Powers Page 5

  And Simon Lahti didn’t exist. Never had.

  He found his story, page one but below the fold, a follow-up on the synagogue fire. The sixth in a year, the article said, complete with map on page five showing how the sites clustered in an area of a few blocks. All were of “suspicious origin,” quoting a police detective named Melissa el Hajj. There appeared to be a “human element” in most of the fires, besides the obvious pattern of the crime locations.

  She hadn’t mentioned the inhuman element. Her business, not Albert’s. But Melissa? He’d expected something exotic like Fatima or Mumtaz. He revised his estimate of how long ago her family had left those Afghan hills.

  Know your enemy—sage advice from a hundred sages. He couldn’t find a listing for her in the telephone directory, not even another el Hajj. Several el-Haj names, Hajji, al-Hajj, but the paper and his memory agreed on her chosen spelling. Nothing in the city directory, either. Well, he couldn’t blame her for an unlisted phone, not in her position.

  He thought about calling up the central police station and asking to speak to her or leave a message, but that didn’t seem like a good idea. Maybe it had something to do with how she wanted to kill him.

  That done, he made a quick check of an old city map, one with an “aerial” view faked with sketched-in buildings as they’d been in the 1880s, points of interest named. The synagogue was there, of course, it had been there since Methuselah was a puppy. He tried to match up the other fires with buildings in the picture, and no connections jumped out at him. At the time of the map, they’d been stores, hotels, a livery stable, a warehouse. The neighborhood had been upscale then, a couple of private clubs made the roster and a couple of banks long gone. He couldn’t see any pattern except proximity, and that they’d all been abandoned for years, “current owner unknown.”

  He shrugged and headed back out, passing the gray-haired librarian now at the circulation desk, who nodded to him with a repeat of that quizzical smile.

  The research had gained him little. At least he had a fine spring morning, blue sky, trees bright green in first leaf, birds singing, and a warm breeze from the south to bring a touch of brine-smell upriver from the bay. He walked, as always.

  The synagogue’s neighborhood didn’t look any prettier by daylight: empty weed-grown lots where buildings once stood, now turning into dumps. The survivors looked like smallpox cases, pocked with boarded up or broken windows and a couple of places where he could see daylight through openings where no daylight should shine—evidence of collapsing roofs or walls. He walked past several of the previous crime scenes on the way, all empty lots, whatever burned-out shells the fires left had been leveled and the cellar holes filled in. No clues, no lingering smell of elementals beyond the slight residue of charred building on adjacent walls. He couldn’t see why anyone would care if the whole neighborhood vanished in smoke. Save the cost of demolition.

  People lived there, though. People who didn’t look him in the eye but who studied his back or glanced sideways as he passed or who watched from windows until they made sure he wasn’t stopping at their doors. He didn’t know if they filed him under “Predator” or “Prey” or “Cop”—some label that made them keep their distance, anyway. Which, given the general atmosphere, suited him just fine.

  The synagogue sat where he’d left it, a lot more detail visible in sunlight. It had been a smallish low plain building—there had never been a lot of Jews in town and most synagogues he’d seen tended to plain architecture. Traces of yellow paint still clung to the clapboards. He didn’t know if that was whim or a good price on bulk paint or a reference to the pale yellow stone of Jerusalem and the Temple.

  Except for a small dome over the entry, now a blackened skeleton, the roof had gone—walls reached up to end in blackened ragged stubs, empty fire-gnawed windows down both sides with less wall at each until the last ones in the rear barely had sills. Even he could see that the fire had started at the rear, around the pulpit or whatever Jews called that space. That screamed “suspicious origin”—not that many fire sources for a pulpit, outside of God’s lightning striking down the preacher.

  The place had been old. He saw timber posts and charred beams lying in the sodden ash on the floor, axe-hewn timbers and boards with the irregular faces of pit-sawing, clapboards split rather than sawn, the materials and methods he remembered from centuries ago and lands across the ocean.

