Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories

by Joseph Nassise

  My hands in Mae’s control reached out and drew the light and fog into shapes familiar and strange—wire frames clothed in silver mist like the projection of a black-and-white film someone had left running in a steam-filled room. “Look what I can do—and you couldn’t understand how I could take all your little toys apart! Look, look, look! I told you this was how it was. I told you!”

  I could feel the shape rendering from Mae’s thoughts inside my head, the force of her imagining pulling the power forth and clothing it in the smoke-and-silver of the Grey. She/I held the colored energy in our hands just like threads or ropes and the power just . . . flowed into shape like some wild woven creature with a burning heart of light. “If I could only bring you here, Alma . . . Then you’d see, then you’d know. And I’d pluck you apart . . . just like this!” Then she tangled my hand in the unburning heat of the thing and yanked the blazing core out, tearing it apart. I almost screamed from the burn of it, but as the thing fell apart, the heat turned back to cold . . .

  “You held me down, you let me drown, you kept me in the cold and ice, and you took everything for yourself—everything, everyone! You told them such lies! Such lies! And this is all there is, forever and forever . . . Now we’ll see . . . now we’ll see how your bright colors and wild animals can protect you, liar!” She turned us and through the mist I saw a bright shape of light—no, two: a fury-red knotted up with spikes of bleeding black that tangled in and through another shape that flashed colors like light through a prism. That had to be Harper—containing Alma.

  Mae plucked the thought from my head and shrieked, “Alma!” She tore through the swirling mist toward the black sketch of the house, and plunged our hands into the sparking shape of my power circle, which she definitely should not have been able to do. I felt it like electricity up my arms as she grabbed hold of it and tore it open.

  A brief holy shit! that was definitely all my own popped out before we were spat into the last of my circles. Harper hadn’t been kidding about tearing things apart, if she—or working the Grey—could do that to one of my power circles. Nobody could do that to one of my power circles.

  Except me. And I was me and I was Mae and, oh God, that got complicated.

  What was not complicated was that we—Mae and I—were now free to roam that small enclosure.

  Free, in her mind, to attack.

  But I wasn’t in the chilly Grey now, and Mae wasn’t a shaman.

  Harper was in no condition to run, even with the cane in one hand, but Alma didn’t know that. She forced Harper’s legs two or three staggering steps before the half-healed shin and joints couldn’t take any more. Alma’s shock was even greater than her own pain as the next step sent them tumbling gracelessly to the floor: the hard landing came mostly on Harper’s shoulder, sending a blunt throb deep into the joint. I’m gonna be a bloody mess by the time this is over . . . Quinton’s going to read me the riot act.

  Harper’s hands were already moving under Alma’s volition, fingernails preparing to scratch open a vein—blood magic to heal the inconvenient wounds—when Walker ripped apart her own small power circle and landed on Harper like a massive cat pouncing on its prey.

  All of Harper’s breath wheezed out, stymieing not just her, but Alma, too. Walker, with a rictus nothing like her own expressions, pushed her knee deeper into Harper’s diaphragm and coiled her hands in an all too familiar fashion. Harper could see the intent, how the Grey surged to answer her, its ephemeral silver and burning colors ready to bend and yield, to let Mae plunge her hands—the tools of her intent—into their combined coil and tear her and Alma to glittering shreds. Is that how I look? Is that how the ghosts and monsters see me?

  Deep in Harper’s mind, Alma shouted with fear-edged outrage, summoning her own bloodstained shamanic magic. Words burst forth, a torrent of wrath and denial. “Not again! Not again, Mae! You killed me once before—!”

  “I killed you?” a voice unlike Walker’s howled from her lips. Harper could have laughed at the echo of her and Walker’s earlier fight—if she hadn’t been sick with dread. “You killed me, with your lies, with your filthy foolish animal magic, you—” Her grasp on the subtlety of the Grey failed under the heat of her invective, and rather than snatch through the streams of magic, she locked her hands into a double fist and slammed them down like a hammer.

