“Is Angela still yelling at you about that?” Doug said. “You want me to talk to her? We told her before she bought, there’s pretty much no such thing as a protected view.”
“No worries,” Jennifer said, over her shoulder. “We’re getting a Fair Housing protest in. There’s a sponsor apartment on the thirteenth floor that would be facing the new development, they’re selling it to the vampire. They’ll have to keep the new building below that height.”
She stopped short with her hand on the door, though, as a thundering knock hit, and then another. She glanced back at Doug and Tom, then shrugged and pulled it open.
A giant horse was standing outside in the hall gazing down at them, nostrils flaring, a thin trail of smoke rising from them. Glowing red flames shone in its eyes. There was a small pile of paint flakes and bits of wood in the hallway, where it had knocked with a front hoof. People were sticking their heads out of other offices down the hall to watch.
“Hi,” the pooka said. “Marvin said you could help me.”
“Marvin?” Tom said, under his breath.
“The vampire,” Jennifer said.
The pooka nodded, mane flopping. “I’m looking for an apartment.”
They all stood and considered. Jennifer suggested after a moment, “Maybe a ground-floor unit?”
Tom said, “Or a place with a good freight elevator? There’s the Atlantica—”
Doug eyed the hooves. Parquet and hardwood were definitely out. Marble tile, maybe. He looked up at the pooka. “So, tell me, how do you feel about Trump buildings?”
There’s an alley in one of the less-affluent neighborhoods of New York that is really a tiny kingdom with a very strange ruler.
THE HORRID GLORY OF ITS WINGS
ELIZABETH BEAR
“Speaking of livers,” the unicorn said, “Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.”
—Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
My mother doesn’t know about the harpy.
My mother, Alice, is not my real mom. She’s my foster mother, and she doesn’t look anything like me. Or maybe I don’t look anything like her. Mama Alice is plump and soft and has skin like the skin of a plum, all shiny dark purple with the same kind of frosty brightness over it, like you could swipe it away with your thumb.
I’m sallow—Mama Alice says olive—and I have straight black hair and crooked teeth and no real chin, which is okay because I’ve already decided nobody’s ever going to kiss me.
I’ve also got lipodystrophy, which is a fancy doctor way of saying I’ve grown a fatty buffalo hump on my neck and over each shoulderblade from the antiretrovirals, and my butt and legs and cheeks are wasted like an old lady’s. My face looks like a dog’s muzzle, even though I still have all my teeth.
For now. I’m going to have to get the wisdom teeth pulled this year, while I still get state assistance, because my birthday is in October and then I’ll be eighteen. If I start having problems with them after then, well forget about it.
There’s no way I’d be able to afford to get them fixed.
The harpy lives on the street, in the alley behind my building, where the dumpster and the winos live.
I come out in the morning before school, after I’ve eaten my breakfast and taken my pills (nevirapine, lamivudine, efavirenz). I’m used to the pills. I’ve been taking them all my life. I have a note in my file at school, and excuses for my classmates.
I don’t bring home friends.
Lying is a sin. But Father Alvaro seems to think that when it comes to my sickness, it’s a sin for which I’m already doing enough penance.
Father Alvaro is okay. But he’s not like the harpy.
The harpy doesn’t care if I’m not pretty. The harpy is beyond not pretty, way into ugly. Ugly as your mama’s warty butt. Its teeth are snaggled and stained piss-yellow and char-black. Its claws are broken and dull and stink like rotten chicken. It has a long droopy blotchy face full of lines like Liv Tyler’s dad, that rock star guy, and its hair hangs down in black-bronze rats over both feathery shoulders. The feathers look washed-out black and dull until sunlight somehow finds its way down into the grubby alley, bounces off dirty windows and hits them, and then they look like scratched bronze.
They are bronze.
If I touch them, I can feel warm metal.
I’d sneak the harpy food, but Mama Alice keeps pretty close track of it—it’s not like we have a ton of money—and the harpy doesn’t seem to mind eating garbage. The awfuller the better: coffee grounds, moldy cake, meat squirming with maggots, the stiff corpses of alley rats.
The harpy turns all that garbage into bronze.
If it reeks, the harpy eats it, stretching its hag face out on a droopy red neck to gulp the bits, just like any other bird. I’ve seen pigeons do the same thing with a crumb too big to peck up and swallow, but their necks aren’t scaly naked, ringed at the bottom with fluffy down as white as a confirmation dress.
So every morning I pretend I’m leaving early for school—Mama Alice says “Kiss my cheek, Desiree”—and then once I’m out from under Mama Alice’s window I sneak around the corner into the alley and stand by the dumpster where the harpy perches. I only get ten or fifteen minutes, however much time I can steal. The stink wrinkles up my nose. There’s no place to sit. Even if there were, I couldn’t sit down out here in my school clothes.
I think the harpy enjoys the company. Not that it needs it; I can’t imagine the harpy needing anything. But maybe … just maybe it likes me.
The harpy says, I want you.
I don’t know if I like the harpy. But I like being wanted.
The harpy tells me stories.
Mama Alice used to, when I was little, when she wasn’t too tired from work and taking care of me and Luis and Rita, before Rita died. But the harpy’s stories are better. It tells me about magic, and nymphs, and heroes. It tells me about adventures and the virgin goddesses like Artemis and Athena, and how they had adventure and did magic, and how Athena was cleverer than Poseidon and got a city named after her.
It tells me about Zephyrus, the West Wind, and his sons the magical talking horses. It tells me about Hades, god of the Underworld, and the feathers on its wings ring like bronze bells with excitement when it tells me about their mother Celaeno, who was a harpy also, but shining and fierce.
It tells me about her sisters, and how they were named for the mighty storm, and how when they all three flew, the sky was dark and lashed with rain and thunder. That’s how it talks: lashed with rain and thunder.
The harpy says, We’re all alone.