He paused.
“… Think I stole that from Doctor Who. Sorry.” He waved a hand. “Bit distracted by the whole dying thing. I’ll be all clever and witty at you later. Except – oh wait!” He stretched his mouth into a manic grin. “No I won’t, because I’ll be dead!”
“No,” Noah snarled, raw and vulnerable, and what was it about just mentioning people dying that made him break so utterly, that stripped all his friendliness away? “No dying, not for any of you. There has to be a way, Saint. You have to think of something –”
“Help me!” Saint snapped at him. “If you’re so damn clever tell me how I can stop this thing! Help me!”
Noah froze. It was jarring, him going from flickering back and forth to stopping and standing quite still, perfectly still. He drew in breath sharply, which presumably was for dramatic effect as Saint doubted he needed it, being dead and all. “… No,” the wairua said, mostly to himself. “No, I can’t do that. The last person I… No.”
“Right. Wonderfully helpful of you. I suppose that’s what I get for trying to rely on intangible people – they’re never there when you need someone to lean on. Okay.” He stood straight. “I think I can walk now. Here’s hoping me being a pathetic coward hasn’t already consigned some poor fool to death. Ah well. At least I can die dashing.” He straightened his coat and held his head at a more rakish angle and grinned. “How do I look?”
“Stop this stupidity,” Noah said.
“Stupidity? This is my heroic last stand we’re talking about here! This is important stuff. It’d be horrible if I died looking less than my best. People would laugh. They would laugh snidely.”
He started down the stairs. Stopped and shuddered, a full-body shiver of fear. Clenched his fists. Swore. Went on again.
Noah stood in front of him suddenly; Saint squinted and focused on him, and could see that Noah’s eyes were dark and sombre, his mouth quite definitely not forming a smile. “No.”
“I think you’re a wee bit too insubstantial to stop me, ghost-boy.”
“You’ll die. Stop.”
“Not,” Saint said, slow and clear. “Going. To happen.”
They stood there for a moment, at an impasse.
Then Noah sighed. “… Decapitation doesn’t kill the mohoao, the maero, the hungry giants. They are the wild-men-of-the-forests, and they are killed by the same things that the forests are.”
“I’ll be sure to start a possum farm.”
Noah shook his head and growled. “No. Stupid. Stop being stupid. This is important.” He held up his right hand, palm facing him, fingers fanned out. He closed his eyes like he was bracing himself for something, then opened them and, with his left hand, pulled off one of his fingers – the little finger. It was like plucking a fruit; it resisted at first, and then came away cleanly. There was no blood, just a little hole where the finger had been. He held it out to Saint.
“Dude,” Saint said. “Gross.”
Noah snorted. “I’m giving you a precious and dangerous thing, boy,” he said, “which I went to quite a lot of trouble to obtain. Don’t treat it so lightly.”
Saint eyed the finger doubtfully. It twitched a little, which really didn’t help. “Don’t you need it?”
“I’m left-handed,” said Noah, as though that explained everything.
“And. What is it, exactly?”
Noah said, “The thing that kills forests.”
Also not helpful. “When I asked you to help me,” said Saint, “I didn’t literally mean for you to give me a hand!” Noah glared at him. Saint quietly filed away the joint joke he’d been planning on making and said instead, “But – seriously. What do I even… What do you expect me to do with it, exactly? Poke him in the eye?”
“Breathe it in,” said Noah. Saint frowned at him.
“Huh?”
“Saint. Hurry.” Noah was speaking through clenched teeth. “Do you want people to die?”
Saint winced. “No,” he said, quietly. “No I do not. Well, then.”
He took the finger. It didn’t feel of anything in his hand, only a vague warmth, maybe. He held it up to his face but then lowered it again, shuddering. “I can’t.”
“Coward.”
“No! I mean, yes, I probably am, but I literally can’t, it’s too …In my head I’m thinking of it as solid. I can’t breathe it in.”
“Well, then,” Noah said.
“… Oh,” said Saint. “Oh. Hell. Ew.”
“It is a –”
“Precious and dangerous gift. Yes. Thank you. Next time you feel the need to get me a present, just get me some socks or an amusing card, all right? Okay. Time for some queasy heroics.” He held up the finger, and eyed it doubtfully, and then, before he could think too much, swallowed it.
It was unpleasant. If he’d ever eaten worms, he imagined it would have felt something like that, the same squirmy sensation, the feeling of eating something unpleasantly alive. Except that eating worms probably didn’t make you feel like you were on fire afterwards.
Saint came back to himself gasping and shuddering. He was on all fours on the landing, and the wooden floor was charred where his hands rested, and the air smelled of smoke. He stood up, feeling raw and jangling and strange. He danced a little impromptu dance, at the end of it extending a hand towards one wall and clicking his fingers. Fire plumed out of them and scorched a neat hole in the plaster. He’d seldom felt more alive.
“Well,” Saint said, grinning fit to burst. “I always knew I was hot, but this is ridiculous.”
Noah laughed. “Is there really time for puns?”
“Always,” Saint said, but he ran down the stairs, taking them two or three at a time in great leaping strides.
