Now, a quick journey to near-future Manhattan where a certain actor wakes up to find a griffin made of shining metal perched at the end of his bed.

… AND THE ANGEL WITH TELEVISION EYES

JOHN SHIRLEY

One gray April morning, Max Whitman woke in his midtown Manhattan apartment to find a living, breathing griffin perched on the righthand post at the foot of his antique four-poster bed.

Max watched with sleep-fuzzed pleasure as the griffin—a griffin made of shining metal—began to preen its mirror-bright feathers with a hooked beak of polished cadmium. It creaked a little as it moved.

Max assumed at first that he was still dreaming; he’d had a series of oddly related Technicolor-vivid dreams recently. Apparently one of these dreams had spilled over onto his waking reality. He remembered the griffin from a dream of the night previous. It had been a dream bristling with sharp contrasts: of hard-edged shafts of white light—a light that never warms—breaking through clouds the color of suicidal melancholy. And weaving in and out of those shafts of light, the griffin came flying toward him ablaze with silvery glints. And then the clouds coming together, closing out the light, and letting go sheets of rain. Red rain. Thick, glutinous rain. A rain of blood. Blood running down the sheer wall of a high-towered, gargoyle-studded castle carved of transparent glass. Supported by nothing at all: a crystalline castle still and steady as Mount Everest, hanging in mid-air. And laying siege to the sky-castle was a flying army of wretched things led by a man with a barbed-wire head—

Just a bad dream.

Now, Max gazed at the griffin and shivered, hoping the rest of the dream wouldn’t come along with the griffin. He hadn’t liked the rain of blood at all.

Max blinked, expecting the griffin to vanish. It remained, gleaming. Fulsome. Something hungry …

The griffin noticed Max watching. It straightened, fluttered its two-meter wingspread, wingtips flashing in the morning light slanting through the broad picture window, and said, “Well, what do you want of me?” It had a strangely musical, male voice.

“Whuh?” said Max blearily. “Me? Want with you?” Was it a holograph? But it looked so solid … and he could hear its claws rasping the bedpost.

“I heard your call,” the griffin went on. “It was too loud, and then it was too soft. You really haven’t got the hang of mindsending yet. But I heard and I came. Who are you and why did you call me?”

“Look, I didn’t—” He stopped, and smiled. “Sandra. Sandra Klein in special effects, right? This is her little cuteness.” He yawned and sat up. “She outdid herself with you, I must admit. You’re a marvel of engineering. Damn.” The griffin was about a meter high. It gripped the bedpost with metallic eagle’s claws; it sat on its haunches, and its lion’s forepaws—from a lion of some polished argent alloy—rested on its pin-feathered knees. The pinfeathers looked like sweepings from a machine shop. The griffin had a lion’s head, but an eagle’s beak replaced a muzzle. Its feathered chest rose and fell.

“A machine that breathes …” Max murmured.

“Machine?” The griffin’s opalescent eyes glittered warningly. Its wire-tufted lion’s tail swished. “It’s true my semblance is all alloys and plastics and circuitry. But I assure you I am not an example of what you people presume to call ‘artificial intelligence’.”

“Ah.” Max felt cold, and pulled the bedclothes up to cover his goose-pimpled shoulders. “Sorry.” Don’t make it mad. “Sandra didn’t send you?”

It snorted. “Sandra! Good Lord, no.”

“I …” Max’s throat was dry. “I saw you in a dream.” He felt odd. Like he’d taken a drug that couldn’t make up its mind if it were a tranquilizer or a psychedelic.

“You saw me in a dream?” The griffin cocked its head attentively. “Who else was in this dream?”

“Oh there were—things. A rain of blood. A castle that was there and wasn’t there. A man—it looked like he was made of … of hot metal. And his head was all of wire. I had a series of dreams that were … Well, things like that.”

“If you dreamed those things, then my coming here is ordained. You act as if you honestly don’t know why I’m here.” It blinked, tiny metal shutters closing with a faint clink. “But you’re not much surprised by me. Most humans would have run shrieking from the room by now. You accept me.

Max shrugged. “Maybe. But you haven’t told me why you’re here. You said it was—ordained?”

