Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories

by Joseph Nassise

  You have my attention.

  “Now that I know there’s a connection to your New York through the land of the dead, I should be able to find it. If I can find it I might be able to sever it.”

  You think that’ll pop the bubble?

  “This shit’s never that easy,” I say. “If I break the connection she might still have enough of her world stuck over on this side that she can keep growing it. Is there some way you can, I dunno, shove the extrusion back over onto my side? Displace the bubble here?”

  Like pushing your guts back in through a hernia.

  “Vivid, but yes.”

  Silence for a long time. I start to wonder if the connection is failing, but then he says, Yeah. I think I can come up with Words for that.

  He says it with the capital, and it’s nowhere near the strangest thing I’ve heard today, so I just nod. “Cool. You go do your thing, I’ll do mine. If it works my New York doesn’t turn into a parallel universe, you stop getting infested by ghosts, Deasmhumhain gets stuck in between.”

  What if it doesn’t work?

  “She probably shows up and kills both of us.”

  This is a shitty plan.

  “Never said it wasn’t.”

  All right, let’s do this. Can’t say it’s been nice talking to you, Eric, but it was . . . educational.

  “Likewise, Lem.” I let go of him and the feeling of his presence, a background hum in the back of my head, disappears. I wonder if there’s a version of Lem on this side. Or a version of me on the other.

  I don’t go down that rabbit hole. It’s time to get to work. But I can’t do anything until I get out of this house. The door opens up to a narrow room with a steep staircase on one side and ends in a foyer with the front door and two close-set windows. Out that door and across the street and I’m home free.

  But, as I am constantly reminded, the universe is an asshole.

  The front door opens and a tall woman with pale skin and red hair cut short and slicked back freezes at the threshold, surprise on her face. She’s wearing a deep green three-piece suit. The crimson tie around her throat knotted in a Windsor.

  “Nice tie,” I say, lifting my tie for her to see. “I can never do better than a four-in-hand. Sloppy, I know, but I just can’t seem to get the hang of it.”

  “What—Who the hell are you?”

  “You’re Deasmhumhain, right? From that other New York? I’ve heard about you. They didn’t tell me you were such a snappy dresser. I really like the suit.”

  The surprise grows on her face. I’ll take confusion over her blasting a hole in me. I need to get out of here and the first order of business is not dying.

  She pulls a switchblade from her pocket and flicks it open, cutting into her hand with a smooth, practiced motion. From what Lem told me her magic is blood and words. She’s got the blood, but she hasn’t opened her mouth, yet.

  So I tackle her. She’s surprisingly solid and I almost bounce off of her. Probably has defensive spells etched into her skin like I do. But inside the house hers actually work.

  She goes down more from losing her balance than anything I’ve done to her, but hits the cement outside hard enough to knock the breath out of her.

  I resist the urge to bounce her head on the doorstep. I doubt it’d hurt her and there’s no point giving her more blood to work with.

  I leap off her and bolt for the street. Behind me I can hear her muttering something unintelligible. A quick glance shows me a gout of flame leaving her fingers toward me. Once I hit the threshold of the bubble the magic should fizzle.

  It doesn’t mean the fire will, though. If I throw something with magic it’s still got momentum. Light the air with magic, it’s going to stay hot.

  I feel the magic slam back into me. It’s a feeling like my ears clearing after a weeklong cold, only all over. I spin and throw out a spell at the fire, forcing it to split down the middle as it comes near, dissipate into the air behind me.

  Deasmhumhain is furious. She stands, starts to come toward me. It would be nice if she made this easy, crossed the threshold where I can do my thing, but she catches herself before she takes two steps.

  We’re at an impasse. On this side of the bubble I can counter anything she throws at me, and likely vice versa.

  Not that that stops her from trying. She says some words and flicks some blood in my direction. A flash of light hits the bubble, making it temporarily visible from the living side, and sputters out. Whatever she just threw at me was probably pretty nasty.

  “That has really got to suck,” I say.

  “I am going to fucking murder you,” she says, a slight Irish lilt to her voice.

