Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, & Magic

by SM Reine

  The black-haired man spoke, his words thickly accented.

  “Dul-ententre d’gaos!” he burst out. “You’re a fucking manipulator!”

  I barely understood his words.

  For my brain, enough was enough.

  Everything around me grayed...then went totally dark.

  “Allie!” Cass lunged for her friend in a panic.

  Allie’s eyes rolled up.

  She crumpled to the floor as Jon leapt the counter, knocking yet another water glass and a few silverware settings to the floor. Diners stood around in the half-empty room, silent, like they weren’t sure what to do, along with Jodi, the other waitperson who had been huffing and rolling his eyes at them only a few moments before for leaving him with all the restocking.

  Cass crouched by her friend. She laid a hand on Allie’s heart while Jon used one hand to carefully lift Allie’s head, feeling for a pulse with the fingers of the other. Cass saw the relief in his eyes and knew he’d found it, right before Jon stared down at his sister’s face.

  “Allie!” he said. “...ALLIE! Wake up!”

  When she didn’t respond, Cass turned.

  “Call 911!” she barked at Tom. “Call 911!”

  “No!” the black-haired man said. “Absolutely not!”

  Jon hesitated, meeting Cass’s gaze. He looked almost like he agreed with the stranger, even as he glared up at him.

  “This isn’t your business, man,” Jon said.

  The big Samoan cook came running out of the kitchen even as Jon said it, waving a spatula and staring down at Allie on the floor. Everyone called him Sasquatch...Cass didn’t even know his real name. He looked about to yell something unhelpful, when Allie’s eyes opened sightlessly towards the ceiling...

  ...and everyone sucked in a breath.

  Cass screamed.

  Allie’s eyes shone upwards with an inhuman glow, the threads of color pulsing strangely behind glass-like irises. The green halos from that sickly light made her face look strangely blank, almost dead...but her eyes themselves flickered darker and lighter, like the colors of an iridescent fish. Or fireflies maybe, only pale green, like the melted ends of two glow sticks, pooling in delicate patterns around her black pupils.

  Cass probably would have screamed again, but Jon clamped a hand over Allie’s eyes, moving to kneel between her body and Cass. When Jon turned his head to glare at Cass herself a second later, Cass fell silent once she understood his expression.

  She saw fear in his eyes that time, too, but not unfamiliarity.

  He’d seen this before.

  Eyes warning, Jon laid a finger from his free hand on his lips. He didn’t take his other hand off Allie’s eyes as he did it, but continued to shield her from the rest of the room.

  When Cass looked up at the black-haired man, he was staring openly at Jon.

  Cass heard Sasquatch make a strangled sound then, and looked back towards the kitchen. She heard the clatter as the big Samoan dropped his spatula and ran out of the tiled and matted aisle behind the bar counter, shouting something incoherent to the back room crew.

  Faces from the dinner crowd diners peered over the counter down at Allie.

  Cass noticed only pieces of this.

  She could still see the glow from Allie’s eyes from where she sat, even with Jon covering most of her face with his hand. The light from her irises continued to escape from between Jon’s fingers, pulsing with their own internal heartbeat, splashing green light and shadow on his hand. As if he could see the escaping light, too, Jon hunched over Allie even further, trying to shield her from the curious onlookers.

  Finally, the black-haired man broke the silence.

  “We’re out of time,” he said to Jon. “She needs to come with me. Now. It’s the only way.”

  “Screw you!” Jon snapped, glaring up at him. He turned to look back at Allie. “Al.” He spoke in a near-whisper, moving his face down closer to hers. “Allie...come on, honey. Come back. Come back now. Please. You need to wake up, Al...”

  Cass saw the black-haired man look towards the door, shifting his weight on his feet.

  Another voice rose behind them, causing her to turn.

  “Yeah.” It was the manager, Tom, on his headset. “No.” Pause. “No drugs that I know of...but maybe, sure.” A pause. “No, she’s not conscious.”

