The New York Magician

by Zimmerman, Jacob

  Hatred. He nodded, fists clenching. I waggled the gun again. "Good. Here's how it's going to be. I'm walking back out of here with my tools." I patted the bandolier. "You're not going to follow me. Neither are your little friends. If I see any of you, I'm going to do what I just did to you, again. With a twist." I pulled a pouch out of my coat pocket, and before Shu could move I threw a handful of dust over him. "That's metal. Really fine powder. For as long as you stay semisolid, it's going to stay embedded in whatever you're using for substance. Only by completely dispersing will you be rid of it."

  "Do you think powder will discommode me?"

  "Yeah, I do. See, because while you have that stuff in you, and I'm using magnetic bullets-" I fired again. This time, the bullet tore through Shu's forearm and took a huge chunk of substance with it, slamming it into the wall behind him to disperse into gas. Shu screamed, an inarticulate sound, and clenched his other hand to the hole in his arm.

  I reloaded while he was occupied. "Hurts, doesn't it? Let me tell you what else, fucker. I had a little talk with some people. Remember my GRANDMOTHER?" I was screaming by the end, the gun in his face. Shu had gone still. He nodded, once, carefully. I drew back. "Good. Then perhaps you'll remember her when she was younger?" He nodded again, still not moving much. "Then remember this, Shu." I walked backwards towards the door. When I reached it, I opened it behind me without looking, and holstered the gun. He stood in the workshop, watching. There was a slight disturbance around him which I gathered to be the sylphs attempting to congeal.

  "How long do you think it'd take you to reconstitute if your current self was anchored to individual particles buried in the walls?"

  He glared at me. That was the answer I needed. "Well, good."

  I flipped the second stun grenade at him and slipped out, closing the door behind me and leaning against the wall. Something hit the door once, a half-hearted impact, and then there was another incredibly loud noise. I sagged, mouth open to reduce the shock, and then walked through the sudden howl of fire alarms to the stairs.

  When I left the building and headed uptown towards home, I passed ten or twenty firefighters rushing in past me. They didn't give me a second look. I pictured them flooding the workshop with water and grinned at the thought of Shu washing down that drain in a myriad tiny particles, god of the Air sluiced into the realm of water.

  On the way, I stopped three times in front of three different statues. Their outlines were wavering slightly, sylphs holding form around them. In front of each, I pulled the Desert Eagle and leveled it until the wavering subsided. I grinned again, once, at each.

  Then I went home.

  Part 3

  On Earth and Fire

  I

  There was a man who lived a life of fire

  * * *

  At 8th Avenue and Horatio there is a jagged weal in the grid system of Manhattan. The angled streets of the West Village meet wandering Greenwich Avenue and the bottom end of orderly Chelsea directly above. Tucked away on 8th and bounded by Horatio Street, 13th Street and West 4th St (I said it was jagged, it also defies logic) is that rarity of sightings: a Manhattan gas station. Taxicabs are frequent custom here; a line of yellow cabs is usually to be found idling at the curb awaiting their turn to sup.

  The taxicabs had all gone, flushed away as the skittish plovers they were, for their small urban feeder was an inferno.

  I stood across 8th Avenue inside the small triangular park that lay almost directly opposite. 8th was blocked by haphazardly parked fire engines, marshal's vehicles, police cruisers and the lethal humping snakes of live fire hoses feeding from the hydrants that pulse invisibly on New York's streets. A tanker truck had gone up while delivering fuel to the small independent station, and due to the station being surrounded on three sides by residential buildings the fire department was making a concerted effort to contain the blaze within the station itself. The only reason they looked like having a chance in hell was that the tanker had been parked as far from the back of the station as possible, essentially on the sidewalk, and the fire was (so far) limited to the underground tanks beneath it, the pumps themselves and the tanker's corpse, which hadn't moved.

