Powers (2 page)

He dragged himself back to present danger. What he did next probably wasn’t smart. He did things like that now and then, things that gave him the total shakes when hindsight kicked in. Then he’d start thinking about his brothers, the ones he knew about, and his sister, and how their stories all ended with them seeking death. And finding it.

He stood up, walked over to the old gas stove, and dropped three coins into a cast-iron skillet he’d left out to dry over the pilot light after washing up from breakfast. Clinkety-clinkety-clink, the proper sound of gold hitting iron, they bounced and rattled and settled and stayed put. They didn’t vanish with a sizzle and puff and a stink of rotten eggs when they touched cold iron. Not fairy gold.

He picked them up and turned back to the table. The demon’s “face” looked vaguely amused. Or maybe not—Albert didn’t have that much experience in reading demon expressions.

That’s the point where second thoughts kicked in and he realized the chance he’d taken. He could have ended up as a smeared layer a molecule or two thick, adding fresh stains to the peeling wallpaper, for insulting his visitor. He wished his brain worked faster, but he’d never claimed to be a genius. Just slow and steady and persistent to the point of pig-headed. Mind or body, he wasn’t built for speed.

He bulled ahead, his usual move when he stepped in that kind of shit. “Who wants to hire me? What do you mean by
act?
”

“Our name is Legion. One of your kind has been abusing our companions. We wish you to stop this abuse.”

Companions.
Albert sorted through memories of Mother by gaslight, or did that flickering yellow gleam in her eyes come from a candle, an oil lamp?
A fire at the mouth of a cave to keep the dire wolf and saber-tooth at bay? Tales in the drowsy fog before sleep, anyway, tales of the land where she was born across the sea or under the mountain or in flying castles above the clouds.

Too many tales, too many words, with no proof that any single word was true. Mother could weave a tale that made you smell the spilled guts of fresh-dead corpses on a battlefield and hear the rustle of raven wings over the groans of the dying, then the next day tell another story with the same heroes very much alive ten years or ten centuries later.

Companions. Companions to spirits, demons, angels—not
pets,
as such, not something owned. Not something equal, either.

Elementals.

Sprites of earth, wind, water, fire, not things of thought and speech and reason. The heart or soul of the grove, the spring, the stone, the mountain cave, the deep and darksome tarn. Blue flame dancing free of the coals of a dying cook-fire.

And someone had been . . .
abusing
 . . . them. This could get messy.

“Why don’t you deal with the problem yourselves?” Hey, King David or Elijah or some other Bible guy got away with arguing with
God.
This was just a demon.

Mother had warned Albert to never trust a demon. Legends again, most cultures—demons didn’t care what happened to mortals, and they seemed to enjoy playing tricks. Plus, they twisted language for their own amusement, seeming to promise one thing and then delivering something quite different.
Nasty
different.

The demon squinted at Albert, as if it read his mind. Maybe it could. “Your kind created the problem. Your kind must deal with it, or face the consequences.”

Talk about guilt by association. “Consequences”—Albert didn’t like the sound of that. Brought up images of Sodom and Gomorrah, it did. Another example of why he didn’t really care whether he was talking to an angel or a demon. Either could be just as rough on innocent bystanders.

Not really.
His brain ran off on another tangent, still trying to dodge.
Angels generally get the worst of any comparison. Demons tempt or torture individuals. Angels visit the Wrath of God on whole cities or tribes or nations and they don’t bother to file an environmental impact statement first.

“Why me?”

As soon as he said it, he realized how silly that sounded. He’d meant it as an actual question rather than the classic whine of Job goosed by God’s fickle finger.
Why do they want to hire me, rather than a detective or some wizard or perhaps a priest? I’m just a maybe-man who has managed to live a long, long time, and forgotten most of it.

Detective, wizard, priest. In all the various and nefarious ways I’ve earned or stolen a living, I’ve never been a detective. Outside of a special bond with iron and steel, I don’t have enough magic in my whole body to light a match without striking it on the box. I’ve never been able to sort out the true Word of God from the lies men spin as easily as they breathe. Like I said, why me?

