by Anton Strout
Rory let out a miserable-sounding groan, but got up and shuffled over to me at the worktable I was set up at. Bits of brick, stone, statue pieces, wire, and half-packed clay blocks were strewn across my work area, my great-great-grandfather’s secret tome laid open off to the side. I wrapped my hands around my project and stood it up. A crude statue formed from brick stood there on two clay legs reinforced by wire within, the entire thing still reeking of chemicals I found among the contents of the art supply cage in the studio. It wasn’t pretty, but it was a functional human form, if a bit stocky, reminding me of a tiny, no-necked football player.
“You ready?” I asked.
“For what?” she asked back, slipping her glasses back on.
“Watch,” I said, and turned to my crudely carved clay figure. I pressed my thoughts into it. My will. I stared at it, wanting it to move, the minutes passing. After several had passed, Rory cleared her throat. I broke my focus on my failed statue and looked at her.
“I appreciate your attempt at modern art there, but I have to say maybe you should stick to those art-class sketches you were working on.”
“Shush,” I said, and turned back to it. I blocked her out completely and threw my concentration into the clay, trying to wrap my mind around it. Unfortunately, all it was doing was giving me a headache right between my eyes across the bridge of my nose, but I refused to give up. If I had read my great-great-grandfather’s book correctly, half of it was belief, and I felt halfway to believing, even though each passing moment let a little bit more doubt settle in.
Then it happened. The clay wasn’t just something I was staring at. It was something I felt pressing against me, resisting me. I pushed it back and felt the space beneath it give way. Wobbling like an unstable toddler, the block of clay and brick took a step back. It teetered on the brink of falling over but I was too far away to make a grab for it. I lashed out with my mind as my body tensed to reach forward anyway, my thoughts wrapping around it, steadying it. The figure righted itself, and Rory laughed in surprise at my side.
“Are you doing that?” she asked. “For real?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t dare for fear of losing control. Instead, I forced the clay-and-brick figure to nod.
Rory ran over to it, leaning close to it, but not too close, I noticed. “Holy crap,” she said, marveling at it. She bounced in place, clapping her hands together. “What else can you do?”
I paused before answering, still fearful of speaking. “I’m not sure,” I said. The creature stayed in its place, a little uncertain on its legs still, but in no danger of falling over. “Let’s see what I can do.”
I danced the figure around in an awkward circle, my teeny Frankenstein obeying my will.
“How are you doing that?” she asked.
I laughed despite the building headache that continued to grow, piercing behind my eyes. “I’m not entirely sure,” I said. “It’s all very new to me.”
Rory gave me a sidelong glance, full of doubt. “You sure that’s wise? Isn’t your next move to make the big fella a companion…? Didn’t you say you were going to? No offense, but I don’t think this little thing here is going to provide much in the way of protection.”
Part of me held my tongue because a surprising and sudden jealous twinge rose up in me—I didn’t really want to make Stanis a companion, did I? Maybe I was being selfish, but I didn’t love the idea of sharing my protector with anyone, let alone someone made for him, but I wasn’t about to tell Rory, who would no doubt immediately start teasing me about sexual incompatibilities with creatures that could only chafe you. “Baby steps,” I said, avoiding the question.
“If some crazies dropped a building on my brother and tried to kill me…” she said. “Don’t you think two gargoyles—grotesques; sorry—would be better protection than one? Stanis could have a pal, and we need strength in numbers, especially since there’s a stream of tattooed psychos looking for you, whatever their reasoning is.”
“Baby steps,” I repeated, sticking to my misdirection, despite the fact she had a point. “Have to learn how the little things work before going full scale.” I wasn’t sure I was prepared to argue about my newfound jealousy of this potential stone companion for Stanis, and fell silent as I concentrated on my little living brick-and-clay man.
Rory’s face fell a little, but she stopped talking for a while as she watched my creation until she spoke with concern in her voice. “It’s living, yes?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m controlling it.”
“Maybe you should stop,” she offered.
“Stop? Why?”
“Until you have a better idea what exactly is going on there…”
“I know it’s not a gargoyle,” I said, becoming defensive now, “but it’s a start! Frankly, I’m a little hurt that you’re not more enthusiastic.”
“I’ll grant you that it’s fantastic,” she said, “but I’d rather know exactly what’s bringing it to life.”
“I am,” I said, unable to hide the harsh tone in my voice.
She walked over to me and got right in my face, meeting me with as much attitude as I was giving. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Because I’m not.”
“Why not?” My clay figure continued walking in little circles on top of my art station as I pulled my focus more to dealing with Rory.
“Why not?” Rory repeated. “Because Alexander warned you in his books of trickster or malevolent spirits! Consider that grotesque that watches over your family. That creature isn’t just reacting to your control, your pushing and prodding of it. It acts on its own. There’s life to it. Giving something life doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. Until you figure that out, you need to stop this. Now.” She grabbed both my arms hard, as if she were trying to restrain me, which set me off.
She wasn’t wrong. There was certainly more to Stanis than stone. But I was frustrated with what felt like an interrogation. I shrugged her off and stepped back, raising my voice.
