Neil Gaiman: Stories: All-New Tales

He chanted, and for a beat the hunters paused-and was that a single trace of a tear gleaming in the shadow of a black fedora? — and Mani sang a glamour of love and death, and of the beauty that is desolation and of the brief firefly that lights up the darkness-for a wing’s beat, for a breath-before it gutters, burns and dies.

But the chant did not halt them for more than a second. Tears or not, these guys were hungry . They glided forward, hands outstretched, and now I could see inside their unbuttoned coats, and for a moment I was sure there was no body beneath their clothes, no fur or scale, no flesh or bone. There was just the shadow; the blackness of Chaos; a blackness beyond colour or even its absence; a hole in the world, all-devouring, all-hungry.

Brendan took a single step, and I caught him by the arm and held him back. It was too late anyway; old Moony was already done for. He went down-not with a crash, but with an eerie sigh, as if he’d been punctured-and the creatures that now no longer even looked like men were on him like hyenas, fangs gleaming, static hissing in the folds of their garments.

There was nothing human in the way they moved. Nothing superfluous. They Hoovered him up from blood to brain-every glamour, every spark, every piece of kith and kindling-and what they left looked less like a man than a cardboard cutout of a man left lying in the dirt of the alleyway.

Then they were gone, buttoning up their overcoats over the terrible absence beneath.

A silence. Brendan was crying. He always was the sensitive one. I wiped something (sweat, I think) from my face and waited for my breathing to return to normal.

“That was nasty,” I said at last. “Haven’t seen anything quite like that since the End of the World.”

“Did you hear him?” said Brendan.

“I heard. Who would have thought the old man had so much glam in him?”

My brother said nothing, but hid his eyes.

I suddenly realized I was hungry, and thought for a moment of suggesting a pizza, but decided against it. Bren was so touchy nowadays, he might have taken offence.

“Well, I’ll see you later, I guess,” and sloped off rather unsteadily, wondering why brothers are always so damned hard, and wishing I’d been able to ask him home.

I wasn’t to know, but I wish I had-I’d never see that Aspect of him again.

I SLEPT TILL LATE the next day. Awoke with a headache and a familiar post-cocktail nauseous feeling, then remembered-the way you remember doing something to your back when you were in the gym, but didn’t realize how bad it was going to be until you’d slept on it-and sat bolt upright.

The guys , I thought. Those two guys.

I must have been drunker than I’d thought last night, because this morning the memory of them froze me to the core. Delayed shock; I know it well, and to combat its elects I called room service and ordered the works. Over coffee, bacon, pancakes and rivers of maple syrup, I worked on my recovery, and though I did pretty well, given the circumstances, I found I couldn’t quite get the death of old Moony out of my mind, or the slick way the two overcoats had crawled over him, gobbling up his glam before buttoning up and back to business. Poetry in motion.

I pondered my lucky escape-well, I guessed that if they hadn’t sniffed out Moony first, then it would have been Yours Truly and Brother Bren for a double serving of Dish of the Day-but my heart was far from light as it occurred to me that if these guys were really after our kind, this was at best a reprieve, not a pardon, and that sooner or later those overcoats would be sharpening their teeth at my door.

So I finished breakfast and called Bren. But all I got was his answering machine, so I looked up the number of his restaurant and dialled it. The line was dead.

I would have tried his mobile, but, like I said, we’re not close. I didn’t know it, or the name of his girl, or even the number of his house. Too late now, right? Just goes to show. Carpe diem, and all that. And so I showered and dressed and went off in haste under gathering clouds to the Flying Pizza, Bren’s place of work (but what a dumb name!), in the hope of getting some sense out of my twin.

It was there that I realized something was amiss. Ten blocks away I knew it already, and the sirens and the engines and the shouting and the smoke were just confirmation. There was something ominous about those gathering thunderclouds, and the way they sat like a Russian hat all spiky with needles of lightning above the scene of devastation. My heart sank lower the closer I got. Something was amiss, all right.

Looking around to ensure that I was unobserved, I cast the visionary rune Bjarkán with my left hand, and squinted through its spyglass shape. Smoke I saw; and lightning from the ground; my brother’s face looking pale and strained; then fire; darkness; then, as I’d feared, the Shadow-and its minions, the wolves, the shadow hunters, boxed into their heavy overcoats.

Those guys , I thought, and cursed. Again.

And now I knew where I’d known them before-and they were pretty bad in that Aspect, too, though I had more on my plate at that time than I do nowadays, and I’ll admit I didn’t give them my full attention. I did now, though, casting runes of concealment about me as I skirted the funnel of black smoke, the funeral pyre of my brother’s restaurant-and for all I knew, of Brendan himself, who had looked pretty wasted in my vision.

I got there at last, keeping an eye out for overcoats, to find fire engines and cop cars everywhere. A line had been cordoned off at the end of the road, and there were men trying to spray water over the great fizzing spume of fire that had already dug its roots deep into the Flying Pizza.

I could have told them they were wasting their time. You can’t put out the work of a firegod-even a god of hearth fire-like it was just a squib. The flames sheeted up, thirty, forty, fifty feet high, clean and yellow and shot through with glamours that would probably have looked like dancing sparks to your kind, but which, if they’d touched you, would have stripped you, flesh to bone, in one.

And Brendan? I thought. Could he still be alive somewhere?

Well, if he was, he must have run. There was no way anyone could have survived that blaze. And it wasn’t like Bren to flee the scene. He had turned and fought; I’d seen as much in my vision, and my brother was so dead set against the use of glamours among the Folk that he wouldn’t have used them if he’d had any kind of choice.

I used Ós-the rune of mystery-to scry my brother’s fate. I saw their faces, thin and wolfish; saw his smile, teeth bared, so that for a second in my vision he could have been me, wild and furious and filled with killing rage. He could be okay, my brother, you know; it just took more time to fire him up. I saw him draw his mindsword-flaming, it was, with an edge that shivered translucent light. A sword that could have cut through granite or silk with the same easy slice; a sword I hadn’t seen since the last time the world ended, a flickering flame of a firegod’s sword that just touched the shadow inside an unbuttoned overcoat and went out like a puff of smoke.

Then, in the dark, they were on him. Question answered. Well, at least my brother went out in style.

I wiped my face and pondered the points. Point one: I was now an only twin. Point two: unless he’d taken his assailants with him (which I doubted), by now the two coats would be on my tail. Point three-

I was just embarking on point three when a heavy hand fell onto my shoulder, another grasped my arm just above the elbow and then both applied a painful pressure, which soon became excruciating as the joint locked and a low, familiar voice rasped in my ear.