Chapter FOUR
“Sorry, mister,“
the cabbie said as he pulled to a stop at the head of Bootblack Alley. “It ain’t plowed properly down there. I’m liable to get stuck.”
Something told Nigel the driver would have refused to make that turn onto Bootblack, regardless of the time of year. The snow was merely a handy excuse. He didn’t have time to argue, however. The other taxi had deposited Luna in the same spot minutes ago.
“Here,“
he said, shoving another wad of bills through the cab window, then dove for the door.
“Mister, you already paid me—“
The door slammed on whatever else the man had to say. Nigel ducked down Bootblack. Luna was already out of sight. The thaumatic streetlamps on this street didn’t work very well. They seemed merely to emphasize the shadows rather than illuminate them. That phantom thing could be lurking anywhere in the darkness, ready to pounce. Luna appeared beneath one of those lights in the middle-distance, tottering uncertainly on the un-shoveled sidewalk. Her progress was slow. Which was fine with Nigel. He opened his mouth, half-wondering if he ought to call out to her. He thought better of it, however, when a pair of unsightly figures lurched suddenly into view from a building close by. Nigel caught his breath, and his hands began to form sorcerous sigils of defense.
“Good evening, Bill!“
Luna’s bright voice called out, ringing in the darkness of Bootblack. “Good evening, George!”
“Evenin’, Luna,“
the two lurchers called back in distinctly slurred voices. They raised their hands in salute and stumbled on their way across the street, and Luna continued down the sidewalk.
Nigel’s pulse wouldn’t stop racing. Why in heaven’s name would Luna take it into her head to go and befriend a couple of creepy street-stragglers? And on a first-name basis, at that! He wasn’t even on first-name basis with her.
He stuffed his hands deep into his pockets, fists firmly clenched against any further urge to form dire symbols. He couldn’t start using sorcery for no reason, no matter how jumpy he felt. Luna wouldn’t like it. Best case scenario, he’d see that she got safely home and leave again without her ever knowing he was here.
Growling softly, he picked his way down the street behind her, keeping a wary eye out for drifting phantoms. It occurred to him that he might have just been seeing things; his brain was quite addled, after all, still recovering from fever. He might even be feverish this very moment, and that sinister image was nothing more than a hallucination brought on by a sick mind. If that was the case, what the hells was he doing, stalking Miss Talbot in her own neighborhood? Who was the creepy one now? Neither Bill nor George, apparently.
He passed by the same seedy bar he’d encountered on his first venture into Bootblack Alley. It wasn’t playing Green Yule hymns anymore, which was a mercy. Instead, strains of “A Rose in the Rain“
blared over the too-loud thaumatic speakers. Many drawling, off-key voices joined in singing: “Oh love, like a rose in the rain! Each petal a sigh, each thorn a sweet pain!”
Gods, how he hated that song.
Once, Luna paused and looked around. In a flash, Nigel leapt into the nearest alleyway between two buildings. He tripped over a fallen trash bin and crashed into another. There were sounds of scurrying, and rats scampered every which-way. He groaned and drew back quickly, trying to ignore the pungent bouquet of putrid smells erupting in his nostrils.
Peeking out carefully, he saw Luna turn and continue on her way, a little faster than before. Had she heard the clanging in the alley? Had he scared her? So much for his gallant gesture of protection! The poor girl was going to be three times more frightened by his attempt at heroics than by whatever imagined demons he’d mistakenly believed dogged her footsteps.
Nigel waited until she was on the doorstep of Mrs. Boggs’s establishment before he dared step out of the fetid alleyway and into the not-quite-as-stale air on the sidewalk. He hung back, watching as the front door opened, flooding Luna’s face with sickly light. Even from this distance, the yip and yap of Mrs. Boggs’s many terriers rattled his ears. “Yes, I know!“
he heard Luna saying with gentle peevishness. “Down, Blitzen! This is my last pair of stockings without a run in them!”
With those words, she stepped inside.
The door shut. The light extinguished.
Bootblack Alley was dark and lonely and apparently abandoned.
Nigel progressed slowly down the street. He stood a moment at the door of Number 27, looking up at the slouching fa?ade of the old brick building. There were lights in some of the windows, but not many and all very dull. Mrs. Boggs was, he knew, stingy when it came to energy consumption.
At last, he breathed out a little sigh. “What are you doing here, Grimm?“
he whispered.
Then, because he couldn’t make himself abandon the cause just yet, he crossed the street to the far sidewalk where he could get a better view of Number 27. He took up residence on a dilapidated doorstep, crossed his arms, and tilted his head back. And back and back, until his gaze reached the little garret window at the very top of the house. Luna’s room.
