The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie) (7 page)

"Son of a bitch, John. You might want to look at this."

The moment Brodsky glanced over at him, the Lieutenant
snapped the strap off of his gun and slid it out of the holster with swiftness
borne of years of practice. He brought it up, taking aim at Brodsky's temple. The
sergeant was the nearest armed man. It only made sense that Landry would take
him down first, Clay second, the cop at the door third. The hooker likely didn't
even enter into his homicidal logic.

Clay moved with stunning speed, putting himself between
Brodsky and that gun. The Lieutenant fired, the report echoing through
Charmaigne's. The bullet tore through Clay's chest and lodged in his vertebrae,
trapped there. He winced at the pain but already he was changing again. This
time, however, there was no cat. Not even the human face of the man the people
of New Orleans knew as Clay Smith. He could have taken the face of any man in
the bar just by touching one of them.

Instead, he showed Lieutenant Pete Landry his own face. His
real face. His clothes were gone, save for a scarlet ceremonial drape around
his waist that hung nearly to his knees. Clay towered over Landry, nearly nine
feet tall and as broad as two men across the chest. His red-brown flesh, from
hairless scalp to bare feet, was damp and soft and run through with cracks.

"Go on, asshole," Clay rumbled, "shoot me
again."

Wide-eyed and hyperventilating, the asshole did.

Clay ripped the gun out of his hand, breaking three fingers,
and grabbed Landry by the throat, trying his best to avoid meeting the grateful
gaze of the murderer's ghosts. He did it for them, but he could not withstand
the sadness in those eyes.

He squeezed the Lieutenant by the throat until the man's
eyes rolled up to white.

"Step away from him," Brodsky demanded.

Clay glanced over, saw that the sergeant had drawn his own
weapon. He let Landry drop, gasping, to the floor and looked down at Brodsky. He
smiled, and he knew it was a grotesque smile.

"John, my friend, you want to know how I track killers?
I'll tell you over a beer some time. If you want other answers about me . . ."
Clay paused and took a long, calming breath, staring into Brodsky's eyes. "Trust
me when I tell you, you're not alone."

With that small, gasping noise he changed again, from
towering clay figure to copper-furred cat. Brodsky shouted after him. The
uniforms were all cursing, wondering what the hell was going on. Caleb and Gage
had just stepped back inside with a small pistol in an evidence bag. One of
them stooped and tried to stop the stray as it ran out the door, but he was too
slow, too clumsy.

The cat darted into an alley, past a Dumpster, then along
other streets until it came once again to Rue Dauphine. As it passed beneath
the shading branches of a tree that grew up from the sidewalk, the cat
disappeared and was replaced by Clay Smith once more. He had no bullet wound. Not
even a tear in his crisply clean navy blue T-shirt.

He cut through to Bourbon Street and fell in amidst the
swirl of tourists, the loud shouts of hucksters, the jazz band playing "When
the Saints Go Marching In" on the corner. Clay hated Bourbon Street, hated
the cheap, carnival atmosphere of it, but he had walked that street at least
once every day since he had come to live here. It was alive and vibrant and
filled with color and at least for a handful of minutes it could make him
forget the things he could not remember.

As he passed by a restaurant that was serving breakfast he
heard people hushing one another inside. There was something urgent about their
manner and so he ducked his head into the restaurant and saw that everyone
waiting for tables had stopped to watch the newscaster on the television above
the bar.

The visual cut away to a scene of the New York skyline.

Blood was raining from the sky.

Though the subway tunnel was abandoned, the roar of nearby
trains thundered throughout the underground. The air was dry and chalky and
there on a platform unused for decades, Doyle felt the shimmer of magic, as
though their every breath disrupted cobwebs of time. This was a sensation he
had felt recently, in the foyer of the brownstone where Yvette Darnall and her
fellow mediums had died to keep Sweetblood's secret. This place had been frozen
in time, had been hidden away from untrained eyes.

Until now.

"Doyle! Why don't you get what we came for?" Eve
snapped.

