Echo City Page 33

  In the end, I was out of touch with everyone I knew, except when my path happened to cross that of someone who had a bit of news of Geraldine or Fresca or, more often, Taliesin. Taliesin, it seemed, was everywhere, and I realized that alone among us, his was the name that would go down in Shadow New York lore, legend, and infamy. St. Clair was the general at the head of our impromptu army, but Taliesin was the public face of the resistance, our trickster king.

  I had no idea how much time passed for us. I would later learn it had been just under two days in the real world; I still don't know how that translated to Shadow New York time. It felt like weeks. I caught catnaps when I could, and ate standing up, my hands paint-splattered and my nerves singing with adrenaline and desperate exhaustion. Bits of news trickled to us, each more depressing than the last: SoHo has fallen. No one can reach V-Day. The Tigers have slaughtered everyone at the 1939 World's Fair and left the shadow standing empty.

  It was a war, a real war. I guess I hadn't realized it would feel that way. All the people who were dying—and, for that matter, the ones who were crouching with me under awnings or lifting me up to swipe paint down the side of a building—had died in the real world decades ago, or gone off to live their lives elsewhere while leaving behind a single moment was captured in time. I guess I thought they wouldn't seem real to me.

  I was wrong.

  Shall I list their names? I want to remember them. Like an elegy on a grave, like a snatch of song in a crowded room ... I saw two different versions of Zora Neale Hurston cut down by Tigers. I met Bob Dylan on the steps of the Astor Library (it was under construction, draped in great swathes of canvas) and passed him a message written on the pages of a Bible given to me by a Harlem gangster named "Bumpy" Johnson; I still don't know what it said. But most of them weren't famous at all. I outran a Tiger in the rain outside a Five Points tenement, hand in hand with a white boy named Edward. (I never knew his last name.) He kissed me on the cheek and then he was gone. I never saw him again.

  In a swamp that would later become Manhattan, I picked up two unusually solid girl-ghosts dressed in skins; I didn't speak their language and I never knew their names, but they took to spray paint like they'd been born for it, and they knew exactly who Tweed was. (I saw one of them much later in Central Park, though I don't think she saw me. She was wearing jeans and a soldier's pea jacket. So I knew she made it through the war, and I was glad.)

  I met another Lily-Bell in another Harlem, but I don't want to talk about that. She wasn't like the other one. She was only a ghost.

  Muirin found me in Central Park, staring at a great swath of the park that had been razed. Nothing was left but blackened stumps. A pall of dirty, garbage-smelling smoke hung in the air.

  "I've been looking all over for you. Come on." When I didn't follow, she turned back impatiently. "Did you think he wouldn't retaliate? What do you think war means, Kay?"

  I came, numbly. "People are dying," I said. "Maybe it shouldn't matter. They're shadow-people, after all. But it does matter."

  She didn't answer. Maybe it didn't matter to her; maybe she had lived so long that real people were as unreal to her as shadow ghosts had once been to me.

  "Muirin," I said as we walked from the devastation toward the still-unruined section of the park. "There's something I have to tell you. Fand came to me a while back, asking questions about you. She ... I didn't know who she was, then, but I let her put a geas on me, though I didn't know that's what she was doing."

  "I know, Kay," Muirin said. She tucked her hands in her pockets. "She is a thousand times older and more ruthless than you are. And yes, she used you to spy on me, but I had to go home sooner or later anyway."

  "I feel like I betrayed you."

  "Do you?" She gave me a look of mild, tired ... something. Surprise? Amusement? A little of both, maybe. "Trust me, even in a normal human lifetime, you will accrue so many more disappointments and little hurts. Things you do to other people, things they do to you ... next to all of that, an innocent mistake weighs less than a feather when the scales are balanced."

  "And you're not upset about it."

  "No, Kay," she said. "I'm not."

  We crossed into the Harlem Renaissance. The streets were largely deserted, with only the most transparent and unaware ghosts still going through their patterned lives. St. Clair met us on the street. She was stylishly and immaculately dressed, as always, but there were a few discreet drops of blood on the hem of her dress. She'd been fighting. Gwyn's hounds flanked her, all four of them.

