Jim Baen's Universe

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Fantasy Stories

Cryptic Coloration

Written by Elizabeth Bear

Illustrated by Chantelle Thorne

Katie saw him first. The next-best thing to naked, in cutoff camouflage pants and high-top basketball sneakers and nothing else, except the thick black labyrinth of neo-tribal ink that covered his pale skin from collarbones to anklebones. He shone like piano keys, glossy-sleek with sweat in a sultry September afternoon.

Katie already had Melissa's sleeve in her hand and was tugging her toward the crosswalk. Gina trailed three steps behind. "We have got to go watch this basketball game."

"What?" But then Melissa's line of sight intersected Katie's and she gasped. "Oh my fuck, look at all that ink. Do you think that counts as a shirt or a skin?" Melissa was from Boston, but mostly didn't talk like it.

"Never mind the ink," Katie said. "Look at his triceps."

Little shadowed dimples in the undersides of his arms, and all Katie could think of for a moment was that he wasn't terribly tall, and if she had been standing close enough when he raised his hands to take a pass she could have stood on tiptoe and licked them. The image dried her mouth, heated her face.

Melissa would have thought Katie silly for having shocked herself, though, so she didn't say anything.

Even without the ink, he had the best body on the basketball court. Hard all over, muscle swelling and valleying as he sprinted and sidestepped, chin-length blond hair swinging in his eyes. He skittered left like a boxer, turned, dribbled between his legs—quadriceps popping, calves like flexed cables—caught the ball as it came back up and leaped. Parabolic, sailing. Sweat shook from his elbows and chin as he released.

A three-point shot. A high geometric arch.

Denied when a tall black boy of eighteen or so tipped it off the edge of the basket, jangling the chain, and fired back to half court, but that didn't matter. Katie glanced over her shoulder to make sure Gina was following.

"God," Melissa purred. "I love New York."

Katie, mopping her gritty forehead with the inside of her T-shirt collar, couldn't have agreed more.

So it was mid-September and still too hot to think. So she was filthy just from walking through the city air.

You didn't get anything like the blond boy back home in Appleton.

Melissa was a tall freckled girl who wore her hair in red pigtails that looked like braided yarn. She had a tendency to bounce up on her toes that made her seem much taller, and she craned over the pedestrians as they stepped up onto the far curb. "There's some shade by the—oh, my god would you look at that?"

Katie bounced too, but couldn't see anything except shirts. "Mel!"

"Sorry."

Flanking Gina, two steps ahead of her, they moved on. Melissa was right about the shade; it was cooler and had a pretty good view. They made it there just as the blond was facing off with a white-shirted Latino in red Converse All-Stars that were frayed around the cuffs. "Jump ball," Gina said, and leaned forward between Katie and Melissa.

The men coiled and went up. Attenuated bodies, arching, bumping, big hands splayed. Katie saw dark bands clasping every finger on the blond, and each thumb. More ink, or maybe rings, though wouldn't it hurt to play ball in them?

The Latino was taller; the blond beat him by inches. He tagged the ball with straining fingertips, lofted it to his team. And then he landed lightly, knees flexed, sucked in a deep breath while his elbows hovered back and up, and pivoted.

It wasn't a boy, unless a man in his early thirties counted.

"Holy crap," said Gina, who only swore in Puerto Rican. "Girls, that's Doctor S."

****

Wednesday at noon, the three mismatched freshman girls who sat in the third row center of Matthew Szczegielniak's 220 were worse than usual. Normally, they belonged to the doe-eyed, insecure subspecies of first-year student, badly needing to be shocked back into a sense of humor and acceptance of their own fallibility. A lot of these young girls reminded Matthew of adolescent cats; trying so hard to look serene and dignified that they walked into walls.

And then got mad at you for noticing.

Really, that was even funnier.

Today, though, they were giggling and nudging and passing notes until he was half-convinced he'd made a wrong turn somewhere and wound up teaching a high school class. He caught the carrot-top mid-nudge while mid-sentence (Byron, Scott), about a third of the way through his introductory forty minutes on the Romantic poets, and fixed her with a glare through his spectacles that could have chipped enamel.

