Thoughtful, Mellie shoveled the rest of the cash into her pocket and put her violin away, latching first the bow, and then the case itself with the remote detachment of long habit. She stood, and taking up her case in one hand - and with tiny, gold coin clenched tightly in the other - she slipped her shoes back on.
As she stepped off the grass, which seemed oddly greener and more vibrant than when she'd arrived in the little park, Melody Devreaux saw a shadowy hand reaching its slow scuttling way out of a storm drain a few feet distant.
Instead of the usual mind-blanking terror, she felt a hard knot of anger coalesce in her middle. She gripped her fiddle case in one shaking hand and the gold mystery coin in the other. Shaking in palpable rage now, instead of her earlier fear.
On an impulse so strong she couldn't resist it, Mellie whistled a few bars from her favorite song. The translucent black claw flinched, a bare inch away from an unknowing pedestrian's ankle. It writhed as she whistled and then began to shake itself apart, disintegrating before her eyes.
Barely believing it, Melody stared at the spot until the clawed member was completely gone. The same fierce joy she'd felt while playing wound through her heart. She had a way to fight back now.
Humming quietly to the world, Mellie turned and went home.
PART TWO
FALLEN KNIGHT
2
Tourney Martin huddled against the side of the Flatiron Building and shivered. He wasn't cold from the air: he didn't really feel that anymore. The chill gripping his guts and bones came from deep inside.
The creeping things had gotten Joe and Maddy.
He didn't know exactly when he'd started seeing real things. He saw stuff that wasn't there a lot. Usually things from his memories, but more and more – especially in the Down Below, under the streets – he saw stuff that shouldn't be.
Figures that couldn't possibly be human moved in the dark and the shadows. Teeth as long as his fingers, hair even longer, eyes big and pale yellow, shiny black skin like his best boot polish. And always he heard their murmuring, murmuring, like a conversation just too far away to understand. It sounded like gravel or ball-bearings poured into a huge metal bucket.
If that bucket wanted to pull the bones from your body.
Tourney shivered, despite the sunlight on his face. Daytime, and fresh air –– fresh for the city, at least – and other people around seemed to help, to hold back the creeping dread. It was safer Down Below, usually. No cops to kick him along, or hipsters to judge him, or activists to try to help him better himself. Or worst of all – he snarled to himself – shrinks to make him think he was even crazier than he knew he was.
But.
People, his people, were going missing Down Below. Under the streets. In the dark. Most of the Down Below was dark, but it was starting to get scary. Really scary, like stuff whispering in your ear and then not being there when you turn around scary.
Three days ago he'd watched Joe Mutter and Mad Maddy walk into a deep, inky shadow. And then not walk out again. Joe's mutter was constant. That's why they called him Joe Mutter. The dark patch in the forgotten hallway Down Below had swallowed Joe and his constant companion Madeline, and then – for the first time since he'd met him – Tourney heard Joe's mutter stop. There'd been a kind of a sigh that faded off into silence.
Then a half-dozen pairs of little yellow spots came on in the dark. Like eyes. Looking at him. Tourn had left Down Below, and hadn't been back since. Lots of other street people were doing the same thing, he'd noticed.
After days on the surface, though, with the lack of good, safe sleep that came with it, he was starting to wonder if he'd been seeing things.
Again.
Tourn thought it had started sometime after coming home from the Sandbox and the suck. Life hadn't been kind, but he'd never asked it to. At almost six feet of cord and gristle under coffee-colored skin, Tourn had always found a place, even if he'd had to make it himself. That had been true in the Corps. It had been especially true after Mama left him and his father. His now-disjointed memories of childhood made Tourney think she hadn't been quite right in the head.
Maybe that's where he got it from.
The normal smells and sounds of the surface city were good things. Fried whatever with spices set his stomach to growling in a comfortingly normal way. Taxis' blatting honks and the cocktail-party-f-of-birds chatter of humanity pulled him back from the edge of his dis-ease. Somewhere nearby, some busker played music. The pleasant weight of the city – his city – gave Tourney space in his head.
To think. To remember.
Life in the Corps had been good for him. He'd made friends – real friends – for the first time in his life. He'd proven good at important military things. Watching his buddies' backs. Keeping his nose clean. Drinking beer. His stutter, the bane of his childhood, had even gone mostly away.
And then That Night.
Tourney's fingers tightened until his ragged nails dug painfully into his skin where they were wrapped around his bent legs. He didn't feel it, though. He was someplace else. The comforting presence of the city vanished, and he was once again in the hot, dusty streets of a place halfway across the world.
The flashes from his muzzle illuminated brief stills of the action around Lance-corporal Martin. He'd always found it strange, the way his goggle and eye seemed to work against each other at night. Bright lights blinded the night vision goggle, while those same flashes showed his Mark One Eyeball what the goggle couldn't see. Of course, then his personal night vision was gone, and the eye not with a goggle had to adapt. Slowly. At the least the NVG got used to things pretty quickly. By now, the interplay was nearly instinctive.
He turned and dropped to a knee as movement from his right pulled at his strained consciousness. Finger squeezed trigger and a three-round burst ripped through a figure swathed in cloth and holding an AK.
"C'mon, Tourn," his squad leader, Sergeant Yves, yelled at him from a short way ahead. Martin obeyed, driving off his planted foot and pounding what passed for pavement in the slums his company was tasked to clear. Flashes from above and left told him somebody else was trying to kill his buddies.
He raised his carbine – there were many like it, but this one was his – taking care, as he'd been taught, not to sweep anybody he didn't want to shoot. Again, finger to trigger. Again, flashes and impact. No noise, though. It was weird how he could never remember hearing the sound of the fire of his own bullets. Just other people's.
