They worked hard. But at least none of them had to worry about money. The Prometheus Club provided whatever it took to make ends meet. “I’ll look for her.”
“She’ll get you inside,” Jane said. “Any theories yet?”
Matthew crouched amid rubberneckers and bent his luck a little to keep from being stepped on. The crowd moved around him, but never quite squeezed him off-balance. Their shadows made it hard to see, but his fingers hovered a quarter-inch from a dime-sized stain on the pavement, and a chill slicked through his bones. “Not in a crowd,” he said, and pulled his hand back so he wouldn’t touch the drip accidentally. “Actually, tell Marion to process the inside scene on her own, would you? And not to touch anything moist with her bare hand, or even a glove if she can help it.”
“You have a secondary lead?”
“I think I have a trail.”
“Blood?”
It had a faint aroma, too, though he wouldn’t bend close. Cold stone, guano, moist rancid early mornings full of last winter’s rot. A spring and barnyard smell, with an underlying acridness that made his eyes water and his nose run. He didn’t wipe his tears; there was no way he was touching his face after being near this.
He dug in his pocket with his left hand, cradling the phone with the right. A moment’s exploration produced a steel disk the size of a silver dollar. He spat on the underside, balanced it like a miniature tabletop between his thumb and first two fingers, and then turned his hand over. A half-inch was as close as he dared.
He dropped the metal. It struck the sidewalk and bonded to the concrete with a hiss, sealing the stain away.
“Venom,” Matthew said. “I’ve marked it. You’ll need to send a containment team. I have to go.”
When he stood, he looked directly into the eyes of one of his giggly freshmen.
“Ms. Gomez,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here. Sorry I can’t stay to chat.”
Gina was still stammering when she came back. “Did you see that? Did you see that?”
Katie hadn’t. “Just the backs of a bunch of tall people’s heads. What happened?”
“I was trying to stay away from him,” Gina said. “And he just appeared right beside me. Poof. Poof!”
“Or you weren’t looking where you were going,” Katie said, but Melissa was frowning. “Well?”
“He did just pop up out of nowhere,” Melissa said. “I was watching Gina, and he kind of . . . materialized beside her. Like he stood up all of a sudden.”
“He’s the devil.” Gina shook her head, but she sounded half-convinced.
Katie patted her on the shoulder, woven cotton rasping between her fingertips and Gina’s flesh. “He could have been tying his shoe.”
“Right,” Gina said, stepping out from under Katie’s hand. She pointed back to the crowd. “Then where did he go?”
Even glamoured, he couldn’t run from a murder scene. The magic relied on symbol and focus; if he broke that, he’d find himself stuck in a backlash that would make him the center of attention of every cop, Russian landlady, and wino for fifteen blocks. So instead he walked, fast, arms swinging freely, trying to look as if he was late getting back from a lunch date.
Following the smell of venom.
He found more droplets, widely spaced. In places, they had started to etch asphalt or concrete. Toxic waste indeed; it slowed him, because he had to pause to tag and seal each one.
How it could move unremarked through his city, he did not know. There were no crops here for its steps to blight nor wells for its breath to poison.
Which was not to say it did no harm.
These things—some fed on flesh and some on blood and bone. Some fed on death, or fear, or misery, or drunkenness, or loneliness, or love, or hope, or white perfect joy. Some constructed wretchedness, and some comforted the afflicted.
There was no telling until you got there.
Matthew slowed as his quarry led him north. There were still too many bystanders. Too many civilians. He didn’t care to catch up with any monsters in broad daylight, halfway up Manhattan. But as the neighborhoods became more cluttered and the scent of uncollected garbage grew heavy on the humid air, he found more alleys, more byways, and fewer underground garages.
If he were a cockatrice, he thought he might very well lair in such a place. Somewhere among the rubbish and the poison and the broken glass. The cracked concrete, and the human waste.
He needed as much camouflage to walk here undisturbed as any monster might.
His hands prickled ceaselessly. He was closer. He slowed, reinforcing his wards with a sort of nervous tic: checking that his hair was smooth, his coat was buttoned, his shoes were tied. Somehow, it managed to move from its lair to the Upper East Side without leaving a trail of bodies in the street. Maybe it traveled blind. Or underground; he hadn’t seen a drop of venom in a dozen blocks. Worse, it might be invisible.
Sometimes . . . often . . . otherwise things had slipped far enough sideways that they could not interact with the iron world except through the intermediary of a Mage or a medium. If this had happened to the monster he sought, then it could travel unseen. Then it could pass by with no more harm done than the pervasive influence of its presence.
But then, it wouldn’t drip venom real enough to melt stone.
Relax, Matthew. You don’t know it’s a cockatrice. It’s just a hypothesis, and appearances can be deceptive.
Assuming that he had guessed right could get him killed.
But a basilisk or a cockatrice was what made sense. Except, why would the victim have thrown herself from her window for a crowned serpent, a scaled crow? And why wasn’t everybody who crossed the thing’s path being killed. Or turned to stone, if it was that sort of cockatrice?
His eyes stung, a blinding burning as if he breathed chlorine fumes, etchant. The scent was as much otherwise as real; Matthew suffered it more than the civilians, who would sense only the miasma of the streets as they were poisoned. A lingering death.
He blinked, tears brimming, wetting his eyelashes and blurring the world through his spectacles. A Mage’s traveling arsenal was both eclectic and specific, but Matthew had never before thought to include normal saline, and he hadn’t passed a drugstore for blocks.
How the hell is it traveling?
At last, the smell was stronger, the cold prickle sharper, on his left. He entered the mouth of a rubbish-strewn alley, a kind of gated brick tunnel not tall or wide enough for a garbage truck. It was unlocked, the grille rusted open; the passage brought him to a filthy internal courtyard. Rows of garbage cans—of course, no dumpsters—and two winos, one sleeping on cardboard, one lying on his back on grease-daubed foam reading a two-month-old copy of Maxim. The miasma of the cockatrice—if it was a cockatrice—was so strong here that Matthew gagged.
What he was going to do about it, of course, he didn’t know.
His phone buzzed. He answered it, lowering his voice. “Jane?”
“The window was unlocked from the inside,” she said. “No sign of forced entry. The resident was a fifty-eight-year-old unmarried woman, Janet Stafford. Here’s the interesting part—”
“Yes?”
“She had just re-entered secular life, if you can believe this. She spent the last thirty-four years as a nun.”
Matthew glanced at his phone, absorbing that piece of information, and put it back to his ear. “Did she leave the church, or just the convent?”