The window was too grimy and faraway to see anything through it other than a dull gleam of light, which popped suddenly into existence. He remembered the chain and the thaumatic bulb hung beside Bryony’s bed. He could easily envision Luna, up in that sad little attic space, slipping out of her coat, hat, and boots. Would she have anything for dinner tonight? If only he’d insisted on her remaining to eat Mrs. Goddard’s “healing broth“
with him. She needed nourishment if she was going to recover. Unless, of course, she planned to meet Ward the Wardsman for a date this evening. Well, good if so. At least it would mean she ate something, and—
Nigel’s blood went cold.
The phantom.
It was there. No longer floating, but crawling along the sidewalk on the far side of the street. Its form was all elongated, one unnatural limb outstretching before the next, pulling itself along through the snow. His stomach knotted tight with disgust as he recognized it for what it was at last: a simulacrum—a sorcerous creation. A minion, wrought to perform the bidding of its master.
This particular simulacrum was not well-made. It didn’t move right. A truly talented sorcerer could construct simulacrums that were extremely convincing and didn’t need to be shrouded in rags and cloths to disguise their innate wrongness. Jastira’s could pass for human, if one didn’t know the subtle signs to watch for. Nigel had made himself one once, though it wasn’t a practice he enjoyed. It involved delving into the darker reaches of the Dire Dimensions, outside his field of study. He’d only made it in a bid to impress Jastira, then had been so appalled at his success that he’d unmade it soon after—an act of semi-murder which haunted him to this day.
This thing was obviously constructed by a sorcerer of some power but no real skill. It didn’t move correctly. It betrayed its own manufacturing in the strange way that it floated one moment then jerked along the next, as though its life-force were every so often dragged out of this realm, back to the Dire where its energies belonged, only to pop back in again an instant later.
But it was real. Real and present, right there in front of him, not conjured up by fever. A living, breathing simulacrum on Bootblack Alley. Stalking Luna.
And he was fairly certain he knew why.
He hadn’t wanted to know. It had seemed much too much of a coincidence when Fabian brought up the Brotherhood and their interest in searching out the last female member of the Thorpewillow family line. Nigel didn’t like coincidence. He liked still less notions of fate or divine intervention, any concept that some power beyond his control had driven the last of the Thorpewillows straight to his doorstep. It was too neat, too convenient, and simply not the way he wanted the world to work. He preferred a nice, old-fashioned chaos. Chaos made sense to his brain. Unlike fate or deities, chaos had no will of its own and, therefore, might be subjected to a stronger will. Like his, for instance.
But he couldn’t deny the truth any longer. He’d known from the start that Luna harbored secrets, secrets she did not feel safe to share with him, possibly never would. And he didn’t care. He could honor her need for privacy; he had secrets of his own, hadn’t he? He’d done everything in his power to quash any curiosity, to enjoy whatever she chose to reveal about her life with her aunties and her tea garden and her funny little anecdotes from childhood. To leave the rest alone. Luna was a deeply sincere person. What she chose to share was real, and that was enough for Nigel.
But there was so much more to her. And, as time went on, he’d found it harder and harder to ignore.
“I know what you are!”
Her voice rang in his memory, along with the image of her, clad in her nightgown, tearing open the fire escape door. He saw again how she fled out onto that rusty metal balcony, her bare feet slipping on ice. How her hand had gripped the rail.
“I won’t let you do it. I won’t let you take me! I’ll die first!”
She would have flung herself over, fallen to break in bloody ruin on the snowy street below, had Nigel not caught her in time. Had he not held her while she sobbed, murmuring words of comfort into her hair until the fit passed.
He’d suspected before then.
After that moment, he knew. Who she was. From whom she was hiding. And why.
Now, as he watched the simulacrum crawling up the street, he saw the life Luna had sought so hard to escape catching up to her at last.
Nigel swallowed.
Luna wasn’t a sorceress. Whatever else she was hiding, it wasn’t repressed magical power. Potential, sure—she had that in spades, more than she knew. But it was completely undeveloped and possibly suppressed over the years by her aunties and their potent Green Magic teas. Which meant she was unprepared for a face-to-face encounter with a simulacrum.
And it was now starting to climb the boardinghouse wall.
Backwards.
Its face, pointed out to the street. Its spine arched. Its limbs curved unnaturally as fingerlike-protrusions gripped the brick.
Nigel strode forward, foundering a little in the soppy snow, until he reached the middle of the street. A gust of winter wind blasted his long coat behind him in a dramatic billow as he raised his arms and summoned an influx of Dire Matter. If there happened to be any SSSD officers in the vicinity, they would sense it and be on him in a trice. His peaceful existence in Ballycastle would be over, and Garden would lose its sole protector.
