Shadows of Humanity

by J. Armand

  “But an answer nonetheless! Now, what did you bring your Grampy?”

  “Bring you? I didn’t bring you anything. You sent for me; I came. I didn’t think this was a dinner invitation, seeing as I don’t share your acquired taste.”

  “Terrible guest, just terrible. And I see you’re still blindly following your elders, if not respecting them! I was hoping you’d bring drapes. I need new drapes for the penthouse suite.”

  “Did you invite me here just to show off your housekeeping skills?” I knew there was more to him than his ramblings by now, but he had a way of very rapidly eroding my patience.

  “’Course not. There’s a storm comin’ though. You’re welcome to stay if ya need a place out of the rain.” His hospitality was disarming. Part of me was touched by his offer because I knew it was genuine, but I was still weary of dealing with his kind. “Or maybe it was a fire?”

  “I’ll be fine. I don’t mind the rain.”

  “Oh ho ho! So you’re a tough guy now, huh? Go on a little trip and you’re not the quivering pup from Boston anymore?”

  “I was trained by the best.” It was a little hurtful to be called a “quivering pup.” I thought I had held my own the last time I was here.

  “You mean that Archios? Pffah! He’s just a kid playing with toy swords. You want real training, try living for yourself!”

  Grampy was really pushing it now. Noah might have been an arrogant prick, but there’s no way anyone could deny he was the best out there. Even though it shouldn’t have, it still pissed me off to hear someone speak ill of him. “You wouldn’t say that to his face and I don’t want you saying it to mine, either.”

  “You could always try to find the sergeant.” Grampy didn’t seem at all bothered by my aggressive defense of an Archios.

  “Find him? What do you know? Where is he?”

  “Don’t know, honest! But I could make it my business to know, if you do somethin’ for little old me first.”

  “Uh-huh. And you look down on the Archios for being manipulative? What is it you need?”

  “I’m askin’ for a favor. A big one, I know. But you were trained by the best and all that, so I figure it should be a snap.” He gave me a wide toothy grin from behind a foul-smelling bushy gray beard that was caked in god knew what. “There’s somethin’ strange about. Just showed up tonight and started killing us off. Thought you might know ‘bout it since you just got here too. I’m ‘fraid they might find us here and… Well, I just couldn’t bear to see my little darling get hurt.”

  “Little darling? You mean Emilia? The girl you kidnapped?” Technically he rescued her, but I was feeling a bit spiteful from his comment about Noah.

  “I’ve been taking in wayward souls longer than you’ve been alive, boy! I didn’t kidnap nobody and you know that! Her keepers would have tossed her for dead when they found out she got the disease. I saved her by turning her, but now I might not be able to save her again. We’re not fighters and the hired fangs just won’t cut it. But you – you took down an Ancient and ya got that big ol’ friend of yours.”

  “Fine.” I agreed even though I knew I’d regret it. “Where is this happening?”

  “All over. Can’t keep track of ‘em and nobody who survived got a good look. That’s all I know. Just make ‘em stop, any way you know how.”

  I wouldn’t be surprised if Noah set this up as a test by throwing Grampy a few bucks. I was going to chase shadows around the city only to find out they were Noah. Noah’s involvement would explain how Grampy knew I was back in the city so fast, but I couldn’t see Noah putting up with him long enough to strike a deal.

  “Yeah, okay, I’m on it. Just find me info on Lyle by tomorrow night and we’re even.”

  “Hoo-hoo! Couldn’t be happier!” He waddled off down the hall and shouted back to me just before turning into a room. “Just don’t get yerself jumpin’ at every shadow now! Remember, the dark is our friend! Would serve ya well to get acquainted with it nice and intimate-like.”

  On my way out I looked with some amusement at the Outsiders tending to their home. Someone was decorating a dingy room with “Coming Soon” and “Under Construction” signs taken from various stores. Another was feeding bread to some rats in a pen that he had decorated with those tiny umbrellas you put in drinks. I was happy that they had found something to enjoy and call their own. Grampy was right about learning to survive, though. They might have shelter, but they couldn’t really defend themselves. They weren’t in any real danger at the moment, but it felt good that I had gotten strong enough for them to rely on me.