“Planned might be a better word, I can tell you that I am Flare, and I am a Conservative Protectionist, a High Functionary in the Fiefdom of Lord Viridian. And you—if you’re human—must be wild talent. At least. You transmitted the mindsend in your sleep, unknown to your conscious mind. I should have guessed from the confused signal. Well, well, well. Such things are outside the realm of my expertise. You might be one of the Concealed. We’ll see, at the meeting. First, I’ve got to have something to eat. You people keep food in ‘the kitchen,’ I think. That would be through that hallway …”

The griffin of shining metal fluttered from the bedpost, alighted on the floor with a light clattering, and hopped into the kitchen, out of sight.

Max got out of bed, thinking: He’s right. I should be at least disoriented. But I’m not. I have been expecting him.

Especially since the dreams started. And the dreams began a week after he’d taken on the role of Prince Red Mark. He’d named the character himself—there’d been last moment misgivings about the original name chosen by the scripters, and he’d blurted, “How about ‘Prince Red Mark’?” And the producer went for it, one of the whims that shape show business. Four tapings for the first two episodes, and then the dreams commenced. Sometimes he’d dream he was Prince Red Mark; other times a flash of heat lightning; or a ripple of wind, a breeze that could think and feel, swishing through unseeable gardens of invisible blooms … And then the dreams became darker, fiercer, so that he awoke with his fists balled, his eyes wild, sweat cold on his chin. Dreams about griffins and rains of blood and sieges by wretched things. The things that flew, the things with claws.

He’d played Prince Red Mark for seven episodes now. He’d been picked for his athletic build, his thick black hair, and his air of what the PR people called “aristocratic detachment.” Other people called it arrogance.

Max Whitman had found, to his surprise, he hadn’t had to act the role. When he played Prince Red Mark, he was Prince Red Mark. Pure and simple … The set-hands would make fun of him, when they thought he couldn’t hear, because he’d forget to step out of the character between shootings. He’d swagger about the set with his hand on the pommel of his sword, emanating Royal Authority.

This morning he didn’t feel much like Prince Red Mark. He felt sleepy and confused and mildly threatened. He stretched, then turned toward the kitchen, worried by certain sinister noises: claws on glass. Splashings. Wet, slapping sounds. He burst out, “Damn, it got into my aquarium!” He hurried to the kitchen. “Hey—oh, hell. My fish.” The griffin was perched beside the ten-gallon aquarium on the breakfast bar. Three palm-sized damsel fish were gasping, dying on the wet blue-tile floor. The griffin fluttered to the floor, snipped the fish neatly into sections with its beak, and gobbled them just as an eagle would have. The blue tile puddled with red. Max turned away, saddened but not really angry. “Was that necessary?”

“It’s my nature. I was hungry. When we’re bodied, we have to eat. I can’t eat those dead things in your refrigerator. And after some consideration I decided it would be best if I didn’t eat you … Now, let’s go to the meeting. And don’t say, ‘What meeting?’”

“Okay. I won’t.”

“Just take a fast cab to 862 Haven, apartment 17. I’ll meet you on their balcony … wait. Wait. I’m getting a send. They’re telling me— it’s a message for you.” It cocked its head to one side as if listening. “They tell me I must apologize for eating your fish. Apparently you have some unusual level of respect in their circle.” It bent its head. “I apologize. And they say you are to read a letter from ‘Carstairs.’ It’s been in your computer’s mail sorter for two weeks under personal and you keep neglecting to retrieve it. Read it. That’s the send … Well, then …” The griffin, fluttering its wings, hopped into the living room. The French doors opened for it as if slid back by some ghostly hand. It went to the balcony, crouched, then sprang into the air and soared away. He thought he heard it shout something over its shoulder at him: something about Prince Red Mark.

It was a breezy morning, feeling like spring. The sun came and went.

Max stood under the rain shelter in the gridcab station on the roof of his apartment building. The grid was a webwork of metal slats and signal contacts, braced by girders and upheld by the buildings that jutted through the finely woven net like mountaintops through a cloud field. Thousands of wedge-shaped cabs and private gridcars hummed along the grid in as many different directions.