  Harper twitched her head just far enough to the side, a part of her wincing as Walker’s knuckles smashed into the floor. But the part powered by Alma’s hatred swung the cane upward, catching Walker’s cheekbone and knocking her aside. Walker tumbled, her weight leaving Harper’s chest, and Alma forced Harper upward a few inches to strike with the cane again, even as Harper herself locked her arm to keep the blow from landing true. It slammed into Walker’s upper arm instead of her neck, and a host of conflicting emotions danced over Walker’s face: pain, offense, gratitude, frustration. Harper felt Alma’s spike of black humor through an equal blur of emotions that were—and weren’t—hers.

  Before Alma could strike again, Walker rolled backward and dropped into a crouch, putting a little distance between the two of them. Her jaw worked, and her voice grated, but it was her own voice now. “I propose we get this done with before these two beat us to death with our own bodies.”

  Still too winded to waste breath, Harper contented herself with, “How?”

  “Give them what they asked for.” Walker locked eyes with Harper and spoke very precisely, but then her grin turned feral again, the madness plain in it: Mae spread her hands, sliding closer to the Grey, gathering herself to dive deep and rip into the gleaming energy, but with Walker’s benediction behind the gesture. Ice slid down Harper’s spine. She pushed to her feet, weight heavy on the cane, and felt a disorienting sluice of power as Alma, unchallenged, sought the shamanic sorcery that she commanded so naturally.

  Give them what they asked for. Harper ran the phrase through her mind, keeping it deep and quiet. Walker had picked her words this time, instead of her usual rough-and-tumble voicing of whatever came to mind. Give them what they asked for.

  Harper breathed, “All right, Jo,” and hoped like hell that Walker knew what she was doing.

  The Grey felt like a weaponized web rising under my—Mae’s—hands. I couldn’t do what she was doing, couldn’t push it and pull it and force myself through to take something apart as she could, but I could give her the freedom to do that. The threads she reached for turned crimson, and I could feel her shifting around inside of me, trying on my body for speed and size.

  I was a lot bigger than Mae had been when she was alive, and much, much stronger. Her delight at being given this vehicle to end her sister with became palpable, and brightened further as she began to appreciate how Harper moved clumsily, putting weight on the silver cane. Alma was in a lesser vessel; that was Mae’s conclusion, and I was okay with her thinking that.

  Lesser vessel or not—and while I was inclined to bet on not, I also didn’t want Mae picking up on that thought—the shamanic sorcerer Harper carried inside her was strong enough to have broken out of my power circle, albeit with an enspelled silver cane. I couldn’t handle Mae’s grasp on the Grey, but I could certainly see Alma’s awakening of sorcery in Harper’s narrow form. She didn’t heal the leg wound; she just shored it up with power, pouring magic into Harper’s body until the half-built shin became whole with blood-spattered sorcery.

  Harper’s body language changed, and I didn’t think it was just her sudden ability to walk easily again. She looked like someone else had settled into her bones, just as Mae had settled into mine. Alma’s posture was more rigid, her steps smaller, unnatural with Harper’s height. She danced her hands around each other, calling black magic into them. Sparks of grey and gold, colors that I imagined had once been Alma’s natural aura, guttered through the blackness, lending it just enough light to have shadows within.

  Armed with equal and unique magics, the two sisters faced off for the space of a breath. Alma’s loathing made Harper’s f
ace gaunt and unforgiving; I expected I looked no more pleasant. We sized each other up. Mae was more confident than I; I knew how much havoc shamanism gone bad could wreak.

  I didn’t know which of us moved first. I went at Harper like a fencer lunging for the kill, reaching for power that flowed through my arms and stabbed forward, seeking to rend the form ahead of me into shards of scattering light. She came on like a bull, arms spread wide, fire-licked black sorcery stretched between them.

  In the absolute last moment before we clashed, I hissed, “My body. My rules,” at Mae, and changed the game.