A red tide rose behind her freckles, brightening her sunburned nose. Her next giggle came out a squeak.

"Ms. Martinchek. You have a trenchant observation on the work of Joanna Baillie, perhaps?"

If she'd gone any redder, he would have worried about apoplexy. She stared down at her open notebook and shook her head in tiny quick jerks.

"No, Doctor S."

Matthew Szczegielniak rubbed his nose with the butt of his dry-erase marker, nudging his spectacles up with his thumbnail. He wasn't enough of a problem child to make his students learn his last name—even the simplified pronunciation he preferred—though the few that tried were usually good for endless hours of entertainment.

Besides, Matthew was a Mage. And magic being what it was, he would be hard put to imagine a more counterproductive activity than teaching three hundred undergrads a semester how to pronounce his name.

****

Enough heat of embarrassment radiated from Melissa's body to make Katie lean on her opposite elbow and duck her head in sympathy. She kept sneaking looks at Doctor S., trying to see past the slicked ponytail, the spectacles, the arch and perfectly bitchy precision of his lecturing style to find the laughing half-naked athlete of the day before.

She'd thought he was probably gay.

Sure, books, covers, whatever. It was impossible to believe in him exultant, shaking sweat from his hair, even though she'd seen it, even though the image fumed wisps of intrigue through her pelvis. Even though she could see the black rings on every finger and each thumb, clicking slightly when he gestured. She couldn't understand how she had never noticed them before. And never noticed the way he always dressed for class, though it was still hotter than Hades; the ribbed soft-colored turtleneck that covered him from the backs of broad hands to the tender flesh under his throat, the camel- or smoke- or charcoal-colored corduroy blazer that hid the shape of his shoulders and the width of his chest.

It was maddening, knowing what was under the clothes. She wondered if the barbaric tattoos extended everywhere, and flushed, herself, at least as bright as Melissa. And then brighter, as she felt the prof's eyes on her, as if he was wondering what she was thinking that so discomfited her.

Oh, lord, but wouldn't that have hurt?

On the other hand, he'd had the insides of his arms done, and the inner thighs. And that was supposed to hurt like anything, wasn't it?

And then she noticed that his left ear was pierced top to bottom, ten or a dozen rings, and sank down in her chair while she wondered what else he might have had done. And why she'd never noticed any of it—the rings, the earrings, the ink, the muscles—any of it, before.

"Oh, God," she whispered without moving her lips. "I'm never going to make it through this class."

But she did. And leaned up against the wall beside the door afterwards, shoulder-to-shoulder with Melissa while they waited for Gina to come out. Quiet, but if anybody was going to do something crazy or brave or both, it would be her. And right now, she was down at the bottom of the lecture hall, chatting up the professor.

"Oh, God," Katie moaned. "I'm going to have to switch sections. I didn't hear a word he said."

"I did. Oh, God. He knows my name." Melissa blushed the color of her plastic notebook cover all over again. Her voice dropped, developed a mocking precision of pronunciation. "Ms. Martinchek, maybe you can tell me about Joanna Ballyhoo . . ."

"Baillie." Gina, who came up and stood on tiptoe to stick a purple Post-it note to Melissa's tit. "He wrote it down for me. This way you can impress him next week."

Melissa picked the note off her chest and stared at it. "He uses purple Post-it notes?"

"I was right," Katie said. "He's gay."

"Do you want to find out?"

"Oh, and how do you propose we do that? Check the BiGALA membership roster?" Melissa might be scoffing, but her eyes were alight. Katie swallowed.

Gina checked her wristwatch. She had thick brown-black hair swept up in a banana clip, showing tiny curls like inverted devil horns at her pale nape. "He's got office hours until three. I say we grab some lunch and drop off our books, and then when he leaves we see where he goes."

"I dunno." Katie crossed her arms over her notebook. "It's not like playing basketball with your shirt off is a crime. . . ."

"It's not like following someone to see where they go is a crime, either," Melissa pointed out. "We're not going to . . . stalk him."

"No, just stalk him."

"Katie!"

"Well, it's true." But Melissa was looking at her, and . . . she had come to Manhattan to have adventures. "What if we get caught?"

