The Interminables (16 page)

S
tatic
. Broken glass razored the air. A pair of stone lions with golden antlers didn't bother trying to dodge a falling radio mast; a crash, and they vanished from sight. Green streaks shot overhead. The horizon reared up, roaring, and every remaining window shattered.

Edmund huddled behind the twitching iron hulk of a crushed tank, clutching at his soaked undershirt with tie askew. Sparks and smoke hazed his vision. His chest rattled with every dull boom. Not good, with a hole in it.

“So I'm curious…” Grace shouted. She hurtled over the top of the tank and dropped down beside him, electricity crackling through her black hair. Her voice was hoarse, raw from inhaled soot.

He winced. “What about?”

“Well,” she said, “for one, how much black you have in your wardrobe.”

“Maybe a third.”

“Two, can I pick you up?”

He squinted at her through the smoke. “What?”

“I know the guy is supposed to make his move first, but–”

A helicopter slewed sideways overhead, insectile jaws gnashing beneath its cockpit, mantis claws tucked in place of landing skids.

Pain burst in his chest as she yanked him upward. Threw him over a shoulder. Took off running, at a dead sprint he knew she could beat a dozen times over alone. Jets of acid burned into the dirt as she skidded into an alley. Sunbursts popped in his vision. “Grace,” he gasped, trying to brace himself and hold on to his hat all at once, “you are aware I can teleport, right?”

“I'm faster!”

The helicopter slammed into the corner. Pieces of brick and other things showered all over the street. He covered his eyes.

“Hey, one last question,” she said once both of them could hear again.

“Yeah?”

“Can I call you Eddie? You look like an Eddie.”

He laughed. He instantly regretted it. “Haven't heard that in a while.”

She grinned at him, slung backwards as he was. “So…”

“Sure. Sure, Grace, that's fine.” The claw hadn't pierced anything vital – his time hadn't run out yet – but lately he was starting to wonder if maybe something had. He tried to stop laughing. God, it hurt. “Been a long time. Can you please put me down now?”

“Edmund?” someone else interrupted. “Edmund?”

Blackness hazed the edges of his sight. “Grace,” he tried to say. “Grace, this isn't... this is a bad....”

“Edmund!”

He awoke to Death.

“Goddammit, Istvan!”

The ghost ignored the pillow flung through his chest. “They've found it,” he cackled. He brandished bloody hands, his cuffs rolled up to his elbows, heedless of the exposed burn scarring on his left forearm. “They've found the beast!”

Edmund picked himself up off the floor. “What beast? What are you talking about? What are you doing in my room?”

“The ice monster, Edmund! The one responsible for mauling all those people and the last investigations team!” He shook Edmund's shoulders. “They've found it and I've volunteered us to catch it!”

Never before had Edmund been more grateful that he'd had the presence of mind to put on pajamas. “Out of my room.”

“You'll have to eat quickly,” Istvan continued, his words almost tripping over each other, “It's taken up residence in Cheerful Gardens, they said, and we need to capture it before any visitors arrive. Miss Justice said that all the information you need is somewhere on your phone.”

“Istvan, out. I've told you not to come in here like this and I can't get dressed with you standing here.”

The specter laughed. “I'll put on the water, then!”

He turned – almost a pirouette, balanced by the shadow of wings – and skipped through the door. Bloodstains and bullet holes flickered across the wood, then faded.

Edmund brushed at his shoulders. There was nothing there. He eyed the bottle of gin on his bedside table, then collapsed back onto his sheets, staring at the cracks on the ceiling. He hadn't touched his glass last night. He'd promised himself he wouldn't drink over any of this last night. If he drank anything now, Istvan would notice and he wouldn't hear the end of it.

Dishes rattled in the kitchen. Clinks and scraping. The rush of water. A humming, half-sung words he couldn't make out, the sort of simple marching melody the ghost favored when he wasn't arguing for the radio to be switched to waltz. If Janet had already made the arrangements...

Edmund sat back up, dragged his pocket watch off the table, and snapped it open. The light coming through the curtained window was faint and pale, a washed-out orange that didn't bode well but was enough to make out the clock's face. Five. Barely five. He mouthed a few choice obscenities to himself. He'd slept less than three hours.