  "About time," was all she said. She turned on her heel, and we descended a stair to a below-street door. When she flung the door open, faces looked up at us: men and women sorting an arsenal of weapons, both the normal kind and more specialized ones for dealing with a shadow menace. Flares, flashlights, torches, fireworks, roman candles ... I wouldn't want to light a match in here.

  St. Clair's smile was not a pleasant thing. "We have reports of Tweed at various points around the city. If ever there was a time his sanctum would be deserted, now is that time."

  I'd been traveling light, with mostly just my art supplies, but now I collected a small arsenal. Machete, heavy-duty flashlight, flare gun and extra flares, two of the big marine flares ... I spotted a shotgun that reminded me of Fresca's, the one kind of firearm I had some experience with, so I picked that up too.

  Muirin slung a satchel over her arm.

  "What's in there?" I asked.

  "My bird-skin," she said. Her look dared me to say anything about it. "Among other things." She glided two fingers over my forearm, not touching me. I felt a quick tingle: she'd put a shield on me.

  "Do we have a strategy here?" I asked, as St. Clair laid a hand on each of our arms.

  "Get the sword," Muirin said. "Get out."

  The hounds pressed close to our legs. Shadow swirled around us, and when it smoked away, we were standing on the black-and-white tile of Tweed's Empire State Building snowglobe.

  Two Tigers burst into motion as soon as we appeared. So did the hounds, a pair of white arrows pointed at each striped throat. The Tigers were down in seconds. St. Clair, not one to stand on ceremony, laid a hand on each Tiger in turn; they wisped away to nothing. From the set of her jaw, I could see that she was in pain, but I didn't embarrass either of us by mentioning it.

  Aside from those two, the vast room appeared to be deserted. The dome, I noticed, had been repaired where Lily-Bell had broken through, as seamlessly as if nothing had ever happened.

  "I can't take us to the second level using the method by which we got here," St. Clair said. She showed a flash of teeth. "So a different method will be necessary."

  She let her shawl slide from her shoulders, revealing the bare arms she normally concealed. The darker stripes, just visible against her smooth brown skin, began to writhe. Darkness flowed down to pool in her hands. She made a throwing motion, and darkness unspooled from her palms, lashing upward, arching in slender threads toward the top of the dome.

  I opened my mouth to ask what I should do, but the twisting ropes whipped around me and launched me into the air. I didn't have breath to scream. Acceleration pressed me into the cradle of shadow cupping me. I was deposited on the golden carpet of Tweed's bedroom so lightly that my feet hardly stirred the deep plush pile.

  I stood gasping as the hounds fell around me like giant snowflakes. None of them looked any happier with the situation than I was. A moment later, Muirin fluttered over the balcony—at least I assumed it was Muirin; there couldn't be that many large gray-white shorebirds hanging around the Empire State Building. St. Clair joined us, set gently on the floor by the ropes of shadow that snaked back to her arms, while Muirin was peeling off her feather cape.

  "That's, um." I caught my breath. "Impressive."

  St. Clair ignored me, looking up instead at the sword suspended beneath the dome, reflected in the pool below. "So that's the weapon," she said.

  "Can you get it out of there?" I asked Muirin.
r />   "Excellent question."

  The three of us studied the sword from the edge of the swimming pool. I could feel its subtle tug, plucking a string at the bottom of my soul. Muirin rummaged in her bag of tricks; I glimpsed the pale feathered mass of her birdskin stuffed back inside. The hounds prowled around Tweed's apartment, inspecting it dog-style. Arian marked his territory on a corner of the huge four-post bed.

  "I don't suppose it's as simple as shining a bright light on it."

  "No. Although ..." Muirin looked thoughtful. "It would probably help."

  I set up my flashlight, propped on a pillow stolen from the bed and pointed at the sword's prison. I didn't notice any difference. Meanwhile Muirin neatly arranged candles on the poolside.

  "How long is this going to take?" St. Clair snapped.

  "It will take as long as it takes," Muirin said blandly.

  For once, St. Clair and I had something in common, a mutual irritation with Muirin's uncommunicative stubbornness. I tried to catch her eye for a moment of sympathetic bonding, but she had stalked to the balcony to peer down. The dogs were equally wary: not frightened, but low of head and tail.