"Get caught . . . walking down a public street?"

Right. Whatever. "We could just look him up in the phone book."

"I checked. Not listed, amigas. Maybe it's under his boyfriend's name."

Even Melissa blinked at her this time. "Jesus Christ, Gomez. You're a criminal mastermind."

****

Those same three girls were holding up the wall when Matthew left the lecture theatre, climbing up the stairs to go out by the top door. He walked past, pretending not to notice them, or the stifled giggles and hiccups that erupted a moment later.

He just had time to grab a sandwich before his office hours. Almost one o'clock; probably nothing left but egg salad.

He needed the protein anyway.

He supplemented the sandwich with two cartons of chocolate milk, a bag of sourdough pretzels and three rip-top packets of French's mustard, and spread the lot out on his desk while he graded papers for his Renaissance drama class. With luck, no students would show up except a lonely or neurotic or favor-currying Ph.D. candidate, and he could get half of the papers done today.

He had twenty-four sophomores and juniors, and of the first ten papers, only two writers seemed to understand that The Merry Wives of Windsor was supposed to be funny. One of those was a Sociology major. Matthew was a failure as a teacher. He finished the sandwich, blew crumbs off his desk so he wouldn't leave mayonnaise fingerprints on the essays, and tore open the pretzels before he sharpened his red pencil one more time.

Honey mustard would have been better. He should get some to stick in his desk. Unless it went bad. Honey didn't go bad, and mustard didn't go bad. Logically, an amalgam would reflect the qualities of both.

The spike of ice and acid through the bones of his hands originated from his iron Mage's rings, and it not only made him drop a pretzel—splattering mustard across the scarred wooden desk—but it brought him to his feet before he heard the police sirens start.

He glanced at the clock. Five more minutes. "That which thou hast promised thou must perform," he said, under his breath.

He left his lunch on the desk and found his keys in his pocket on the way to the door.

****

Their quarry almost ran them over as they were on their way in to start stalking him. Katie sidestepped quickly, catching Gina across the chest with a straight left arm. Melissa managed to get herself out of the way.

Doctor S. was almost running. His corduroy jacket flapped along the vent as he skidded between pedestrians, cleared four concrete steps in a bounce, and avoided a meandering traffic jam of students with as much facility as he'd shown on the basketball court. And if Katie had begun to suspect that it was just a bizarre case of mistaken identity, the toreador side step around the lady with the baby carriage would have disabused her. Doctor S. moved with force and grace that were anything but common to academia.

Katie turned to follow him. It was only a small gesture to catch Gina's wrist, and without more urging, Gina trotted along beside her. Which was good, because Gina was strong and stubborn, even if she was only three apples high. Melissa took two more beats to get started, but her longer legs soon put her into the lead. "Slow down," Katie hissed, afraid that he would notice them running after him like three fools in a hurry, but frankly, he was getting away.

So when Melissa glared at her, she hustled, like you do. And Gina actually broke into a trot.

Doctor S. strode east on 68th, against traffic, towards the park. He never glanced over his shoulder, but kept rubbing his hands together as if they pained him. Maybe the rings were the magnet kind, for arthritis or something. RSI.

"I can't believe I never noticed he wears all those rings."

"I can't believe I never noticed the muscles," Melissa answered, but Gina said "Rings?"

"On all his fingers?" Melissa was too busy dodging pedestrians to give Gina the were you born that stupid or do you practice hard? look, and Katie was as grateful as she could spare breath for. They were disrupting traffic flow, the cardinal sin of New York's secular religion. Katie winced at another glare. Somebody was going to call her a fucking moron any second.

Gina sounded completely bemused. "I never noticed any rings."

Doctor S. continued east on 68th past Park Ave., down the rows of narrow-fronted brick buildings with their concrete window ledges. By the time he crossed Madison Ave., she was sure he was headed for the park. Every so often he actually skipped a step, moving as fast as he possibly could without breaking into a purse-snatcher sprint.

. . . he wasn't going to the park.

