We order shots of bourbon, clink glasses, and down them.
“Oh that’s it,” Gabby says breathlessly, signaling, to my amazement, for two more. We let those sit.
“So, tell me,” I say, scratching my head. I haven’t showered in a few days, and feel like New York City has been grated directly onto me.
He sighs. Gabby has no specialty. He’s one of those idimustari, one of those Tricksters who discovered the Words and found his way to us, learned precisely four spells and sat back, satisfied to survive on four dollars a day. But then again I am good with the Words and I am broke and faced with the daunting task of feeding Pitr Mags later. I am in no position to judge another mage’s successes.
“You know I lost my mother last year,” he says, and I have to control myself. Gabby has been lamenting the loss of his “mawmaw” every day for a year now, a rail-thin, bitter woman who could not possibly have once housed someone as huge and inflated as Gabby Monke.
“So, some ustari set out her shingle as a medium,” Gabby continues, picking up his whiskey but just holding it, staring. “Straightforward enough, no mumbo-jumbo: A C-spot, and some bleeding, and she’ll let you talk to anyone who’s passed on. So I go. This townhouse down in the Village, skinniest fucking building I ever saw. I pay my tithe, I bleed her a pint, and five minutes later I’m talking to Mawmaw. Like really talking to her, Lem!”
His eyes are shining, and I have a horrible moment of thinking he is going to fucking burst into tears on me. “You got conned, Gabs,” I say, retrieving my own shot from the bar in case I upset him and he decides to regret buying it for me. “Oldest one in the book, practically.” I think how I would do it: a light Charm, to make things friendly, a bit of Compulsion to control the reactions, a lot of Glamour to make the special effects land. It isn’t like it’s impossible to contact the dead, but it takes a lot more blood than a pint.
“No.” Gabby reaches out and grabs my arm, making me slop whiskey everywhere. “No, Lem, I swear, this shit was legit. It was Mawmaw. It was.” He grimaces. “The first time.”
I tip the shot back before the miserable bastard can spill it all. “So, the second time?”
“Same thing. A hundred bucks, a pint of blood, but when she went through the spell, it wasn’t my mother. It was my father.”
I nod, waiting.
“My father ain’t dead, Lem.”
I wait again, and then lean forward. “Gabs. You. Got. Conned.”
His hand tightens on me. “Listen, Lem, help me out. Go down there and check it out, bust that bitch, get my loot back.” He licks his lips, lizard-like, and I flinch away from the sight. “Look, get back my dosh and I’ll split it with you. A hundred bucks. What do you say?”
I ball my feet inside my shoes and feel the paper-thin spot on the sole that will soon be a hole, letting in tiny rocks and puddles of water. I consider my personal fortune of seven dollars, with which I will have to feed myself and Pitr Mags, a man who makes hot dogs disappear in one bite and then spends five minutes licking his fingers in sad remembrance of the meal that was.
“C’mon, Lem,” Gabby pleads. “You know every scam, every angle, every damn trick there is. Whatever her game is, you’re the one to spot it.”
I sense this is a compliment. Flattery doesn’t mean anything though. I calculate how many hot dogs a hundred bucks will buy Mags.
I nod. “Fine.”
I’m sitting in an overpriced bar in Manhattan full of ghosts and the wealthy. The rich folks are three kinds of rich. Investment rich, old rich, or drug rich. They’re all equally boring.
But the ghosts, well, they’re all kinds of interesting.
Haunts who’ve been stuck in the building since the 1800s, Wanderers who’ve come in off the street to check me out, a surprising number of Echoes, psychic recordings repeating their deaths like a skipping record.
I’ve seen six so far and there are more hiding in the background. Two gunshot wounds, three stabbings, and I can’t be sure, but I think one with a face torn off by a monkey.
To look at the place you’d think it wasn’t that kind of bar. But one thing all bars have in common is people get into fights, sometimes they die. Sometimes they leave behind ghosts.