  “Tom!” Cass said, sharp. “Tom, no!”

  The manager held up a finger, listening to whoever was on the other end.

  “Yeah. She seems to be breathing––”

  “Tom! Hang up! Please!”

  The black-haired man walked directly up to Tom, without so much as a pause in his steps. Tom stared at him, slack-jawed, but stopped speaking when the much taller man loomed over him, his face set in a hard scowl. Tom didn’t move as the taller man took the headset off his head, either. Hooking the set over his own ear, the black-haired man began speaking as if Tom had never stopped.

  “...Oh,” he said, his voice sounding almost like Tom’s. “My mistake! She seems to be coming around now.” He paused. “Yeah, she’s fine. Yeah. Screwing around with her friends, they’re telling me now.” Another pause. “Yeah. Sorry for wasting your time. Sure. I’ll call back, if that happens.”

  Again, without a pause, he took off the headset, stuffing it in his pocket.

  Cass expected Tom to protest, but when she looked up at him next, his eyes were blank, faraway-seeming. Cass started to get to her feet, but Jon grabbed her wrist, yanking her roughly back down. Before she could speak, he laid his mouth on her ear, his words a fierce whisper.

  “Cass. Don’t. What do you think he is?”

  She stared at Jon, then up at the black-haired man. Her throat closed.

  “What are we going to do?” she whispered back.

  “We’re taking her home,” Jon said.

  “Jon! But what about her eyes? Everyone saw! They’ll take her away!”

  “No,” the black-haired man said, his voice openly warning. “They won’t. She’s coming with me.” He waited for Jon to look up. “Jon...you know. I know you know. It’s too late to hide it...I can’t push that many. Surveillance goes directly to the feeds. Make this easy. Let me take her. Or you’ll never see her again, I promise you.”

  Jon returned his gaze. Frowning, he looked at Tom and Jodi, then around at the diners watching them and the small crowd of kitchen staff crammed in the single door to the back room, peering around the grease-stained wood.

  Taking in eyes and faces, Jon looked back up at the black-haired man.

  “You can get her out of here?” Jon demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “You work for SCARB, man?”

  “No.”

  “The government?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not CIA? Some kind of fucking trader?”

  “No.” The man hesitated. “I’ll take her away from all that, Jon. I promise. You know what they’ll do to her if I don’t. You saw what she did.”

  Cass saw Jon’s jaw harden more.

  He stared at the wall with the broken glasses. For the first time, Cass noticed his arms were cut from when he fell. His face had nicks as well; he was bleeding, but barely seemed to notice. He was shaking, too, she realized, nearly in shock.

  For a moment he seemed to be thinking, staring up at the black-haired man’s angular face, then around the small diner. Cass saw him focus briefly on the surveillance cameras that were standard in every public place, monitored by SCARB and occasionally, with a warrant, by the SFPD or the FBI.

  After another pause, Jon raised his voice to the rest of the room.

  “She’s okay,” he said. “She’s coming around. Everyone just be cool, okay? Allie’s fine. She’s been tested. Lots of times.”

  Sasquatch’s eyes were round as saucers, but he nodded, looking out over the dinner crowd, most of whom remained on their feet. No one said a word, but Cass wondered if even a single one of them believed that, given what they’d just seen.

&nbs
p; But Allie was coming around...sort of.

  The light in her irises abruptly began to dim.

  Then, when they were almost back to normal, her eyelids flickered, then a frown crinkled her face before she reached out with her hands, grabbing Jon’s fingers over her face, then using her other hand to clutch at the leg of a nearby bar stool. When it moved under her touch, she grabbed for the base of the counter, instead.

  Jon helped her to a seated position.

  Her eyes never came fully into focus, and something was off in them as she stared at her own feet in her thick-soled waitressing shoes, but they’d stopped glowing. Cass watched her face, a face she had loved for the past twenty-plus years, even envied at times.

  Now, she couldn’t help but see it as different.