  Using the shadows behind the building as cover, I flew up top to scope out the area from the roof. “Hey.” I gave an unkempt Outsider woman tending to some pigeons a grin. It wouldn’t be too difficult to remain undetected in Harlem, but once I got further downtown I’d have to be extra careful going from rooftop to rooftop.

  If I knew Noah, he wouldn’t make this easy on me. He’d want me in the busiest, most distracting place possible so he could jump down and ridicule me for not paying close enough attention. The best place for that would have to be Times Square. He’d be able to see me coming from blocks away, so I wanted to be as high up as possible to have any sort of chance at spotting him.

  I could tell when I was getting closer to Times Square by the bright lights and pungent smell of pretzels and exhaust fumes. I wasn’t sure what made that so prevalent in my mind, but I had had a strong scent memory ever since passing my first street vendor in the city.

  Looking for Noah was a lot trickier than I had anticipated. The traffic alone was making me dizzy as I tried to scan for anything out of the ordinary, and the buildings were too high to see the ground accurately from above. I’d have to try something else. He can’t think I’d be able to find him like this, I thought.

  I landed in an alley right as someone dashed away into the darkness. I followed, hoping it wasn’t a human that I had just scared the life out of. The alley led to an empty dead end with no fire escape or windows. I couldn’t sense anyone around. Whoever I was following had to be Noah or at least someone fast enough to get away without me noticing. There were almost no supernaturals at Noah’s level and after training with him I knew his style pretty well. This had to be Noah.

  I went back to the roof to see if he had run up the wall. There was no sight of him, but I knew he wouldn’t go too far. He’d want to stay in the area to keep taunting me. Staying out of sight wasn’t easy here with all the lights. There was an abundance of bars, clubs, and restaurants around. I noticed a figure run out the back exit of a nightclub and start fiddling with a manhole cover on a side street. It wasn’t Noah, and I couldn’t picture an Archios getting its hands dirty, but it certainly had me curious.

  Down on the street the figure – a man in suit with a terrified look on his face – turned to me as I landed, pausing before entering the manhole. I’d been wrong about the Archios getting their hands dirty. The Archios were notorious for being the best at blending in with mortals; they had infiltrated the government, the media, and many major companies. This guy was practically impossible to differentiate from a human except for the Archios’ signature aesthetic of being a little too perfect.

  “Wha-” I didn’t get to finish asking what was wrong. The man was stabbed through the chest from behind and crumbled into ash. I didn’t get a good look at who did it, but I knew it was Noah from the quick glimpse I got of his blade before he was gone again.

  “Noah, what the hell?!” I couldn’t abide by him killing random people just to test me, even if they weren’t human. I dumped the man’s suit in the sewer and replaced the cover to get rid of any evidence. I knew Noah liked to show off, but he was normally good about hiding his tracks and was against needless and sloppy killing. He was really pulling out all the stops. I knew if I didn’t take care of that little detail he’d get me for it later.

  A fit of loud screams came from back at the plaza in Times Square. The screaming spread into a full-b
lown riot and soon people filled the side street where I stood. Some people stopped along the way to take pictures and video with their phones. There was no way I’d be able to find a hiding place to fly away from now. I waded through the crowd to see the first responders trying to calm the situation. Beyond them in the now-empty plaza was… absolutely nothing. I tried listening to what people were saying, but everyone was frantic.

  “He cut his head right off!” “I saw it!” Two friends shouted at each other over the screams. The police were fighting the tide, trying to calm everybody down.

  “It was just a hoax, people! Nothing to be afraid of. Just another street magician trying to go viral,” a policewoman yelled over the uproar. I would have been inclined to believe her assessment if it weren’t for the pile of clothes blowing against the barricade of the plaza.

