New York Fantastic

by Paula Guran

  Max thought: Why didn’t the harpies kill me, then?

  The vinyl harpies tore an arm from the sprawled dead man, and fed it into their master’s fire. Their camera-lens eyes caught the shine of the fire. Thanatos looked at Max. “You have not yet spoken.”

  And Max thought: Say anything. Anything to get the hell away. “I’ll do just what you ask. Let me go and I’ll bring you lives. I’ll be your, uh, your emissary.”

  Another long, smoky sigh. “You’re lying. I was afraid you’d be loyal. Instinct of some sort, I suppose.”

  “Loyal to who?”

  “I can read you. You see only the semblance I’ve chosen. But I see past your semblance. You cannot lie to one of us. I see the lie in you unfolding like the blossoming of a poisonous purple orchid. You cannot lie to a Lord.”

  He licked barbed wire lips with a tongue of flame.

  So they will kill me, Max thought. They’ll feed me into this monstrosity! Is that a strange death? An absurd death? No stranger than dying by nerve-gas on some foreign battlefield; no more absurd than my Uncle Danny’s death: he drowned in a big vat of fluorescent pink paint.

  “You’re not going to die,” said Thanatos. “We’ll keep you in stasis, forever imprisoned, unpleasantly alive.”

  What happened next made Max think of a slogan stenciled on the snout of one of the old B-12 bombers from World War II: Death From Above. Because something silvery flashed down from above and struck the two harpies bending over the body of the man in the smudged white suit … both harpies were struck with a terrible impact, sent broken and lifeless over the edge of the roof.

  The griffin pulled up from its dive, raking the tar roof, and soared over the burning outbuilding and up for another pass. The remaining harpies rose to meet it.

  Other figures were converging on the roof, coming in a group from the north. One was a man who hovered without wings; he seemed to levitate. His body was angelic, his skin dazzling white; he wore a loincloth made of what looked like aluminum foil. His head was a man’s, haloed with blond curls—but where his eyes and forehead should have been was a small television screen, projecting from the bone of his skull. On the screen was an image of human eyes, looking about; it was as if he saw from the TV screen. Two more griffins arrived, one electroplated gold, another of nickel, and just behind them came a woman who drifted like a bit of cotton blown on the breeze. She resembled Mother Mary, but nude: a plastic Madonna made of the stuff of which inflatable beach toys are made; glossy and striped in wide bands of primary colors. She seemed insubstantial as a soap bubble, but when she struck at a vinyl harpy it reeled back, turning end over end to fall senseless to the rooftop. Flanking her were two miniature helicopters— helicopters no bigger than horses. The lower section of each helicopter resembled a medieval dragon attired in armored metal, complete with clawed arms in place of landing runners. Each copter’s cab was conventionally shaped—but no pilot sat behind the windows; and just below those sinister windows was a set of chrome teeth in a mouth opening to let loose great peals of electronically amplified laughter. The dragon copters dived to attack the remaining harpies, angling their whirring blades to shred the vinyl wings.

  Thanatos grated a command, and from the burning doorway behind him came seven bats big as vultures, with camera-lens eyes and sawing electric knives for teeth and wings of paper-thin aluminum.

  Max threw himself to the roof, coughing in the smoke of the growing fire; the bats whipped close over his head and climbed, keening, to attack Our Lady of the Plastics.

  Two dog-sized spiders made of high-tension rubbery synthetics, their clashing mandibles forged of the best Solingen steel, raced on whirring copper legs across the roof to intercept the angel with television eyes. The angel alighted and turned to gesture urgently to Max. The spiders clutched at the angel’s legs and dragged him down, slashed bloody hunks from his ivory arms.

  Max saw Lord Thanatos catch a passing griffin by the tail and slam it onto the roof; he clamped the griffin in his white-hot hands. It shrieked and began to melt.

  Two metal bats collided head-on with a copter dragon and all three disintegrated in a shower of blue sparks. Our Lady of the Plastics struck dents into the aluminum ribs of the vinyl harpies who darted at her, slashed, and boomed GO IMMEDIATELY, bellowing it in triumph as she burst open—but they recoiled in dismay, flapping clumsily out of reach, when she re-formed, gathering her fragments together, making herself anew in mid-air.