  He’d seen the peeling paint even in the night. Now, in daylight, he could see warped clapboards hanging askew with rust streaks telling him the damage came long before the fire. He saw rot in one unburned windowsill, then another, gray weathered breaks on the sash, piles of gray droppings and white streaks on the remaining eave trim where pigeons had gotten into under-roof spaces and nested.

  Yellow tape still guarded the ruin, warning people away from a crime scene. Somehow that added to the mournful sense of a building abandoned, a building that had outlived its people and use. He could still smell the salamander and sandalwood again but much fainter, fading, he might not have caught it if he hadn’t been searching. No wonder Legion had wanted him to get there while the smells hung fresh.

  He picked up a nail lying close to the wall and inside the tape, pulled from interior trim the firemen had ripped loose and thrown out through a smashed window in their haste. Wrought iron, not steel, it hadn’t caught enough heat to destroy its memory. He rolled it across his palm. Square shank, hand-wrought, rose-headed by five hammer blows on a nail plate, pointed by four taps on the anvil, he remembered making them by the hundreds, by the days, the weeks as an apprentice. He’d learned to hate nails. He touched it to his tongue.

  “What can you taste from rusty iron?”

  He jerked and looked up, finding his nemesis. She’d done it again, materialized like a ghost out of the shadows, moving without sound, now standing inside a burned-out window of the hulk. That woman was trying to give him a heart attack. At least this time she didn’t have a gun in her hand. She did have a shaved patch and bandage on the side of her head where he’d hit her, didn’t make her look any prettier, and some kind of cast on her left wrist and hand that left her fingers free.

  Both cast and bandage were stained with soot. So were her blue coveralls, especially the knees and elbows—she’d been poking around her crime scene. He got the impression that she’d be pure hell as a patient. Doctor had probably told her to stay in bed.

  “Age,” he answered.

  She cocked her head to one side. “Age? Talked to a guy at Historic Preservation this morning. Near as he can tell, this was the oldest synagogue in the western hemisphere. No record of construction, but it turns up in town records from 1700. What does your magic tongue say?”

  He tasted the iron again—cold, rusty, bitter, tired. “About three hundred winters, I guess. It’s a simple working, not enough soul for a good memory.”

  She blinked at that, and looked skeptical. Hey, he didn’t know how he knew that sort of thing. He’d just spent so much time and sweat and blood and skin on working iron, they recognized each other. He could tell the man who forged the nail hadn’t been a Jew, hadn’t liked or trusted Jews, hadn’t thought they should be allowed to build in town. They denied the Son of God. Unhappy smith, unhappy nail, endless years sunk into the wood of a building it despised. He tasted that in the iron.

  He remembered a scene from long ago and another city, a burning building with dark-coated men dashing through the flames and smoke and falling embers, coming out with their clothes and hair smoldering and red shining burns on hands and faces but joy glowing through those burns, bodies protecting long rolls cased in rich cloth with knobs of silver on the ends . . .

  “Did they save the scrolls?”

  Lifted eyebrows—she didn’t understand what he was asking.

  “The, what do they call them, the Torah? The Word of God? I’ve heard that a Jew should protect it with his life.”

  The cop shook her head. “Nobody’s used this building in something over f
orty years. Anything that important, they’d have taken away long ago.”

  He could still feel something under that ash and char, just as strong as it had been a night ago, two nights, whatever. A piece of iron called to him. Old iron, old beyond anything he’d felt before, and that included Roman iron.

  And it was hurt.

  Iron didn’t usually cry out like that, even to him. He could walk past steel-framed buildings every day and barely feel all those tons. Even touching the metal or tasting it, like the nail, he needed to really pay attention to get something out of it. He had to heat iron, hammer it, forge it, want to make it into something, to get a good conversation going.

  “Are you going to shoot me if I come inside?”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Probably not.”

