“All hands?”
Saint grinned that insufferable grin of his. “Figure of speech,” he said airily.
Steffan groaned. Saint laughed.
Why did he always have to be like this, couldn’t he just open up and tell him the truth for once –
Steff’s thoughts went, unwillingly, to the night Saint showed up at his door soaked from the rain and trying to hide his bruises, one time when they were younger. The memory of it still made his guts twist. He’d done his best to clean Saint up and get some food into him, and he’d made gallons of tea, and they had sat and watched TV – but that was nothing, that was less than nothing, all he could do was give him food and a safe atmosphere when Saint needed help. It was stupid, selfish, to make this about him instead of Saint, but every time Saint flinched away or lied or told him he was fine it hurt. It hurt more than Steff would’ve believed possible.
Saint was a tangled knot of complications, and Steffan was sick of doing the best he could but never being enough.
He must’ve shown some of those thoughts on his face, because Saint leaned forward again. “Are you sure I’m not being a trouble?” he asked, resting his head on one hand and widening his eyes. “You look a little stressed. And old, and over-caffeinated. And boring.”
Steffan sighed. “It’s no trouble,” he said. It was, but that wasn’t Saint’s fault. And it wasn’t Saint’s fault that Steff didn’t know how to help, either, and it didn’t mean he was allowed to stop trying. “I… I have to.” Someone has to. God knows you need it. But he couldn’t exactly say that. “I’m – doing my duty as a friend.”
The swagger vanished, just like that.
“Doing your duty,” Saint repeated. His head sagged forward, actually needing the support of his hand now.
Steffan flushed. “That’s – I didn’t mean it like that, Saint, you know I didn’t, I meant that, that even when it’s hard it’s… I don’t mind, honestly, I don’t.” Saint was just staring at him. Steffan swallowed and changed the subject. “Tell me about your workmate? Perhaps you and them can reach a compromise. I’d love to help.”
“Uh, wow. No, I’d rather stick with this, this fascinating vein of conversational gold we just located,” Saint said. He leaned back. Blinked. “Have to. Huh. Would you look at that. Well.” He shook his head as if to clear it, then stood up. “I think that’s us then.”
“What? No. No! Stop being dramatic. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I could no sooner stop being dramatic than I could cease to breathe,” Saint declared, flinging out his arms.
“That’s self-proving,” Steff pointed out, then was annoyed at himself. What a pointless thing to say. Stumbling over his words again. He was no help at all. “So, your… your beautiful elf people, are they –”
“No, no, shut your goddamn mouth,” Saint said, holding up a hand to forestall him, and when Steffan gaped in indignation – more at how Saint said it all gallant than the actual words – Saint added, “By all means, I insist. I won’t bother you any more.”
“Ha, is that a promise?” Steffan said, trying to grin.
Saint met his eyes squarely. “Yeah.”
The grin wasn’t very successful, in the face of that.
“I do so hate being any sort of annoyance or burden, is all,” Saint continued, and Steffan had to laugh at that. Saint smiled along at the joke. “Anyway, forget about the patupaiarehe,” he said. “I’d rather encounter one of them at the moment than have another second of conversation with you. I actually would prefer for my brain to be scooped out by spoons and then boiled with dry potatoes and served at school camp than put up with this any longer.”
Steffan stared at him.
“Frightfully sorry, pet,” Saint said, not sounding sorry at all, and he left in a swirl of coat.
“Oh, come on!” Steffan yelled after him, but Saint was already gone. “… I’m sorry,” Steff added, to the empty space where Saint wasn’t.
The sandwich wilted on its plate.
Steffan tried to study after that, but after a while he set his laptop aside with a tight, irritated sigh. It was time to face the facts; quantum mechanics just didn’t grab him like it used to. He supposed he could blame Saint for distracting him from it, this time, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t already distracted himself, earlier, with that stupid dead-end research into the unrelated deaths and so on. His ennui wasn’t Saint’s fault. Maybe Steff should call him and apologise – but calling Saint was trying at the best of times, and he couldn’t quite work up the energy. Not right now.
