Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories

by Joseph Nassise

  I lean forward and concentrate, but there is nothing. Not a rune, not a mark, no sign at all of any sort of spell—which is impossible, because my own spell has just revealed the skinny building to be a fake.

  “All right.” I wave Mags down, and with a grunt he flexes his hand and the witchlight vanishes with a splutter. “Let’s go in.”

  I meet Peter Manelli in his butcher shop off Bleecker Street, a few blocks from where Bill was found hung out to dry. He’s a sallow, snaggletoothed man with a limp and a comb-over that makes him look harmless, dismissible. The easiest of easy marks. A guy muggers and pickpockets can take in a dark alley on a moonless night.

  Poor bastards.

  Manelli’s a ghoul. Not quite human, not quite not. He likes the taste of his fellow man. Craves it, needs it. Without it he’ll wither and die.

  If you really look at him you can tell that his weird, lumpy body is from muscles attached in strange places, bulging with superhuman strength. I’ve seen ghouls deadlift cars. And throw them.

  Some ghouls are hunters. I don’t get that vibe off this one. He’s nervous, twitchy, doesn’t know what to make of me. He avoids eye contact. Either he’s a good enough actor to fool all the other supernaturals in his neighborhood, or he’s legit.

  He’s not going to scavenge so close to where he lives and works. Which makes his butcher shop the perfect place. He has a refrigerated truck. He can head over to Brooklyn or Jersey or some backwater where he’s not going to step on some other ghoul’s toes, grab a body to eat and toss him in the back. I don’t know how ghouls find them. They just seem to have a knack for it.

  “You’re Carter? The necro?” His voice sounds like he’s gargling marbles. He has an esophagus that stretches like a balloon to accommodate bigger pieces of food, and teeth inside that to make sure the stuff going in keeps going in. If you’re devouring your meat live I figure that must be an asset.

  “Mister Manelli,” I say, not shaking his hand. It’s not rudeness, it’s practicality. On top of everything else, a ghoul’s palms are like sharkskin. “Good to meet you.”

  Really, nothing about ghouls is appealing.

  “Yeah, sure. Miranda said you were coming by. You want to see Bill? I got him in the freezer.”

  I look behind him at the freezer door behind the counter. He catches my look.

  “Oh god no. Not that freezer. The normals would shit kittens if I did that. I got him in the basement. Made special. Secret doors and everything. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Normally I make a point of not going into the basement with strange ghouls, but I’m on the clock and if things go south I can take him. Maybe.

  I follow him downstairs, where he slides aside a pile of dusty junk that’s all bolted together to look exactly like a pile of dusty junk. Then he hits a series of hidden catches on the wall. It pops open and swings aside to show an industrial freezer lit with bright fluorescents. Bodies hang from meat hooks.

  “Nice setup.” I try not to judge, but half a dozen naked corpses hanging in a basement freezer like something Ed Gein would cook up is a little much.

  “Thanks. Anyway, there he is. In the back. You need anything? I have to get back to cutting up pork chops.”

  “Nah, I’m good. Just leave the door open if you could. I’d hate to have to blast it off the hinges if I got stuck in here.”

  He frowns at me, not sure if I’m joking or not. Decides I’m not. “Yeah, sure. Just don’t take too long. This meat gets too warm it’s gonna be a problem.” He backs out of the freezer and leaves me alone with his meat.

  “All right, Hobo Bill, let’s see what you got here.” He’s been stripped naked and hung with the hook through the back of his neck, making it easier to see the marks.

  Hobo Bill is fat, balding, and gray. His blood poured out of him from cuts in his neck and wrists. He’s heavily marked up with these runes. Some of them are drawn on, some of them carved on.

  Up close and personal I still don’t know what the hell they are, but I think they’re real. People who don’t do magic use the same recognizable bullshit as everybody else. Barrett’s Magus, Crowley’s Magick, Agrippa’s Books of Occult Philosophy. This is none of them. It doesn’t even look like any of them.

  And the thing is, some of them are legit. Or near to legit. I may not be able to recognize the runes, but I can tell big magic when I see it. Even if I can’t get a whiff of any magic coming off the body.