At that point he decided he needed another beer. Maybe the demon wanted another, too. He had no idea what effect alcohol had on the spirit world. If he’d stopped to think about it, the vision of a drunken demon probably would have pushed him over the edge to run screaming down Main Street. But the demon nodded when he waved another Shipyard in its direction. Albert pulled a fresh six-pack out and set it on the table between them, no reason to stint. Hell, he might not live to finish another.

The demon smiled. Albert
thought
it was a smile. It still showed too many pointed teeth and a hunter’s eyes, like a leopard or wolf shape-shifted into human form. “You see things that others do not see. You hear things that others do not hear. You do not seek dominion over men. We know that you respect our companions.”

It gestured toward the living room on the far side of the kitchen doorway, at the old fireplace that used to be the sole heat of the room, back when Albert’s family first bought the pile of crumbling brick and dry rot fronting on South Union. Four fireplaces on each floor, originally, one drafty pitiful heat-waster for each of the front and rear rooms of this deep narrow row-house apartment, with a long cold tunnel of space in between. Say what you want about the sad decline of civilization and the golden Elder Days, Albert thought central heating and flush toilets were grand ideas.

He’d had a mason reopen and line one fireplace and flue when he had the whole apartment torn apart for renovations about fifty years ago. He didn’t like to let strangers past his door, but roof leaks had gone far beyond the drip-bucket stage and he didn’t mess with gas lines and electricity. They bit.

Yeah, I don’t like strangers in my lair. More to the point, skilled work costs money. That pile of gold—I pinch every penny that comes my way. I have to. I can earn a dollar here and there by day labor, but a steady job, paying good money? With every piece of official paper forged? Not likely. My driver’s license, the other documents, they’re good enough by themselves. But I can’t afford the kind of paper that stands up to a serious check.

Sell my blades? Custom knives and swords bring real money, but you need to be a public person to make the sale, fair to middling famous in the collector’s world. I don’t dare walk that path.

He couldn’t even wave a birth certificate under some official nose. As far as Immigration was concerned, he was another illegal just arrived from Canada or Mexico. Sure, he’d lived in the U.S. for over a century and a half. Fat chance on proving
that
to a judge. Only reason he didn’t get hassled more, his blond hair and blue eyes made him
look
like he belonged. Except for being short, and even
that
made the cops ignore him. Short people, especially short people walking with a cane and limp, aren’t seen as a threat.

So, most repairs, he did himself or did without. Besides the money problem, too many awkward questions could come up, like the almost-human skeleton in tarnished silver chains bricked up inside an offset in one wall. He could remove that one and dump it, bone by bone out on the river or in the woods, but he couldn’t guarantee that the bones would stay separate and dead . . .

He shivered at the memory. There were other memories of this place that could give him the shivers too, but now he let salamanders come and go and play in the fireplace, kept dry wood laid on the hearth for them. He’d come back to the place in the morning or late evening and find cold ashes where he’d left wood, sometimes felt and smelled a difference when he started a fire himself to give life to the space. Elementals of air and fire helped clear out the ghosts, the must and dust of old wood and plaster, made the air smell fresh and clean and friendly, and they respected the limits he’d set for them.

His eyes stung. He took a deep swig of beer, probably drinking too much too fast, or not—considering he had a demon sitting just across the table.

Yes, a lot of bad memories tied to this place. Still, bad memories or not, every time he’d given his feet to Mother’s wanderlust, turned nomad and gone on walkabout for twenty or fifty years, somehow he ended up back in this same room. He’d come back to find everyone he knew and cared about had vanished, or been replaced by grave markers.

Even Mother. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. Or something else.

“Simon Lahti, we know that you respect our companions, and you do not trust powers that are beyond mortal control. We know of this.”