He rubbed at the puncture scar on his chest and gazed across the room. Closet, wooden floors, flowered wallpaper. His time ledger lay open on the top of his desk, forgotten after he'd finished tabulating time stolen and spent. That wasn't right. He couldn't be doing that. He got up to put it away. He'd promised himself he wouldn't drink over this. Not over Grace. Not anymore.

But... an ice monster? At five in the morning? After everything that had happened yesterday, Istvan wanted to go on a hunting expedition?

He shut the ledger in its drawer. Scrubbed his hands across his face. Eyed the bottle again.

Just one. Istvan wouldn't notice just one.

Edmund took a moment to get dressed.

A
figure
in black slouched down the hallway.

“There you are,” Istvan called. He saluted with transparent cup and saucer. Coffee, in an earlier age; now nothing but habit and memory, something to hold that steamed. “I've put the water on, as promised. It was boiling a moment ago.”

Edmund squinted at the lights. “That's very kind of you.”

“You know, that's what you said when I made
Fiakergulasch
last Thanksgiving.”

“So it is.”

“You hated it.”

“So I did. It was still a kind gesture.” Edmund retrieved a cup and saucer of his own, and scooped a spoonful of furled leaves from the tea tin. “Now what's this about an ice monster?”

Istvan laughed as barbed wire looped in sweeping curves around his feet, glittering red and silver. Fresh and new. What luck to bring this news, and what a bloody night it had been! “Oh, the latest team came back an hour or so after I arrived. Frightful, Edmund, absolutely frightful – they thought they were tracking it, but it was tracking them, and you can imagine the carnage. I stabilized the lot, and while everyone is defrosting, you and I are to chase the beast down and return it to the Twelfth Hour for study and safekeeping. And…” He leaned forward, eyebrows raised in conspiracy. “…they're saying that it doesn't match the usual spellscar creatures, Edmund. It might be from further north. Perhaps even the Greater Great Lakes.”

Edmund poured the water so thoughtfully provided into his cup and set it down to steep. “Ah.”

“A straggler from the Wizard War, after all this time!” Istvan set his own cup down so he could gesture with both hands. His sleeves were still rolled up, unbuttoned, original surgeon's cuffs. “Oh, it sounds a terror, Edmund – frostbite, clawing, internal laceration from bits of ice broken off in the wounds, some of the victims hurled or dragged great distances – it ought to be great fun taking it down, wouldn't you say?”

Edmund set out a frying pan. “I don't know that I would.”

Fear stirred and sweetened his affect, and Istvan knew why – there weren't supposed to be any stragglers, not in Big East, not after Providence, not after then-Magister Templeton had hurled the last remnants of the Twelfth Hour into Death's teeth. They'd kept Shokat Anoushak busy. Distracted. Hour after hour, until whatever strange stratagem Mercedes Hahn had prepared was ready – and she called an immediate retreat, for what good that had done.

Big East was safe now, as much as a fracture region could be. All of its monstrous armies lured to Providence and destroyed with Shokat Anoushak herself.

Istvan couldn't remember anything but a blur of brilliant euphoria, blasts and shattering, blood spun in lazy arcs through smoke. He had managed to stay on the defensive for a short while, but according to Edmund he had followed orders for only the first quarter-hour or so, and then gone off on a mad tear through anything his bindings would permit him to kill. He was the World War! The First! The Great! The crack and roar of guns that never ceased, machine-driven death that dealt in swathes and droves, all the discoveries of a grand and hopeful age bent to ending it in mud and rot and bloody snow.

He hadn't retreated in time. He'd gotten better.

He reached over to shake Edmund's shoulder, still chuckling to himself. “Oh, don't be so melancholy, Edmund. It's only a single ice monster. Something like a bear, I'm told. Surely the Hour Thief can handle a bear.”

Edmund opened the refrigerator door, selected two of the remaining eggs, and closed it again. “I wouldn't know,” he said. “Hard to take time from an animal that doesn't know what you're asking.”