  But they’d been friends since they were kids. How could she be a seer? Seers looked like kids until they were around twenty years old. Hell, Jon was right...she never would have made it through adoption protocols if she had even a hint of seer blood, especially given how she’d been found as a baby.

  Still, there’d always been something...uncanny about Allie.

  Cass never really wanted to connect the dots, but that didn’t mean she didn’t see them.

  “Al?” Jon took her arm. His voice grew almost harsh. “Al! You need to get it together.” He hesitated, looking up at the black-haired man. “Al...this guy’s going to help us, okay?”

  Cass’s jaw dropped, but Jon didn’t seem to notice.

  When Allie didn’t move, Jon helped her slowly to her feet. For a moment Allie just stood there, leaning a palm on the counter while Jon supported her with his arm. Everyone stared at her...customers, the kitchen staff, Tom the manager, Jodi.

  All but the black-haired man.

  He stared out the windows.

  “No one’s leaving,” he said a second later. He looked at Jon. “I won’t hurt her, Jon. But we have to go. Now. They’re on their way.”

  Cass watched Jon in a kind of disbelief as he nodded.

  Somehow, he believed this guy. She couldn’t help but wonder if the black-haired man had hypnotized Jon, too. He was a seer; he had to be. Now that Cass knew that about him, she wondered how she could have missed it before. His height. The weird eyes. But he hadn’t been collared.

  Cass saw Jon wipe his eyes then, and realized in a kind of disbelief that he was crying. He really had known about this.

  Wiping his eyes again, almost angrily that time, Jon tightened his hold on Allie’s arm. He gave the black-haired man a hard look.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  The taller man gestured in a downward slash. “No. Absolutely not.”

  “You can’t stop me, man!”

  “Yes,” the black-haired man said, but more gently. “I can, Jon.”

  ...It was the last thing Cass remembered before she blinked suddenly, and found herself staring around the dining room of the Lucky Cat in confusion.

  It took a beat longer for the sound to kick back in.

  Initially, all Cass had to go on were visuals.

  Sirens rotated and flashed outside the diner windows. She saw people through the glass, most of them wearing uniforms, motioning and shouting, holding weapons as they headed for the diner’s front door.

  Cass might have been afraid, under different circumstances.

  As it was, she could only stare, sure it wasn’t real.

  Patrons seemed to be coming alive around her, too, looking around themselves like they had no idea what had just happened.

  Jon stood right next to the bar’s formica counter, not far from where Cass remembered seeing him last. A trickle of blood ran down his face from under his hairline; his arms had nicks and cuts where his T-shirt didn’t cover them.

  The person who had stood between them, the person on whom the entire room had been focused, what felt like only seconds before...was gone.

  The black-haired man was gone, too.

  4

  ROOK

  I am. No thoughts cloud me.

  The stories that run silently in the background, all the time...about my life, my dreams, my problems, what it all means...they are all vaporized, gone.

  I am. It is enough.

  Time is not...not here, anyway. No past is, no future. No “just now,” no “the other day” nor “in a minute.” All lives live in one life that is not-life...at least not in the way I’d thought. I live in spaces between time increments, outside time which spins like a glass ball, a matrix clockwork toy whirling dutifully overhead. Breaths in and out make up a pulse, a beat that follows another...then another still. Life flows a thousand currents from that single point, an ocean of light and dark, colors broken into shards and shadows, interconnected like drops of paint bleeding over canvas.

  I see the world in which my physical body lives.

  It it real, too. It moves through time.

  The walls of buildings glow like oddly invasive lines, showing me where to direct each foot. Movement is born all over again at each clench and unclench of muscles.

  I look up and sky unfolds like a dark cloth thrown out on a windy lawn, rippling and vast. It is more than I can take in, so my mind filters, makes it manageable. Stars appear in that vast landscape, broken pieces of sun.

  He pulls me along the street, and I feel fear through his fingers.

  I don’t understand how he could be afraid.