Halfway between Park and Fifth Avenue—which, of course, unlike Park, was on the park—traffic was gummed up behind flashing lights and restraining police. Doctor S. slowed as he approached, stuffing his hands back into his pockets—"Would you look at that?" Gina said, and Katie knew she, too, had suddenly noticed the rings—and dropping his shoulders, smallifying himself. He merged with the gawking crowd; Katie couldn't believe how easily he made himself vanish. Like a praying mantis in a rosebush; just one more green thorn-hooked stem.

"Okay," Melissa said, as they edged through bystanders, trying not to shove too many yuppies in the small of the back. "Stabbing?"

"Sidewalk pizza," Gina the Manhattanite said, pointing up. There was a window open on the sixth floor of one of the tenements, and Katie glimpsed a blue uniform behind it.

"Somebody jumped?"

"Or was pushed."

"Oh, God."

Gina shrugged, but let her hip and elbow brush Katie's. Solace, delivered with the appearance of nonchalance. And then, watching, Doctor S. seem to vanish between people, betrayed only be metallic gleams of light off slick hair. She could pick him out if she knew where to look, if she remembered to look for the tan jacket, the hair. Otherwise, her eyes seemed to slide off him. Creepy, she thought. He's almost not really there.

And then she thought of something else. And maybe Melissa did too, because Melissa said, "Guys? What's he doing at a crime scene?"

"Or accident scene," Gina said, unwilling to invest in a murder without corroboration.

"Maybe he's a gawker."

"Ew." Katie tugged Gina's sleeve. "We should see if we can get closer. He probably won't notice us." And then she frowned. "How did he know about it?"

"Maybe he has a scanner in his office?"

"So he's a vulture."

"Maybe he's an investigator. You know. Secret, like."

Katie rolled her eyes. "Right. Our gay college prof is Spiderman."

Gina snorted. "Hey. Everybody knows that Spidey and Peter Parker have a thing."

Melissa hunched down so her head wouldn't stick up so far above the crowd. Her hair was as bad as Doctor S.'s, and she didn't have his knack for vanishing into the scenery. "Gina," she said, "you go up, and tell us what's going on."

"I've seen dead people, chica."

"You haven't seen this one," Melissa said. "Go on. It might be important."

Gina shrugged, rolled her eyes, and started forward. And Melissa was right; a five foot tall Latina in gobs of eyeliner did, indeed, vanish into the crowd. "Criminal mastermind," Melissa said.

Katie grinned, and didn't argue.

****

This was the part of the job that Matthew liked least. There was no satisfaction in it, no resolution, no joy. The woman on the pavement was dead; face down, one arm twisted under her and the other outflung. She'd bounced, and she hadn't ended up exactly where she'd hit. She'd been wearing a pink blouse. Someone in the crowd beside him giggled nervously.

Matthew figured she hadn't jumped. He checked his wards—pass-unnoticed, which was not so strong as a pass-unseen, and considerably easier to maintain—and the glamours and ghosts that kept him unremarkable

His hands still ached; he really wished somebody would come up with a system for detecting malevolent magic that didn't leave him feeling like a B-movie bad guy was raking his fingerbones around with a chilled ice pick.

He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, buttoned the middle button on his jacket, and hit speed dial. He was one of five people who had the Promethean archmage's reach-me-in-the-bathtub number; he didn't abuse the privilege.

"Jane Andraste," she said, starting to speak before the line connected. He hadn't heard it ring on his end. "What's going on?"

"Apparent suicide at Fifth and 68th." He checked his watch. "It tickles. I'm on the scene and going to poke around a little. Are any of the responders our guys?"

"One second." Her voice muffled as she asked someone a question; there was a very brief pause, and she was back on the line. "Marla says Marion Thornton is en route. Have you met her?"

"Socially." By which he meant, at Promethean events and rituals. There were about two hundred Magi in the Greater New York area, and like Matthew, most of them held down two jobs: guardian of the iron world by night, teacher or artist or executive or civil servant by day.

They worked hard. But at least none of them had to worry about money. The Prometheus Club provided whatever it took to make ends meet. "I'll look for her."

"She'll get you inside," Jane said. "Any theories yet?"

