“You will be host to Lugal,” she said. “His brothers are lesser lights—savage, eager, stupid. They will continue to tear down the infrastructure, to sow chaos, uncertainty. They will claw at the foundations of this mechanical world. You will assist Lugal with a higher purpose. Together we will tear this world down and reassert the proper order. People will crawl to us when we are revealed, begging us to save them, to rule them.”
She smiled at me. It was a warm, sad smile, the sort of smile your grandmother might offer when she was about to push you off a roof or shoot you in the head. Then she spoke a torrent of Words, a rapid-fire series of syllables that exploded in the room, burning up the river of gas. I was flung down onto the floor, arms and legs spread, my scream locked in my throat. I couldn’t move. I’d never felt this kind of power, this wanton waste of someone else’s lifeblood. I did the only thing left to me: I listened. I tried to remember.
One of the Bleeders dropped to his knees with a thud, then fell forward.
I remembered the girl in Hiram’s house. Shivering, looking down at her canvas sneakers. I remembered Hiram ordering me to bleed her, to get used to it, and I’d recoiled from the tiny flow of gas in the air, someone else’s life, gorgeous and revolting. I’d thought I knew what it felt like to steal someone’s life, but I’d been wrong. This was murder. This was power. And there was no difference.
The old woman spoke the Words, and I felt my existence being pried open, something wedging its way into my mind. And still my scream was lodged in my throat, choking me.
6.
I CAME TO SLOWLY, swimming up through a haze that sucked at my thoughts and sent them spinning down unexpected tangents. And then I was even more confused, because I wasn’t lying down, I was walking, already in motion. It was a bright, chilly day and I was walking briskly down the street as I woke up, swinging my arms and making an incessant tuneless humming noise.
I mentally flailed, trying to seize control of my own limbs. Nothing happened. I kept walking. I kept swinging my arms. I kept humming. It was like I was a passenger in my own body.
And then I became aware of Lugal.
It was like someone was standing too close to me, breathing on my neck, hands in my pockets. Or like someone was with me in a small room, but I couldn’t see them. Or like a story I once heard from an old duffer sitting at the bar at Rue Morgue who told me how he woke up several times a week unable to move or speak or open his eyes, and often remained that way for hours.
I could feel my lungs, my leg muscles, working; I hadn’t walked this fast in a long time. I was practically running, and my anemic, malnourished body wasn’t happy, but the fucking demon kept me motoring forward. I knew it would push my body like a machine, making me move as fast as it needed me to, for as long as it needed me to, until I dropped dead. Lugal, I thought, was a better class of demon, and the old lady had inserted it into me while I was still alive. I had a feeling Fallon would be impressed by me when he saw me.
I knew the neighborhood: Lower East Side, slowly gentrifying but still scuzzy, the sort of place where ancient rotten tattoo parlors sat between newly renovated wine bars. It was riddled with Tricksters. Little Magicians like me, we liked rich drunk people, and a neighborhood like this was infested with them at all hours of the day, ideal folks to cast a Charm mu on, a Glamour, sometimes both. I kept a lookout for someone I knew, someone who I might find a way to signal, though I didn’t have any clue how.
Peculiarly, the streets were empty for the middle of the day, like everyone was inside watching television news and refreshing web pages. There were sirens in the air, more or less continuously, and as the demon moved me down the sidewalk, two cop cars raced by in quick succession, lights flashing.
I stopped in front of a bar with no name, a narrow storefront with a single BEER sign lit up red and flickering. A jolt of panic went through me, because I knew this place. If it had an official name, I didn’t know it. But if someone said they were heading to the bar to buy some Bleeders, everyone knew they were headed to this shithole with the walls covered in doodles and signatures and doggerel, this shithole where the Brokers sat all day and night, their little notebooks at the ready, their sad inventory seated in the back.
Only big shots had Bleeders, permanent blood bags. If you weren’t enustari, and you needed a lot of blood, or needed it fast without having to engage in fifteen separate insane negotiations with crazy, desperate people, you came downtown and found a Broker.
Bleeders were curious people; at the higher levels, owned by enustari, they lived well. They were rich and well cared for, well fed and worried over—in exchange for the odd chance of being bled to death. Most were devoted. They loved their masters and mistresses, somehow—perhaps helped along by a premium-grade Charm spell.