by Mur Lafferty
He was pushing her away, he didn’t want her there to see him fail, to see him change. That was the only explanation. That coupled with his death wish would pretty much shut her out of his life entirely.
She dressed and cleaned the blood and demon junk off her jacket, then put it on. She strapped a knife to her arm. Granny Good Mae had given it to her, and it remained dear, even though she had cut herself with it more than once. Anna had given her privacy—or at least Zoë had asked her to—and waited outside the bathroom door. She made her presence known when Zoë exited, and Zoë allowed her in.
So this merging-with-the-city thing. It helps you actually talk with the city, right? Could the city help me find the Doyenne?
If she’s in the city, yes. If not, then no.
Let’s go, then.
Zoë didn’t see anyone as she left the B and B, not even Freddie Who’s Always Ready.
The day was cloudy and cool, and an early-morning rain had washed the cat and human and vampire blood from the sidewalk in front of Freddie’s Ready B and B. At least Zoë assumed her party had left such biological hazards behind them.
To merge with a city is more than talking to it, or being its friend, or even being as close as we are now, Anna instructed, and Zoë could hear the shyness leave her voice as she got down to business. She could almost see the girl’s earnest dark face beaming at her.
You must give a part of yourself to the city. Willingly.
“A part of myself? Like a toe?” Zoë asked aloud.
Blood will do.
Zoë still had pink scars from her adventures in New York last December. A cut on her arm, one on her shoulder, and a self-inflicted deep gouge on her hip from when she had tried to use a knife while being swallowed by a snake demon. And yet still the idea of cutting herself and feeding her blood to the city was scary, somehow.
She firmly reminded herself that she had reached down a demon dog’s throat the night before, and this was nothing compared to that.
The morning was calm and gray. Beads, trash, cups, and vomit had been swept from the streets already, and the city looked new and fresh, ready for tonight’s partying.
We need to look for the heart of the city.
Zoë looked up and down the street, then started walking away from the B and B. “How do I find the heart? Is it Jackson Square? A jazz club? A strip club? A cemetery? Bourbon Street? A bead manufacturing plant? The Superdome?”
Take the knife; cut your hand. Your dominant hand.
She couldn’t help but feel it was a supremely bad idea, but Zoë obediently slid her knife across the heel of her palm, wincing at the pain. The cut wasn’t deep, but it bled, and that was what she needed. She held her hand above the cobblestone street and watched the blood drip down and seep into the dirt between the stones.
The sensory improvement was subtle, but it was there. She could feel the number of bodies in the buildings around her, who slept, who stirred, who played video games, who read the same sentence over and over again because of an argument with a spouse. She could sense the humans and coterie, and tell them apart.
“Wow,” she said.
In front of her, she felt rather than saw a golden line on the sidewalk, a line that pulsed as if from a great heartbeat. She followed it down the sidewalk, her head down. She stepped over a homeless man, dropping a dollar in his lap.
The city became awake around her. She could sense waitstaff coming into work to open for the early lunch rush. The shop owners opening their doors. A trolley rumbling by two blocks away.
The walking became meditative to her, and she began thinking apart from the golden line.
Arthur is off in another hotel saying he doesn’t need me. I somehow killed an ancient dog demon. Arthur doesn’t want me. His drama and my drama don’t click. I come from a long line of assassins. Some of the assassins were assassins for the assassins. And other guys, too.
The thought process hit her hard then, and the hairs on her neck prickled. She continued to walk, absorbed in thought, not paying much attention to where she was going, or to the golden thread in front of her, or to her cut hand, which dripped blood onto the ground as she walked. Anna was quiet in her head, letting her learn the way herself, but Zoë could still sense her.
The golden thread got brighter and brighter. Zoë was dimly aware of her phone buzzing in her pocket, but she ignored it, seeing nothing but the gold and hearing nothing but distant jazz music. She turned down a residential street with short houses and walled courtyards. Colorful shards of broken bottles were glued to the tops of the walls, layman’s barbed wire. Or perhaps artists’ barbed wire.