He missed, he discovered as a figure leaned out of a second story window. Tourn crouched just as a strobe lit the blacker opening in the black wall. The distinct AK noise gave him hope, and the impact of bullets on the wall behind him told Martin his enemy didn't have nearly as much training as the USMC gave.
He switched the selector to semi-auto and squeezed off a round at the open window. And stepped quickly to the side, just in case. He wasn't trying to hit anything with that shot, just give the
muj
something else to shoot at. Tourn waited a beat, during which he set the selector back to burst fire, then ripped off three more rounds just as the figure leaned out again. The young lance-corporal sensed, rather than saw, an absence where he'd been shooting, and turned to follow his squad.
And froze.
Tourney's very soul screamed at what he saw. Nearly clear as day, hunched black figures struggled silently with his squad-mates. He got the impression of hair – or spines – and sharp, rending teeth, and knew he saw bright yellow-green eyes.
Time seemed to slow, and he knew what he'd see.
He'd seen it again. And again, and again.
Usually in his nightmares.
Sergeant Yves threw off one of the figures and fired a burst into – through? – its chest. The glare from the flashes lit up the entire street, and his goggle blanked, obedient to the bright light. Tourn saw a figure, a human figure, rise up from a rooftop and lift a tube to its shoulder. A tube with a pointed end.
As always, Tourn tried – God, he tried! – to alert his squad. He screamed, but no sound came out of his mouth. He ran toward them, but his feet move so very slowly. He could almost feel sharp-fingered hands holding him back, and somewhere he shivered. And all the figures turned to look at him. His squad-mates' eyes were filled with despair and the fore-knowledge of their own deaths, while the inhuman black figures laughed at Lance-corporal Martin's inability to save his friends.
The sharp crack-HISS of the rocket propelled grenade filled Tourn's mind. The flash of its ignition briefly lit up the night, and its trajectory blazed a trail across his vision. In the nightmare world of his memory, Tourn could actually see the warhead impact among his brothers.
The world went white.
Through the longest split-second of his life, through the thunder of the explosion and the remembered pain of a fist the size of a bus hitting him, Tourney Martin heard the fierce song of the busker.
There was a comfort in the notes. They wormed their way into his shattered soul, and their magic filled in some of the cracks. They warmed the chill in his bones. And when the notes faded away, the music inside him played on.
Tourn came back to the present in the same place he'd left it. Instead of the fear and despair he become accustomed to, however, he felt light. And, if not whole, at least less broken. Almost… free.
Tourn didn't know how long he'd been sitting trapped in his terror past, but his bones creaked as he pushed himself to his feet. Thrusting his arms over his head, he stretched. He was pretty sure every joint he possessed popped, one after another.
He moved out of the alleyway and slid into the foot traffic. He'd bathed a few days previous, so people didn't immediately shy away from him like they sometimes did. He'd learned early on to keep his arms and legs in, to occupy as little space as he could. Normal people didn't mind homeless head-cases, so long as you didn't intrude on their space. He moved forward, toward where he thought the music had been coming from. Something told him he needed to find the source.
If only to say thank you.
It was the first time in years a flashback hadn't ended with Tourney puking and shitting himself or hurting somebody while delirious. And that was worth everything.
As Tourn walked, his thoughts ranged. The actual blast had killed his squad. A flying piece of debris had impacted his helmet so hard he'd blacked out. When he came to – in a medical tent – he'd been unable to speak. Or move his head for the pain. Whiplash, concussion and the likelihood of further brain damage. Not to mention the cuts and scratches. They'd told him he'd been lucky to survive the blast, but he'd never seen it that way.
When it had come time for his after action report – as the only one left alive to do so – he'd dutifully written out what had happened. Typed, really, as he was still having trouble talking, and similar trouble with his handwriting. Which had never been that great, anyway.
The report had gone up his chain of command, and the shrinks had come back down. Are you sure you saw hairy monsters with glowing eyes, Lance-corporal? Wasn't it just maybe insurgents with some kind of mask on? Did Sergeant Yves do everything he should have? Did you?
By the time they were done with him, Tourney Martin didn't know what he'd seen. He remembered his squad in close-quarters battle with some kind of creatures. But had he actually seen that, or was it something the head wound had left him? Like the stutter that was worse than before he'd enlisted. And the headaches, and the nightmares where he watched his friends murdered again and again and again.
Tourney stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, something pinging his unconscious. He stood in front of a small park. It wasn't even a park, really, but a bit of manicured landscape in front of a building. A small crowd was in the process of dispersing, its individual bits going off about their own business. He slid his invisible way through the foot traffic until he stood on the grass.
The green, vibrant grass was odd for this late in the fall, especially in the city. Looking around, it came to Tourn that the people making their way past the little park were smiling. He realized he, himself, wasn't even wearing his near-constant scowl, and while it couldn't be said to be a smile, at least nobody was avoiding his gaze.
And then he looked down, and saw the footprints.
Somehow, the impressions of two bare feet had pressed down the grass just a short way from where he stood. As he bent down to look, he saw some of the blades stand back up. So, someone light. And right in front of the footprints was an oblong shape tamped down in the grass.
Urgency wrapped its fist around his heart. He didn't know why, but he had to find the player. He looked up, face fierce with purpose. Instinct honed by years spent on the street compelled him to movement, but Tourn beat it down. He needed intelligence.
He looked from face to face, searching for something to give him a clue. Not finding anything but the strangely gentle smiles on the faces of passersby, he looked down at the footprints again. Someone light. Small feet, too. Probably female.