None of the other patrons can see them, of course. They’re all normals near as I can tell, regular people with no magic. And even if there is another mage in the crowd they probably wouldn’t see them, either. Every mage has a knack, one thing they’re really good at. Divination, illusions, whatever.
My thing’s necromancy. Rare enough to be exceptional, creepy enough nobody wants it. Kind of like winning a lifetime supply of fast-food cheeseburgers.
Looking at the dead in the bar I can say I’m not looking much better than they are. I’ve got a bruised rib, black eye, split lip, a gash on my arm I stitched together with dental floss and butterfly bandages the night before.
I should be in bed with Vicodin and a bottle of vodka. I stand out like a sore thumb in this crowd, and a nice circle of space has opened up around me since nobody wants to be near me. At least I’m wearing a tie.
“Eric Carter?” I look up from my scotch to see a young black woman dressed for a night of clubbing. She has skin the color of teak and hair pulled back into a bun on top of her head. Her dress is a short, shimmery silver number and her nails are immaculate with plum polish.
But it’s the eyes that do it. They’re more gold than brown, with flecks of green and orange speckled through them. Look close enough and you can see the colors dance in them like motes of dust in a sunbeam.
Easy eyes to get lost in. Which is the point.
“You Miranda?”
She sticks her hand out and I shake it. She has a grip like ice. Like literally ice. When I pull my hand back it’s like I stuck it in a freezer. I rub my hands together to get some warmth back into it.
“Sorry about that,” she says. “I haven’t eaten tonight.”
“I hear they make awesome fries here,” I say. She indulges the joke with a smile. We both know what she eats and it isn’t bar food. Well, I suppose it depends on your definition of bar food.
“Thank you for coming to meet me on such short notice,” she says and slides onto the stool next to me. “And for meeting me here. I don’t get that it’s really your scene.”
“What gave it away? The rumpled suit? The bad haircut?”
“The black eye, bruises, and cuts, actually,” she says.
“I’m trying a look.”
“It suits you.”
“Thanks. Why are we meeting here?”
“I need to eat tonight,” she says. “Soon. This is a good place for it.”
“Ah. Let’s get to it, then. I understand you need to talk to a dead man.”
“I’m hoping to. There are . . . concerns in my community.”
“So it’s not an ordinary dead man.”
“Well, yes and no. He’s ordinary. His death not so much. His name’s Bill Pear. Local homeless man. Nice enough guy, didn’t cause trouble. About a month ago he wandered off. Nobody thought anything of it until his body turned up two days ago. Bled to death.”
Miranda’s “community” is made up of supernatural creatures like herself who live in Manhattan. Every city’s got them. Vampires, Gwisin, Pombero, Wendigo, things like that. They do what they can to blend in. Sometimes because they want to be left alone. Sometimes because they prey on humans. They’re never quite what the stories say, though there’s always a grain of truth in them, somewhere.
Miranda’s a Lamia. She doesn’t have a snake’s tail, or lion’s feet as far as I know, but she does feed off the life force of humans a couple of times a week. She doesn’t usually kill her meals, that’d draw unwanted attention, but she does shave a few years off their lives.
When you live in the shadows like Miranda you pay attention to the others who live there, too. The junkies, the hustlers, the homeless, the grifters. And when something unusual happens to them it pays to get answers before the same thi
ng happens to you.
“Vampire moving in?”
She shakes her head. “No. He was bled, but the blood was just spilled, not taken. We don’t know what this is.” She pulls her phone from her purse and brings up a set of photos and hands it to me. I scroll through them and I get what she’s talking about. I don’t know what the hell this is, either.
Male, late sixties, probably younger. Homelessness does a real number on people. He’s naked, tied upside down by his feet to a fire escape. He’s been bled, all right. Messily. Instead of one neat cut across his throat there are dozens of smaller ones all across his face and body. I zoom in on one to get a better look. They’re not just random cuts, they’re runes. Somebody was writing on him with a knife.
“Anyone ID what the runes are? I don’t recognize them.”
“No,” she says. “Not that any of the local mages who might be able to read them are interested in helping us.”
