Tales of the Unquiet Gods (4 page)

He came too just in time to see a leg – covered in fishnets and stuffed in a size thirteen, pointy-toed, patent leather boot – swing back. Spilled booze, most of it fruity and cloying, sent fumes up his nostrils from the floor just a few inches away. Mike rolled sideways into the other leg just as the toe swung toward his ribs. Applying just the right amount of violence, he grabbed, twisted and pushed upward with an explosive grunt.

There were downsides to bouncing at one of the most notorious gay bars in the West Village, but all out brawls usually weren't one of 'em.

The big queen went over backward - a definite con to wearing five-inch stilettos, Mike thought - creating just enough space to get to one knee. His thick, leather bike jacket soaked up a couple of blows as he got to his feet. He left the armor pads in for just such occasions. He mostly let 'em come in, as it wasn't his job to hurt people.

He'd learned that one early, to his shame.

Finally on his feet, Mike set his back to the bar and defended his territory. Mostly, as usual, this involved whipping elbows at all comers and keeping an eye out for the rest of Bella's tough guys. Bella - Frank to his friends, or while off the clock - hired big men to see to the smooth operation of his establishment. Mike saw Gerald and Tomás headed in from the door.

Nancy and Virginia - Bella hired some tough girls, too - were spraying the brawl with soda water from behind the bar again. Each gripped an empty in her offhand and smacked the hell out of anybody stupid enough to get that close. Assuming he survived this one, he'd have to talk to them about that. He didn't want either left holding a handful of broken glass. Or handcuffed in the back of a cruiser, as bottles could be lethal. They didn't break nicely like you see in the movies.

Mike felt the melee starting to cool off, when a bantam-weight little bruiser flew at him out of the press. The kid's eyes glared madness and his mouth hung open in a rictus snarl. His white net tank top did little to hide the nut's impressive muscle definition. Light from the spots flashed off knuckles more or less encased in shiny metal rings.

Mike felt a moment's wave of unease. The guy coming at him wasn't going to give up short of a knock out: he'd seen enough fights and fighters to sense it. Mike's gaze zeroed in on what he thought at first was a weird necklace. It hung around the crazed attacker's neck, and looked made out of hard black metal and animal parts.

And then it moved.

Dried-up, leathery-looking tentacles slid across the kid's chest, and twined around his neck. Spiny bits that could have done for spider legs - if they'd come off a black widow as big as a hubcap - pricked at the kid's ribcage. Mike thought he saw blood running down the boy's torso. Plates that might have been metal, or might have been something far more insectile rustled and shivered as the kid moved into Mike's range.

But Mike couldn't move.

The big bouncer felt like somebody just poured ice into his veins. Muscles accustomed to obeying commands instantly lay frozen and locked. It was all Mike could do to stand as the little man with the crazy eyes and the terrifying thing raged into him.

Armored fists thudded into Mike's torso. Each blow felt like his attacker wielded hammers. Mike had gone up against drunks and junkies with less strength. He tried to defend himself, but couldn't so much as lift his arms.

Despair rose, threatening to swallow him whole. The kid cackled, and the pace of his blows increased. Mike sagged, and a punch glanced off his forehead. He felt heat as blood sheeted down his face, and the world flashed white again. Instead of the sea, though, Mike saw the crazy kid's disturbing collar thing.

But in the space inside his head, the tentacles weren't dried and leathery. Slime coated leprous-pale flesh writhed against the non-background, and chitinous legs the bright shiny crimson of a hooker's lips scrabbled and twitched, trying to bring the thing closer to Mike.

To his face.

A surge of primal horror swept Mike down. The last thing he saw as his vision cleared and returned to the world around him was a pinpoint of horrified despair deep in the kid's eyes. Then Mike saw nothing at all.

Mike's eyes flew open and his big, scarred hands closed vise-like on the wrists of the paramedic hovering over him. For a moment before he realized where he was, Mike's vision was still filled with lashing, twisting, snapping tentacles springing from a mass of slime and horn-slick ruby shell, chasing him through the dark corners of his soul.