  That’s weird, too. I should be able to feel something residual if his death was used to fuel a spell. Something I can taste, feel. But there’s nothing.

  Whatever this was for, it’s about the blood. The runes are too precise, too orderly. They’re over his chakras, carved in the skin at the bleed points.

  I’ll sometimes bleed for a spell, but that’s to feed ghosts, use it as bait. Sometimes it’s a trigger for anything I’m doing death related. Don’t ask me why, it just works that way.

  Knacks are like that. I know a sex mage in SoHo who does her best work getting raw dogged in a fetish bar. Scryers who can’t divine a goddamn thing without getting high as balls first. Amazing the number of mages who are heroin addicts.

  Was this the same thing? Did whoever did this use the blood the way I might? I’ve never used this much. Can’t conceive what kind of spell would even need this much blood. With a tablespoon I could summon every Wanderer in a ten-mile radius and pull in Haunts who haven’t been visible in three hundred years.

  But a whole person’s worth? Jesus. That’s some ugly magic right there. If someone dies as part of a ritual they give off a flare of energy that a mage can tap into. It’s why human sacrifice was so popular when we could get away with it.

  But if it was just to kill him and collect his energy to fuel a spell, why bleed him? That’s just more work. Too many questions, not enough answers.

  High time I asked the man himself.

  Each floor of the place was basically one room. Standing in the foyer, the hairs on my arms stand on end, and I try to put my eyes everywhere. The feeling of strangeness is like static electricity. I can’t sense anything: no gas in the air, no magical energy. And yet I’m standing in a space that shouldn’t be there, that has to be magical.

  “Welcome.”

  A woman; she must have come from the doorway directly in front of us, a few feet past the narrow, steep stairs rising up to the second floor. She’s older, fiftyish, with gray-black hair pulled back in a sloppy bun. She’s heavyset, but moves with grace, bracelets and rings tinkling. Her eyes are gorgeous: deep, clear eyes, the kind of eyes you try to drag over to you, the kind of eyes you perform for.

  “I am Celine Meridia.” She pauses as if this name should have an effect on us. After a tick of her head, she reassesses. “Walk-ins? Were you referred?”

  I shake my head. I don’t know what kind of scene Gabby might have made, so I don’t use his name. “We’ve heard stories.”

  She smiles, and waves us toward her. “Come then. Don’t be shy.”

  A few steps in and the stairs rise up on our right, and Mags has to hold his arms in close to squeeze down the hall. Even I feel crowded and crushed. The next room is a little better, though; it feels subterranean from a lack of windows and light, but the ceiling is high, crowned with an elaborate old plaster rose and a spectacular old-school chandelier made of crystal, and the space spans the full nine feet, which is a relief after the tightness of the foyer.

  It’s filled to bursting with a huge wooden table. Candles and tiny pieces of art line the shelves on the walls, and the floor creaks and moans as we shift our weight, the ancient floorboards wide and gnarled, chewed up and cracked. After the initial sense of freedom from the slightly larger space, it suddenly feels choked, filled with scented candle wax and smoke.

  “Sit,” she suggests. “You have come to be read? You know our policies: The price is one hundred dollars and a . . . sacrifice. A very personal sacrifice.”

  I’m sweating. I feel like it’s taking secret energy fo
r me to remain in the room, as if some force is trying to pull me away, throw me out, and I have to exert myself in some invisible, unknowable way to remain. “We don’t have any money,” I say, feeling lame.

  She smiles. “Arrangements can be made,” she says, looking at Mags. “Perhaps a more substantial . . . sacrifice.”

  I study her. Magic takes blood, fresh and hot and still full of life, and it can’t be stored, can’t be preserved—although a few enterprising enustari have “stored” blood by the simple expedient of imprisoning people until they could be bled at the proper time, and in the proper sequence.

  Mages. We are not good people.

  She smiles wider. It has every superficial resemblance to a warm, reassuring smile. “You have come in pain, as all do, seeking comfort. Do not hesitate. I take only what is necessary for the ritual. Only what is needed to make contact.”

