Page 31 of Spring's Arcana
His trousers were hemmed a little too high as well, and his wingtips were ferociously polished. He had a sharp high bony nose,bladed cheekbones, a head slightly too big for the rest of his wispy body, and the skin drawn tight over his scalp only boasted the most anemic of gleaming comb-overs, three or four black strands plastered down in defiance of even a hurricane. If not for the obscene, vivid life in his deep-set eyes, he could have been a grinning skull set atop a stick-made scarecrow. But those eyes—black as tar, black as pitch—burned like the coal in Leo’s barbecue before it gathered a coat of protective ash, and that hot, hungry gaze was terrifying.
Like Baba’s, in fact. Or like Dmitri’s.
Fortunately, Nat had already been scared out of her wits over and over again since showing the business card to a pair of security guards in a building she’d thought about for weeks before gathering enough courage to step inside. Maybe she was just running out of fear-juice.
And here she thought she’d had a lifetime supply. “I know where it is.” Technically it might even be true. Except Mom had only said,with the man who believes in the future.
Was there anyone around who didn’t? The future kept happening, whether you wanted it to or not.
“Oh, you do, Miss Drozdova?” The man’s fingers twitched. “My, it’s breezy. Come inside, and we’ll discuss it.”
“You know where I was.” She made it a flat statement of fact. “You know what happened.”
“Oh, yes. Jay throws a party, the divine dance and drink. Come midnight, nature takes its course.” His sharp-starved shoulders lifted, dropped; the shrug said it was no big deal to watch a man’s wrists or feet hammered through with railroad spikes. “And the carrion crow performs her ancient function. What’s dead must be eaten, so it may be transformed.”
Well, that was ecology in a nutshell, wasn’t it. “Energy can neither be created or destroyed,” she hazarded. It was just like talking to a drunken college student who didn’t want to pay their tab just yet, let alone give a tip. “Right?”
“Is that what they’re saying nowadays? I prefer the older proverbs, myself.” His head gleamed, the black tendril comb-over almost shaping a letter she couldn’t quite remember. “But come, you’recold. A cup of coffee and answers await you, Miss Drozdova. Ideally, I’d like to be inside before Konets comes along.”
“You don’t like him?”Imagine that.
“My dear, nobody likes him, and that’s the way he likes it. But he reserves a special place in his cold, missing little heart for me.”
“You guys are enemies?” If they were, maybe it meant she was halfway safe.
But Nat wasn’t betting on it.
“Does a mirror hate what it holds?” He twitched again, that tiny movement that could have been another shrug or a settling of moistureless bones inside a sack. Then he turned on one worn wingtip heel and set off across the rooftop, heading for what looked like a glass pyramid, glowing golden with bright electric light.
Wait a minute. That wasn’t there before. Or had it been? There was even a pulsing eight-pointed star at its apex, a helluva tree-topper. The star’s stuttering made her uneasy.
Nat glanced nervously at the van. The side door was closing, silently oozing along its tracks. It didn’t look so much like a door as a slowly healing scab, really. Nat shivered and set off after the scarecrow-thin man, trying not to notice the way his shadow didn’t quite follow the rest of him.
The shadow’s edges were heavy, and moved a few fractions of a second after he did. The lag was enough to give you a headache, and she had all she could handle in her skullcase right now. So she set her chin and hurried, grateful that the heels kept up their grabby-soles magic and didn’t dump her on the ice. Being terrified into near-incoherence was one thing, but pratfalls were justundignified.
It was a good thought, a sane thought, and she clung to it as the wind keened along the skyscraper’s edges and tugged at her hair, almost as if trying to warn her. A few hard ice-pellets rattled across the roof.
It would start to snow again soon.
OBJECT LESSON
The trouble with Koschei’s home—or den, or haunt, whatever you preferred to call the bastard’s lair—was that it moved like Baba’s chicken-legged personal domicile. Not only that, but the man, if you could call him that nowadays, was so fond of obfuscation and camouflage even a wet pink nose like Friendly’s would have difficulty catching a whiff of a trail.
Fortunately all Dima had to do was sniff his fingertips. He’d clawed thezaika’s arm, trying to keep her from hurting herself, and every time he held his hand near his nose he got another shot of that heady green fragrance with its floral edge, jasmine and spice over rising sap and crushed grass.
Maschka had been heavy black earth under the strong sunshine of the old country, mud firming and the slight astringency of sunflowers beginning a long stretch towards an endless sky. Her daughter held no carrion reek of rotting bodies pressed into dirt gone semiliquid from the thaw, no edge of ice from streams roaring with melt.
Perhaps she was gentler. But she would learn.
Sooner or later, they all did.
Dmitri crouched on the half-wall skirting the First Mutual building’s roof, his hair shaken down over his forehead and his eyes alight with bloody gleams. His suit was spattered with slush and melt; the falling snowflakes vanished before they touched him, cringing into water when they encountered a simmering haze of anger. Most of the time his rage was black ice waiting for an unwary foot; tonight, however, it was the red glow of a just-fired artillery shell.
He sniffed at his fingers again, his eyelids fluttering, and felt the unphysical tug all the way down to his guts. Not only did he have thezaika’s flesh under his nails, but Koschei appeared to have forgotten he was merely a jumped-up tick, hanging bloodfat on the skin of the world’s ear.
Dmitri was otherwise. He was the patron of thieves, and the Deathless—oh, he called himself that, and Dima longed to truly put it to the test—hadstolensomething Dmitri Konets was not finished with yet.
There. That way. Dmitri straightened, a frigid wind pushing at his back, and leaned forward. His boot-toes twinkled, there was a hardsnaplike wet washing in a laundress’s callused hands, and he was on the street fifty stories below, streaking along, little flashes of wickedness curling across his path but nothing interesting enough to slow for. Tonight he wouldn’t wander among muggers or slip into a gaming hall, pass unseen between pickpockets at an airport lounge or meld into the shadows of a businessman’s bedroom while the fucker dreamed of leverage and buyout. Tonight, though he was invoked, propitiated, and sometimes demanded, he was out of the office.
