As I stood there in surprise, his head swiveled to look towards me. Our eyes met for just a moment, and then his face showed shock at the realization that I was looking at him, not the fire. His brows furrowed together for a second. At that moment, I pushed away from the wall and began to lumber through the flood of pedestrians towards him.
He leapt from the box with a convulsive straightening of his legs, landed on a small patch of clear ground without knocking anyone over, and then melted into the crowd. I was too far away and not tall enough to see him go. By the time I reached the newspaper box, he was long gone; even after I clambered up onto the space he had just vacated I couldn't see him or any out-of-place movement in the crowd. He had apparently had the sense to move away just far enough and then move with the flow.
Damn it.
I climbed thoughtfully down off the box and went home.
* * *
I didn't think much of it for a couple of weeks. While sitting at my desk at work one day, however, I was caught by an image from the New York One video news feed which I kept running, along with several similar streams, on a flat panel monitor on my office credenza. Looking up from my newspaper, I saw a flash of fire, and reached for the remote. A click brought the NY1 feed up to cover the entire screen, and I watched a large powerboat (or small yacht, depending on your point of view) burn merrily. It seemed to be docked somewhere on the East River, perhaps near the Seaport, but it was hard to tell from the angles. The fiberglass hull coat and superstructure was deforming under the heat as the frozen therms of plastic and diesel liberated themselves in a sooty orange celebration. A fireboat and two fire engines were in attendance; the text scroll on the screen was explaining that the boat had been rammed by a runaway tugboat which had caused a rupture of the fuel tanks. The tugboat was visible in the background, having been unceremoniously hauled away from its victim. No casualties had been suffered; the powerboat had been parked and empty at the time of the collision. I was about to switch the feed down again when I saw a shape that looked out of place.
A man was crouched atop a large piling at the next pier down, his ungainly figure projecting above the small crowd that had gathered to watch the fun. I snatched the remote back up and tried frantically to get the idiot computer running the feeds to zoom in on him, but the camera cut away again. By the time the same angle popped back up on the screen, the piling was empty.
I rubbed my chin thoughtfully and caught myself idly readjusting the weight of the Desert Eagle underneath my oversized sports coat.
* * *
I was drinking with Kevin a few days later when I remembered the two sightings. We were in Molly's, a
shebeen
on the lower east side near the Police Academy with an actual working fireplace and sawdust on the floor. Popular with the cadets, it was usually a good place to drink undisturbed. Staring into the flickering fireplace, I was struck by a sudden memory and turned to my companion.
"Kevin, do you know of anybody in Manhattan like you, but associated with a fire Elder?"
"What, like Belenus or Xolotl?"
"Or Vulcan, or Hephaestus, or anybody like that."
Kevin took a draught of Guinness, one worthy of his size and accent, thinking. I waited. He lowered the glass to the bar and shook his head. "Nope."
"Are you sure?" I asked, disappointed.
"Yeh. Me boss keeps tabs on those types. His counterparts, y'know."
"Yeah, I can see that."
"Sure. Anyway, he tells me when they're up to summat, and when they are it's always either in person or via a temporary avatar. I've not heard of them using a human for any long term work. They're difficult for a human to work with, o'course."
"Because…?"
He grinned, reached forward and pinched out the candle. Waving his fingers, he showed the black soot mark on the thumb and forefinger to me. I understood. "Oh. They can't avoid heating their environments?"
"Well, they can, but they can't exist in environments that aren't uncomfy warm for us. Me, I'm from th'auld sod, so bein' soaked through to the skin is no great handicap."
I laughed and took a drink of my own. "Makes sense. As much as anything."
"Why d'ye ask, boy?"
So I told him about what I'd seen. He shook his head. "Are ye sure ye saw something? Two sightings, one barely credible, for a moment on a TV?"
"Yeah, I'm sure, Kevin. It
Looked
right." I looked into my beer for a bit. "I can tell when I'm Seeing things. I was, those times. Nobody else noticed."
"All right then. Was the man hisself visible only to you, or was it just the oddity that only you could see?"
