by Eric Flint
He dug in his pocket with his left hand, cradling the phone with the right. A moment's exploration produced a steel disk the size of a silver dollar. He spat on the underside, balanced it like a miniature tabletop between his thumb and first two fingers, and then turned his hand over. A half-inch was as close as he dared.
He dropped the metal. It struck the sidewalk and bonded to the concrete with a hiss, sealing the stain away.
"Venom," Matthew said. "I've marked it. You'll need to send a containment team. I have to go."
When he stood, he looked directly into the eyes of one of his giggly freshmen.
"Ms. Gomez," he said. "Fancy meeting you here. Sorry I can't stay to chat."
* * *
Gina was still stammering when she came back. "Did you see that? Did you see that?"
Katie hadn't. "Just the backs of a bunch of tall people's heads. What happened?"
"I was trying to stay away from him," Gina said. "And he just appeared right beside me. Poof. Poof!"
"Or you weren't looking where you were going," Katie said, but Melissa was frowning. "Well?"
"He did just pop up out of nowhere," Melissa said. "I was watching Gina, and he kind of . . . materialized beside her. Like he stood up all of a sudden."
"He's the devil." Gina shook her head, but she sounded half-convinced.
Katie patted her on the shoulder, woven cotton rasping between her fingertips and Gina's flesh. "He could have been tying his shoe."
"Right," Gina said, stepping out from under Katie's hand. She pointed back to the crowd. "Then where did he go?"
* * *
Even glamoured, he couldn't run from a murder scene. The magic relied on symbol and focus; if he broke that, he'd find himself stuck in a backlash that would make him the center of attention of every cop, Russian landlady, and wino for fifteen blocks. So instead he walked, fast, arms swinging freely, trying to look as if he was late getting back from a lunch date.
Following the smell of venom.
He found more droplets, widely spaced. In places, they had started to etch asphalt or concrete. Toxic waste indeed; it slowed him, because he had to pause to tag and seal each one.
How it could move unremarked through his city, he did not know. There were no crops here for its steps to blight nor wells for its breath to poison.
Which was not to say it did no harm.
These things— some fed on flesh and some on blood and bone. Some fed on death, or fear, or misery, or drunkenness, or loneliness, or love, or hope, or white perfect joy. Some constructed wretchedness, and some comforted the afflicted.
There was no telling until you got there.
Matthew slowed as his quarry led him north. There were still too many bystanders. Too many civilians. He didn't care to catch up with any monsters in broad daylight, halfway up Manhattan. But as the neighborhoods became more cluttered and the scent of uncollected garbage grew heavy on the humid air, he found more alleys, more byways, and fewer underground garages.
If he were a cockatrice, he thought he might very well lair in such a place. Somewhere among the rubbish and the poison and the broken glass. The cracked concrete, and the human waste.
He needed as much camouflage to walk here undisturbed as any monster might.
His hands prickled ceaselessly. He was closer. He slowed, reinforcing his wards with a sort of nervous tic: checking that his hair was smooth, his coat was buttoned, his shoes were tied. Somehow, it managed to move from its lair to the Upper East Side without leaving a trail of bodies in the street. Maybe it traveled blind. Or underground; he hadn't seen a drop of venom in a dozen blocks. Worse, it might be invisible.
Sometimes . . . often . . . otherwise things had slipped far enough sideways that they could not interact with the iron world except through the intermediary of a Mage or a medium. If this had happened to the monster he sought, then it could travel unseen. Then it could pass by with no more harm done than the pervasive influence of its presence.
But then, it wouldn't drip venom real enough to melt stone.
Relax, Matthew. You don't know it's a cockatrice. It's just a hypothesis, and appearances can be deceptive.
Assuming that he had guessed right could get him killed.
But a basilisk or a cockatrice was what made sense. Except, why would the victim have thrown herself from her window for a crowned serpent, a scaled crow? And why wasn't everybody who crossed the thing's path being killed. Or turned to stone, if it was that sort of cockatrice?
His eyes stung, a blinding burning as if he breathed chlorine fumes, etchant. The scent was as much otherwise as real; Matthew suffered it more than the civilians, who would sense only the miasma of the streets as they were poisoned. A lingering death.
He blinked, tears brimming, wetting his eyelashes and blurring the world through his spectacles. A Mage's traveling arsenal was both eclectic and specific, but Matthew had never before thought to include normal saline, and he hadn't passed a drugstore for blocks.
How the hell is it traveling?
At last, the smell was stronger, the cold prickle sharper, on his left. He entered the mouth of a rubbish-strewn alley, a kind of gated brick tunnel not tall or wide enough for a garbage truck. It was unlocked, the grille rusted open; the passage brought him to a filthy internal courtyard. Rows of garbage cans —of course, no Dumpsters— and two winos, one sleeping on cardboard, one lying on his back on grease-daubed foam reading a two-month-old copy of Maxim. The miasma of the cockatrice —if it was a cockatrice— was so strong here that Matthew gagged.
