The Wind City (12 page)

“Hey, hey,” Saint said, lofty and lazy. “I have work to do too, you know. It’s important stuff. You think I could stop at just killing one giant? That wouldn’t be very proactive of me. My ghost friend’s telling me there’s all sorts of monsters I gotta take down.”

Steffan rubbed at his temples and thought very irritable thoughts about vexing friends and why did he even bother. “So you’re busy with this, then,” he said. He frowned down at one of the dirty coffee cups on the table. “Giants and ghosts.”

“Yeah!” Saint said. “Glad you understand, pet.”

You used to drag me on ridiculous adventures
, Steffan wanted to say,
and yes, half the time I hated it, but
–
but
–
at least it was something, no one at university’s as easy to talk to as you are and it’s not like that’s even setting the bar very high
– “There was a time not too long ago when you were occasionally very nearly plausible,” he said instead, tight and sharp. “Oh, how I miss that time. Those were the days!”

“Uh,” Saint said. He sounded discomforted.
Good
, Steff thought savagely.

There was a pause.

“… For realsies, though,” Saint said. He sounded a lot more serious now, or at least as serious as someone could sound while using the word ‘realsies’. “Is it that hard to believe that you’re not the only one who has important things to do? Stuff to contribute?”

“Saint,” Steffan said, and then he said, “If you didn’t want to see me, you could’ve just
said
.”

And he hung up. Refreshing to be the one hanging up for a change.

He tried to go back to his work, but somehow it lacked its usual appeal. To be honest, it had for a while. He was passionate about the subject material, always had been, but – burnout? Was that the term? He had burnout something chronic. What he really needed was to go relax and have fun, but.
Fun
. How did you even fun?

He squared his jaw and ate an energy bar and settled down to put some good solid work into his thesis.

For several hours there was nothing but the sound of keyboard-tapping, interspersed by muttered calculations, frantic pen scrawl on whatever scrap paper was nearby, and occasional pacing. He worked quite studiously. It was Steffan. He always did.

He set his pen down and eyed his notes on vacuum decay. His sprawling colour-coded document full of quantum field information in general. His life’s work, the thing he was most passionate about in all the world.

“I am so fucking bored,” he said eventually, testing the words, and then he left.

His house was perched on Mt Victoria, with its impossibly steep roads and roads that were only connected to other roads by little flights of steps, with its bright-painted houses and parking spaces built on platforms jutting out into nothingness. Steff didn’t have a car, which made things easier, but he didn’t have a driveway either: the street didn’t reach him, so he had a stunted little cable car connecting the house with the narrow road.

The cable car rattled and creaked its way the short distance down the hill, and he got out and walked the medium distance into the central city. His life was measured out in moments of averageness, really. Forecast: boring, with a chance of bone-tired genius.

He went to the Pelham and sat there, fiddling studiously with his iPad like he was here to do work. There was an old couple arguing in the corner, a bored businessman sipping a ginger beer, a chatty group of high school students. He’d thought being around people might make him feel better, but he felt distanced. Normally this café’s clientele was made up of people more to his tastes –

That was a mean thought. He grabbed a free paper in an effort to cheer himself up. It was one of those silly uplifting ones that normally had crosswords and horoscopes and happy little bits of local news, articles about people with award-winning cheeses, that sort of thing.

The headline of this one read
Man Mauled by Sharks was Wearing Lifejacket
.

He blinked at it.

Sometimes he forgot to keep up with local news, being too immersed in his work; he hadn’t known about any shark attacks at all. He grimaced and placed the paper on the table. Not very cheery stuff. The old couple’s argument was much louder now. He got up to leave.

Half a second later he came back and snatched up the paper, scanning it. Something was nagging at him, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. This just seemed
odd
. Shark-maulings weren’t exactly common in Wellington Harbour.

