There it was, the hair-thin crack in the center of this hunter. Not the chink that would allow me inside, but a different, infinitesimal sliver. The fools want to be heroes. It spurs them to great heights, and curses them to fall inevitably short.
"Profit. Your guiding star." His irises darkened, and I did not let the welling excitement show. I let him struggle with himself. It takes longer with hunters, of course, and I had watched and discarded so many prospects already. Patience is not the only virtue, but it is the one most conducive to doing business. "All right, Per. Give the details."
"I'll need bare skin." I showed my teeth. "A little kiss, a little pain, and you'll be ever so much stronger. Then, all you must do is injure me."
"That would be a pleasure," he muttered, his right hand tensing and flexing as if he felt a throat under it.
Oh, he was a joy to behold. I tut-tutted, waving one long, thin index finger. "Not yet, mein Herr. Wait until you hear the planes."
The Elders have their hungers, and our cousins have their Pattern. We have the bargain. We may take, we may exchange--but we may also impart. Even to the righteous. All it requires is agreement.
His chest was paler than the rest of him; a hunter's work, like ours, is done at night. Wiry golden hair, pressed flat in places by the straps and buckles of the ingenious harnesses hunters use to carry their weapons. Straps and sheaths of muscle underneath, crisscrossed with a map of scars denser than any subway's spiderweb this world could dream up, an atlas of suffering. The claws of my kind had no doubt scored his hide in many places, and the sharp edges of others who share the night and a hunger for fleshly little miseries as well.
Your world is full of things your kind never suspects. The ignorance you pursue would be charming if you did not also avidly pursue your own destruction by every means ingenious, common, or possible.
Contrary to popular belief, most of my kind would like to see you persevere. Certainly I would. Where else, in all the planes, worlds, niches, or kulhalt, would we find such marvelous diversion?
"Jesus," Jack Karma said finally. "Get it over with."
"No savoring the moment?" My tongue flicked, and I exhaled against his skin. His right hand leapt, and I let him clasp my nape, digging his blunt-bitten fingernails in. He was strong, as hunters are, but if he thought he could deter me at this range, he was sorely mistaken.
Still . . . the nasty gleam clinging to his fingers prickled uncomfortably. I leaned into it, restrained the chattering of my teeth since I didn't think he'd get the joke.
When his hand fractionally eased, I pressed my lips to his flesh. High on the right side, since the left would be over his heart, and I sensed he would definitely object.
It was graceless, I admit. Perhaps I was a little excited. He screamed, his body stiffening and his right hand clamping down, and the marking burned as it left my tongue and lips and eyes and will.
Just like that, in a dusty cellar, I was born. To stay in your world, I needed an anchor, one durable enough to handle some strain.
I did not mind sharing my un-father's strength to gain it.
PROMISE
February 14, 1945
The Gothic roof pitched steeply, and it took some doing to anchor the heavy, man-sized iron frame to it. The Sophienkirche crouched below, quivering in distress as the burning city convulsed. The planes were returning, and I had to hope Karma would remember his part of our bargain.
Is this what your kind feels? An unsteadiness in what passes for vital organs, a thrill along the back of your carapace? I do not know, for all I may sip and sup upon your sadness.
Or your anticipation.
There, that is the precise word. The thrill, the catch in the throat of whatever form I wear. Oh, it is delicious. There is nothing like it for a pale shadow, a placeholder for the masters of my plane, a mere marker left on a table.
For that little catch, that tiny thrill, I had set this game in motion.
The screaming had receded, but the fires were still smoldering. There would be more, of course. So much subtle maneuvering, such careful twitching of the threads, to lead the Allies--and, more important, Jack Karma, the second so named of his hunter lineage, the scourge of the nightside in Saxony--to this very place.
And he was late.
I heard them well before any of your kind would. A faint metallic blurring, a buzzing in the distance. This was the last major city to escape the Allies' full attention, with their cargoes of death from silver-bellied birds. Last night had merely been a prelude, but the shock and pain and fire were so theatrical. Not to mention delicious.
I stroked the iron framework with one hand, baring my teeth. When Karma arrived . . .