It was average Wellington weather outside, cloudy and windy. The street was one of those that acted mostly as an in-between place, a place for cars to drive right by, with most of its buildings on lease or not earthquake safe. There weren’t many people around. Saint spotted the maero maybe twenty metres away, walking deadly slow – more creeping than walking, really – and, just ahead of him, a couple of people, an Asian-looking girl and a white guy, both laden with shopping bags.
Saint shouted, “Hey!” but if they heard him they didn’t show any sign of it. The maero turned around and took him in, though, and Saint was hoping it’d run at him, or just run, but it turned back to its prey, advancing.
Saint dashed toward it, heart in his mouth and ghost-friend by his side. The maero lifted up one hand with those fearsome claws and batted at the guy, sending him reeling. He hit the ground hard. The girl screamed and swung her shopping bag against the maero, once, twice, but it still advanced. The guy stumbled to his feet, yelling for help, and the maero put one claw under the girl’s throat, tilting her head up, and Saint finally, finally got within range.
“Hey!” he hollered again, and the maero turned and faced him. Its yellow teeth bared in threat or amusement: here was its prey, scuttling back tamely to the slaughter. It lifted one claw, not even trying to be quick. Saint was still scared. It was tall and uncanny and it had claws like meat hooks and he was so damn scared.
Saint held out both hands, and he burned it.
Burned just it, mind – he was fiercely aware of how easy it had been to burn a hole in the wall and it’d be just as easy to burn a hole in the girl or a nearby car if he wasn’t careful. So he focused the fire that he somehow magically had so that the fire burned the monster and only the monster – it felt weird as all hell, trying to use this fire, his hands trembling worse than if he’d been holding a gun. But damn did he burn it good. He burned it until the fur seared and the skin slipped from the bones and the bones blackened. He burned it until it stopped screaming.
It didn’t take long. Not long at all.
He held up his fingers and blew across the tops of them, like you blew across guns to cool them, or to clear the smoke, or whatever the hell it was you blew across guns for.
“Ha,” Saint said, to the blackene
d ash of the successfully killed monster. He let his hands fall to his sides. His new fire was magical – well, obviously. But it was magical in more than just the obvious way, if it could achieve all that in just a few seconds without incinerating him and everything else within a ten-foot radius as well.
As it was the people he’d saved were standing there staring at him. The guy had dropped his shopping bag, and the plastic had split. A couple of cans of baked beans were rolling at his feet. Saint swallowed. Yeah, nice going – you saved some people by brutally murdering a creature right in front of them. That’s not gonna traumatise them at aaalllll.
“You okay?” he said, gentle as he could.
“Thenk ye!” the guy said, wide-eyed and with a strong Scottish accent. “What a punch!”
Saint stared at him. “Uh… yes,” he said, for lack of anything better to say. He stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his feet and grinned haplessly.
The girl was shaking a little, standing closer to her friend than she had been before, though not quite touching. Just close enough to be assured that he was there, Saint rather thought, like it was enough to be within touching distance of someone who was safe and kind and wouldn’t hurt you. She looked around. “But where did he go?”
Saint glanced down at the pile of maero-ashes on the ground. “Uh.”
“Most tangata – humans – they can’t see much of what atua do,” Noah said helpfully from beside him. “Their minds don’t let them.” Saint gave a fraction of a nod.
“We,” he said, solemnly, “may never know. Criminals, man. Who can tell?” He bent down to pick up the groceries, helping load the groceries that had spilled into the unbroken bags.
“But seriously,” the girl said. She was calming down, slowly. “Thank you. That… that was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.” The guy scowled a bit.
Saint smiled. “It was my honest pleasure,” he told them. “But you were doing pretty well on your own. Right time, right place, and all that. Will you folks be all right now?”
They traded glances and nodded.
“Then my work here is done,” he said, and shot both of them a smile. He contented himself with winking at the guy, as he was feeling threatened, but he blew the girl a kiss before turning and swaggering away like he owned the place.
He couldn’t seem to stop grinning, and he had to restrain himself from dancing, he felt so alive. Once he was far enough away he glanced at Noah, keeping pace beside him.
“Did they swoon?” he asked.
“Yes,” Noah said, looking as awed as the guy had. “Both of them. How do you do that?”
“Sheer charisma.” Saint laughed. “Thanks. Seriously.”
Noah quietened. He reached out a hand like he wanted to pat Saint’s shoulder, and then withdrew it. “I thought that would work,” he said, “but can I just – can I just say, I’m very glad it did? They’re brutal, you know. You could’ve, you could’ve been dead, could’ve died, could’ve just not been here anymore. I’m glad you killed it.”
“Yes, you said. Today, I would say, is a victory for righteousness. Oh hells yes! Don’t suppose you have any detachable parts that’ll turn into a bottle of champagne and a few admiring gorgeous people, do you?”
“No.”
“On second thoughts, good, because that’d be weird. Pity, though. I could use some champagne.” He clapped his hands together and laughed, because he felt like moving, because even just moving was a joyous thing right now. Mostly the fact that he still could. He clapped his hands together again, this time making them send up sparks, and he laughed, again, spreading out his arms, enjoying his triumph and the giddy rush of not currently being in mortal danger. “A victory for righteousness and bravery and lovably fearless rogues everywhere. Oh yes! And I didn’t even need to die!” He tugged at his coat, which was looking a little worse for wear, he had to admit. “Provided I survive the cost of dry-cleaning this thing.”