  Max sensed that the real battle was fought in some other dimension of subatomic physicality, with a subtler weaponry; he was seeing only the distorted visual echoes of the actual struggle.

  The spiders were wrapping the angel’s legs with cords of optical fiber. He gave a mighty wrench and threw them off, levitating out of their reach, shouting at Max: “Take your life! You—”

  “SILENCE HIM!” Thanatos bellowed, stabbing a hot finger at the angel. And instantly two of the harpies plummeted to sink their talons in the throat of the angel with television eyes. They tore at him, made a gouting, ragged wreckage of his white throat—and Max blinked, seeing a phosphorescent mist, the color of translucent turquoise, issuing from the angel’s slack mouth as he fell to the ground.

  I’m seeing his plasma body escape, Max thought. I’m realizing my talent.

  He saw the blue phosphorescence, vaguely man-shaped, drift to hang in the air over the body of the dead Hispanic. It settled, enfolding the corpse. Possessing it.

  Sans its right arm, half its face clawed away, the corpse stood. It swayed, shuddered, spoke with shredded lips. “Max, kill yourself and lib—”

  Thanatos lunged at the wavering corpse, closed hot metal fingers around its throat, burned its voice box into char. The body slumped.

  But Max stood. His dreams were coming back to him—or was someone sending them back? Someone mindsending. You were of the Concealed.

  Thanatos turned from the battle, scowling, commanding: “Take him! Bind him, carry him to safety!” The spiders, gnawing on the corpse of the angel with television eyes, moved reluctantly away from their feeding and crept toward Max. A thrill of revulsion went through him. He forced himself forward. He knelt, within the spiders’ reach. “Don’t hurt him!” Thanatos bellowed. “Take care that he does not—”

  But he did. He embraced a spider, clasping it to him as if it were something dear, and used its razor-sharp mandibles to slash his own throat. He fell, spasming, and knew inexpressible pain and numbness, and grayness. And a shattering white light.

  He was dead. He was alive. He was standing over his own body, liberated. He reached out, and, with his plasma-field, extinguished the fire on the outbuilding. Instantly.

  The battle noises softened, then muted—the combatants drew apart. They stood or crouched or hovered silently, watching him and waiting. They knew him for Prince Red Mark, a sleeping Lord of the Plasmagnomes, one of seven Concealed among humanity years before, awaiting the day of awakening, the hour when they must emerge to protect those the kin of Thanatos would slaughter for the eating.

  He was arisen, the first of the Concealed. He would awaken the others, those hidden, sleeping in the hearts of the humble and the unknown. In old women and tired, middle-aged soldiers and—and there was one, hidden in a young sepia-skinned girl, not far away.

  Thanatos shuddered and squared himself for the battle of wills.

  Max, Lord Red Mark, scanned the other figures on the rooftop.

  Now he could see past their semblances, recognize them as interlacing networks of rippling wavelength, motion that is thought, energy equal to will. He reached out, reached past the semblance of Lord Thanatos.

  A small black girl, one Hazel Johnson, watched the battle from a rooftop across the street. She was the only one who saw it; she had the only suitable vantage.

  Hazel Johnson was just eight years old, but she was old enough to know that the scene should have surprised her, should have sent her yelling for Momma. But she had seen it in a dream, and she’d always belie
ved that dreams were real.

  And now she saw that the man who’d thrown himself on the spider had died, and his body had given off a kind of blue glow; and the blue cloud had formed into something solid, a gigantic shape that towered over the nasty-looking wire-head of hot metal. All the flying things had stopped flying. They were watching the newcomer.

  The newcomer looked, to Hazel, like one of the astronauts you saw on TV coming home from the space station; he wore one of those spacesuits they wore, and he even had the U.S. flag stitched on one of his sleeves. But he was a whole lot bigger than any astronaut, or any man she’d ever seen. He must have been four meters tall. And now she saw that he didn’t have a helmet like a regular astronaut had. He had one of those helmets that the Knights of the Round Table wore, like she saw in the movie on TV. The knight in the spacesuit was reaching out to the man of hot metal …

  Lord Red Mark was distantly aware that one of his own was watching from the rooftop across the street. Possibly Lady Day asleep in the body of a small human being; a small person who didn’t know, yet, that she wasn’t really human after all.

