Whiskey and Water (2 page)

Lucifer turned and looked, as if Satan's
words could indeed come as a revelation to him. Kit knew him well enough to
read irony, however, and even Satan could not have missed it when Lucifer
turned back with an elaborate shrug.

Satan curled a lip off his fanged teeth
and snarled, "Do you expect the rest of us to bear idle witness while you
crawl to
Him,
begging forgiveness? I will not have it."

Lucifer tossed the slip of paper over his
shoulder. An unseen servant, swift and mindless as a gust of wind, swept it
aside to be disposed of. The Morningstar tilted his head and smiled. :Darling,:
he murmured, :that is but a request for an audience. Do 1 seem to you the sort
that crawls?:

For a moment, the poet thought Lucifer
might actually get away with it. And then Satan moved, his right arm
straightening on a swinging blow that caught the other angel across the
stomach. Lucifer doubled around the blow. The second one smashed him to his
knees, while the stones of the courtyard groaned under Satan's moving weight.

So fast.
The poet realized that he had started forward only
when Keith's hand locked on his right biceps and dragged him back into the door
arch. "That's not your fight," Keith said, but the poet noticed that
Keith's other hand had dropped to the pommel of his sword.

Keith asked, reluctantly, "Will they
kill each other?" He wasn't over-fond of the poet, or vice versa.

"No more than Fae are likely to,
outside a field of war or honorable combat," the poet muttered in reply.
"If Michael would not strike them down, but only hurl them from Heaven,
they'll not destroy each other so easily. There are" —he grimaced —
"forms
for these things."

The pause was brief, and then both men
winced when Satan kicked Lucifer, a swinging blow that sent him sprawling on
the courtyard flags. He strode after, the earth groaning under his feet, and
caught Lucifer a sweeping kick under the ribs that lifted the fallen angel into
the air.

"Exile's a possibility, though,"
the poet continued. "Or imprisonment. And seizure of chattels." "Meaning
us."

"Meaning you," the poet said.
"I'm a free man."

"Hah," Keith answered. "You
think
he'd
care about that?"

Both re-covered their ears as Satan raised
his stinging voice again. "That seems a creditable approximation of
crawling to me." Lucifer pushed himself to his knees, his wings sagging on
either side of his shoulders, his velvet jacket torn at the elbow. Satan
stepped forward, foot swinging —

Lucifer got one foot under him, knee bent
as if making obeisance, and the poet flinched. But then Lucifer rocked aside,
dodging the kick, and rose to his feet with a bar of light flickering in his
left hand like a tongue of flame. He extended his arm en garde.

:So draw your sword.:

Satan folded his arms over his stony
chest. "You won't meet me with fists, Morningstar?"

Lucifer smiled. Right-handed, he wiped
blood from the corner of his mouth, and flicked it sizzling on the stones. :It's
easy to forget that I stood against Michael too, isn't it, brother mine?:

"Stood," Satan said. "And
fell."

:A flaw we both endure. Come. I'll show
you the door.:

"Don't bother," the poet said,
stepping forward, his cloak swirling heavily against his calves. "I'm headed
that way myself. I'll see the Devil out."

The year Matthew Magus turned forty,
Halloween fell on a Sunday. He'd canceled his classes for Monday and Tuesday,
and now he stood before an antique silver-backed mirror in a wrought-iron frame
and made ready for a duly more sacred than teaching. First he bound his bobbed
hair into a stubby ponytail, the end twisted with copper wire. Once, he would
have worn a camouflage jacket, buttons buttoned and zippers zipped. But he had
no intention of blending into
this
night, even if he still could;
sympathetic camouflage did not suit his purpose now.

Instead he wore a patchwork tailcoat, red
velvet and copper brocade sewn with bugle beads, fringes, droplets of amber,
silver and steel bells and chips of mirror, a phoenix embroidered on the left
lapel and a unicorn on the right. Matthew wouldn't wear a shirt under the
talisman on Hallow's Eve, so the skin from his collarbone to his belt shone
bare, revealing the black edges of the spells etched into his skin. The coat
smelled of nag champa and dragonsblood incense; he kept it with his aromatics
so the odor wouldn't fade.