  Was Noah really getting that reckless? Or was his arrogance just getting the best of him? I had to stay focused despite all the confusion, and it was a good thing I did. I spotted Noah’s shadow up on one of the billboards overlooking the crowd. There wasn’t an easy way to get up there without going around the block first.

  I was sprinting down the sidewalk to find somewhere I could fly from when a man in a trucker’s hat and red parka pushed past me. He came up behind a couple holding hands and shoved one of them to the ground.

  “Fags!” The man in the hat jeered and spit at the guys before running off.

  That word alone made my skin crawl. I put on my sunglasses and kept my eyes on him as he ran. I would have loved to send him into traffic. Instead, the man in the hat had his own fateful encounter with the pavement when he mysteriously lost his footing, slammed into a street sign, and fell back onto a row of motorcycles. I thought karma could use a little telekinetic help. I heard swearing coming from the group of bikers who had just watched their rides get knocked over. I looked back to see them surround the bigot, who was cowering under them as the couple he had assaulted walked past with a smile.

  I made it up and around to where I’d seen Noah on the billboard, but of course there was no sign of him anywhere. It was going to be sunrise soon and I was getting tired. This game of tag would have to end. I wondered where he would hide for the day. He had never given any indication of where he went to sleep or feed when we were in Japan. Maybe he still didn’t trust me enough to leave himself vulnerable. Tonight was turning out to be a complete failure. Taking Grampy up on a place to stay might not be a bad idea. At least I could check in to see if he’d found out anything about Lyle.

  The pigeon lady wasn’t on the roof when I returned. The sun would be up in an hour, so she could have been inside. However, something was off. Everything was so quiet. The door was open, but I couldn’t hear any sounds coming from inside.

  Ashes and piles of worn clothes lined the side of the stairwell as I made my way down. One of the teenagers’ hoodies was caught on the broken glass of a window and the others were strewn about in the ashes. The lights were still on in the building. The killer was either sloppy or didn’t feel the need to cut the power.

  “Grampy? Emilia? Anybody?!” I ran downstairs, wishing I had stayed there from the start. Someone really was hunting the Outsiders, but if that was the case, why go after the Archios downtown, too? Emilia’s door was open, but there was no sign of her anywhere. I checked around the room for any signs of her hiding. My heart sank when I found ashes coming from under a closet door. There wasn’t anyone left and it was making me angrier by the second. These guys played video games and kept rats and pigeons as pets. They were innocent and didn’t deserve to be hunted. Emilia was just a little girl, an actual little girl, no more than maybe eight years old.

  I searched the rest of the apartments on the floor in vain. I came across a locked door and knocked, hoping for some sign of life – or unlife.

  Nothing.

  This place was cleared out. I forced the lock and let myself in to take a look around. The room was set up like a very dirty makeshift office. I checked out the desk, which was made out of two beat-up garbage cans with a door resting across them. There were stacks of paper everywhere. Some of them were especially colorful – crayon and marker pictures drawn by Emilia. Most of them depicted her and Grampy together and were titled “Grampy and Me” or “My Grampy.” They looked happy. Other pictures were of the rest of the Outsiders she lived with; I could tell by the hoodies and pointy teeth. Those pictures were titled “My Minions.” The man with the rats and woman with her pigeons were in a few pictures too; those were titled “My Friends.”

  Seeing this was just making me feel worse, but there was another paper that looked interesting. It was an old medical form that had been badly water damaged and stuck to some sort of certification. Most of the writing was illegible. From what I could make out, someone named “Octavio Jules” was certified to practice psychiatric medicine. All that was left of the address was Amsterdam, New York. The paper was dated 1893. Could that have been one of the Outsiders? It seemed like a pretty strange thing for them to collect at random, but then again they were all a bit strange to start with.

  I took a look around the room again. A fake Christmas tree in a pot, a torn-up couch near the desk, a broken tape recorder and lamp next to a big cushioned chair – was this an attempt at recreating a psychiatrist’s office? There was a picture without a frame nailed to the wall behind the couch. It was a sepia photo of a prestigious-looking bearded man in a suit and top hat. Judging by the quality of the photo, it appeared to be from the turn of the twentieth century.