Matthew crouched amid rubberneckers and bent his luck a little to keep from being stepped on. The crowd moved around him, but never quite squeezed him off-balance. Their shadows made it hard to see, but his fingers hovered a quarter-inch from a dime-sized stain on the pavement, and a chill slicked through his bones. "Not in a crowd," he said, and pulled his hand back so he wouldn't touch the drip accidentally. "Actually, tell Marion to process the inside scene on her own, would you? And not to touch anything moist with her bare hand, or even a glove if she can help it."

"You have a secondary lead?"

"I think I have a trail."

"Blood?"

It had a faint aroma, too, though he wouldn't bend close. Cold stone, guano, moist rancid early mornings full of last winter's rot. A spring and barnyard smell, with an underlying acridness that made his eyes water and his nose run. He didn't wipe his tears; there was no way he was touching his face after being near this.

He dug in his pocket with his left hand, cradling the phone with the right. A moment's exploration produced a steel disk the size of a silver dollar. He spat on the underside, balanced it like a miniature tabletop between his thumb and first two fingers, and then turned his hand over. A half-inch was as close as he dared.

He dropped the metal. It struck the sidewalk and bonded to the concrete with a hiss, sealing the stain away.

"Venom," Matthew said. "I've marked it. You'll need to send a containment team. I have to go."

When he stood, he looked directly into the eyes of one of his giggly freshmen.

"Ms. Gomez," he said. "Fancy meeting you here. Sorry I can't stay to chat."

****

Gina was still stammering when she came back. "Did you see that? Did you see that?"

Katie hadn't. "Just the backs of a bunch of tall people's heads. What happened?"

"I was trying to stay away from him," Gina said. "And he just appeared right beside me. Poof. Poof!"

"Or you weren't looking where you were going," Katie said, but Melissa was frowning. "Well?"

"He did just pop up out of nowhere," Melissa said. "I was watching Gina, and he kind of . . . materialized beside her. Like he stood up all of a sudden."

"He's the devil." Gina shook her head, but she sounded half-convinced.

Katie patted her on the shoulder, woven cotton rasping between her fingertips and Gina's flesh. "He could have been tying his shoe."

"Right," Gina said, stepping out from under Katie's hand. She pointed back to the crowd. "Then where did he go?"

****

Even glamoured, he couldn't run from a murder scene. The magic relied on symbol and focus; if he broke that, he'd find himself stuck in a backlash that would make him the center of attention of every cop, Russian landlady, and wino for fifteen blocks. So instead he walked, fast, arms swinging freely, trying to look as if he was late getting back from a lunch date.

Following the smell of venom.

He found more droplets, widely spaced. In places, they had started to etch asphalt or concrete. Toxic waste indeed; it slowed him, because he had to pause to tag and seal each one.

How it could move unremarked through his city, he did not know. There were no crops here for its steps to blight nor wells for its breath to poison.

Which was not to say it did no harm.

These things—some fed on flesh and some on blood and bone. Some fed on death, or fear, or misery, or drunkenness, or loneliness, or love, or hope, or white perfect joy. Some constructed wretchedness, and some comforted the afflicted.

There was no telling until you got there.

Matthew slowed as his quarry led him north. There were still too many bystanders. Too many civilians. He didn't care to catch up with any monsters in broad daylight, halfway up Manhattan. But as the neighborhoods became more cluttered and the scent of uncollected garbage grew heavy on the humid air, he found more alleys, more byways, and fewer underground garages.

If he were a cockatrice, he thought he might very well lair in such a place. Somewhere among the rubbish and the poison and the broken glass. The cracked concrete, and the human waste.

He needed as much camouflage to walk here undisturbed as any monster might.

His hands prickled ceaselessly. He was closer. He slowed, reinforcing his wards with a sort of nervous tic: checking that his hair was smooth, his coat was buttoned, his shoes were tied. Somehow, it managed to move from its lair to the Upper East Side without leaving a trail of bodies in the street. Maybe it traveled blind. Or underground; he hadn't seen a drop of venom in a dozen blocks. Worse, it might be invisible.

Sometimes . . . often . . . otherwise things had slipped far enough sideways that they could not interact with the iron world except through the intermediary of a Mage or a medium. If this had happened to the monster he sought, then it could travel unseen. Then it could pass by with no more harm done than the pervasive influence of its presence.