His gray brows knitted together as he turned to glare at
her. Her jacket was torn: the demon's claws had ripped through suede and cotton
at her shoulder and blood was seeping into the fabric. The thing towered above
her on the platform, its footfalls cracking the tile floor with every step. Even
as Doyle glanced at Eve, the thing Sweetblood had set here to guard his hiding
place bent once more and lunged for her. Distracted in that moment by her ire
at Doyle, Eve could not avoid its ridiculously long arms and the demon snatched
her by the throat, one of the sharp protrusions on its arm cutting a gash in
her face that flayed her cheek to the bone.

She snarled in pain, latched onto its wrist with both hands,
swung her legs up and braced them against its body, and then used that leverage
to break its arm. The grinding snap of bone echoed across the platform. Eve
dropped to the tile and rolled away from the guardian, then turned to glare at
him.

"What the fuck are you just standing there for?"

Doyle smoothed his coat. His own wardrobe had thus far
suffered only the veil of dust that hung in the air and covered every surface.

"Merely wondering if you might be bleeding less if you
concentrated on what you were doing rather than policing my own actions."

He raised an eyebrow as the demon raced at her again,
roaring, cradling its shattered arm. Then he turned away, leaving her to the
battle. Eve's face would heal, as it always had. All of her wounds would
disappear. That was the gift and curse of her immortality. In comparison, his
own extended life was merely a parlor trick.

Since the moment they had left Yvette Darnall's brownstone
he had been trying to sense the power of Sweetblood. When they had entered
Grand Central Station he had known they were on the right track. Had anyone but
Sweetblood cast the glamour that hid the guardian's true nature, Doyle would
have seen right through it. Not that it mattered now. The trail had led him
here, to this platform, to the door that now stood before him.

Or perhaps not
.

Though to Eve it seemed he was merely standing there, Doyle
was searching for the emanations of the magic Lorenzo Sanguedolce had used to
hide himself away. At first it had seemed to lead through that door, but now he
frowned deeply, knitting those eyebrows once again, and turned to focus upon
the tiled wall to his right. A tremor went through him and he felt something
tug him, as though he were a fish who had just taken the bait. Quickly he
strode across the platform.

Eve hissed loudly and Doyle glanced over to see her on the
demon's back, her legs wrapped around it from behind. Its protective spines
stabbed into her but she held on tightly as she tried to reach around to claw
out its eyes. For just a flicker of a moment her gaze caught his but he ignored
the continued accusation in her eyes as he approached the far wall.

Doyle felt his skin prickle and the hair rise on the back of
his neck. His stomach clenched and he was forced to pause a moment to avoid
spraying vomit all over the floor. With a flourish he crossed his wrists and
then spread his arms in front of him and some of the magical seepage that had
infected the air around him dispersed. Sweetblood did not want any visitors. It
was too late for that.

"You must not disturb the mage!" the demon
bellowed in its hellish, grinding voice.

Doyle whipped around to see it lunging for him, but in that
same instant Eve plunged two long talons into its right eye. The sound was
sickening and a spray of viscous gray fluid spurted across the cracked tiles.

"You're missing the point, Fido. Someone's gonna wake
the old bastard up. Better us than the alternative," Eve snarled.

The demon shrieked and tried to reach for her, then threw
itself backward, crushing her between its own body and the floor, impaling her
on those terrible spines. Eve screamed.

Doyle ignored her.

He reached out toward the tiled wall. His fingers traced
lines in the decades of dust and grime that had accumulated there. Despite
Sweetblood's magic, this place had not been entirely untouched by time; not
like the brownstone. Doyle thought this was all part of the ruse, part of the
cover, in case another sorcerer should have gotten this far. He saw through the
glamour as others might have, but he was skilled enough also to see past the
diversion.

With a glance over his shoulder he saw that Eve was choking
the guardian, though her own blood pooled on the subway platform. He saw the
door that he had been about to enter and wondered what lay beyond it, what
peril Sweetblood might have placed there to dispatch seekers who came too close
to discovering his location.

With a blink of his eyes and a flick of his wrist, Doyle
cast a spell that shattered the tiles on the wall. They showered down in
fragments, revealing a stone wall behind them that he doubted had been part of
the original plans for this location. A tiny smile passed over Doyle's features
and he laid his palm upon the stone.