"Ahh!" The rather attractive paramedic cried out, black eyes wide in her suddenly pale face. Mike's crushing hands sprang off her wrists as though he'd grabbed red-hot metal bars instead of human flesh and bone. The skin on her face returned from ashen to a more normal healthy dark olive color.

"S-sorry." Mike blinked his eyes rapidly, trying to figure out where he was. Cinder Bella's still, judging by the ceiling, snaky with hung cables for the PA, stage and mood lighting. The overheads glared down into eyes made sensitive by unconsciousness. He took it all in while trying to rid himself of the hideous dream images.

"Where'd the little guy with the creepy necklace go?" Mike asked, still trying to come to grips with what he'd seen in the last moments of the brawl. As his shuddering heartbeat slowly calmed, Mike pushed himself up to his elbow and looked around. Bella's looked like there'd been a battle in it, which made sense. Tables and chairs were knocked all over, and more than one other EMT crouched over a prone figure. Bella - Frank - sat on the bar, talking to a cop. Another officer leaned against the front door.

Mike craned his head around, ignoring the paramedic's sharp warning not to move as she applied temporary sutures to the cut on his forehead. He was struck by how her gentle hands didn't hurt. Then his heart sank: other cops covered the rest of the exits, including the trapdoor behind the bar from when the place had been the entrance to a speakeasy.

Somebody must have died.

Dammit. He was going to lose his job over this one. As the head bouncer, he was answerable for a lot of what went down in a fight. If they were lucky, he'd be the only one fired. He shook his head - angry at himself and ashamed for only then thinking about the poor, presumably, dead person - and immediately wished he hadn't.

"I know you're tough, Mr. Runey, but stop moving your head," the pretty EMT told him, her beautiful eyes crackling now with anger. "Dennis - at the door - said he saw you go down twice during the fight. How you don't have a split skull I can't imagine, but you'll have a nasty headache for a while, regardless." Throughout the rant, her hands never stopped moving. She closed up the gash on his head, cleaned up his face and helped him pick the glass out of the back of his jacket.

"Ma always said my skull was made of rock," he muttered, and saw what looked suspiciously like a smile dance around her lips. He hadn't been smiled at by a pretty girl in a while.

"Thank you, Miss-" Mike left it open, hoping she'd tell him her name.

She smiled. Right out in the open, this time.

"Pahlavi. Yasmin Pahlavi. You're welcome, Mr. Runey, but let's not meet like this again." She had a dimple in her left cheek.

"Call me Mike."

She smiled again, and pushed a few strand of her straight, black hair out of her face. Mike's heart started to pound again, though not from fear. He opened his mouth to ask for her number - hey, it could happen - when a voice completely derailed his train of thought.

"Mickey Runey?" He really didn't like people calling him that, especially not someone like this. The voice in question spoke the with the clipped tones of officialdom: all I'm-supposed-to-be-here-and-I-don't-want-to-have-to-make-your-life-a-mess-really, and that's-an-awfully-nice-life-you're-living-there-shame-if-something-happened-to-it. He distrusted those tones on an instinctive level. Lower-level bureaucrats always wanted to make somebody else's life harder. As far as Mike was concerned, it came of being a bureaucrat.

This one looked like most of the rest he'd ever dealt with. Middling height, middle build, just starting to slide to fat as time in a chair caught up to him. Slightly shaggy haircut, cheap off-the-rack suit, glasses frames straight out of the 1960s. Perfectly standard bureau-bum, but for the hint of something shiny where his shirt gapped over his chest.

Mike shrugged and stayed where he was, lying on the floor. He found that officials preferred talking to people from positions of power. So long as he didn't stand up and tower over the suit by a good head, he figured he'd be fine. Also, not giving up much in the way of information.

"Mr. Runey, I'm Sergeant Timmons, NYPD," the man pulled a badge out of his jacket and held it at Mike's eye-level. His tone probed, as Mike expected. Cops always wanted to use your own words to trip you up. "Several eyewitness have you knocking over a, ah, Ms. Cherry Jubilee, and then assaulting an unnamed man."

