James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“You want a fight? I’ll give you a fight.” Flushed with adrenaline, I tried it again with much the same result. This time, the parasite – good GOD, it really was a parasite – thrashed until I retched with pain.

I stretched out through the cramping again, clutching the towel around my waist. In the mirror over the sink, the legs of the corona moved like tentacles as they settled back into place. It wasn’t coming out.

I scowled at my reflection. “Wait until I get Lidocaine and a scalpel, you little son of a bitch.”

Now that I was clean, my clothes looked faded and worn, and they smelled bad – like metal and old sweat. They were still all I had to wear. Grimacing, I pulled on the t-shirt, jeans and sweater, rolling the sleeves to my elbows before I pulled on the gloves. The cable-knit sweater had fit me once. Between wear and weight loss, it was baggy in the body and sleeves. I hadn’t looked this poor since I was a boy.

From deeper within the house, I heard voices and smelled cooking. There were probably more boarders here besides me and Zane. I waited in the darkened hallway outside the bathroom for a little while, uncertain if I should join them or not. After so much solitude, my social navigation was at an all-time low. It wasn’t going to get better without practice, though. With a deep sigh, I headed for the kitchen.

Zane was alone. He was prowling restlessly around the kitchen, a cordless handset jammed between neck and shoulder while he listened and ‘mm’hmm’d to whoever was on the other end of the line. He had stripped down to a black wifebeater, revealing arms that were covered in greenish-black tattoos. A mandala disappeared around his shoulder. Tiny, intricate, beautifully executed calligraphy wound around his upper arms and forearms in a solid sheet of lettering. It almost looked like magical scripture of some sort.

Belatedly, I noticed there was a pan of bacon and eggs on the rusty gas stovetop. I pointed at it enquiringly, and he gave me the thumbs up. Grateful for the reprieve, I slid some onto a plate and took them to the other side of the table.

“Yeah, alright. Next Saturday. I’ll let you know if anything comes up, alright? Okay, thanks.” Zane held on for another couple of seconds while the handset yammered, then clicked. With a sigh, he hung up.

“Must be urgent if they’re calling you this late,” I said. “It’s after four.”

“That was work,” he replied. “Got a fight booked next weekend. About time, too – I haven’t had a gig in a couple of weeks.”

“You aren’t on a roster?” I doused my eggs in Tabasco, pepper and salt. They smelled so greasy that I wasn’t sure I could hold them down, not after weeks of monotonous sandwiches.

“I’m still building a rep in New York,” he said. “A lot of these fights aren’t really formalized until the week before. If I’m lucky, I’ll land an agent. Kickboxing isn’t exactly mainstream, though.”

“Using your feet in boxing is generally frowned on.”

“Nah, kickboxing isn’t English boxing. Kickboxing is a whole other thing… its proper name is Muay Thai . Comes from Thailand, as you might have guessed.” He smiled. “Jenner got me into it.”

“She’s Thai?”

“No. Vietnamese. But her family relocated to Thailand after the war. She ran her first gang in Chiang Mai, then she came over here. Funny thing is, the first time I met her was when I was in Thailand on holiday. It’s funny how that kind of thing happens… she says that Weeders always find a way to meet each other.”

“Shapeshifters subscribe to fate?” I arched an eyebrow, and tried my first forkful of eggs.

“I think it’s the reincarnation thing.” He glanced at my plate. “Is that okay? I probably should have asked if you ate bacon.”

I held up a hand for a moment’s pause, savoring the taste and the glide of yolk on my tongue. “You have no earthly idea how much I’ve missed real food.”

Zane sat back, watching me eat with his arms loosely folded across his broad chest. He was as muscular as I’d suspected, gym-cut and sculptural. “So… how does a guy like you end up on the street?”

“Any number of ways,” I said. “The current Avtoritet of Brighton Beach is ex-Spetznaz, and far too intelligent for my continued health. Hotels were the first place he’d look, and half the hotels in New York are mafia-operated. Sleeping rough is something he’d never expect me to do. Secondly, I was kidnapped from my home before I could get any of my belongings, money included. Someone found my go-bag. I spent so much of my life paying off my father’s debts that I never really invested in property.”

“I have to agree with Mason, though. I figured a guy like you would just kill someone and take their stuff.”

“There’s security cameras and cops everywhere since the Central Park Jogger incident.” I chewed thoughtfully for a space. “Besides that, killing people you don’t know is murder. It is not something you undertake lightly.”

“What? And killing people you know isn’t murder?”

I paused for a moment. “Not the kind of people I knew.”

Zane snorted, and shook his head.

“It’s irrelevant now.” I shrugged. “More relevant are you and your people. I don’t know the first thing about shapeshifters.”

“We’re secretive as all hell, even among ourselves,” Zane replied. “Privacy is a big deal, and for good reason. Witch hunters, Inquisition types. Some crazy pred shapeshifters seek out prey shifters to hunt, specifically because they think eating them will make them stronger. The Covenant of Ib-Int is meant to protect us from each other as much as from norms.”

“Huh. That makes a certain sick sort of sense.”

“I guess. The government used to hunt us down, poison bullets and everything. Now they corral us into programs like the one Ayashe was talking about. It’s pretty classified stuff, too… that’s why she’s always so strung out. She’s trying to balance two secret worlds that are still in conflict.”

“I never knew.” Shapeshifters were common lore in the study of magic, but the lore conflicted across different books and different time periods. “Would you say shifting is a form of magic?”

“Not really,” Zane said. “But I can’t say any more. That’s part of the Ib-Int , the ancestral laws. They’ve been passed on from Elder to young for like six thousand years, at least. Only Elders are allowed to talk about this stuff, and I’m not an Elder.”

“What defines an Elder?” I folded the bacon and took a mouthful. Whatever cultural guilt I might have felt passed as soon as the flavor hit.

“Like Michael said, the human changes, but the animal stays the same. You reincarnate over and over again. Each time, the Ka gets a bit smarter. Enough times around the wheel, and it starts to remember things from lifetime to lifetime. Someone like John or Jenner can have memories reaching back eight hundred years or more.”

I tried to imagine it. Maintaining a single set of memories was difficult enough. Everything I’d learned growing up, all of the mistakes I’d made, the people I’d known, the things I did. I had an excellent memory – practically photographic – but too much thinking on the past was tiring and difficult. What would it be like to have a second set of memories overlaid over the top of all of that? A third? Five? Twenty? Entire human beings, their experiences linked only by the animal soul that ran, unchanged, through each cycle. It was a wonder they weren’t all as mad as hatters.

“That is remarkable,” I said. “What about Lily and Dru Ross?”

Zane’s wry expression crumpled into a frown. “They were first generation Elders. This was the first life where their Ka passed the initiation tests. Michael screened them for the Pathfinders, and John made them honorary Elders in his. They were very good people, you know? Really churchy, but they were never pushy about it. They just lived their lives… all the kids they raised never say a bad thing about them. A lot of them stay on at this boarding school in Texas.”