“But you’re in my . . .” I hesitated, trying to find the appropriate word. There didn’t seem to be one. I followed her through the door at the back of the storeroom and down the stairway on the other side, finally saying, “You’re in me. Don’t you think that means you’ve invited the observation?”
“To be quite honest, no.” Mina stopped at the bottom of the stairs to light a match and touch it to a length of wick protruding from a copper pipe. The flame flared briefly, and gas lamps came on all around the room, illuminating a space I would have sworn I didn’t contain.
Catching my expression, Mina shook out her match and said, “The walls are reinforced. Just let me know if you feel an earthquake coming on, and we should be fine.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. A variety of arcane seals were chiseled into the floor and ceiling. I pointed to one of them. “Are those why I can’t normally see you?”
“Yes, they are.” She walked calmly across the room to the twin of the bar upstairs, where she put down the rum and bent forward, leaning over the wood to extract a pair of glasses. “As for why I don’t believe we’ve invited observation, the spirits of cities are born when a sufficient number of thinking beings have moved into the area. Those thinking beings don’t get a vote in the matter. My father had no objection to you, and neither do I, but that doesn’t mean I want you looking over my shoulder all the time.”
I frowned as I followed her. “You could move.”
“We were here first.” She poured two fingers of amber rum into a glass and pushed it toward me. “Here. This should make you feel better.”
“Thank you.” The rum didn’t have a taste so much as it had a sensation, like fire running down my throat. I choked a little, coughing into my hand before putting the glass aside. “Much better,” I managed to wheeze. “Now, can you tell me what I’m doing here?”
“I haven’t a clue,” said Mina, pouring herself a much larger glass of rum and downing it in a single impressive swallow. “I didn’t know anything was going on until my orrery of the Bay Area started spinning out of control. It was as if one of the largest gravitational forces—that being you—had vanished from the model. Something was disturbing the natural order of things. My books indicated that it might be a matter of incarnation, so I sent Andy looking for a naked, confused person who wasn’t meant to be a person at all. He has an eye for that sort of thing.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, reaching for the bottle of rum. Getting drunk was sounding more appealing by the moment.
“Because he’s a person who wasn’t meant to be a person at all. What’s the last thing you remember?”
I stopped, blinking at her for a few seconds, before I poured myself another glass of rum and said, “I was . . . it’s hard to explain where I am, when I’m in my natural state. I’m everywhere. I’m the sidewalks and the rooftops and the houses. I’m the shops and the theaters and the stands the food vendors set up along the beach. I see things, but they aren’t immediate. Not the way they are right now.”
“Small gods,” Mina said, turning to begin rummaging through the shelves of liquor behind the bar. “Lares and Penates. That’s where all this began. You would have been a household spirit, once, when everyone carried their own gods with them. Now, you’re the soul of a city, and you’re sitting here wearing my golem’s coat, drinking rum, leaving San Francisco just this side of completely unprotected.”
“What?” I looked at her with alarm. “I can’t be unprotected. I have police, firemen, pigeons—”
“None of whom will be able to defend you if whatever—or whoever—caused you to incarnate shows up with a shotgun,” Mina said, sounding entirely too reasonable. She turned back to me, holding a bottle of something green. “Did anything unusual happen before you took on flesh? Anything at all?”
“I . . . I don’t remember.”
“Try.” It wasn’t a suggestion. She poured a glass of the green liquid and pushed it across the bar to me. “A great deal depends on it.”
Lacking any better options, I picked up the glass and drank.
This time, when I awoke, I was lying flat on my back on the basement floor, and there were no pigeons. Mina was standing over me, a quizzical look on her face. “Well?”
“There was a man.” I pushed myself into a sitting position. My throat felt raw and tender from whatever it was she’d given me to drink. “He was . . . he was the summer! The whole summer, walking around like a man!”
“That’s James Holly,” said Mina, dismissively. “He’s the Summer King. Did he do this?”
