Shoggoths in Bloom (22 page)

Melissa hunched down so her head wouldn’t stick up so far above the crowd. Her hair was as bad as Doctor S.’s, and she didn’t have his knack for vanishing into the scenery. “Gina,” she said, “you go up, and tell us what’s going on.”

“I’ve seen dead people, chica.”

“You haven’t seen this one,” Melissa said. “Go on. It might be important.”

Gina shrugged, rolled her eyes, and started forward. And Melissa was right; a five foot tall Latina in gobs of eyeliner did, indeed, vanish into the crowd. “Criminal mastermind,” Melissa said.

Katie grinned, and didn’t argue.

This was the part of the job that Matthew liked least. There was no satisfaction in it, no resolution, no joy. The woman on the pavement was dead; face down, one arm twisted under her and the other outflung. She’d bounced, and she hadn’t ended up exactly where she’d hit. She’d been wearing a pink blouse. Someone in the crowd beside him giggled nervously.

Matthew figured she hadn’t jumped. He checked his wards—passunnoticed, which was not so strong as a pass-unseen, and considerably easier to maintain—and the glamours and ghosts that kept him unremarkable His hands still ached; he really wished somebody would come up with a system for detecting malevolent magic that didn’t leave him feeling like a B-movie bad guy was raking his fingerbones around with a chilled ice pick.

He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, buttoned the middle button on his jacket, and hit speed dial. He was one of five people who had the Promethean archmage’s reach-me-in-the-bathtub number; he didn’t abuse the privilege.

“Jane Andraste,” she said, starting to speak before the line connected.

He hadn’t heard it ring on his end. “What’s going on?”

“Apparent suicide at Fifth and 68th.” He checked his watch. “It tickles.

I’m on the scene and going to poke around a little. Are any of the responders our guys?”

“One second.” Her voice muffled as she asked someone a question; there was a very brief pause, and she was back on the line. “Marla says Marion Thornton is en route. Have you met her?”

“Socially.” By which he meant, at Promethean events and rituals. There were about two hundred Magi in the Greater New York area, and like Matthew, most of them held down two jobs: guardian of the iron world by night, teacher or artist or executive or civil servant by day.

They worked hard. But at least none of them had to worry about money.

The Prometheus Club provided whatever it took to make ends meet. “I’ll look for her.”

“She’ll get you inside,” Jane said. “Any theories yet?”

Matthew crouched amid rubberneckers and bent his luck a little to keep from being stepped on. The crowd moved around him, but never quite squeezed him off-balance. Their shadows made it hard to see, but his fingers hovered a quarter-inch from a dime-sized stain on the pavement, and a chill slicked through his bones. “Not in a crowd,” he said, and pulled his hand back so he wouldn’t touch the drip accidentally. “Actually, tell Marion to process the inside scene on her own, would you? And not to touch anything moist with her bare hand, or even a glove if she can help it.”

“You have a secondary lead?”

“I think I have a trail.”

“Blood?”

It had a faint aroma, too, though he wouldn’t bend close. Cold stone, guano, moist rancid early mornings full of last winter’s rot. A spring and barnyard smell, with an underlying acridness that made his eyes water and his nose run. He didn’t wipe his tears; there was no way he was touching his face after being near this.

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 fifty-eight-year-old unmarried woman, Janet Stafford. Here’s the interesting part—”

“Yes?”

“She had just re-entered 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 for 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 humidityfrizzled 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.”