The Shambling Guide to New York City (11 page)

Phil clapped his hands once. “Yes! Humans look at the Statue of Liberty as a gift from France and a symbol of freedom. But it’s really the horrific sarcophagus of a great French demon who was killed and sent to America as a gift and warning.”

Zoë felt the spit in her mouth dry up. “Warning? Of what?” She thought of the time she had gone to Liberty Island—had she really been wandering around the insides of a demon?

“It’s there to keep immigrating demons out of New York. It’s a symbol of the might of the coterie hunters. A ‘Look what we did to the last demon who came here’ warning.”

She started writing things down. “All right. That is different. So I outline the book, assign writers, and then set them free?”

“You will need to go with some of them,” Montel drawled. “You will get a better sense of what the book must contain if you see our field research.”

“But—” Zoë stopped herself. Phil had said she wasn’t as safe outside, but she knew she had to accept the risks if she was to accept the job. “Right. Field research.”

“This week we’re doing interviews, and I’ll need you to help interview the writers,” Phil said. “You won’t have to do it alone, but you must remember—”

Zoë held up her hand, pen wedged between her fingers. “I know, Montel already told me. Don’t judge people by their, uh, race, do you call it? Or something else?”

Phil raised his eyebrows. “That’s very good, but I wasn’t going to say that. I meant to say that if we interview someone who feeds from humans, you can’t judge them on that basis. And they may not respect you as a boss right away, and you will need to assert yourself. The stronger you appear, the fewer problems you will have, especially outside the office.”

“OK, no judging, be strong and stuff. Got it,” Zoë said. On her notepad, where Phil and Montel couldn’t see, she wrote, in very small letters, “help.”

New York is one of the older cities in the United States, and New Amsterdam was built on an island after a battle that still-existing coterie call the Day the Sun Caught Fire. The treaty that sprung from that battle, with the water sprite Angah and the vampire Dark Sun signing, allowed for the humans to settle their city on the island with small concessions to the coterie to continue existing.

One thing the coterie made sure of was to leave enough existing underground tunnels to accommodate its survivors, as well as creating elaborate tombs to make the already dead feel at home. We recommend Grant’s Tomb, as some of the inner sanctums are quite lovely. But perhaps the best secret lodging is the New York Marble Cemetery in the Bowery, with hidden catacombs offering luxurious safety to visiting coterie.

T
he next week was a blur.

Zoë fit in better than she’d thought she would. Once her coworkers became used to her, she began to relax a bit.

She was impressed with her writing team, especially Gwen, who had a clear geographic knowledge of the city. Opal was a native New Yorker whose specialty was her home, the Bronx, while Kevin had been turned while visiting the city and had spent most of his undead existence in Manhattan.

Zoë got a sense that Opal was annoyed with his preference for Manhattan, but couldn’t figure out why. She got along well with Opal, who was open and friendly, but while Kevin never threatened her, he was short with her.

“Don’t take it personally,” Opal said one day in the break room. “He was only turned a year ago and has a tendency to resent humans still.”

“Is that normal?” Zoë asked.

“Sure, we all did. It doesn’t take long to acclimate to undeath, though. He should be used to it in five years or so.”

Paul, the zombie on her writing team, was the hardest to get to know. He was a fresher zombie than Montel, apparently, but didn’t have the other man’s flair for conversation. Instead of having been turned by a simple bite, Paul had actually had parts of his brain devoured, which left him a little slow. And that was compared to most zombies.

Zoë asked Phil, in private, why they had hired him in the first place.

“Oh, the speech center in his brain was damaged, but the man can write beautifully. He also observes very well, and catches things people usually do not. I’ve put him on writing about ‘Things to Do’ since he can go and watch people and see who’s best at entertaining coterie.”

Ursula, John, and Koi were on some sort of business trip to Boston, and Zoë was glad not to have more complications. She could get used to only so many new creatures at once.

However, one thing she had to do that week was interview new writers. She found it illuminating, as she met coterie she had never even heard of. Since the company had little need of marketing yet, Zoë begged Morgen to act like her assistant so she could warn Zoë of what kind of coterie was coming through the door.

She interviewed a scab demon, a minor Norse deity (Eir, goddess of healing, she had said), and Bertie, a wyrm, who called himself a baby dragon at “only” two hundred years old. He was a knowledge devourer, and wanted to eat as much of the city as possible, and he assured her that he could maintain his human shape for some time. He almost never lost his human shape when it was “really important.”

Almost never
, thought Zoë.

All of the applicants looked human, in fact, except that the scab demon was covered in hideous scabs, and Zoë tried very hard to calmly meet her eyes without staring.

“Why are you not working at a hospital? Why a publishing company?” Zoë asked Eir.

The goddess, a tall, broad woman with spiky yellow hair, pulled herself up even taller in her chair. “I failed out. To work in a hospital, I must go through years and years of medical
school that I don’t need, learning practices that are pointless. Why should I learn the strains of syphilis if I can cure it with a wave of my hand?”

“You can cure syphilis but can’t conjure up a medical degree?” Zoë asked without thinking. The goddess’s eyes grew wide and she gasped. She stood up and looked very tall while Morgen and Zoë stayed seated, stunned.

Is she going to throw lightning at us?
Zoë thought wildly.

Eir stomped out.

“Don’t worry about it. The Norse are prickly. At least you didn’t piss off a thunder god,” Morgen said as Zoë banged her head on her desk. “What’s this one going to do after being offended, anyway? Heal you
really hard
?”

Zoë was more careful with the baby dragon and the scab demon, and decided that the dragon deserved a second interview. The scab demon was new to the city and wasn’t sure which island was Manhattan and which was Long Island.