Mike shrugged when the guy paused. He hadn't known the big queen's name, and it looked like the cop still didn't, if all he had was her nom de guerre. So to speak.

The cop frowned.

"Mr. Runey, I'd really appreciate it if you helped me out here." There it was, the we're all friends here tone. Mike had heard that one a lot, too.

"Well, Sergeant Timmons, you haven't asked me any questions yet." Out of the corner of his eye, Mike saw Yasmin's lips twitch.

For a bare moment, Sgt. Timmons stared down at Mike. The light from the fluorescents overhead hit the cop's glasses just right, completely hiding his eyes behind artificial glare. Somehow, it seemed to Mike as though the room had darkened. His pulse sped up at the shaded hint of danger.

"Of course." And now the cop's tone was guarded. "What do you remember of the brawl?"

Mike frowned. He'd been holding up one end of the bar, when suddenly everybody seemed to start throwing punches. He filled in Sgt. Timmons on what he remembered, carefully omitting references to his nightmarish dreams. And while he mentioned the creepy kid's creepier necklace, Mike chose not to mention how it seemed to reach for him right at the end.

By the time Mike finished recalling the evening to the cop, Yasmin finished with him and moved on to somebody else across the room. Sgt. Timmons or no Sgt. Timmons, Mike was pretty sure he had a chance with her, and wanted to finish this up quick. Before she left.

The cop frowned at him again.

"Mr. Runey, you claim to have no memory from the time your assailant came out of the crowd and attacked you until the point where you awoke while Ms. Pahlavi treated you."

Mike nodded. Safer than quibbling with the cop's choice of words. And accurate enough, in its own way.

"So you also claim you don't remember kicking your unnamed assailant in the chest, and sending him flying halfway across the room?" Skepticism lurked in the back of Sgt. Timmons voice. The trick was in the words, though.

"Frank's gotta have tapes," Mike said, jerking a thumb at a shiny, black bulb tucked over the bar. "I guess those should have what you're looking for." Answering the question in his usual direct manner would probably have gotten Mike in trouble. Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

Something about Timmons creeped him out. Beyond the whole cop thing. After a moment, it came to Mike. It was as though his body was trying to say things his mouth wasn't. Looking a little closer - casually, casually, it wouldn't do to piss off the good sergeant - he noticed dark stains at the detective's pits and at his neck.

Which was a little weird. The cop wasn't that big a man. He wasn't even fat. Just a little chunky. Certainly no bigger than Mike was, himself. And the suit, while wool, shouldn't have been enough to make him sweat like that. Mike found the room just a bit chilly without the usual crowd of gyrating club-goers.

"So you don't remember kicking a kid half your size across the room?" The overhead light still reflected off Timmons's glasses, hiding his eyes behind them.

Mike felt his eyes narrow, and forced his face into stillness.

"Like I told you, Sergeant, this guy - not a regular - came out of the crowd at me. He looked hopped up on something, and for whatever reason, I blacked out." Smooth and easy did it. Mike had nothing to be angry about. Bar fights weren't common, but weren't anything to freak about, either. On the other hand, the coppery smell of spilled blood and the sour odor of spilled booze set Mike's guts to roiling. The questioning didn't help any. "The first thing I remember after that was waking up with Ms. Pahlavi working on me."

Timmons's lips twisted - ever so slightly - as though he tasted something he didn't like. The skin just over his eyebrows tensed. Same for the skin over his cheekbones. Mike noticed the fingers of his right hand twitching, and wondered if the good officer wasn't maybe on some kind of substance, as well.

He wanted something. All cops did - hell, everybody did - but Timmons wanted something specific. Something he wasn't getting. Taking in the cop's almost labored breathing, Mike realized that the smaller man gave off the same tells as a guy looking for a fight. His pulse pounded in response.

Deliberately, he leaned back on his elbows. He hated leaving himself open to a guy that seemed like he might snap, but he could probably sweep the cop's legs if it came to it. More than that, though, he looked far less threatening this way. Getting attacked by a cop in the city could easily turn into having attacked the cop in the first place.