“That’s mages for you.” Bunch of shortsighted sociopaths, the lot of us. If the homeless are a harbinger of trouble for the supernaturals, the supernaturals are the same thing for us. “Speaking of which. Why me? I can’t be the only necromancer around here.”
I haven’t been in New York for very long, only about a year. I’m an L.A. boy. I left eight years ago under a bit of a cloud and haven’t been back. Been wandering here and there ever since. I like New York. City of a thousand smells, none of them what I’d call good.
New York magic is city magic. Tastes like hot metal, poured concrete. A mélange of all the cultures and beliefs that have passed through it. Hopes and shattered dreams, fortunes and downfall. The magic in an area takes on the flavor of the world around it the way wine grapes take on the flavor of the soil.
New York magic is good for creating things that last. Golems and constructs, for example. Curses that really stick. Compare it with L.A., where you can’t pin it down. L.A. magic is good for reinvention, making something new and burying the old.
Not that you can’t use a place’s magic for anything else, of course. It just makes some things easier. It’s like wine with food. Pair it right, you have something special. Pair it wrong, you’ll still get just as drunk.
The thing about New York is that it isn’t big, there are just a lot of people in it. And that includes mages. We’re a rare breed, but out here there are a shit ton of us. With this many in play there should be one or two necromancers around.
“There was one we used to work with, but she was in the Towers when they went down. A few others have moved in, but they’re . . .” She searches for a word.
“Racist fucks?” I say.
“That’s one way to put it. I’d heard you were more open than most.”
“For the right price, I’ll do just about anything.”
“Hence the black eye?”
“That’s more a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing. Jersey Devil.”
A look of fear passes over her face and just as quickly disappears. “In the city?”
“Morristown. Sniffed me out and thought it could get a quick meal.” Nasty fuckers. Up here they’re Jersey Devils, down in Mexico they’re El Cucuy. I hear the Russian mages call them Baba Yagas.
Whatever you call them, they’re bad news. Magic eaters. They love to eat mages. But they’ll go after just about anything that uses or is magic. Like Miranda here.
“You got off light.”
“It wasn’t very big. Anyway, where’d you find Hobo Bill? And why isn’t he in the papers?”
“Behind a restaurant on Bedford and Commerce. Around three in the morning. Peter, one of our ghouls, got the body. He still has it if you want to see it. Thought it would be better than letting the police get involved.”
“You sure this wasn’t just some nutjob writing gibberish occult nonsense on the corpse?” I turn the phone in my hand trying to get a better view of the runes. Doesn’t matter the angle; I can’t tell what these are.
“I know it’s unlikely, but I have to ask—”
“If Peter did it?” she says. “No. He’s a scavenger, not a hunter. Very conflict avoidant. Lot of anxiety. He’s been on Paxil for years. It’s definitely not one of us. It can’t be one of us. We’d like to find out if this is something we need to worry about.”
She’s scared. Her whole neighborhood’s scared. I get it. Some new beastie’s walked in that they don’t understand and tossed everything sideways.
“I’ll check the scene and see if he left a ghost. With this kind of thing they usually do. If there’s enough of him left I’ll ask him what happened.”
“We would really appreciate it.”
I keep turning the phone, trying to pick out the runes. Some of them are almost ones I recognize, but there are differences that don’t match up. Like seeing a mix of different languages that don’t make sense, letters mashed together to form new ones.
“This ghoul, Peter, he live near where you found the body?”
“Yes. I can give you the address. Do you want to see the body? I can let him know you’re coming. He runs a butcher shop a few blocks away.”
Of course he does. “Thanks. If I see the body maybe I can tell if these markings are just bullshit nonsense. Then I don’t have to talk to Bill. Save you guys some money.”
“Such magnanimity.”
“More laziness, honestly. He hasn’t eaten the body yet, has he?”
“He promised he wouldn’t,” she says. “For a few weeks at least. Wants to age the meat a little.”
“Great. A connoisseur.”