  One hundred dollars. I can get as much bleeding for someone like Heller—or even Hiram, if he would have me. But something is so wrong here I can’t walk away. It nags me, tugging at my sleeve.

  I look at Mags. “You up for a donation, Pitr?” I swallow, feeling dirty. This is dangerously close to bleeding someone else, I think. Dangerously close to taking advantage of the big guy, who sometimes seems confused by the simplest things.

  But he looks at Celine, then around the room, then right back at me. “Yes,” he says, and begins rolling up his sleeve again. I nod, not feeling any better, and turn to look at her. “All right.”

  The space behind the restaurant on Bedford where they found Hobo Bill is more courtyard than alley. The block is a triangle of Bedford, Commerce, and Seventh Avenue. It’s boxed in by brownstones on two sides and an iron gate and brick wall on the third, an old locksmith shop sitting between them. Thick trees give a lot of cover. A good place to murder somebody if you can keep the noise down.

  From the number of ghosts hanging out back here, I’d say I’m not the first person to have that thought. Except these are all Wanderers. No Haunts, no Echoes. Something’s attracting the Wanderers but I can’t tell what.

  I find the spot where Bill was hung up pretty easily. The blood has been washed away but it’s left a lingering stain on the concrete, the walls. From what I can tell he squirted out here like a juiced lemon and nobody bothered to catch the blood.

  Did he use it to attract the Wanderers? Done right, spilling blood will pull them in for miles. But I don’t see what’s keeping them here. If it was a spell to trap them, I should feel it.

  I don’t see Hobo Bill anywhere among the ghosts, and I can’t tell if he’s hiding. There are too many here and it’s all just noise. Time to sort through them all.

  I sit cross-legged on the cement, check to see that nobody’s watching, then roll up my left sleeve and pull out my straight razor and a small silver bowl.

  I have tattoos all over my body, but I keep an empty patch on the inside of my forearm for bleeding. It’s scarred and covered in little Band-Aids. I peel one of them back to get to the scab and quickly run the razor over the spot to let a few drops of blood drip into the bowl. It doesn’t take much. They feed off the life in the blood, crave it like a junkie craves smack. As soon as I put some power into it I should have their attention.

  Only I don’t.

  The Wanderers pay no attention to me. No attention to this offering of life I’ve spilled.

  “Okay, what the fuck,” I say. I cover the small wound back up with the Band-Aid and fling the blood out from the silver bowl. “Come on, take it. Chum in the water, people.”

  Nothing. I’m starting to get a little creeped out here.

  Is it me? I cast a small flame to dance around my fingertips. No, I can still do spells. And I can still see the ghosts.

  I watch the Wanderers milling about and after a few minutes I notice a pattern. They’re all clustering more or less around a ridiculously thin house stuck between two brownstones. Each time they pass it they turn their heads to look. Aside from it being stupidly small, I don’t see anything unusual about it.

  So what are the ghosts seeing?

  There’s only one way I know to get a view of what they’re seeing and I really don’t want to do it. It’s a pain in the ass, and with this many ghosts around it’ll probably get me killed.

  I know a spell that will flip me over to the ghosts’ side of the veil. It’s a pretty shitty place. It sucks the life out of you, drains you away. Stay too long, you’re not coming back.

  And that’s the upside.

  The downside is you won’t last that long because the ghosts will eat you. They’ll chew through your soul like a fat man at a Vegas buffet. I go over there they’ll swarm me like piranha.

  Or maybe they won’t. They don’t seem to be paying attention to anything besides the house.

  This is a really bad idea. Nobody ever said I was smart.

  I expected mumbo jumbo. Whatever odd feeling I’m having—and I am undernourished, poorly rested, and bleed every day for small spells—there is no other reason a mage would be working people for gas and money. It has to be a grift. So I keep my eyes open.

  She dispenses with the tourist bullshit and just bleeds us, slicing us each on the forearm and launching into her spell. She speaks in a twisty, bullshit-laden patois, though, clearly designed to obfuscate what the spell actually does. To the untrained ear it’s merely pretty. To the stupid, which includes just about every other idimustari I know and definitely includes Gabby, it makes no sense, Words dropping like useless anvils, never coalescing into a grammar that directs the universe on how to use the gas we’re feeding it.