“No. He . . . he was running away from something. Someone. The man who did this to me. This one wasn’t the summer.”
“Most men aren’t,” agreed Mina, helping me to my feet. “What was he?”
“He was like you. The same sort of construction.”
Mina’s eyebrows lifted. “He was an alchemist?”
“Is that what you are?”
“Since I doubt you can use your magical city powers to detect bartenders, yes.” She sighed. “His name is Stuart. He’s a little unbalanced. And apparently, he’s learned how to incarnate the souls of cities. Oh, won’t this be fun?” She started for the stairs.
“Wait!” I cried, alarmed. “Where are you going?”
“To telephone the Summer King and let him know that we’re all about to die. You can come, if you’d like. Or you can drink more aconite absinthe. I understand that even geographic fixtures can become drunk, if they consume enough. Feel free to try.”
Then she was gone, walking back up the stairs to the storeroom. I stayed where I was, wobbling slightly on my unfamiliar legs, and tried to figure out what, precisely, was going on. When I realized that I wasn’t going to succeed, I followed her.
I took the absinthe with me.
It took approximately thirty minutes for James Holly to cross me and arrive at the bar. That was sufficient time for Mina to find me a dress—too big at the bust, too long in the skirt, but still an improvement over Andy’s borrowed coat—and a pair of shoes. James burst into the room, ignoring the CLOSED sign on the door, and demanded, “Where is she?”
Mina looked up from polishing a beer stein and replied, mildly, “James Holly, Summer King, meet the City of San Francisco. San Francisco, meet James Holly, the source of all our troubles.” Andy didn’t even grant this much of an acknowledgement, but simply continued sweeping the floor.
“That’s unfair,” objected James, before bowing in my direction. I remembered that gesture, even though I’d never seen it before, and smiled at him in answer. “My lady. I am very sorry for your current inconvenience.”
“I have absolutely no idea what’s going on right now,” I said, still smiling. It seemed like the best thing to do. “Are you really the entire summer?”
“To my occasional chagrin, yes.” He straightened. “Miss Norton, are you sure this is my brother-in-law’s work?”
“She saw an alchemist chasing you shortly before she was given human form, James. What do you think?”
James scowled. “Blast and damn.”
“Precisely.”
I held up a hand. “Could you please explain what’s going on? I don’t appreciate being talked around, even if I’m not customarily in a position to join the conversation.”
“It’s simple, really. He,” Mina pointed at James, “is married to the Winter Queen, and the Winter Queen’s younger sister is married to your embodying alchemist.”
“Stuart and Jane Hauser,” interjected James. “They want to claim our Seasons. Margaret and I would rather they didn’t, as this would kill us.”
“What does that have to do with me?” I demanded. “I’m not really involved in this line of succession. I just want to stay alive.”
“I’d assume Stuart was planning to sacrifice you to gain power, if he’d been there when you incarnated,” said Mina. “As he wasn’t, I have to assume that he wanted you out of the way for a time. He wanted San Francisco stripped of mystical d
efenses.”
“Are you humans always this complicated?” I rubbed my forehead. “I’d like to resume being a city, please.”
Mina frowned. “You never stopped,” she said. “You just stopped paying attention to yourself. James, grab a bottle of Scotch and follow me. We need to find out what Stuart is up to.”
The gas lamps in the basement were still on. Mina stormed down the stairs with the two of us behind her, muttering to herself. “You!” she whirled, pointing at me. “Where is Stuart?”
“In an abandoned warehouse two blocks east of here,” I replied, without thinking about it. I froze. “What—what did you do?”
“Nothing. You did it. You can’t be completely sundered from yourself, or we’d have fallen into the ocean by now.” She moved behind the bar, grabbing a large stein and several bottles. “James, the Scotch. City, tell your pigeons to watch Stuart. If he moves, you need to know.”
“I can try,” I said, uncertainly.