  “I dunno about that. A little bird told me somebody’s trying to dismantle your little pocket kingdom here from the other side. It’d suck if all this work you did went away. You might want to check on that.”

  It’s a dick move, I know. I’m essentially siccing her on Lem. But it might get her out of my hair for a bit so I can find the connection to Lem’s world and try to cut it off.

  It works. She glares at me, her mouth twisting to say words she knows won’t work against me. I press my thumb to my nose and waggle my fingers at her.

  She slams the door closed. Time for me to get to work.

  For a second I ponder the existence of Eric Carter. He sounds like someone I might like. Or at least someone who might not want to fuck me over at first chance, which is almost the same thing. I wonder if there’s a . . . version of him on this side of things.

  I look over at Mags. No time for social networking cross-dimensional doppelgangers. “I need your help, buddy.”

  He perks up, like a dog who has learned the word treat, and I feel like an asshole. It’s easy to talk him into things, and I try not to take advantage of that.

  “What happened?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “I’ll explain later,” I say. It’s too much. I can barely comprehend what I’ve just experienced as it is. Trying to verbalize it would be impossible. “Right now we got work to do.” I take a deep breath. “And I need you to cast.”

  Mags shakes his head. “I’m no good, Lem,” he says. “I’ll mess it up. You do it. I’ll bleed.”

  I don’t even have the energy to be angry. I just shake my head again. “We don’t bleed anyone but ourselves, Mags,” I say, struggling for consciousness and clarity. This has taken more out of me than anything I’d ever done. It feels like spells that carry over into the other universe take twice as much gas, maybe more. “You bleed, I’ll give you the Words. Come on, we don’t have much time.”

  Mags, his face a mask of worry, begins pulling off his jacket, his arms getting caught in a complex web of sleeves. He tries to stay cool, and keeps working it without looking away from me. “What if I screw it up, Lem? No one says the Words like you.”

  I nod. It is my one and only skill and talent, and so far it has brought me poverty, humiliation, and Pitr Mags. “I’ll be right here. I’ll walk you through it. We have to do this, Magsie. We don’t, something bad is gonna happen.”

  He rolls his shirtsleeve up and fumbles for his knife. He holds it poised over his arm, shaking slightly.

  “All right, Lem,” he says with calm, horrifying trust. “Tell me what to say.”

  A couple across the street are staring at me. “The fuck are you looking at?” Like they’ve never seen weird shit in New York. They put their heads down and hurry past.

  I try not to do magic in front of the straights, but sometimes you can’t help it. More than likely their minds will fill in the blanks with some rationalization. Say somebody had a flamethrower on Bedford.

  I don’t know how much time I’ve got. If Deasmhumhain can actually do anything to Lem, probably not a lot.

  More Wanderers come by, entranced by the trap Deasmhumhain has set for them. Now that I know what it looks like I can see their essence coming off of them like smoke as soon as they get near. The rate that they’re coming in, and dissolving, seems to
be accelerating.

  I sit down on the sidewalk and concentrate on moving to the other side. Focus on the darkness and the cold, emptiness, void. I tie the spell together and my mind wrenches as I shift over to the other side.

  The sounds of the street disappear to be replaced by an uncharacteristic wailing, a banshee shriek that fills my head. It’s almost too much to bear, but I grit my teeth and push past it.

  It’s the Wanderers. The ones that are still self-aware enough to realize what’s happening to them. Screaming as they try to hold on to the last shreds of their souls. The bubble has cranked up its feeding frenzy and ghosts are draining away into it like they’re being flushed down a toilet.

  Once she saw me, Deasmhumhain must have sped up the process. I don’t know enough about this magic to tell if that’s going to do anything to my chances of disconnecting the bridge between worlds, but I’m going to have to assume it is. The clock is ticking. I just don’t know what time it is.

  I didn’t see anything besides the bubble on the back of the house, so it should be connected somewhere here in the front. But I don’t see anything. I run from one side of the house to the other. Nothing.

