Bewere the Night (29 page)

A single door is set in each of the five walls on each floor, and it is from one of these upper doors that the Engineer emerges. He follows a catwalk along the wall to a set of stairs and begins to descend without looking up from the leatherbound book in his hands. The Engineer is a short and squat little man with three sets of spidery arms and an extra joint in each of his too-long fingers. His wrinkled face gives him a look of perpetual squinting, and his ragged robes could be as old as the wrinkles.

Kelsey freezes where she stands, feeling unworthy to ask for his regard. She should go before he notices her.

He reaches the bottom of the stairs and, without looking at her, says, “The Engine Room is not open to the public.”

“Sir, I need a moment of your time.”

The Engineer adjusts the round set of spectacles perched on his nose. “I’m occupied, as you can see.”

“There’s an Old One loose in Chicago, and it’s using the glamour network.”

He makes a motion that might be a shrug. “The network is built for all Lorefolk to use.”

“But the Old One isn’t just hiding, it is draining power to use during its killing sprees. It’s a parasite. It has to be stopped.”

“That is . . . interesting.” His lowest set of arms folds across his stomach, and his upper arms slowly close the book. “What would you have me do about it?”

“Sir, I know that I impose upon your time, but—”

“To the point, if you please.”

Kelsey takes a deep breath and let it out. “I need you to build me a trap fit for an Old One.”

Once she slips past the museum guards and regains her freedom, enough night remains for Kelsey to fly back to Novak’s apartment and check on him. She alights on the fire escape outside his living room window and peers in. He has fallen asleep in an old armchair, and instead of waking him, she sneaks in and leaves a note:
meet me in Rockefeller Chapel at sundown
. Then she departs to find a resting spot of her own.

Sunrise. The oblivion of sleep. Sunset.

Kelsey launches into the darkening sky, beating her wings to gain some altitude. The campus blurs beneath her, and she lands atop the tower of the university chapel. She takes the spiral stairs down, fingertips running along the brick-lined inner wall of the tower. The chapel sighs comfortably, still warm and calm from the Engineer’s daytime visit—she can feel the residue of his presence in every brick.

She cuts through the dim-lit sanctuary past the long shadows of polished-wood pews and finds a side door locked only from the outside. Sticking her head out, she yells for Novak, who comes jogging around from the front entrance. His flashlight rakes her eyes and she squints against the brightness to see him jerk to a halt.

Too late, Kelsey realizes she’s wearing her real face.

“It’s me,” she says curtly.

“You’re . . . you’re a monster.”

“I told you I’m a grotesque. What exactly did you expect?” She spits, angry that for a moment he made her wish for her human face. “If you stand out there all night, the Old One will paint the grass with your innards. Come.”

He comes forward again, cautiously now, and slips through the door she holds open. The high, vaulted ceiling of the sanctuary swallows up the brightness of his flashlight, and the scuff of his shoes on the stone floor echoes.

“So, what—ancient cloud demons don’t like churches?” He forces out the words, trying not to look at her.

Kelsey shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter that it’s a chapel, but it does matter that it’s
my
chapel. I know these stones well. They’ll aid me.”

He breathes deep, lets it out, and turns to face her. “Okay. What’s my job?”

“Sit on the dais and act, you know, murderable.”

“I’m the
bait
?”

She blinks. “Naturally. What did you think I needed you for?”

She turns away and walks the length of the sanctuary on both sides, checking the small brass relays hidden behind each pillar. No long antennas on these pentagonal brass contraptions—the Engineer didn’t build them for transmitting in this instance. What Kelsey needs is the opposite. She circles back to the dais and finds that the Engineer left the trigger on the podium, as promised. She picks it up, round and brass like a pocketwatch but singing with the power of glamour.

She says, “Not long now.”

“Oh. Great.” Novak flops down on the steps of the dais, elbows resting on knees. “I love this plan.”

She stares at him, perplexed. “How you feel about it isn’t relevant.”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“The alternative is dying in an explosion of gore.”

“Look—I’m in, okay? But I don’t have to like it, is all.”

Not knowing what to say, Kelsey shrugs it off. Now is the time to focus. She springs up, gives the air two long strokes of her wings, and finds a perch atop the large pipe organ on the right side of the dais. The height and partial concealment give her a comfortable edge. She’s ready for it.

They wait.

It comes.

Slowly at first, like the howl of a distant hurricane, the city begins to moan. As the Old One approaches, the calm evaporates from the chapel walls and each stone seems to shiver in terror. Kelsey feels the tremor when the Old One’s fluid mass breaks like a wave against the outer wall. It leaks in through the cracks around the front doors, a black cloud thicker than firesmoke pouring into the air.

On the dais below, Novak shifts nervously. Kelsey stares down, willing him to hold his wits together until the Old One has been lured all the way inside. Stupid of her to plan a trap that hinges on a human’s help, but Novak stills himself and does not flee.

The Old One literally pulls itself together, black tendrils tucking in to form a sphere of darkness, and begins to glide down the central aisle. It pulses slightly, as if breathing, and the hideous eyes and teeth rise to the surface to gape hungrily at Novak.

When the Old One reaches the center of the chapel, Kelsey pushes off from her perch and snaps open her wings to glide down to the floor, landing in front of Novak. The stones of the chapel quail and shriek beneath the Old One, and she feels Novak’s fear, too, like a subsonic vibration. But when she serves the city, she has no fear of her own.

Kelsey kneels to place one palm on the smooth stone floor, the other hand still holding the trigger. She reaches out with her mind and draws in glamour from beyond the chapel, making herself seem larger, more ferocious. Fangs and claws to match the Old One’s, eyes that glow with citylight, wings growing spurred and enormous to fill the vaulted space. She shows off for the Old One, goading him to match her skill.