  Apparently the tanker had been full. This was bad as far as extinguishing the blaze went, but good in that there hadn't been a vapor-backed explosion; rather, it appeared that the transfer hose had somehow ignited, caused a slow and steady ignition rather than a detonation. This, too, meant the flames were for the moment contained within a thick barrier of foam the pompiers had placed around the site, maintaining it with grim determination. Burning fuel slid under the foam walls and promptly extinguished, and a second team was playing sprayers over the rivers of gasoline that emerged from beneath the gigantic bubble-bath in order to keep the air above it cool and keep it from igniting. There were two trucks of HAZMAT crews trying with some success to keep the fossil fuels from running into the storm sewers, liberally dispensing bentonite to absorb and block the flows. The entire area reeked of smoke and fuel. Since this was New York, the watching crowd had swelled to somewhat ludicrous levels, and pulled in all the street vendors from perhaps thirty blocks around. New Yorkers love a show. Occasional bursts of activity by the emergency services crews would prompt spatters of cheers, only a few of them sarcastic.

  I had been on my way home from the A/C/E stop at 14th and 8th, happening by only a few minutes after the initial blast. I hadn't seen that, but upon exiting the subway I'd seen (and heard) the conflagration and had, like my fellow city dwellers, hastened to get a good spot. I'd had two hot dogs (one good, one foul) a falafel (quite good) and two pieces of fruit from the enterprising types with carts. I'd spent a few minutes scanning the scene and the crowd looking for any indication that there was Elder presence or involvement in the fire, and seen none; there were a couple of sylphs watching from a hundred feet back or so, but I'd seen them arrive after the fact. They'd nodded to me warily and I'd nodded back, our personal differences suspended in New York truce. They had been quietly watching the sights wrapped into and around a pair of trees at the back of the park. The slightly wavy outlines of the trunks where they were interposed, some fifteen feet up, was almost indistinguishable even to my sight, so I had no fear they would be seen by anyone.

  As I turned to head downtown towards home (resigning myself to a detour away from Eighth due to safety barriers) my eyes came to rest on man crouched atop a newspaper vending box. It was his posture that arrested me, I'm fairly sure; he was poised, his feet together underneath him with his bent legs splayed out, hands resting not on his knees but on the newspaper box's surface. With his slight forward lean and intent stare, he looked almost like a sprinter in the blocks. I frowned and angled to walk past him. Other than his stance, he seemed perfectly normal, and mere pyromania - no matter how severe - couldn't serve to mark him as odd in this crowd.

  After I passed the newspaper box, though, I turned to look at him again. With the fire behind him, silhouetting him, the story was entirely different, causing me to stop and move instinctively to the building wall for a better look. He was still in the same pose, but around his body was a wavering brightness. On examination, it looked as though the light from the fire was being lensed around his body, compressed into bands of high intensity near his outline. A man-shaped bonfire, optical illusion, roared up from the vending machine into the New York skyline, merging with the light reflected from the surrounding buildings.

  As I stood there in surprise, his head swiveled to look towards me. Our eyes met for just a moment, and then his face showed shock at the realization that I was looking at him, not the fire. His brows furrowed together for a second. At that moment, I pushed away from the wall and began to lumber through the flood of pedestrians towards him.

  He leapt from the box with a convulsive straightening of his legs, landed on a small patch of clear ground without knocking anyone over, and then melted into the crowd. I was too far away and not tall enough to see him go. By the time I reached the newspaper
box, he was long gone; even after I clambered up onto the space he had just vacated I couldn't see him or any out-of-place movement in the crowd. He had apparently had the sense to move away just far enough and then move with the flow.

  Damn it.

  I climbed thoughtfully down off the box and went home.