Impatiently, Max once more thumbed the green call button on the signal stanchion. An empty cab, cruising by on automatic pilot, was dispatched by the Uptown area’s traffic computer; it detached from the feverishly interlacing main traffic swarm and arced neatly into the pick-up bay under the rain shelter. Max climbed inside and inserted his Unicard into the cab’s creditor. The small terminal’s screen acknowledged his bank account and asked, “Where to?” Max tapped his destination into the keyboard: the cab’s computer, through the data-feed contacts threaded into the grid, gave the destination to the main computer, which maneuvered the cab from the bay and out onto the grid. You are to read a letter from Carstairs, the griffin had said.

He’d met Carstairs at a convention of fantasy fans. Carstairs had hinted he was doing “some rather esoteric research” for Duke University’s parapsychology lab. Carstairs had made Max nervous—he could feel the man following him, watching him, wherever he went in the convention hotel. So he’d deliberately ignored the message. But he hadn’t gotten around to deleting it.

As the cab flashed across the city, weaving in and out of the peaks of skyscrapers, over the narrow parks that had taken the place of the Avenue, Max punched a request to connect to his home computer. The cab charged his bank account again, tied him in, and he asked his system to print out a copy of the email from Carstairs. He scanned the message, focusing first on: “… when I saw you at the convention I knew the Hidden Race had chosen to favor you. They were there, standing at your elbow, invisible to you—invisible to me too, except in certain lights, and when I concentrate all my training on looking …” Max shivered, and thought: A maniac. But—the griffin had been real.

He skipped ahead, to: “… You’ll remember, perhaps, back in the last century, people were talking about a ‘plasma body’ that existed within our own physiological bodies, an independently organized but interrelated skein of subatomic particles; this constituted, it was supposed, the so-called soul. It occurred to some of us that if this plasma body could exist in so cohesive a form within an organism, and could survive for transmigration after the death of that organism, then perhaps a race of creatures, creatures who seem to us to be ‘bodiless,’ could exist alongside the embodied creatures without humanity’s knowing it. This race does exist, Max. It accounts for those well-documented cases of ‘demonic’ possession and poltergeists. And for much in mythology. My organization has been studying the Hidden Race—some call them plasmagnomes—for fifteen years. We kept our research secret for a good reason …”

Max was distracted by a peculiar noise. A scratching sound from the roof of the cab. He glanced out the window, saw nothing, and shrugged. Probably a news-sheet blown by the wind onto the car’s roof. He looked again at the letter. “… for a good reason. Some of the plasmagnomes are hostile … The Hidden Race is very orderly. It consists of about ten thousand plasmagnomes, who live for the most part in the world’s ‘barren’ places. Such places are not barren to them. The bulk of the plasmagnomes are a well-cared-for serf class, who labor in creating base plasma fields, packets of nonsentient energy to be consumed or used in etheric constructions. The upper classes govern, study the various universes, and most of all concern themselves with the designing and elaboration of their Ritual. But this monarchist hierarchy is factioned into two distinct opposition parties, the Protectionists and the Exploitationists: they gave us those terms as being the closest English equivalent. The Protectionists are sanctioned by the High Crown and the Tetrarchy of Lords. Lately the Exploitationists have increased their numbers, and they’ve become harder to police. They have gotten out of hand. For the first time since a Protectionist walked the Earth centuries ago as ‘Merlin’ and an Exploitationist as ‘Mordred,’ certain members of the Hidden Race have taken bodied form among us …”

Max glanced up again.

The scratching sound from the roof. Louder this time. He tried to ignore it; he wondered why his heart was pounding. He looked doggedly at the letter. “… The Exploitationists maintain that humanity is small-minded, destructive of the biosphere, too numerous, and in general suitable only for slavery and as sustenance. If they knew my organization studied them, they would kill me and my associates. Till recently, the Protectionists have prevented the opposition party from taking physical form. It’s more difficult for them to affect us when they’re unbodied, because our biologic magnetic fields keep them at a distance… . Centuries ago, they appeared to us as dragons, sorcerers, fairies, harpies, winged horses, griffins, angels, demons—”

Max leaned back in his seat and slowly shook his head. Griffins. He took a deep breath. This could still be a hoax. The griffin could have been a machine.