“But it isn't an animal.”

“Does it talk?”

“I suppose we'll find out, hm?” Istvan picked up his coffee again, congratulating himself on a successful distraction. The man would have no cause to think of Grace Wu now. “Don't worry so, Edmund. There isn't a beast alive, magical or not, that can best me.”

“Not that we've met.”

“And stop dragging your feet. I know you're better than this.”

Edmund rolled his eyes – and then he'd cracked, cooked, seasoned, and thrown the eggs onto a plate. Tea retrieved. Fork selected and seated in the closest chair to the stove, facing the doorway. He was a decent cook – he had to be, planning as he did to never have a wife – but nothing extraordinary, Istvan knew. “Happy?”

“Cheater.”

“And a thief.” Edmund bolted down his breakfast.

Istvan turned his face, hiding his scarring as he smiled. Oh, it was like the old days again. Like it should be.

After all, it was Istvan who had helped him through the worst. Istvan who had requested to be paired with him on all official assignments. Istvan who ensured his shellshock remained under control. Istvan who had become so closely affiliated with him that even though Edmund were more famous it was in a Gothic sense: the masked mystery in black who ought never be crossed, lest he reappear with his terrifying winged partner.

He didn't need Grace any more than he needed poison. All that had to be done was remind him of that.

C
heerful Gardens was silent
. The great glass dome over the trees shielded them from fitful winds, the steam and smoke that drifted from the Generator district passing over in wisps and ribbons. Much later in the day, the place should have played host to dozens of Big Easterners – former New Yorkers, former Bostonians, former townsfolk of innumerable smaller cities and towns from across New England – taking a respite from their labors. Walking, flinging Frisbees, sitting on benches formed of scented wood, trying to decipher any one of a dozen signposts written in what was almost Japanese. The misplaced habitat dome had become a haven, a refuge from the twisted realities of the outside world. It was safe.

It should have been safe.

That was before two picnickers turned up missing. Then, days later, not missing: found with great bloody gashes ripped in their flesh, limbs torn off, blood flash-frozen in their veins. A new caller had come to town... and it wasn't interested in reading signs.

Edmund crept beneath the pines. Pocket watch ready. Neck hair raised. He'd downed two cups of something caffeinated at the Twelfth Hour before they left for the scene of the crime, but now it seemed he wouldn't be needing it. Birds flitting through branches and needles crackling underfoot were enough. He focused on his own breathing, slow and regular. On every errant motion between the trees. Istvan was only a step ahead, silent save for the faint rushing slither of barbed wire, stopping at odd intervals to peer in one direction and then another before stalking off on a new route.

“It's here,” the ghost muttered, stopping yet again to look around. “I know it's here.”

“That's what you said an hour ago.”

“I'm no bloody good with animals.”

“You said it wasn't an animal.”

“It's like an animal, then. Enough to make this difficult!”

Edmund brushed away a branch the other man had walked through before it hit him in the eye. “Istvan, I was looking forward to some sleep before I had to turn in that report. Not all of us are restless spirits and no one is awake this early.” He winced at the wooden crack of one of his own footsteps. “No one sane.”

Istvan grimaced. “It's stalking us, I think.” He jogged up a rise, leaping a guardrail to a footpath marked by floating lamps of red and gold.

Edmund followed him, soft loam giving way beneath his shoes, cursing the specter's unnatural tirelessness. He himself was in decent shape, thanks to his habitual patrolling, but Istvan was a tough act to follow – especially uphill. “That's what you said an hour ago.”

“No, this time it's closer. It's...” Istvan turned slowly around, scanning the trees.

Edmund glanced up at the great angular stone that marked the park's center. Dark granite. He was sure they had circled it at least twice. His pocket watch was smooth and reassuring, though not as secure as it could have been. Despite the coolness of the park, he was sweating. “It's what?”

“What would you have me say? It's hungry? That isn't anything, Edmund. I can't work from that. It's so watered-down, I....” Istvan looked back to him, expression twisted, almost pleading. “I had hoped it would be more man-like, Edmund. Please, believe that.”