I raised my metal bar and the boy backed away.
“You want me to break the other one?” I asked him. “I’m not sure a teenage boy can survive without one good hand.”
“We didn’t touch any stinking Vamps!” he screamed, and his spit caught the torchlight as it flew through the air.
I looked around at the timid faces as their bravado dropped like an executioner’s ax. There was no guile or secrecy in the cowering kids, just an open-faced desire to get out of there and back to bed.
“He’s telling the truth,” said a voice from my left. It was a girl with a shaved head. “We haven’t hurt anyone yet. It’s just talk.”
Embarrassed grunts and nervous nods came from the candlelit faces around the room. I sighed to myself. The devil would have to wait.
“Okay, little ones. You happy to walk yourselves home or do I need to call your parents?”
“Fuck you.”
Here we go. Little redhead’s balls finally dropped.
“Something to say, Curly?” I asked. “Ready to defend your noble cause? Of course, you look like you’ve done this dance a few times. That’s where all those nasty holes in your clothes came from, right? Taking hits from shivs and shrapnel while fighting off Magum on the mean streets of Sunder City? Looks to me like they were cut with kitchen scissors.”
He pulled back his jacket to reveal a long knife. He unsheathed it slowly, making a big fat moment of it, like we were all supposed to gasp. At least he held it the right way around.
He might have practiced a few pretend fights in the mirror but his lunge was sloppy. I dropped my steel, grabbed his attacking hand and twisted him around. When I was done, I’d taken his spot in the circle, with my back to the wall, just in case his leadership had inspired a last-minute assault.
I didn’t need to worry. The kids flanking him cowered back on instinct. I held his knife-hand away from me and a twist of his arm locked him in position. Then I raised my other hand and whipped him across the face.
It wasn’t a big hit. It wasn’t an angry hit. It was the shittiest little slap I could manage. It made us both look stupid. So I did it again. And again.
It didn’t feel good and it didn’t feed the devil but it proved my point: he was no leader, I was no great adversary, and no boy in that room was tough enough to say anything about it. Even the pale-faced blubberer with the broken knuckles was crawling towards the door. After a dozen little slaps, each less exciting than the last, I put my boot into his backside and kicked him across the floor. He tripped over his feet and landed on his knees.
“Everybody out,” I said, as casually as possible.
They shuffled quickly to the exit. Redhead looked up at me with nervous little eyes and I pointed a finger at his half-pink face.
“You. Stay.”
10
It didn’t take much to get the kid to talk. I asked him where this Dog-man was and he told me: Stammer Row. A filth-filled alley behind the buildings that fronted Main Street. Backdoors and dumpsters and plenty of walls to hold back the wind. In my desperate days without a bed, I’d always sought out lonely places to sleep: abandoned buildings or subway cars. I preferred solitude when I fell on misfortune, but my time out in the elements had never been for long. After a few weeks on the street I might have sought out some kind of society too.
I was a stranger on Stammer but I didn’t look out of place. Uptown, among the elites of the city, I might worry about fitting in. With my patched-up clothes and alcoholic stare I blended into Stammer like a local.
The street was full of lean-tos and curled-up figures under sheets of old cloth. The floor was lined with palettes and crates to drain the water from beneath them. During the winter, they would be huddled in groups, all pressed together or wrapped around their neighbors. I suppose it wasn’t only the cold but the companionship. I was almost jealous. I couldn’t recall the last time someone fell into my arms for the night. I guess I could always go down to Stammer if I felt like a cuddle.
The faces paid me no notice as I passed them. Despite the range of species, every resident looked remarkably similar. Each visage was covered with the same creases, the same sadness and the same gray shade of city dirt.
Beneath a brown blanket that had once been white, a balding stump of a tail rested on the cold cement. I coughed and the bundle shifted, revealing a somewhat familiar face.
“Oh no.” The words slid out my mouth without thought of sensitivity. “Pete.”
All Lycum went through a change when the Coda hit, causing the half-Human–half-animal combination to became unstable. One of Pete’s eyes was blue, the other topaz yellow. His nose was mostly Human but one nostril was stretched wide and painted black like burnt leather. His face, head and body were covered in scrappy patches of mottled fur. He had one Human hand and one that was a twisted mixture of fingers and claw. Amongst this melange of man and animal, it was his jaw that caused the most concern. In fact, it was a thing of pure horror. The left side of his face was yawning open with the deformed gums and scattered fangs of a piece of roadkill brought to life. The heavy canine pieces pulled down on his otherwise humanoid skin, drawing his expression into the eternal sorrow of a mother in mourning. The jaw became even more fearsome when it laughed.
“Well, look what we have here. Fetch Phillips stumbling down to Stammer. You always did love a freak show, didn’t you, delivery boy?”
The Werewolves of Perimoor had been a well-respected, powerful species and Peteris Merland was once their Ambassador to Sunder City. I’d only ever seen him in a tailored linen suit with an expertly combed, foppish fringe. Now he was wrapped in sailcloth and his hair was as overgrown as a bachelor’s bathroom mold. Time hung open between us like both our gaping mouths. He finally snapped the silence with a voice-box full of scabs and broken glass.
“How about you buy an old friend a drink?”
We went back to The Roost. It was safe to say that the run-down, old-world warriors now outweighed the blooming youth, in presence if not in number. We’d tried to get into some other bars closer to Stammer but no one was going to let in a sweaty mercenary and his half-dog companion. The best thing about Eileen’s bar was that it stuck out on to the street. That helped to blow away the damp, pissy smell that wafted out of Pete’s fur.
“So, tell me about these bastards,” he said, after I filled him in on my night so far.
“Just kids. They hang around that saloon in Swestum. Not a real fighter among them but I thought I should give you a heads-up in case I inspired them to get their big brothers.”
He lapped at his beer with a spotted tongue. His asymmetrical lips didn’t hold the liquid too well, but it seemed to give him some satisfaction nonetheless.
“It was laughable really. The leader was a ginger kid with bad acne. Remember how army grunts used to stitch up their hand-me-down recruit jackets rather than buy new ones? He’d done that with a new damn jacket! Not a scratch on it except for the holes he’d poked himself. I know we’ve seen some crazy stuff in our time, but that was the most ridiculous damn thing I’ve seen in years.”
His laughter rattled like a sandpaper saxophone.
“Look at you, Fetch. The world is upside down but you’re exactly the same. Running from one job to another, following whoever rings the bell. I believe there might be more dog in you than me.”