Neil Gaiman - Stories - All-New Tales

SHE INVITED US IN straightaway. No checking of credentials; no suspicious glance from behind the open drapes. I’d had her down as pretty, but dumb; now I saw she was a genuine innocent, a little-girl-lost in the big city. Not my type, naturally, but I could see what Arthur saw in her.

She offered us a cup of ginseng tea. “Any friend of Arthur’s,” she said, and I saw his painful grimace as he tried to fit his big fingers around the little china cup, all the while trying to hold himself in so that Sunny could have her sunshine…

Finally, it was too much for him. He let it out with a gasp of release, and the rain started to come down in snakes, hissing into the gutters.

Sunny looked dismayed. “Damn rain !”

Arthur looked like someone had punched him hard, right in the place where thunder gods keep their ego. He gave that feeble smile again. “It doesn’t make you feel safe?” he said. “You don’t think there’s a kind of poetry in the sound, like little hammers beating down onto the rooftops?”

Sunny shook her head. “Yuck.”

I lit the fire with a discreet cantrip and a fingering of the rune Kaen. Little flames shot out of the grate and danced winsomely across the hearth. It was a good trick, though I say it myself-especially as it was an electric fire.

“Neat,” said Sunny, smiling again.

Arthur gave a low growl.

“So-have you seen anything strange around here lately?” Stupid damn question, I told myself. Move a sun goddess onto the third floor of a Manhattan brownstone, and you’re apt to see more than the occasional pyrotechnics. “No guys in suits?” I went on. “Dark overcoats and fedora hats, like someone from a bad fifties comic strip?”

“Oh, those guys.” She poured more tea. “Yeah, I saw them yesterday. They were sniffing around in the alleyway.” Sunny’s blue eyes darkened a little. “They didn’t look friendly. What do they want?”

I was going to tell her about Bren, and what had happened to Old Man Moony, but Arthur stopped me with a glance. Sunny has that effect, you know; makes guys want to do stupid things. Stupid, noble, self-sacrificing things-and I was beginning to understand that I was going to be a part of it, whether or not I wanted to be.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Arthur said with a big smile, clamping a hand on my upper arm and marching me onto the balcony. “They’re just some guys we’re looking for. We’ll camp out here tonight and keep an eye out for them for you. Any trouble, we’ll be here. No need for you to worry. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Sunny.

“Okay,” I said between gritted teeth (my arm felt like it had been pounded several times with a hammer). I waited until we were alone, and Sunny had drawn the curtains, then I turned on him. “What’s the deal?” I said. “We can’t hold back the Shadow-wolves. You must know that by now, right? You saw what they did to Moony and Bren. Our only chance is to outrun them, to take your lady friend with you and to run like the blazes to another city, to another continent if we can, where the Shadow has less influence-”

Arthur looked stubborn. “I won’t run.”

“Fine. Well, it’s been a blast- Ow! My arm !”

“And neither will you,” said Our Thor.

“Well, if you put it that way-”

I may be a trifle impetuous, but I know when to surrender to force majeure. Arthur had his mind set on both of us being heroes. My only remaining choice was whether to set my mind to helping him, thereby possibly saving both our hides, or to make a run for it as soon as the bastard’s guard was down-

Well, I might have gone down either path, but just then I caught sight of our boys in the alleyway, sniffing and snarling like wolves in suits, and I was down to no choice at all. I drew my mindsword, he drew his. Glamours and runes distressed the night air. Not that they would help us, I thought; they hadn’t helped my brother Bren, or the mad old moongod. And Shadow-or Chaos, if you prefer-had plenty of glamours of its own with which to strike down three renegade gods, fugitives left over from the End of the World-

“Hey! Up here!” yelled Our Thor.

Two pairs of eyes turned up towards us. A hiss like static as the ephemera tuned into our whereabouts. A glint of teeth as they grinned-and then they were crawling up the fire escape, all pretence of humanity gone, slick beneath those boxy black coats, nothing much in there but tooth and claw, like poetry with an appetite.

Oh, great, I thought. Way to keep a low profile, Our Thor. Was it an act of self-sacrifice, a ploy to attract their attention, or could he possibly have a plan? If he did, then it would be a first. Mindless self-sacrifice was about his level. I wouldn’t have minded that much, but it was clear that in his boundless generosity he also meant to sacrifice me .

“Lucky!” It was raining again. Great ropes and coils of thunderous rain that thrashed down onto our bowed heads, all gleaming in the neon lights in shades of black and orange-from the static-ridden sky, great flakes of snow lumbered down. Well, that’s what happens around a raingod under stress; but that didn’t stop me getting soaked, and wishing I’d brought my umbrella. It didn’t stop the ephemera though. Even the bolts of lightning that crashed like stray missiles into the alleyway (I have skills too, and I was using them like the blazes by then) had no effect on the wolves of Chaos, whose immensely slick and somehow snakelike forms were now poised on the fire escape beneath us, ten feet away and ready to pounce.

One did-a mindbolt flew. I recognized the rune Hagall. One of my colleague’s most powerful, and yet it passed right through the ephemera with a squeal of awesome feedback, then the creature was on us again, unbuttoning its overcoat, and now I was sure there were stars in there, stars and the mindless static of space-

“Look,” I said. “What do you want? Girls, money, power, fame-I can get all those things for you, no problem. I’ve got influence in this world. Two handsome, single guys like yourselves-hey, you could make a killing in showbiz.”

Perhaps not the wisest choice of words.

The first wolf leered. “ Killing,” it said. By then I could smell it again, and I knew that words couldn’t save me. First, the thing was ravenous. Second, nothing with that level of halitosis could possibly hope to make it in the music business. Some guys, I knew, had come pretty close. My daughter Hel, for instance, has, in spite of her-shall we say alternative -looks, a serious fan base in certain circles. But not these guys. I mean, Ew.

I flung a handful of mindrunes then: Týr; Kaen; Hagall; Ýr-but none of them even slowed it down. The other wolf was onto us now, and Arthur was wrestling with it, caught in the flaps of its black coat. The balcony was pulling away from the wall; sparks and shards of runelight hissed into the torrential rain.

Damn it , I thought. I’m going to die wet . And I flung up a shield using the rune Sól, and with the last, desperate surge of my glam I cast all the firerunes of the First Aettir at the two creatures that once had been wolves but were now grim incarnations of revenge, because nothing escapes from Chaos, not Thunder, not Wildfire, not even the Sun-

“Are you guys okay out there?” It was Sunny, peering through a gap in the curtains. “Do you want some more ginseng tea?”

“Ah-no thanks,” said Arthur, now with a demon wolf in each hand and that stupid grin on his face again. “Look, ah, Sunny, go inside. I’m kinda busy right now-”

The thing that Our Thor had been holding at bay finally escaped his grasp. It didn’t go far, though; it sprang at me and knocked me backwards against the rail. The balcony gave way with a screech, and we all fell together, three floors down. I hit the deck-damned hard-with the ephemera on top of me, and all the fight knocked out of me and I knew that I was finished.