"Sure, kid." Malsumis' speech patterns tended to jump around. He'd seen all of American culture go by around him and had latched onto several archetypes which fought for space in his manifestation. I could never be sure if he was consciously imitating or just not paying attention. "Ask away."
"I've thought about this pretty hard, and I don't recall either agreeing to perform any service for ... well, you know. I also don't recall him charging me to do anything."
"That's amusing. What did he say?"
"Well," I thought about it for a moment, "he acknowledged my presence, and accepted the message I'd been charged to give him, and said that even though he knew what I was going to say, I had to say it to fulfill my charge. I said it, and he stated my charge was complete."
"Was that all? You're sure? When did he Frankenstein your timepiece?"
"He said ... " I ran down. Malsumis took another drink, uncharacteristically patient. "Oh, shit."
"Was that the sound of realization?"
"Mal, he said 'for your grandmother's sake.' Right before he hit the watch."
Malsumis actually choked on his drink. I stared at him, but he recovered quickly and placed the glass back down. By the time it hit the bar, he was in perfect control. "For your grandmother's sake?"
"Yeah. What did he mean?"
"You tell me, Michel. You're supposed to be good at this talking-to-the-powers routine."
I scowled at him. "The shrink act, Mal. It's not you."
The other shrugged. "Doesn't matter. What do you think he meant?"
"Either he owed my grandmother something ... "
"Unlikely."
"Yeah, I think so too. Or somehow ... "
"You're almost there, Michel. I can tell from the smoke."
"Suck my monkey dick, Malsumis. Somehow ... he hit the watch because of something my grandmother did. Or didn't do."
"Yes."
"Oh, hell." I looked at Malsumis in horror. "Mal, what happens to those talismans you mentioned in the case of the contract holder's death?"
The Abenaki god grinned at me with extremely sharp canines and eyes burning in his dark-skinned face. His straight black hair fell across his forehead as he answered. "The contract passes down, Michel. Inherited. The obligation traverses the generation, and thus also does any tool or talisman originally granted the contract holder."
"You're telling me
my gran’mere
had a contract with fucking
Cthulhu?
"
Malsumis finished his drink and waggled his thumb and forefinger at Rose for the check. "That's exactly what I'm saying, boy. And now, of course, that contract has passed to you."
"But I have no idea what it is!"
"Well," said the Amerindian Elder, signing some form of his name to the credit card slip without looking at me, "Maybe you'd better swallow some of that annoying French pride and go ask, hadn't you?"
II
Gas pressure disqeuilibrium among the urban rejecta
* * *
The wraith moved down Broadway, a disturbing ripple in the atmosphere of Manhattan with death on its spiderspun mind. It slipped past pedestrians and vehicles with the elliptical flutters of a windborne leaf's breeze, slowly sliding downtown past 12th Street in the evening lightplay of streetlamps and signage. I almost lost it when the light changed and traffic swung from 12th across the avenue, but the heat-shimmer of its presence outlined the shape of a person in the warble of halogen headlights.
I didn't know why it was here, but I had a fairly good idea what it was here to do. Wraiths move slowly, patiently; they can be diverted by a cross breeze, but they never stop. Not once. They're implacable, and they'll follow their designated culmination until they reach it and wrap their fields of eldritch energy about it in autonomic ecstasy.
They wander until they kill. Human nervous systems can't handle the wraith's embrace, but they'll only enfold their target, the person to whom they’ve been attuned.
The real problem is that I was fairly sure this wasn't just a wraith. It was moving wrong. It looked like one, that much I was sure of; but it just didn't
slide
right. I worried at the thought, a bit of skepticism caught in a tooth, for the past two blocks. I'd seen it upon leaving the bar and turned to follow it automatically. My reluctance to accept it as what it seemed wouldn't leave me, and I wouldn't leave it. It fluttered down towards 11th, huddling close to the building edges on the right side of the sidewalk, as I sauntered after it.
