Which was not to say it did no harm.
These things—some fed on flesh and some on blood and bone. Some fed on death, or fear, or misery, or drunkenness, or loneliness, or love, or hope, or white perfect joy. Some constructed wretchedness, and some comforted the afflicted.
There was no telling until you got there.
Matthew slowed as his quarry led him north. There were still too many bystanders. Too many civilians. He didn’t care to catch up with any monsters in broad daylight, halfway up Manhattan. But as the neighborhoods became more cluttered and the scent of uncollected garbage grew heavy on the humid air, he found more alleys, more byways, and fewer underground garages.
If he were a cockatrice, he thought he might very well lair in such a place. Somewhere among the rubbish and the poison and the broken glass. The cracked concrete, and the human waste.
He needed as much camouflage to walk here undisturbed as any monster might.
His hands prickled ceaselessly. He was closer. He slowed, reinforcing his wards with a sort of nervous tic: checking that his hair was smooth, his coat was buttoned, his shoes were tied. Somehow, it managed to move from its lair to the Upper East Side without leaving a trail of bodies in the street. Maybe it traveled blind. Or underground; he hadn’t seen a drop of venom in a dozen blocks. Worse, it might be invisible.
Sometimes … often … otherwise things had slipped far enough sideways that they could not interact with the iron world except through the intermediary of a Mage or a medium. If this had happened to the monster he sought, then it could travel unseen. Then it could pass by with no more harm done than the pervasive influence of its presence.
But then, it wouldn’t drip venom real enough to melt stone.
Relax, Matthew. You don’t know it’s a cockatrice. It’s just a hypothesis, and appearances can be deceptive.
Assuming that he had guessed right could get him killed.
But a basilisk or a cockatrice was what made sense. Except, why would the victim have thrown herself from her window for a crowned serpent, a scaled crow? And why wasn’t everybody who crossed the thing’s path being killed. Or turned to stone, if it was that sort of cockatrice?
His eyes stung, a blinding burning as if he breathed chlorine fumes, etchant. The scent was as much otherwise as real; Matthew suffered it more than the civilians, who would sense only the miasma of the streets as they were poisoned. A lingering death.
He blinked, tears brimming, wetting his eyelashes and blurring the world through his spectacles. A Mage’s traveling arsenal was both eclectic and specific, but Matthew had never before thought to include normal saline, and he hadn’t passed a drugstore for blocks.
How the hell is it traveling?
At last, the smell was stronger, the cold prickle sharper, on his left. He entered the mouth of a rubbish-strewn alley, a kind of gated brick tunnel not tall or wide enough for a garbage truck. It was unlocked, the grille rusted open; the passage brought him to a filthy internal courtyard. Rows of garbage cans—of course, no dumpsters—and two winos, one sleeping on cardboard, one lying on his back on grease-daubed foam reading a two-month-old copy of Maxim. The miasma of the cockatrice—if it was a cockatrice—was so strong here that Matthew gagged.
What he was going to do about it, of course, he didn’t know.
His phone buzzed. He answered it, lowering his voice. “Jane?”
“The window was unlocked from the inside,” she said. “No sign of forced entry. The resident was a fifty-eight-year-old unmarried woman, Janet Stafford. Here’s the interesting part—”
“Yes?”
“She had just re-entered secular life, if you can believe this. She spent the last thirty-four years as a nun.”
Matthew glanced at his phone, absorbing that piece of information, and put it back to his ear. “Did she leave the church, or just the convent?”
“The church,” Jane said. “Marion’s checking into why. You don’t need to call her; I’ll liaise.”
“That would save time,” Matthew said. “Thank you.” There was no point in both of them reporting to Jane and to each other if Jane considered the incident important enough to coordinate personally.
“Are you ready to tell me yet what you think it might be?”
Matthew stepped cautiously around the small courtyard, holding onto his don’t-notice-me, his hand cupped around the mouthpiece. “I was thinking cockatrice,” he said. “But you know, now maybe not certain. What drips venom, and can lure a retired nun to suicide?”
Jane’s breath, hissing between her teeth, was clearly audible over the cellular crackle. “Harpy.”
“Yeah,” Matthew said. “But then why doesn’t it fly?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Right now? Question a couple of local residents,” he said, and moved toward the Maxim-reading squatter.
The man looked up as he approached; Matthew steeled himself to hide a flinch at his stench, the sore running pus down into his beard. A lot of these guys were mentally ill and unsupported by any system. A lot of them also had the knack for seeing things that had mostly dropped otherwise, as if in being overlooked themselves they gained insight into the half-lit world.
And it didn’t matter how he looked; the homeless man’s life was still a life, and his only. You can’t save them all. But he had a father and mother and a history and a soul like yours.
His city, which he loved, dehumanized; Matthew considered it the responsibility that came with his gifts to humanize it right back. It was in some ways rather like being married to a terrible drunk. You did a lot of apologizing. “Hey,” Matthew said. He didn’t crouch down. He held out his hand; the homeless man eyed it suspiciously. “I’m Matthew. You have absolutely no reason to want to know me, but I’m looking for some information I can’t get from just anybody. Can I buy you some food, or a drink?”
Later, over milkshakes, Melissa glanced at Katie through the humidity-frizzled curls that had escaped her braid and said, “I can’t believe we lost him.”
The straw scraped Katie’s lip as she released it. “You mean he gave us the slip.”
Melissa snorted. On her left, Gina picked fretfully at a plate of French fries, sprinkling pinched grains of salt down the length of one particular fry and then brushing them away with a fingertip. “He just popped up. Right by me. And then vanished. I never took my eyes off him.”