What he was going to do about it, of course, he didn't know.
His phone buzzed. He answered it, lowering his voice. "Jane?"
"The window was unlocked from the inside," she said. "No sign of forced entry. The resident was a 58-year-old unmarried woman, Janet Stafford. Here's the interesting part— "
"Yes?"
"She had just reentered secular life, if you can believe this. She spent the last thirty-four years as a nun."
Matthew glanced at his phone, absorbing that piece of information, and put it back to his ear. "Did she leave the church, or just the convent?"
"The church," Jane said. "Marion's checking into why. You don't need to call her; I'll liaise."
"That would save time," Matthew said. "Thank you." There was no point in both of them reporting to Jane and to each other if Jane considered the incident important enough to coordinate personally.
"Are you ready to tell me yet what you think it might be?"
Matthew stepped cautiously around the small courtyard, holding onto his don't-notice-me, his hand cupped around the mouthpiece. "I was thinking cockatrice," he said. "But you know, now maybe not certain. What drips venom, and can lure a retired nun to suicide?"
Jane's breath, hissing between her teeth, was clearly audible over the cellular crackle. "Harpy."
"Yeah," Matthew said. "But then why doesn't it fly?"
"What are you going to do?"
"Right now? Question a couple of local residents," he said, and moved toward the Maxim-reading squatter.
The man looked up as he approached; Matthew steeled himself to hide a flinch at his stench, the sore running pus down into his beard. A lot of these guys were mentally ill and unsupported by any system. A lot of them also had the knack for seeing things that had mostly dropped otherwise, as if in being overlooked themselves they gained insight into the half-lit world.
And it didn't matter how he looked; the homeless man's life was still a life, and his only. You can't save them all. But he had a father and mother and a history and a soul like yours.
His city, which he loved, dehumanized; Matthew considered it the responsibility that came with his gifts to humanize it right back. It was in some ways rather like being married to a terrible drunk. You did a lot of apologizing. "Hey," Matthew said. He didn't crouch down. He held out his hand; the homeless man eyed it suspiciously. "I'm Matthew. You have absolutely no reason to want to know me, but I'm looking f
or some information I can't get from just anybody. Can I buy you some food, or a drink?"
* * *
Later, over milkshakes, Melissa glanced at Katie through the humidity-frizzled curls that had escaped her braid and said, "I can't believe we lost him."
The straw scraped Katie's lip as she released it. "You mean he gave us the slip."
Melissa snorted. On her left, Gina picked fretfully at a plate of French fries, sprinkling pinched grains of salt down the length of one particular fry and then brushing them away with a fingertip. "He just popped up. Right by me. And then vanished. I never took my eyes off him."
"Some criminal mastermind you turned out to be," Katie said, but her heart wasn't in it. Gina flinched, so Katie swiped one of her fries by way of apology. A brief but giggly scuffle ensued before Katie maneuvered the somewhat mangled fry into her mouth. She was chewing salt and starch when Melissa said, "Don't you guys think this is all a little weird?"
Katie swallowed, leaving a slick of grease on her palate. "No," she said, and slurped chocolate shake to clear it off. Her hair moved on her neck, and she swallowed and imagined the touch of a hand. A prickle of sensation tingled through her, the same excitement she felt at their pursuit of Doctor S., which she had experienced only occasionally while kissing her boyfriend back home. She shifted in her chair. "I think it's plenty weird."
She wasn't going to ask the other girls. Melissa had a boyfriend at Harvard that she traded off weekends with. Gina was . . . Gina. She picked up whatever boy she wanted, kept him a while, put him down again. Katie would rather let them assume that she wasn't all that innocent.
Not that they'd hate her. But they'd laugh.
"What are we going to do about it?" she asked, when Melissa kept looking at her. "I mean, it's not like he did something illegal."
"You didn't see the body up close."
"I didn't. But he didn't kill her. We know where he was when she fell."
Gina's mouth compressed askew. But she nodded, then hid her face in her shake.
Melissa pushed at her frizzing hair again. "You know," she said, "he left in a hurry. It's like a swamp out there."
"So?"
"So. Do you suppose his office door sticks?"
"Oh, no. That is illegal. We could get expelled."
"We wouldn't take anything." Melissa turned her drink with the tips of her fingers, looking at them and the spiraling ring left behind on the tabletop, not at Katie's eyes. "Just see if he has a police scanner. And look for his address."
"I'm not doing that," Katie said.
"I just want to see if the door is unlocked."
Melissa looked at Gina. Gina shrugged. "Those locks come loose with a credit card, anyway."
"No. Not just no."
"Oh, you can watch the stairs," Gina said, sharp enough that Katie sat back in her chair. Katie swallowed, and nodded. Fine. She would watch the goddamned stairs.
"You want to finish?" she asked.
Gina pushed her mangled but uneaten fries away. "No, baby. I'm done."
