Christopher Golden - The Nimble Man

She sensed movement close by, the stale air rushing around her, and turned to see a shape shambling out of the darkness of the tunnel they had just journeyed through. Eve tensed for a fight, but it was the homeless man who had tried to warn them off before. She frowned. Doyle had cast a spell before to blind people back on the platform to their presence. But this filthy creature had seen them.

He leaped up from the tracks to the platform, where he landed without making a sound.

"It appears there is more to our poor soul than meets the eye," Doyle said. "I'd thought madness responsible for his resistance to magick. Now it seems not."

The man strode toward them, his duct-taped shoes making a strange scuffing sound upon the concrete-and-dust-covered surface of the platform.

"What gave him away?" Eve asked, watching the figure with a predator's gaze. "It was the seven-foot jump that clinched it for me."

"I'll leave you to deal with this complication," Doyle said, his voice reaching her from somewhere on the platform behind her, "while I endeavor to bring our search to an end."

Eve didn't respond to Doyle, choosing instead to keep her eyes upon her would be attacker. "Don't want any trouble," she told the man.

The homeless man stopped his advance, glaring at her with eyes that now seemed to glow with an eerie inner power. "The Mage must not be disturbed," he roared, in a new and terrible voice.

She wondered if he was possessed.

But then the man began to grow and his clothes tore as his musculature was altered, bones twisting grotesquely along with his flesh. As she watched the transformation, she doubted that this thing had ever really been human at all. Spiny protrusions erupted from the new flesh beneath the old. The creature reared back, stretching to its full height, and she saw that it had more than doubled in size, torn skin hanging from its body in tatters.

"For nigh upon a century have I guarded this place," its voice rumbled through a mouth filled with jagged, razor teeth. "I shall not fail in my duty now."

It came at her then with speed belying its size. She dodged from its path, leaping onto the wall and clinging there, insectlike.

The demon fixed her in its gaze, head cocked, yellow eyes glinting with surprise. It tilted its head back and sniffed the air as she hissed. Eve sprang at it from her purchase upon the wall.

"Vampire," it growled in disgust, slapping her viciously away, the sharp protrusions that adorned its body shredding the soft suede of her Italian coat as well as the delicate pale flesh beneath.

Eve rolled across the filthy floor and came up quickly, coiled upon her haunches. She felt the bestial side of her nature awaken, the canines elongating within her mouth, fingernails curling to talons.

"Did I forget to mention how much I hate that fucking word," she spat, and she lunged at her foe, a thirst for the blood of her enemy taking her to the brink of madness.

It was a place she had been so many times before.

A stray cat with fur the color of copper and one white ear trotted along Rue Dauphine, darting out of the paths of tourists strolling the New Orleans streets and sniffing at air redolent with the aromas of the city's famous cuisine. Most people did not even notice the stray. Despite the glitter of its later development, in its heart it was still an old city at heart, home to countless rats, and stray cats were not only inevitable in such an environment, but welcome. An old Cajun man sat on the stoop in front of a barbershop whose window frames were badly in need of a new coat of paint. He called out to the cat as it passed, almost as though the two were old friends. Otherwise the stray went on without interruption.

If anyone had taken enough interest they might have observed that the cat seemed far more single-minded than most of its species. Rather than wandering, lured by tempting smells or idle curiosity, it seemed to have purpose.

Most of the traffic in the French Quarter was on foot. Quickly, though, the stray was moving away from the core of the Quarter, and there were more cars rumbling by and fewer people on the sidewalks. There were children searching for summertime diversions, but none of the street performers who livened up the cobblestones of the Quarter.

Soon the stray left Rue Dauphine and began a winding journey that took it past buildings that had been beautiful once, their balconies and facades elegant and proud. Now they were falling apart, paint faded and cracked, and where there might once have been flower pots upon the balconies or outside of windows there were now cases of empty beer bottles and washing hung out to dry.

On a corner, the cat paused and perched on its haunches, staring first into the air above it at something visible only to its eyes, then across the street at a barroom called Charmaigne's. Only the first half of its neon sign was glowing, and even that was dim in the sunlight. A pair of police cars were parked askew in front of the place and across the street was a third car, this one with no police markings but with a blue light spinning behind the rear windshield.

No spectators had gathered on the sidewalk outside the barroom. It wasn't that kind of neighborhood.

The cat stared for a long minute at the grimy plate glass windows of Charmaigne's. The barroom door was propped open with a cinderblock but with the sunshine so bright it was only darkness inside. At length the stray set of across the street. It paused beside one of the New Orleans P.D. squad cars, then slipped beneath the vehicle. The cars had been there long enough that the engine was not even warm above the stray.

With a practiced, feline nonchalance, the cat went up onto the sidewalk and slipped into the steamy, fan-swirled gloom inside Charmaigne's. Two uniformed police officers stood just inside the door on either side, as though they were concerned someone might try to escape the stale beer and bad cigar stink of the place. A third officer stood in the center of the barroom with a man in a white shirt with rolled-up cuffs and a loosened black tie. His hair had been cut with a military severity and he wore a gun on one hip, a badge clipped to the other.

At their feet was the corpse of a boy, perhaps fifteen years of age, who lay on his belly in a pool of his own blood. His face was sideways, one cheek on the floor in the coagulating crimson, the other turned upward, the diffuse sunlight in the darkened barroom creating an otherworldly sheen upon his ebony skin. He was not the only corpse in Charmaigne's. Behind the bar there was a second dead man, a wiry former fighter named Calvin Traviligni, known to most as Trav. Trav had tended bar at Charmaigne's for seventeen years and had taken a bullet to the face, crashed into a rack of bottles and died in a puddle of broken glass and a potpourri of spilled whiskey, vodka, rum and gin. No liqeuers. Nobody in this part of town drank that shit.

At the back of the room a fourth uniformed officer sat with a young black girl who wore too much make up. Old before her time, Jaalisa had been on her way home after a long night on the only job she'd ever known, a job her father had first given her, and heard the shots. Saw a car tearing off down the street. She insisted to the officer that she had seen nothing more.

The stray took all of this in immediately and it darted across the room and slide along the base of the bar beneath the lazily whirling fans. The beer and cigar smells were ingrained in the wood, but the new scent of fresh blood hung in the air like a fresh coat of hell's own paint. The cat was skittish at the smell of blood but did not let its instincts turn it away. The plainclothes cop, a detective, noticed it, and the cat noticed him noticing, but they ignored one another.