Bewere the Night

GROTESQUE ANGELS by Gwendolyn Clare

The rain turns the city upside down. In the gutters the water pools and flows, each drop fracturing the surface until the slick streets glitter as if seeded with pavement-bound stars. Low-slung clouds glow orange with light pollution, the night sky lit better than the street below. Not that the street is too dark for her eyes; nothing is ever completely dark in Chicago.

From her rooftop perch, Kelsey waits and watches. The city feels wrong tonight. Something old and hungry lurks in her territory, and the streets moan silently under the unwelcome weight of it. The Old One hides behind the city’s glamour—her glamour—and she cannot see it. So she waits, wishing shadows were its only disguise, but the Old One is more clever than that.

Kelsey drops off the roof and lands on a narrow ledge part way down the side of the building, her claws scraping the neo-Gothic limestone façade. She crouches, motionless again, and the rainwater runs over her skin and streams from the tips of her wing-feathers as it might from a statue. The sidewalk below grumbles and sighs to her, unsettled by the Old One’s passage. It walked this street not long ago.

A muted wail of sirens cuts through the sounds of the storm and the sidewalk’s complaints, and Kelsey’s head snaps up to catch the distance and direction. The sound lies ahead of her along the path she has already chosen—the path to track the Old One. It could mean nothing.

It’s probably not nothing.

The rain stings her face when she flies, and she squints against it. Her nose detects the reek of bad magic from half a block away, vile and sulfurous. It leads her to a narrow alley wedged between a couple of brick four-floor walk-ups. She circles above, evaluating. Police lights paint the old brick in alternating blue and red, and the alley crawls with cops.

She alights on the fire escape above and watches through the black metal grate. The glamour cloaks her from sight. If they were to stare at her hard enough, they might see a shadow shape crouched in her place, but she knows they won’t stare; they will not think to look up at all. Humans have an odd deficiency of awareness for what’s above their heads. Perhaps their genetic programming is to blame, their pre-historic ancestors never having encountered airborne predators. An odd quirk of human psychology, Kelsey thinks, but convenient.

Below, the flooded alley looks like a biblical curse, rainwater diluting blood until there seems to be much more than a few liters and it flows like a river. Red streaks the side of one building, the evidence already smeared by the weather. Kelsey does not envy the humans as they splash through the remnants of their rapidly deteriorating crime scene. The corpse is a messy pile of ruined flesh likely to win the award for all-time low point in the detectives’ careers. Kelsey certainly has no desire to give it a closer inspection.

She has never seen such exuberant carnage before, and it worries her. The Old One’s misbehavior is escalating. Time to report in. Perhaps Duncan will know what to do.

A brick-and-glass monolith on State Street, the Harold Washington Library devours an entire city block in downtown Chicago—an impressive feat of architecture, and also Duncan’s daytime resting place. Like most grotesques, Duncan has a penchant for dramatic buildings.

Kelsey finds him on the broad balcony that circles the top floor. She lands beside him, drops down on one knee in a quick obeisance, and straightens. Duncan seems pensive tonight, and the rain slicks his shale-gray skin giving him a polished look. The feathers of his headcrest are the color of olivine—a deep greenish hue that darkens to black when wet.

Staring out over his city, he says, “What news of the Old One?”

Kelsey spits over the rail with savage disgust. “It has begun taking human lives, and messily. The police are investigating already. Problematic.”

“Find out what they know. Use it if you can.”

“And how am I supposed to do that?”

He turns to look at her, meeting her reluctance with a stern command in his eyes. “How do you think? The Change, of course.”

She spits again. “Fantastic.”

The first time, she was only a child and she thought she was dying. Her claws shrunk to useless, flat nails; her pale gray skin soured to a disgusting pink shade; her silver crest feathers yellowed like old paper and curled into strings of hair. Worst of all her wings melted away, feathers deliquescing and bones softening like hot wax, and the drops of her flesh vanished before they hit the ground as if the limbs had never existed.

She lived, but sometimes wished she hadn’t.

The other grotesques called her “half-breed” and “werehuman.” It didn’t matter that pure bloods were rare; it didn’t matter that few if any of them could claim a heritage untainted by humanity. The Change cursed her alone, and so she grew apart from them.

