The Nimble Man m-1 Read online

"He never believed that another mage would demonstrate the skill necessary to actually track him," Doyle said, grim satisfaction etched upon his face. "And, Heaven forbid that they did, he left a warning that should have successfully ended the trail."

  She looked about the platform. There were people waiting, but not half as many as there should have been at this time of the morning. "But Sweetblood wasn't counting on you being the one doing the looking, was he?" she asked, playing with the man's cockiness.

  Doyle's smile was fleeting. "He never recognized my talents," the sorcerer said, walking to the end of the platform. A homeless man surrounded with shopping bags full of empty cans snoozed against a wall and Doyle was careful not to wake him as he peered down the tunnel into the inky darkness beyond. "He thought me incapable of mastering the weirdling ways."

  "I guess you showed him," Eve muttered, standing by his side. She noticed that some of the commuters had begun watch then with interest. "If you're thinking of continuing this little expedition down into the tunnel you might want to use some of that mojo you're so good at so nobody calls the transit police in to arrest our asses."

  Doyle looked away from the tunnel and toward the small crowd waiting for the next train. "Ah yes, prying eyes," he said, his own eyes sparking with mystical blue energies. "Perhaps I'll make them see us as workers from one of the utility companies," he said, a strange, lilting spell upon his lips as he raised a hand, barely visible wisps of supernatural manipulation streaming from his fingertips to work their magick upon nosey commuters.

  Eve heard the rustling of plastic bags and turned to see that the homeless man had awakened from his slumber and was staring at them.

  "You don't want to go down there," the man said, his voice gravely and rough, as if not used to speaking. He hooked a dirty thumb toward the tunnel entrance behind where he sat. "Some nasty shit goin' on down there." The poor soul was covered in grime and was dressed in multiple layers of clothing, the shoes upon his feet held together with wrappings of electrical tape. A foul odor of misery wafted up from him, an aroma he seemed perfectly content to wallow in.

  Doyle had turned from the subway crowd. "A friend of yours, Eve?"

  "Just a concerned citizen," she told the mage.

  The man brought his legs up to his chest. "Stuff not meant to be seen by the likes of us," he said, beginning to rock from side to side. "Somethin' bad's comin', I know," he said, his pale, green eyes glazing over as he rocked. "And it ain't ridin' the train, oh no. It's comin' in real style. That's it. Real style."

  Doyle stared at the rambling man, then reached into the pocket of his coat and drew out a small billfold. She wasn't exactly sure how much money it was, but Doyle didn't even glance down to count it as he leaned forward to present it to the homeless man. "Thank you so much for your assessment," he said. "We'll keep it in mind."

  The homeless man took the money from Doyle and looked at it briefly, before stashing it amongst the layers of his clothing.

  "Coming, Eve?" Doyle asked as he stepped down off the platform into space. There was a good seven feet to the tracks below, but that didn't seem to hinder the mage's progress. It was if the air beneath him had thickened and he drifted unharmed to the tunnel floor.

  "Don't spend that all in one place," she told the man as she followed the mage off the platform. Eve leaped down into the darkness and landed in a graceful crouch, careful to avoid the electrical bite of the third rail. Electrocution wouldn't kill her, but she doubted it would be a very pleasant experience.

  Able to see as well in the darkness as in the light, she spotted Doyle waiting against the tunnel wall. He gestured for her to follow.

  "Quickly now," he urged.

  The subway was filthy and she made a conscious effort to keep from making any contact with the walls. "Damn. This is not a place for suede. I should have left my jacket back in the car." She had purchased the coat only recently in Milan and did not want it ruined.

  "Your clothing should be the least of your worries, my dear," Doyle said as he held his hand out before him, a sphere of light glowing from a space just above his palm, lighting his way.

  "Are you trying to scare me?" she asked, watching the rats scurrying about in the shadows, bothered by their presence. "Me?"

  He stopped before an ancient metal door, its surface caked with ages of dust, dirt and corrosion. It was also padlocked. "You mean after all you've seen thus far you're not scared already?" He placed one of his hands against its rusted surface.