The gold thread led to one of the walled courtyards. She couldn’t see into the yard, but she knew it was the right place.
“What am I supposed to do now?” she asked.
The wall was about ten feet high, redbrick, with green broken glass atop it. In the middle was a wooden door. Zoë hesitated for a moment, her hand over the handle. She was sure it would be locked, or that the owner was on the other side with a shotgun. Before she could touch it, though, it swung open.
Did the city do that? she wondered.
I did.
The voice was not Anna’s, but one far older, a touch of the Southern Creole accent, a tone of amusement underneath the very presence of it.
Instead of hearing the words in her head, Zoë felt them. She stepped into the courtyard. It wasn’t a backyard, in that it didn’t have the back of a building as one of its four walls. It seemed to be completely enclosed with brick, with only the wooden door as a way out.
Anna stepped out of her and remained visible, nearly corporeal. Zoë jumped back in alarm. The girl twirled around, laughing.
“You can be seen here?” Zoë asked.
“I can almost touch things, even,” Anna said. She sank to her knees and ran her fingers through the grass, saying, “Thank you” over and over again.
Along the borders of the garden grew long purple flowers, sunflowers, and rose bushes. Ivy dripped from the wall, and in the far corner, in the morning shadows, a fountain bubbled secrets to itself.
“Did—did you know this was going to happen?” she asked Anna, loath to interrupt her, but having no idea what was going on.
“I hoped. I didn’t know. I haven’t visited a city heart since I died,” Anna said. “I can’t talk to her, or rather, I can’t hear her, but you still can.” She twisted so she sat on the ground, cross-legged, skirt over her knees.
“It’s time for your next step,” she said.
“Cutting myself and bleeding on the street wasn’t enough? What does she need now, my appendix?” Zoë was frustrated and feeling a little left out with the city and the ghost citytalker knowing more than she did.
Not seen a talker in decades. Not one who’da speak to me.
“What about Reynard? He’s still here, arrived yesterday, a little after me,” Zoë asked.
I seen him, but he don’t talk.
“That dude is too mysterious for his own good,” Zoë said.
Or maybe he do speak, but I ain’t been myself since before.
Zoë was starting to realize that “before” referred to Hurricane Katrina, and that perhaps the city was damaged even beyond the devastation that the human world was aware of.
“So what do I do now?” she asked.
“She brought you here to connect with us. You can get a stronger bond with her, and you’ll be aware of everything going on in the city. It’s intense at first, but you get used to it,” Anna said.
“So what do I have to do?”
“Your goal,” Anna said, “is to deepen your connection.” She pointed to Zoë’s hand. “Reopen your wound. Stick it into the dirt. You must sacrifice some of your life directly to her.”
Zoë pulled out her knife and looked at it distastefully. “So… bleeding all over her all the way here wasn’t enough?”
“Just a bit more,” Anna said, smiling.
Zoë took a deep breath and cut into
her hand again, wincing.
“And I can’t even put this in my book, I bet,” she grumbled.
Anna pointed to the flower bed, where a hole had been dug. At the bottom lay a small brown flower bulb. Daffodil, perhaps? “Put your hand in the hole.”
“Putting your hand somewhere mysterious is never a good idea,” Zoë said. “I learned that from Flash Gordon.” But she did as Anna said, and let the blood run down into the hole, coating the flower bulb.
“So I just sit here and court an infection while…” Zoë trailed off as scenes assaulted her senses.
The first sensation was size. She, Zoë, was a cell in an organism that was vast, stretched miles. She could feel it, sense its borders, feel its roads and its people and its music and laughter and businesses and power and parties and secrets and crimes. The edges felt ragged and painful, as if a page had been torn from a book. It was hard to focus any one place; she could feel pain here, pleasure there. She couldn’t feel one specific person or car or building, but she knew that life was happening inside a hospital, and in a poverty-stricken neighborhood. She could feel death happening in nursing homes, and bedrooms, and inside a Dumpster.