“Did you just see what I did here, Ror?” I shouted. “Did you?”
She nodded but didn’t move, only meeting me with silence.
“Jesus, can’t you just be excited for me?” I said. “I find one thing that breaks me out of the monotony of learning the real estate market in New York City, and you can’t just join in the fun for a single moment—”
“Lex,” Rory said, looking over her shoulder. Her voice was stern, but I was having none of it or her attitude.
“Let me finish!” I shouted.
Rory waved me over without turning to even look at me. “Can’t,” she said. “Too important.”
“Tough,” I said. “What I have to say is important to me.”
She grabbed my arm and pulled me to her. “You need to calm down,” she said.
“Why?”
She pointed at my art station. “That’s why.”
My tiny figure shook on the table, looking like a junkie going through withdrawal, the bulk of its body falling over as the brick dragged around the tabletop, and it wasn’t alone.
Every other piece of stone or clay on the table was also in motion. Bricks, lumps of clay still in the package, and even fragments of discarded stone twitched and slid around the surface, many of them threatening to tear apart the pages of my great-great-grandfather’s secret book.
The pulse of the chaos beat in time to the anger I was feeling from my argument. I tried to calm myself, but everything continued to stay in motion, a jagged chunk of broken brick dragging across the book now. I ran over to it, laid my hand on the book, and breathed out the words of power to transmute it back into its stone form. The page under my hand went cold, turning thick and heavy in seconds. I grabbed the piece of animated brick off the page and stepped back.
Calm, I thought, fighting to follow that in my mind.
Everything on the desk slowed until they came to a stop, several of the pieces toppling over.
I let out a sigh. “Jesus, that was—”
; Rory pointed behind me toward the floor. “Not over,” she said.
I spun around. My little brick-and-clay monster fiend was tottering off across the floor at a remarkable pace, my feelings on it a mix of horror and pride. “Shit,” I hissed out. “Stupid teeny rampage.” I wasn’t sure how much damage the little guy could do, but I didn’t want to wait to find out, especially with so many of Alexander’s precious books and works of art all around the space.
“Do something!” Rory shouted. “Stop it, Puppet Master!”
I reached out for it with my mind to disarm the little bastard, but it continued on, knocking one of my boots across the room and through a pane of glass on the French doors leading out to the terrace.
“I can’t control it,” I said, unable to exert my will over it, the connection lost. I reached for my large stone book on the table, picked it up, and ran after my creation.
I dropped the book on top of the figure, its legs flying off the body, shattering as they went lifeless. Signs of struggle from beneath the stone book continued until it slowed, then stopped altogether.
“You want to take back what you said earlier?” Rory asked after a moment of silence. “About you being in control of it?”
“Okay, fine,” I said, vexed that she had been wary and, worst of all, right. “I was controlling it at first, but I don’t know…I’ll concede, as you so astutely pointed out, that there might be some merit in my great-great-grandfather’s warnings about trickster spirits and the like, that spirits seek out a vessel to occupy. I guess any vessel will do. In some small way, that’s a positive, right?”
Rory went over to the stone book on the floor and hefted it up with her well-muscled but still petite arms. “That I might believe was some form of malevolent spirit, yes. But Stanis? He’s something completely different, far more complex, Lexi. I want you to learn how to build more of them for your family’s protection, but until you figure that part out, I wouldn’t play around too much with this part of the process.”
She handed me the book, and I laid it on one of the empty worktables nearby. “I need to get out of here,” I said, “before I destroy the place.”
Rory went to the folder off to the side of the worktable and picked up the bill of lading from the shipyard. “Brooklyn, then?”
I nodded, grabbing up my shoulder bag and single boot before stepping carefully past the broken glass and out onto the terrace to fetch my other boot. “Let me change first,” I said, heading for the stairs at the back of the space that led down to my living area. “Hitting Brooklyn in overalls might make me blend in a little too much.”
Twenty
Alexandra
The strangest thing about Brooklyn was figuring out where the hip, habitable areas ended and the closed, run-down areas began. Only when the crowds on the street thinned out did I find us heading in what looked to be the right direction. Some of the waterfront had been taken over by developers, all of the buildings fresh and new, but the address on the bill of lading took us well away from those to a land of shipping cargo containers stacked several stories high on top of one another, large freighters docked all along the water. We watched from a distance for about half an hour. The cargo area was patrolled by the occasional slow roll of a security van with Port Authority markings, but the ships themselves were comparatively unattended. A dockworker running a forklift pointed us down the long strip of pavement along the waterfront, and we set off counting down the slip numbers until we found the one on the paperwork.
“These people have been docked here for more than four months,” I said as we walked. “I want to know why, or at the very least if any one of them met with my brother that night.”
“What if they were the ones who dropped a building on him?”
“I guess we’ll see what I can drop on them, then.”
Rory and I stopped, looking up at the ship docked there. It was like the other freighters, more rust than paint on it, and it was massive, rising several stories higher than the tallest stack of cargo crates onshore.
“Well, now what?” she asked, shoving her hands deep into the pockets of her coat.
