Still, it was a great show.
Nowadays, I’m semiretired. I can afford to be; as one of only two surviving band members I have a nice little income, and when I’m feeling bored I play piano in a fetish bar called the Red Room. I’m not into rubber myself (too sweaty), but you can’t deny it makes a terrific insulator.
By now you may have gathered—I’m a night person. Daylight rather cramps my style; and besides, fire needs a night sky to show to best advantage. An evening in the Red Room, playing piano and eyeing the girls, then downtown for rest and recreation. Not a scene that my brother frequents; and so it was with some surprise that I ran smack into him that night, as I was checking out the nicely flammable back streets of the Upper East Side, humming “Light My Fire” and contemplating a spot of arson.
I didn’t say? Yes, in this present Aspect, I have a brother. Brendan. A twin. We’re not close; Wildfire and Hearth Fire have little in common, and he rather disapproves of my flamboyant lifestyle, preferring the more domestic joys of baking and grilling. Imagine that. A firegod running a restaurant—it makes me burn with shame. Still, it’s his funeral. Each of us goes to hell in his own way, and besides, his flame-grilled steaks are the best in the business.
It was past midnight, I was a little light-headed from the booze—but not so drunk that you’d have noticed—and the streets were as still as they get in a city that only ever shuts one eye. A huddle of washouts sleeping in cardboard boxes under a fire escape; a cat raiding a Dumpster. It was November; steam plumed from the sewer grates and the sidewalks were shiny with cold sweat.
I was just crossing the intersection of Eighty-First and Fifth, in front of the Hungarian meat market when I saw him, a familiar figure with hair the colour of embers tucked into the collar of a long grey coat. Tall, slim and ballet quick; you might almost have been forgiven for thinking it was me. Close scrutiny, however, reveals the truth. My eyes are red and green; his, on the other hand, are green and red. Anyway, I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing those shoes.
I greeted him cheerily. “Do I smell burning?”
He turned to me with a hunted expression. “Shh! Listen!”
I was curious. I know there’s never been much love between us, but he usually greets me, at least, before he starts with the recriminations. He called me by my true name. Put a finger to his lips, then dragged me into a side alley that stank of piss.
“Hey, Bren. What gives?” I whispered, correcting my lapels.
His only reply was a curt nod in the direction of the near-deserted alley. In the shadows, two men, boxy in their long overcoats, hats pulled down over narrow, identical faces. They stopped for a second on the kerb, checked left, checked right and crossed over with swift, effortless choreography before vanishing, wolfish, into the night.
“I see.” And I did. I’d seen them before. I could feel it in my blood. In another place, in another Aspect, I knew them, and they knew me. And believe me, they were men in form alone. Beneath those cartoon-detective overcoats they were all teeth. “What d’you think they’re doing here?”
He shrugged. “Hunting.”
“Hunting who?”
He shrugged again. He’s never been a man of words, even when he wasn’t a man. Me, I’m on the wordy side. I find it helps.
“So you’ve seen them here before?”
“I was following them when you came along. I doubled back—I didn’t want to lead them home.”
Well, I could understand that. “What are they?” I said. “Aspects of what? I haven’t seen anything like this since Ragnarók, but as I recall—”
“Shh—”
I was getting kinda sick of being shoved and shushed. He’s the elder twin, you know, and sometimes he takes liberties. I was about to give him a heated reply when I heard a sound coming from nearby, and something swam into rapid view. It took me a while to figure it out; derelicts are hard to see in this city, and he’d been hiding in a cardboard box under a fire escape, but now he shifted quick enough, his old overcoat flapping like wings around his bony ankles.
I knew him, in passing. Old man Moony, here as an Aspect of Mani, the Moon, but mad as a coot, poor old sod (it often happens when they’ve been at the juice, and the mead of poetry is a heady brew). Still, he could run, and was running now, but as Bren and I stepped out of his way, the two guys in their long overcoats came to intercept him at the mouth of the alley.
Closer this time—I could smell them. A rank and feral smell, half rotted. Well, you know what they say. You can’t teach a carnivore oral hygiene.
At my side I could feel my brother trembling. Or was it me? I wasn’t sure. I was scared, I knew that—though there was still enough alcohol carousing in my veins to make me feel slightly removed from it all. In any case I stayed put, tucked into the shadows, not quite daring to move. The two guys stood there at the mouth of the alley, and Moony stopped, wavering now between fight and flight. And—
Fight it was. Okay, I thought. Even a rat will turn when cornered. That didn’t mean I had to get involved. I could smell him too, the underpinning stench of him, like booze and dirt and that stinky sickly poet smell. He was scared, I knew that. But he was also a god—albeit a beat-up Aspect of one—and that meant he’d fight like a god, and even an old alky god like Moony has his tricks.
Those two guys might yet have a shock coming.
For a moment they held their position, two overcoats and a mad poet in a dark triangle under the single streetlight. Then they moved—the guys with that slick, fluid motion I’d seen before, Moony with a lurch and a yell and a flash from his fingertips. He’d cast Týr—a powerful rune—and I saw it flicker through the dark air like a shard of steel, hurtling towards the two not-quite-men. They dodged—no pas de deux could have had more grace—parting, then coming together again as the missile passed, moving in a tight axe-head formation towards the old god.
But throwing Týr had thrown Moony. It takes strength to cast the runes of the Elder Script, and most of his glam was already gone. He opened his mouth—to speak a cantrip, I thought—but before he could, the overcoats moved in with that spooky superhuman speed and I could smell their rankness once more, but so much stronger, like the inside of a badger’s sett. They closed in, unbuttoning their coats as they ran—but were they running? Instead they seemed to glide, like boats, unfurling their long coats like sails to hide and envelop the beleaguered moongod.