The second sensation was that the city herself was a human, a tall black woman, thin and old, with high cheekbones. Her thick hair was in cornrows, and she wore a simple blue dress.
So now I’m you and you’re human?
The woman smiled. Not exactly. I just wanted you to have someone to look at. I got some memories to show you.
She took Zoë’s hand—now Zoë realized she had hands!—and pointed.
The citytalkers had the power of omniscience once upon a time. They’d connect to a place and know it immediately. The really good ones could search the city in an instant from the inside, spot crimes, spot targets. They were silent assassins; no one could hide from them as long as they were in a metropolitan area.
Weren’t there some who didn’t want to kill? Zoë interrupted.
They was raised to be that way. They didn’t know any other way. They were a secret society, with close families that held they secrets. You couldn’t spot a citytalker, they wasn’t like weres or zoëtists, who were damn powerful. Good citytalkers can talk with a city while having a whole separate conversation with a human.
So what happened after that? How did they find people to kill?
At that moment, images rose in front of Zoë’s metaphysical state, men and women being slaughtered in hotel rooms and in sewers, slaughtered by coterie they hadn’t seen coming. Weres died when they were in their human form, and only the zoëtists were able to fight back.
How did the talkers not see the coterie coming?
The woman looked very sad. I don’t know.
Who got to choose the targets?
The same people who run Public Works, and the coterie council. The Grey Cabal.
Isn’t that a conflict of interest?
The genocide shattered that Grey Cabal, which had many powerful zoëtists and weres as well as other coterie. Once the humans were gone, the Cabal died. Went silent. Most of the citytalkers was dead. There was chaos for years. Only now is it starting to die down. And the Cabal want what’s theirs.
Who mourned assassins, anyway? Zoë wondered.
Zoë was dimly aware that she knelt in a garden with her hand buried in a hole over a flower bulb, but she could sense the whole city in front of her, could feel it, could smell it. If she focused in, she could taste the spices one cook threw into a pot of stew. She could see the shades of blue an artist chose for her painting. She could smell the Mississippi River.
How do more people and coterie not know about the Grey Cabal and the citytalker assassins?
Citytalkers guard their secrets. And the Grey Cabal isn’t in a city, no one knows where it is. I’ve learned what I could from conversations and during assassinations. Some talkers will tell me more than others. But no one talked about where the Grey Cabal made its home.
The woman was silent then, and Zoë couldn’t think of what else to ask, so she took the opportunity to feel the expanse of the city, and tried to home in on some of the people she knew. She found Christian the incubus feeding in the back room of Public Works, and she quickly retracted her consciousness. Gwen and Eir were in Gwen’s room at the bed-and-breakfast, and Eir was ranting loudly while Gwen listened passively. Zoë could feel the tension in the air. She left before she invaded their privacy.
Opal was on the phone, and Zoë guessed she was talking to Phil. She stood stiffly, staring down at the empty desk in her room with the windows blackened.
Bertie was the most shocking. Zoë hadn’t seen him in his natural form yet, and was surprised to see him stretched out on the floor, looking like a giant snake with silver scales. Thin, paperlike wings were folded against his back and his face was vaguely doglike.
He doesn’t look like a baby… I wonder when he’ll reach full size. He’s going to be huge!
The wyrm snoozed on the floor, the gas fireplace in his room throwing gentle light that bounced off his silver scales.
Arthur…
She expanded her consciousness, not sure what she was looking for. She pictured him, thought about how he smelled, the sound of his voice. Something tugged at her, and she found a taxi caught in traffic from an accident on the highway out of the city. Arthur sat in the back, staring out the window, one hand massaging the zombie bite on his shoulder. He toyed with something in his hand, his talisman.