I thought about that, too. "I…don't know. I think he was visible; I mean, I think I saw people avoiding him." I frowned, trying to pull the memory up. "Yeah, they walked around him."
"Hm. Sounds indeed like a mortal, of rare device."
"Ah well. I'm not sure why I even care. Unless he's the one setting the fires."
We drank for a moment, before Kevin asked of the air, "'Course, why is he runnin' away?"
I didn't have an answer to that which I liked.
* * *
Nothing happened on the firewatcher front for a couple of months. I had a run-in with a paladin on upper Broadway which ended up with my having to purchase a bodega and the next door food stand due to demolishment, as well as invoke more favors than I would have liked to avoid official inquiry. The paladin lived, worse luck, but I vindictively hoped he'd be a bit more careful naming his Demons in future. I met three more Elders who were willing to talk about Gran'mere, and I managed to avoid talking to Cthulhu or Azif at all.
Then, around the time the weather changed to chill, I was walking down West Houston Street when I turned my head and saw him. Just past Mercer Street, a bit west; he was sitting on the curb talking with two other men. Wiry but not small, he was wearing a leather jacket against the cold and was engaged in a loud and good-natured argument about baseball. His face, in profile, was unmistakable despite its relative plainness; I had seen it outlined in faeried fire and compressed combustion. I continued walking east until I'd passed him and his companions, wondering what to do, before shrugging to myself and turning back to approach them. They trailed off arguing, three fairly confident-looking New Yorkers, Italian extraction if I was guessing right, and turned to look at me. I was inhaling to introduce myself when he looked up at my face.
Then he blanched, sprang to his feet, and took off north, cutting through traffic towards the Mercer block. I didn't want to wait around to find out how his friends were going to react, so I muttered "sorry," and belted off after him. There were shouts behind me, but no footfalls; I was gambling that his obvious flight would confuse them long enough to make them unwilling to get involved immediately.
I was perhaps fifty feet behind him when he hit Mercer proper. He was maintaining his lead when we blazed past Bleecker, a block later. He jumped a fence on the west side of Mercer and cut across a maze of development grounds; I stopped at the fence, my trench coat hampering me and, frankly, his speed so far making it unlikely I would catch him. I felt like an idiot.
Instead, I turned around. His friends were nowhere to be seen so I walked down Mercer to Grand then cut east to get an espresso. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting outside a tiny bakery, nibbling on a cannoli and sipping an espresso that had come out of a copper altar the size of my bathroom into an eggshell-thin Wedgwood cup. As I restored the calories wasted in pursuit, a black-on-black-on-black Cadillac STS wafted up to the curb in front of me. I raised my espresso cup to the darkened windows. One of the rear ones rolled down a few inches; so summoned, I picked up my espresso and strolled the five feet to the car, bending over to speak into the gap.
"Michel."
"Sir." There's no harm in being polite if you're not interested in starting trouble.
"So good to see you out and about. Does your trip concern anything I might want to know about?"
"No, sir. I'm just out for an espresso."
"Ah. I understand you were taking your exercise up near Bleecker."
Dammit. Never try to outbland an Italian south of Delancey. "I was, sir, but that to my knowledge doesn't concern any of you or yours. I would have spoken with you if I believed it did."
"Yes. You were raised polite, boy."
I nodded my head.
"Do enjoy your drink, and be welcome." The window rolled up and the Cadillac breathed away from the curb. See, car types have it all wrong. They continually lambaste the Caddy for having soggy suspension and no ability to use the power it has; but that's not what it's
for
. The reason The Man In The Long Black Car always rides in a Lincoln or a Caddy is because the enormous Detroit lumps in the front have enough torque to waft the car around Little Italy without coming up past idle - and as a result, you never notice that the damn car is right behind you until too late.
It works, too. Until the signage on Mulberry Street is in Korean, there will always be at least a niche market for those cars.
I sat back down and dug out a sterile lancet from an inner pocket, unwrapped it and drove it into my finger. Then I reached that finger into my bandolier and touched the spearhead.