  It is so beautiful here I could cry. Colors here are the the truest, purest of colors, what the physical world tries to emulate but cannot. Clouds tower in silence, held breaths with hints of billowing motion. The night sky...

  Well, night is the all-space.

  Light whales wing past, screeching into silence. Dragons swim by. Fish, birds, trees, masks. People too...

  They all live here, it is their home.

  Am I dead? I wonder.

  No, is all he says.

  I follow the insistent tug of his fingers. I occupy myself by feeling my legs as they are jerked and released like a puppet’s wooden limbs.

  The streets are full of glowing beings.

  Most are white and gray sheep with blurred outlines. They have no features, no faces. Above their heads, thin, sparking threads rise up, forever into that darkness.

  Humans, he explains. That is what they look like, from here.

  From where? I wonder.

  He doesn’t answer this.

  I look at him then, too, see the structured light and chiseled features inside the same wash of dark and light sky. He is so different from the blurry sheep it is hard to see even the similarities. He is something else. He cannot be the same type of creature at all.

  Seer, he tells me. The Barrier is where our differences show. I am a seer, Allie.

  I lift a hand, even as I stumble along after him, trying to keep up with his long legs. I must look like I’m tripping out on drugs, I think. Like an acid freak.

  Well, I’m in the right city for it.

  I laugh at the thought, but still, I am fascinated as I look at my hand. I am not like the sheep, after all. Rather than being a puff of indeterminate smoke, I am like him, made of crisscrossing white and gold and fire-colored light. It weaves into complex patterns under my gauzy skin. I turn my hand over in wonder, see veins and light structured as bone.

  Am I not human? I ask.

  My companion is silent.

  Hey, I say to him. Hey. What am I...?

  Later, he says. We don’t have time for Seer 101 right now, Allie.

  I remember that he is nervous. I try to focus, to do as he says.

  But it is so easy to get distracted here.

  Wind whispers by; it goes through me, a soft pulse of warmth. I rise higher, higher still...until I seem to be looking out over Earth itself. Ghosts vie with one another from that much higher place. They dive and screech, sightless between stars.

  Above them stands the Pyramid.

  It is made of bright silver light, a hard metal umbrella of jarring, precise lines. Anger drives it,
a determination to impose its own rhythm, to control...

  He grips my hand, tighter. It hurts.

  I find myself with him once more, though, after he does it. I am walking over the ground, on the sidewalk, using my strangely clumsy body and its odd, jerking movements. My legs never stop flexing back and forth. We are walking fast, and I almost recognize where we are as we climb a rising sidewalk towards another row of buildings.

  I click between realities like changing channels, negative to positive.

  We approach another of those sky people, a being of bright gold light, like the man holding my hand. I feel my companion react. The new being with the chiseled face and body grows nearer with every step.

  Unlike us, he does not walk, but sits.

  The negative clicks to positive.

  I see a flash of the street through my physical eyes...

  ...and a homeless man blinked back at me from the sidewalk, a broken cardboard box over his legs for warmth. A puppy lay curled at his feet, a dirty white color with chocolate brown spots. The homeless man wore a gray beard and tie-dyed shirt over jeans stiff with dirt and sweat. His eyes shone dark, intense.

  My mind reacted, pulled briefly from that feeling of peace.

  They are everywhere, I think. They look just like us...

  ...then I am back in the place of no time.

  There, the homeless man’s eyes glow as pale white stars, reflecting a quiet joy that lives in kindness and warmth. I feel my companion’s relief as he looks at this man. He shows me, in another flash of layered and complicated thought, the proper means of greeting the other in this place. The other person...

  Seer, my friend whispers.

  I flinch from the word.

  But the old man is smiling. He bows to me, and to the man with me; a whisper of warmth flows from him to us, a soft, liquid light. My companion sends a similar pulse back. He shows me how to do the same, mixing his light with mine, and I smile, unable to help it.

  The homeless man smiles back.

  We are all everything, sister, he tells me. All the time.

  Time passes.

  I am somewhere else now.