I heard his pulse, then, on the other side of Postplatz's cobbled expanse. The Felder were too busy to ship the rest of their hated, helpless enemies away; some of the chain-gorgeted military police even had to work for once, instead of terrifying those they suspected. You are wonderful, you busy little ants, swarming in the wreckage, organizing and swabbing away while the full horror bears down on you. One of your more admirable and tragic qualities, I think.
He drew closer, and I felt the lash of sensation again. A nail stuck in the clotted fabric of your plane, holding me fast. My fellows would sneer if they suspected my ambition. Your flesh, the very thing you surrender so easily, its dense-packed, cringing fragility--
"What the fuck is that?" Karma landed easily on the roof beam, just where I expected him to appear. It gave him a clear field of fire down the Sophienkirche's roof. Its high holy spines had rotted and been removed, but their stumps still remained next to faded red-purple shingle-scales.
"Bait needs a hook to cling to." I patted the iron frame again. "The straps will hold me. Until they burn."
Under the irritating layers of cloth on his chest, my mark throbbed, an aching-empty tooth socket. Budapest had fallen, and my quasi-father was in an orgy of gluttony there. He had noticed no change in me. It was easy enough to feign my former blankness. The perplexing question of just when I had decided to take this risk had to be shaken away as a distraction best left for contemplation some other time.
"You're going to strap yourself into that?" He didn't sound horrified, just thoughtful. The mark on his chest gave him greater durability. He drew through it, and each time he did, I was seated a little more firmly in your world. The process was slow, but it was steady.
Inexorable.
Metallic buzzing drew closer. Soon the screams would rise afresh--high mechanical ones from above, and the full-throated, bloody wailing from below, while the fires made a noise of their own.
You have such marvelous toys.
"No. You're going to strap me in." I bared my teeth. Feeling the lips slide over them, exquisite. "And you will hurt me, with your silver knives, until he comes."
"Argoth." Karma dropped into a crouch, graceful and fluid, to make his silhouette smaller against the sky. Behind him, the wet, bright pinpricks of stars straggled, dim behind a smoke veil.
If he expected me to flinch at the human approximation of my un-father's name, he was sorely disappointed. Now that I was nailed in, with my mark on a fleshly denizen, the syllables didn't sting.
At least, not much. "Yes. Now hurry up."
The planes were drawing close.
The toy guns at the edges of Dresden began to bark, spitting tiny chips skyward to pierce thin air-faring skins. The first cut laced my shell--a prelude, a lash along my pale, hairless, exposed chest. A thin brackish blackness leaked, and Karma's high-prowed face set with disgust. He dragged the knife down, and I hissed, tipping my head back. So this was what flesh felt like.
No wonder we craved causing pain. It was the only thing that came close. Your kind does not know what it possesses and wastes so flagrantly: pleasure, the ice-chill of a blade separating skin, the welling from underneath. My tongue lashed damp, smoke-drenched night air, and a distant invisible searchlight swiveled in my direction.
My un-father would assume t
he hunter had driven me to Dresden, or that I'd been called there on urgent business and der Jager had brought me to bay. Karma was a thorn in Argoth's side, and perhaps the hunter thought it was a hunter's skill instead of my judicious applications of subtle protection that had made him such an aggravation. The trap was set, baited with care, and my eyes half closed as the metal birds over the suburbs began to drop their whistle-scream cargo. The buzzing reached a pitch even flesh ears with their stretched membranes could hear, and the fear screams began again, too.
Oh, what music to attend my ascension.
Plumes of choking black puffed skyward. A thrill ran all along my internal organs, a quiver in the fluids holding them, a ripple all up and down my shell. Jack Karma cut again, and now he was distinctly pale. Almost green.
Metal birds veered, and your rocky, tiny birthplace spun under me. Why do we come here, you ask? Well, yours is not the only backwater we attend to. But it's the one my un-father, my progenitor, my original, chose.
Lucky you.