As she takes to wing, Kelsey’s stomach clenches with disgust at the thought of becoming that version of herself she has fought so hard to suppress. Duncan sends her forth to the task as if the Change were a gift and not a reason for shame. He knows what it costs her, but it doesn’t matter. Anything and everything in service of the city.

Kelsey wonders: if she is not a true grotesque, why does the city still compel her? Surely her human-self would let her sense of duty slide.

The question will have to wait for tomorrow night. Sunlight pales the cloud cover to the east, dull gray light invading the orange city-glow. She already feels the sluggishness of dawn pulling at her, turning her wing-strokes clumsy. She flies south to the university—her beautiful neo-Gothic university—where her own daytime resting place awaits. She takes her post atop the stone archway of Hull Gate and settles down, camouflaged by the city’s glamour to look like an architectural flourish, a gargoyle of the inanimate stone variety.

The city sighs relief as somewhere out there the Old One quiets too. Kelsey’s eyelids slip closed.

The storm blew off during the daylight hours, leaving the night cold and newly dry. Kelsey stretches her wings in the fading twilight and launches into the air to begin tracking the groans and shivers of the streets. The Old One has awoken, too, and the city hunkers down to endure the long hours ahead.

Tracking is slow business. The Old One keeps to a particular course for several blocks, then suddenly zigzags as if it knows it’s being followed and is trying to shake her. She must stop often to listen for the worst creaks and complaints from the pavement below. Perhaps if she were faster, perhaps if she could see her quarry—but “perhaps” is worth its weight in air.

So she keeps moving.

Up ahead the city wails softly to itself, the sound emanating from a spot too ravaged to send out a louder distress call. Another alley, chosen more hastily than the last kill site. Happenstance, or escalation? If the Old One is escalating, this won’t be the only tonight. Kelsey drops onto the edge of a rooftop to survey the damage.

The scene below is a blood splatter analyst’s wet dream: the full five liters sprayed in a spectacular starburst that spans the alley and climbs the brick walls on either side. No one is allowed close to the body—or what’s left of it—before the photographers finish their work, lest they trample the evidence.

A pair of detectives huddle off to one side, alternately staring and trying not to stare at the bloodbath while they wait for the forensics team to give them the okay. One of the detectives is tall and too narrow at the shoulders for his height, so his trench coat hangs loose on his skinny frame. The other’s somewhat shorter, somewhat older, and working on his coffee-and-donuts belly.

Kelsey drops quietly to the ground several yards away from them, landing barefoot on the wailing blacktop. Her clothes will be a problem soon—shorts and a tank top and no shoes in the middle of October—since her grotesque-form doesn’t mind the cold. Nothing to be done about it now.

With a deep breath, Kelsey reaches within herself for the closed door, the locked vault, the sealed box—every mental metaphor she used to suppress her blasphemous other half—and she spins the locks, releases the seals, turns the knob and pulls.

The Change snaps through her more swiftly than the first time, the pressure of being bottled up making for a rapid release. She wavers on her too-small human feet with their useless short toes and almost meets the pavement the hard way before her new sense of balance kicks in. The cold starts to seep into her weak human flesh. Time to get this over with.

Twisting a scrap of glamour around herself, Kelsey fashions a fluffy coat and shoes that do nothing to warm her shivering human-form. At least she’ll look a little less odd. She lifts the rest of the glamour slowly, sliding into the realm of human awareness as if strolling into view.

The tall detective notices her first and closes the distance in six strides. “Ma’am, I need you to get behind the line. This is a crime scene.” He puts a guiding hand on her elbow, though she does not let him pull her away.

“No explosives,” she says softly, looking past him at the remains.

He freezes. Then his hand drops from her arm to hang limp at his side. “What did you say?”

“You won’t find any traces of explosives,” she elaborates. “Just like the last one. Or have there been more?”

Not so subtly he sweeps back his trench coat to rest his hands on his narrow hips, the right one within easy reach of his gun. “If you could come with me, I’ll need to ask—”

“No. No police stations, no interrogation rooms. When you’re ready to talk, you tell me what you know about the case, and then I’ll take care of your problem.” She waves a hand in the vague direction of the carnage.

“Look, I don’t know who you think you are sweetheart, but this is a homicide investigation.”

“You’re out of your depth. You need my help. Call me when your ego deflates enough to admit it.”