  Now he reached out and closed one of his gloved hands around Lord Thanatos’s barbed-wire neck (that’s how it looked to the little girl watching from across the street) and held him fast, though the metal of that glove began to melt in the heat. Red Mark held him, and with the other hand opened the incinerator door, and reached his hand into the fire that burned in the bosom of his enemy—

  And snuffed out the flame, like a man snuffing a candle with his thumb and forefinger.

  The metal body remained standing, cooling, forever inert. The minions of Lord Thanatos fled squalling into the sky, pursued by the Protectionists, abandoning their visible physicality, becoming once more unseeable. And so the battle was carried into another realm of being.

  Soon the rooftop was empty of all but the two corpses, and a few broken harpies, and the shell of Thanatos, and Lord Red Mark.

  Red Mark turned to look directly at the little girl on the opposite roof. He levitated, rose evenly into the air, and drifted to her. He alighted beside her and took off his helm. Beneath was a light that smiled. He was beautiful. He said, “Let’s go find the others.”

  She nodded, slowly, beginning to wake. But the little-girl part of her, the human shell, said, “Do I have to die too? Like you did?”

  “No. That was for an emergency. There are other ways.”

  “I don’t have to die now?”

  “Not now and …” The light that was a smile grew brighter. “Not ever. You’ll never die, my Lady Day.”

  The real estate market in Manhattan is always an adventure: everyone wants to live somewhere in the city and that includes elves, wizards, brownies, goblins, and other supernatural types.

  PRICED TO SELL

  NAOMI NOVIK

  “I’m over getting offended,” the vampire said despondently. “I just want to stop wasting my time. If the board isn’t going to let me in, I don’t care how much they smile and how polite they are. I’d rather they just tell me up front there’s no chance.”

  “I know, it’s terrible,” Jennifer said. No co-op board was going to say anything like that, of course; it was asking for a Fair Housing lawsuit. “Have you thought about a townhouse?”

  “Yeah, sure, because of course I’ve got a trust fund built on long-term compound interest,” he said bitterly. “I’m only fifty-four.”

  He didn’t look a day over twenty-five, with that stylish look vampires got if they didn’t feed that often, pale and glamorous and hungry, staring into his Starbucks like it was nowhere near what he actually wanted. Jennifer wasn’t too surprised he was getting turned down; right now she was feeling pretty excellent about the garlic salt she’d put on the quick slice of pizza that had been lunch.

  “Well,” Jennifer said, “maybe a property in Brooklyn?”

  “Brooklyn?” the vampire said, like she’d suggested a beach vacation in Florida.

  It took him five minutes wrapping up to leave the cafe: coat, gloves, hat, veil, scarf, and a cape over all that; Jennifer was so not envying him the rush-hour subway ride home on the Lexington Avenue line.

  She walked the five blocks uptown and poked her head into Doug’s office to report. The vampire had been bounced over to their team from a broker at Black Thomas Phillips, with blessings, after getting rejected by a second co-op board.

  “Try him on some of the new condo developments, where the developer is still controlling the building,” Doug said. “What’s his budget?”

  “A million two,” Jennifer said.

  “And he wants a three-bedroom?” Doug said. She winced and nodded. “Not a chance. Show him some convertible twos and see if the amenities make him happy.”

  “I was thinking maybe if we could shake something loose in the Victorian, on 76th?” she said. “I could send around postcards to the current owners.”

  “Keep it in your back pocket, but I wouldn’t start there,” Doug said. “The board there won’t mind he’s a vampire, but they’ll mind that he’s less than a hundred years old.”

  Tom knocked on the door and looked in. “Doug, sorry to interrupt, but you’ve got that 2:15 with the new client at their place on 32nd and 1st.”