But then, it wouldn't drip venom real enough to melt stone.

Relax, Matthew. You don't know it's a cockatrice. It's just a hypothesis, and appearances can be deceptive.

Assuming that he had guessed right could get him killed.

But a basilisk or a cockatrice was what made sense. Except, why would the victim have thrown herself from her window for a crowned serpent, a scaled crow? And why wasn't everybody who crossed the thing's path being killed. Or turned to stone, if it was that sort of cockatrice?

His eyes stung, a blinding burning as if he breathed chlorine fumes, etchant. The scent was as much otherwise as real; Matthew suffered it more than the civilians, who would sense only the miasma of the streets as they were poisoned. A lingering death.

He blinked, tears brimming, wetting his eyelashes and blurring the world through his spectacles. A Mage's traveling arsenal was both eclectic and specific, but Matthew had never before thought to include normal saline, and he hadn't passed a drugstore for blocks.

How the hell is it traveling?

At last, the smell was stronger, the cold prickle sharper, on his left. He entered the mouth of a rubbish-strewn alley, a kind of gated brick tunnel not tall or wide enough for a garbage truck. It was unlocked, the grille rusted open; the passage brought him to a filthy internal courtyard. Rows of garbage cans—of course, no Dumpsters—and two winos, one sleeping on cardboard, one lying on his back on grease-daubed foam reading a two-month-old copy of Maxim. The miasma of the cockatrice—if it was a cockatrice—was so strong here that Matthew gagged.

What he was going to do about it, of course, he didn't know.

His phone buzzed. He answered it, lowering his voice. "Jane?"

"The window was unlocked from the inside," she said. "No sign of forced entry. The resident was a 58-year-old unmarried woman, Janet Stafford. Here's the interesting part—"

"Yes?"

"She had just reentered secular life, if you can believe this. She spent the last thirty-four years as a nun."

Matthew glanced at his phone, absorbing that piece of information, and put it back to his ear. "Did she leave the church, or just the convent?"

"The church," Jane said. "Marion's checking into why. You don't need to call her; I'll liaise."

"That would save time," Matthew said. "Thank you." There was no point in both of them reporting to Jane and to each other if Jane considered the incident important enough to coordinate personally.

"Are you ready to tell me yet what you think it might be?"

Matthew stepped cautiously around the small courtyard, holding onto his don't-notice-me, his hand cupped around the mouthpiece. "I was thinking cockatrice," he said. "But you know, now maybe not certain. What drips venom, and can lure a retired nun to suicide?"

Jane's breath, hissing between her teeth, was clearly audible over the cellular crackle. "Harpy."

"Yeah," Matthew said. "But then why doesn't it fly?"

"What are you going to do?"

"Right now? Question a couple of local residents," he said, and moved toward the Maxim-reading squatter.

The man looked up as he approached; Matthew steeled himself to hide a flinch at his stench, the sore running pus down into his beard. A lot of these guys were mentally ill and unsupported by any system. A lot of them also had the knack for seeing things that had mostly dropped otherwise, as if in being overlooked themselves they gained insight into the half-lit world.

And it didn't matter how he looked; the homeless man's life was still a life, and his only. You can't save them all. But he had a father and mother and a history and a soul like yours.

His city, which he loved, dehumanized; Matthew considered it the responsibility that came with his gifts to humanize it right back. It was in some ways rather like being married to a terrible drunk. You did a lot of apologizing. "Hey," Matthew said. He didn't crouch down. He held out his hand; the homeless man eyed it suspiciously. "I'm Matthew. You have absolutely no reason to want to know me, but I'm looking for some information I can't get from just anybody. Can I buy you some food, or a drink?"

****

Later, over milkshakes, Melissa glanced at Katie through the humidity-frizzled curls that had escaped her braid and said, "I can't believe we lost him."

The straw scraped Katie's lip as she released it. "You mean he gave us the slip."

Melissa snorted. On her left, Gina picked fretfully at a plate of French fries, sprinkling pinched grains of salt down the length of one particular fry and then brushing them away with a fingertip. "He just popped up. Right by me. And then vanished. I never took my eyes off him."