* * *
The man's name was Henry; he ate an extraordinary amount of fried chicken from a red paper bucket while Matthew crouched on the stoop beside him, breathing shallowly. The acrid vapors of whatever Matthew hunted actually covered both the odor of unwashed man and of dripping grease, and though his eyes still watered, he thought his nose was shutting down in protest. Perversely, this made it easier to cope.
"No," Henry said. He had a tendency to slur his speech, to ramble and digress, but he was no ranting lunatic. Not, Matthew reminded himself, that it would matter if he was. "I mean, okay. I see things. More now than when I got my meds" —he shrugged, a bit of extra crispy coating clinging to his moustache— "I mean, I mean, not that I'm crazy, but you see things out of the corner of your eye, and when you turn? You see?"
He was staring at a spot slightly over Matthew's left shoulder when he said it, and Matthew wished very hard that he dared turn around and look. "All the damned time," he said.
The heat of the cement soaked through his jeans; the jacket was nearly unbearable. He shrugged out of it, laid it on the stoop, and rolled up his sleeves. "Man," Henry said, and sucked soft meat off bones. "Nice ink."
"Thanks," Matthew said, turning his arms over to inspect the insides.
"Hurt much? You don't look like the type."
"Hurt some," Matthew admitted. "What sort of things do you see? Out of the corners of your eyes?"
"Scuttling things. Flapping things." He shrugged. "When I can get a drink it helps."
"Rats? Pigeons?"
"Snakes," Henry said. He dropped poultry bones back into the bucket. "Roosters."
"Not crows? Vultures?"
"No," Henry said. "Roosters. Snakes, the color of the wall."
"Damn." Matthew picked up his coat. "Thanks, Henry. I guess it was a cockatrice after all."
* * *
What happened was, Katie couldn't wait on the stairs. Of course she'd known there wasn't a chance in hell that she could resist Melissa. But sometimes it was better to fool yourself a little, even if you knew that eventually you were going to crack.
Instead, she found herself standing beside Gina, blocking a sight line with her body, as Gina knocked ostentatiously on Doctor S.'s door. She slipped the latch with a credit card— a gesture so smooth that Katie could hardly tell she wasn't just trying the handle. She knocked again and then pulled the door open.
Katie kind of thought she was overplaying, and made a point of slipping through the barely-opened door in an attempt to hide from passers-by that the room was empty.
Melissa came in last, tugging the door shut behind herself. Katie heard the click of the lock.
Not, apparently, that that would stop anybody.
Katie put her back against the door beside the wall and crossed her arms over her chest to confine her shivering. Gina moved into the office as if entranced; she stood in the center of the small cluttered room and spun slowly on her heel, hands in her hip pockets, elbows awkwardly cocked. Melissa slipped past her—as much as a six foot redhead could slip—and bent over to examine the desk, touching nothing.
"There has to be a utility bill here or something, right? Everybody does that sort of thing at work. . . ."
Gina stopped revolving, striking the direction of the bookshelves like a compass needle striking north— a swing, a stick, a shiver. She craned her neck back and began inspecting titles.
It was Katie, after forcing herself forward to peer over Gina's shoulder, who noticed the row of plain black hardbound octavo volumes on one shelf, each with a ribbon bound into the spine and a date penned on it in silver metallic ink.
"Girls," she said, "do you suppose he puts his address in his journal?"
Gina turned to follow Katie's pointing finger and let loose a string of Spanish that Katie was pretty sure would have her toenails smoking if she understood a word. It was obviously self-directed, though, so after the obligatory flinch, she reached past Gina and pulled the most recently dated volume from the shelf.
"Can I use the desk?" The book cracked a little under the pressure of her fingers, and it felt lumpy, with wavy page-edges. If anything was pressed inside, she didn't want to scatter it.
Melissa stood back. Katie laid the book carefully on an uncluttered portion of the blotter and slipped the elastic that held it closed without moving the food or papers. The covers almost burst apart, as if eager to be read, foiling her intention to open it to the flyleaf and avoid prying. The handwriting was familiar: she saw it on the whiteboard twice a week. But that wasn't what made Katie catch her breath.
A pressed flower was taped to the left-hand page, facing a column of text. And in the sunlight that fell in bars through the dusty blind, it shimmered iridescent blue and violet over faded gray.
" Madre di Dio," Gina breathed. "What does it say?"
Katie nudged the book farther into the light. "14 October 1995," she read. "Last year, Gin."
"He probably h
as the new one with him. What does it say?"
"It says 'Passed as a ten?' and there's an address on Long Island. Flanagan's, Deer Park Avenue. Babylon. Some names. And then it says 'pursuant to the disappearance of Sean Roberts— flower and several oak leaves were collected from a short till at the under-21 club.' And then it says 'Faerie money?' Spelled F-a-e-r-i-e."
"He's crazy," Gina said definitively. "Schizo. Gone."
"Maybe he's writing a fantasy novel." Katie wasn't sure where her stubborn loyalty came from, but she was abruptly brimming with it. "We are reading his private stuff totally out of context. I don't think it's fair to judge by appearances."