Powers (3 page)

His brothers and his sister finally hunted for their deaths. His kind couldn’t count on age or disease to find them and give them rest.

But evidence said they weren’t immortal. Which might be just as well.

He stood up. He faced the demon.

“No.”

The demon lifted its right eyebrow, just the ridge of “skin” over “bone,” no hair—Albert noticed for the first time that it didn’t have any hair at all. That oversight told volumes about how his brain was working. Or wasn’t.

Fire spread from Legion’s fingers, coating walls, floor, ceiling, wood and plaster and brick alike, scorching and curling the faded wallpaper and boiling centuries of varnish and paint off wood. Black smoke filled the air, biting deep in Albert’s lungs and throat, and when he lifted his hand to cover his mouth he saw his skin blister and char. The pain hadn’t hit him yet, but heat drove deep into his flesh and bone, the demon raising the fires of hell to torment him.

“Breaker of guest-law!” He coughed the words out and tried to hold what little breath remained behind them. It had been easy to be philosophical about death, until he looked it straight in the face.

The burning froze. The demon walked through the flames to stand in front of him, frowning, a curl of smoke hooked in one nostril.

“Yes, your kind would use those words. And we accepted bread and salt from you, even if you did not bind us with peace-words in the giving.”

It gestured, and the flames vanished. The
damage
vanished. No smoke, no heat, no charred flesh on the hand in front of Albert’s face, no sense that anything at all had happened in his rooms. No pain.

Demons.

“We obey ‘guest-law.’ This house and hearth are sacred. But we will find you in another place.”

Which could mean the instant Albert stepped out of his door, or ten years or a hundred years from now, on the far side of the world. Who knew what time and space meant to a demon? Nothing, most likely . . .

The demon had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He decided that maybe he wasn’t ready to die yet.

“Where and when has this abuse happened? What can I do to stop it? Can I call on your kind and your companions for help?”

Time grows short. A week, two weeks, as mortals measure time.
The demon had said that.
Already, we feel change. Your kind broke the balance, opened the path. Repair it, or this world shatters.

The demon wasn’t telling him everything. Albert knew that. He headed down the stairs anyway. Down through the dark abandoned third floor of drifted musty dust and peeling wallpaper and chunks of age-broken horsehair plaster gritty on the wide-plank flooring, avoiding the first and fifth and eighth treads of the stairs—he didn’t invite people home, and anyone who fell through those worn old cracked boards should never have been there in the first place.

Shatters, and becomes what? “World” as universe, or planet, or laws of physics, or society? Repair what? This isn’t just about “companions.”
This was a demon speaking, maybe lying, maybe twisting double-meaning words into something hidden, very different.
Armageddon? Ragnarok? Or some demonic joke?

He stepped into the second floor, fancier with varnished hardwood flooring and plaster moldings around the ceiling but just as abandoned and stale with last year’s air, the old gaslight fixtures still in place, dust-furred gray sheets shrouding mahogany Victorian furniture: monstrosities bought new at the height of fashion back when Mother invited strange men home and lightened their pockets of excess gold. They’d owned this building for something like a century and a half, through a corporate fiction that didn’t draw official notice if it lived forever. The pizza joint’s rent paid the taxes these days, successor to a dozen similar greasy spoons or beer halls in the past.

He paused at the fireplace in the front parlor where a marble mantel and columns framed a blackened brick hollow that hadn’t felt heat in decades. Stooping, he left a pint of vodka, a brick of dark chocolate, a wedge of Emmenthaler, and half the remaining loaf of rye on the hearth. They wouldn’t be there when he came back. He didn’t know what happened to the empty bottles, or
want
to know.

Most people ignored the hearth-spirits of their homes. Mother had taught him the price of that. They’d take their due without the gift, and you’d never know why you lived under an unlucky roof. He’d give a pint of cheap vodka any day to keep those little . . . friends . . . out of his hair and cupboards. If they held drunken midnight parties with punk-rock music cranked up to “ten,” they did it in some pocket universe where he couldn’t hear.