“Don’t try. Do it or we’re all going to die.”
James frowned as he passed the Scotch. “A bit apocalyptic, don’t you think?”
“No.” Mina half-filled the stein with Scotch before beginning to add splashes from her other bottles. “Why incarnate the city of San Francisco? Why distract her from her usual occupation?”
“Boredom?” he ventured.
“He’s trying to start an earthquake.” My voice surprised even me. James turned to stare at me, but I was distracted by the sensations in the bottom of my feet, the itching I hadn’t recognized until I started trying to focus on what I was, rather than the body I was wearing. “He’s pressing down on one of my faults—he wants to shake the city into the sea. Why would he do that to me?” I looked at them pleadingly. “Why?”
“Because he’s mad,” said James.
“Because he wants to blackmail us into giving him the summer,” said Mina. She picked up the stein and swigged half its contents before pouring the rest into a flask she produced from inside her bodice. Dropping the empty stein to the bar, she tucked the flask away and said, “All right. Let’s go save you.”
Walking through my own streets was even more disconcerting now that I had a vague idea of what was going on. It didn’t exactly help that I acquired an escort of pigeons, stray cats, and wharf rats as soon as we stepped out of the bar. Mina ignored the wildlife, scowling at shadows and taking occasional swigs from her flask. James also ignored the wildlife, perhaps because he was distracted by the way flowers kept sprouting from the cracks in the pavement as he passed.
“Oh, yes, we’re very unobtrusive,” muttered Mina, glaring at a dandelion that had suddenly popped up in front of her shoe.
James looked abashed.
“If we can stop the earthquake, does that mean he’ll stop doing whatever he’s done to me?” I asked, hurrying to catch up with the pair of them. “This is very distracting. I don’t like it.”
“The human condition is so rarely welcome,” said Mina.
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It wasn’t intended as one.” She sighed. “I don’t know, all right? So far as I know, no one has ever incarnated a Lare of your scale without their cooperation. This could be permanent.”
I stared at her, horrified. “What do you mean, permanent ?”
“I mean it could last until you die. Now come on. This will be entirely moot if we all plummet into the Pacific Ocean. If you don’t mind?” Mina sped up, forcing us to follow or be left behind.
“I don’t think I like her,” I muttered.
James just smiled.
The warehouse was old, crumbling, empty, and most importantly, mine. Unlike Mina’s bar, it had never been shielded against me, and when I pressed my hand against the wall, it was happy to tell me what it contained. I would have had no trouble interpreting its message in my natural form. As it was, my knees nearly buckled before I gasped, “He’s in the back. There’s a woman with him. She’s . . . on fire?”
James and Mina exchanged a look. “Jane,” they said, in unison.
“He’s reading something. I don’t understand the words. No one in me speaks that language.”
“Probably Babylonian, or something dreary like that,” sighed Mina. “Well, then. In we go.”
I pulled my hand away from the wall. “What? What about a plan?”
“That is the plan.” She held up her flask, smiling sardonically. “Last call. Place your orders and get out.” With that, she shoved the warehouse door open and strode inside. James shook his head and followed.
“I won’t do it!” I called after them. “I’m going to stand right here until you come back here and have a better plan!” They didn’t come back. The itching in my feet was getting worse. Scowling, I motioned for the pigeons to come along, and ran after them.
James and Mina were striding through the warehouse, making no effort to move stealthily. I caught up to them easily, my pigeons soaring overhead and roosting in the rafters. Neither James nor Mina said anything, and then I heard the sound of chanting, different now that I was hearing it with ears, but also what I’d heard before.
“Stop that rubbish right now, Stuart!” half-shouted James. “You’re being silly. Dropping the entire city into the ocean doesn’t make you clever, it makes you a bit of a bastard.” He paused. “Ah, apologies for my language, Miss the City.”
“People are saying worse inside me right now,” I reassured him.
That was when the first fireball hit the rafters, and things became too complicated for conversation.