  It’s not in the front; it’s not in the back. Does it go through the houses on either side? If so, shouldn’t I see something poking out as the block ends? I don’t even know what it looks like, but I’m pretty sure it’s not here.

  Then I kick myself for thinking like the living.

  I look for a manhole cover in the street. Hope I find one that hasn’t been in the ground too long. They don’t get moved often, or replaced. But just because something’s solid over here doesn’t mean it’s heavy. They’re just hard to get a grip on. It’s all willpower.

  I find one a house down and pry it out of its hole. Sewers are some of the most solid structures over here. Most of them have been around for centuries. People don’t think about the actual tunnels much, so get too far out and they sort of disappear, but around manholes and homes folks pay enough attention that I can walk around them.

  I jump down into the sewer tunnel. I can see the bubble of Deasmhumhain’s magic extending down below the street and into the ground. Nothing as prosaic as dirt is going to stop it.

  And not far over there’s the connection, a pulsing silver cord as thick as my forearm connected near the bottom and extending down to fade away into nothing.

  I wonder if I have time to go get a chainsaw.

  The bubble shudders, flickering with a strange static, then stabilizes. All right, that’s a no on the chainsaw.

  I pull my straight razor and open it. I wonder how good it is for sawing through magic pipes.

  I stagger a little, and Mags feints toward me, his brow wrinkling in concern, but I wave him back. He doesn’t stop speaking, which is amazing. I’ve seen Mags break off a spell because a butterfly danced across his field of vision, the spell collapsing around us like an invisible explosion. He settles back, blood seeping from the deep wound across his forearm, sizzling and burning off, taken by the greedy universe.

  I shouldn’t be as exhausted as I am. I feel like I’ve been bleeding for ten minutes, like I’m trying to cast some complex biludha, some ancient world-changing ritual. I’m ready to fall over after a spell that should be a walk in the park. Whatever Deasmhumhain had done here, folding two realities together, poking through into Carter’s and dragging mine after her, it made casting much more difficult. Like walking through deep mud, the ground sucking at every Word.

  I give the Words to Mags. His pronunciation leaves a lot to be desired, but so far the Universe seems to be buying it. I can feel him taking hold of the . . . tunnel, the extrusion, whatever it is, and pinch it shut. It isn’t enough to close it. We’d have to bleed someone—several someones—dry to manage that. We’re just trying to distract her, give Carter, whoever he is, a fighting chance on his side of things. Because the brief taste I was getting of his universe told me I never, ever wanted to go there.

  I give Mags the Words, and Mags speaks them, and we pinch at the portal. I sway on my feet, slurring. Mags, big as a fucking mountain, doesn’t seem to feel a thing.

  And then, again, someone is on me, from the other side. Pulling at me, violently, and trying to drag me across, into Carter’s world. Where I would be powerless, exhausted, and, in quick order I have no doubt, fucking dead.

  It’s painful. I feel like I’m being pushed into a three-inch pipe, skin flaying off and soul squeezed out of me like I was a tube of toothpaste. If I break off feeding Mags the Words, the spell will collapse and blow us into the air. And I’m not sure I have the gas to do anything substantial anyway.

  But I’m good with the Words. And I’m a Trickster, a con artist, a grifter. On the fly, I alter the Words I’m giving Mags, grinding them out through gritted teeth and clenched throat. My slim experience with enustari like Deasmhumhain is that they are ready for nuclear bomb–level spells, but they never see a dirty trick coming.

  I’m sawing through a tube of magical energy I barely understand with a straight razor. It’s like cutting through bad steak with a butterknife.

  Unlike the psychic impressions of the buildings the cord has an actual physical presence. And yet it doesn’t. It’s slightly spongy, and bends away from the blade as I cut, while at the same time dissolving like smoke, the blade biting into nothing. I can’t tell if I’m making any progress.

  A swell of energy shoots up the connection and the bubble shudders again, flickering into nothing and then back strong as ever. A thin thread of light snaps under my blade, fraying from the rest of the cord. The shuddering happens again. Another thread pops off.

  Great. That only took all of five minutes. Now in about four hours or so I should be through the whole thing.

