Urban Enemies (Cainsville 4.5)

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.