the inflamed wound in his arm, making him wince. He realized it was somehow connected with his sickness. Something had gotten into him through that little nail hole; it was eating away at him. Another invisible thing.

  Pearly tightened around his neck. “Inchy, you must not do this. Go back! This place you are taking us . . . I cannot promise our return.”

  Inchy made no reply.

  The shouting of cops fell farther and farther behind. It would take them a while to find a key to that padlock. Of course, they could go across the street and down the block to the other station entrance, and considering he had a gun they were not going to just let him go. But right now he had freedom, and he would use it. Feet banging out echoes, he ran through the moldy concrete darkness to the subway platform—and there he saw the man. The killer in blue, herding a boy ahead of him, down on the track. The boy might have looked a little bit like him, he supposed. He was about the same age with curly brown hair; but he wore dark blue jeans that looked like they hadn’t been worn or washed many times; he also wore expensive hightop sneakers and a blue silk football jacket that was too big for him. Something bulky shifted in the jacket but Inchy couldn’t tell what it was. The pouchy-faced man glanced back at the sound of Inchy’s steps, and shot him a look that was first furious and then sneering; then he chivvied the boy up the ladder onto the other platform.

  Lungs heaving broken glass, Inchy climbed down, jumped over the tracks and the lethal third rail, running to the ladder. Pausing there, Inchy shouted: “Boy—kid! Jump off the platform! I’ll shoot him if he follows you! I got a gun! Mister—I’m . . . I’m gonna shoot!”

  Pearly appeared, then, between him and the ladder—glimmering ghostly in the murk. “Inchy, let them go. You can give descriptions to the police now. You are a child and weak with fever, and that one is too strong. I can’t let you go after them.”

  Inchy hesitated. There was something in Pearlywhite’s eyes—was it tears? No, but it was an endless sorrow. As if Pearly had read his heart, already knew his answer. Maybe Pearly was right.

  But then Inchy saw Garvey lying crushed into the asphalt, smeared there with incredible force as if dropped from a height and then hammered down. He saw Niall’s hand tumbling out above the blood-soaked edges of the books he treasured. He saw Clyde’s poor grubby bare defenseless foot. And he thought of Mina. Vick and Cassandra and the twins, sure, and the other kids in the city, so many of them. But especially Mina.

  “No,” he said. “It has to stop. It’s up to us . . . you, too, Pearly. You, too.”

  He took the pearls from his pocket and held them out in the palm of his hand. Pearlywhite whirled in the air and drained away into the pearls. Inchy heard him whisper, as he went: “We might lose each other . . . we might lose . . . ”

  When Inchy got to the top of the ladder, a train was raging out of the dusty tunnel. The wind of it flung wax-paper trash as it came, and then it squealed to a stop. A few people idled on the active side of the station, several moved toward the train, but there were still no cops.

  Far down the dimly lit platform, the man pushed the boy ahead of him, onto the train.

  Inchy hesitated once more. He was suddenly sickeningly tired and thirsty, his mouth paper dry. But the train made a chirping sound that meant the doors were about to close.

  Inchy hid the cold metal bulk of the gun in his coat and dodged into the last car just as the doors closed. There was a chunky black lady, a transit cop, sitting across from him. He waited for her to grab him, but she only glanced at him, frowning.

  It looked to Inchy like she was going home after a long day on duty. She had her belt radio turned off and zero interest in turning it on. She hadn’t heard about the kid who’d swiped a cop’s gun and run away. Still, he imagined they’d be searching the stations up ahead, if they had time to organize. He hoped the man wasn’t going too far. He had few enough advantages in this chase.

  He started to go through the door to the next car, to find the man and the boy up front, but a hard grip on his arm stopped him. “Boy, you stay right in here. We don’t want you kids running around between cars now. Jus’ sit your ass down and wait for your stop.” He nodded. But instead of letting him go, she cocked her head and peered at him. “You okay, boy? You look sick.”

  “I’m okay. Goin’ home.”

  “That right? Well tell your mama to give you a bath.”

 
A stab of painful sadness went through him at that. “Yes, ma’am. I will.” She let go and he went to sit down. To wait.

  The train rattled and grumbled through an endless chain of stops. At each, a few people got on or off—but never the big man with his captive boy.

  That didn’t happen until the end of the line.

  He let them get ahead of him, because he felt so vulnerable here—so exposed. No one else had gotten off, and the station was bright enough that he couldn’t follow them too soon. Poplar trees poked their swaying feathery heads up beyond the fence at the end of the raised, open air platform. From up here Inchy could see a parking lot, and across from that houses. Endless miles of houses on long regular streets spreading off into darkness toward a line of hills. Low roofs with warm lights glowing out from under them. None of the hulking buildings he was used to. None of the city noises. It was quiet. He stood feeling the cool wind on his cheek, wishing it would take the edge off his fever. Instead, it only made him shiver, and instantly he felt sicker.

  Down below, coming out from under the edge of the platform, he saw the man urging the boy ahead of him toward the parking lot. It suddenly occurred to him that they were probably going to get into a car and drive away, and then he’d have lost them for good. In a panic, he hurried down the escalator, leaping steps so fast he felt he was flying. The station was deserted down here, too. Seeing no station agent, he leapt the turnstile and rushed out to the street.

  The man and his boy were just passing under the last row of streetlights at the edge of the lot, moving on foot toward the houses. They weren’t driving after all. Inchy breathed a sigh of relief, and followed.

  It was a pretty house in a street of pretty houses; a two-story white house trimmed with open green shutters. Curtains, soft-looking as cobwebs in the tall windows. Someone hadn’t mowed the thatchy lawn in a while, and one of the tires of the station wagon that sat in the driveway was flat. There was a light shining out from around back—the kitchen, Inchy thought, as he walked past the glossy bulk of the station wagon.

  His head throbbed, and he felt sort of dreamlike; the gun was heavy against his rib cage. He wanted to see if the car was unlocked, and if it was he wanted to lie down on those wide soft seats. But he kept going, through the open wooden gate into the back yard. Crickets sawed away. A nightbird chattered and fell silent.