But he knew better. He’d known since he was a boy, really. Even then, certain Technicolor-vivid dreams—

He tensed: the phantom scrabbling had come again from overhead. He glimpsed a dark fluttering from the corner of one eye; he turned, thought he saw a leathery wingtip withdraw from the upper edge of the window frame.

“Oh God.” He decided it might be a good idea to read the rest of the letter. Now. Quickly. Best he learn all he could about them. Because the scratching on the roof was becoming a grating, scraping sound. Louder and harsher.

He forced himself to read the last paragraph of the letter. “… in the old days they manifested as such creatures, because their appearance is affected by our expectation of them. They enter the visible plane only after filtering through our cultural psyche, the society’s collective electromagnetic mental field. And their shapes apparently have something to do with their inner psychological make-up—each one has a different self-image. When they become bodied, they manipulate the atoms of the atomic-physical world with plasma-field telekinesis, and shape it into what at least seem to be actually functioning organisms, or machines. Lately they take the form of machines—collaged with more ancient imagery—because ours is a machine-minded society. They’re myth robots, perhaps. They’re not magical creatures. They’re real, with their own subtle metabolism—and physical needs and ecological niche. They have a method of keeping records—in ‘closed-system plasma fields’—and even constructing housing. Their castles are vast and complex and invisible to us, untouchable and all but undetectable. We can pass through them and not disturb them. The Hidden Race has a radically different relationship to matter, energy—and death. That special relationship is what makes them seem magical to us … Well, Mr. Whitman, we’re getting in touch with you to ask you to attend a meeting of those directly involved in plans for defense against the Exploitationists’ campaign to—”

He got no further in his reading. He was distracted. Naked terror is a distracting thing.

A squealing sound of ripped metal from just over his head made him cringe in his seat, look up to see claws of polished titanium, claws long as a man’s fingers and wickedly curved, slashing the cab’s thin roof. The claws peeled the metal back.

Frantically, Max punched a message into the cab’s terminal: Change direction for nearest police station. Emergency priority. I take responsibility for traffic disruption.

The cab swerved, the traffic parting for it, and took an exit from the grid to spiral down the off-ramp. It pulled up in the concrete cab stop at street level, across from a cop just getting out of a patrol car at a police station. Wide-eyed, the cop drew his gun and ran toward the cab.

Claws snatched at Max’s shoulders. He opened the cab door, and flung himself out of the car, bolting for shelter.

Something struck him between the shoulderblades. He staggered. There was an icy digging at his shoulders—he howled. Steel claws sank into his flesh and lifted him off his feet—he could feel the muscles of his shoulders straining, threatening to tear. The claws opened, released him, and he fell face down; he lay for a moment, gasping on his belly. He had a choppy impression of something blue-black flapping above and behind. He felt a tugging at his belt—and then he was lifted into the air, the clawed things carrying him by the belt as if it were a luggage handle.

He was two, three, five meters above the concrete, and spiraling upward. He heard a gunshot, thought he glimpsed the cop fallen, a winged darkness descending on him.

The city whirled into a gray blur. Max heard the regular beat of powerful wings just above. He thought: I’m too heavy. It’s not aerodynamically possible.

But he was carried higher still, the flying things making creaking, whipping sounds with their pinions. Otherwise, they were unnervingly silent. Max stopped struggling to free himself. If he broke loose now, he’d fall ten stories to the street. He was slumped like a rabbit in a hawk’s claws, hanging limply, humiliated.

He saw two of the flying things below, now, just climbing into his line of sight. They carried the policeman—a big bald man with a paunchy middle. They carried him between them; one had him by the ankles, the other by the throat. He looked lifeless. Judging by the loll of his head, his neck was broken.