The article was sparse on actual detail, so he sat down and fetched out his iPad, browsing news sites. As he’d thought, the authorities weren’t
certain
that it had been a shark; the body had been found in the water, but the bite marks weren’t consistent with any known species. He swiped his finger across the screen, looking at links. This wasn’t the only odd death. Other people had been drowned, or had gone missing. It went further back than the last few months, too. He sifted through news sites a little more, seeking. More unexplained deaths, and a couple had both fallen into comas as they were walking back to their hotel after a concert at the Michael Fowler Centre. Both of them at once, and neither of them had pre-existing conditions as far as the doctors could tell. Elsewhere a child had been found… drained of
blood
? There didn’t seem to be any common thread here, nothing that tied the incidents together aside from their strangeness.

“Hm,” he said. This seemed interesting, and finding things interesting was probably as close to having fun as he ever got. So he went to the library.

5

Saint ran up the stairs, coat flapping at his feet. At the top of the narrow little staircase there was a plain and serviceable door, which he kicked open. Now he was on the roof. The building was some officey headquarters or other in the business district, and he had to stop and blink for a second, because he had not been at all prepared for the view. It was early evening, the cloudy sky purpling at the edges. He could see the ocean stretching out, other buildings rising up around him, the ground far, far below. He hadn’t been prepared for the other part of the view, either, which was a bunch of creepy bird/human hybrids or something. Yikes.

There were four of them, bundled up in oversized clothes that didn’t do much to hide their inhumanity. His eyes traced the thinness of their arms and the shabby patches of feathers springing out of their skin in places, the tough almost-scaly hooked hands. On his arrival they all sprang up in a cacophony of squawks and screeches, hopping back in quick nervous motions, their eyes fixed on him. This behaviour was especially unnerving on the two that kept tilting their heads so they could keep Saint in view with one eye or the other, a seagull thing and a parroty one with greenish feathers.

“Noah,” Saint said, raising his hands carefully, slowly, fake-smiling like he didn’t have hostile intent, “you are an utterly rubbish distraction.”

He tried to glance over at where Noah was standing without taking his eyes off the bird things. It was Noah who’d suggested hunting for atua on the rooftops, where there was no way for them to escape and wreak havoc on the civilians; personally Saint suspected he just liked being somewhere he could feel the wind. He was twirling patterns with it, spinning it between his fingers as he stood there on the edge. Saint was fine with that so long as he didn’t go all weird and amnesiac again, which – had been happening less and less often, actually. And Noah’s shape was generally firmer now, too. “I did warn you,” Noah said almost too quietly. “There’s… not much I can do.”

Saint chuckled. “Sweet one, I have to warn you – if I get killed by a bunch of mutant chickens because of your self-esteem issues I will be really not amused.” The bird things were still just watching him, wary but staying still; slowly he let his hands drop. One, a little plump thing, was too wrapped up in layers of clothes for him to make out clearly, and one had wide goldish eyes and white and black feathers like a gull. The parrot one tilted its head back and forth, staring. They all of them stared.

“What are these things exactly?” Saint said, and he took a step forward. The cluster of creatures recoiled. One hissed, its head bobbing. The parrot flapped its arms; it had a stretch of diseased-looking red feathers, underneath. None of them had anything like real wings, though.

“Spirits displaced,” Noah said. “Pests. Petty little creatures that grew of the forestland.”

“Like those little hakuturi of yours? But, y’know, not as dead.”

Noah sniffed. “Those hakuturi were the spirits of this place when it had more woodland,” he said. “These things – I’m a friend to birds generally, but these are just scavengers. Pests. It ill becomes them. They don’t fit here.”

“Except for seagull guy,” Saint said. The creature in question had wandered off to pick at the ground. “He’s just chilling. Kudos to you, seagull guy. Noah, are these things even harmful? They don’t actually seem likely to be of any danger to anyone.”

