Charles De Lint - The Ivory and the Horn

They weren't wrong.

The trouble is, when you can do the things I can do now, you get cocky. And in this business, cocky means stupid.

Crouching there on the rooftop, all I can find myself thinking about is another bit of fairy lore.

"The way it works," Annie told me once, explaining one of her stories that I didn't get, "is that there's always a price. Nothing operates in a vacuum: not relationships, not the ecology, and especially not magic. That's what keeps everything in balance."

If there's got to be a price paid tonight, I tell the city skyline, let it be me that pays it.

I don't get any answer, but then I'm not expecting one. All I know is that it's time to get this show on the road.

4

It starts to go wrong around the middle of August, when I meet this guy on the East Side.

His name's Christopher Dennison and he works for Social Services, but I don't find that out until later. First time I see him, he's walking through the dark back alleys of the Barrio, talking in this real loud voice, having a conversation, except there's no one with him. He's tall, maybe a hundred-and-seventy pounds, and not bad looking. Clean white shirt and jeans, red windbreaker. Nikes. Dressed pretty well for a loser, which is what I figure he must be, going on the way he is.

I dismiss, him as one more inner-city soul who's lost it, until I hear what it is that he's saying. Then I follow along above him, a shadow ghosting from roof to roof while he makes his way through the refuse and crap that litters the ground below. When he pauses under some graffito that reads PRAISE GOD FOR AIDS, I make my way down a fire escape.

I want to tear out the heart of whoever spray-painted those words, but they're long gone, so I concentrate on the guy instead. I can see perfectly in the dark and my hearing's nothing to be ashamed of either. The wind changes and his scent comes to me. He's wearing some kind of cologne, but it's faint. Or maybe it's aftershave. I don't smell any fear.

"I just want to know how you do it," he's saying. "I've got a success rate of maybe one in thirty, but you... you're just shutting them down, right, left and center. And it sticks. I can tell when it's going bad. Can't always do something about it, but I can tell. The ones you help stay helped."

He's talking about me. He's talking to me. I don't get the impression he knows what I am— or even who I am and what exactly it is that I can do— but he knows there's something out in the city, taking back the night for those who aren't strong or old enough to do it for themselves. I've been so careful— I didn't think anybody had picked up on it yet.

"Let me in on the secret," he goes on. "I want to help. I can bring you names and addresses."

I let the silence hang for long moments. City silence. We can hear traffic from the street, the vague presences of TVs and stereos coming out of nearby windows, someone yelling at someone, a siren, but it's blocks away.

"So who died and made you my manager?" I finally say.

I hear his pulse quicken. His sudden nervousness is a sharp sting in my nostrils, but he's pretty quick at recovering. He looks above him, trying to spot me, but I'm just one more shadow in a dark alley, invisible.

"So you are real," he says.

A point for him, I think. He didn't know until I just confirmed it for him. How many nights has he been walking through these kinds of neighborhoods, talking to the night this way, wondering if he'll make contact or if he's just chasing a dream?

I make a deliberate noise coming down the fire escape and sit down near the bottom of it so that our heads are almost level. His heart rate quickens again, but settles fast.

"I wasn't sure," he says after I've sat there for a while not saying anything.

I've decided that I've already said enough. I'll let him do the talking. I'm in no hurry. I've got all night. I've got the rest of my life.

"Do you, ah, have a name?" he asks.

I give him nothing back.

"I mean, what do people call you?"

This is getting ridiculous.

"What?" I say. "Like the Masked Avenger?"

He takes a step closer and I tense up, but whether I'll fight back or flee if he comes at me, I'm not sure yet. The cat anima left me with a lot of curiosity.

"You're a woman," he says.

Shit. That's another bit of freebie information I've given him. I feel like just taking off, but it's too late now. I'm intrigued. I have to know what he wants from me.

"My name's Chris," he says. "Chris Dennison, I work with Social Services."

"So?"

"I want to help you."

"Why?"

He shakes his head. "Christ, you have to ask that? We're in the middle of a war and the freaks are winning— isn't that enough of a reason?"

I think of the child waiting in the dark for a boogieman that's all too real to come into her bedroom. I think of the woman whose last bruises have yet to heal, thrown across the kitchen, kicked and beaten, I think of the boy, victimized since he was an infant, turning on those weaker than himself because that's all he knows, because that's the only way he can regain any kind of self-empowerment.

It's not a war, it's a slaughter. Fought not just physically, but in the soul as well! It's about the loss of innocence. The loss of dignity and self-respect.

"What is it that you do to them?" he asks.

I don't know how to explain it. Using the abilities with which the anima have gifted me, I could literally tear the monsters apart, doesn't matter how big and strong they are— or think they are. But I don't. Instead, I pay them back, tit for tat.

But how do I do it? I'm not sure myself. I just know that it works. I look at this Boy Scout standing there, waiting for an answer, but I don't think he's ready to hear what I have to say, how everyone has a dreaming place inside them, a secret, private place that defines them. It's what I learned from Annie's stories. I just put that knowledge to a different use than I think Annie ever would have imagined someone could.

"I turn them off," I say finally. "I go into their heads and just turn them off."

He looks confused and I don't blame him.

"But how?" he asks.

I can tell it's not just curiosity that's driving him. What he wants is a weapon for his war— one that's more efficient than any he's had to work with so far.

"It's too weird," I tell him.

"I'm not a stranger to weird shit."

I'm not sure I want to get into wherever that came from.

"How did you figure out that I existed?" I asked to change the subject.

He takes the bait.

"I started to notice a drop of activity in some of our more habitual offenders." he says. "You know, cases where we're trying to prove that there's good reason to make the child a ward of the court, but we're still building up the evidence?"

I didn't, but I gave him an encouraging nod.

"It was weird," he goes on. "I mean we get more recants than we do testimony anyway, but when I investigated these particular cases I found that the offenders really had changed. Completely. I didn't make any kind of a connection, though, until I was interviewing a six-year-old boy named Peter. His mother's boyfriend had been molesting him on a regular basis, and we were working on getting a court order to deny the man access to the child and his mother as a forerunner to hopefully laying some charges.

"The mother was working with us— she was scared to death, if you want the truth, and was grasping at straws. She claimed she'd do anything to get out of this relationship. And then she suddenly retracted her offer to testify. The boyfriend had changed. He was good as gold now. Peter confirmed it when I interviewed him. He was the one who told me that he'd quote, 'seen a ninja angel who'd stolen away all of the boyfriend's badness.' "