During the afternoons Zoë researched New York guidebooks for humans, making notes of the best things to see and do. She left lodging and restaurants to the writers’ discretion, as she doubted a scab demon could get into the New York Athletic Club or a table at Sugiyama.

She took her lunches outside and alone, needing sunlight and human contact.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad job.

Training with Granny Good Mae was another thing. Every morning she had to get up and run through Prospect Park to increase her endurance, and every evening Granny Good Mae would meet her after work and drag her to some private area for
training. Every time Zoë messed up, Granny Good Mae would hit her on the head and yell, “Dead! You’re dead now.”

She was learning a mix of kung fu, self-defense, and dirty street fighting. Each day they focused on a different coterie type, its fighting style, and how to defeat it.

“Fire demon,” Granny Good Mae said on Thursday after she took Zoë to the train station.

“Yeah?” Zoë said, fearing the woman would attack her with a branding iron. She still had healing puncture wounds where the woman had hit her with a stick covered in thumbtacks to imitate a vampire.

“No defense. Unscrew a fire hydrant. Lesson over!” She turned to go.

Zoë reached out to catch her arm, then thought better of it. She ran after her instead. “Wait, that’s it? No beating me up, no calling me dead?”

“No. With fire demons you either burn or you open a hydrant. You can’t punch a bonfire.”

“I don’t even know how to open a fire hydrant! Don’t you need a giant wrench?”

Granny Good Mae stopped and looked in Zoë’s eyes, the matter-of-fact look that always made Zoë feel very stupid. “Then carry a big wrench. You should be armed anyway.”

On Friday, Zoë saw no sign of the woman. She looked around on the block where Granny Good Mae usually intercepted her, saw no one, then shrugged and went home.

She slept a lot that weekend.

Between working with monsters and training with the crazy homeless kung fu master, Zoë didn’t have many chances to work
on her social life. She managed to get Carl to be a bit warmer to her, and his barista, Tenagne, called her “pale as butter on a cockwaffle” one day, which left her feeling accepted and pleased. Morgen accompanied her to coffee breaks and to lunch once, and seemed to be the closest thing she had to a friend.

What really bugged her, however, was that her neighbor Arthur never seemed to be home. She had hoped to run into him in the hall, naturally, as neighbors do, as she had on the night she’d gone out with Phil, but she and Arthur never seemed to be home at the same time. She even went to his door after work once, with the lame “cup of sugar” excuse, but he wasn’t home.

She wasn’t looking for love, or a fling, but dang, if you had a cute neighbor, it was a shame if you couldn’t look at him from time to time.

“All right, what’s with Public Works?” Zoë asked the following Tuesday, waving one of her writers’ first reports of the Upper East Side. “I’ve heard you mention them once, now my writers are mentioning them, and I have no idea who they are. I thought they did, like, the sewers and water and power lines?”

Phil winced and looked up from his desk, where he had been reading a newspaper. “Did I fail to explain them?”

“Yes,” Zoë said, her voice stony. “And it sounds like they’re a big deal.”

“The humans and coterie live in a balance, that much should be obvious. If we ate everyone, we would be out of food. If the humans drove us out—well, they would probably be fine, but we don’t support our own extinction. Centuries ago, the humans invented Public Works to control coterie movement.”

“The dirty guys in the sewers? They’re Buffy?”

Phil snorted. “Forget sexy vampire hunters; today’s slayers
are the same guys about whom the term ‘plumber butt’ was invented.”

Zoë winced. “OK… that’s news to me. How does it work?”

“Ideally, they keep an eye out for when coterie break the rules, murder humans, et cetera. In reality, they have spies everywhere, and whenever one of us attacks one of you, they assemble. We’re supposed to go to the legitimate places for food, blood banks, morgues, et cetera. But everyone wants to hunt. It’s our nature. When we do, then they have to act.” His voice sounded slightly bitter.

“I thought they just handled water and sewer and stuff? Hard hats with lights on them?”

“First, where do you think the majority of coterie live? Above ground?” Zoë blushed; the number of coterie living in the sewers should have been an obvious thing, she realized. “Secondly, it’s been this way for years. Colonization. Humans try to establish a new city; those whose job it is to develop the foundation of the new city encounter the coterie first. They clear the land and find the sprites, they dig up the subterranean demons. There are battles. If the humans hang on long enough, they can manage to do ethnic cleansing on a city. Seattle is sterilized, for one. So is Belfast. More likely, the humans and coterie eventually draw up treaties, create rules for living in balance. They provide us with food, we don’t eat them. Often the coterie understand that if humans move in, their food supply will increase, so a balance is in their best interest.”

He frowned. “Although having a police force watching one is less desirous. Anyway, during these battles, if the coterie win and drive the humans out entirely, then places like the Mayan ruins can happen.”

“How much does Public Works know about the coterie?” Zoë asked.

“We aren’t sure,” Phil said. “Sometimes they can track a hunting zombie and kill him in a single evening. Other times they are woefully ignorant of hunters at large gatherings, like New Year’s Eve. I hear we have a mole inside, keeping the balance but throwing the organization off the scent just often enough to keep too many coterie from being falsely accused, but I don’t know enough to know who that is.”

Zoë paused, and then had to ask. “Would that be a literal mole?”

Phil smiled. “I don’t think so, but I try never to assume.”

Zoë didn’t tell any of her coworkers about her meetings with Granny Good Mae; they were, as far as she knew, unknown to Phil and the others. She felt it was safest if no one knew she studied with the strange woman.

When they met on Monday night, Zoë asked where she had been at the end of the previous week. Granny Good Mae laughed. “You’re not the only thing there is.”

“What can you tell me about Public Works?” Zoë asked as the woman lunged at her, slowly, like a zombie. Zoë countered by nimbly stepping aside and touching the back of Granny’s head lightly with her hand, trying to imagine she was holding a heavy weapon or knife.