  The man in the photo seemed familiar somehow. He almost looked like Grampy. I pulled the picture off the wall and flipped it over. The back had the name Octavio on the back and the start of a date, “July 20th, 19-” The rest of the date was covered by a stain. The more I stared at the photo, the more I could see it being Grampy.

  “What happened to you, Octavio?” I asked myself out loud. “How did you go from the man in this picture to the senile hobo I knew?” My head hurt just thinking about it. He was a doctor, like my parents. Even in his current state he was trying to help people who were down on their luck in his own eccentric way.

  Footsteps creaked along the floorboards downstairs, putting a stop to my investigation. Someone was still here.

  Chapter Three

  I floated down the stairs to avoid alerting anyone of my presence. Whoever was still here could be a survivor – or a potential threat. I told myself I shouldn’t be concerned. Noah had prepared me for situations like this. I just had to stay focused and keep a clear mind.

  The footsteps were slow and heavy; someone was carrying out their own recon. Sneaking around buildings like this was an unwanted habit, but one I was getting good at. Most of the apartment doors had been taken off their hinges, making it easier to scope out the basic floor plan with a quick peek. I followed the graffiti-laden hallway to the last place I’d heard the footsteps and landed with my back against the wall to listen. There was definitely still someone inside the next apartment. Again I wondered whether this was the person responsible for what had happened. Was the amount of noise they were making sloppiness? Or were they just so strong they didn’t need to bother with stealth?

  I never would have been able to guess the sight that greeted me around the corner of the doorframe. A hooded man was kneeling in the ashes of some poor Outsider and praying to the rosary in his hand. The act alone was curious enough, considering that the undead consider themselves cursed by God, but the man’s clothes were what really puzzled me. Maybe “clothes” wasn’t the right word to describe what I saw.

  A flashlight’s blinding glare pierced the room. I’d been spotted already. How annoying.

  “Oh, you’re not one of them.” He spoke flatly and turned off the flashlight, putting it back in his pocket. “What are you doing here?”

  The man before me was no more than a few years my senior at most – and completely human. He was thin and relatively nondescript except for a pair of blue eyes and auburn hair that sto
od out against his pale skin. Maybe he smoked, or just hadn’t slept in days, because his face was unusually drawn for someone so young. But it was the costume he was wearing that I couldn’t figure out. Dressed in a combination of brown leather and chainmail garb, he looked as though he was headed to a renaissance faire. The heavy footsteps earlier were from a pair of medieval-esque boots. A sheathed sword and dagger etched with inscriptions were strapped to his side. If not for the weapons’ immaculate craftsmanship, I would have laughed him off as some roleplaying weirdo come to see the “haunted house” at a really inconvenient time. Of course, if he had been supernatural, I have viewed him as a threat considering the age he would have to be for those clothes to be authentic.

  “I was told it was safe to crash here. I’m homeless.” One thing the Archios taught me by example: lie and deny everything. While it wasn’t technically a lie, I doubted he had any involvement with what was going on in here and I wanted to keep it that way.

  “This place is far from safe. Who told you that?”

  Unfortunately, I’m a horrible liar.

  “Um, other homeless people?” Why couldn’t he be an eight-foot tall abomination so we could fight and get it over with? Somehow this was so much worse. “Why are you dressed like King Arthur?”

  He wasn’t as amused by that as I was and pushed past me into the hall. “Would you call yourself a man of faith?”

  “Sure, yeah.” I had defeated two demons, after all. That should count for something. I never put much thought into God’s existence when I was growing up. My parents were very scientific and I was never left looking for answers to life. When the Strigoi explained that the undead had come about through God’s curse on the first demon-tempered mortals, I accepted it as fact. All of these other supernatural beings were real; why not God? “Why?”

  “This place is evil.”

  I had to hold back a laugh. “You mean like drugs? Prostitution?”