Dwelling on the wasted research wasn’t exactly productive, but he couldn’t help it; it had just been such a waste, of time and energy. He’d trawled through archived newspapers on Papers Past for a good four hours, and found plenty of articles, certainly, but nothing that tied things together or even gave him the slightest idea of where to look next. Maybe there wasn’t anywhere to look next. It was probably nothing, just a stupid hunch. Why would those things be connected, anyway? People in comas, drained of blood, it was ridiculous, like some absurd fairy tale –
Wait.
Fairies. Fae. What was that thing Saint had said? Anyway, forget about the patupaiarehe… Beautiful elven psychopaths. Hm.
Steff ordered more coffee, flipped open his laptop and researched a little. And sure enough things started turning up. He compiled notes, mainly of the traits that all the stories agreed on. Reading up on patupaiarehe quickly led to other beings as well, tipua and hakuturi and maero and, more interestingly, ponaturi – interesting because by the look of things, whoever had been murdering people was recreating these old stories. The people who had been drowned, that was clearly reminiscent of ponaturi. The blood-drainings and people falling into comas – that reflected what patupaiarehe were said to have done. Perhaps he could put together a comprehensive folder, cite it as best he could under the circumstances, and then report his findings to the police? Even if he didn’t, you could never have too much knowledge.
And it looked like he owed Saint an apology, and maybe some thanks. Well. He could always just text him later, once Saint had cooled down. This, at the moment, was a lot more interesting, not to mention a great deal easier to figure out than Saint ever would be.
He put his instinctive disbelief on hold, and researched. He was a student of quantum mechanics, after all. It was what he did best.
After a while, though, he found his leg twitching again, jittery, full of energy and nowhere to expend it sitting in a café. He packed his things and got up.
There was a busker somewhere outside playing saxophone, smooth and smoky, and the sound of it helped to ease Steff’s troubled mind. He fumbled change out of his wallet as he was paying for the coffees and Saint’s sandwich, and when he went outside he dropped a coin in the busker’s hat.
The man nodded up at him and continued playing. He was dressed in dark jeans, a brownish waistcoat open over his rather shabby shirt. Odd that he even had a hat; he had a saxophone where his head should have been, so he probably didn’t need one.
Steffan nodded back and wandered on.
If someone was drowning people in imitation of obscure traditional Māori sea monsters, then perhaps there would be some sign of it by the waterfront, perhaps the killer or killers would be based there; he could ask questions of the business owners …No, he’d just make a nuisance of himself. But there was no harm in doing a little looking around, surely. He made his way down Cuba Street, barely paying attention to his surroundings, his mind a whirl.
It was colder by the ocean, and Steffan, lacking coat or jacket, shivered. He wandered the long stretch of pavement until even he had to admit that this was pointless, that there was no use to this, what exactly did he even expect to find –
A noose slipped around his neck and he was yanked into the shadow of a looming warehouse, out of sight.
“Someone’s been poking his nose in!” a voice sand, “someone’s like to get himself snapped up!”
He
scrabbled at his throat, choking; the cord was – rough, his brain supplied, something fibrous to judge by how it cut into his neck. He fell to his knees and breathed frantically and looked at his assailant.
A girl, much smaller than him, wearing some kind of costume: her skin was blue and she was shaped oddly, her features exaggerated, cheeks too sunken and teeth too sharp. Strange. He hadn’t expected the gang or whoever it was – maybe the girl on her own? – to actually wear costumes. Maybe they had cult affiliations.
The girl ran her tongue across her teeth, taking him in. “Not much meat on you, is there?” she said, and she laughed like a hyena. “There’s enough! There’s enough! Meat enough, Māripi’s gonna eat her full,” and then she said something in a slippery language he didn’t recognise.