"Some criminal mastermind you turned out to be," Katie said, but her heart wasn't in it. Gina flinched, so Katie swiped one of her fries by way of apology. A brief but giggly scuffle ensued before Katie maneuvered the somewhat mangled fry into her mouth. She was chewing salt and starch when Melissa said, "Don't you guys think this is all a little weird?"

Katie swallowed, leaving a slick of grease on her palate. "No," she said, and slurped chocolate shake to clear it off. Her hair moved on her neck, and she swallowed and imagined the touch of a hand. A prickle of sensation tingled through her, the same excitement she felt at their pursuit of Doctor S., which she had experienced only occasionally while kissing her boyfriend back home. She shifted in her chair. "I think it's plenty weird."

She wasn't going to ask the other girls. Melissa had a boyfriend at Harvard that she traded off weekends with. Gina was . . . Gina. She picked up whatever boy she wanted, kept him a while, put him down again. Katie would rather let them assume that she wasn't all that innocent.

Not that they'd hate her. But they'd laugh.

"What are we going to do about it?" she asked, when Melissa kept looking at her. "I mean, it's not like he did something illegal."

"You didn't see the body up close."

"I didn't. But he didn't kill her. We know where he was when she fell."

Gina's mouth compressed askew. But she nodded, then hid her face in her shake.

Melissa pushed at her frizzing hair again. "You know," she said, "he left in a hurry. It's like a swamp out there."

"So?"

"So. Do you suppose his office door sticks?"

"Oh, no. That is illegal. We could get expelled."

"We wouldn't take anything." Melissa turned her drink with the tips of her fingers, looking at them and the spiraling ring left behind on the tabletop, not at Katie's eyes. "Just see if he has a police scanner. And look for his address."

"I'm not doing that," Katie said.

"I just want to see if the door is unlocked."

Melissa looked at Gina. Gina shrugged. "Those locks come loose with a credit card, anyway."

"No. Not just no."

"Oh, you can watch the stairs," Gina said, sharp enough that Katie sat back in her chair. Katie swallowed, and nodded. Fine. She would watch the goddamned stairs.

"You want to finish?" she asked.

Gina pushed her mangled but uneaten fries away. "No, baby. I'm done."

****

The man's name was Henry; he ate an extraordinary amount of fried chicken from a red paper bucket while Matthew crouched on the stoop beside him, breathing shallowly. The acrid vapors of whatever Matthew hunted actually covered both the odor of unwashed man and of dripping grease, and though his eyes still watered, he thought his nose was shutting down in protest. Perversely, this made it easier to cope.

"No," Henry said. He had a tendency to slur his speech, to ramble and digress, but he was no ranting lunatic. Not, Matthew reminded himself, that it would matter if he was. "I mean, okay. I see things. More now than when I got my meds"—he shrugged, a bit of extra crispy coating clinging to his moustache—"I mean, I mean, not that I'm crazy, but you see things out of the corner of your eye, and when you turn? You see?"

He was staring at a spot slightly over Matthew's left shoulder when he said it, and Matthew wished very hard that he dared turn around and look. "All the damned time," he said.

The heat of the cement soaked through his jeans; the jacket was nearly unbearable. He shrugged out of it, laid it on the stoop, and rolled up his sleeves. "Man," Henry said, and sucked soft meat off bones. "Nice ink."

"Thanks," Matthew said, turning his arms over to inspect the insides.

"Hurt much? You don't look like the type."

"Hurt some," Matthew admitted. "What sort of things do you see? Out of the corners of your eyes?"

"Scuttling things. Flapping things." He shrugged. "When I can get a drink it helps."

"Rats? Pigeons?"

"Snakes," Henry said. He dropped poultry bones back into the bucket. "Roosters."

"Not crows? Vultures?"

"No," Henry said. "Roosters. Snakes, the color of the wall."

"Damn." Matthew picked up his coat. "Thanks, Henry. I guess it was a cockatrice after all."

****

What happened was, Katie couldn't wait on the stairs. Of course she'd known there wasn't a chance in hell that she could resist Melissa. But sometimes it was better to fool yourself a little, even if you knew that eventually you were going to crack.