  He ducked under the yellow tape and followed his nose through a side door splintered ajar by fire axes, into the sodden lye-smell of ash and char. The floor thumped solid under his cane, stone or tile—he’d been in burned-out buildings before and knew they sometimes hid nasty surprises, shells of a floor or wall that looked whole and sound but just wanted a touch to collapse into black empty hollows behind. He didn’t know that Ms. Detective el Hajj would let him walk into a death-trap, but he wouldn’t put it past her. Most likely, though, she needed to spill his blood with her own hands. An “accident” wouldn’t satisfy her honor.

  The iron cry for help pulled him toward the rear, where pulpit and choir would sit in a Christian church, the focus of the sanctuary, the worst damage of the fire. He thumped along, step by step, testing each bit of floor before he trusted it. Even natural fires could skip and concentrate within a matter of a few feet.

  He found the remains of a cabinet of some kind, quality woodwork, even a smith could tell a skilled craftsman had put a lot of work and pride into that. Further proof of something unnatural about this fire. It shouldn’t have survived at all, that close to the heart of the fire, even damaged as it was.

  In the still-damp ash, under charred boards, he found a hexagram—the six-pointed star known as the Star of David or the Seal of Solomon—forged thick and the width and height of his joined palms. He found two of them, as if they had ornamented matching cabinet doors. One felt normal to him, just wrought iron, maybe the same age as the nail. The other . . .

  The other one was old. One point of it had cracked. Had been cracked, judging by the feel, by some outside force, and it wasn’t heat, wasn’t the building burning down around it. This was wrought iron, not cast iron, tough instead of brittle. It could take heat and the quenching cold of the fire hoses.

  It knew him, knew his skills. It wanted him to fix it. It needed him to fix it, it was important, something dark and dire would happen that he couldn’t see, couldn’t understand, if he didn’t take this seal back to his forge and make it whole—

  “Drop it!”

  She had her cannon out and pointed at his heart. Gripped in one hand, rested on the cast around her other, steady, the huge bore swallowing light. She stood between him and the door.

  She didn’t understand. “I have to repair this. It holds the worlds apart. It seals the way.”

  The words came from the iron, not from him. He couldn’t say how or why. He didn’t know what they meant.

  “Drop it. Nobody takes evidence from my crime scene.”

  V

  Possessive young lady, calling it her crime scene.

  He studied her face, harsh and concentrated over the gun-sights. No, not young. Crow’s feet at her eyes as she scowled. More, indefinable, a sense of weight, of having seen more than a few years. Forties, he guessed, maybe as old as fifty, from all the humans he’d seen grow and fade. So fast.

  He didn’t drop the star. That would have been rude, after it had spoken to him.

  He bent over and laid it back in the mold it had formed for itself by settling into the bed of damp gray ash, careful to fit the edges and points exactly as he’d found them. He covered it with the charred boards that had been a cabinet face, again matching the pieces to the marks they’d made, leaving her crime scene as undisturbed as possible. Then he stood up. She still had that gun pointed at him.

  “Why don’t you just shoot me and get it over with?”

  “Can’t. The demon won’t let me.”

  There it was again. He shook his head. “Look, I wouldn’t be here if a demon hadn’t started to burn me alive for refusing. I don’t have much choice. How about you put that cannon away so we can talk like civilized people?”

  “Drop the cane and I’ll think about it.”

  So much for people not seeing that his cane was a weapon. But she still wore the bandages and bruises from it, and had seen the blade inside. She was a cop—he was surprised she hadn’t asked to see his concealed weapons permit. Which, of course, he didn’t have.

  She didn’t seem to care much for standard police procedure. Breaking into his forge without a warrant, however she’d done it—that could count as “hot pursuit” under the meaning of the act. Leaving without arresting him, standing by in the shadows watching while he destroyed evidence? Not really. Likewise for letting a civilian poke around in a crime scene.

  “Look, I need to get out of here. That seal is making my teeth ache. It’s whining at me. Either let me get some distance from it, or let me take it back to my forge and heal it. Or shoot me.”

