Irregulars: Stories by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Ginn Hale and Astrid Amara (54 page)

“But that’s what we’re asking,” Falk replied.

Jason scowled down at his hands. Flecks of his own dried blood pebbled his right palm.

“You’re free to refuse,” Falk told him with another of those crooked smiles, though now the expression looked dark and cynical. “But the fact remains that Phipps is likely to come after you whether we’re protecting you or not. If you were smart, you’d invite us along.”

Jason nodded, not because he agreed so much as he couldn’t disagree. He could hardly process all of this. And it felt suddenly like the first night he’d spent in St. Mary’s, half out of his mind with horror while soft-spoken doctors and nurses had told him what would be best for him and locked him in a small room where the bed was bolted to the floor.

He wondered how it could be that, in discovering that he wasn’t insane and never had been, his life had actually become more unbelievable and farther beyond his control? At least before there had been a real world where monsters didn’t exist. A real world that he could hope to one day belong to. Now that was lost to him.

Jason closed his eyes and for a moment cast his thoughts back past all this confusion to the moment he’d first woken this morning, when everything had been calm and hopeful. He thought of the melody that he’d planned to perform for Mr. Phipps’s special customer. The soothing refrain played through his memory and Jason let it calm him.

At last he forced himself to look up and face the two agents in front of him. “So, how will this work? You guys stake out the place where I’m staying and I wear a wire or something?”

“No wires.” Falk shook his head. “They’re too unreliable where magic is concerned. Too conductive to outside influences.”

Gunther nodded in agreement with Falk and then went on, “We’ll place agents around you, and since Falk’s with us, we’ll also be able to have him shadow you through the shade lands.”

“Should I ask what the shade lands are or will it just confuse me more?” Jason inquired. “Because I’m feeling pretty close to my limit of confusion right now, but I need to know what’s going to be happening to me.”

Gunther looked slightly concerned, but Falk just gave a rough laugh.

“Have you had anything to eat this morning?” Falk asked.

“I didn’t have time—”

“Why don’t we go grab us a couple sandwiches or something?” Falk suggested. “Maybe somewhere a little more comfortable. And NATO will foot the bill.”

“Sure.” The suggestion struck Jason as relievingly mundane. “I’d like that.”

“Carerra hasn’t gotten back in—” Gunther began in a low whisper to Falk.

“Just tell her I felt I needed to relocate to a point of greater personal geomantic power. She’s already sure I’m a kook.” Falk smiled in that oddly knowing manner. “And who knows, it could be true.”

“What geomantic location are you thinking of?” Gunther asked.

“Mac’s joint.” Falk sounded almost wistful. “Is it still around?”

“No. Mac passed five years back.” Gunther shook his head. “His diner’s a Starbucks now.”

For just a moment the shadows of Falk’s face deepened. Then he turned his attention back to Jason. “Why don’t you pick. You got a favorite spot?”

“I like the HRD Coffee Shop, just off Third and Tabor Alley,” Jason suggested. Despite what Falk had said about paying, he thought he should keep things in a range he could hope to afford. Maybe someday he’d eat somewhere as exotic and refined as Michael Mina, but right now he just wanted to escape to cheap, cheerful, and above all, familiar surroundings.

Falk gave him a nod. “All right then. Let’s go get some grub.”

Gunther and Falk escorted him out of the small room through a rather dull corridor of what looked like offices. When Jason kept his gaze straight ahead, he encountered only beige walls cement floor, and ordinary men and women dressed for business.

But occasionally, he glimpsed a flare of brilliant color or a strange, beastly countenance just over the frames of his glasses. And once, when he glanced up at the ceiling, the periphery of his vision filled with thousands of arcane symbols, blazing like stars against a fathomless darkness. Looking directly through his glasses, he saw only a yellow Casablanca ceiling fan wheeling in slow circles beneath a white plaster ceiling and banks of florescent lights.