Except for the rush of wind past his face, the pain at his hips where the belt was cutting into him, Max felt numb, once more in a dream. He was afraid, deeply afraid, but the fear had somehow become one with the world, a background noise that one grows used to, like the constant banging from a neighborhood construction site. But when he looked at the things carrying him, he had a chilling sense of déjà vu. He remembered them from the dreams. Two mornings before, he’d awakened, mumbling, “The things that flew, the things with claws …”

They were made of vinyl. Blue-black vinyl stretched over, he guessed, aluminum frames. They were bony, almost skeletal women, with little hard knobs for breasts, their arms merging into broad, scalloped imitation leather wings. They had the heads of women—with DayGlo wigs of green, stiff-plastic bristles—but instead of eyes there were the lenses of cameras, one in each socket; and when they opened their mouths he saw, instead of teeth, the blue-gray curves of razors following the line of the narrow jaws. Max thought: It’s a harpy. A vinyl harpy.

One of the harpies, three meters away and a little below, turned its vinyl head, its camera lenses glittering, to look Max in the face; it opened its mouth and threw back its head like a dog about to howl and out came the sound of an air-raid warning: GO TO THE SHELTERS. GO IMMEDIATELY TO THE SHELTERS. DO NOT STOP TO GATHER POSSESSIONS. TAKE FAMILY TO THE SHELTERS. BRING NOTHING. FOOD AND WATER WILL BE PROVIDED. GO IMMEDIATELY—

And two others took it up. GO IMMEDIATELY—in a sexless, emotionless tone of authority. TAKE FAMILY TO THE SHELTERS—

And Max could tell that, for the harpies, the words had no meaning. It was their way of animal cawing, the territorial declaration of their kind.

They couldn’t have been in the air more than ten minutes—flapping unevenly over rooftops, bits and pieces of the city churning by below—when they began to descend. They were going down beyond the automated zone. They entered Edgetown, what used to be the South Bronx. People still sometimes drove combustion cars here, on the pot-holed, cracked streets, when they could get contraband gasoline; here policemen were rarely seen; here the corner security cameras were always smashed, the sidewalks crusted with trash, and two-thirds of the buildings deserted.

Max was carried down toward an old-fashioned tar rooftop; it was the roof of a five-story building, wedged in between three taller ones. All four looked derelict and empty; the building across the street showed a few signs of occupation: laundry in the airshaft, one small child on the roof. The child, a little black girl, watched without any sign of surprise. Max felt a little better, seeing her.

Where the shadows of the three buildings intersected on the fourth, in the deepest pocket of darkness, there was a small outbuilding; it was the rooftop doorway into the building. The door hung brokenly to one side. A cherry-red light pulsed just inside the doorway, like hate in a nighted soul.

Max lost sight of the red glow as the vinyl harpies turned, circling for a landing. The rooftop rushed up at him. There was a sickening moment of freefall when they let go. He fell three meters to the rooftop, struck on the balls of his feet, plunged forward, shoulder-rolled to a stop. He gasped, trying to get his breath back. His ankles and the soles of his feet ached.

He took a deep breath and stood, swaying, blinking. He found he was staring into the open doorway. Within, framed by the dusty, dark entrance to the stairway, was a man made of red-hot steel. The heat-glow was concentrated in his torso and arms. He touched the wooden frame of the doorway—and it burst into flame. The harpies capered about the tar rooftop, leaping atop chimneys and down again, stretching their wings to flap, cawing, booming, GO IMMEDIATELY TO THE SHELTERS, GO IMMEDIATELY, GO GO GO …

The man made of hot metal stepped onto the roof. The harpies quieted, cowed. They huddled together, behind him, cocking their heads and scratching under their wings with pointed chins. To one side lay the lifeless body of the policeman, its back toward Max; the corpse’s head had been twisted entirely around on its neck; one blue eye was open, staring lifelessly; the man’s tongue was caught between clamped teeth, half severed.

For a moment all was quiet, but for the rustling of wings and crackling of the small fire on the outbuilding.