The owner of the vintage shop he'd bought
it from—without haggling, as was right for a ritual tool —had claimed it had
belonged to Jim Morrison. This was a lie. Joey Ramone had tried it on once but
hadn't bought it, but the real magic of the coat lay in salvaged fabric and
beads: a skirt panel from the original Broadway production of
Kiss Me Kate;
a
harness bell from Andrew Carnegie's carriage horses; a fragment of a busted
bathroom mirror from The Bitter End; enough baubles to buy Manhattan twice over
(purple and white wampum sawn from the shells of quahog clams, a handful of
love beads thrown away by Robert Crumb, a tourist's charm shaped like the
Empire State Building which somebody had given to Gregory Corso, once); a steel
jingle made from a valve cover off Peter Beagle's motor scooter; a horseshoe
nail lost when the nag bolted in the Five Corners; a penny John Coltrane picked
off the floor of Birdland—heads—and ran through a press at Coney Island in
1963...

Matthew brushed the gold fringe on the
epaulets until it fell properly. He double-knotted his steel-toed boots and
stared at the man in the mirror one more time: a little more gray in the hair,
a few more lines beside the eyes, the ink in his tattoos starting to fade and
blur a little, here and there.

His jeans had a steel zipper and copper
rivets. He wore a black leather glove on his clawed right hand. The healed scar
where a unicorn's horn had pierced his heart shone white and crescent-shaped among
the black lines on his skin.

He slapped his hands together, the strong
one and the shattered one, and let himself out through dead bolts, chains, and
the police lock to see what Hallow's Eve would bring.

Sunset gave the illusion of warmth to a
city whose nights were already chilling into winter. New York had never been
one of those cities where Halloween became a ritual, a citywide block party and
an excuse to riot all rolled into one. San Francisco claimed Halloween; New York's saint's day was New Year's Eve.

But Halloween was Halloween, and New York also wasn't a city that missed an excuse to throw a party. Or a parade. So Matthew
armed and armored himself, and went out like Gawain —or perhaps like Don
Quixote—to defend the innocent. Or the best approximation he could find, in New York City.

He walked south through the Upper West Side under the watchful eyes of gargoyles: leering faces and twisted animals
bent in manners foreign to their anatomy. A green man watched him pass; a
beaked creature something like a wingless hippogriff twisted in its skin of
stone to follow him with a weathered granite regard. In the bright eyes of
buildings only sleepily alert to the mayfly existences of their creators, Manhattan's
last Mage burned with iridescence, a dragonfly catching sunlight through lazy
summer air.

His city knew him still.

Matthew headed for Greenwich Village. The
noise of the city followed like a lover's whispers. He jingled with every step.
The Fae were in the city tonight, this night of all nights, though they usually
gave New York the respect due a graveyard.

Matthew couldn't keep them out, not alone,
and he was too tired to try.

He couldn't keep them out. But he could
try to make sure they stayed out of trouble. And they knew his name, both the
Daoine Sidhe and the Unseelie, even if the residents of his city did not. They remembered
a bridge of iron and Matthew's own heart's blood that had carried a war into
Faerie.

New York
remembered a woman on a white horse and a dragon with
black iron wings that had carried that same war back to the heart of the city.
And Matthew preferred it that way. He could walk through New York unheralded,
the new gray streaks twisted into the blond of his hair, wearing the city's essence
like a hermit crab's home on his back, and play its warden in the dark, with no
one but the gargoyles the wiser. It was a lonely existence.

But it would serve.

The buzz of his cell phone pulled him from
his reverie, but when he read the display, he saw the name Jane Andraste. His
right hand ached when he thought about it, so he stuffed the phone back into
his pocket and rubbed the scarred palm with his opposite thumb, trying to chafe
some comfort into the old wound.