The flaming woman charged out of the back, her hands filled with dirty orange fire. She flung it at us indiscriminately, rapidly filling the warehouse with the smell of singed pigeon feathers. Mina and I dove for cover while James raised his hands, heat like the sun baking off him until the flames were dwarfed by its power. “This, again?” he asked. Sunlight surged, and the flaming woman was blown backward, slamming into the wall with a bone-rattling thud.
“City, come on!” shouted Mina, skirting the burning patches of floor as she made for the back of the warehouse. “I need you!”
With no better idea of what to do—and no real desire to be set aflame—I followed, pausing only to stomp out any embers I passed. I was too aware of how old and dry the wood around us was. My pigeons, rats, and cats came with me, and they, too, stopped to extinguish any flames small enough to be handled by their wings and paws.
Behind us, the woman shouted something spiteful, and James answered with another burst of heat. It was like all of July was trying to happen at once. Then we passed a large stack of boxes, and I lost my concern for anything but the man kneeling in front of me, still chanting in that language I didn’t understand. It made my teeth ache, but not as much as the sight of the chalk circle around him. Something about it was wrong. I couldn’t look directly at it.
“Stop that!” I shouted, involuntarily.
The man looked up and—to my dismay—laughed. At least that meant he wasn’t chanting anymore. “Oh, this is cute. You’ve brought me the city, Miss Norton? How did you even find her?”
“I have my ways, Stuart,” snapped Mina. “Listen to your habitation when she tells you to do something, and stop that.”
“This is giving me a headache,” I complained. “I’m not used to having a head. I don’t like this.”
“The headache is probably from the rum, but we’ll have worse than a headache in a few minutes if Stuart doesn’t stop playing silly buggers with the laws of nature.” Mina started to uncap her flask.
“I wouldn’t do that, Miss Norton.” Stuart stood, shouting something in a different language I didn’t recognize. This one made my eyes water and caused a gust of wind to sweep Mina off her feet and slam her into the wall. Her flask hit the floor, still capped.
Stuart turned toward me, smiling. I took a step backward.
“Don’t come any closer,” I said. “Or . . . or else.”
“Or else what? You’ll shout at me? Behold the City by
the Bay, reduced to harsh words and questionable allies.” He stepped out of the chalk circle. “You’re a brilliant work of transfiguration. Lead into gold, city into girl. Oh, the things I’ll be able to do once I’ve taken you apart—”
Mina wasn’t moving. James was shouting something in the warehouse behind us; that, and the waves of heat washing against my back, told me there was no assistance coming from that quarter. Stuart was advancing on me, looking entirely too pleased with himself. I did the only thing I could think of, futile as it was certain to be. I raised one hand, pointing at Stuart, and used the other to gesture my animal attendants forward.
“Pigeons,” I said, “kill.”
With a raucous din worthy of Chinese New Year, the urban wildlife descended. Stuart screamed. After that, the feathers obscured the worst of it—at least for a little while.
My animals stopped shy of tearing Stuart to pieces, but only because James came around the corner with Jane’s unconscious body slung over one shoulder, looked at the scene, and groaned. “Don’t kill him if you have a choice, please?” he asked. “My wife will be annoyed if I let him die. It’s a family thing.”
“He was quite happy to kill us,” I said. “He was going to use me for parts!”
“And now he’s not, so please?”
“Very well.” I sighed and clapped my hands, calling, “Everyone come away from the bad man. He’s probably terrible for your digestion, anyway.” The animals came with only a few complaints, moving to cover the floor all around me. Pigeons settled on my head and shoulders. I didn’t shoo them off. “Now what?”
“First, this.” James dumped Jane next to Stuart, who was scratched and bleeding but still breathing. Ignoring them both, James picked up Mina’s flask and uncapped it, pouring the contents onto the chalk circle. The lines blurred and ran together, becoming a muddled mess.
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