A point of diseased brilliance. A revolving glitter. It weakens us to travel through your thickness with such haste. From Budapest to Dresden, some four hundred of your miles. Folding them and stepping across is a feat only the oldest and most powerful of us may perform, and my quasi-father had the power to do so only because he went to greet his placeholder, his fingernail driven into a page to mark a particular word.
Jack Karma went flying from the roof of the church, and the fire took a deep breath. The bombs passed overhead, and I could have danced in their small stinging rain. I strained against the iron cage frame so my un-father could feel the bonds against his own wrists, his own feet, feel his chest dripping blood from the third interrupted slice.
The mad barking of a handgun, and Jack Karma screaming his hawk-cry of combat and bright righteous hatred. The bombs pounded a writhing mass of masonry and steel, cobbles ripped from their setting and dancing, orange and yellow glowing under a column-hood of black vapor, a bleary eye that sucked the gases you breathe into its hungry pupil. First there was the inhalation, then came the heat, belching in torrents. The Sophienkirche cried out as it was shattered, the harsh holy glow wedded to its insides possessing far more power to wound one of us than the heat outside.
Your belief can be wielded like the weapon it is, if only you would grasp its whisper-sharp handle.
Leather turned crisp and black. It was simple enough to tear myself free. The church shook, and the sorcerous flame your hunters cast--they call it banefire, and a blessing--poured up in a stinging gout to meet the other fires dancing from every side. Wood, fat, metal, skin, cloth, concrete, blood--they all burn. More screaming silver canisters fell, detonating among the destruction. I laughed as the church's old, consecrated walls crumbled, skipping from stone to stone in midair.
You tell stories of that night, of the fire robbing your lungs of breath. Of your kind burning like candles, falling into the torments and delights that await you when you shed your frail, marvelous coats of nerve-spark pleasure. None of you ever suspect that the real battle was in the ruins of one of your sanctified places, where Jack Karma, blue eyes blazing, grasped my final gift to the hunters of his line--a talisman, a burning sword copied from our Pattern-loving winged cousins who mouth service and duty and charity as if they know what the words mean, and have ever suffered in their thrall.
It was my un-father's final cry on your plane that wrecked most of the city, and the firestorm you so kindly supplied finished the job. And Jack Karma, the keyhole for my plan--though not the key, no indeed--tried to push me away when I reached him on the shattered floor of the church, fire sucking the breath from him and the heat turning his skin shiny and robbing him of patches of his wheat-gold hair.
It didn't matter. My quasi-father's matrix on your plane had been disrupted, and I was the only marker left behind. I knew as much, you see, because I had--oh, very carefully indeed--removed all the others.
After that, I could afford to wait.
PATRONAGE
June 1962
East Berlin was a cheerful place, if you enjoyed bathing in a warm, swimming haze of low-level fear. It wasn't the fine vintage of, say, truly innocent suffering, though there was plenty of that if you followed the Black Marias to squat concrete buildings where the KGB took up their work with a vengeance. If you preferred finer, lighter nourishment, it was advisable to slip through the Wall and find a basement or a bierhaus where the throb of bass and the smell of greasepaint mixed with sweat, cheap perfume, vinyl, and the high notes American rock sometimes hits. Desperation, sex, and pleasure all at once is my preferred drink, and there was plenty among the go-go boots, the beehives, the musky skunk reek of marijuana, and the more acrid, chemical notes of other drugs. Cocaine was not a favorite yet--it was all hash and acid on paper tabs that let your kind glimpse, for a few moments, the nature of your universe.
Now, that was fun. You call them "bad trips." More than once I've chuckled at the apropos.
East Berlin was also where Jack Karma, bowing to the inevitable, found an apprentice. The gangly youth--a blond, naturally, with Siberian eyes--almost vomited when I appeared at their front door. Karma, much more dangerous, had a new gun full of silver-jacketed ammo pointed at me.
"Oh, hello." I smiled, wide and white, spreading my hands to show I was unarmed, enjoying the high, hard clip of both male pulses throbbing along. Did Karma think the firestorm had finished me off, and the mark on his chest was just a fading afterthought? "It's so nice to see you again, Herr Karma. And this must be little Yevgeny Serafimovitch. I hear he's going by Mikhail now." I examined the hunter's apprentice from top to toe thoughtfully. "Mikhail Tolstoy."