He settled against a brick wall, his
shoulder to the traffic, and fussed with his glove for a minute. A car alarm
buzzed across the street, the flashing lights attracting his attention. He
dropped his hands to his sides and turned, scanning the crowds moving along the
sidewalk, faster pedestrians wending between slower clumps.

Matthew spotted the follower before he
quite caught up. The man was easy to pick out of the crowd, not because his
head was bowed over a PDA, his lips moving in concentration, but because Matthew
could not have failed to notice the twisted, dark-colored rings encircling his
thumb and forefinger.

Matthew didn't know this apprentice. But
Matthew knew what he was and also knew why his phone had rung just then.

Matthew had it in his hand already when it
rang again. He didn't bother answering, because at the sound of his phone, the
apprentice's head came up. He turned until he faced Matthew directly. He was good-looking,
Irish or Swedish extraction, with freckles scattered across his cheekbones and
the bridge of his nose, and wavy dark red hair. The young man's face rearranged
itself around a positively dazzling smile as he slipped up to Matthew, who
found himself ridiculously at bay with his back against a brownstone wall.

"Matthew Magus?" the apprentice
asked, and stuck out the hand that didn't have the PDA in it: his right hand,
and Matthew didn't reach to take it. He didn't care to offer his crippled paw
to shake like a well-trained golden retriever.

"I am," he said. "What does
Jane want?"

Matthew should have asked the man's name;
his eyebrows drew together at the sting of that slight. He recovered, though,
and lowered his hand. "I'm Christian Magus," he said, smoothly.
"I'm here on behalf of Jane."

"Christian
Magus,"
Matthew
repeated. "She's recruiting. It figures. How did she find you?"

The young Mage wore a copper-colored
brocade blazer over a black turtleneck. He dropped his hands into his pockets
and drew the brocade around himself, fist balled around the PDA. There was a
bit of Mage-craft on it, Matthew could guess, a spell to help find Matthew
through the link established when Jane called his phone, whether he chose to
answer or not. Simple enough magic. The sort he would have worked without
thinking, himself, once upon a time.

Christian didn't answer his question.
"Jane wants to talk to you. Just talk."

Matthew stared through his eyeglasses. The
apprentice didn't drop his gaze, but met him glower for glower. He wondered how
long Jane had been recruiting apprentices, how many new Magi she'd collected .
. . whether she was planning on moving against Faerie again.

"Jane needs everybody,"
Christian said. He held out a granite-colored business card; when Matthew
didn't take it, he tucked it into the breast pocket of his gaudy coat with a
sort of charming insolence. "She needs as many of us as she can get. She
just wants to talk to you."

"How many of you are there now?"

"About twenty," Christian said.
"And growing. I've been with her five years, and I know she's sincere."

Matthew put his phone away again and
smoothed his left hand over his hair. "You know why she doesn't have any
Magi left, Christian?" he asked. "Why she's starting over from
scratch?

Christian bit his lip, frowning. "The
Faerie War."

"Because she got the last batch all
killed,"
Matthew told him. "And she'll get you killed too. No." "Matthew?"

He turned away, showing Christian the back
of his hand. "No," he said. "I won't talk to Jane. I have a city
to take care of. Leave me alone."

Two young women and a man in their early
twenties hesitated on the platform, bewildered by the rumble of trains, the
reek of grease and the arch of yellow metal against swallowing darkness. The
train had breathed them into Penn Station like a dragon breathing particles of
soot onto the air. The chambered heart of a vast beast echoed around them,
sound ringing off granite blocks laid with a master's precision. The three
exchanged glances, their own hearts thundering in their chests as New York's
thundered in their ears.

They ascended the narrow escalator single
file, passing through a gap in a dull, corrugated walkway suspended above the
platform like a vast air-conditioning duct. Inside, grimy cement was punctuated
in long rows by the alien luxuriance of cobalt tiles, blue as a madonna's robes
against char.