The man of hot chrome wore no clothes at all. He was immense, nearly two-and-a-half meters tall, and smooth as the outer hull of a factory-new fighter-jet. He was seamless—except for the square gate on his chest, with the little metal turn-handle on it. The gate was precisely like the door of an old-fashioned incinerator; in the center of the gate was a small, thick pane of smoke-darkened glass, through which blue-white fires could be seen burning restlessly. Except for their bright metal finish, his arms and legs and stylized genitals looked quite human. His head was formed of barbed wire—a densely woven wire sculpture of a man’s head, cunningly formed to show grim, aristocratic features. There were simply holes for eyes, behind which red fires flickered in his hollow head; now and then flames darted from the eyeholes to play about his temples and then recede; his scalp was a crest of barbs; eyebrows and ears were shaped of barbs. Gray smoke gusted from his mouth when he spoke to the harpies: “Feed me.” The wire lips moved like a man’s; the wire jaw seemed to work smoothly. “Feed me, while I speak to this one.” He stepped closer Max, who cringed back from the heat. “I am Lord Thanatos.” A voice like metal rending.

Max knew him.

One of the harpies moved to the corpse of the policeman; it took hold of the arm, put one stunted foot on the cop’s back, and began to wrench and twist. It tore the corpse’s arm from its shoulder and dragged it to Thanatos, leaving a trail of red blood on black tar. The harpy reached out with its free hand and turned the handle on its lord’s chest. The door swung open; an unbearable brightness flared in the opening; ducking its head, turning its eyes from the rapacious light, the vinyl harpy stuffed the cop’s arm, replete with wrist-com and blue coat-sleeve, into the inferno, the bosom of Thanatos. Sizzlings and poppings and black smoke unfurling. And the smell of roasting flesh. Max’s stomach recoiled; he took another step backward. He watched, feeling half paralyzed, as the harpies scuttled back and forth between the corpse and Thanatos, slowly dismembering and disemboweling the dead policeman, feeding the pieces into the furnace that was their lord.

And his fire burned more furiously; his glow increased.

“This is how it will be,” said Thanatos. “You will serve me. You can look on me, Max Whitman, and upon my servants, and you do not go mad. You do not run howling away. Because you are one of those who has always known about us, in some way. We met on the dream-plane once, you and I, and I knew you for what you were then. You can serve me, and still live among men. You will be my emissary. You will be shielded from the cowards who would prevent my entry into your world. You will go to certain men, the few who control the many. The wealthy ones. You will tell them about a great source of power, Lord Thanatos. I will send fiends and visitations to beset their enemies. Their power will grow, and they will feed me, and my power will grow. This is how it will be.”

As he finished speaking, another harpy flapped down from the sky, dropping a fresh corpse into the shadows. It was a young Hispanic man in a smudged white suit. Thanatos opened the wiry mouth of his hollow head and sighed; blue smoke smelling of munitions factories dirtied the air. “They always kill them, somehow, as they bring them to me. I cannot break them of it. They always kill the humans. Men are more pleasurable to consume when there is life left in them. My curse is this: I’m served by half-minds.”

Max thought: Why didn’t the harpies kill me, then?

The vinyl harpies tore an arm from the sprawled dead man, and fed it into their master’s fire. Their camera-lens eyes caught the shine of the fire. Thanatos looked at Max. “You have not yet spoken.”

And Max thought: Say anything. Anything to get the hell away. “I’ll do just what you ask. Let me go and I’ll bring you lives. I’ll be your, uh, your emissary.”

Another long, smoky sigh. “You’re lying. I was afraid you’d be loyal. Instinct of some sort, I suppose.”

“Loyal to who?”

“I can read you. You see only the semblance I’ve chosen. But I see past your semblance. You cannot lie to one of us. I see the lie in you unfolding like the blossoming of a poisonous purple orchid. You cannot lie to a Lord.”

He licked barbed wire lips with a tongue of flame.

So they will kill me, Max thought. They’ll feed me into this monstrosity! Is that a strange death? An absurd death? No stranger than dying by nerve-gas on some foreign battlefield; no more absurd than my Uncle Danny’s death: he drowned in a big vat of fluorescent pink paint.

“You’re not going to die,” said Thanatos. “We’ll keep you in stasis, forever imprisoned, unpleasantly alive.”

What happened next made Max think of a slogan stenciled on the snout of one of the old B-12 bombers from World War II: Death From Above. Because something silvery flashed down from above and struck the two harpies bending over the body of the man in the smudged white suit … both harpies were struck with a terrible impact, sent broken and lifeless over the edge of the roof.