It took another few moments to settle in. The thing just wasn't fluttering enough. It was holding an almost purposeful path, something wraiths never do. It was slipping sideways once in a while, but always…
…always to avoid something. Something solid.
Which meant that even if that
was
a wraith, denizen of the air and servant of the ether, it wasn't alone. It was hiding something, or someone. I'd never heard of anything that could survive in the clutches of a wraith, and I didn't like the notion - the wraiths themselves came out only at night and only to kill.
It floated around the corner of Tenth, turning right. I shambled after it, leaning on the corner and lighting a cigar. It was still moving down the block to the west as I stared past my lighter's blue jet, eyes focused halfway on the moving discontinuity. I took my focus off it for just a second, to actually light the cigar, and naturally that's when it vanished.
I controlled my urge to leap after it and took a drag on the now-glowing stick. It couldn't have dissipated, unless it had killed, which would leave a corpse on the street. It still had to be there, somewhere. Putting my lighter into my inner trench coat pocket, I moved my hand from the pocket to the butt of the Beretta suspended vertically along my coat's inner side, and walked slowly westward.
There was no traffic on Tenth, car or foot, at least as far as University. A few meters on, I caught a slice of blackness where the wraith had disappeared, and angled out towards the curb by reflex rather than walk close to the alley entrance. I lifted the Beretta from the holster that held it and held it loosely in my right hand along my trouser leg. With my left, I reached to my chest and found the familiar lump of the watch. As I drew even with the alley entrance, I pivoted to the right and
pressed
, willing a small wave of energy from the watch out into the alley.
My hand almost blew off.
A cone of
something
erupted from my bandolier, and every edge in the alley suddenly lit in glaring incandescence, a hellish line-drawing of urban oubliette. In my surprise, I moved my right hand up into line and as I did so, a sequence of lines bent and twisted, forming a luminous outline which moved away from the right-hand wall and towards me. The trigger pull was reflexive.
chooonnnk. chooonnnkACK
.
There was a whiplash sound as the second shot of the double-tap, done by habit, overwhelmed the baffles of the suppressor and released propellant gases into the air. The lines of light in the alley all detached from their surfaces, rimes of ice flowing before the sun, and dripped upwards, fading as they went. The shape jerked, twice, and then fell in its rush to crumple at my feet.
I stepped back once and pulled the Maglite. Twisting its crown with my fingers, I played it on the figure.
It was gray, flowing, and almost human. As I stared at it, the Beretta still pointing at its middle, it began to rustle around the edges. A moment later it lost cohesion into a flood of gases which spread rapidly out around my heels and dissipated into the cold New York night.
I just stood there for a moment, unsure of what the hell had just happened, and then common sense took over. I turned left, hunched into my collar, and slipped the Beretta into my coat once more as I hurried towards University Place.
There had been something under the wraith, but I had no idea what it had been. It had apparently had its own ideas about being followed. I was completely caught up in wondering what the hell I'd just shot when the surroundings rippled once, twice, and the sounds of the city trembled with a dissonance I'd never heard or hoped to hear. The wraith settled around me from above my head. I had just enough time to lift both my hands to my face before I felt an incredible flood of energy, energy manifested in the very fractures of space that were the wraith's form. It crackled into me with the hissing roar of air cannoned through a train tunnel, and before I could think or do anything, my awareness flickered and snuffed under its assault.
I have no memory of hitting the pavement.
When I came to some of my senses, I was in an amazingly uncomfortable position. I opened my eyes to discover that that really didn't make much of difference. There was a stickiness over my eyelids which I had fervently wished wasn't blood, but which I also recognized probably was. The reason for my discomfort was that my wrists were tied behind my back and my ankles were bound together and tied to my upper thighs. The result of this knot work was that I was in a sort of fetal position, lying on my right side. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the really tormented muscles seemed to have gone numb before I woke up. That was a bad sign in the long run.
I coughed experimentally. That disturbed a cloud of dust from the floor around my face, so I resolved not to do it again but promptly failed, wracking my chest and straining my shoulders as my diaphragm convulsed.