  A subway train squealed somewhere close by and she wondered if it was coming their way. "I've faced the wrath of God," she said, watching him at the door. "I've had more terrifying dates than this."

  A tiny smile played at the edges of Doyle's mouth. "Ah, yes. Sometimes I forget." Doyle took his hand away from the door. "We'll need to get through here," he said, pointing to the rusted padlock. "Do the honors?"

  Eve reached over and tore the lock free with a single tug, rust smearing her palm and fingers.

  "I don't suppose you have anything that I could use to wipe my hand?" she asked the mage as he went through the door. With a sigh, she resigned herself to the fact that her wardrobe was going to be ruined.

  Eve wiped her hands upon her denim-clad legs and joined Doyle in the tiny entryway. There was a metal staircase leading down into further darkness, which her companion had already begun to descend, his eerily glowing hand lighting the way. That staircase ended at another door, which led to a cramped hallway that took them to another even older-looking door that had been sealed shut with planks of wood nailed to the frame.

  "Let me guess," Eve said as she grabbed hold of the first piece of wood and ripped it from its moorings. "You want these removed as well."

  Doyle stepped back, giving her room to work. "Astute as well as beautiful," he observed. "Traits not commonly found together these days, I'm sorry to say."

  Eve smiled. "When He made me He broke the mold."

  The last board came away from the frame with a metallic shriek as the old nails were torn from the wood, and the door stood revealed.

  "Allow me," Doyle said, sliding back a corroded deadbolt on the door with some minor difficulty. The rusted joints squealed as he yanked the door open, a damp, ancient smell wafting out to greet them.

  "Smells old," Eve observed, following the mage through the doorway and out onto what appeared to be another, far more antiquated version of a subway platform. "Even by my standards."

  "It should," he replied, raising his arm to shed further light upon the forgotten chamber. "It's been sealed up tight since 1899 when the major construction was begun on the subway tunnels above us. This was part of the old Grand Central Depot."

  There was definitely something to this place, Eve thought, something in the air that hinted of a power as old as Creation. Whatever was going on here, there was more to it than rains of toads or some antisocial sorcerer hiding out. She walked the platform, her footfalls leaving prints in the inch-thick dust that had settled there since the close of the nineteenth century.

  "Very good, Lorenzo," she heard Doyle say to himself, his voice as sibilant whisper in the lost station. "But not good enough."

  She sensed movement close by, the stale air rushing around her, and turned to see a shape shambling out of the darkness of the tunnel they had just journeyed through. Eve tensed for a fight, but it was the homeless man who had tried to warn them off before. She frowned. Doyle had cast a spell before to blind people back on the platform to their presence. But this filthy creature had seen them.

  He leaped up from the tracks to the platform, where he landed without making a sound.

  "It appears there is more to our poor soul than meets the eye," Doyle said. "I'd thought madness responsible for his resistance to magick. Now it seems not."

  The man strode toward them, his duct-taped shoes making a strange scuffing sound upon the concrete-and-dust-covered surface of the platform.

  "What gave him away?" Eve asked, watching the figure wit
h a predator's gaze. "It was the seven-foot jump that clinched it for me."

  "I'll leave you to deal with this complication," Doyle said, his voice reaching her from somewhere on the platform behind her, "while I endeavor to bring our search to an end."

  Eve didn't respond to Doyle, choosing instead to keep her eyes upon her would be attacker. "Don't want any trouble," she told the man.

  The homeless man stopped his advance, glaring at her with eyes that now seemed to glow with an eerie inner power. "The Mage must not be disturbed," he roared, in a new and terrible voice.

  She wondered if he was possessed.

  But then the man began to grow and his clothes tore as his musculature was altered, bones twisting grotesquely along with his flesh. As she watched the transformation, she doubted that this thing had ever really been human at all. Spiny protrusions erupted from the new flesh beneath the old. The creature reared back, stretching to its full height, and she saw that it had more than doubled in size, torn skin hanging from its body in tatters.

