SO SHARP

Back at Da Cut, Stagger Lee watched the Baby Mage fade from sight, leaving behind nothing but a shadow. He bowed his head, took a breath, and considered. Fire still burned in the pit of his belly, undiminished by the water inside and all around him. His lungs expanded and contracted, puffing little gouts of smoky flame from his nostrils, and he wondered why they came so fast. Dimly, he remembered the sensation of exertion, what it felt like to run, and how it cut his breath and made it jag as it came and went.

Was he tired? Out of shape? No, this was something else. The fire burned in his belly, but something else burned with it. It was…? Anger? Frustration. It was frustration. He had focused his will, he had acted, and he’d been thwarted by a gang of children.

The Velvet Room stood mostly empty. Chairs and tables lay overturned by fleeing patrons, and the stench of fear hung thick in the room. The dead bartender stood slack-jawed, bottle still in hand, staring at Stag, a body without a soul.

Without thinking, Stag raised his pearl-handled.45, sighted, and shot. The bullet struck the zombie square between the eyes, sailed on through his head, carrying bits of skull and gore in its wake. The corpse swayed on its feet and went down, never to rise again.

Stag had expected the kill to calm the burning in his gut, but it didn’t. Not at all. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d settled on a murder and had it taken from him. The girl who’d knocked his wrist and queered his aim was likely dead, but the fact that her body was nowhere in evidence, and that Stag would be unable to watch her spirit leave it and kill her ghost as well, filled him with an emotion that, while it was not alien, came from so far in Stag’s past that it seemed to belong to another life, another self, entirely.

Stagger Lee crossed to the bar, inhaled, and vomited a wall of flame that ruptured every bottle on the shelf. The more flammable liquors went up as well, and instead of watching them burn, Stag whirled and went about his business, stomping through tables and chairs. There must have been a hundred tables, four, five hundred chairs, but he smashed every last one to kindling, then used his fire breath to set them burning as well.

The Baby Mage had looked him in the eye. He had spoken to Stag as he would have to a mortal man. Stag thought he’d seen a trace of fear in the little boy’s eyes, but terror should have overwhelmed him, driven him to his knees to beg for his life.

He remembered Jailbird’s whining. Save me, Jesus. Save me. Hide me, Lord. Oh, God!

Stag had felt nothing as he watched the fear cast its shadow over Jailbird’s wrinkled brown face—a lion of the Serengeti wouldn’t have cared, and neither had Stagger Lee—but the way the little wizard had looked him in the eye and answered his question without a quaver: You. It was you. Stag cared not at all that the boy’s words had made no sense. What he hated was that the child had been able to find its voice to do anything but beg.

Stag broke the last table in two and turned to survey his handiwork. The only piece of furniture left whole in the room was an upright piano set against the black glass wall. If Stag had known it was here before he’d come in, things would have gone differently, to be sure. Now he wished he could destroy it, but he needed the instrument. He flipped the cover off its keyboard and drew his left hand across the ivory.

The Velvet Room faded from sight.

Moments later, Stagger Lee found himself before another piano. This one was a baby grand, and there was no water in this room. The ceilings were high, but dust lay thick on the carpet and the drapes. Cobwebs hung like party streamers, and wan golden light shone through one of the high windows where the drapes hung slightly open.

YAKUMO, Stag called, and his voice echoed in the empty room.

The darkness trembled. Now, not even the golden streetlight shone to illuminate Stag’s surroundings. The darkness pulsed once, then breathed, and then drew itself into a familiar shape.

It was mostly the form of a man, but legless, and it hung at the center of the circular room. A faded, tattered robe draped its rail-thin body, and its skin was icily pale. Its head drooped to the side. Its bloodshot right eye bulged, while its left eye was missing entirely. Its gray hair flowed to its shoulders, and looking at it, Stagger Lee wondered, not for the first time, whether it was male or female. Its body rippled, and it made quiet swallowing sounds that made Stagger Lee nervous.

what news stagger lee it whispered. Its voice sounded like the wind chasing dry leaves across a city sidewalk.

YOU DONE STEERED ME WRONG, YAKUMO, Stag told it. JAILBIRD WAS WHERE YOU SAID HE’D BE, BUT THEM OTHERS WAS ALREADY THERE.

i said they might be  i told you what to do if they arrived

THASS RIGHT. KILL ’EM ALL. WHAT YOU AIN’T TOLD ME WAS THAT ONEA DEM KIDS WAS MAGIC.