She wanted to call out to him, but she knew he wouldn’t be able to hear her. The image of him faded as he left the city limits when traffic lightened.
Curiosity pulled her back to Public Works, not where Christian fed in his office, but the first floor with the Poison Ivy secretary, and then to a basement. It was small, barely six feet tall, and concrete-lined. A trap door and a ladder went from ground to basement floor, and inside the basement lay a number of coterie in a variety of chains.
Their prison, Zoë realized with shock. She had been under the impression that Public Works just killed whatever monsters it found, but most of the beings in the basement were elemental. A fire demon raged inside what looked like a block of ice. An earth elemental, looking like a man made from bark and vines, hung from the ceiling by chains, secured several feet away from the ground, his power source.
And in the corner was a huge tank with thick green glass. It was sealed on all sides like a fish tank with a lid, and the water inside surged and thrashed, a water sprite imprisoned.
She thought of Morgen, then wanted to leave immediately and talk to Christian. If he knew how to bind water elementals, then perhaps he knew how to free them.
She tore her awareness away, determined to learn what she could from the city.
Now what?
She wondered what had happened in Jackson Square the night before, so she shifted her focus there. It looked completely different in the daylight, with the shining statue and the cats all gone. But there was something odd about it—the whole square had a sense of dread to it, as if the square itself had witnessed something horrible, but people still walked around, music still played, and the fortune-tellers still set up. Closer to the train yard, Zoë could feel the spilled blood, the bit of the demon that had joined with the city. It was foul and corrupt, and the grass beside the gravel had already withered, as if sown with salt. There was no sign of Kevin, and Zoë wondered what Opal had done with his body.
The vampire dissolved when the sun rose, which killed the grass there, the city said.
Did you see what happened last night?
The woman looked sad and confused. I saw the demons fight. I saw the vampires fight. Then there was a lot of blood. That’s all.
When Zoë returned to Jackson Square, the old limping man who had invited her to the party suddenly looked up from his tarot cards. It looked as if he looked right at her, and smiled a big, wide smile.
That party is tonight, she realized. When am I going to sleep during this trip?
She c
ould always not go. It was pretty damn clear she had a lot on her plate. Then again, if a being was so strong that he could recognize her when she was part of the freaking city, that didn’t sound like someone she wanted to commit a faux pas against.
She gave a mental sigh. Too much to think about. She let her mind return to the garden, where she became aware of her body, still kneeling. The sun looked odd; she realized she had spent several hours as part of the city.
So now what? she asked the woman.
We are part of one another. You can reach into me and feel me when you need to, and I can call you if I need to.
Why would you need someone like me?
New York City needed your old woman, didn’t she?
Zoë was quiet at that. She hadn’t wanted to think about Granny Good Mae, or the implications of what she had learned. She had learned so much when she had trained with the old citytalker, but not about the citytalkers’ history, or why they were citytalkers, or her destiny, whatever that would be. She had thought Granny Good Mae was an assassin because of her history with the CIA, not because of being a citytalker.
I—I would like to go back now. I need to follow Arthur, make sure he’s OK, talk to Public Works about water sprites.
You don’t want to stay with me?
Zoë felt her spine go cold, even within the floaty metaphysical state. Her awareness was transported to an old country house, and she and the city sat in rocking chairs on the front porch. The sun set in the distance over the fields, and a pitcher of iced tea sweated into a doily on the table between them. Zoë felt like someone trying to make a gracious good-bye, but who couldn’t find the words.
I can’t. You know that. And besides, aren’t we already connected?
The human form of the city shrugged her bony shoulders. Stay a while. Keep an old woman company.
Zoë could feel the solid manner of the city fraying at the edges. She remembered how fragile this being was. She put a soothing tone into her words. And I’m not going anywhere. Not right now, anyway. I just need to get back to, uh, me, and talk to my friends. And possibly stop my friend from getting killed in the swamps. But I can’t stay here forever. I’m sorry.