  "For nigh upon a century have I guarded this place," its voice rumbled through a mouth filled with jagged, razor teeth. "I shall not fail in my duty now."

  It came at her then with speed belying its size. She dodged from its path, leaping onto the wall and clinging there, insectlike.

  The demon fixed her in its gaze, head cocked, yellow eyes glinting with surprise. It tilted its head back and sniffed the air as she hissed. Eve sprang at it from her purchase upon the wall.

  "Vampire," it growled in disgust, slapping her viciously away, the sharp protrusions that adorned its body shredding the soft suede of her Italian coat as well as the delicate pale flesh beneath.

  Eve rolled across the filthy floor and came up quickly, coiled upon her haunches. She felt the bestial side of her nature awaken, the canines elongating within her mouth, fingernails curling to talons.

  "Did I forget to mention how much I hate that fucking word," she spat, and she lunged at her foe, a thirst for the blood of her enemy taking her to the brink of madness.

  It was a place she had been so many times before.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A stray cat with fur the color of copper and one white ear trotted along Rue Dauphine, darting out of the paths of tourists strolling the New Orleans streets and sniffing at air redolent with the aromas of the city's famous cuisine. Most people did not even notice the stray. Despite the glitter of its later development, in its heart it was still an old city at heart, home to countless rats, and stray cats were not only inevitable in such an environment, but welcome. An old Cajun man sat on the stoop in front of a barbershop whose window frames were badly in need of a new coat of paint. He called out to the cat as it passed, almost as though the two were old friends. Otherwise the stray went on without interruption.

  If anyone had taken enough interest they might have observed that the cat seemed far more single-minded than most of its species. Rather than wandering, lured by tempting smells or idle curiosity, it seemed to have purpose.

  Most of the traffic in the French Quarter was on foot. Quickly, though, the stray was moving away from the core of the Quarter, and there were more cars rumbling by and fewer people on the sidewalks. There were children searching for summertime diversions, but none of the street performers who livened up the cobblestones of the Quarter.

  Soon the stray left Rue Dauphine and began a winding journey that took it past buildings that had been beautiful once, their balconies and facades elegant and proud. Now they were falling apart, paint faded and cracked, and where there might once have been flower pots upon the balconies or outside of windows there were now cases of empty beer bottles and washing hung out to dry.

  On a corner, the cat paused and perched on its haunches, staring first into the air above it at something visible only to its eyes, then across the street at a barroom called Charmaigne's. Only the first half of its neon sign was glowing, and even that was dim in the sunlight. A pair of police cars were parked askew in front of the place and across the street was a third car, this one with no police markings but with a blue light spinning behind the rear windshield.

  No spectators had gathered on the sidewalk outside the barroom. It wasn't that kind of neighborhood.

  The cat stared for a long minute at the grimy plate glass windows of Charmaigne's. The barroom door was propped open with a cinderblock but with the sunshine so bright it was only darkness inside. At length the stray set of across the street. It paused beside one of the New Orleans P.D. squad cars, then slipped beneath the vehicle. The cars had been there long enough that the engine was not even warm above the stray.

  With a practiced, feline nonchalance, the cat went up onto the sidewalk and slipped into the steamy, fan-swirled gloom inside Charmaigne's. Two uniformed police officers stood just inside the door on either side, as though they were concerned someone might try to escape the stale beer and bad cigar stink of the place. A third officer stood in the center of the barroom with a man in a white shirt with rolled-up cuffs and a loosened black tie. His hair had been cut with a military severity and he wore a gun on one hip, a badge clipped to the other.

  At their feet was the corpse of a boy, perhaps fifteen years of age, who lay on his belly in a pool of his own blood. His face was sideways, one cheek on the floor in the coagulating crimson, the other turned upward, the diffuse sunlight in the darkened barroom creating an otherworldly sheen upon his ebony skin. He was not the only corpse in Charmaigne's. Behind the bar there was a second dead man, a wiry former fighter named Calvin Traviligni, known to most as Trav. Trav had tended bar at Charmaigne's for seventeen years and had taken a bullet to the face, crashed into a rack of bottles and died in a puddle of broken glass and a potpourri of spilled whiskey, vodka, rum and gin. No liqeuers. Nobody in this part of town drank that shit.

