Richard Kadrey: Blind Shrike

A second Sphere was home to the rarest creatures-the phoenix, selkies, vampires, barbegazi, corrigans, tengus, lamias, rompos, sylphs, gorgons, volkhs, wyverns, trolls and other exotic beasts.

The last realm was left to the most glorious and dangerous inhabitants of the planet: angels and demons.

So it was that each of these groups lived and grew old and died in its own Sphere, inhabiting the same time and space as all the other Spheres, but rarely touching-unless a creature was powerful or clever enough to learn the spells of crossing over. Because the town meeting that divided the world had taken place in a human city, cities became the places where the creatures who moved from Sphere to Sphere would meet up to talk, joke, eat, exchange spells and news, make love or commit the occasional genocide.

Over the next few thousand centuries, the creatures who dwelled in the second and third Spheres struck a kind of déente. Unfortunately for the beasts of in the first Sphere (which included ninety-nine percent of humanity), they forgot about the other Spheres completely and only glimpsed them in their dreams.

Or so they thought.

Later, Spyder went out the back and into the alley behind the Bardo Lounge for a quick piss.

It wasn't Spyder's habit to urinate in public, but at the best of times the Lounge's toilets were questionable. Sometime during the day, Rubi told him, they had committed Hara kiri. "One summer during college I was trekking in Nepal," Rubi said. "First night out we came to this little village and I asked this lady who ran the local teahouse where the toilets were. In Nepali she said, essentially, `Anywhere but here,' and pointed to an open field."

As Spyder unzipped in the alley, he consider the club's name and wondered if the real afterlife would be at all like this. A tab at your favorite bar. Pretty girls to chat up. The occasional piss in an alley next to God's own dumpster. It didn't seem like the afterlife would be too bad a place. Spyder wondered who the bouncer in the Bardo Realm would be. The Black Bhairab, he decided. Shiva's most wrathful form. The six-armed, crown-of-skulls-wearing Mad Max of the afterlife.

Spyder zipped up and turned to reenter the club. Like a bad dream, the Black Bhairab was right there beside him. Something big enough, strong enough and wild enough to be the Black Bhairab, though Spyder knew that these qualities were also present in most of your dedicated crackheads, Spyder. This particular crackhead grabbed Spyder by the front of his shirt and lifted him off him feet, tossing him into the trash cans and empty liquor boxes at the back of the alley.

Stunned, Spyder reached for his cash, hoping this would get the guy to back off. The mugger came up and slammed his boot into Spyder's midsection, then kept kicking, even after he'd snatched the money from Spyder's hand. Spyder didn't even get a decent look at the guy and that really bothered him. He wanted to see the face of the man who was about to kill him.

As if the mugger had heard Spyder's thoughts, he felt himself being pulled up by his collar until he was standing upright. Then Spyder's feet lifted from the dirty alley floor and he hung limp in the air at the end of the mugger's arm. "You know how to whistle don't you? Just put your lips together and blow," Spyder croaked as he hung there. He punched the crackhead as hard as he could. The guy's face gave as if there were no bones in there, just a lot of flesh-colored pudding.

The mugger's face began to change. His skin crawled in the jittery sodium light from a street lamp. The mugger's eyes swelled and burst from their sockets, black and glittering with facets. His lips seemed to melt, drawing down into a long, twitching tube. Cracked, curved horns burst from the sides of his head. The mugger exhaled a fetid cloud of steaming breath. Spyder's brain was on overload. The adrenaline rush and oxygen-deprivation had him flashing on a frantic stream of schizophrenic data. Snakes. Insects. Wolves. Angels. The mugger had a smell. Overwhelmingly sweet. Vanilla roses. Rotting fish. The perfume of dead school girls. Spyder thought of his room in high school. He'd had a poster on the wall, a parody of the kind of out-of-date Civil Defense instructions they used to give kids in case of nuclear attack. The last line had read, "Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye."

Spyder vomited on the mugger's arm. The puke seemed to have some kind of mysterious juju power because at that moment the mugger's head sheered off and rolled to the alley floor. His body, which still had a solid grip on Spyder's collar, follow a second or two later.

When he could open his eyes, Spyder saw a pair of shiny vinyl boots in front of his face. He closed his eyes again, ready for this new intruder to finish him off.

"Get up," came a woman's voice.

Spyder looked up and saw the blind dancer he and Lulu had spoken to in the bar earlier that night. She was holding a long and bloody sword in her hands.

"I'm tapped out. The dead guy got all my money," said Spyder.

"I'm not mugging you, fool. I'm saving you. Not that you deserve it." The blind woman reached down for Spyder's arm and helped him to his feet.

"Thanks. What the fuck just happened?"

"A Bitru demon attacked you. I killed it."

"I don't believe in demons."

The woman nodded. "All right. It was a junkie with the head of an insect and possessing superhuman strength."

"Okay," Spyder croaked.

Spyder looked at the body at his feet. He hadn't been hallucinating. The body wasn't even vaguely human.

"What the fuck… Why would a demon want me?"

"A Bitru doesn't just drop by for blood and crumpets. He doesn't come unless he's called."

"I did not call any goddam bug monster thing to kick my ass. I wouldn't even know how."

"You must have his mark on your body. Near your heart," said the woman. She ran both sides of her sword across the demon's body, cleaning the blood from the blade. Planting the tip of the sword on the ground, she gave it hard shake. The sword blurred and when she stopped shaking, it had transformed into the white cane she'd had earlier.

"Damn." Spyder opened his shirt and looked at his chest. "I have a lot of ink on me. Geometrics. Tribal work. Religious geegaws."

"Any runes or symbols?"

"A shitload."

"And do you know the meanings of all those runes?"

"'Course. Some. In a Trivial Pursuit kind of way. They're just designs."

"So says the man covered in demon blood." The woman moved closer to Spyder. "Did it ever occur to you that those symbols have meaning and power?"

"Where? How? I've done a thousand tattoos like that on people."

"Some of them are probably going to have a dream date like the one you just had." She laid her hand over his heart. "You don't believe in demons, but you believe in magnetism, right? These symbols you put on your body, like the Bitru's sigil, these are a kind of magnetism. You don't have to understand how they work. The demons do."

"What can I do?"

"Take it off. Change it. All the signs and symbols that you don't know."

"What's your name?" asked Spyder.

The woman took her hand from his chest. "Most people just call me Shrike."

"Thank you, Shrike."

She ran a hand lightly over Spyder's cheeks and jaw. "Good thing you're pretty. You're not the quickest little pony on the track, are you?"

"You underestimate me," said Spyder. "This was all my clever plan to meet you. I think it went pretty well."

"Take care of yourself," Shrike said, moving back toward the mouth of the alley.

"My name is Spyder," he called to her.

"Take care of yourself, Spyder." She waved without turning around.