  Which I wholeheartedly understood. We were in the innermost heart of our enemy's lair, and the whole place breathed with Tweed's presence. The smallest sound made me jump, whirling around in fear of coming face to face with Tweed and an army of Tigers.

  "Kay," Muirin called. I came, and she pointed up. "Look at that for me with your second sight. I need to know where the lines of force are."

  Calming myself enough to shift into my second sight was difficult. I had to sit crosslegged at the pool's edge, forcing my hands to unclench, my shoulders to unknot.

  When I opened my eyes, it was to a room filled with a dense network of blue-white strands. The air itself was thick with them, running every which way, chaotic yet purposeful. Tweed's bed was a particular locus of line-ends, as were the pool and the sword itself.

  Some appeared to be thicker than others on first glance, but turned out to be composed of many smaller strands twisted together. The sword was supplied with four of these, like umbilical cords hooking it into the larger network. I pointed them out to Muirin, who was herself a fascinating tangle of green, gold, and red strands, twining out from her body into the magic circle that she was building under the sword.

  St. Clair erupted in a sharp burst of undoubtedly profane French and stumbled away from the railing. Through my third-eye-enhanced vision, the spiderweb of light flared briefly, nearly blinding me, and brilliance erupted between me and St. Clair. There was a tremendous pop, a hiss, and a deep-throated scream. My vision recovered enough to see St. Clair tossing aside a heavy plastic tube as big around as her fist—she'd fired not a flare gun, but a flare cannon, blowing a swath through the Tigers that had just materialized in Tweed's bedroom. There were at least twenty of them, with more popping in all the time. And it wasn't just Tigers.

  "My dear," Tweed said, shaking out his top hat as shadow melted into the floor around him, "this—will simply—not—do!" His voice was calm, but his face was livid: not with fear, but with suppressed rage.

  "Fuck your mother," St. Clair spat, and switched to a torrent of furious French. Cursing Tweed and the Tigers in at least three different languages, she raised her bare arms and great ropes of shadow whirled out of nowhere to twine about her.

  I had problems of my own: Tigers bounding out of nowhere all around us. The hounds, not waiting for a command, threw themselves into battle with abandon. Creiddylad lunged for one Tiger's throat while another hound, the one with the lilac collar, savaged its hamstrings. Arian let out a pained yelp as two Tigers set on him, his slim white body vanishing beneath striped, heaving fur.

  I emptied the shotgun into their backs. The pellets tore out great chunks of fur and flesh, but the wounds sealed up without a trace. It did, however, give Arian a chance to scrabble away—and turned the Tigers' attention to me. Hooray. I was trying to reload when a Tiger barreled into me and knocked me into the swimming pool.

  The water was a muted, cool shock through Muirin's shield. I went down, down, into the swirling depths. My eyes were open and I could still see lines of force crisscrossing the pool, lacing the world in electric white-blue. I held off the Tiger with both hands as we sank. This one was far gone, with hardly anything human left anymore. Gleaming white teeth and powerful claws battered at the shield, sliding off my skin like I was coated in glass. Its eyes were golden cat's eyes, wild and alien. Maybe it was due to proximity, maybe repeated exposure, or maybe my second sight—but I could see those eyes clearly, without any distortion.

  I didn't feel the usual chill weakness of energy drain, but an instant later I realized why, when Muirin's shield let go in a flood of pool water across my face. The Tiger had sucked all the energy out of the shield, and now claws tore into my hip, my leg. Dark ribbons of blood unfurled into the water, twining through the web of light. I clutched its furry throat and struggled to keep its face away from mine. Somehow I managed to hang onto my lungfuls of air. My chest ached.

  In slow motion, we touched the bottom of the pool. The Tiger's great bulk pressed me down. I still had the flare gun, and I held the Tiger off with my legs while I brought the gun's muzzle up to press against the hot mass of fur. I pushed it under the Tiger's chin as it forced its head down toward mine. Whiskers tickled my face and then I pulled the trigger. Light tore a hole through its head like a shotgun blast. It spasmed and I struggled free, well aware those flailing paws could gut me even without conscious intent. The Tiger's eyes were open, blinking; it wasn't dead, despite the ragged hole, big enough to put my arm through, from its throat to the top of its head. But it could only twitch in horrible, uncontrolled jerks, and I struck for the surface, breaking through with a pained gasp.