“I’m sorry,” he said, staring up at her. His mind was chanting fool fool fool and taking in every single aspect of the situation, both at once. “There’s, I have money in my wallet, you’re welcome to, I, it’s not much but –”
She tugged at the rope, and the noose tightened again. It was strange how quickly choking became unbearable, he thought distantly; how it felt like your face was swelling so fast with all the blood rushing to it that it might burst. He didn’t know what was going on, and that was almost worse.
The girl put one claw beneath his chin and tilted it up to look at him. He looked at her, in turn. She was potbellied but hollow-cheeked, like she didn’t eat healthily or regularly, or ate something strange; her clothes were ragged and –
The claw beneath his chin felt real, he noted. He looked at the hand that held the rope, the joints of her fingers, the inhuman shape of her hands. They were real. She… wasn’t wearing a costume.
All… all right then.
His vision was filling with stars and the world spun strangely and he choked out, “I can get you food, I, I mean you no harm,” or maybe he didn’t manage to say that, he couldn’t seem to shape the syllables, the world was swimming with black.
Then the noose loosened and he fell to hands and knees, gasping in air, precious beautiful air, how had he never valued air before now? “Really,” the girl said. She tugged the noose over his head and draped it over her arm, then bent to poke at his stomach. “Hmmm well well. There is little meat on you and Whai does say never kill humans.” Her head jerked to one side. “But Whai wouldn’t know,” she said, grinning wicked. “What would Whai know, Whai nothing knows, no one knows… .”
Steffan was shivering, he noted, distantly. It wasn’t from the cold. This girl seemed half crazy. More than half. “I can get you food,” he said again, because he did not have anywhere near enough oxygen in his brain right now to figure out what sort of lie he should be telling.
“But I got myself food right here,” she said, drawing out a wooden knife with a serrated edge made of rows and rows of shark teeth and drawing it along one filthy-clawed finger, nodding with approval when it drew blood. (Thick blood, black and sludgy. Interesting.) “Gonna eat the bones and guts of you, eat the flesh and blood of you.”
Maybe he could get away. He pulled himself cautiously to his feet and she lashed out impossibly fast and grabbed him by the chin, claws digging in cruelly. She tugged him forward again and held the knife against his face.
“Might be I should slice you up first,” she said. “Might be that’d be fun.” Her eyes glinted.
He flinched away from the knife, the sharpness of it. Thought, frantic.
“I’m a scientific man, by the way,” he said.
She looked confused. “You’re gonna be meat,” she said with a shrug, and aligned the knife with his throat, the teeth pressing gently against his skin. She pulled back the knife to swing.
“Allow me to test a hypothesis,” Steff said, breathless, and with all the strength he had he pulled free and stumble-dashed the few metres out of the shadow of the warehouse and into sunlight.
She was far stronger than him, inhuman levels of strong, faster too, probably, she could pull him back easy… but hadn’t, not yet.
He turned around so he could dodge the noose if she tossed it again, and so he could look back into the alley. She stood rooted to the spot, glaring at him. Hadn’t moved out of that patch of shadow.
“So you’re something that doesn’t like sunlight,” he said. “Right. I can work with that.”
She lunged at him and he flinched and fell on his ass like an idiot, tried to scrabble away but she was already recoiling from the sunlight with a hiss, hunkered over. She started to moan to herself, pained and eerie like the wailing of a cat.
Steffan stood up and ran, ran until he was far enough away to feel safe again. Then he walked, his mind busy, always busy. There was fear underneath it, terror, self-hatred even, a part of his mind yelling look what your curiosity has brought you, look what taking the initiative has brought you, it will bring you nothing but death, but the rest of his mind was thinking about how he’d figured out her weakness and escaped, and was feeling almost proud, that he’d kept his composure and found new knowledge and applied it. And thinking about the other stories he had found online, and whether maybe those were true, as well. There was just so much to learn. Such depth. Such complexity.