  Doug didn’t really know the building; it was a rental, and not a good one: near the Midtown Tunnel traffic, no views, and only an aggressive goblin minding the door, who scowled when Doug asked for 6B. “Six B?”

  “Yes?” Doug said.

  “You … friend?” the goblin asked, even more suspiciously.

  “He’s expecting me,” Doug said, diplomatically—some tenants didn’t want their landlord knowing they were apartment-hunting.

  Unbelievably, the goblin went ahead and poked a foot at the watch-cat sleeping under the front hall table. It raised its head and sniffed at Doug and said in a disgruntled voice, “What do you want from me, it’s just a real estate broker.”

  “Broker?” the goblin said, brightening. “Broker, huh? He moving?”

  “You’d have to ask him,” Doug said, but that wasn’t a good sign. Bad landlord references could sink a board application quicker than vampirism. He was starting to get doubts about the client anyway. Anyone who really had a $3 million budget, living here?

  The IKEA furniture filling the apartment didn’t give him a lot of added confidence, but the client said, “Oh, it’s—it’s in a trust fund,” blinking at him myopically from behind small, thick-glassed round John Lennon specs. Henry Kell didn’t seem like a candidate to piss off goblins: he was a skinny five-foot-six and talked softly enough that Doug had to lean forward to hear him. “I don’t like to spend it, and— and I don’t have very many needs, you know. Only—well—I think it would be best if, if we had our own property, and I think he’s come around to the notion.”

  “Okay, so we’re looking for a place for you and your—partner?” Doug said. “Should I meet him too?”

  “Er,” Mr. Kell said. He took his glasses off and wiped them with a cloth. “You very likely will, at some point, I would expect. But perhaps we could begin just the two of us?”

  Kell didn’t care about pre-war or post-war, didn’t care about a view— “Although I would prefer,” he said, “not to look directly into other apartments”—and only shrugged when Doug asked about neighborhoods.

  “Okay,” Doug said, giving up. He figured he was going to have to take Kell around a little to get some sense of the guy’s taste. “I can show you some places tomorrow, if you have time?”

  “That would be splendid,” Kell said, and the next morning he set Doug’s new personal best record by walking into the first place he was shown, looking around for a total of ten minutes, and coming back to say he’d take it for the asking price.

  Not that Doug had a deep aversion to getting paid more for less work, but he felt like he wasn’t doing his job. “Are you sure you don’t want to see anything else?” he said. “Honestly—the ask here is a little high, the place has only been on
the market a week.”

  “No, I,” Kell said, “I think I would prefer, really, to tie everything up as quickly as possible. The apartment is quite excellent.”

  Not a lot of people would have called it that—it was an estate sale, the kitchen and the bathrooms were original, and the late owner had committed crimes against architecture with a pile of ugly built-ins. But nobody could deny it met Kell’s criteria for privacy—three rooms facing into blank walls, another one into a courtyard, and the bedroom had a little slice of a view into Riverside Park. The neighborhood was quiet, the elves at Riverside kept it that way, and it was a condo.

  “How soon can we sign a contract?” Kell asked.

  “I’ll get your lawyer in touch with the seller’s lawyer,” Doug said, and called Tom to cancel the rest of the viewings, shrugging a little helplessly to himself.

  “Wow,” Tom said, when Doug got back into the office.

  “Yeah, that was really something,” Doug said. “I think I get bragging rights for easiest commission ever made on this one. How did it go at Tudor City?”

  Tom shook his head glumly. The Tudor City apartment was a beautiful place—view of the UN, formal dining room and two bedrooms, renovated kitchen, new subway tile bathrooms, and priced to move. Unfortunately, it had come on the market as part of a divorce settlement, and before moving out the owners had gotten into a knockdown, drag-out screaming fight that had ended in dueling curses in the living room.

  People weren’t even getting to the master suite. They came in, stuck their heads into the big entry closet, walked into the living room, saw the long wall swarming over with huge black bugs, and turned around and went right out. Sometimes they screamed, even though Doug always warned their brokers beforehand. But it was a tough market right now, and no one wanted to give up a chance for a sale.