  * * *

  I didn't think much of it for a couple of weeks. While sitting at my desk at work one day, however, I was caught by an image from the New York One video news feed which I kept running, along with several similar streams, on a flat panel monitor on my office credenza. Looking up from my newspaper, I saw a flash of fire, and reached for the remote. A click brought the NY1 feed up to cover the entire screen, and I watched a large powerboat (or small yacht, depending on your point of view) burn merrily. It seemed to be docked somewhere on the East River, perhaps near the Seaport, but it was hard to tell from the angles. The fiberglass hull coat and superstructure was deforming under the heat as the frozen therms of plastic and diesel liberated themselves in a sooty orange celebration. A fireboat and two fire engines were in attendance; the text scroll on the screen was explaining that the boat had been rammed by a runaway tugboat which had caused a rupture of the fuel tanks. The tugboat was visible in the background, having been unceremoniously hauled away from its victim. No casualties had been suffered; the powerboat had been parked and empty at the time of the collision. I was about to switch the feed down again when I saw a shape that looked out of place.

  A man was crouched atop a large piling at the next pier down, his ungainly figure projecting above the small crowd that had gathered to watch the fun. I snatched the remote back up and tried frantically to get the idiot computer running the feeds to zoom in on him, but the camera cut away again. By the time the same angle popped back up on the screen, the piling was empty.

  I rubbed my chin thoughtfully and caught myself idly readjusting the weight of the Desert Eagle underneath my oversized sports coat.

  * * *

  I was drinking with Kevin a few days later when I remembered the two sightings. We were in Molly's, a shebeen on the lower east side near the Police Academy with an actual working fireplace and sawdust on the floor. Popular with the cadets, it was usually a good place to drink undisturbed. Staring into the flickering fireplace, I was struck by a sudden memory and turned to my companion.

  "Kevin, do you know of anybody in Manhattan like you, but associated with a fire Elder?"

  "What, like Belenus or Xolotl?"

  "Or Vulcan, or Hephaestus, or anybody like that."

  Kevin took a draught of Guinness, one worthy of his size and accent, thinking. I waited. He lowered the glass to the bar and shook his head. "Nope."

  "Are you sure?" I asked, disappointed.

  "Yeh. Me boss keeps tabs on those types. His counterparts, y'know."

  "Yeah, I can see that."

  "Sure. Anyway, he tells me when they're up to summat, and when they are it's always either in person or via a temporary avatar. I've not heard of them using a human for any long term work. They're difficult for a human to work with, o'course."

  "Because…?"

  He grinned, reached forward and pinched out the candle. Waving his fingers, he showed the black soot mark on the thumb and forefinger to me. I understood. "Oh. They can't avoid heating their environments?"

  "Well, they can, but they can't exist in environments that aren't uncomfy warm for us. Me, I'm from th'auld sod, so bein' soaked through to the skin is no great handicap."

  I laughed and took a drink of my own. "Makes sense. As much as anything."

  "Why d'ye ask, boy?"

  So I told him about what I'd seen. He shook his head. "Are ye sure ye saw something? Two sightings, one barely credible, for a moment on a TV?"

  "Yeah, I'm sure, Kevin. It Looked right." I looked into my beer for a bit. "I can tell when I'm Seeing things. I was, those times. Nobody else noticed."

  "All right then. Was the man hisself visible only to you, or was it just the oddity that only you could see?"

  I thought about that, too. "I…don't know. I think he was visible; I mean, I think I saw people avoiding him." I frowned, trying to pull the memory up. "Yeah, they walked around him."

  "Hm. Sounds indeed like a mortal, of rare device."

  "Ah well. I'm not sure why I even care. Unless he's the one setting the fires."

  We drank for a moment, before Kevin asked of the air, "'Course, why is he runnin' away?"

  I didn't have an answer to that which I liked.

  * * *

  Nothing happened on the firewatcher front for a couple of months. I had a run-in with a paladin on upper Broadway which ended up with my having to purchase a bodega and the next door food stand due to demolishment, as well as invoke more favors than I would have liked to avoid official inquiry. The paladin lived, worse luck, but I vindictively hoped he'd be a bit more careful naming his Demons in future. I met three more Elders who were willing to talk about Gran'mere, and I managed to avoid talking to Cthulhu or Azif at all.