  The wailing above me of the Wanderers being torn apart to feed Deasmhumhain magic rises to a crescendo, a high-pitched keening that threatens to split my head open. Then it stops.

  I can still feel the Wanderers up there. They’re not gone. But they’re not being tortured anymore. If they’re not destroyed and they’re not feeding Deasmhumhain’s magic, that means one thing.

  I’m standing below a sea of pissed-off ghosts who have just been set free.

  I saw faster.

  I feed Mags the Words, and he speaks them.

  It’s easy to twist the spell, keep it inflating, keep it fed and orderly. All it requires is a shift in grammar, including Deasmhumhain as the object as well, so we’re pinching her as well as the extrusion. It’s strange, though. I can sense the spell. It enters the extrusion, the portal between universes, strong. And then . . . fades. When it hits her, it’s weakened and slippery, like trying to grab hold of smoke. But it’s working.

  This is a gray area, morally. I always tell Mags: We don’t bleed other people. And we aren’t. He isn’t bleeding for me. I’m not casting on his gas. We are, I realize, a single organism. Mags came to me as a burden, as this monosyllabic, monobrowed pet who costs more than a small country to feed. But Mags is mine.

  Every Word tightens our grip, squeezing, and I can feel it, the flow of gas from Mags into the hole. It’s like building a complex machine with Words, each syllable putting another component into place. I’m making the spell up as I go, and the effort to keep all the threads in place, all the balls in the air, has me sweating freely, my head buzzing with exhaustion.

  And then she takes hold of me.

  I know it’s a she, somehow. Deasmhumhain. How she knows to ignore Mags and come after me I can’t figure, except to remember what everyone told me about her: enustari, so powerful all the Archmages had gathered in New York a century ago to put her down. What I feel is a savage, cold hatred—as fresh and active as if someone had recently revved her up and pissed her off—and a force that’s reaching into me. It feels like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It’s more than a physical sensation, it’s a psychic one, like a hand chopping down into my thoughts.

  I stumble on the Words, dropping to the floor. Mags freezes, starin
g at me, and for a second I can feel the spell hovering in a quantum state, waiting a moment to see if this is Mags taking a breath or a spell broken off. And with all the gas Mags has put into it, a collapse will blow us through the wall.

  Tensing, I push another Word out, and Mags speaks it. Deasmhumhain tightens her grip, agony crushing me. It’s like I’m being torn apart—me, my existence, shredded, my thoughts and memories splintering and atrophying.

  I push out another Word, and Mags speaks it, and the universe remains patient. But I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to keep it up. Or how long I’ll continue to exist. My new invisible friend and I have picked a fight I am suddenly uncertain I can finish.

  C’mon, Mr. Carter, I think, pushing out another Word. Hurry the fuck up.

  Another strand snaps. This thing is less a cord or a pipe and more like braided cable. I keep sawing and the strands keep popping, flares of light snapping around it with each break. But it’s not going nearly fast enough.

  I can feel the Wanderers nearby getting closer. They’ve got my scent, or whatever it is they track by over here, and I don’t have a lot of time.

  I dig into my jacket pocket with my free hand, not daring to stop sawing. I pull out a leather cord with six Chinese coins knotted into it. The coins are old, the metal brittle. I snap one between my fingers and drop it at my feet. There’s a muted pop and one of the coins begins to burn to ash. When that’s done, the next coin will go, and the next. The magic in them should hide me from the ghosts for a few minutes. Maybe.

  Another strand of the cable goes, then another. The bubble shudders, contracts in on itself, grows larger. I edge away from it like I’m dodging a wave at the beach.

  I was able to use my magic on the dead side when I was inside the bubble to flip to the living side when I went into the house, but I don’t know what it will do to the coins if it grows large enough to touch them. Right now, they’re the only things keeping me hidden from the ghosts.

  Another contraction, unsteady this time. It wobbles, turns an angry shade of red. Whether that’s my doing or Lem’s I can’t tell. It shrinks down to the size of a basketball. For a second I think it’s all over.