Nine held his hands out in front of himself, his chest heaving, muscles flexing. The eddy of his enchanted rage flowed out and away, lapping at every surface it passed.

Hawk took a deep breath and shouted, “Stop!”

“Oh, fuck—oh fuck—I’m sorry!” The teen’s hands gripped his head.

Hawk looked around. The music pounded. The girls were still taking selfies with Eternal Love as if nothing had happened. They hadn’t noticed. Hadn’t heard. But the man with the handlebar mustache in the pizzeria had stopped. He watched them for a second, then went back to spinning the dough on an invisible plane above his head.

Below, on the first level, they danced, skated, and played their video games. Maybe they were safe, but there was that flutter in his solar plexus like a swarm of moths trying to escape.

There—there, in the middle of the ramps. A man in a black jacket stood with his back to them. Hawk knew it the moment he saw him—he was searching for the source of the ripples.

“We gotta go, now!” His voice scratched in his throat. His knees felt like jelly. “Back door!”

“Shit, shit, shit!” said Nine.

“Come on.” Hawk grabbed Spike’s hand.

“Don’t worry, Hawkson. We got this!” Spike sang with bravado. The boy was itching for a fight. He had learned something about himself, and he wanted to test it.

“No, we run!”

“Nine, what’s going on?” asked Rhonda. She looked around them nervously, not comprehending. She was not like them. Could she even see the Veil? He never knew what normal people saw, just that it was different for them.

“Baby, it’s okay. I got you. I got you.” Nine took her face in his big hands and kissed her deep. Kissed her hard, and she kissed him back. “You gotta listen to me, baby. Remember what I told you about?”

“Yeah, about the thing, the people?”

“Yes. Now we gotta go, baby.”

At the back of the loft, a grated fire exit led to the walkways of the city in the sky—the building tops to passages and the doors that would take them to safety. But they had to run.

He prayed the ripples hadn’t traveled far, but it could be all of Billings. Nor did he know how many of the dark creatures lurked in the streets, waiting for some careless freak to make himself known.

The back stairs were lit by red overhead lights and blue diodes that marked the slick steps exposed to the elements. It had started to sleet. Nine held tight to Rhonda so she wouldn’t fall. Spike slipped once and went down, but he picked himself up and kept going.

“Hawk, she can’t do this,” said Nine.

“Get a tuk. Get her out of here,” said Hawk.

They took the stairs down to the matrix of narrow alleys that webbed out into the maze of the BAT. At the bottom of the steps, Nine kicked open the gate, and they started to run.

“Stop! There!” said Spike.

They froze. Ahead of them in the shadows, something moved.

“It’s just a dog,” said Rhonda.

“Not just a dog,” said Nine as he stepped in front of the group.

The cur, black and sleek, thick with muscle, bared its fangs, a low snarl filling the narrow passage. Hawk put his hand on Spike’s shoulder when the animal rose before their eyes onto its hind legs as if performing a trick, then fully extended with a popping and grinding of bone and dislocating joint into a man, thin, tall, and naked. The red lights from the stairwell behind them lit his body, save his face obscured by shadow. Between his sinewy legs, a heavy appendage seemed to breathe with him. Protruding from his right arm, a long blade scraped the concrete of the alley floor.

“Don’t come any closer,” said Nine.

“What have we here? A bunch of little freak babies?” Like the dog he’d been, he growled.

“Leave us alone,” said Nine.

“That was pretty impressive in there. Woke up the whole town. I doubt you can do it again.”

“Come here and find out, you fucking asshole.” Nine cracked his knuckles.

“I’ll tell you what. There’s a way out, a way you can live tonight. We’re looking for a few good candidates. Got a program that can fix you up.”

“Nine, who is that? What’s he saying?” said Rhonda.

“Shhhh,” Nine hushed her sharply.

“Oh, she doesn’t understand. Oh my.” He took a step forward, the blade scraping like fingernails on a chalkboard, bringing his face into the crimson light.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Hawk first saw the glinting eyes, large and narrow, tapering toward his pinned back ears, then the teeth, jagged incisors dripping a viscous salivation onto his chin and down his chest.

Rhonda let out a squealing gasp and put her hand protectively over her swollen belly. Spike pulled close to Hawk.

The hunter’s laughter was cruel. He shook his head. “That’s too bad. Should’ve kept it in your pants, son.” His black blade scraped the wall next to him. “Now I have to cut it out. Those are the rules. Kill the Maji. Stop the Chaos.”

Footsteps behind them on the wet cement. Hawk jerked around. There stood a hooded figure blocking their only path of escape.

“No, Hunter-seki,” said the man’s voice from the blackness of his hood. “Children, go behind me. Balinahn!” His accent carried the thick tones of an Asiatown ghetto.

Hawk pulled Spike aside as the man moved past them. He held his hand high, a gloved hand with the fingers cut out.

“Maji, you all die!” screamed the creature.

With a fluid and graceful motion, almost faster than the eye could see, the hooded man reached into his pocket and tossed something at the hunter’s feet. It sounded like marbles.

The hunter gnashed its teeth and sprinted with blade leading, but then stopped and looked down, then back up again with an animal fear in its demonic eyes. It couldn’t move. It roared and swung its blade, but the hooded man sprang forward, inside the weapon’s arc, grabbed the creature’s head, and twisted, as though dealing with an unruly soda cap.