Kelsey tosses a folded scrap of paper between his feet, and his eyes track it. By the time he glances up again, she has wrapped herself in the glamour and faded from view.

After her first Change, she went to Duncan for guidance. Or for penance, or absolution perhaps—she didn’t know what she expected from him, but whatever he could give, it had to be a step up from the hollow dread inside her.

She explained to him what had happened, though she doubted he hadn’t already heard a secondhand account. Still, he let her speak until she fell quiet, then let the silence stretch for several seconds.

Finally, he answered, “And what would you have me say to this?”

“Well,” Kelsey hesitated, knotting her fingers together. “Should I leave the clan?”

Duncan frowned. “I do not know. The city will decide.”

She looked away, cautiously persistent. “You could decide.”

“If you’re looking to me for a way out, for an excuse to run from your duties, you’ll not find it here.”

“We all know I am an abomination, not fit to serve the city.”

Duncan’s mouth quirked. “If you truly believed that, you would not need to ask my permission to go.”

One on the North Side, one on the South Side. Kelsey decides to wait for the detective’s call at an intermediate location, or as close as she can get to one. The Tribune Tower just north of the Loop has a glamour relay atop it and comes with additional benefits, such as five hundred feet of gloriously intricate neo-Gothic limestone façade. She lands on the highest peak of the building, with a pleasant view from above of the eight flying buttresses that circle the uppermost floors.

With architecture like that, the Tribune has its own grotesques, but luckily they’re away from their roost for the night. Kelsey needs to tap into the glamour relay, and she doesn’t want to be disturbed.

The relay consists of a pentagonal brass box and fifteen feet of antenna, and is one of several stations that spread the glamour through the city like an invisible web. Kelsey pops open a side panel and tinkers with the mechanical innards. The number she gave the detective piggybacks on the glamour network. It probably wouldn’t please the Engineer who made the network to know she uses it thus, but he’s an important being with more important concerns than Kelsey’s personal communications.

When she’s done tinkering she crouches, motionless. Kelsey is good at waiting, because she has to be. Finally, the air hisses with an incoming call. She places her palm on the slick brass to finish the connection.

She says, “Yes,” not really a question.

A male voice thrums through the air. “This is Detective Novak from Chicago Homicide.”

Ah, so tall and narrow has a name. “What can I do for you, Detective Novak?”

“You can tell me who you are and how you knew we wouldn’t find any traces,” he snaps.

“I knew there wouldn’t be traces of explosive because explosives weren’t used. And I am the person who’s going to stop your killer.”

He pauses. “Department policy doesn’t endorse vigilantes.”

At least he no longer seems to have her on his suspect list. “And how far have your policies gotten you on this case?”

He heaves an audible sigh. When he speaks, his words slur with sleep deprivation. “I’ve been standing in an empty alley for forty minutes, and I’m nowhere. I thought if I went back to the first scene, maybe I missed something … ”

“You’re at the scene alone?” That feels wrong. A place where such destructive power was recently released would still be weak, scarred, and a very vulnerable position.

“I mean, why here?” Novak rambles on, as if he hadn’t heard her. “If the murders are about showmanship, why do it outside in the rain where all the work gets washed away before anyone sees it?”

“Listen carefully: you need to get—” A vibration like static suddenly buzzes through the air, the call cutting off. For a split second, the whole glamour network flickers, making her breath catch as surely as a skipped heartbeat would.

“Shit,” Kelsey says to no one. Given the size of the network, even a slight fluctuation means a big power drain, and if the interruption wasn’t on her end it was probably on Novak’s.

It will take her whole minutes to fly to the first kill site. He might already be dead.

She feels the Old One from three blocks away, the city crying and cowering in all directions around it. It is unquestionably active, roiling with a sulfurous heat that chokes her as she approaches from above. For once, the Old One isn’t hiding in the glamour. Instead it twists the glamour into hideous malformations that nauseate Kelsey even before she glimpses them with her eyes.

The view of the alley nearly knocks her from the air. At one end, an enormous cloud of black smoke boils and churns, full of glowing eyes and gnashing teeth and other monstrous parts that smoke should not have. The smoke cloud seems to pulse and grow, promising horrible agonizing death.

At the other end, Novak is literally stuck where he stands. The pavement has come alive, crawling inexorably over his shoes and up his legs, and—to Kelsey’s ears—screeching like a torture victim all the while. Terror rolls off his skin in waves.

The Old One is toying with him, devouring his fear like candy. And it’s using the city’s glamour to do so.

Kelsey drops down into the alley like a stone, half shifting in mid-air so Novak will recognize her. She keeps her wings, though, to soften the landing.

The Old One’s many eyes focus on her and it exudes annoyance at her distraction.

She glares right back. “You think you know glamour, do you? You think you can use my city?”

The Old One huffs disdainfully and gnashes its teeth. Fleshy tentacles curl and whip through the smoke, eager to get on with its horrific business.

“I don’t think so.”

Kelsey goes down on one knee and places both palms against the wounded pavement. She can feel the threads of abused glamour twisted and knotted within the smoke cloud. Through her palms she senses how the wrongness radiates outward, disturbing the whole city. And if she focuses, she can feel exactly which threads to yank to make it all fall apart.

She yanks.

The integrity of the smoke cloud falters and the Old One lets out a surprised hiss. Then Kelsey flares her wings wide and reaches out through her palms to the pavement, the alley, the streets beyond, and she pulls the citylight into herself. She begins to glow with orange incandescence, the artificial light of a thousand streetlamps growing brighter and brighter until she fills the alley with blinding modernity and the Old One flees.

Kelsey lets go of the light and for a moment all she can do is cling to the blacktop, exhausted and blinded by her own trick. The city should not have lent her such an ability, not in her blasphemous state of being, but she is nonetheless glad that it did. With a sigh, she lets go of her wings and finishes the transformation into her human-form.

She stands and turns to face the shell-shocked Novak. The pavement has gone dead again, unfortunately while still wrapped around his legs. Kelsey stumbles over to him, shivering with cold and adrenaline, and she kneels down to coax the pavement off of him. After a minute of her gentle whispering, it melts back down and resumes its former shape.

Novak stumbles, almost falls. Eventually he finds his voice again. “A—are you a guardian angel?”

She blinks at him. “Even if I were, I wouldn’t be yours.”

“But … ” He leaves his mouth hanging open for a moment before shutting it and looking away. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Kelsey,” she says, with impulsive honesty.

“I … need to sit down,” he says but makes no move to do so.

Another wave of shivers runs through her fragile human flesh. “Let’s find somewhere warm. Come.”

It takes Novak three cups of coffee and half an order of cheese fries at an all-night diner before the interrogation instinct supplants the shock. After what he saw, Kelsey doesn’t see much use for denial, so she answers his questions more or less truthfully.

“So what are you, if not an angel?”

“A grotesque.”

“Are there others like you?”

“I’m unique,” she says, which is true though not the answer to the question he meant.

He shakes his head. “Look—it’s not that I’m not grateful, but why did you help me?”

“I protect.” She shrugs uncomfortably. “Humans, Lorefolk, the city itself … from each other. That’s what I do.”

“Lorefolk?”

“Things like me, and like it.” The pronoun alone makes her want spit again, though she contains the impulse. “And others like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

“It?”

“An Old One.”

He rubs his face with one hand, as if her freely given answers only serve to frustrate him more. “None of this makes any sense.”

She shrugs, not knowing what to say to that, and watches the waitress refill Novak’s mug.

“Are you sure you don’t want anything?” he says for the third time, in between questions.

She shakes her head. “Grotesques don’t eat.” Her human-form might be able to, but now doesn’t seem like a good time to experiment. She feels dizzy and lightheaded, and all knotted up in the midsection.

“You’re looking pretty human to me right now. Come on, try some.” He pushes the half-eaten plate of cheese fries across the plastic table-top towards her.

Kelsey picks up a single fry and puts it in her mouth. The sensation on her tongue is foreign, overwhelming, and not entirely pleasant. She works her jaw the way she watched him do and swallows it. Her midsection seems to respond, though she can’t parse out whether the reaction is positive or negative.

“So? What do you think?”

She frowns, considering. “Being human is problematic.”

Novak laughs. “Believe it or not, cheese fries are the easy part.”

She pushes the plate back across the table. She does not want to learn how to be human. Not now, not ever. This is a temporary alliance between two protectors of the city and nothing more. The task at hand is all that matters.

She says, “You should know: what I did in the alley with the light just spooked it, didn’t get rid of it for good. The Old One’s got your taste in its mouth now. It will come back for you.”

His hand holding the coffee mug freezes halfway to his mouth. He sets the mug down cautiously, as if afraid his muscles will betray him. “It could be out there killing people right now.”

“No, that’s not likely.” Kelsey shakes her head. “It’s you the Old One wants now.”

Kelsey rides in his car back to his apartment, and she gives him instructions to turn all the lights on and stay inside until dawn. Just in case, she walks a quick circuit of all the rooms, painting the walls with a subtle glamour of disinterest and distraction. Noto see here, move along. She hopes it will be enough. There is work to be done, and she cannot bring him where she needs to go. On the fire escape outside his window, she transforms back into herself and takes to the air.

She approaches Museum Campus from the north, flying low over Grant Park and Lake Shore Drive. The Field Museum, in all its Neoclassical glory, sits atop a well-manicured grassy hill with the Shedd Aquarium nestled against the lakefront some three hundred feet to the left. An expansive flight of steps leads up to the four massive Ionic columns of the museum’s north entrance. Kelsey cannot get in that way, of course, not in the middle of the night.

She shims open the latch on a top floor window, slides through the narrow space, and drops down into an empty office room. Peering out into the hall, she checks for cracks of light under the other doors; no one appears to be working this late. Good.

The upper floors, reserved for curators and research staff, are arranged in a disorienting grid of look-alike hallways. Kelsey finds the nearest stairwell and descends into the public-access portion of the museum, and the door at the top of the stairs swings shut and autolocks behind her.

She tried propping the door one time, but the electronic security system tattled on her and a guard fixed the problem before she got back. Funny how it’s harder to break out than in.

The second-floor balcony offers a stunning view of the marble-floored main hall below. The hall stretches all the way between the north and south entrances and holds some of the larger items on display, including two taxidermied African elephants and the biggest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the world.

The skeleton is named Sue. Kelsey doesn’t understand the desire to truss up dead things and show them off, and she especially doesn’t understand the need to name them. She wishes the humans wouldn’t clutter up beautiful architectural spaces.

One hop and she’s over the balcony railing, wings snapping open to guide her descent. She lands almost silently, nothing more than a whisper of claws on marble, and darts through a doorway on one side. She runs down a long hallway lined with more crass displays of dead animals. In the back, the hallway opens up into a high-ceilinged exhibition hall wherein her destination lies: a full size replica of a Maori meeting house.

The structure encloses one large, empty room, with a doorway and a single window set into the front wall. Carved mask faces cover the dark, polished wood on the exterior, and the inlaid mother-of-pearl eyes seem to glow in the dimmed lighting. It is a sacred structure, patiently waiting to be used for the purpose it was meant for—a fulfillment that will never arrive.

The Lorefolk, at least, found a use for it, and a respectable one at that. Kelsey steps forward until she can rest her hands on the empty door frame. The wood feels smooth and warm beneath her fingertips. She mutters the Old Words and sends her will down her arms to fill the doorway, and the view of the interior wavers as if no longer confident of its reality.

Kelsey steps through. Her feet land on grass, and a clean, unscented breeze lifts her crest feathers. Behind her, an empty stone archway leading nowhere; in front, the architectural collage of the Engineer’s workshop.

The low, sprawling structure shows no respect for right angles. It has three prominent domes—the smallest built of glass and the larger two of wood painted white with stripes of gold—fewer windows than all that weirdly-angled exterior wall space might suggest, and only one door.

Kelsey sidles forward hesitantly, glancing at the rocky humps of small hillocks surround the workshop on all sides, eerily silent and isolated to her city-accustomed mind. She opens the door and slinks inside. The front hallway opens up into a cavernous pentagonal room, three storeys high plus the domed ceiling. Five enormous machines hulk in the center of the room, all shining brass and dark bronze. They hiss and chug in a steady rhythm, filling the air with almost musical sound.

A single door is set in each of the five walls on each floor, and it is from one of these upper doors that the Engineer emerges. He follows a catwalk along the wall to a set of stairs and begins to descend without looking up from the leatherbound book in his hands. The Engineer is a short and squat little man with three sets of spidery arms and an extra joint in each of his too-long fingers. His wrinkled face gives him a look of perpetual squinting, and his ragged robes could be as old as the wrinkles.

Kelsey freezes where she stands, feeling unworthy to ask for his regard. She should go before he notices her.

He reaches the bottom of the stairs and, without looking at her, says, “The Engine Room is not open to the public.”

“Sir, I need a moment of your time.”

The Engineer adjusts the round set of spectacles perched on his nose. “I’m occupied, as you can see.”

“There’s an Old One loose in Chicago, and it’s using the glamour network.”

He makes a motion that might be a shrug. “The network is built for all Lorefolk to use.”

“But the Old One isn’t just hiding, it is draining power to use during its killing sprees. It’s a parasite. It has to be stopped.”

“That is … interesting.” His lowest set of arms folds across his stomach, and his upper arms slowly close the book. “What would you have me do about it?”

“Sir, I know that I impose upon your time, but—”

“To the point, if you please.”

Kelsey takes a deep breath and let it out. “I need you to build me a trap fit for an Old One.”

Once she slips past the museum guards and regains her freedom, enough night remains for Kelsey to fly back to Novak’s apartment and check on him. She alights on the fire escape outside his living room window and peers in. He has fallen asleep in an old armchair, and instead of waking him, she sneaks in and leaves a note: meet me in Rockefeller Chapel at sundown. Then she departs to find a resting spot of her own.

Sunrise. The oblivion of sleep. Sunset.

Kelsey launches into the darkening sky, beating her wings to gain some altitude. The campus blurs beneath her, and she lands atop the tower of the university chapel. She takes the spiral stairs down, fingertips running along the brick-lined inner wall of the tower. The chapel sighs comfortably, still warm and calm from the Engineer’s daytime visit—she can feel the residue of his presence in every brick.

She cuts through the dim-lit sanctuary past the long shadows of polished-wood pews and finds a side door locked only from the outside. Sticking her head out, she yells for Novak, who comes jogging around from the front entrance. His flashlight rakes her eyes and she squints against the brightness to see him jerk to a halt.

Too late, Kelsey realizes she’s wearing her real face.

“It’s me,” she says curtly.

“You’re … you’re a monster.”

“I told you I’m a grotesque. What exactly did you expect?” She spits, angry that for a moment he made her wish for her human face. “If you stand out there all night, the Old One will paint the grass with your innards. Come.”

He comes forward again, cautiously now, and slips through the door she holds open. The high, vaulted ceiling of the sanctuary swallows up the brightness of his flashlight, and the scuff of his shoes on the stone floor echoes.

“So, what—ancient cloud demons don’t like churches?” He forces out the words, trying not to look at her.

Kelsey shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter that it’s a chapel, but it does matter that it’s my chapel. I know these stones well. They’ll aid me.”

He breathes deep, lets it out, and turns to face her. “Okay. What’s my job?”

“Sit on the dais and act, you know, murderable.”

“I’m the bait?”

She blinks. “Naturally. What did you think I needed you for?”

She turns away and walks the length of the sanctuary on both sides, checking the small brass relays hidden behind each pillar. No long antennas on these pentagonal brass contraptions—the Engineer didn’t build them for transmitting in this instance. What Kelsey needs is the opposite. She circles back to the dais and finds that the Engineer left the trigger on the podium, as promised. She picks it up, round and brass like a pocketwatch but singing with the power of glamour.

She says, “Not long now.”

“Oh. Great.” Novak flops down on the steps of the dais, elbows resting on knees. “I love this plan.”

She stares at him, perplexed. “How you feel about it isn’t relevant.”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“The alternative is dying in an explosion of gore.”

“Look—I’m in, okay? But I don’t have to like it, is all.”

Not knowing what to say, Kelsey shrugs it off. Now is the time to focus. She springs up, gives the air two long strokes of her wings, and finds a perch atop the large pipe organ on the right side of the dais. The height and partial concealment give her a comfortable edge. She’s ready for it.

They wait.

It comes.

Slowly at first, like the howl of a distant hurricane, the city begins to moan. As the Old One approaches, the calm evaporates from the chapel walls and each stone seems to shiver in terror. Kelsey feels the tremor when the Old One’s fluid mass breaks like a wave against the outer wall. It leaks in through the cracks around the front doors, a black cloud thicker than firesmoke pouring into the air.

On the dais below, Novak shifts nervously. Kelsey stares down, willing him to hold his wits together until the Old One has been lured all the way inside. Stupid of her to plan a trap that hinges on a human’s help, but Novak stills himself and does not flee.

The Old One literally pulls itself together, black tendrils tucking in to form a sphere of darkness, and begins to glide down the central aisle. It pulses slightly, as if breathing, and the hideous eyes and teeth rise to the surface to gape hungrily at Novak.

When the Old One reaches the center of the chapel, Kelsey pushes off from her perch and snaps open her wings to glide down to the floor, landing in front of Novak. The stones of the chapel quail and shriek beneath the Old One, and she feels Novak’s fear, too, like a subsonic vibration. But when she serves the city, she has no fear of her own.

Kelsey kneels to place one palm on the smooth stone floor, the other hand still holding the trigger. She reaches out with her mind and draws in glamour from beyond the chapel, making herself seem larger, more ferocious. Fangs and claws to match the Old One’s, eyes that glow with citylight, wings growing spurred and enormous to fill the vaulted space. She shows off for the Old One, goading him to match her skill.

When the Old One rises to her challenge, though, it takes glamour from the immediate area of the chapel. She feels the tension as it draws in more power, as if the relays are springs and the Old One stretches them out to their limits. The web of glamour pulls taut, singing like instrument strings, and when the threads are stretched to the breaking point, Kelsey jams her thumb down on the trigger.

The glamour springs back toward the relays, lightning-quick with elastic tension, and the relays suck it down, devouring the power and storing it. Each relay becomes a point of negative pressure, the energy flow from the Old One firmly established. Mindlessly thirsty, the relays will not stop drinking until the Old One is drained.

The Old One screeches and writhes. Its eyes and teeth and limbs disappear first, then wisps of black cloud begin to siphon off and it gradually shrinks. The last few seconds are the worst, when the core being of the Old One rends in a dozen different directions, and the very air wants to shrink away from its ancient rage. Then, with a final rip, the relays devour it.

The walls sigh relief at its passage.

Novak stands shakily from the dais steps and walks over to Kelsey. “You saved my life again. That’s twice now. Thank you.” His eyes are too deep and grateful, with a puzzling lack of disgust.

“Well. Have a nice life,” she says and flees the chapel.

With luck, Duncan will never ask her to take on the horrid human-form again. No frailty, no confusion, no illusions of humanity. That is what she wants, yes, she’s certain. Never again.

Kelsey flies her rounds, starting at the lake and meandering westwards. The city has been quiet for days, but something is different in the air tonight. Something waits for her.

She lands on the steps in front of Rockefeller Chapel—next to Novak.

“What are you doing?” she says, dropping her cloak of glamour so he can see her.

He jumps at her sudden appearance. “Waiting for you. Took you long enough to show up.”

She blinks. “Our business here is done.”

“I got this case, see. I think it’s up your alley.”

The rush of hope and anxiety and desire catches her off-guard, echoes of human-form emotions nothing like the cool certainty of a grotesque’s mission.

Novak takes her silence as an invitation to continue. “Today I had a out behind the River North cineplex that was drained of blood. What do you think? Vampire?”

“There are no vampires in Chicago.”

“Well that begs the question—who did take the blood, and why?”

She hesitates. “I don’t work for you.”

“What about my supernaturally blood-free Jane Doe? You willing to work for her?”

Kelsey scowls, knowing he’s probably right. This case sounds as if it involves elements he is ill-equipped to deal with, elements that fall into her realm of experience. Her responsibility, even.

“I brought a coat, for when you’re wearing your other face.” Novak holds the spare coat out to her. “Come on. We can go someplace warm, review the details. And hey, maybe you could give food a second chance.”

Reluctantly, she takes the coat from him and lets her wings melt away before wrapping it around her shoulders. The night air chills her human hands, and she shoves them down into the pockets. It feels strangely good—the cold and the coat, the discomfort and the doubt. Maybe it’s okay to want this. Maybe her human-self is not a curse, after all.

As they make their way to Novak’s car, the sidewalk sighs approval at the touch of her bare human feet. The streetlights flicker their agreement when she passes beneath them. Startled, Kelsey realizes the city wants this of her.

And she always gives the city what it wants.