There’s so much fucking gas in the city. We ride the subway downtown and there is just gas in the air, someone on the car bleeding under a bandage, under their clothes, somewhere. Not a lot, but enough for a mu or two, something small, if you were willing to bleed someone else. Plenty of my fellow travelers do that, paying kids or hookers or drunks for a bleed, and plenty of others don’t even pay.
I’d done that once, and every time I thought of it, my skin crawled and my heart started pounding. For me and Mags, we cast off our own gas, period. I’m light-headed all the time, but I sleep at night.
At 75 1/2 Bedford Street we find the skinniest fucking house I’ve ever seen. Standing in front of it, Mags stretches his arms out, punishing the cheap seams of his jacket even more, and if he were inside he might have touched both walls. The neighborhood has so much money it makes me itch. I feel shabby, standing on the street in my thin suit and my fading shoes.
And then I feel something else, because there is something wrong with the house.
Mags feels it too. He turns to look back at me with the wide-eyed expression he reserves for the Unknown, for anything he isn’t sure he should be afraid of. It makes him look like a kid, some monstrous six-foot-five Indian kid with hands like shovels. Mags could casually knock down walls, but he is scared of everything.
Something is . . . missing. Something I normally feel, swim around in, breathe, but never think about. But it’s just a house.
“C’mon,” I say gruffly, giving him a little shove as I step past him. For a hundred bucks I am ignoring my instincts. This has never gone well for me in the past, but then paying attention to my instincts has left me with exactly seven dollars and a man-child companion who is more stomach than brain. The lessons the universe is trying to teach me are vague, at best.
As I approach the front door the sense of wrongness gets stronger. With a furtive look around to ensure privacy, I tug up my sleeves with a practiced motion, pull my switchblade from my pocket, snap it open, and drag the blade across my forearm. The usual sting, the usual uncanny delay, and then a thick line of red blood. I taste the gas in the air and hold my arm up, touching my forefinger to my thumb to make a circle. Six Words, a mu of my own creation, designed to reveal truths and dispel Glamours.
I close one eye and squint through the circle formed by my fingers. The townhome is gone. Everything else is exactly as I saw it, but in place of this ridiculously skinny building there is an alleyway running
between the two buildings, grass and trash.
I flex my hand and the spell snaps. The familiar wave of mild dizziness passes through me, and then I’m back to normal, and the wound on my arm is already a raw, scabbed memory. The universe is hungry for blood, but it’s polite about it.
“Still doesn’t make sense,” I say.
“Gabs said he was in the house,” Mags says quietly.
He’s right, which is unusual enough to make me look at him in surprise. If the building isn’t really there, then it’s a Glamour. But if it’s a Glamour, then Gabby couldn’t have walked into it. And if it’s a Glamour, that doesn’t explain the sense of nothing I get from it.
“Mags,” I say. “Can you give me a bit of the witchlight?”
He grunts. Teaching Mags a new spell generally means he forgets one you taught him last week, but the witchlight was one of the basics every single idimustari, the Little Magicians, could cast. You might never become an enustari, an Archmage, but you would be able to light up hidden runes and other magical markings. Not quite as useful as a solid Charm cantrip or a fireball spell, but useful enough.
He opens his palm, crisscrossed with faded white scars and newer pink ones, lines on a map. He produces a fucking steak knife, nicked, I thought, from Hiram’s place when we made our unceremonious and humiliating departure, and I am fucking mortified. Hiram already thought I was an idiot to walk away from his apprenticeship—and the old man still hadn’t released me from my magical oath of urtuku, which meant I was still under his thumb—but if I had to crawl back to return his fucking cutlery, my ignominy in the world of mages would be secure.
Mags slices his palm with a wince and a tiny, childlike sound. Then he clenches his fist, speaks the Words, and his hand is engulfed in a sputtering blue-white light.
“Crank it up,” I say.
He settles himself and concentrates, lips moving, and the ball of light grows larger and brighter until it throws the townhome and everything around it into sharp relief. No one not in our grubby little guild of magicians could see it. All they would see was two disreputable assholes apparently doing interpretive dance on the sidewalk.
Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 26