On his way out, he picked up his cane where he’d left it next to the parlor door. He kept almost-innocent things like that scattered around his home, always in the same places where he could find them in the dark, a habit of long survival in dangerous places. Most people wouldn’t see a cane as a weapon, especially an orthopedic cane—rubber grip and rubber tip and what looked like a shaft of brushed aluminum. Sign of a cripple, not dangerous . . .

That’s why he carried it. He hefted the cane, stainless steel, much heavier than your eye would suspect, just in case. Enough weight to break a wrist, a knee, a skull—he’d done all three. Like many small people, he was much stronger than he looked.

He let his hands and the steel remember each other and loosed a twist he thought only his peculiar brain could work. The cane separated below the grip, unsheathing a foot-long blade of laminated steel, a fighting blade much more complex than his kitchen knives. The sight of it woke memories of smelting the raw ore, furnace panting like a live animal, carbon blending with iron under the blue-flamed red bank of charcoal. Then time outside of time at his forge fold-welding yellow-hot sparking metal again and again and yet again to judge the grain of the metal by its bending, wrapping keen brittle steel around the tough heart that made it strong, forming, grinding, heating, quenching, polishing to bring out the grain of watered silk—as keen and deadly a blade as his centuries of skill could conjure out of iron.

His city wasn’t a nice place. He didn’t live in a nice part of it. He didn’t think he’d
ever
lived in a nice place.

If the cops got nosy about why he always carried a cane, even if he walked like he was perfectly healthy, he could point to the sole of his right shoe, built up more than an inch—that leg was shorter than the left and not quite straight. Result of a tangle with a freight wagon, so Mother said, when he was two or three and playing where he shouldn’t. Medical care being what it was, or
wasn’t,
back then, he was lucky to have two legs. Another bit of his past he’d have to take her word for. He’d always limped from it, as far back as he could remember.

He headed down another set of dark dusty stairs, another set of treads that creaked their warning if he put a foot wrong. No, he hadn’t booby-trapped the place. He’d just learned to guard himself with what was available. Obvious traps were harder to explain to curious policemen than “accidents” and the wear of age.

The demon wasn’t telling him everything. He wondered, though, whether the things it
did
tell him were truth or lies. Why would a demon need his help? If it could flick its fingers and turn his apartment into hell’s inferno, it could do the same to whatever mortal was “abusing” its companions.

Or were those flames illusion? They’d looked real, felt real, smelled real, even to him. The demon wasn’t using metaphor when it said Albert could see things that others did not see. His senses weren’t human. He could see beyond the human range, into infrared and some into the ultraviolet. Likewise, he could hear above and below the human normal range. His nose twitched at scents that eluded most people.

Those were not blessings without price. They helped in working metal—judging fuels and fluxes and ores and the metals they become, judging heat, listening to the metamorphosis of iron becoming steel under his hammer—but he couldn’t stand crowds. People
stank,
and the modern world screamed noise at him from near and far.

Why would a demon need human help? Or
mortal
help, anyway, given that best guess says I’m not human? Maybe it has a bet down with its buddies? Betting on me, for or against?

He froze, one foot up in the air, and then put it back down on a safe stair tread. Another possibility had flitted through his head. He needed to examine it before he stuck his head into the noose.

If there was more than one demon involved . . . not bets, maybe, but either pranks or deadly warfare. Mother had told him that demons—angels, spirits, whatever—they didn’t get along any better than mortals. Just study Loki and his chummy relations with the other Æsir.

One demon was enough, more than enough. Getting involved in demon politics could be suicide. But did he have a choice?

He didn’t. He chased that idea down at least five dead-end alleys. Legion would kill him if he didn’t play its game, whatever its game turned out to be. Probably kill him in a way that took five days. The demon had made that plain. If Legion said “Shit!”—the only questions it allowed were “How much?” and “What color?”

Those thoughts got Albert nowhere, as well as to his front door. He checked the sidewalk through his peephole, unlocked, unbarred, and stepped through. With another twist of thought he reset it all from outside—that door was a lot stronger than it looked, a burglar would find it easier to break in through the brick wall to either side, and that was two feet thick.

