Megan Lindholm - Wizard of the Pigeons

“I don’t believe this! What’s me matter with you, are you crazy or what? You can’t just walk off like that, running off in a Hallowe’en suit with no shoes on! You can’t just walk out on me- You can’t treat me this way! You’ve got no right to treat me like this.”

“I’ve got no right to treat you any other way, either.” She wouldn’t hear him. How can you say good-bye to someone who never even heard you say hello?

For a moment she stared at him, her face an ivory mask in the darkness. Then she burst into tears, stamping her fed on me sidewalk. When he impulsively reached to comfort her, she hammered him with quick, forceless blows of her fists. “Go away, men. Go away! Leave roe alone! I knew you would anyway, sooner or later Everyone always leaves me, or makes me throw them out! All men use roe! And you’re no different.”

She continued to hammer at him wordlessly. He caught one of her flying wrists and restrained it. With her free hand, she dealt him a slap on me side of me head that clapped his ear painfully and stung his cheek. “Lynda‘” he protested, but she swung again, a backhanded slap that smashed his lips against his teeth. Damn, she was strong. He tasted blood. Anger coursed through him and he squeezed the captured wrist and began to turn it. The night pressed close all around diem. Electrically gray-

He let go and sprang back from her so suddenly that she fell. “No!” he told her frenziedly.“No!” He turned and ran from her. She shrieked obscenities after him and the sodden hem of his robe flapped against his ankles as he ran. He fled through the night, a hunted thing. Mir had stalked him well, from a perfect blind. Its raking claws had touched his soul and marked him. It would have him this night.

The city marked his cowardice and turned on him. He collided with dumpsters in alleys. At an intersection a yellow light winked suddenly green, and a car roaring from nowhere blasted its nom at him. He raced up streets that were all uphill. A passing squad car suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree and squealed a u-turn to pursue him. He darted up a crowded alley, knocking over garbage cans as he fled, then turned left and ran half a block before dropping to roll into hiding beneath a parked truck. He lay flat and still, the front of his robe absorbing an oily puddle of rainwater. He held his breath until he could force himself to breathe silently. He thought of Lynda’s eyes gone huge and gray and hungry in the night. He shuddered.

Cassie bad been wrong. It was hiding, not only in the city, but within him. Like was calling to like, and when they united, it would have him. Lynda had come perilously close to letting it out. It had been stalking him all this time.

The cold water met his skin and chilled it painfully. He endured it, lying still until he was sure that the patrol car was far away. Then he rolled from under the truck and stood again in the bitter November wind. There was a heaviness inside him, a sense of carrying as if he bore the seed of a deadly disease. It hid in his chest and in the muscles of his back, questing tentatively into his biceps, probing into his wrists and hands. Waiting. It could materialize in his fingers, or use his feet as its tool. His body was rotten with it. The knowledge disgusted him. It was worse than the idea of internal parasites.

He would have preferred intestines full of tapeworms or the cellular anarchy of cancer, leprosy, or plague. But he had not been given a choice.

“ ‘And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off,’” he muttered.

He laughed bitterly. It was past the stage of a hand or an eye.

He would have to cast his whole body aside to be free of it.

Now, how did one go about that? The word was like a snake sliding through dry summer grasses. Suicide. The cold certainty of it settled on him even as he denied it. Cassie would never have sent him out to face it if that were the only way he could win. But, men, Cassie had not known as much as she thought she did. She would not believe that it lurked inside him: not as a figment of his imagination, but as a fragment of himself.

Maybe Estrella had known more than she had been able to tell.

The Hanged Man. A helpful suggestion from your friendly neighborhood fortune-teller. But it wouldn’t be his foot in the loop. The plan did not please him, but there was a bitter satisfaction in knowing that by losing, he would win.

One detail disturbed him, and it took him a moment to find it. There it was- He did not want anyone weeping over his body. Not Lynda, dramatic in black, not Cassie, shaking her head. A vision came to him, clear and cold as ice. He saw himself standing on one of Seattle’s bridges, the rope looped several times around his throat, simply looped, not a noose at all. He would jump, and the weight of his body at the end of the rope would be enough to break his neck. Then the slow turning of the body at the end of the rope from the natural torque of the woven strands; the rope unwinds itself from me throat, and me body drops neatly down, to be carried away by the moving water. In the morning, an empty rope dangling from a bridge. He was almost positive it would work. If it didn’t, he’d never know. Tidy, he congratulated himself, and tried to ignore the gray chuckling in me back of his mind. As for me rope—had not me dumpsters of the city always provided him with all his needs before? So would they this night. His stride was purposeful.

The scream ripped his decision. It was a strange cry, thin and short, terror with no breath to vent it. He could not decide if it came from deep inside himself or only echoed mere. It was a sharp sound, pained and despairing and gray. He crossed his arms on his chest, holding it in and muffling it- He heard three quick scuffs, soles against pavement, and me gong of a heavy body colliding with a dumpster. Then silence. Fear rolled through Wizard. He wanted to stopper his ears and keep walking. He had reached a decision for his gray Mir, and he wanted it to be a final one. He doubted he had the strength to face anything else this night. But his traitorous ears brought him the harsh breathing of a predator on a blood trail. It came from an alley mourn, less than a half a block away.

Wizard kept walking, his steps reflexively silent. He would reach the alley mourn and pass it, search for his rope elsewhere.

His own burden was all he could carry, and his mission was clear in his mind. If other evil walked in Seattle, that was no affair of his. Someone else would have to handle it. He was already doing as much as he could-

The alley loomed on his right, blacker than me night itself.

It was a deadend alley, walled up so that it offered no light or escape at the far end. Entering it was a one-way journey to me pit. Coldness emanated from it. He kept his eyes down and straight, watching me sidewalk in front of him. He walked soundlessly past the mourn of me alley and continued walking.

The grayness wriggled inside him, chuckling. He clenched his arms tighter around it.

“Oh. please!”

The cry, whimpered with no hope of clemency, halted him.

The stalker had found his prey and was upon her. The grayness giggled inside him, rejoicing in wickedness and the turmoil in Wizard’s soul. If it was no affair of his, why did he Know that me plea was directed to him?

“Ah!” A soft little sound, beyond terror or pain. He knew it well. Once. in a small hot black place, he had made that sound, not once, but many times. Death was better than me uttering of such a sound. He had to turn to it.

The alley was black, the grayness inside him a cold, heavy thing be must guard. He stepped with care, straining all his senses. Soft, ugly sounds were coming from a far black end.

With no wanting, he felt me knife. It was hot and keen, and its razor edge was being scraped slowly up and down his throat, paring away layers of skin thai left exposed new cells stinging.