“I see.” And I did. I’d seen them before. I could feel it in my blood. In another place, in another Aspect, I knew them, and they knew me. And believe me, they were men in form alone. Beneath those cartoon-detective overcoats they were all teeth. “What d’you think they’re doing here?”
He shrugged. “Hunting.”
“Hunting who?”
He shrugged again. He’s never been a man of words, even when he wasn’t a man. Me, I’m on the wordy side. I find it helps.
“So you’ve seen them here before?”
“I was following them when you came along. I doubled back-I didn’t want to lead them home.”
Well, I could understand that. “What are they?” I said. “Aspects of what? I haven’t seen anything like this since Ragnarók, but as I recall-”
“Shh-”
I was getting kinda sick of being shoved and shushed. He’s the elder twin, you know, and sometimes he takes liberties. I was about to give him a heated reply when I heard a sound coming from nearby, and something swam into rapid view. It took me a while to figure it out; derelicts are hard to see in this city, and he’d been hiding in a cardboard box under a fire escape, but now he shifted quick enough, his old overcoat flapping like wings around his bony ankles.
I knew him, in passing. Old man Moony, here as an Aspect of Mani, the Moon, but mad as a coot, poor old sod (it often happens when they’ve been at the juice, and the mead of poetry is a heady brew). Still, he could run, and was running now, but as Bren and I stepped out of his way, the two guys in their long overcoats came to intercept him at the mouth of the alley.
Closer this time-I could smell them. A rank and feral smell, half rotted. Well, you know what they say. You can’t teach a carnivore oral hygiene.
At my side I could feel my brother trembling. Or was it me? I wasn’t sure. I was scared, I knew that-though there was still enough alcohol carousing in my veins to make me feel slightly removed from it all. In any case I stayed put, tucked into the shadows, not quite daring to move. The two guys stood there at the mouth of the alley, and Moony stopped, wavering now between fight and flight. And-
Fight it was. Okay, I thought. Even a rat will turn when cornered. That didn’t mean I had to get involved. I could smell him too, the underpinning stench of him, like booze and dirt and that stinky sickly poet smell. He was scared, I knew that. But he was also a god-albeit a beat-up Aspect of one-and that meant he’d fight like a god, and even an old alky god like Moony has his tricks.
Those two guys might yet have a shock coming.
For a moment they held their position, two overcoats and a mad poet in a dark triangle under the single streetlight. Then they moved-the guys with that slick, fluid motion I’d seen before, Moony with a lurch and a yell and a flash from his fingertips. He’d cast Týr-a powerful rune-and I saw it flicker through the dark air like a shard of steel, hurtling towards the two not-quite-men. They dodged-no pas de deux could have had more grace-parting, then coming together again as the missile passed, moving in a tight axe-head formation towards the old god.
But throwing Týr had thrown Moony. It takes strength to cast the runes of the Elder Script, and most of his glam was already gone. He opened his mouth-to speak a cantrip, I thought-but before he could, the overcoats moved in with that spooky superhuman speed and I could smell their rankness once more, but so much stronger, like the inside of a badger’s sett. They closed in, unbuttoning their coats as they ran-but were they running? Instead they seemed to glide, like boats, unfurling their long coats like sails to hide and envelop the beleaguered moongod.
He began to chant-the mead of poetry, you know-and for a second the drunken voice cracked and changed, becoming that of Mani in his full Aspect. A sudden radiance shone forth-the predators gave a single growl, baring their teeth-and for a moment I heard the chariot chant of the mad moongod, in a language you could never learn, but of which a single word could drive a mortal crazy with rapture, bring down the stars, strike a man dead-or raise him back to life again.
He chanted, and for a beat the hunters paused-and was that a single trace of a tear gleaming in the shadow of a black fedora? — and Mani sang a glamour of love and death, and of the beauty that is desolation and of the brief firefly that lights up the darkness-for a wing’s beat, for a breath-before it gutters, burns and dies.
But the chant did not halt them for more than a second. Tears or not, these guys were hungry. They glided forward, hands outstretched, and now I could see inside their unbuttoned coats, and for a moment I was sure there was no body beneath their clothes, no fur or scale, no flesh or bone. There was just the shadow; the blackness of Chaos; a blackness beyond colour or even its absence; a hole in the world, all-devouring, all-hungry.
Brendan took a single step, and I caught him by the arm and held him back. It was too late anyway; old Moony was already done for. He went down-not with a crash, but with an eerie sigh, as if he’d been punctured-and the creatures that now no longer even looked like men were on him like hyenas, fangs gleaming, static hissing in the folds of their garments.
There was nothing human in the way they moved. Nothing superfluous. They Hoovered him up from blood to brain-every glamour, every spark, every piece of kith and kindling-and what they left looked less like a man than a cardboard cutout of a man left lying in the dirt of the alleyway.
Then they were gone, buttoning up their overcoats over the terrible absence beneath.
A silence. Brendan was crying. He always was the sensitive one. I wiped something (sweat, I think) from my face and waited for my breathing to return to normal.
“That was nasty,” I said at last. “Haven’t seen anything quite like that since the End of the World.”
“Did you hear him?” said Brendan.
“I heard. Who would have thought the old man had so much glam in him?”
My brother said nothing, but hid his eyes.
I suddenly realized I was hungry, and thought for a moment of suggesting a pizza, but decided against it. Bren was so touchy nowadays, he might have taken offence.
“Well, I’ll see you later, I guess,” and sloped off rather unsteadily, wondering why brothers are always so damned hard, and wishing I’d been able to ask him home.
I wasn’t to know, but I wish I had-I’d never see that Aspect of him again.
I SLEPT TILL LATE the next day. Awoke with a headache and a familiar post-cocktail nauseous feeling, then remembered-the way you remember doing something to your back when you were in the gym, but didn’t realize how bad it was going to be until you’d slept on it-and sat bolt upright.
The guys, I thought. Those two guys.
I must have been drunker than I’d thought last night, because this morning the memory of them froze me to the core. Delayed shock; I know it well, and to combat its elects I called room service and ordered the works. Over coffee, bacon, pancakes and rivers of maple syrup, I worked on my recovery, and though I did pretty well, given the circumstances, I found I couldn’t quite get the death of old Moony out of my mind, or the slick way the two overcoats had crawled over him, gobbling up his glam before buttoning up and back to business. Poetry in motion.
I pondered my lucky escape-well, I guessed that if they hadn’t sniffed out Moony first, then it would have been Yours Truly and Brother Bren for a double serving of Dish of the Day-but my heart was far from light as it occurred to me that if these guys were really after our kind, this was at best a reprieve, not a pardon, and that sooner or later those overcoats would be sharpening their teeth at my door.