"Lorenzo," he whispered. "Can you hear me? Some
choices are not yours to make. Your power can't be allowed to fall into the
wrong hands." Doyle closed his eyes and summoned magic from a well of
power he had accumulated within him over the years. Images like shards of
broken mirror glass tumbled through his mind, of family dead and friends left
behind, of grief and the wonder of discovery, of a man he once had been, and
the trifle his meager efforts at entertainment seemed to him now.

This work, laboring in the shadows between the darkness and
the light, was what mattered.

"
Tempus accelerare
," Doyle whispered, and
his fingers went rigid as power surged up his arm. It ached to the marrow and
he gritted his teeth. Friction heated the palm of his hand where it lay against
the stone wall.

And the stone crumbled away to nothing in front of him.

There was an alcove behind it, a space in the wall perhaps
ten feet high and equally broad. Within that recess was a block of amber, like
a massive slab of rock candy. It was honey-gold with hints of red, and through
it, Doyle could see a distorted view of the man encased within. Sweetblood's
eyes were closed, his expression peaceful, as though he lay in a casket rather
than frozen in a trap of his own creation. Though dulled by whatever substance
encased him, Sweetblood's magic crackled like electricity in the air within
that recessed chamber.

"Time to wake up, now, Lorenzo," Doyle whispered. "No
matter how reluctant you may be."

The ground shook beneath his feet. He heard the sounds of
Eve and the guardian in combat, the snorting, rasping of their breathing. He
smelled Eve's blood and the fetid ichor of the demon. Trains rumbled elsewhere
along the New York subway system, their growling echoing in the tunnels. But
Doyle had stopped registering any of these things as he stared through that
amber slab at the features of his former mentor, the man for whom he had
searched for decades. A mage with enough power to scar the face of the world.

It was only when Eve screamed his name that Doyle realized
something had gone terribly wrong. On instinct, he manifested a magical energy
charge from his fingers as he spun around to see what had alarmed her. Even as
he did so, they were already leaping up onto the subway platform.

Corca Duibhne. The Night People.

They were lean creatures with taut, ropy musculature and
skin the color of rust, shaped like humans but no larger than a girl in her
early teens. The Corca Duibhne were stealthy and swift, able to merge with
shadows and creep along seemingly sheer walls. All of them, male and female,
had black and spiky hair and eyes so oily-dark that they seemed nothing but
pits of shadow in their heads. They had been called The Night People in a time
when the only stories about them were told in a fearful huddle around the
village fire. Yet now they had adapted to the modern world. They wore human
clothing and sported bits of silver in their ears and noses where ordinary
people might have piercings.

But the Corca Duibhne were not ordinary. They were not
human.

Doyle began to shout for Eve but his voice faltered as he
saw the Night People overrun her and the demon guardian Sweetblood had chosen
to protect his hiding place. Both had been weakened by their combat. The
guardian had a shattered arm and had been blinded in one eye. Eve was bleeding
from multiple wounds, her clothes sodden with sticky scarlet, and the Corca
Duibhne were strong and fast and far too many. She was ferocious and nearly
impossible to kill, but Eve would not be of any help to him at the moment.

"Damn you, Lorenzo," Doyle muttered. "This is
your fault."

The Night People lunged for him, first three, then seven
swarming over Eve and the guardian to rush at Doyle. But he knew they weren't
really racing at him. Their goal was behind him. Doyle placed himself in their
path and he could feel the hole in the wall behind him, the magic that pulsed
from the amber slab in which Sweetblood was encased. The Corca Duibhne gnashed
their jaws, baring teeth that were jagged and cruel, and their oily eyes
focused on him.

"Don't be an idiot," snarled the one in the front,
its voice low and insinuating.

Doyle had waited long enough. He raised both hands, palms
outward, and azure light flashed from his fingers throwing blue shadows on the
high walls and a cerulean glow out into the tunnel. A wave of magic traveled
with this light and the force of it slammed into the Corca Duibhne, cracking
bone and ripping flesh, throwing the nearest of them sprawling across the floor
in a tangled heap. But there were too many of them still swarming up from the
subway tunnel.