  At that point, he wasn’t sure he cared which way it went. That thing’s whine was making his teeth ache, throbbing from his wisdom teeth up inside his temples and pressing on his brain until his eyes watered. Yes, he still had his “wisdom” teeth, small wisdom they conferred on him. Dentists hadn’t been invented when his teeth grew in, and he was just lucky they grew in straight.

  Or maybe his species didn’t have the same problems with teeth that humans did. He wasn’t sure which.

  He moved across to the broken side door, still testing the surface with his cane as he went. Solid. Solid like rock, not even the echo you’d get from a concrete slab or stone paving over empty space. Which didn’t fit . . .

  “Does this place have a cellar?”

  She kept her distance, kept the gun braced on her left wrist and cast and pointed at his chest, kept the remains of benches or pews between them, as if he was maybe a kung fu master in the movies and could drop her with a flying side kick from twenty feet away. She just shook her head at his question.

  Outside, in a narrow alley next to crumbling brick walls that still showed scorch marks from the synagogue fire next door, the star’s whine faded back to a thin plaintive buzz like a fly trapped on the other side of a window. He ducked under the yellow tape, took a deep breath, and dropped the cane to rattle on cracked potholed asphalt. After all, he’d already decided that he wanted to live a while longer.

  “Cellar?”

  She’d followed him through the door but still kept her distance, trash and bits of burned building between them, still kept her pistol ready. She shook her head again. “Not that I know of. Why?”

  “When I held the star, it wasn’t just talking to me. I could see something. A black space that felt hollow, like a cave, with moving lights in some kind of haze or smoke. They scared me. I don’t know what they were, but I didn’t want to meet them.”

  “Salamanders? That’s how they got in to cause the fire?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment and shuddered, remembering that dark vision. “Not salamanders. Those things were mean. Salamanders are just big friendly puppies that happen to start fires. Give them a safe place to play and they make the whole room happy. What I saw and felt, those things fed off pain and hate and sorrow, not wood. And they were hungry. A long time since their last meal.”

  “Nothing I’ve ever heard of.” She paused and clicked something on the side of her gun. He hoped she was setting the safety on. Then she moved the muzzle so that it pointed just a bit away from him, letting him breathe a little easier. That muzzle looked like the tunnel of the New York subway.

  Her eyes looked almost
as dangerous, memorizing him from hair to boots. “Little man, what’s your real name? ‘Albert Johansson’ wouldn’t stand up to a record search, would it? Not if you go deep enough? That guy at Historic Preservation had a photo of your block, 1883. Put a suit and bowler hat and mustache on you and you’d be twin brother to the man standing in front of the storefront bakery. I doubt if that’s coincidence.”

  Oh, hell. Photographs. He tried to avoid them, but sometimes he got caught by accident. He wondered what he’d been doing that made him stand still long enough to be frozen in one of those old wet-plate photos. Probably drooling over a pie or pastry in the window display—if he remembered right, that place baked the most amazing cherry strudel, sour and sweet at the same time, flaky layered crust. It would melt in your mouth . . .

  She gestured her left hand and the cast at the side of her head. “I wasn’t feeling too good the other night. Head hurt. But I still can’t See the beginning of your lifeline behind you. Who are you, what are you, why are you tied up in this shit?”

  He shrugged. She had the gun, she knew too much already, she’d proven that she was very good at finding things and following people. Whatever trouble he could get into, he was already hip deep. Maybe neck deep, but he was short.

  “I’ve used dozens of names. Can’t remember all of them. The demon called me ‘Simon Lahti.’ I guess that makes it as permanent as any. I’ve already told you I don’t know what I am. As for why, the demon says I have to stop someone from abusing their companions. Or mortals will suffer the consequences. My demon claimed to be called ‘Legion.’ Is that the same as yours?”

  She frowned and narrowed her eyes. “Police ask questions. We don’t answer them. Keep talking.”

  And here he’d been thinking she wasn’t a typical cop. Still, putting two and two together and adding them up to five, somebody wasn’t telling the whole truth. Somebody with golden skin, no sex, and no hair.