When the Old One rises to her challenge, though, it takes glamour from the immediate area of the chapel. She feels the tension as it draws in more power, as if the relays are springs and the Old One stretches them out to their limits. The web of glamour pulls taut, singing like instrument strings, and when the threads are stretched to the breaking point, Kelsey jams her thumb down on the trigger.

The glamour springs back toward the relays, lightning-quick with elastic tension, and the relays suck it down, devouring the power and storing it. Each relay becomes a point of negative pressure, the energy flow from the Old One firmly established. Mindlessly thirsty, the relays will not stop drinking until the Old One is drained.

The Old One screeches and writhes. Its eyes and teeth and limbs disappear first, then wisps of black cloud begin to siphon off and it gradually shrinks. The last few seconds are the worst, when the core being of the Old One rends in a dozen different directions, and the very air wants to shrink away from its ancient rage. Then, with a final rip, the relays devour it.

The walls sigh relief at its passage.

Novak stands shakily from the dais steps and walks over to Kelsey. “You saved my life again. That’s twice now. Thank you.” His eyes are too deep and grateful, with a puzzling lack of disgust.

“Well. Have a nice life,” she says and flees the chapel.

With luck, Duncan will never ask her to take on the horrid human-form again. No frailty, no confusion, no illusions of humanity. That is what she wants, yes, she’s certain. Never again.

Kelsey flies her rounds, starting at the lake and meandering westwards. The city has been quiet for days, but something is different in the air tonight. Something waits for her.

She lands on the steps in front of Rockefeller Chapel—next to Novak.

“What are you doing?” she says, dropping her cloak of glamour so he can see her.

He jumps at her sudden appearance. “Waiting for you. Took you long enough to show up.”

She blinks. “Our business here is done.”

“I got this case, see. I think it’s up your alley.”

The rush of hope and anxiety and desire catches her off-guard, echoes of human-form emotions nothing like the cool certainty of a grotesque’s mission.

Novak takes her silence as an invitation to continue. “Today I had a out behind the River North cineplex that was drained of blood. What do you think? Vampire?”

“There are no vampires in Chicago.”

“Well that begs the question—who
did
take the blood, and why?”

She hesitates. “I don’t work for you.”

“What about my supernaturally blood-free Jane Doe? You willing to work for her?”

Kelsey scowls, knowing he’s probably right. This case sounds as if it involves elements he is ill-equipped to deal with, elements that fall into her realm of experience. Her responsibility, even.

“I brought a coat, for when you’re wearing your other face.” Novak holds the spare coat out to her. “Come on. We can go someplace warm, review the details. And hey, maybe you could give food a second chance.”

Reluctantly, she takes the coat from him and lets her wings melt away before wrapping it around her shoulders. The night air chills her human hands, and she shoves them down into the pockets. It feels strangely good—the cold and the coat, the discomfort and the doubt. Maybe it’s okay to want this. Maybe her human-self is not a curse, after all.

As they make their way to Novak’s car, the sidewalk sighs approval at the touch of her bare human feet. The streetlights flicker their agreement when she passes beneath them. Startled, Kelsey realizes the city wants this of her.

And she always gives the city what it wants.

BLUE JOE

STEPHANIE BURGIS

Josef Anton Miklovic, Blue Joe, was twenty-one years old and playing the sax in a nightclub in Youngstown, Ohio, when he met his father for the first time.

Joe was on stage with his family band: Karl on keyboard, hunched and intense; Niko on drums, grinning his lopsided, dreamer’s grin; and Ivan, as smooth and polished as a Croatian Clark Gable, playing his shining trumpet like a peal up to heaven.

Smoke swirled across the tables, obscuring the waitresses in their Betty Boop outfits and the customers in their sharp suits, with dyed blondes on their arms. Ivan had hooked up with the son of a local mob boss to pull this job, and the rest of the brothers knew how lucky they were to get it. Ivan had big plans, and Joe was happy to go along with them.

Joe soared into his lead break, and at the end of it, as he emerged sweating and victorious, he met the fierce gaze of a hawk-nosed man at the back of the room, through all the smoke and the darkness. Time froze around them, and the music stopped.

“You don’t look much like your mother,” the man said as he crossed the room. He wore a long black coat from a different era, and it flapped around him like the wings of a crow.

Joe squinted through the smoke, watching the man sidestep frozen Betty Boops and customers’ arms flung out in mid-gesture. Joe’s brothers were as still as statues on the stage around him, and he thought he probably ought to be scared.

“Everyone always said I took after her,” he said mildly.

“All they meant was, you don’t look like that lump she married.” The man reached the stage and jumped up onto it as easily as if it were only an inch high, instead of four feet from the ground. “You take after me.”

Joe looked the man up and down and knew it to be true. They shared the same crazy golden eyes, the same jet-black hair, though Joe’s was slicked back into fashionable lines, and the same great, hooked nose, about which Joe’s brothers had always teased him.

He turned to look at his brothers now, and the man before him shook his head.

“No. They’re not mine. Your mother and I had parted ways by then. But I told her I’d come for you to raise you right, when I was ready.”

“And you waited till now?” Joe laughed, despite the shock. “You left it a bit late, don’t you think?”

“It took time to make my way over. Do you remember the journey you took?”

Joe shook his head. “I was only a baby when we came over to the States.”

“Well, I took a longer route. It’s harder to leave the old country, for some.”

Some
. Joe didn’t know exactly what the man meant, but he didn’t care to ask, not with the rest of the nightclub frozen around them like stills in a newsreel. Whatever power this man had, it was obviously more than the local mob, and that was enough to scare anyone with sense.