He didn’t care. Because that thing was now halfway up the side of Mrs. Boggs’s Boardinghouse for Young Women of Good Character.
He called up an impalious spell—not a random blast, but a pointed bolt of Dire Matter, sparking with anti-glitter, which manifested in his hand. He sent it hurtling up the building, and it branched in the air like lightning before reforming into a solid point the instant before impaling the simulacrum’s bizarrely arched body.
It didn’t screech. Simulacrums don’t have voices.
But Nigel felt the reverberation of its pain burst across his senses. He staggered back, braced himself, and watched the bundle of rags fall with a thud to the sidewalk. There it scrabbled with its strange, multi-jointed fingers at the Dire Bolt protruding from its, for want of a better word, chest.
Nigel raced forward, dropped to his knees beside the creature. He threw back its hood, trying to get a good look at it, to guess at the thing’s maker. Sometimes one could glimpse a reflection of the father or mother in the offspring’s face.
This face was too poorly wrought, however. There weren’t even any eyes, and merely two raw slits for a nose. No lips either, just gnashing teeth, all pointed, which opened and closed grotesquely in its agonies.
It was at the point of death. But that wasn’t good enough. Because there were others. Whoever had constructed this monstrosity had made many more besides, all searching for Luna at their master’s behest. But most sorcerers hadn’t the strength for more than a single power strand, drawn from the Dire, and would link all simulacrum creations along that same line. Which meant, if you got hold of one, you should be able to reach them all.
“Hold still,“
Nigel growled through gritted teeth. “This won’t hurt a bit.”
He placed his palm on that featureless forehead, above the snapping teeth. Closing his eyes, he sank his awareness down, down, down into its being. Another silent screech burst out from it, nearly throwing him off, but he was prepared for it. He leaned in harder. He was, in that moment, no longer Nigel Grimm of The Arcane Bouquet, Addle Street. He was the Grimshade Lord, consort of Jastira, Master of the Mystic and the Dire.
He reached into that simulacrum’s head, found the power thread which its creator used to enliven it and its brethren. There were quite a few of them—Nigel could feel them, dozens of them. All over Ballycastle. Hunting, searching, scouring. Eventually, they would all converge on Bootblack Alley, unless . . .
He stretched his power down into the writhing, shrieking, dying simulacrum’s brain and grabbed hold of that power line. It seared his soul, but he didn’t care. He’d suffered far worse in days of yore. He felt the shocked awareness of the other sorcerer at the end of that line, and smiled at the alarm which radiated out from that person’s spirit. For this sorcerer, whoever he or she may be, was about to get a much bigger shock.
Words of a dark and damned tongue fell from Nigel’s lips. He sent a pulse down the power line, rippling through layers of reality far removed from the one in which he knelt. The silent shrieks of many dying simulacrums echoed across Ballycastle as, one by one, its brethren crumped up, fell, and disintegrated, leaving behind nothing but piles of moldy rags.
Last of all, the simulacrum in his grasp collapsed under his palm. Nigel opened his eyes, stared down at the pile of empty rags in front of him. He breathed out slowly. Little motes of anti-glitter floated from his mouth.
Then he looked at his palm. An angry black welt stretched across it. A Dire burn. He grimaced. There was a time in his life when such burns were common enough. Suffering was all part of the game when one began to reach for real power. Jastira’s sensuous body was often riddled with such marks. She gloried in them, displaying them proudly for Nigel’s eyes, though in public she took care to hide them with glamor spells.
This one wasn’t bad. He hadn’t needed to reach far into the Dire to work that particular trick. It would heal soon enough.
Rising, Nigel kicked the bundle of rags off the sidewalk and into the gutter. Then he tilted back his head, looking up at Mrs. Boggs’s building, up to the little window where the single thaumatic bulb glowed. Was Luna even now preparing for bed? He hoped so. Because tonight, she would sleep safe, stalked by no hellish abominations. And now, whoever it was who searched for her knew she wasn’t without friends. Or protection.
He turned, shoved both hands deep into his pockets, and stomped back up Bootblack. As he passed the little trashcan alley between two buildings, he paused a moment. The stench of scorched rat tickled his nostrils. The summoning of Dire energy always demanded a cost, after all. It could have been worse. He could have used Mrs. Boggs’s yippy terriers. Sucked their annoying little souls out of their wretched little bodies and used them to fuel his spell. It would have been more potent than rat-lives, that’s for sure.
But he wasn’t such a Dark Sorcerer as all that. Not anymore.
Shoulders hunched against the cold, he hurried up the street, leaving the dead rats and the shadows of Bootblack Alley behind him.