The griffin pulled up from its dive, raking the tar roof, and soared over the burning outbuilding and up for another pass. The remaining harpies rose to meet it.

Other figures were converging on the roof, coming in a group from the north. One was a man who hovered without wings; he seemed to levitate. His body was angelic, his skin dazzling white; he wore a loincloth made of what looked like aluminum foil. His head was a man’s, haloed with blond curls—but where his eyes and forehead should have been was a small television screen, projecting from the bone of his skull. On the screen was an image of human eyes, looking about; it was as if he saw from the TV screen. Two more griffins arrived, one electroplated gold, another of nickel, and just behind them came a woman who drifted like a bit of cotton blown on the breeze. She resembled Mother Mary, but nude: a plastic Madonna made of the stuff of which inflatable beach toys are made; glossy and striped in wide bands of primary colors. She seemed insubstantial as a soap bubble, but when she struck at a vinyl harpy it reeled back, turning end over end to fall senseless to the rooftop. Flanking her were two miniature helicopters— helicopters no bigger than horses. The lower section of each helicopter resembled a medieval dragon attired in armored metal, complete with clawed arms in place of landing runners. Each copter’s cab was conventionally shaped—but no pilot sat behind the windows; and just below those sinister windows was a set of chrome teeth in a mouth opening to let loose great peals of electronically amplified laughter. The dragon copters dived to attack the remaining harpies, angling their whirring blades to shred the vinyl wings.

Thanatos grated a command, and from the burning doorway behind him came seven bats big as vultures, with camera-lens eyes and sawing electric knives for teeth and wings of paper-thin aluminum.

Max threw himself to the roof, coughing in the smoke of the growing fire; the bats whipped close over his head and climbed, keening, to attack Our Lady of the Plastics.

Two dog-sized spiders made of high-tension rubbery synthetics, their clashing mandibles forged of the best Solingen steel, raced on whirring copper legs across the roof to intercept the angel with television eyes. The angel alighted and turned to gesture urgently to Max. The spiders clutched at the angel’s legs and dragged him down, slashed bloody hunks from his ivory arms.

Max saw Lord Thanatos catch a passing griffin by the tail and slam it onto the roof; he clamped the griffin in his white-hot hands. It shrieked and began to melt.

Two metal bats collided head-on with a copter dragon and all three disintegrated in a shower of blue sparks. Our Lady of the Plastics struck dents into the aluminum ribs of the vinyl harpies who darted at her, slashed, and boomed GO IMMEDIATELY, bellowing it in triumph as she burst open—but they recoiled in dismay, flapping clumsily out of reach, when she re-formed, gathering her fragments together, making herself anew in mid-air.

Max sensed that the real battle was fought in some other dimension of subatomic physicality, with a subtler weaponry; he was seeing only the distorted visual echoes of the actual struggle.

The spiders were wrapping the angel’s legs with cords of optical fiber. He gave a mighty wrench and threw them off, levitating out of their reach, shouting at Max: “Take your life! You—”

“SILENCE HIM!” Thanatos bellowed, stabbing a hot finger at the angel. And instantly two of the harpies plummeted to sink their talons in the throat of the angel with television eyes. They tore at him, made a gouting, ragged wreckage of his white throat—and Max blinked, seeing a phosphorescent mist, the color of translucent turquoise, issuing from the angel’s slack mouth as he fell to the ground.

I’m seeing his plasma body escape, Max thought. I’m realizing my talent.

He saw the blue phosphorescence, vaguely man-shaped, drift to hang in the air over the body of the dead Hispanic. It settled, enfolding the corpse. Possessing it.

Sans its right arm, half its face clawed away, the corpse stood. It swayed, shuddered, spoke with shredded lips. “Max, kill yourself and lib—”

Thanatos lunged at the wavering corpse, closed hot metal fingers around its throat, burned its voice box into char. The body slumped.

But Max stood. His dreams were coming back to him—or was someone sending them back? Someone mindsending. You were of the Concealed.

