21

GETTING TAILED

I don’t like being in New York City. It’s partly a ’thrope thing; there’s too much noise, too many smells, too many people moving around me from all angles, but mostly, too many monsters with attitude. There are two basic ways for supernatural beings to hide, and the ones who want to live a quiet life find some place isolated, and the ones who want to spread their wings—sometimes actual wings, mind you—find somewhere crowded.

Maybe that’s why I’ve never been to the Big City without getting into big trouble, and I’m not talking about getting into it with a cab driver because the GPS on my phone says he’s taking me on a roundabout, or dealing with aggressive panhandlers, or holing up in my hotel room during a power outage while looters hold the New York version of a Mardi Gras kind of trouble, either. I’m talking the kind of trouble where you hear a child’s voice coming through a sewer grate and spend two hours wading through all kinds of shit—literally and figuratively—only to find out that the child is actually an ahuizotl (and if you don’t know what an ahuizotl is, trust me, you’re not missing anything). I’ll innocently follow the smell of a lamb kebab down a street I’m not familiar with and wind up spending the night running through back alleys and over rooftops, being pursued by were-jackals who think I’m the scout for a wolf pack invading their territory.

Which is why I sighed when the pretty Asian woman who smelled like a fox dropped a folded slip of paper on my table. I’d been waiting for something like this, but it still felt like it was time for my New York rectal exam. But at least I was eating some seriously good spiessbraten on a terrace outside a German restaurant, and I continued to do so.

“What’s this about, Foxy?” I murmured softly, carefully watching the buttocks of her high rear end alternate up and down in red slacks as she walked away. Young kitsune have a hard time making their tails disappear when they assume human form, and I was just trying to get a sense of how experienced she was, honest.

Her light voice came running beneath the cacophony of car engines and pedestrian nattering. “This is about self-expression.”

“That sounds painful,” I observed.

She just laughed a distinctly non-demure and feminine laugh and disappeared into the herd of street cattle as they mooed into their cell phones. She was maybe five foot four and not wearing heels, so she disappeared fast. I thought about trying to follow her, but tracking a fox who knows you’re tracking it is difficult under the best of circumstances, and a crowded city sidewalk was far from the best of circumstances. Scent trails would be confused, sounds would be submerged, and it would be easy for her to bob and hide among the taller pedestrians around her. So, I stayed put.

I did wonder if this was the same kitsune who had helped Kevin’s mother though, and how much that mattered. I opened the slip of paper. It had the next day’s date, an address, and a time on it. The time, of course, was midnight.

The address turned out to be waterfront property, a warehouse in the middle of a bunch of other warehouses and docks and shipyards. The most obvious place to watch the warehouse from was a diner down the street, so I didn’t go there. The best place was a neighboring warehouse that appeared to have been under construction when it was abandoned for one reason or another, so I didn’t go there, either. No point being predictable when trying to spy on a fox.

Eventually, I settled on a small alcove formed by two improperly stacked storage containers in a neighboring dockyard. The site was downwind and about forty feet above the ground, and the shadows the two immense metal containers formed between them were so thick that I was hidden while lying down. It hadn’t been hard to get up there unnoticed. All the younger guys working the yard were bundled against the cold. They dressed the same and moved the same: stocking caps, vest jackets, thermals or hoodies, work gloves, all of it pulled over a kind of sauntering slouch, so it was easy to blend without having to get a specific uniform. The field glasses I’d picked up from an army surplus store weren’t anything fancy, but they were compact, collapsible, and had great glare reduction.

It turned out the warehouse address was owned by an Asian man in a white overcoat, an older fellow beginning to wrinkle like cured meat but still spry, with an iron-grey beard and a buzz cut. Probably Akihiko, but I wasn’t assuming anything until I got close enough to smell him. He was definitely the owner, though, whether it said so on any piece of paper or not. It was in the way Probably Akihiko moved when he walked into the place.

Probably Akihiko had servants too. A woman walked in front of him like a bodyguard instead of behind him like the traditional idea of a proper Japanese woman, and when she opened the door for him, she went in first. The woman was taller than Probably Akihiko, almost six feet, unusually lithe and muscular in dark clothes that wouldn’t impede movement. She was wearing pants too, just like the kitsune I’d met. This new woman had long black hair that went all the way to her waist and had small spiked metal spheres anchored at the end of it like beads. It was too far away and the dockyard made too much noise to tell if she clacked when she moved, but she smelled bad. An attempt had been made to cover that smell with some heavy, flowery perfume, but her stench was so strong that I caught a whiff of it on a breeze almost six hundred meters away. She wasn’t undead, exactly, but her meat smelled sour.

I didn’t know what she was, but she wasn’t a kitsune.

Nothing else of note happened for roughly two hours, and then something did. A very weird something.

The door to the warehouse opened, and nothing visible came out, but the light in front of the door warped, kind of the way air will shimmer above hot concrete, though it had been a couple of months since the city had last seen a hot day. A stray fast food wrapper that was floating in the wind smacked dead against some large object or person that I couldn’t see, and if I couldn’t see it, that meant the person or thing was physically bending light waves around itself, not using mental magic. I knew it was large because I could hear the boardwalk creaking as if under assault. The scrap of paper came to a dead halt in midair before something invisible plucked it, held it suspended, maybe looked at it, and threw it away.

Sweet Mary, mother of God.

Sorry, sometimes I forget that I’m not a practicing Catholic anymore.

The breeze had died down, and I couldn’t smell whatever had opened that door, but I knew it was large, probably Japanese, and capable of bending light around itself. I also knew that Akihiko had spent a lot of his life among the mountains of Japan. To me, that spelled oni. T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Oni.

Except that didn’t make any sense. Oni hate large bodies of water. That’s why they live on and beneath the mountains and hills of Japan and hardly ever leave their island nation; their massive muscles aren’t quite as dense as a chiang-shih’s—oni run from six and half to nine feet tall—but they are just as strong because what they lack in compactness they make up in mass. An oni’s skin is as tough as Kevlar too, all of which means that oni sink like rocks. Drowning is one of the few things oni are actually afraid of, and for this one to be here, Akihiko had to have either gotten an oni to fly over an ocean or float over it and then hang out on a waterfront.

Things started to heat up in the dockyard and a crane began redistributing storage containers in my vicinity—a big shipment must be coming in—and I decided to go get a little food and check in with Sig and the others before the sun went down and the yard lights came on. As I was making my way out of there by jumping from one row of shipping containers to another, I leaped on to an unevenly formed ledge that smelled like fox urine. Fresh fox urine. I wondered if the kitsune had been in her true shape when she did it, or if the human she was pretending to be had just dropped trou while hanging out behind me downwind. I have no idea why that mattered. What did matter was that the kitsune hadn’t just needed to pee. She had been watching me trying to spy on her in her territory, and she wanted me to know it. Foxes like to mess with you that way.

Did I mention that I don’t like being in New York City?