That . . . name . . . repeated a third time as a charm. Icy fingers ran down his spine. “Simon Lahti” was
not
his name, neither the name on his current driver’s license nor the name he was known by many years ago, but it said things about him he’d prefer that no one knew. Not even demons.

Sure, in theory, he knew that Others lived all around him, not seen but seeing. He
knew
this, but he was just as capable as any man of forgetting it for years at a time. Now Legion kept rubbing his nose in it.

But that had nothing to do with finding out who abused elementals. The past was gone, and often had little connection with any particular future. And he couldn’t change it. The future, now, sometimes he could change
that.
What he
could
do . . .

Dangerous. Likely fatal. He refused to think about it. He got up from the table, surprised that his knees seemed willing to hold his weight. Crossed the kitchen to the front parlor, to the old oak roll-top desk that held those papers connected to his current name and station in the world. Found the nerve to pull out the bottom drawer on the left and took from
that
a linen bag, lurking alone in the solitary space
it
wanted, hand-loomed fabric brown with the grease of generations of fingers, smelling of time and graves.

A stream of yellow-brown dice spilled into his palm, small bone cubes hand-cut and less than perfect, the scratches and chips and grime of centuries not masking the runes slashed across the faces of each die. They’d belonged to Mother, and she’d left them when she vanished. Where
she
got them, God alone knew. But
which
God?

Sometimes they’d speak to him. He didn’t know how. Their magic lived inside them, came from the songs and smokes and potions and whispered spell-chants of whatever forest-witch or desert shaman had formed and smoothed them centuries ago.
If
they spoke, they spoke true.

Generally, they didn’t speak. No use at all for the stock market or picking horses. He didn’t know why. His small powers didn’t run that way.

He rolled them clicking in his cupped hands, looking off through plastered brick walls into the distance rather than at them. He thought about their number, twenty-seven, three-cubed of cubes, probably important and if he lost or cracked one they’d never speak again, or would speak gibberish. He thought about the demon, behind him and making the skin crawl up and down his spine. It had manifested small, no larger than Albert and he was practically a dwarf by modern standards. He knew that it could grow to the size of a mountain in an eye-blink if it wished, or shrink to a gnat and fly up his nose to eat his brains out from the inside.

He cast the bones on the floor, against the baseboard so they bounced and muttered and rattled on the broad pine boards. Out of that rattle, he heard a word, syllables and sounds in some language he’d never heard on any human tongue. But he knew what it meant.

Nothing vague and Delphic about
that.
He shuddered. Saying “no” to a demon . . .

He thought about the heap of gold on his kitchen table, wealth enough for lots of good food and good music, even a stereo or refrigerator newer than the last ice age. He got by, just barely, by not owning a car, not paying rent, staying away from medical care. His palms
itched
for that gold.

He found it hard to think straight with gold in the room. It wasn’t
just
money, that heavy soft rare metal. It seemed almost like a drug to him, sensuous in the way it called, the way it blocked sense and self-preservation—lust and envy and covetousness and the rest of that list rolled into one. Sort of like sex to humans.

But when the cubes spoke at all, they spoke true.

He gathered the cubes into a pile in his hands and cast them again, this time staring at them, at the spin and bounce and tumble of the runes, hoping against hope that the bound spirits or whatever would change their minds. Six letters formed among the runes, Roman characters, and then vanished again as soon as he’d noticed them.

REFUSE.

All capitals. The magic thought it needed to shout.

He decided he didn’t want to try again. After all, the bones just told him what he already knew.

Never
trust a demon.

As he thought that, the letters flashed again before fading back into dark runes cut into yellow bone and shaded with what looked like ancient blood. Runes he couldn’t read, runes he’d never seen in any book or museum in all his years and wandering. Maybe the magic itself had made them, for just this one set and purpose.

He shivered again. He gathered the cubes, dumped them rattling into their bag, and tucked the bag into its drawer, to wait in darkness for the next time someone called them, whether that someone would be him or Mother or some stranger that the magic first called to itself. He had a general idea of what would come next. Not specifics, no, but he
had
been getting bored with life.