The resulting
CRACK
of power felt like it had lifted the crown of my skull off as always, especially after a native espresso. Once things had settled down there was an insistent tugging on my soul to the northwest. I paid my bill and walked in that direction.
* * *
The pulling on my mind led me over as far as 6th Avenue, then northward. I trudged onward until suddenly I was yanked left, towards the other side of the avenue. There was a low building there, with a garage door painted red.
Oh, of course. Engine 24.
I kicked myself, hard, for stupidity, then placed my palm over my chest and expressed a small fold of power from the pocket watch, covering myself from view with a slipcloth of imagination and distraction. I was about to walk over to the fire station and wait for someone to open a door when the big door opened, and Engine 24 spun out with the spinners lit and the horns going.
I grimaced, waited until it turned uptown past me, and grabbed one of the rear posts, swinging myself aboard to stand behind the hose stack. Nobody saw me. We roared up Manhattan for several blocks, turned West finally coming to a halt before a four-story building in the West Village that was definitely burning. No flames were visible, but there was surely an awful lot of smoke coming from the top floor windows. I hopped off and watched various firefighters hurry around the truck to remove gear-
-and there he was. Helmet on his head and face shield down, but the spearhead wouldn't lie and it pulled me towards him as he geared up and slapped another firefighter on the shoulder. Together, they hefted prybar and axe and moved towards the front of the building. I moved up behind them. After they had yanked the front door from its track and gone in, I followed.
I know, but it's not as stupid as it sounds. I'm protected against a whole raft of stuff when I'm cannoned up, as I was, and smoke inhalation really doesn't weigh in as a heavy hitter in my personal fight card. Nor does heat. Actual combustion, well, that was still a problem, but not as big of one - the Burberry was imbued with enough power to remain impenetrable for several minutes, if it came to that. I pulled on my gloves as we went in.
The problem with this magical armor routine, in my opinion, is that I've never yet found a power equation that will let me avoid sweating like a pig. Small price to pay, I suppose. I try to stay in decent shape, that helps. But now, with my scarf over my lower face and the coat closed and gloves on, I started to feel damp almost immediately.
I followed my quarry up one flight of stairs, and then the two separated, apparently intending to search the floor. I followed my pigeon, and when he took a cursory look around the rear room and continued upstairs, I was right behind him.
The fire was beautiful. It was flowering nearly silently across the upstairs hallway wall, and flowing with mesmerizing fluidity across the ceiling, a blue and yellow and orange blanket of life and death. I shook myself to stop myself staring at it-
And saw that he had stopped. He was staring at it with much the same expression I must have had on my face, but his hands hung limp at his side. I was behind him and several steps below him on the stairs, and I could see the view of the fire distorting around his head. I moved up a step, as quietly as possible despite the audible crackling of floorboards and ceiling joists, squinted, and…
Saw
. There was a head around his head, transparent and nearly four times human size, looking at the fire with him; from this angle, inside the giant, almost crystalline shape, he looked like a pomegranate seed inside its angular jacket. Both he and whatever he was wearing were looking at the flames, entranced. I looked downstairs; I probably only had a few seconds.
I was wrong. The ceiling fell in at that moment, directly on top of him. I lunged forward, but my outstretched gloves met only debris, and then the floor slowly detached from the sidewall of the building and we lazily tumbled the two stories down to the ground, waiting below.
* * *
I don't remember landing. I know that when I was next aware, blinking stupidly in the cooler air of the lower floors, I was nearly entombed in a pile of rubble. Concrete, plaster, wood and metal debris were piled around and atop me, the pile spilling from the wall at one side over the edge of the stairway to the lower level at the other. The bannister had been smashed through by the deluge.
Although I could hear shouts coming from several directions, I was having trouble keeping my mind on them. I somewhat hazily self-diagnosed a mild concussion and swore at myself, trying to ignore the slowly rising pain in my skull.
Oh sure, armor your damn coat, fireproof your hands. What's the most important thing you can damage, you idiot? Yeah. My headache got worse.