  Then, around the time the weather changed to chill, I was walking down West Houston Street when I turned my head and saw him. Just past Mercer Street, a bit west; he was sitting on the curb talking with two other men. Wiry but not small, he was wearing a leather jacket against the cold and was engaged in a loud and good-natured argument about baseball. His face, in profile, was unmistakable despite its relative plainness; I had seen it outlined in faeried fire and compressed combustion. I continued walking east until I'd passed him and his companions, wondering what to do, before shrugging to myself and turning back to approach them. They trailed off arguing, three fairly confident-looking New Yorkers, Italian extraction if I was guessing right, and turned to look at me. I was inhaling to introduce myself when he looked up at my face.

  Then he blanched, sprang to his feet, and took off north, cutting through traffic towards the Mercer block. I didn't want to wait around to find out how his friends were going to react, so I muttered "sorry," and belted off after him. There were shouts behind me, but no footfalls; I was gambling that his obvious flight would confuse them long enough to make them unwilling to get involved immediately.

  I was perhaps fifty feet behind him when he hit Mercer proper. He was maintaining his lead when we blazed past Bleecker, a block later. He jumped a fence on the west side of Mercer and cut across a maze of development grounds; I stopped at the fence, my trench coat hampering me and, frankly, his speed so far making it unlikely I would catch him. I felt like an idiot.

  Instead, I turned around. His friends were nowhere to be seen so I walked down Mercer to Grand then cut east to get an espresso. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting outside a tiny bakery, nibbling on a cannoli and sipping an espresso that had come out of a copper altar the size of my bathroom into an eggshell-thin Wedgwood cup. As I restored the calories wasted in pursuit, a black-on-black-on-black Cadillac STS wafted up to the curb in front of me. I raised my espresso cup to the darkened windows. One of the rear ones rolled down a few inches; so summoned, I picked up my espresso and strolled the five feet to the car, bending over to speak into the gap.

  "Michel."

  "Sir." There's no harm in being polite if you're not interested in starting trouble.

  "So good to see you out and about. Does your trip concern anything I might want to know about?"

  "No, sir. I'm just out for an espresso."

  "Ah. I understand you were taking your exercise up near Bleecker."

  Dammit. Never try to outbland an Italian south of Delancey. "I was, sir, but that to my knowledge doesn't concern any of you or yours. I would have spoken with you if I believed it did."

  "Yes. You were raised polite, boy."

  I nodded my head.

  "Do enjoy your drink, and be welcome." The window rolled up and the Cadillac breathed away from the curb. See, car types have it all wrong. They continually lambaste the Caddy for having soggy suspension and no ability to use the power it has; but that's not what it's for.
The reason The Man In The Long Black Car always rides in a Lincoln or a Caddy is because the enormous Detroit lumps in the front have enough torque to waft the car around Little Italy without coming up past idle - and as a result, you never notice that the damn car is right behind you until too late.

  It works, too. Until the signage on Mulberry Street is in Korean, there will always be at least a niche market for those cars.

  I sat back down and dug out a sterile lancet from an inner pocket, unwrapped it and drove it into my finger. Then I reached that finger into my bandolier and touched the spearhead.

  The resulting CRACK of power felt like it had lifted the crown of my skull off as always, especially after a native espresso. Once things had settled down there was an insistent tugging on my soul to the northwest. I paid my bill and walked in that direction.

  * * *

  The pulling on my mind led me over as far as 6th Avenue, then northward. I trudged onward until suddenly I was yanked left, towards the other side of the avenue. There was a low building there, with a garage door painted red.

  Oh, of course. Engine 24.

  I kicked myself, hard, for stupidity, then placed my palm over my chest and expressed a small fold of power from the pocket watch, covering myself from view with a slipcloth of imagination and distraction. I was about to walk over to the fire station and wait for someone to open a door when the big door opened, and Engine 24 spun out with the spinners lit and the horns going.