  Hands grabbed me and hauled me out of the water, deposited me on the carpet in a wheezing, sodden heap. I rolled over and looked up. It was a Tiger rearing above me—no, it was Millie—no, it was both, the woman's stocky shape subsumed by the aura of a great-shouldered beast. The shaggy head, made of light, hung masklike over Millie's face. She was speaking.

  "—you all right?"

  With a great effort, I got my hands under me and heaved myself to my knees. I was bleeding all over Tweed's carpet: shame, that. I'd just healed from the last time I got torn up. The Tiger's claws had ripped across the fresh new skin where Scylla's heads had savaged me. I healed fast because of the sword, but I wondered how much damage I actually could heal, and whether I was about to find out.

  Still on my knees, I drew one of my marine flares and struck it. Flame ignited in a rush. I waved it in front of me. "Back off."

  Millie stepped back. She was unarmed, at least to all appearances. "I'm not going to attack you unless I'm directly ordered."

  "Well, that's reassuring." I struggled to my feet. Muirin was the first place I looked—Muirin, whom I was supposed to be protecting so she could do her magic thing; great job there, Kay. But she seemed to have it under control. A wall of green flames surrounded her, and the Tigers who tried to leap over, or through, fell back with yelps of pain. In the circle of flame she knelt, candles burning around her and a glass knife in her lap. I could see the power that twined around her like a knotted rope, green and gold, winding along the candles' circle. Experience had taught me that Muirin's power was finite, though, and once depleted, she'd be at their mercy.

  "What do you expect me to do, Kay?" Millie demanded. "I'm in a rough position here."

  "You could help us!"

  "Against Tweed? Why should I do that?"

  "Because he's tearing this place apart. And the real world is next." She looked miserable, so I pressed what little advantage I had. "I know you don't want to see the whole world go dark, or Shadow New York with all the light and life sucked out of it. Nothing left but Tweed and a lot of Tigers—"

  "You're desperate and grasping at straws." She took another step back, away from me and the spitting flare. "We both serve who we
serve, Kay. I am a Gatekeeper and I am also—" She drew a breath. "—a Tiger. Do you know what would happen to me if Tweed went down? That's death for me, Kay, not a happy-ever-after."

  I hadn't thought about that. She had a point—it was self-interest binding her to Tweed as much as any personal loyalty to him. Or loyalty to the others, the Tigers supposedly her comrades-in-arms ...

  "What about helping your friends?" I asked. The Tiger I'd shot in the head was still drifting in the pool, facedown, twitching every so often.

  "They aren't my friends."

  There was a flash and a tremendous bang from the other side of Tweed's bedroom. St. Clair seemed to be holding her own, and keeping Tweed busy. I couldn't see any of the dogs.

  "Kay!" Muirin shouted.

  A thunderclap shook the room. Growing up in the Midwest, I'd often experienced furious thunderstorms. This was like the eardrum-rattling, window-shaking explosion when lightning flashed directly overhead—a great ripping sound, as if the heavens had been torn in two. Primed by my childhood, I instinctively braced for a downpour of rain to follow.

  Instead, the sword dropped out of the air, hit the surface of the pool with a great splash, and vanished.

  "You better figure out which side you're on!" I yelled at Millie. Then I dropped the flare, took a running leap and dove into the pool. The water seared my clawed hip like acid, and then closed over my head, shutting out the pandemonium of battle and sealing me into a deceptively quiet and peaceful world.

  The sword, being iron, had sunk to the bottom. I kicked down, reaching for it. I didn't have to look, orienting on it like the good little compass needle I was. My fingers closed around its hilt, and there it was, back in my life. It clicked into place like a puzzle piece.

  I broke the surface and shook water out of my ears. I couldn't see Tweed, but I heard him bellow from across the room, "Get her! And get the sword!"