Powers (7 page)

She lifted an eyebrow. “Probably not.”

He ducked under the yellow tape and followed his nose through a side door splintered ajar by fire axes, into the sodden lye-smell of ash and char. The floor thumped solid under his cane, stone or tile—he’d been in burned-out buildings before and knew they sometimes hid nasty surprises, shells of a floor or wall that looked whole and sound but just wanted a touch to collapse into black empty hollows behind. He didn’t
know
that Ms. Detective el Hajj would let him walk into a death-trap, but he wouldn’t put it past her. Most likely, though, she needed to spill his blood with her own hands. An “accident” wouldn’t satisfy her honor.

The iron cry for help pulled him toward the rear, where pulpit and choir would sit in a Christian church, the focus of the sanctuary, the worst damage of the fire. He thumped along, step by step, testing each bit of floor before he trusted it. Even natural fires could skip and concentrate within a matter of a few feet.

He found the remains of a cabinet of some kind, quality woodwork, even a smith could tell a skilled craftsman had put a lot of work and pride into that. Further proof of something unnatural about
this
fire. It shouldn’t have survived at all, that close to the heart of the fire, even damaged as it was.

In the still-damp ash, under charred boards, he found a hexagram—the six-pointed star known as the Star of David or the Seal of Solomon—forged thick and the width and height of his joined palms. He found two of them, as if they had ornamented matching cabinet doors. One felt normal to him, just wrought iron, maybe the same age as the nail. The other . . .

The other one was
old.
One point of it had cracked. Had
been
cracked, judging by the feel, by some outside force, and it wasn’t heat, wasn’t the building burning down around it. This was wrought iron, not cast iron, tough instead of brittle. It could take heat and the quenching cold of the fire hoses.

It knew him, knew his skills. It wanted him to fix it. It
needed
him to fix it, it was
important,
something dark and dire would happen that he couldn’t see, couldn’t understand, if he didn’t take this seal back to his forge and make it whole—

“Drop it!”

She had her cannon out and pointed at his heart. Gripped in one hand, rested on the cast around her other, steady, the huge bore swallowing light. She stood between him and the door.

She didn’t understand. “I have to repair this. It holds the worlds apart. It seals the way.”

The words came from the iron, not from him. He couldn’t say how or why. He didn’t know what they meant.

“Drop it. Nobody takes evidence from my crime scene.”

Possessive young lady, calling it her crime scene.

He studied her face, harsh and concentrated over the gun-sights. No, not young. Crow’s feet at her eyes as she scowled. More, indefinable, a sense of weight, of having seen more than a few years. Forties, he guessed, maybe as old as fifty, from all the humans he’d seen grow and fade. So fast.

He didn’t drop the star. That would have been rude, after it had spoken to him.

He bent over and laid it back in the mold it had formed for itself by settling into the bed of damp gray ash, careful to fit the edges and points exactly as he’d found them. He covered it with the charred boards that had been a cabinet face, again matching the pieces to the marks they’d made, leaving her crime scene as undisturbed as possible. Then he stood up. She still had that gun pointed at him.

“Why don’t you just shoot me and get it over with?”

“Can’t. The demon won’t let me.”

There it was again. He shook his head. “Look, I wouldn’t
be
here if a demon hadn’t started to burn me alive for refusing. I don’t have much choice. How about you put that cannon away so we can talk like civilized people?”

“Drop the cane and I’ll think about it.”

So much for people not seeing that his cane was a weapon. But she still wore the bandages and bruises from it, and had seen the blade inside. She was a cop—he was surprised she hadn’t asked to see his concealed weapons permit. Which, of course, he didn’t have.

She didn’t seem to care much for standard police procedure. Breaking into his forge without a warrant, however she’d done it—that could count as “hot pursuit” under the meaning of the act. Leaving without arresting him, standing by in the shadows watching while he destroyed evidence? Not really. Likewise for letting a civilian poke around in a crime scene.

“Look, I need to get out of here. That seal is making my teeth ache. It’s whining at me. Either let me get some distance from it, or let me take it back to my forge and heal it. Or shoot me.”