  At the back of the room a fourth uniformed officer sat with a young black girl who wore too much make up. Old before her time, Jaalisa had been on her way home after a long night on the only job she'd ever known, a job her father had first given her, and heard the shots. Saw a car tearing off down the street. She insisted to the officer that she had seen nothing more.

  The stray took all of this in immediately and it darted across the room and slide along the base of the bar beneath the lazily whirling fans. The beer and cigar smells were ingrained in the wood, but the new scent of fresh blood hung in the air like a fresh coat of hell's own paint. The cat was skittish at the smell of blood but did not let its instincts turn it away. The plainclothes cop, a detective, noticed it, and the cat noticed him noticing, but they ignored one another.

  At the back of the bar the cat went to a corner booth that was draped in shadows, not far at all from where Jaalisa was being interviewed, squeezed for some vital detail that might make this crime more than a statistic. The stray leaped up onto the bench of that booth and sat down.

  And then it changed.

  The only sound was a low rush of air, like a man inhaling suddenly. Flesh rippled and bone stretched with impossibly fluidity. Where the cat had been, Clay Smith now sat staring at Sergeant John Brodsky, the uniformed cop who had called him down here in the first place.

  Deja vu. Clay had first been in Charmaigne's forty-seven minutes earlier. He and Brodsky had a passing acquaintance based almost entirely upon Clay's reputation. He wasn't a private investigator, but for a wealthy resident of the Quarter he had found himself in the midst of enough murder investigations in recent years — and was invaluable in solving nearly all of them — that some of the members of the N.O.P.D. had come to rely upon him. Other cops, however, detectives in particular, despised him.

  Clay didn't mind. It was never about being liked.

  A call on his mobile phone from Brodsky had brought him to Charmaigne's before the department had sent a homicide detective down. That was better for everyone, politics-wise. He had talked to Brodsky, heard about Jaalisa's 911 call, the deaths of Trav and the kid on the floor, and nodded once.

  Then he h
ad gone to work.

  Someone had gunned the kid in the doorway while Trav was getting the place cleaned up for business. The bartender always came in early to wash the floor, wipe down the tables, all the things that nobody wanted to do when they were closing up at 3 a.m. The kid — whom no one had identified yet — had obviously run in through the door and then been shot in the back. Trav had been a witness, and witnesses have a very short life expectancy.

  Clay had examined both bodies without touching them. He had made a show of considering the crime scene. But that was just for the sake of the cops who were watching him, trying to figure out how he did it.

  They couldn't see the tether.

  The souls of murder victims never passed on to the afterworld immediately. Always, they clung to their victims for a time, crying out for vengeance, perhaps hoping someone will hear their anguish. If Clay reached the victim within the first few hours after their murder he could still see the tether, an ethereal trail of ectoplasm that stretched from the hollow shell that had been the victim's flesh all the way to the current location of the soul.

  The soul that was attached like a lamprey to its killer.

  Clay had followed the tether out the door of Charmaigne's and then on a twisting path through the French Quarter. Eventually, it had led him back here.

  The voices of the policemen and the tired, hard-edged words of the prostitute seemed like church whispers as they drifted through the bar. Clay slid from the rear booth and stood up, black shoes scuffing the floor. He wore tan chinos and a simple, v-necked navy blue t-shirt and his hair was freshly cut. In this neighborhood he would have stood out, been noticed by everyone he passed. But nobody had noticed a stray cat with copper fur and one white ear.

  Clay started toward the front of the bar.

  Sergeant Brodsky looked up sharply from questioning Jaalisa, notepad and pen in his hands, and he frowned deeply, then stood up and moved to block Clay's path.

  "I didn't even see you come in," Brodsky said.