  Harper slammed her hands together, boxing Walker’s ears and letting shamanic sorcery burst into the other woman’s body. Mae’s Grey thrust ripped into Harper at the same time, piercing and tearing at the shape of her life. Harper welcomed the slicing cold sizzle and burn. She snatched the energy, twisted and pulled it wide into the aegis—the cold edge and flood of colorless purity—and instead of turning it aside into a shield as she usually did, she let it inundate her body. Alma—the consciousness and memory, thoughts and soul, that shared Harper’s body—couldn’t refuse the reality of the Grey’s singing, vibrant electricity of raw magic as it washed them both. Extraordinary awe swept over Harper, too, and her thoughts tangled up in Alma’s: This cold, this light! It is so much better than dying . . . so grand, so huge, kind and colorful, living and raw and full! It is the same power that spins the shamanic worlds, just . . . different.

  Across from her, Walker took in the shamanic power the same way, guzzling it down as if she’d become greedy for it. Rage and disbelief and understanding flashed through the other woman’s eyes in an instant, so fast Harper could never have named the emotions had she not been experiencing the same roller coaster herself. If Alma had not been experiencing them, just as Mae did.

  All each sister had wanted, from the beginning, was for the other to believe that her power was real.

  It was visceral now, as true as if they had gone into the icy water together and emerged sharing magics as well as sisterly bonds. The knowledge undid them for an instant, shattered the way they’d seen the world, and rebuilt it.

  An instant was apparently all Walker needed.

  Gunmetal blue healing power exploded across both of them. All of them—Harper didn’t know how to count them, anymore. It wrenched through Alma, burning a century of hatred from her heart. Harper gasped and staggered aside; when she caught herself, Alma stood where Harper had been, gazing in weary bewilderment at the dark walls around them.

  Mae surged out of Walker as though she’d been pushed, and looked around with as much confusion as Alma. Neither spoke or moved; they hardly seemed aware of one another, and were instead drawn toward the bleak walls of the little house.

  Walker blurted, “Quick quick quick quick quick, unpick unpick unpick,” and Harper, with a hoarse laugh, was surprised to understand what she meant.

  The sisters had been tied to the house for far too long, and the Grey was good for taking things apart—even things that had physical form so long as the power was what held them in shape. Harper plunged her hands into the searing black and pulled. The walls shuddered, shattered, and tumbled, as the ghostlight sinews of anger and pain that had for too long bound together the very bones of the spite house tore apart, piece-by-piece. The healed spirits sighed with each crack of the walls, drifting not farther apart, but closer together, until as the house fell to bits, they embraced in lambent light, and faded into nothing.

  Green grass, neatly cared for and faintly immaterial, appeared beneath Harper’s feet. Walker took half a step toward her, kicked something, and said, “Ow,” as she bent to pick it up. The lockbox from the hall table. Harper barked a warning too late, and Walker, box in hand, looked up with a laugh. “I never learn, do I? But it didn’t bite this time.”

  “I should have realized it wouldn’t.” Harper caught a glimpse of the key and crouched to collect it, too. She handed it to Walker, noticing that her leg took her weight and movement with less complaint. It wasn’t yet at full strength, but . . . “This is . . . ah . . . better,” she said.

  Walker looked abashed. “A little, yeah. Sorry about that. Kind of. I mean, I know you don’t want to explain magically regenerating bones to the doctors, but that healing blast kind of—it wasn’t very focused. I was trying to get everything out of the twins, and one of them was in you . . .”

  “Hey, I was just going to say thank you.” Harper shrugged and gave a crooked grin. “We’ll call it a medical miracle and the docs can have a field day arguing about it.” Her leg was still imperfect, but it felt like it would have less of a weather-wise ache now and she was grateful. “What’s in the box?” she asked.

  Walker fitted the key and opened the box. A fragile newspaper clipping lay inside; they both peered at it without daring to touch.

  Miracle Twins! the boldface headline proclaimed. Three days ago, Alma and Mae Lindsey plunged through thin ice on Lake Washington and were miraculously pulled from the water, still alive, twenty minutes later. The story went on, but the accompanying photograph drew Harper’s attention: two young women with strong jaws and long noses, sternly corseted and, despite the formality of the photograph, still clearly holding on to one another for support and comfort.

  Harper smiled. “They looked a little like that at the end, didn’t they?”

  “Did they? I can’t see ghosts. But I’m glad.”