At that point, he wasn’t sure he cared which way it went. That thing’s whine
was
making his teeth ache, throbbing from his wisdom teeth up inside his temples and pressing on his brain until his eyes watered. Yes, he still had his “wisdom” teeth, small wisdom they conferred on him. Dentists hadn’t been invented when his teeth grew in, and he was just lucky they grew in straight.

Or maybe his species didn’t have the same problems with teeth that humans did. He wasn’t sure which.

He moved across to the broken side door, still testing the surface with his cane as he went. Solid. Solid like rock, not even the echo you’d get from a concrete slab or stone paving over empty space. Which didn’t fit . . .

“Does this place have a cellar?”

She kept her distance, kept the gun braced on her left wrist and cast and pointed at his chest, kept the remains of benches or pews between them, as if he was maybe a kung fu master in the movies and could drop her with a flying side kick from twenty feet away. She just shook her head at his question.

Outside, in a narrow alley next to crumbling brick walls that still showed scorch marks from the synagogue fire next door, the star’s whine faded back to a thin plaintive buzz like a fly trapped on the other side of a window. He ducked under the yellow tape, took a deep breath, and dropped the cane to rattle on cracked potholed asphalt. After all, he’d already decided that he wanted to live a while longer.

“Cellar?”

She’d followed him through the door but still kept her distance, trash and bits of burned building between them, still kept her pistol ready. She shook her head again. “Not that I know of. Why?”

“When I held the star, it wasn’t just talking to me. I could see something. A black space that felt hollow, like a cave, with moving lights in some kind of haze or smoke. They scared me. I don’t know what they were, but I didn’t want to meet them.”

“Salamanders? That’s how they got in to cause the fire?”

He closed his eyes for a moment and shuddered, remembering that dark vision. “Not salamanders. Those things were
mean.
Salamanders are just big friendly puppies that happen to start fires. Give them a safe place to play and they make the whole room happy. What I saw and felt, those things fed off pain and hate and sorrow, not wood. And they were
hungry.
A long time since their last meal.”

“Nothing I’ve ever heard of.” She paused and clicked something on the side of her gun. He
hoped
she was setting the safety on. Then she moved the muzzle so that it pointed just a bit away from him, letting him breathe a little easier. That muzzle looked like the tunnel of the New York subway.

Her eyes looked almost as dangerous, memorizing him from hair to boots. “Little man, what’s your real name? ‘Albert Johansson’ wouldn’t stand up to a record search, would it? Not if you go deep enough? That guy at Historic Preservation had a photo of your block, 1883. Put a suit and bowler hat and mustache on you and you’d be twin brother to the man standing in front of the storefront bakery. I doubt if that’s coincidence.”

Oh,
hell.
Photographs. He tried to avoid them, but sometimes he got caught by accident. He wondered what he’d been doing that made him stand still long enough to be frozen in one of those old wet-plate photos. Probably drooling over a pie or pastry in the window display—if he remembered right, that place baked the most amazing cherry strudel, sour and sweet at the same time, flaky layered crust. It would melt in your mouth . . .

She gestured her left hand and the cast at the side of her head. “I wasn’t feeling too good the other night. Head hurt. But I still can’t See the beginning of your lifeline behind you. Who are you,
what
are you, why are you tied up in this shit?”

He shrugged. She had the gun, she knew too much already, she’d proven that she was very good at finding things and following people. Whatever trouble he could get into, he was already hip deep. Maybe neck deep, but he was short.

“I’ve used dozens of names. Can’t remember all of them. The demon called me ‘Simon Lahti.’ I guess that makes it as permanent as any. I’ve already told you I don’t know
what
I am. As for why, the demon says I have to stop someone from abusing their companions. Or mortals will suffer the consequences. My demon claimed to be called ‘Legion.’ Is that the same as yours?”

She frowned and narrowed her eyes. “Police ask questions. We don’t answer them. Keep talking.”

And here he’d been thinking she wasn’t a typical cop. Still, putting two and two together and adding them up to five, somebody wasn’t telling the whole truth. Somebody with golden skin, no sex, and no hair.