The haint’s outline turned hard and angular. magic you say  how so

KID WAS MAYBE TEN YEAR OLD, BUT HE HAD HIM A MAGIC BAG.

yes Yakumo hissed. yesss indeed  where is the bag now

BOY WITCHED HISSELF AND HIS FRIENDS INSIDE IT ALONG WITH JAILBIRD.

what  and what became of the bag

DISAPPEARED SAME AS THEY DONE. YOU SAID THEY WEREN’T NO TROUBLE. YOU SAID THEY COULDN’T PUT UP NO FIGHT. THEY DONE TOOK MY KILL AND FLED MY PUNISHMENT. I WANTS—I DEMAND SATISFACTION, YAKUMO. WHAT ELSE BOUT THESE KIDS YOU AIN’T TOLD ME?

The haint turned this way and that, absently rubbing its clawed hands together. think carefully  the bag  they disappeared into it

Stagger Lee felt—not bothered or nervous, but… wary. His rage didn’t seem to upset or worry the spirit at all. He wondered what would happen if the two of them tangled, and he honestly didn’t know. Maybe he should shoot this ghost on general principle. WHAT I SAID?

and the bag disappeared with them

THASS RIGHT. WHO THEY IS?

ha ha haaah laughed the ghost. it hardly matters now  theyll never be seen again  find the other songs and kill them all  soon we will be free of this accursed city

That strange old emotion flooded Stag again. He felt it come, marveling as it sped his heart and filled his lungs to bursting. Now he knew it for what it was: rage. BUT THEM KIDS, he said. YOU SAY THEY AIN’T SHOWING UP AGAIN. BUT IF THEY DOES? WHAT THEN?

then do what you do best lee shelton    kill them  kill them all

“LEE SHELTON”? Stag said. WHO THAT IS?

November 2018

No word had come to Casey since the night he’d passed out in the abandoned nightclub. He’d taken the highway past the Treme a couple more times, and only once had he seen the rooftop bar above Circle Food. The other times, the roof held its normal collection of boxy metal and concrete structures—inert engines for the HVAC system and the store’s cold cases and freezers, Casey assumed. Instinctively, he avoided Frenchmen Street and he didn’t run into Foxx King anywhere else—and more importantly, nobody who was definitely not Foxx approached or contacted him.

And how could he? Casey had given the apparition no cell number, no email address. It had no earthly way of getting a hold of him.

Casey grimaced at the unfortunate choice of words as he locked up his office, ready to head home for the night. This late, the building reminded him of a leftover movie set—which was not far-off: Various productions shot regularly at the International School. He jogged across the parking lot to Ole Girl—not because he was worried about being waylaid by some mysterious figure, but because he’d skipped lunch this afternoon to finish a proposal to connect the Foreign Language and International Affairs classes with the State Department’s Youth Mentorship Program.

His phone chirped before he opened his car door. Casey sucked his teeth. His phone was almost always on silent for this exact reason. Trying not to think what he was doing, Casey drew the phone from his slacks and checked the message.

COLISEUM SQUARE. 7.

It came from an unknown number. Easy enough to ignore.

Casey checked the time. It was a quarter till. He opened the car door and sat in the driver’s seat with the door open. He retrieved a Newport from the forgotten pack in the center console and lit it.

When he finished smoking, he was no closer to a decision. Night had closed like a lid over the city, and the parking lot lights cast a dirty sodium glow that reminded Casey of a season in decline. Idly, he stared at the rack of blue rental bikes parked outside Rouses on Baronne Street. Slowly, he shut the door and started the car.

By the time he turned onto Prytania, Casey had to admit he’d been kidding himself. How could he stay away? How could he even consider it? Given these rarified circumstances, what sort of coward could turn away? He guided the car down Race Street and easily found a parking space. A bit of summer heat had returned to the city, and this soon after sunset, it was still eighty degrees out.

Casey didn’t see anyone sitting at the benches positioned around the park’s larger fountain, but he knew the place was roughly the shape of an acute triangle. There was a whole other end of the park. He resolved to make a full circuit, and if he found no one and nothing, he’d give up and treat himself to Ethiopian food. Instead, he crossed the street and walked up the concrete pathway to the fountain, then took a seat on a wrought-iron bench that would give him a broad view of the green park lawn rolling away in the direction of Calliope Street.

A breeze gusted past, carrying the scents of raw honey and gardenias. Suddenly, Casey was not alone on the bench. His body tried to balk, but he turned to look at the other man.

Casey sucked in a shocked breath as he saw the bees clinging to the man’s lower left arm. Somehow, he thought that detail would be translated into something else—long striped sleeves, maybe? Surely a living man couldn’t walk around this way. And yet there they were, buzzing quietly, resting as they awaited their master’s commands. But Sharp wasn’t their master, Casey knew. He was one of their own, specially empowered by Osun to defend the hive that was planet Earth.

