He saw the blue phosphorescence, vaguely man-shaped, drift to hang in the air over the body of the dead Hispanic. It settled, enfolding the corpse. Possessing it.
Sans its right arm, half its face clawed away, the corpse stood. It swayed, shuddered, spoke with shredded lips. “Max, kill yourself and lib—”
Thanatos lunged at the wavering corpse, closed hot metal fingers around its throat, burned its voice box into char. The body slumped.
But Max stood. His dreams were coming back to him—or was someone sending them back? Someone mindsending. You were of the Concealed.
Thanatos turned from the battle, scowling, commanding: “Take him! Bind him, carry him to safety!” The spiders, gnawing on the corpse of the angel with television eyes, moved reluctantly away from their feeding and crept toward Max. A thrill of revulsion went through him. He forced himself forward. He knelt, within the spiders’ reach. “Don’t hurt him!” Thanatos bellowed. “Take care that he does not—”
But he did. He embraced a spider, clasping it to him as if it were something dear, and used its razor-sharp mandibles to slash his own throat. He fell, spasming, and knew inexpressible pain and numbness, and grayness. And a shattering white light.
He was dead. He was alive. He was standing over his own body, liberated. He reached out, and, with his plasma-field, extinguished the fire on the outbuilding. Instantly.
The battle noises softened, then muted—the combatants drew apart. They stood or crouched or hovered silently, watching him and waiting. They knew him for Prince Red Mark, a sleeping Lord of the Plasmagnomes, one of seven Concealed among humanity years before, awaiting the day of awakening, the hour when they must emerge to protect those the kin of Thanatos would slaughter for the eating.
He was arisen, the first of the Concealed. He would awaken the others, those hidden, sleeping in the hearts of the humble and the unknown. In old women and tired, middle-aged soldiers and—and there was one, hidden in a young sepia-skinned girl, not far away.
Thanatos shuddered and squared himself for the battle of wills.
Max, Lord Red Mark, scanned the other figures on the rooftop.
Now he could see past their semblances, recognize them as interlacing networks of rippling wavelength, motion that is thought, energy equal to will. He reached out, reached past the semblance of Lord Thanatos.
A small black girl, one Hazel Johnson, watched the battle from a rooftop across the street. She was the only one who saw it; she had the only suitable vantage.
Hazel Johnson was just eight years old, but she was old enough to know that the scene should have surprised her, should have sent her yelling for Momma. But she had seen it in a dream, and she’d always believed that dreams were real.
And now she saw that the man who’d thrown himself on the spider had died, and his body had given off a kind of blue glow; and the blue cloud had formed into something solid, a gigantic shape that towered over the nasty-looking wire-head of hot metal. All the flying things had stopped flying. They were watching the newcomer.
The newcomer looked, to Hazel, like one of the astronauts you saw on TV coming home from the space station; he wore one of those spacesuits they wore, and he even had the U.S. flag stitched on one of his sleeves. But he was a whole lot bigger than any astronaut, or any man she’d ever seen. He must have been four meters tall. And now she saw that he didn’t have a helmet like a regular astronaut had. He had one of those helmets that the Knights of the Round Table wore, like she saw in the movie on TV. The knight in the spacesuit was reaching out to the man of hot metal …
Lord Red Mark was distantly aware that one of his own was watching from the rooftop across the street. Possibly Lady Day asleep in the body of a small human being; a small person who didn’t know, yet, that she wasn’t really human after all.
Now he reached out and closed one of his gloved hands around Lord Thanatos’s barbed-wire neck (that’s how it looked to the little girl watching from across the street) and held him fast, though the metal of that glove began to melt in the heat. Red Mark held him, and with the other hand opened the incinerator door, and reached his hand into the fire that burned in the bosom of his enemy—
And snuffed out the flame, like a man snuffing a candle with his thumb and forefinger.
The metal body remained standing, cooling, forever inert. The minions of Lord Thanatos fled squalling into the sky, pursued by the Protectionists, abandoning their visible physicality, becoming once more unseeable. And so the battle was carried into another realm of being.
Soon the rooftop was empty of all but the two corpses, and a few broken harpies, and the shell of Thanatos, and Lord Red Mark.
Red Mark turned to look directly at the little girl on the opposite roof. He levitated, rose evenly into the air, and drifted to her. He alighted beside her and took off his helm. Beneath was a light that smiled. He was beautiful. He said, “Let’s go find the others.”
She nodded, slowly, beginning to wake. But the little-girl part of her, the human shell, said, “Do I have to die too? Like you did?”
“No. That was for an emergency. There are other ways.”
“I don’t have to die now?”
“Not now and …” The light that was a smile grew brighter. “Not ever. You’ll never die, my Lady Day.”
The real estate market in Manhattan is always an adventure: everyone wants to live somewhere in the city and that includes elves, wizards, brownies, goblins, and other supernatural types.
PRICED TO SELL
NAOMI NOVIK
“I’m over getting offended,” the vampire said despondently. “I just want to stop wasting my time. If the board isn’t going to let me in, I don’t care how much they smile and how polite they are. I’d rather they just tell me up front there’s no chance.”
“I know, it’s terrible,” Jennifer said. No co-op board was going to say anything like that, of course; it was asking for a Fair Housing lawsuit. “Have you thought about a townhouse?”
“Yeah, sure, because of course I’ve got a trust fund built on long-term compound interest,” he said bitterly. “I’m only fifty-four.”
He didn’t look a day over twenty-five, with that stylish look vampires got if they didn’t feed that often, pale and glamorous and hungry, staring into his Starbucks like it was nowhere near what he actually wanted. Jennifer wasn’t too surprised he was getting turned down; right now she was feeling pretty excellent about the garlic salt she’d put on the quick slice of pizza that had been lunch.
“Well,” Jennifer said, “maybe a property in Brooklyn?”
“Brooklyn?” the vampire said, like she’d suggested a beach vacation in Florida.