“I don’t trust demons. They lie, they play tricks, their goals aren’t my goals. I
think
Legion wanted me here because I’m a smith. I can heal that star. Nothing to do with stopping the fires. You’re the detective—that’s
your
job. My job is working iron. Let me take the star back to my forge and make it whole. It’s
important.”

Her frown turned into full-blown scowl. “Little man, I don’t know about you, but I’ve lived long enough that I don’t believe everything I hear. I’ve come across old broken magic that damn well should
stay
broken. I want to find out what that star really does before I’m going to let you fix it.”

Her “little man” phrase was starting to annoy him. Which was probably why she used it—he was getting a sense of why she said the police “put up” with her for her special skills. The woman
liked
to piss off people.

“Look, that thing feels about as old as Solomon.”

“You expect me to believe that Suleiman bin Dauod was a
blacksmith?
”

“I didn’t say Solomon made it himself. Just that it was too old for me to tell. I’ve heard plenty of stories about Solomon as a powerful wizard, not just a king—commanding the winds and the djinni and knowing the language of the animals. Aren’t some of those straight from the Qur’an itself, the words of the Prophet?”

She blinked at that. “Peace be upon him . . . Four or five, yes.”

She broke off and shivered. Not the cold, not with the warm spring day, blue sky and sun. “I’ll get a police magician out here to look at it.”

He’d been ignoring the buzz while they talked. It spiked for a moment, another twinge from his teeth up to his temples and pressing on his eyeballs from the inside even at that distance, a sense of urgency.

“Don’t take too long. Something bad happens soon.” He paused, following branches and possibilities that had sprouted in his head while they talked. “Who owns this place? Maybe we can find someone who knows the history of that thing, where it came from, what it does. Get your answers that way. Faster.”

She cocked her head to one side. “Funny you should ask. We don’t
know
who owns this wreck. We’ve been trying to track it down, but Jews don’t have a bishop or a diocese or anything like that, no national organization that runs things or owns things. The congregation owned the building, and the congregation seems to all have died or moved away. Like I told you, this place hasn’t been used in decades.”

“Doesn’t the city have an address for the tax bills?”

“Tax exempt. Religious building. Not even utility bills—water, electric, gas. All cut off years ago. That’s one reason why I went to Historic in the first place. If nothing else, we need to figure out who pays to tear it down.”

He looked around. Roof gone, except for that bit of dome in the front, walls damaged or half gone, no windows left, wood posts and beams charred to the point where half of them collapsed—a hot fire that had plenty of time to work before the fire company got here. Historic as hell, maybe one of the oldest synagogues in North America? Maybe, but she was right. It wouldn’t be a repair job, and rebuilding to historic standards would cost a ton. No congregation, he had to assume no insurance.

She could see him working his way through that. A faint smile twitched her mouth. “Now get lost. I’m supposed to be on sick leave, and you’re keeping me from a cold beer.”

He thought she was joking. “Doesn’t your Prophet forbid alcohol?”

She stilled and that muzzle came back to his chest, unwavering, with a click that meant the safety was off again. Her face settled into a slit-eyed glare that could have frozen the bay.

“Little man, I once killed a Badakhi because he thought he should beat me for going unveiled. He was much larger than you. I killed him with my knife, slowly, starting with his manhood. Then his brothers came for his blood, and we killed them. Then their cousins came, and
their
cousins. We had better rifles, from the
farangi,
but this grew tiresome, and the ammunition cost much. So we left our mountains, and came here. Do you wish to start such a thing?”

She’d slipped into the sing-song cadence he remembered from the Bengali delta to the Pamirs, English as a second language. The New York accent had vanished, leaving him with more questions than answers. He gulped and backed away.

That might be
another
reason why the police
put up with
her. None of her bosses dared to chew her out or fire her.

She let him live. She let him go. He picked up his cane and backed all the way to the end of the alley, turned, and hiked up the street with a crawling sensation between his shoulder blades, wondering if she’d shoot. All the way, Kipling’s words kept chasing their tails through his head: