James Baldwin - Stained Glass

I had read about it, in passing, on my daily scrounged copy of the Times. Even by New York standards, it had been a big deal: a wealthy couple murdered in their beds up in the nice part of north New York, and all the children at the home were unaccounted for. It hadn’t meant much to me at the time. “I remember.”

“Mmph.” Spotted Elk drew on his pipe. “Wolf Grove was run by Dru and Lily Ross. They were esteemed and valued members of our communities, and united us across our various cultural, ethical and moral divisions. I suppose you wonder exactly what it is we do?”

“I know what bikers do,” I replied. “And I know what goes on in museums and police stations, but I’m more wondering what you all are. ”

The small sounds of the room quieted, like spooked birds falling still in a forest clearing. Jenner glanced at Mason, then at Zane. He shrugged.

Spotted Elk raised a brow. “Was that a guess or an inference?”

“A deduction. Phitometry isn’t a word I often hear thrown around. I didn’t know anything about it until I met something very personal and very ancient.” Tiny details of Spotted Elk’s body language fit together into a strange whole. His nostrils were flaring like a deer’s. His neck was long and slender, and there was something in his mannerisms that made my teeth ache and my mouth water. Strange feelings to have, in the presence of a man one has only just met… but then again, I hadn’t killed anyone for a while.

“Fair enough.” Spotted Elk spread his hands. “I’ll come clean, ay? We’re shapeshifters. Every man and woman in this room, save for Aaron.”

His flippant reveal hung over the room for a moment. Talya cleared her throat in the silence.

“I see,” I replied, after a few seconds of digestion. “As in, werewolves?”

A few people grimaced in distaste, except for Jenner and Duke. They grinned.

“The wolves are not here tonight. This murdered couple, they were from our circle. They were Pathrunners.” Karim spoke up this time, a proud cant to his head and an arrogant look in his heavy-lidded eyes. He had a strong French accent, clay-brown skin, and designs shaved into his hair and through the thick stubble on his cheeks.

“You make it sound more significant than I understand it to be.” I turned to look at them both – really look at them. Maybe it was my own ideas about what a shapeshifter should be, but I was searching for the animal in each of them now.

“Pathrunners are the keepers of law in our communities,” Michael said. “Our members are the rats, raccoons, birds, and other small animals… those who live quickly and die often. Our Ka run ahead to guide all other creatures, learning much from each brief lifetime.”

“I don’t know anything about your Art or your traditions,” I said. “So start from the beginning.”

“We will not give you much,” Michael replied. “Our laws are our own.”

“We’re not Phitometrists, if that’s what you mean,” Spotted Elk said. “Weeders – shapeshifters – have a human face and an animal face. Ib and Ka-Bah, to borrow the Pathrunners’ preferred Egyptian terms. Human heart and body, animal soul. Two sides of a coin.”

“The human changes,” Karim said. “The animal remains the same from life to life. It is not the human who turns into the Ka. The Ka takes human form.”

There was a brooding heaviness over the room as these men spoke. I had the distinct impression that if I rejected this knowledge, the lot of them weren’t going to let me out of the room alive. I doubted anyone would find the body.

“Our children are born at random,” Spotted Elk said. “Across cultures and states, often to families who don’t understand them. There are different… approaches to the way we live our lives. The Pathrunners are our law-givers, and they arbitrate between our communities and gangs and packs. They find and gather children, raise them in the understanding of our ways, and then the children decide where their hearts lie. Some of them join outlaws like Jenner and Mason. Some of them join wolf packs, or lion prides, or flocks. Others throw in their lot with the likes of me when they come of age.”

“Some of them change their minds.” A young man with a chicken neck and a beaky, pointed face muttered, glancing at Talya. She was still pressed against Zane’s arm. If anyone else heard, there was no sign of it.

“So the murdered couple and the missing kids were all shapeshifters?” The surrounding threat was palpable, but dangerous knowledge and interesting knowledge were often the same thing. “I thought the government was rounding up all the supernatural elements nowadays.”

“’Rounding up’ isn’t the point,” Ayashe said. “The Vigiles is trying to bring supernatural elements under law. Wolf Grove worked with the NYPD and the Northern Supernatural Support Unit. Pastor Aaron here is the SSU chaplain and caseworker for magically gifted kids. I’m supporting the Unit as a specialist in shapeshifters, part of the deal I negotiated with them when the Vigiles was formed. The Jammies and Blanks were… are all registered for adoption and training. The Weeder kids are in the system, but they have to be of age to choose their affiliation. A few of them stay here, but Lily and Dru send them to a school in Texas and a lot of them end up living there by choice. We have to let them decide. That’s the tradition and the law.”

“Jammies?” I arched an eyebrow.

“Children with magical potential.” The Chaplain added. “As in, they’re still sleeping… and so they’re in their pajamas.”

“So what you’re saying is that these missing children were part of a tag and release program.” The nape of my neck crawled. I had been born before the Vigiles, in a time when the only special interest groups for magi had been the various organized religions, a range of secret societies, and the street. As of 1985, they’d begun screening kids reported to churches and doctors for the common signs of magical talent. Poltergeist activity, apparent possession, talking to ghosts, minor psychokinetics, injured pets spontaneously healing or reviving. Back in the day, they called those miracles or hauntings. Now, the government was hunting for it. Where the children went… who knew?

Ayashe sighed. “If you want to get cynical about it. The two adults are dead and twenty-one kids are missing. Of those, fifteen of them were Weeder kids. The other six… two Blanks, four Jammies.”

“Right.” I rubbed my jaw, scruffing the palm of my glove over the stubble. “It is safe to assume the police are handling the murder.”

“They’re trying, but this is way over the head of the local SSU.” Ayashe said. She sounded tired now, a little guttural. Somehow, I doubted she got much sleep. “Even with the V.M. on site, it’s not going anywhere. We know that someone somehow managed to pull off a mass kidnapping and a double murder and get away clean. There’s no physical evidence we can use beyond some basic shit. Besides some drawings and weird symbols, there wasn’t any arcane evidence left behind. The NYPD went stomping around in the house and shifted anything that might have been useful to our medium. She didn’t find no resonance, no tracers, no nothing.”

“Why do you think a Spook can do anything that the police can’t?”

“There were occult elements to the murders,” Spotted Elk replied. “The murderer… took some things. There were some demonic symbols left in the house, acts of blasphemy and desecration. Lily and Dru were both religious people. Devout, modest people. That’s what brought them together in the first place, and that’s why we and all the other stakeholders of New York agreed to let them care for our young.”

I had visions of a church home where these elders and gang-leaders went to fish for recruits. Maybe it was good, maybe it wasn’t, but the whole thing made my skin crawl. “You said the murderer took some things. What did they steal?”