He didn’t want visitors.

A gesture to convention and any watchers, he touched the crosses that marked and guarded both jambs of the doorframe, invoking God on this journey. He looked right and left, checking for threats again and then freezing like a suspicious rabbit. Dusk had crept in, somewhere during his encounter with the demon.

He didn’t know why or how, but they screwed up time as well as space. He’d been making lunch at noon. A few minutes later, he stepped out into late spring twilight heavy with the scents of threat and promise—a whiff of sweetish smoke from the opium den across the street mixed with the tomato and oregano and baking crust of the pizza joint, roasting coffee from the warehouse district, traces of coal tar from the gasworks and the paving.

Albert shook his head. Demons.

He walked across town as the town grew dark around him. Yes, walked. He knew it wasn’t normal, marked him as
different,
but he didn’t own a car. Beyond the budget problem, he didn’t
trust
cars. He should, he supposed, they were just clever metal-working on a larger scale, but he kept looking for the horse or team that wasn’t there. Besides, most machines felt . . . empty to him. Worked metal should have a heart, a soul, the trace and memory of the smith who’d forged it and woke life in it. Machines made by machines lacked that.

Irrational, maybe, but that’s what you got when you brought an old mind into the modern world.

He still twitched when one of those new electrics or hybrids whispered up behind him, not just horseless but without the rumble and whine of an engine to warn you it was coming. He didn’t have a phone, either, or a computer or a lot of other modern magic. Airplanes? He still remembered the first one that droned over his head, a kite of sticks and wire and cloth and an engine reeking of burned castor oil. You couldn’t make him fly in one for his weight in gold.

He walked in and out of the pools of light, through the reek of humans and their lives, past whores and street-side drug peddlers offering strange deaths. As always, he saw the city as the outsider he was, wondering why laws forced a man or woman into the risk of buying and selling on the street, the traders of flesh or chemicals working corners and alleys rather than a licensed house. He shuddered, remembering some of the published lab tests on street drugs, some of the rates of blood-borne and venereal disease in street whores of either sex. Make prostitution legal, allow it in designated areas, and neighborhoods wouldn’t be plagued with the crime. The sex workers would be safer, healthier, and so would their clients. Make drugs legal, they would cost maybe one percent of the black market price and wouldn’t kill the users anywhere near as fast. No
legal
house would risk its reputation on the psychos currently running the business.

Sanction and license the drug house across the street from his apartment, you’d pay a lot less and get exactly what you paid for. Content and dosage certified by independent lab. If you wanted to fry your brain, at least that way you fried it the way you wanted and sank into oblivion or hallucinations with a sober guard covering your ass.

But then the criminals
and
the cops
and
the politicians wouldn’t get rich off the transactions. Albert had grown cynical with age.

Flesh and drugs didn’t tempt him. Maybe that was part of not being human. Temptation
did
reach out and try to grab him by the ears, a whiskey-rough blues voice wafting down a side street from a bar he sometimes visited. Two blocks further on, a snatch of saxophone reached out to him, first clear and then fading back to a whisper even to
his
ears as a door opened and closed, split-note and trill followed by a smoky sultry glissando, and he froze in his tracks. He
knew
that sax, a tone and style unique to one blind jazz genius escaped from the slums of São Paulo, but the short phrase wasn’t on any recording or broadcast he’d ever heard . . .

He’d never seen Lula perform live, hadn’t known he was in town. The jazzman never booked gigs. He just showed up sometimes at a bottle-club door for a one-night stand, no publicity, take it or leave it, and word spread like wildfire among the fans. Live music was so much better than any recording, almost a different species. It was, well, it was
live.

By whatever God you recognize, he was tempted. Another night he would have followed that sound, his own peculiar vice. He stopped and listened for a few minutes, there in the electric darkness, even turned. The demon’s chore could wait. Then he thought about what he knew of demons. Odds were, Legion wouldn’t just kill him, it would burn down the whole block with Lula and the audience and a hundred random strangers added to the toll. Sodom. Gomorrah. Pillars of salt optional.