Or at least, that had been Bee Sharp’s origin when Casey had first conceived him as a woman. Did it make sense for Osun to empower a man? It didn’t matter.

He wore his black-and-yellow striped Afro picked out. He—Casey had sat staring for too long. But the man looked—he was sharp. So, so sharp.

“So,” Casey croaked.

“Took me a while to get the lay of the land,” Sharp said softly, “but I done it.”

His skin was darker than Casey had imagined. Darker than Foxx King’s, even. It was what Casey’s grandmother would have called blue-black. The park’s lights gleamed against its perfectly moisturized surface. And his sunglasses. Casey had imagined them as a pair of black ones like he’d seen Kurt Cobain wearing in a promo photo, but these were different: Instead of lenses and frames they were all one bubble, tapering to nothing as they reached behind Sharp’s ears—and those ears were unusually small, like Casey’s own. Ximena used to call them “teeny little mutant ears.”

“Jaylon was already gone when the studio went up, but where he gone to is… complicated.”

“What do you mean?”

“Folks saying he got took. Wouldn’t nobody say where—and baby, I axed real nice.”

“So—so that’s it? It’s a dead end?”

A white woman walked by with a fluffy blond lap dog on a leash. She glanced in their direction and walked faster.

“Not quite,” Sharp said. “Came across a cat named Wally Benson. He said to tell the man I work for the Doctor will see him.”

“The Doctor? What doctor?”

Bee Sharp shrugged. “Thought it might mean more to you than it did to me.”

“Shit. Shit. Okay. Where do I go? When?”

“Benson says the Doctor will send for you,” Sharp said. “But look. Some of what I found… it’s strange than a mug.”

Casey looked at Sharp’s insect-encrusted arm and waited for him to say more.

“They’s another city sharing space with New Orleans,” he said. “I can feel it buzzing. I ain’t really axed nobody bout it—I don’t think nobody supposed to know, heard? I feel points, here and there, where the membrane between this place and that is… thin. But the vibration I feel is… It’s sound. And what is a explosion but sound and force?”

Casey frowned, trying to follow. “You think this invisible city is connected to the explosion at the studio?”

“We know that wasn’t no normal fire the way that place went up…? And none of the buildings next to it was damaged or even singed. Bang that big, that whole motherfuckin’ block shoulda gone up.”

“Yeah,” Casey said. “I thought about that. Cops told me explosions are unpredictable. You can guess what they’ll do, but sometimes they zig when they should zag.”

“Sounds to me like five-oh didn’t want to admit that they have no got-damn idea what happened.”

“Yeah. Yeah,” Casey said. “Me too.”

They sat in silence for a moment. “What you want to do now?” Sharp asked.

What Casey wanted was to go knocking down doors with Bee Sharp. Question witnesses, threaten violence if he had to—but he knew the feeling came from too much TV and movies. He sighed. “Wait for the Doctor to send for me, I guess.”

“You want me to go with you when the time comes? Squeeze the motherfucker?”

Casey shook his head. “Not yet, at least. I’ll go alone. But do you… do you need anything?”

“My needs is met, baby.”

“You sure?”

“Course I’m sure,” Bee Sharp said. Emotion roughened his voice. “It’s been so long. I thought you forgot me.”

“Never that,” Casey said. “Never.” I want to see, he thought. I want to see your eyes. But he’d never say so.

For a long time neither of them moved or spoke, but then Bee Sharp scooted forward on the bench and cheated his shoulders until he and Casey were half-facing. He took off his glasses.

His eyes were big, but they fit into his face more or less the way human ones would. Still, they were black, unimaginably compounded. How… how could this have come from Casey? He’d never imagined eyes like these.

As Casey stared, he began to notice a tension in the other man’s strange face. When a tear spilled down Sharp’s sharp black cheek, Casey reached up and wiped it away.

“My God,” he said. “My God.”

Sharp lifted his right hand, and the bees retreated down his arm. He pressed Casey’s hand against his cheek. “… Am I what you wanted…?”

Casey pressed his forehead against Sharp’s own, and for a moment, they breathed together. Raw honey, gardenias, wood-smoke, and the change of seasons. The wind slid lightly between the trees, shaking their branches.

“You’re so much more,” Casey said. “You are everything. Everything.”

Bee Sharp began to fade. “I am in you,” he whispered. “I am of you. I am yours, always. Always.”

And then he was gone.

