Streets of Shadows

by Tom Piccirilli

  I tried the command again, and again, the damn gun just shook more.

  So, figuring the rule of three, I tried one final time. Join your handfast partner.

  The gun stopped trembling. And then it whirled as if pursued, and floated away from me. I sat for a moment, stupidly, then realized that the damn gun didn’t belong to me. It was a different weapon than the one locked in the lockbox I kept in the Tiffany’s box.

  I got up and stumbled after the gun. It floated down the hallway, then down the stairs, always staying at chest-height, just as if someone were holding it.

  It reached the lobby, bumped out the door (I have no idea how it got open), and into the sleet. I followed, coatless, instantly chilled, and nearly slammed into a couple wearing less clothes than I was, giggling their drunk way out of a nearby bar. They didn’t seem to see the gun, but I couldn’t take my gaze off it.

  Because it went into the alley, where Ry died. And then it started banging against the brick wall behind a Dumpster, as if it were trying to get into something.

  I wished for gloves. And boots. And a coat. I was sliding on ice, and still the alley had the stench of weeks-old garbage. It didn’t matter how cold or wet something got, the smells remained.

  I tried not to look at the back corner, where Ry bled out. It was covered in a snow pile six feet high anyway. The gun kept banging and scraping, and I finally decided to violate one of the major rules of automated magic.

  I got between the gun and the wall. The gun kept hitting the same brick, scraping it white. I grabbed the damn thing, surprised that my fingers fit where the mortar should have been.

  So I pulled.

  The brick slid out easily, and I slid backwards, nearly falling. I caught myself on the edge of the ice-cold Dumpster.

  The gun turned itself sideways, shoving its grip into the open hole. It had stopped trembling.

  It balanced on the edge of the brick below for just a moment, then toppled downward.

  I jumped back, afraid it would go off by accident.

  But it didn’t.

  It rested on top of the ice as if all the magic had leached out of it. Its color was different too. No longer silver, but a muddy brown instead. I tilted my head, blinked hard, my face wet with sleet.

  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, smearing the cold rather than getting rid of it.

  The gun still looked odd. I figured it actually looked odd—it wasn’t my magical sight that had changed; the gun was different.

  So I crouched. And looked closer.

  And gasped.

  Something had wrapped itself around the grip. Brown and mottled. It took a moment for my eyes to make sense of what I saw.

  The word Onward in Gothic script.

  Bile rose in my throat.

  I nudged the gun with my foot, then managed to flip the weapon over. The image on this side was a distorted yellow, desiccated and faded.

  I swallowed hard, my stomach churning.

  Then I stood and, with a single but deliberate thought, made a small flare out of my right fingertip. I used the flare to illuminate the hole in the bricks.

  I lost my not-fancy dinner. And breakfast. And every meal for the past week.

  Some investigator.

  I’d searched for those patches of skin from the very beginning—all six of Ry’s tattoos—knowing his magic lurked in them.

  Only, as I braced one hand on the wall, and used the other hand to wipe my mouth, I realized that there were a lot more than six scraps of skin in that wall.

  A lot more.

  I allowed myself to get sick one final time before hauling out my phone, and calling the only detective at the NYPD who would ever listen to me.

  Ryder’s older brother.

  Dane.

  * * *

  He showed up ten minutes later, wearing a dress coat over an ill-fitting suit, and a this-better-be-worthwhile attitude. He wore his hair regulation cut, and he didn’t have the muscles or the tattoos. Still, there was enough of a family resemblance to give me a start every time I saw him walk toward me. Same height, same build, same general energy.

  “Three-hundred dollars up front for dinner,” he said. “Includes five courses and champagne. We’d just finished appetizers.”

  “Special girl?” I asked.

  “I’m hoping,” he said. “We’ll see if she’s still there when I get back.”

  She might be waiting a long time, I thought but didn’t say. I just showed him the open hole in the brick.

  “What?” he asked impatiently.

  “Just look,” I said, my voice raspy, throat sore, my breath so foul I tried not to face him.

  He grabbed his phone and used it like a flashlight, then backed away when he realized what he was looking at.

  “What the hell?” he asked.

  He peered into that obscene storage space, then looked at me, his handsome face half in shadow.

  “How did you find this?” he asked, as if I had created the horror all I my own.

  I poked the toe of my battered Nike against the gun.

  He turned the phone’s light toward it, saw the desiccated but still visible smiley face, and swallowed hard, then shook his head.

  “You’re out here without a coat or hat or mittens, and you’re telling me you just stumbled on this gun?”

  He didn’t mention his brother’s skin, wrapped around it, or the fact that there was more shredded skin in that opening.

  “No, I’m not saying that.”

  Now that he mentioned how I was dressed, I remembered just how cold I was. My teeth started chattering. I shoved my hands in the pocket of my jeans, not that it did much good.

  “I asked you how you found this?” Dane snapped.

  “And I showed you,” I said.

  “It means nothing.” His voice went up, echoing between the buildings.

  “Only because there are some things you refuse to let me tell you,” I said, matching his tone.

  He stared at me, breathing hard. I tried to stay calm, but it was difficult, considering how bad I was shivering.