“Well, they’re abominations in any case,” Noah said, and then another of the parroty ones scuttled out from behind the cover of a ventilation thing, snapping its beak at them. It gripped something in its claw-hands that looked remarkably like a car aerial. “And you forget that I’ve known of this side of the world a lot longer than you have,” Noah added. “I’ve seen them attack people. Do you
want
them to hurt people?”

That decided things. “Oh, you public menace,” Saint said to the parrot, and he pirouetted and sent a spear of flame directly at it. He missed by a large margin. He guessed he kind of deserved that. Spinning in circles wasn’t very practical.

The other birdthings uttered shrill cries of alarm and scattered. Saint whooped and ran amongst them, laughing. “This is less heroic than I was picturing at the start,” he said, as his next burst of fire caught the seagull one solidly in its beaky face. “I pictured myself standing silhouetted bold and grim at sunrise, holding my own against like, a dozen maero, y’know? This is more like… ” He flailed flame at one of the birdthings and swore cheerfully when he missed it. “Pest extermination. I’m not complaining, mind. I merely observe.”

“Maero are largely South Island creatures,” Noah said. “Your – house-sharer… ”

“Flatmate,” Saint said helpfully. The parrot one launched itself over the handrail to glide north down the Quay, but Saint managed to singe its tail-feathers to send it on its way.

“Your flatmate was an outlier.”

“Really? You know ‘outlier’ but not ‘flatmate’.
Really
.” He seemed to have gotten rid of most of them, but he was still full of energy, so he tilted his head upwards and sent a great roar of fire harmlessly to either side of him, just for the fun of it. He whirled laughing as the sparks dispersed. “Oh that was so cool. Noah, did you see that?”

The ghost-man was looking serious as always. It was awfully hard to make him laugh, which just meant that Saint had to try harder. “There’s still one left,” Noah pointed out.

Saint rolled his eyes. “You are absolutely no fun. Honestly.”

There
was
one left, the one so bundled up in cast-off clothes that it was unrecognisable. Saint flapped his arms at it. “BEGONE!” he bellowed, loud as he could, and he waved his arms some more in what he hoped looked like arcane gestures. “Leeeave this place! Never return! Maybe go hang out at Zealandia or something! Begooooone!” It didn’t move, so he walked closer, clapping his hands so sparks came out. “Hey, get on out of here,” he said, and the bird looked up, looked straight into his eyes.

Its eyes were wide and yellow and staring, glaring, set under thick white brows. Its face was lined with brown speckled feathers.

The morepork gave a high, piercing cry, and then it fled, leaving him staring after it.

“Well,” Saint said, a little at a loss.

They just stayed there for a while, hanging out. Noah wanted to leave, but Saint was enjoying the view, the air. The company, too.

It wasn’t often that he invited people to stay the night, despite what Steff thought. He didn’t have one night stands so much as …one night
dates
. Generally it went: meet someone pretty and interesting, flirt a lot, take them somewhere interesting, be silly and fun, and duck out of their lives afterwards if they’re boring. There was more variety that way. You could take them to Te Papa and manage to make it
interesting
– last time he’d done that by pretending that the giant squid had insulted him and he’d insulted it back in rhyme. The girl had been a good one that time – she’d stared a bit and then laughed and laughed and laughed, and he’d got to end that day with the warm happy glow that comes of knowing that you’ve brought some pleasant variety into someone else’s life. The one before her had just blinked at him in confusion when he took her out into howling southerly winds to go broken-umbrella collecting.

It wasn’t very often he invited them home, not when ‘home’ was such a miserable, dull place. That would ruin the picture he’d built of himself, this dashing mysterious guy – going to
their
places was fine, of course, but generally they expected to go to his place, and… even
he
didn’t want to spend time at his place, so they sure wouldn’t. It was shabby, and dreary, and whenever he was there he felt like it somehow shrank him down, diminished him, making him shabby and dreary too. There weren’t many prospective partners that he was fond enough of to not mind the thought of them seeing him so low. Actually, not many people at all.