  “You can’t—” The ground underfoot was growing more solid. Harper frowned at it. “I’ve got a thousand questions for you, but I think the planes that the house held together are returning to their rightful place.”

  “Yeah. We’re running out of time here.” Walker scuffed her foot against the grass, watching it bend beneath the pressure, then looked up and offered a hand. “Well. It sure was interesting meeting you, Harper Blaine.”

  “You, too, Joanne Walker.” They shook hands, and Harper, still testing her weight on the half-healed leg, turned and started away, the cane more jaunty and less necessary in her grip.

  A moment later Walker’s voice followed her: “Hey, Harper.”

  Harper turned back, curious. Walker, looking almost a ghost herself now, twisted something off a bracelet—Harper hadn’t even seen it under the sleeves of Walker’s white leather coat—and tossed it her way. It landed solidly in Harper’s hand: a small copper lynx charm. She looked up at Walker questioningly.

  The other woman shrugged and smiled. “Who knows? If you’re ever in trouble, rub it, click your heels together, and say ‘There’s no one like Jo,’ three times, or something.”

  “I think that’s there’s no place like home,” Harper replied pedantically, and Walker, laughing, disappeared from the Grey.

  The lynx stayed solidly in Harper’s palm, though, and after a moment she held it in her fingertips, examining it in the light. It glimmered and Harper, smiling, tucked it into her pocket. “I wonder which one of us is going to get paid?”

  Crossed Wires

  JEFF SOMERS AND STEPHEN BLACKMOORE

  “I got a problem, Lem.”

  I glance up from my cards and take him in: Gabby Monke is a flabby blimp of a man who always wears the same linen suit, a study in increasing alarm. Each finger of both hands is wrapped in a piece of white gauze, red stains leaking through. The effect is of a fat man with marshmallows stuck on his fingers, removing that scrap of dignity that Gabby had left.

  “You don’t have a nickel to your name, Gabs,” I say, “so I’m not sure where I come into this.”

  My poverty is famous. I glance at Mags, who is squeezing drops of blood from one thumb and holding a match in his other hand, muttering a mu that was supposed to light the match spontaneously. A fucking useless bit of doggerel, but I could see where it could be beefed up with a few extra Words and made into something forceful. Studying the seams of his sports jacket, which spread and creak over his huge shoulders as he hunches over his project, I amend my thought: Our poverty is famous. Mags is basically my pro
perty by now. Hiram made it clear: The moment the huge bastard followed me out of his apartment, he was mine to water and feed.

  “C’mon, Lem,” Gabby says in a ridiculous stage whisper, as if there were anything like privacy in a bar filled with idimustari. Tricksters cast eavesdropping cantrips instinctively, automatically. “I just need a consultation.”

  I sigh and look around my table. I’ve been playing for three hours and I’m up exactly five dollars from where I started, which means I have seven dollars to my name. It’s rough when you can’t use a little bit of gas and cloud people’s judgment, but the easiest way to get barred from Rue’s Morgue, I’d learned, was to cast a spell in a room full of Tricksters who could smell blood.

  “Fine, Gabs,” I say. “Buy me a drink and tell me your sorrows.” I stand up. “Cash me out,” I say, pushing my chips into the center of the table. I look at Mags, who has fallen in love with me and can’t bear to be away from my comforting presence. “Stay!” I command. “Sit!”

  Mags is just a huge dog, deep down. He offers me a sad face, but settles back into his seat.

  “You ever worry that boy’s gonna roll over in his sleep and crush you to death?” Gabby asks as we head for the bar, where Sheila is swaying in misery, blind hungover and green-faced. She manages a smile for us, though, a true professional.

  “Yes,” I admit. “Among other things.”

  Pitr Mags is dumb as a post and strong as a fucking angry bear, and he breaks things by looking at them, by simply sharing space with them. He still thinks he will one day be a bona fide ustari, bleeding to cast spells and mastering the universe, even though so far he’s learned about six spells, five of which he fucks up regularly. He also seems to think I am his gasam, that Hiram has transferred him to me. Pitr Mags lives his life under a lot of misapprehensions, but I’ve grown to like the guy. He is completely honest, totally loyal, and useful in a fight.