The gangplank leading from the ship met with a closed-in tower on the land, a door at street level leading into what I presumed were stairs within.
“We go up,” I said, and headed for the tower.
Rory grabbed my arm. “We do?”
“It’s broad daylight and there are security vans patrolling nearby,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen. We go up on deck, check it out, and if things look too sketchy, we bolt for safety.”
“All right,” she said, letting go of my arm but still sounding unsure. “But I think we’ve already hit sketchy just by being down at the waterfront.”
We headed into the tower, metal stairs taking us up to the gangplank. We snuck off across it to the ship, my hands gripping onto both railings as we went, when a man appeared on the deck of the ship in a brisk walk toward the dock.
“Hey, Blue Hair!” he shouted in a gruff voice.
I touched the talisman around my neck, feeling only a remaining hint of its charge left. He apparently had noticed only Rory, but now that he was staring straight at my blue-haired friend, his eyes also turned to me. “You two…Did a couple of the crew order up some…entertainment?”
“Yes,” I said without thinking, running with the impromptu bluff. A wicked smile crossed his face and I dropped my hand away from my necklace. Unfortunately his eyes went straight to my talisman with recognition, and his face went from wicked and amused to dead cold.
“Holy shit,” he said, and, reaching into his coat pocket, pulled out a now-familiar sight to me, although I wished it wasn’t—a white-handled knife, held in his tattooed hand.
“Does this count as sketchy?” Rory asked.
“Totally,” I said. “Full retreat.”
I spun around with Rory, headed back toward the tower, but before we got more than ten feet a man with a short brown crew cut and hard features came into view, blocking our way, a knife in hand also.
“Shit,” I said. The two of us started back out the center of the gangplank, men now closing in from both ends. I struggled to get my backpack off while holding on to the railing, and pulled Alexander’s tome free from it.
“Please tell me you have something,” Rory said.
“Not really sure what I can do on a metal walkway fifty feet off the ground,” I said, flipping through the pages, “but I’m looking.” Between the heights, the pressure, not having near enough time studying the book, and the men closing in, it didn’t look promising. “Don’t think I’ve got anything.”
The men were maybe ten feet away on either side of us, knives in hand. Rory turned to me, taking off her horn-rimmed glasses. “Hold these,” she said.
“What are you doing?” I asked, but it was too late to answer. Rory had already turned to face the man coming for me, running at him. At the last second she planted her hands on the railing, stepped up onto it, and, with an open-legged lunge, went over him. She landed with that dancer’s grace of hers, and brought her right leg around like a ballerina going into a turn, catching him behind the knee. He dropped, falling forward, and she planted the heel of her boot in the center of his back, driving him under the rail and off the gangplank, down into the water gap between the ship and shore.
Her eyes were wide, her face flush with anger. I had never seen her this way before. She tore past me toward the man still blocking our escape. As she ran, she planted her hands again on the railing, and, anticipating her, the man raised his knife high, unwilling to fall for the same thing his fellow toady had fallen for. I didn’t bother to tell him that the last thing you should do is try to anticipate Aurora Torres.
She wrapped her hands tight to the railing, and threw herself into a spin around the railing itself, coming in under it just as fast. The momentum slid her like a shot across the gangplank, again, perfect grace and form as she compacted herself down, shooting between his legs. Rory came up h
ard into his crotch with both hands, using her accumulated speed to drive her bunched fists into him. He fell to the gangplank, the knife falling over the edge of it, and his hands flew to grab himself.
Rory rolled into a standing position, then came at the prone man, pummeling him with a barrage of kicks, her powerful legs lifting him each time she connected. The first few he reacted to in pain beyond that of her initial blow, but after the blood started flowing, he didn’t seem capable of reacting anymore and his eyes rolled back into his head.
“Whoa, whoa,” I said, pulling her back from the figure on the gangplank. “He’s down, he’s down.”
Rory’s eyes were wide, her breath coming in heavy rasps. Her muscles were tensed in my grip on her, reminding me of a feral cat I had once tried to rescue in an abandoned lot down in Alphabet City. I only hoped that Rory wasn’t about to leave me with a set of scars the same way the cat had.
The man at our feet still breathed, but I didn’t think he’d be getting up anytime too soon. Rory lashed her foot out in his direction to strike again, but I tugged her back from him even farther.
“Where the hell did you learn that?” I asked. Her wild eyes relaxed a little, but she stared through me. I shook her hard, her body loose in my hands like a rag doll.
“I don’t know,” she said, her words dull on her lips. “Years of dance training?”
“That’s wasn’t dance,” I said. “Dance isn’t brutal like that.”
Her eyes finally shifted to me, a hint of panic in them. “It’s pretty brutal, actually. You train your body hours on end and then something like this happens…I couldn’t help myself.” She looked down at her bloody boots, then over at him. “Crap…I didn’t kill him, did I?”
I let go of her and stepped toward the body, but not too close. If horror movies had taught me anything, it was to never get close to the lifeless body. I wasn’t going anywhere near enough for him to leap up and grab at me.