Instead, she found herself standing beside Gina, blocking a sight line with her body, as Gina knocked ostentatiously on Doctor S.'s door. She slipped the latch with a credit card—a gesture so smooth that Katie could hardly tell she wasn't just trying the handle. She knocked again and then pulled the door open.

Katie kind of thought she was overplaying, and made a point of slipping through the barely-opened door in an attempt to hide from passers-by that the room was empty.

Melissa came in last, tugging the door shut behind herself. Katie heard the click of the lock.

Not, apparently, that that would stop anybody.

Katie put her back against the door beside the wall and crossed her arms over her chest to confine her shivering. Gina moved into the office as if entranced; she stood in the center of the small cluttered room and spun slowly on her heel, hands in her hip pockets, elbows awkwardly cocked. Melissa slipped past her—as much as a six foot redhead could slip—and bent over to examine the desk, touching nothing.

"There has to be a utility bill here or something, right? Everybody does that sort of thing at work. . . ."

Gina stopped revolving, striking the direction of the bookshelves like a compass needle striking north—a swing, a stick, a shiver. She craned her neck back and began inspecting titles.

It was Katie, after forcing herself forward to peer over Gina's shoulder, who noticed the row of plain black hardbound octavo volumes on one shelf, each with a ribbon bound into the spine and a date penned on it in silver metallic ink.

"Girls," she said, "do you suppose he puts his address in his journal?"

Gina turned to follow Katie's pointing finger and let loose a string of Spanish that Katie was pretty sure would have her toenails smoking if she understood a word. It was obviously self-directed, though, so after the obligatory flinch, she reached past Gina and pulled the most recently dated volume from the shelf.

"Can I use the desk?" The book cracked a little under the pressure of her fingers, and it felt lumpy, with wavy page-edges. If anything was pressed inside, she didn't want to scatter it.

Melissa stood back. Katie laid the book carefully on an uncluttered portion of the blotter and slipped the elastic that held it closed without moving the food or papers. The covers almost burst apart, as if eager to be read, foiling her intention to open it to the flyleaf and avoid prying. The handwriting was familiar: she saw it on the whiteboard twice a week. But that wasn't what made Katie catch her breath.

A pressed flower was taped to the left-hand page, facing a column of text. And in the sunlight that fell in bars through the dusty blind, it shimmered iridescent blue and violet over faded gray.

"Madre di Dio," Gina breathed. "What does it say?"

Katie nudged the book farther into the light. "14 October 1995," she read. "Last year, Gin."

"He probably has the new one with him. What does it say?"

"It says 'Passed as a ten?' and there's an address on Long Island. Flanagan's, Deer Park Avenue. Babylon. Some names. And then it says 'pursuant to the disappearance of Sean Roberts—flower and several oak leaves were collected from a short till at the under-21 club.' And then it says 'Faerie money?' Spelled F-a-e-r-i-e."

"He's crazy," Gina said definitively. "Schizo. Gone."

"Maybe he's writing a fantasy novel." Katie wasn't sure where her stubborn loyalty came from, but she was abruptly brimming with it. "We are reading his private stuff totally out of context. I don't think it's fair to judge by appearances."

Gina jostled her elbow; Katie shrugged the contact off and turned the page. Another record of a disappearance, this one without supporting evidence taped to the page. It filled up six pages. After that, a murder under mysterious circumstances. A kidnapping . . . and then some more pages on the Roberts disappearance. A broken, bronze-colored feather, also taped in, chimed when she touched it. She jerked her finger back.

One word underneath. "Resolved." And a date after Christmastime.

Doctor S., it seemed, thought he was a cop. A special kind of . . . supernatural cop.

"It sounds like Nick Knight," Melissa said. Katie blinked, and realized she had still been reading out loud.

"It sounds like a crazy man," Gina said.

Katie opened her mouth, and suddenly felt as if cold water drained down her spine. She swallowed whatever she had been about to say and flipped the journal to the flyleaf. There was indeed an address, on West 60th. "He's not crazy." Not unless I am.

"Why do you say that?" Melissa asked,