Noah smiled.
Saint stuck his hands in his pockets and whistled a little as they walked on down the street, past his doorway, heading to nowhere in particular. There still weren’t many people around, but just at this moment he didn’t especially care if anyone saw him talking to thin air. “… Say. While we’re here and all chummy and cosy, I’ve been wondering – why do you happen to be carrying fire around in your fingers? Just as a polite sort of query, you understand. I merely ask.”
“Oh, you know,” Noah said. “Some people carry pen and paper, some people carry handkerchiefs… ”
Saint chuckled. “Nice try. Normal people do not carry around magical spooky fire-making powers in their little finger, pet.” Or handkerchiefs. Wow did Noah not understand the twenty-first century. “And how did you still have it, even all ghosty?” He wiggled his fingers and decided against adding a ghosty sort of ‘wooo’. It would, he felt, ruin the current dignifiedly triumphant atmosphere.
“I’ve always been a rule-breaker,” Noah said again.
“Well,” Saint said, not really wanting to push Noah, not when this was the first time in weeks he felt like he was even halfway to doing what he was capable of. “That makes two of us, then.” He held out his fist. “Quite the team, huh? As dynamic duos go we are more than usually dynamic, I’d say.”
Noah blinked at his fist.
“You bump it,” Saint explained, demonstrating with his own hands and then holding out a fist again. Noah said, “Ah,” and tapped his four-fingered fist lightly against the space in front of Saint’s. Saint smiled.
Noah played with wind, absentmindedly, stirring dust in the gutter into little eddies and patterns. “That help I needed,” he said, watching the dust but watching Saint out of the corner of his eye. “It was along these lines. Finding atua which are a danger to people and getting rid of them. Would you be interested?”
Saint ran a hand through his hair. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off he was a little less pleased about this enterprise. He’d just killed a living thing, regardless of the fact that it would’ve tried to kill him and any number of other folks if he hadn’t. It had still been alive, and now it wasn’t, and he’d never even had the nerve to kill spiders, always had to ferry them safely out the window or the door, and there was hardly anything left of it, just ashes. “I’m hypothetically not entirely cool with the prospect of that idea,” he said, in a rush.
Noah’s motion stilled. “I could find someone else, I suppose.” He crossed his arms and frowned into the distance. “I… suppose. I’d rather you than anyone else; we work well together and you have a knack for this – but I don’t blame you, of course I don’t. Thank you for your company, all the same.”
“Ha!” Saint said, and he slung his arm over where Noah’s shoulders weren’t. “I said hypothetically, pet. Like I’ve ever been the sort to worry about hypotheticals. Screw those hypotheticals, I say, or would say in the hypothetical situation where I’m even aware of hypotheticals, because screw them. You want some monsters slain? I’m your man.”
Noah grinned, and Saint grinned back.
The waterfront had been built on wharfs, originally, on and around them. It had been where ships came and went and cargo was stored, had been the lifeblood of the town back when Wellington was a port and little else, and had continued to be an important part of the city ever since. Ocean and sky and land came together at the waterfront, and there were kilometres of it, pathways, restaurants, theatres, sculptures, fragments of prose and poetry carved into the stone, boats, Civic Square with its important buildings and neat paving – and, in places, still the original wood of the wharfs, the piers, Wellington’s connection to the ocean.
Tony didn’t go as far as the marina where her boat was usually tied up – here there was just a pleasant walkway for people to enjoy, no boats bobbing at their tethers. She still loved it here, the wind and wavelets and ever-changing sky. Often she came down to watch people having fun on the jumping platform set in a space where the old wharves had met: it was best on cold day
s, watching people shiver and step back and forth uncertainly and finally take the plunge when their friends goaded them.
Today though, she was here for business. She walked out to a longish stretch of waterfront with relatively few people, and stood beside that statue of a naked guy leaning into the northerly wind. The ocean lapped greasily at the wharf’s walls. She liked the parts where you could clamber down to be right by the water, but this was nice too – it was all rigid and concretey, and still the wildness of the water remained, just hushed a little. It was peaceful. Nothing could ruin this gentle tranquillity.
“OI!” she hollered, loud as she could. “WHAI!”
She flopped down to swing her legs over the edge and wait, ignoring people’s odd looks.
She didn’t have to wait all that long before he arrived, entirely disregarding the ladder and instead swarming lithely up the boundary wall itself. He hauled himself over the edge and sat beside her, grinning widely.
“Hey, sea-sister,” he said.
“Hey!” Tony said, and then she punched him in the face. He soared in a great arc off the edge and splashed into the ocean a good ten metres away.
Tony blinked down at her fist.
Whai swam back to land, a smooth slide beneath the water, and hauled himself back up, glaring. He was wearing conventional human clothes today, jeans and a T-shirt, and they made him look drenched and bedraggled and thoroughly pitiable. His hair didn’t even look wet, though; it shed droplets like an umbrella.
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