He would be husky when fully grown, and he already had the stare hunters develop--a faraway look, as if their meat eyes can pierce the flesh of their fellows. He was just a shade too stolid, a shade too . . . unimaginative.
No, I decided, he wasn't what I was waiting for.
But he would do.
"Per." Karma almost spat the word. "Go away."
"Oh, no." My smile widened, if that was possible. It was precisely the reaction I'd expected. Hunters are rarely so predictable. "Is that any way to treat an old friend, Jack?" My tone dropped, even more intimate. "Or do you want to die with that mark on you, mein kleiner Jager?"
The little apprentice, his aura already showing the sparks and spikes of those among you who wield belief, dropped back two steps. His hand twitched, as if he wished he had a gun, too. Stolid, but ready to do battle.
I could already tell he was going to be fun.
"Son of a bitch." Jack was losing the purity of his Berliner accent. He must have been already speaking English again in preparation for crossing the Atlantic. Not that he would reach the Americas, of course.
But his apprentice would. At the very least, I'd see to that.
"You could invite me in." My lips closed over my teeth. I slid on my somber mask. "We have much to discuss, you and I."
PRIMACY
Much later
I thought I had learned everything your flesh had to teach me, and I despaired. Well, at least a little. Then Mikhail Tolstoy, the cub become wolf, took an apprentice in his fading years. He brought her to the Monde Nuit.
I had tried, you see, to re-create some of the breathless years just after my un-father stepped into your world for the third time, in the year of your Lord 1918: cabarets, heedless abandon, and the like. I prefer my nourishment flavored with the gasping, intense explosion of asphyxiation and orgasm combined, but without a certain . . . ferment that my quasi-father's presence had spurred. A frothing, a yeasting, like the beer Jack Karma drank. I did my best with what I had, a shipwrecked mahogany bar and a bartender--Riverson, one of your kind, a man whose filmed gray eyes were not blind. I merely borrowed them every once in a while--with his consent, of course.
Always with your consent.
Mikhail came to question me about a certain case. They fancy themselves Polizei, the hunters. Bra
ve sheriffs of the nighttime. Tin stars and ten-gallon hats, or maybe that was the sand talking. Of all the places Mikhail could have chosen, he settled on the desert. Sand, poison, and venom, blinding salt-pan days and icy nights. Hot and cold, no middle ground.
Just like her. His apprentice. At last.
Dark hair, threaded with those silver charms. A mismatched gaze--one brown eye, one blue. Modernity is kind to male creatures--it has given us leather pants, skintight T-shirts, and waterproof kohl that rings a woman's eyes. The old Russian wolf dropped his hand to his gun. He did not have Jack Karma's grasp, but advances in firepower had made their job, such as it is, easier.
"Now now, tovarisch." I wagged my index finger back and forth, the past bending over onto the present like one of your ingenious paper fans. Muscovite Russian is so fluid; it drips from the tongue like honey. I had expected him to go home, but maybe he thought he could wipe out his past here.
All the Caucasians who flooded the Americas thought so. The indigenous population knew better, but who thought to ask them?
"Hellspawn." He chose English, and his apprentice--in the long leather coat that copied his, and copied Jack Karma's, and had become a sort of uniform for them despite its origins--did not even look at me. She looked past, at my brethren on the dance floor, waltzing demurely to the stylings of a trio of siblings who had traded with me for singing voices to rival the birds.
All it cost them was their hands, and their obedience. I am, always, a patron of the arts.
It was her blue eye, I realized. The thought that she had visited my home for even a short while pushed a frisson through me, from tip-top to toe and out through every invisible part as well.
"Watch yourself," Tolstoy continued, tapping the butt of his right-hand gun once, twice. His English was not native, but it was passable. "You have lovely nest here. I would hate to have to burn it."
That brought her gaze back to me.
"Charmed," I replied, and congratulated myself for wearing the blandest, softest version of my skin today. She would underestimate me. They all did. "Well, what is it to be, Gospodin? I am, as ever, your servant."