Moaning seemed to be in order. I gave that a try. It didn't improve my situation, but it made me feel better about the amazing discomfort and pain I was in.
After a couple of minutes arguing with myself to the effect that I wasn't really in bed, and I really should try to figure out what the hell was going on, I acknowledged the point with surly bad grace and tried to at least roll up to a kneeling position. This was painful and pointless until, in my thrashing, I came up against a wall; using that as a fulcrum for my shoulder, I finally managed to get my weight on my knees. I blinked several times, trying to see if I could clear my vision, but I couldn't tell if I was succeeding - the problem was in fact that it was pitch-black around me.
I noticed first that my bandolier was gone. So was my coat, and the hardware that it had contained. My ankle was numb, but I presumed that if whoever had tied me had taken the time to tie my ankles, they'd found and removed my holdout gun from there as well. I couldn't tell if I had shoes on until I rocked enough to smack my feet against the hard floor. The soft
thump
told me that nope, I probably didn't. I caught myself thinking of the forthcoming pins and needles, assuming I managed to avoid gangrene, and almost sobbed in anticipatory agony.
Just around about then, an intensely searing light drove its way back into my skull and I tried to scream and close my eyes. I did close my eyes. I may have croaked. The light turned out to be a door opening; the dimness of a hallway, painful to my light-starved eyes, showed me two figures entering the room. They grabbed me under the shoulders, cut my ankles free from my thighs, and hoisted me up between them before carrying me out of the room. I tried to keep my feet off the floor to avoid my toes being smashed into anything during the half-lift half-drag; I wasn't sure I'd succeeded. The lack of feedback I was getting from my body was getting worrying.
We went right, then up a flight of steps that looked like 'basement back stairs' before exiting through a crash-barred door. Wending through a few darkened rooms, we finally came to what looked like workshop, with silent power tools and shelving surrounding a battered workbench in the center. The workbench was lit from above by a pair of portable work lights, making it a pool of brilliance. The figures on either side of me hoisted me without much apparent effort - I felt strangely light, as if they weren't lifting my whole weight - and dropped me onto the workbench. The pain of impact was bad, but not nearly as excruciating as I'd predicted. I rolled over back onto my right side.
"Free him."
That was new. The voice came from the shadows in the back of the room. A moment later, something cut the remaining thongs binding my ankles and wrists. I didn't so much stretch as ooze back into normal shape and extension, still lying in a curl on the bench. I know I cried at the pain that the movement of my joints engendered, but no tears came. I thought about the headache and my throat and guessed I was dehydrated. If I wasn't able to get lachrymose, it had to be fairly severe.
"Leave him there. Go away."
Voice was someone of few words, but effective ones. The shapes to either side withdrew into the darkness. After a few seconds, I heard a door open and close.
"Mister Wibert. You'll have to excuse the help." There was a rustling noise as the voice moved towards me. I blinked blearily towards it. A dark man was weaving smoothly between the tool benches. He reached the workbench and surveyed me, hands flat on the bench to either side of his shoulders, before shaking his head.
I wasn't bound. But there was no way I was moving. He was just as safe, which pissed me off.
"…'ter?" I managed to croak.
The observer nodded and reached under the bench. He came up with a squeeze bottle, which he spritzed once into my open mouth. I swished the liquid around as best I could and felt the sandpaper start to break free and dissolve. It was water, room temp but apparently unaltered. I spat the mouthful out and opened again, hopefully. He obliged me, and I drank gratefully, ignoring the foul taste which was almost certainly my mouth and not the water.
After a few repetitions, he put the bottle down again and moved around the table so that his face was in easy view. I looked at him. He was middle height and looked awfully familiar, despite that I was sure I'd never met him. It wasn't until he spoke again that the shoe dropped.
"Mister Wibert. I understand I have you to thank for my brother Hapy's arrival."
I shook my head in confusion. "Shu?"
"Indeed. Very nice to make your acquaintance."
"Why…this?"