Tellingly, he couldn’t hear a hint of traffic or the busy street life that usually filled the city.

“Where are we exactly?” Jason asked.

“San Francisco headquarters,” Gunther replied.

“Underground,” Falk added.

“You mean we’re in tunnels under the city?” Jason asked.

Falk just nodded.

Jason remembered fellow patients at St. Mary’s whispering about the vast system of tunnels supposedly lying below San Francisco, but he’d never really believed any of their stories. At the time the descriptions of secret subterranean bunkers and missile control rooms had struck him as paranoid delusions. Now, walking these immense corridors where the elongated silhouettes of black cats and red-eyed goblins slunk through his peripheral vision, it struck him that a secret military base was actually rather mundane—even a little unimaginative.

As they progressed, passersby laden with black folders and stacks of files greeted Gunther warmly but took in Falk’s presence with an odd uncertainty, as if he was someone they knew of but never imagined they’d meet, like Santa Claus or Jack the Ripper.

One pretty young woman admitted that she’d thought Half-Dead Henry had gone over to the other side, while a plump, bald man recalled his superior officer disappearing for a week while he supposedly attended Falk’s funeral.

“But that was back in the weird old days, you know, when all the monarchies were being overthrown and none of our agents would say what they were really doing out in the other realms.” The bald man stopped in front of a door marked Lower Incantations. “It must be nice to be back now that things have straightened up.”

“Sure,” Falk replied, but he didn’t linger on the subject or in the other man’s company. Instead he turned away. Gunther and Jason followed after him.

The gold plaques designating each door they passed offered Jason an almost surreal sense of the types of work that went on behind them—Sacrifice Licensing, Enchantment Residue Analysis, Transformation Vaults, NATO Irregular Affairs Division Payroll—but none proved to be their destination.

As they walked farther, he began to wonder if they were lost. And he almost asked, but then they turned a corner and came to a halt where the hallway abruptly ended in a wide expanse of gray concrete. The air smelled of the subway and someone had stenciled a mishmash of city transit routes, street maps, and timetables across the concrete wall in front of them. To the far left stood several steel bike racks where—among mountain bikes, ten speeds, and a few brooms—Jason’s battered green bicycle leaned at an expectant angle.

Aside from a few additional chips in the paint, his bike looked to be in good shape, which Jason found relieving. It had been his one reliable form of transportation since he was sixteen.

He gripped the handlebars and took a kind of comfort in the solid reality of them. Nothing strange or hidden here, just simple machinery laid bare. For just a moment he could pretend that the world was still the same as it had been yesterday.

When he looked up from the bike, he saw Falk take a piece of white chalk from one of his pockets and scrawl something on the cement wall. Beneath that he drew the tall rectangle and simple circle that a child might have used to depict a door and its knob.

A delighted smile lit Gunther’s handsome face.

“I’ve always wanted to see how they used to do this back in the day,” he commented to Jason, as if Jason could have any idea of what he really meant.

“The door’s the easy part, really. The trick is deciding whether you trust yourself enough to walk through it.” Falk dropped the chalk back into a pocket of his stained trench coat and glanced to Gunther. “Are you coming or staying?”

Gunther looked torn but then shook his head.

“I’ve still got paperwork and background files. Commander Carerra will skin me alive if I wander off on a hobo adventure just now. But I’ll catch up with you later. No doubt Carerra will have orders for me to deliver to you.”

“Sure.” Falk gave the response in an offhanded manner as if his attention was already far away. Then he spat into his own palm and smacked his hand against the chalk doorknob.

Jason felt the hair standing up on his arms and along the back of his neck.

Then Falk blew out a long slow breath.

It was hardly anything, and yet Jason’s stomach flipped as if he’d suddenly dropped twenty feet. For just an instant he thought he saw a white mist rising at the edges of his vision. Peering over the fames of his glasses, Jason saw Falk blaze to a silver brilliance. He looked radiant, almost beautiful, but far too bright to keep gazing at.