  “Magic?” he asked with a sneer he once reserved for Ry, but had transferred to me since Ry’s death.

  I nodded.

  Dane rolled his eyes and shook his head. “You think this crap has been here all along?”

  I shrugged one shoulder.

  “You want to tell me, without talking about magic, how you came down here?”

  I sighed. I could have said no, I supposed, but I didn’t. “I followed the gun.”

  “And whoever was holding it,” he said.

  “I didn’t see who was holding it,” I said.

  “Convenient,” he said, “since it looks like Ry’s gun.”

  It is Ry’s gun, I wanted to say, but knew better. Because then Dane would ask me how I knew that, and I would point to the layer of skin wrapped around the grip.

  “Ry told me he had one,” I said. “I never saw it. How do you know it’s his?”

  Besides the skin, I mean, I added mentally.

  “Pretty unusual thing, huh?” Dane said. “Ry called it magic. Me, I think it’s some kind of toy, since it supposedly invents its own bullets.”

  I ignored that jibe. “He ever use it in front of you?”

  “No, he wanted to take me to the range to practice with it, but he….” Dane let out a sigh. “He died before we could go.”

  “Who ended up with the gun?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dane said. “I never saw it again.”

  “So you remember it after ten years?” Lying on the ice, with Ry’s skin wrapped around it, the gun didn’t look that distinctive, at least not to me.

  “I’d tell you I recognized it by that lovely silver barrel,” Dane said, “but I didn’t even notice that part at first.”

  I waited. I was going to make him say it, the bastard.

  “I don’t think we’re going to have to test the DNA on that skin,” Dane said quietly.

  I nodd
ed.

  “But we might have to on the rest of this stuff in here.” Dane peered at that hole. “Why would the gun turn up now?”

  It had been exactly ten years since I got my gun. But I had no idea if Dane knew I had one too, and I wasn’t about to tell him.

  “The anniversary’s coming up,” I said.

  “Yeah, like I can forget that,” Dane said dryly. He sighed again. “I’m going to call this in. You need to go inside before you freeze solid.”

  “What about the gun?” I asked. “Do you think it should go into evidence?”

  He looked at me. He knew what I was thinking. Hell, all of New York would have known what I was thinking. The city had seen a lot of news lately about weapons stolen out of the NYPD’s evidence storage.

  “You want to pick it up?” he asked.

  Of course I didn’t. Neither did he. But he had opened the door, and he was the magic-denier, not me. I reached around me, and with shaking fingers, sorted through the Dumpster until I found a box that wasn’t too junked up. It was a shoebox with some stains along the bottom, but it didn’t smell that bad, so I grabbed it.

  I was going to scoop up the gun with the box lid, but I stopped halfway. I didn’t want to mess up that grip. (That tattoo.) So I glanced at Dane. He was watching me closely.

  I slid the lid underneath the box, then held the box in my left hand. I turned my right palm upward. Then I concentrated on the gun and hooked it mentally to my right hand. Slowly I raised my hand, and the gun rose too.

  Once the gun was a foot off the ground, I crouched, slid the box underneath it, and turned my palm down. The gun bounced into the box, and I slapped the lid on it.

  Dane watched me, face gray in the half light. His gaze met mine, but he didn’t say anything. I knew, if asked, he would say only that I slid the box under the gun and scooped up the gun.

  I offered him the box.

  He shook his head. “You keep it.”

  “There could be evidence here,” I said, taunting him.

  He shook his head. “We’ll have more than enough. Now, go inside.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. I scurried to my building, feeling as if I would never get warm again.

  * * *

  So Ry had hand-fasted to the gun, just like I had.

  I carried it up the stairs to my office, noting that the box did have an odor, but I wasn’t sure if the odor came from the Dumpster or that tattooed slice of skin. I didn’t want to think about that either.

  Instead, I locked the entire box inside my office safe. Then I went to the ladies room down the hall ostensibly to run warm water on my hands but, in reality, to get whatever was on that box off my skin.

  I shivered and shivered, even after I warmed up. The shivering didn’t just come from the cold.

  After I’d cleaned up, I grabbed my heavy down coat, unattractive knit cap, and gloves. I slipped everything on, locked the office, and headed home.

  I needed to know if my own gun was still there.

  When I reached the street, the cold returned with a vengeance. It was as if I hadn’t gone inside to get warm at all.

  A crime scene unit had the alley blocked off. Dane appeared to have left, and some uniforms guarded it all. They stared at me as if I were the bad guy. I pivoted, went the other way, and headed to my place.

  At least the sleet had stopped, but the sidewalk was slippery. The restaurants along the way—this place was so gentrified now—were filled with well-dressed couples pretending to be happy. And maybe they were over their—what had Dane said? $300 meals? I preferred the take-out sushi eaten with custom-made chopsticks on a roof so cold it made this evening seem like the Bahamas in summer.

  I still missed Ry, the bastard. I liked to think I had moved on, but I hadn’t. Not inside. Not where it counted.

  I took an elevator to my apartment, and let myself in. The apartment was warm, homey, perfect, just like it had been since I bought it. I closed the door and locked it, then checked the wards just in case.