  To my ear, it isn’t a spell that has anything to do with summoning spirits. And yet the spirits come. Or, one spirit.

  Heya, laddie, the voice says. That’s all. That’s enough. It’s the familiar Jim Beam rasp, the four syllables that more or less defined my childhood.

  “The fuck,” I hiss, standing up. Celine blinks at me in sudden surprise. A moment later Mags surges up, copying my body language and movements, and Celine is much more alarmed, standing up and backing against the wall.

  “I must warn you—”

  I stare at her for a moment, and she shuts her mouth with a click. I have a feeling poor old Gabby isn’t getting his money back, after all. My father is gone, but he’d been there, the one voice I never needed to hear again. But the spell—the spell Celine had spoken hadn’t been about spirits. It hadn’t been about the afterlife. It had been all about the blood.

  It takes a few minutes to get the spell going. This is like swimming with sharks. It’s not something you want to fuck up.

  I hang back from the milling crowd of Wanderers. Popping over to the other side in the middle of them would be a remarkably bad idea. Over here, if they notice me, I might be far enough away to shift back before they eat me.

  I close my eyes, let the void soak into my mind, put out my senses. I don’t strictly need to bleed for this one, but it helps. I run the straight razor against my forearm, the blood welling up from the cut. I shake some onto the ground and will myself over.

  Jet engine burst of sound. Screaming wind. Frozen air sucks at my lungs. The world of the living shifts into a dim shadow, gray and empty, goes silent.

  Architecture here is made of memory and time. The longer a thing stays in one place the more it imprints on the psychic landscape. Old buildings like these brownstones, even ones that have been torn down, have a solidity that’s more than physical. Cars, streetlights, trees—anything new—are nothing but indistinct outlines bleeding over from the living side.

  I made the mistake once of doing this in a new high-rise building, materializing into an empty void fifty stories up. I fell three floors before I managed to shift back. Broke my leg, collarbone, two fingers.

  But down here the buildings have the weight of a hundred years or more. Rooted in time and place. Cobblestones instead of pavement, decorations on the buildings long gone. Over time the landscape will shift again as today takes over the past. B
ut it will be a while.

  The Wanderers come into full view, flickering past like badly threaded film. Their attention pulled to the narrow house stuck between the two brownstones. On the side of the living, the house is a blank wall, new construction. Over here there are two windows and a back door.

  But what really takes the cake is the giant phosphorescent bubble surrounding the whole goddamn thing. It’s as high as the building, stretching outward. I can see it pulsing, shifting color, intensity. I’m not sure but I think it’s growing.

  For the life of me I have no idea what it is. Or how it’s even possible. Magic works on this side, but mages are disconnected from the pool of power we tap into to cast big spells. All we have is whatever we bring over with us. Most people it’s not much. Even if Hobo Bill had been gutted for his magical potential it wouldn’t be enough to do this. It would have sputtered and drained away in minutes, hours at most.

  And that’s not even the weirdest part. I can see now why the Wanderers are giving the house such intense stares as they mill past it in a slow circle. As they pass by wisps of their essence are being pulled off of them like smoke, funneled in through the keyhole in that spectral door.

  Is it using the ghosts to power it?

  I was hoping this would be simple. But then when has anything ever been simple. I’m going to have to go inside. And that means wading through the ghosts.

  I edge in closer, get ready to pop back as fast as I can, waiting for them to pounce. Even at this distance they should sense me, come at me in a stampede. But they don’t.

  Ten feet, five. Nothing. A break in the mob opens up and I hurry through, taking care not to let them touch me. They don’t pay any attention to me at all.

  I step up to the bubble. No helping touching that. I stand there for a minute watching it creep slowly toward me. I step through it and . . . nothing happens. I don’t burst into flame, my soul doesn’t get sucked out my asshole, nothing. I feel fine.

  Next step is the door. It isn’t really here, not in any physical sense. It’s a memory of a door. For the door to be here on this side, but not on the other, means it’s recent construction.