SNAP!

He gouged his thumbs deep into its eyes, emitting a sound like sucking mud, sending blood dripping onto the stones.

In his hands, the hunter withered, and the corpse of a dead dog hit the ground with a soft thud.

Rhonda was sobbing.

“Holy shit,” whispered Spike.

The man stepped away, picked up one of the pebbles, inspected it closely, then flicked it into the alley and said, “So they’re finished. Good rock, rare rock, but all finished now.”

Somewhere off in the depths of the BAT, a howl rose that cooled Hawk’s blood, followed by another and another, as if a pack of wolves had wandered into the urban jungle.

He realized now that he was sweating. His hands were tingling, but he hadn’t enchanted. He’d held control.

“Hunter-seki sad now.” The man nudged the dog’s corpse with his boot. “We leave. Others coming.”

They followed him out of the alley, giving the dog’s lifeless body a wide berth.

In the light of the street and the music from the Cage, the man from the trash barrel fire in front of his building, the man with the scar across his face, the man with the fingerless gloves, put Nine, Rhonda, and Spike into a closed tuk-tuk. Hawk saw him give the driver money and a little bag of white powder.

“Your friends are safe. Driver is good fighter. I’ll take you home,” he said. “Can you run?”

----------------------------------------

They sprinted into the twisted streets. When Hawk thought his heart would burst, they slowed to a jog and then to a fast walk. A couple of times, the man put his hand on Hawk’s chest to stop him as he looked around a corner. When he touched him, he felt something, like a surge, a river of untapped strength.

The man took him down an alley he’d never seen. Asiatown was like that, full of hidden passages, secret doors hiding secret rooms and shameful things. They climbed a ladder to the top of a building and traversed streets from building top to building top until they could go no farther. At last, the man pointed. “Home,” he said.

There was his building, blinking red and blue from the sign of the Chinese restaurant. The electricity looked to be still out.

“Can you jump?”

Hawk looked down. It was far, at least three stories. On the street below, pedestrians hurried, coming and going. A motorcycle porting crates of beer swerved between them, balancing its cargo.

“That’ll kill me,” he said.

The man shrugged. “We all different. We take stairs.”

The janky stairs led to an old refinery from the railroad days that had been subsumed into the rhizomatic architecture of the BAT. They came out onto a path no wider than his shoulders that emerged from behind the old woman’s locked-up dumpling cart onto his very street, which was vacant of any pedestrian or vehicle at this late hour.

At the trash barrel stove, the man fed the smoldering coals from his pile of broken chairs and dressers. Soon, like a happy phoenix, the flames were dancing up into the cold air, which carried the lightest of crystalline snow.

“Warm,” he said and held his hands over the flames. Hawk held his over, too. He had an urge to touch the fire, and when he did so, the man laughed and said, “Fire boy.”

“Who are you?” Hawk asked after a silence.

The man did not acknowledge the question.

“Thanks, for back there.”

“A favor. Long time ago. Favor paid.” His gaze rested on the fire’s hypnotic dance. “What you looking for?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” said Hawk.

“I watch you. You looking.”

Did it matter to tell this man? He had saved them from the hunter; he brought Hawk home safely. He had been there for nearly a year now, tending his fire. He was obviously Maji. He had killed a hunter with his bare hands.

“I… I want to find the Maji. Do you know?”

The man shook his head and said, “The Maji is here.” He reached out over the fire and touched Hawk’s chest. That feeling. That rush. The man jerked his hand away.

“They come for our dreams. You know, they do this.” He pulled up his shirt to reveal his scars.

The man touched his hand to lower the garment.

“My uncle, he said the Maji can help us.”

“Okay then.” The man reached into his pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and gave it to him.

Hawk unfolded it. It was an advertisement. A picture of a blue guitar with the caption: “Build A Fire Shakes the Earth. Come if you can hear—details will be announced on 11.14 Country FM 101.”

“Build’s A Fire? A concert?”

“Burn it,” said the man.

Hawk read the poster again and dropped it into the fire—a single tongue of deep blue leapt up and then faded.

“You better go.” He looked up at his building. “Boys shouldn’t be out on the streets tonight.”

The fire illuminated the scar on the man’s face.

“Do you… do you want to come up?” asked Hawk. What did it matter? He was alone. They were both alone.

The man gazed at him like he did not understand a word that was said.

“I mean… if you don’t have a place to sleep tonight. You can stay in my place. I’m alone.” He bit his bottom lip. “Please.” The fire surged through his blood. He might cry.

The man turned his hands over the flames. “Go to bed, boy. No terrors tonight.” He reached out and brushed a tear off Hawk’s cheek. His thumb was warm from the flames. “Fire boy,” he whispered.

Hawk climbed the dark stairs to his door and unlocked it. Breathing heavily, he went to his window and looked down. The man was still there, tending the fire.

It was cold. He pulled his mother’s old chair over to the window. Then he picked up one of his uncle’s notebooks and curled up under a heavy blanket. He opened it at random and read the drug-addled words in the neon light. Though he could not understand, they were familiar to him, and they made the room less lonesome, and the night less dark.