Jason shifted his attention to the concrete wall and realized that the outline of the door wasn’t just a line of chalk anymore. Bright white afternoon light poured in at its edges. A warm beam fell across Jason’s arm as he walked his bicycle closer.

Falk pushed door open and blinding sunlight poured into the dim hallway. Jason smelled frying onions and noticed the noise of street traffic rumbling over pedestrian conversations. A car alarm went off and then stopped.

Falk stepped out into the light and Jason blindly followed him out of the dark into the mundane squalor of Tabor Alley. When Jason glanced back he found nothing remained of the door but a few scratches in the graffiti tagged across the brick wall behind him.

Chapter Four

The HRD Coffee Shop was not a coffee shop, Henry noted, but more like a greasy spoon diner that had collided with an Asian taco truck back in the seventies and was still reeling with dark wood paneling and flecked Formica. The sweating cooks behind the grill served up pancakes, turkey dinners, fried rice, pork tacos, kimchi burritos, and Mongolian cheesesteaks to a throng of seedy customers.

As he and Jason worked their way to the counter, Henry noted that several burly cooks seemed to know Jason by sight and greeted him warmly. The Hispanic girl working the register offered him a sisterly grin and judged his new glasses to be “very smart”. Jason laughed at that, then after a moment of consideration, ordered a kimchi burrito.

“I love that there’s so much to choose from here,” Jason commented to Henry. “It’s like free will on a menu board.”

“Certainly more exotic than most coffee shops from my day,” Henry agreed. Still he chose to play it safe his first day back among the living and ordered the Mongolian cheesesteak.

“It’s not all that spicy,” Jason assured him and Henry tried not to smirk at the young man’s concern.

They seated themselves at the narrow bar. While Jason mulled over the variety of hot sauces, mustards, and soy sauce on offer, Henry studied the place more closely. It was cheap, run down, and certainly quirky, but for all the exotic menu items and condiments, it remained utterly human.

Not a trace of otherworldly magic hung in the pungent, oily air. Not a single nixie lurked among the newly delivered boxes of napkins. No restless ghosts lent their unearthly chill to the wheezing beverage cooler. The place was clean, at least in terms of supernatural activity. The countertop seemed a little on the sticky side.

Still, Henry could understand why Jason felt comfortable in this cramped dive. It was entirely free of illusions. And in a city like San Francisco, seated atop so many portals and populated by such a diverse variety of both the unearthly and undead, Jason probably tripped over a displaced ogre, a slumming djinn, or an out-of-work kelpie every time he stepped out his front door. After only one supernatural encounter the average man generally flipped his lid. More than a few ended up on the evening news, wearing nothing but tinfoil beanies and screaming at invisible pixies.

Hell, a good fifth of NIAD’s recruits were picked up en route to psych wards.

But somehow Jason had eluded detection for years. It could have been a coincidence, but Henry didn’t think so. Too much about Jason seemed designed to be overlooked, misfiled, and forgotten. Henry didn’t think he’d ever met a man who better embodied the average nice-guy qualities that so easily melted from memory. Just one more in a sea of boys next door who claimed no fixed address in anyone’s awareness.

Henry stole a sidelong glance at the young man as he briskly anointed his burrito with bright red sriracha sauce. A subtle dexterity played through his long hands. The speed of his motions brought to mind a few of the genuine magicians Henry had known—not those flashy con men on darkened stages, but the rare people whose bodies pulsed with magic.

And yet, Henry couldn’t catch even a whisper of power from the young man. So, either he was the best fake Henry had ever encountered or the power within him had been hidden very deeply indeed: carved into his bones and then buried beneath layers of anonymity spells. Jason was definitely too young and too inexperienced to have done such a thing himself.

“You have much family here?” Henry asked.

“Me?” Jason glanced to Henry as if he expected him to be addressing someone else.

“I wasn’t asking myself.”