Baby I been too long away

Baby I travel by night

Studying on you night and day

And I hope you feel all right

Her voice began low and quavering—her age might be indeterminate, but to Casey, Auntie Roux sounded ancient. As she reached the second verse, though, the years seemed to fall away. Before long, her voice was as young and smooth as that of Lady Irma.

The sound of a soprano sax unfolded from Roux’s throat. Its tone struck Casey to his core, and now he knew why the witch was capable of contacting Fess in the first place. Fess could play and he could sing, but Auntie Roux could sing the sound of the greatest horn ever played—the soprano sax of Sidney tha Great. As the solo stretched on, chords slid in underneath it, and Casey saw the shadow of a piano fade in against the flagstones of the square. Before long, Fess appeared, sitting at the keyboard, playing and singing right along with all the music of a full band pouring from his mouth and fingers.

“I cain’t dance the steps I used to,” he sang. “I can’t kick or dip or twirl. Now my baby done cast me aside, I’m the loneliest man in this ole world!”

Now his voice joined Auntie Roux’s, and they sang the rest together.

Lord, I do, I do, I do, baby

I do, I do, I do.

Without you by my side

I’m just a-walkin’

Yes I’m walkin’,

Walkin’ that lonely mile.

The music faded into nothing, but Fess stayed where he was, brushing his fingertips across his keyboard. He still swayed, as if in time to some unheard tune. Looking at him, Casey knew that he saw only a fraction of this man. There was more of him elsewhere, and there was no telling what Casey could see if his vision were more refined.

“Henry,” Auntie Roux said, smiling. It had never occurred to Casey that Doctor Professor must have a proper name. Roux’s eyes were wet now, and hearing her speak, Casey knew all he needed to know about her connection to Doctor Professor.

Ladies, Fess said. Gentleman. What I can do for y’all tonight?

The dark-skinned woman rose from her seat. “My name is Lisa Monique Jennings Léandre,” she said. “You have burdened my grandbabies with a perilous quest. You have sent them in your name without weapons or resources, and you have withheld crucial information about the nature of their task. It is only out of respect for your position that I restrain my hand. So tell me: What will you do to make this right?”

“Now, hold on a minute there, baby,” Fess said. “You got me all wrong. I was told them children been given some of the most powerful weaponry exists in this world, and that you the one done left it to ’em.”

“They had not yet received their birthright when you enlisted them in your cause, but that matters little to me now. What truly angers me is that you sent them on this mission without telling them that Stagger Lee had assumed a physical form.”

“Well, that just ain’t so,” Fess said. “Stag right where he belong, inside my Mess Around. If he was runnin’ the streets, I wouldna sent no children after him, and thass a natural fact.”

“Fool!” Mama Lisa shouted. “Are you so derelict in your duties that you have no idea what you’ve lost? This boy here encountered Stagger Lee this very night.” She stabbed a finger in Casey’s direction, and Casey jumped as if she’d brandished a knife.

“Thass… that’s impossible, now, baby. That’s just—”

Now Casey spoke up. “It’s… it’s not, sir. I seen—I saw him. He wore a purple hat, had a mouth full of jewels, and the meanest gun I ever seen. He killed a man right in front of me and then walked into the Bayou breathing fire. He’s—you really didn’t know?”

Fess looked from Casey to Auntie Roux to Mama Lisa, his mouth hanging open. The helplessness of his expression made Casey feel cold inside. “I gotta talk to the Powers,” he said. “They’ll know what to do. I didn’t—I swear if I’da known Stack was gone, I’da never sent no kids after him.”

Mama Lisa drew in a long, slow breath. She’d seemed no taller than Auntie Roux when Casey first saw her, but now she towered. “You consult your Powers,” she hissed. “But know this: Your negligence has drawn me across oceans of time to involve myself in this conflict. If any harm should come to my family, you will never play another note.”

“I dig what you tellin’ me, ma’am,” Fess said. “You ain’t gotta threaten me none.”

“Oh, that’s no threat,” Mama Lisa said sweetly. “Now, where are they?”

“The children? You ain’t got ’em?” The corners of Fess’s mouth turned down as he realized what a stupid question that was. “If they ain’t… If you don’t… I don’t… Let me… I’ll find ’em directly and bring ’em to you, ma’am.”

“Don’t make me come looking for you,” Mama Lisa said.

Without another word, without playing or singing another note, Doctor Professor and his piano disappeared.

Mama Lisa sagged with relief and reached up to remove her glasses. She pressed the fingers of her right hand against the bridge of her nose and stood in silence.

“Ma’am—” Casey began without knowing what he would say or why.

“Boy,” Mama Lisa cut him off. “Why are you still here?”