Thanatos turned from the battle, scowling, commanding: “Take him! Bind him, carry him to safety!” The spiders, gnawing on the corpse of the angel with television eyes, moved reluctantly away from their feeding and crept toward Max. A thrill of revulsion went through him. He forced himself forward. He knelt, within the spiders’ reach. “Don’t hurt him!” Thanatos bellowed. “Take care that he does not—”

But he did. He embraced a spider, clasping it to him as if it were something dear, and used its razor-sharp mandibles to slash his own throat. He fell, spasming, and knew inexpressible pain and numbness, and grayness. And a shattering white light.

He was dead. He was alive. He was standing over his own body, liberated. He reached out, and, with his plasma-field, extinguished the fire on the outbuilding. Instantly.

The battle noises softened, then muted—the combatants drew apart. They stood or crouched or hovered silently, watching him and waiting. They knew him for Prince Red Mark, a sleeping Lord of the Plasmagnomes, one of seven Concealed among humanity years before, awaiting the day of awakening, the hour when they must emerge to protect those the kin of Thanatos would slaughter for the eating.

He was arisen, the first of the Concealed. He would awaken the others, those hidden, sleeping in the hearts of the humble and the unknown. In old women and tired, middle-aged soldiers and—and there was one, hidden in a young sepia-skinned girl, not far away.

Thanatos shuddered and squared himself for the battle of wills.

Max, Lord Red Mark, scanned the other figures on the rooftop.

Now he could see past their semblances, recognize them as interlacing networks of rippling wavelength, motion that is thought, energy equal to will. He reached out, reached past the semblance of Lord Thanatos.

A small black girl, one Hazel Johnson, watched the battle from a rooftop across the street. She was the only one who saw it; she had the only suitable vantage.

Hazel Johnson was just eight years old, but she was old enough to know that the scene should have surprised her, should have sent her yelling for Momma. But she had seen it in a dream, and she’d always believed that dreams were real.

And now she saw that the man who’d thrown himself on the spider had died, and his body had given off a kind of blue glow; and the blue cloud had formed into something solid, a gigantic shape that towered over the nasty-looking wire-head of hot metal. All the flying things had stopped flying. They were watching the newcomer.

The newcomer looked, to Hazel, like one of the astronauts you saw on TV coming home from the space station; he wore one of those spacesuits they wore, and he even had the U.S. flag stitched on one of his sleeves. But he was a whole lot bigger than any astronaut, or any man she’d ever seen. He must have been four meters tall. And now she saw that he didn’t have a helmet like a regular astronaut had. He had one of those helmets that the Knights of the Round Table wore, like she saw in the movie on TV. The knight in the spacesuit was reaching out to the man of hot metal …

Lord Red Mark was distantly aware that one of his own was watching from the rooftop across the street. Possibly Lady Day asleep in the body of a small human being; a small person who didn’t know, yet, that she wasn’t really human after all.

Now he reached out and closed one of his gloved hands around Lord Thanatos’s barbed-wire neck (that’s how it looked to the little girl watching from across the street) and held him fast, though the metal of that glove began to melt in the heat. Red Mark held him, and with the other hand opened the incinerator door, and reached his hand into the fire that burned in the bosom of his enemy—

And snuffed out the flame, like a man snuffing a candle with his thumb and forefinger.

The metal body remained standing, cooling, forever inert. The minions of Lord Thanatos fled squalling into the sky, pursued by the Protectionists, abandoning their visible physicality, becoming once more unseeable. And so the battle was carried into another realm of being.

Soon the rooftop was empty of all but the two corpses, and a few broken harpies, and the shell of Thanatos, and Lord Red Mark.

Red Mark turned to look directly at the little girl on the opposite roof. He levitated, rose evenly into the air, and drifted to her. He alighted beside her and took off his helm. Beneath was a light that smiled. He was beautiful. He said, “Let’s go find the others.”

She nodded, slowly, beginning to wake. But the little-girl part of her, the human shell, said, “Do I have to die too? Like you did?”

“No. That was for an emergency. There are other ways.”

“I don’t have to die now?”

“Not now and …” The light that was a smile grew brighter. “Not ever. You’ll never die, my Lady Day.”