  They were fine.

  I peeled off my gloves and tossed them on an occasional table. Then I went into my bedroom and opened the closet.

  There, on the top shelf, was the Tiffany’s box. I pulled it down, and gingerly untied the ribbon. I tugged the lid off and looked inside. The lockbox was still there. I opened it too, and stared at the gun, gleaming in the light.

  It looked no different than it had ever other time I had looked at it. It was a shame I had never used it, a shame that it hid here in the dark, as if it were at fault for Ry’s death.

  I ran my fingers across its cool surface. It glowed faintly, in recognition. I wished I knew how to use it. I wished Ry had told me where he had gotten it, why he had chosen a Tiffany’s box to keep it in, what it all meant.

  I closed the lockbox, then closed the Tiffany’s box, and retied the ribbon, like I’d done dozens of times over the years. I put the gun on the top shelf of my closet, then closed that door. If only it were that easy to put the gun out of my mind.

  Something had caused the second gun to come to me. Something had powered it. Something—or someone.

  I wouldn’t know what until I knew more about the guns themselves.

  I grabbed my cell to call Dane. Then decided I wasn’t going to speak to him on the phone.

  I would go to him, wherever that was.

  I took my gloves off the occasional table and let myself out of the apartment, using the edges of my magic to track Dane.

  It wasn’t hard.

  He was at the precinct, at his desk—which, I was certain—was not where he wanted to be.

  * * *

  The limestone façade of the three-story precinct building looked dirty against the sleet-shiny snow. Ry used to call it the Home of the Enemy, but he didn’t really mean it. He was always mad at Dane for refusing to acknowledge the magic or the work Ry and I were doing.

  The rivalry between them didn’t mask the love they had for each other, though, and I knew Dane had been as torn up over Ry’s death as I was.

  I let myself inside, the smell of fear and sweat enveloping me. I took the steps up to the detective unit, and slipped inside.

  Nighttime made little difference. There were always detectives pouring over files, tapping on ancient computers, or talking tiredly into the phones.

  Dane was sitting at his desk toward the back, hands pressed against his cheeks, staring down at some paperwork in front of him. His suit coat was hanging over the back of his chair, and his long dress coat was hanging on peg on the wall.

  I walked over to him and hovered, waiting for him to acknowledge me.

  “At least fifteen different skin types,” he said. “And they’re just estimating. Who does that?”

  He sounded tired. I guess the possibly-special woman hadn’t waited for him after all.

  “Not who,” I said. “What does that?”

  “Yeah, some kinda animal,” he said more to himself than to me. Because we both knew that he was deliberately misunderstanding me.

  It was a good question, though. Demons shredded skin, but they used the unbelievable pain from the process to increase their own power. There were lots of creatures from all sides of the magical divide that consumed skin, mostly as food, and a handful that took the magic from tattoos.

  But nothing native to New York. Because all of the native creatures destroyed the skin when they did what they did.

  I knew of nothing that took tattoos like trophies.

  “Was everything—” I couldn’t bring myself to say skin fragments. “—tattooed?”

  “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Mean something to you?”

  I shook my head, but he wasn’t looking up. Maybe he took my silence as an acknowledgement.

  “Do you know where Ry got the gun?” I asked.

  Dane finally raised his head. He seemed to have aged years in the past few hours. He seemed surprised by the question.

  “There were two,” he said. “They belonged to my paren
ts. I figured he had given one to you.”

  My cheeks heated. I had never told Dane about the gun. I hadn’t told anyone.

  Dane was frowning. “He was going to—you know—ask you to marry him. He was all goofy about it. He even found a Tiffany’s box, because engagement rings come in Tiffany boxes. He thought you’d get it.”

  I thought we didn’t believe in marriage. I thought marriage was so…middle class, so ostentatious.

  I had missed the point.

  Why me? I had asked Ry.

  Because I love you, he had said, so sure, so certain.

  And then, at my confusion, he had shrugged, said he was cold, and we’d better hurry. Still, we hand-fasted me to the gun. My gun. And his matched.

  Like wedding rings.

  Son of a bitch.

  “Did your parents have wedding rings?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Dane said, “but my folks were pretty traditional. They wanted the guns to go to me and Ry, like we were supposed to split up the rings.”

  Dane leaned back, closed his eyes for a minute, then shook his head, then added, “I was the only sane one. The only one who didn’t see little sparklies in the universe or dark things crawling out of corners. My folks were so disappointed…”

  Then he rocked forward and opened his eyes.

  “I thought you knew,” he said again, but I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the guns or his parents or all of it.

  I shrugged, pretending at a nonchalance I didn’t feel. “What were the guns for?”

  “Monster hunting,” he said sarcastically.

  I nodded, not going there.

  “Thanks,” I said, and threaded my way through the desks.

  “Hey,” he said. “You need help?”

  Not your kind of help, I nearly said. Instead, I shook my head. “You guys are doing it all.”

  And as I walked out, I realized that was true. After I had come to my senses, I left the investigation in the hands of the police.

  Even when I had known that whatever killed Ry hadn’t been human—at least, by my definition. Maybe by Dane’s.

  But not by mine.

  * * *