Standing on the roof, Saint threw his phone. Just pulled it out of his pocket and flung it, surprising himself with the force of it. Threw the phone with all his strength, and it actually hit the building opposite his, so he must’ve been stronger than he thought. It hit the wall and more or less exploded, little bits of plastic and wiring falling shattered to the ground far below.
Wow his friends were dicks.
He had his monster-slaying, of course, and that was fun. He’d fought some squat multi-limbed things with sunken dark eyes and barklike skin and tufts of leaves instead of hair; pretty terrifying, except that they burned like torches, they burned like a bonfire. Under Noah’s guidance he’d lurked by a grille in the gutter until a weakly gasping shadowy creature hauled itself out, and he’d burned that too, and more of the bird pest things, and a thing that took on the form of a different monster each time he looked at it, though it burned easy enough. His least favourite had been the creatures he’d fought late one misty night, a group of weird gaunt shades not terribly unlike Noah, whispering. But they burned, too.
Even with his monster-slaying, things got in the way, what with that inconvenient phobia of his. At least Noah was yet to say anything about how he’d run from that scary and oddly well-dressed patupairahe guy. Saint didn’t know why he was so terrified of patupaiarehe that just the sight of one made him stumble and falter, why it made blood well up at the back of his throat all saltymetallic and made him think of rain, of buses, made him need to rest his head against the wall and breathe steadily for several minutes before he could convince himself that he was here, safe or close enough to it, rather than on the bus with the pale girl staring all dark-eyed, the girl reaching into his mind and just twisting and –
He didn’t think about it more than he had to. Didn’t want Noah to think him as much a burden as Steff apparently did.
He wasn’t thinking about that either, melodramatic phone-smashing aside.
Later, they went to the waterfront. Noah spent a fair amount of time ranting about beings called ponaturi (gods, Saint couldn’t even think the name and keep a straight face), which were amphibious, apparently, in that they mainly lived by and in the ocean but could come on land. They drowned people and were ever so dangerous to careless humans and were all in all bad news.
“Have they murdered babies?” Saint asked. He was amused by how personal Noah was about this. Normally Noah was more businesslike about it all.
“Probably,” Noah said very seriously. He cut a proud and regal figure standing there.
“Killed a kid’s very first dog and best ol’ pal?” Saint said, and Noah scowled at him. Then the wairua’s head jerked up, his eyes narrowing. Saint could see him clearly in this dim light, though there was a touch more silver to him in the darkness.
“S
omeone’s here.”
“Who?”
“I – I don’t… ” Noah said, and looked lost for a moment, but he gathered himself and said, haughtily, “Someone dangerous, for me to be able to feel his presence. That’s all you need to know. Look out – Saint!”
Saint ducked, and something’s worryingly sharp claws whistled over his head. What was it with iwi atua and claws? And how had they even managed to approach without him hearing? Yikes.
There were four of them, dim and shadowy, hissing at him. There weren’t any other people around, which was good, he guessed; just the bulk of Te Papa off to one side, chromed and gleamy, and a brick warehouse on the other, and all around Saint a wide open space that was perfect for slaughtering goblins. Or, come to think of it, for goblins to slaughter him. He’d been hunting atua for a few days now, and this was the first time that he’d been the one to be ambushed.
“You lot are clever,” Saint noted, taking a step back. He scanned around for any exits. The ponaturi weren’t so clever after all; they were all in a tight cluster, not spreading out to block his path or anything. Not that there was really that many places to go. There were some benches? He could… stand on a bench? And rain fire from above, he reminded himself, and grinned.
“Won’t let you live to hurt my folk, not a one of ’em,” hissed the one who’d dived at him, who seemed to be their leader. “Won’t. I’ll drown you dead – wait!” The last bit appeared to be directed to another of the goblins, and if so it was too late: the thing had already dived at Saint, and when he stepped aside it hit the ground and wailed in pain. Saint blinked.
“Show some control,” the leader said, snapping his teeth at his comrades. “We used to hunt in packs – what’s wrong with you!”
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