The Shambling Guide to New York City (31 page)

Safe to wake, now.

Zoë’s eyes opened. She was lying on a pile of pillows, caked with goo and blood, and she smelled something oddly familiar.

“Coffee? I hear the kids like coffee these days. I get my tea from a nice gay incubus up top,” the voice said. “Of course, he and his customers hate me. I think it’s because sometimes I kill coterie for the Public Works. But I’d never kill a man who gave me good tea. Once he stopped giving me garbage tea in bags, we got along quite well.”

Zoë blinked and focused on the overcoat and boots and little wrinkled face of Granny Good Mae.

“You saved me again,” Zoë croaked.

“Well, I didn’t save you so much as pick you up from your unique automobile. Very clever to have a demon bring you to the sewers, but I would have chosen one with a roomier interior,” Granny Good Mae said.

“What happened?”

“You stopped your demon car in the sewers and I came across it when I was coming home. There was a hand waving at me, so I waved back, and then it waved again, and I thought to myself, I thought, ‘Granny Good Mae, you don’t wave twice at someone unless you’re under the age of five, or you need help. And that’s a woman’s hand.’ So I looked closer and then saw you come out of the demon. I carried you home.” She looked appraisingly at Zoë. “You have some snake on you. But I don’t mind. I’m just lucky I bought a coffee along with my tea. She told me to buy it, you know.”

“Granny Good Mae?” Zoë asked dumbly. “Are you all right?”

Her brown eyes were wide. “Of course, poppet. Why?”

“You just don’t sound like yourself, you’re not as… coherent. Actually you sound like you did when I first met you.”

“That could be because you have demon in your ears. Or it could be because I can relax more at home. Or because it’s Thursday.”

“It’s Monday. Or Tuesday. I think,” she said, trying to think. Right now, oxygen was her favorite thing in the world.

Granny Good Mae nodded. “She told me where you were and that I should find you. She likes you a lot. You’re Life.” She took out an ancient china set from a cardboard box and took the plastic lids off the coffee cups. She daintily poured some coffee into two little cups and handed one to Zoë.

Zoë struggled to sit up and accept the cup. “Where are we?”

“My home, honey!” Granny Good Mae looked surprised at the question.

They were in a small series of rooms lined with lightbulbs on cords, pillows on the floor, chests, a low table, a hot plate, and what looked like a sink from a workshop with a deep basin and U-shaped faucet. Some of the wall coverings were kitschy quilts, but others were fine silk. The place looked as if it had been decorated by several different ladies at once, or just one lady with several places to Dumpster-dive.

“We’re still in the sewers?”

Granny Good Mae snorted. “I’d appreciate it if you referred to them as tunnels. Shit hasn’t flowed through here in years.” She covered her mouth and giggled like a girl who’d sworn without her parents around.

Zoë sipped her coffee. It tasted good, a mouthful of normal in the bizarre and painful hell that had dumped her, shat from a demon, injured in various places, into a homeless woman’s quite cozy home, covered in blood and snake goo, drinking coffee from a cup that demanded her pinkie finger be raised in a ladylike way. She felt as if she were having a tea party with a girlfriend, considering how ragged they both were. It felt like a surreal game of pretend.

“Why do you keep rescuing me?” she asked. “I mean, I appreciate it and all, but every time I get into trouble, you’re there. What’s up with that?”

The older woman’s eyes widened. “I rescue you because you need rescuing. Perhaps the question is why do you need rescuing?”

“Because I’m getting involved with coterie,” she said, running her hand through her stiffening hair. She grimaced and wondered how soon she could get to a shower.

“And why did you get involved with them?”

Zoë snorted. “I needed a job.”

“And why did you need a job?”

Zoë bit her lip. “I lost my job.”

“And why did you lose your job?”

Granny Good Mae’s eyes were wide with innocence. Zoë frowned. “How much do you know?”

“Just what
she
told me.”

“Who is ‘she’?” Zoë shouted, spilling her coffee on her pants. Her outburst surprised her.

Granny Good Mae looked sad. “I’m trying to keep you safe. She wants me to. I want me to. You’re in a lot of danger, all the time. She talks to me, I talk to me, and I think she’d talk to you too, if you’d listen. She’s my special friend, but she really likes you, too.”

The pronoun mystery was making Zoë’s head spin. She held her cup out and Granny Good Mae poured more coffee. “All right. I’ll listen to her. And I am grateful.”

Granny Good Mae looked satisfied. “I do like you. It’s been a lonely life. Most of the time I have only her to talk to. I’ve been here in the tunnels for so long.”

“How long?”

Mae screwed up her face. “Reagan. He was president. I was studying his security detail for leaks. I learned some things. I went to the hospital. I broke out and came here. I like it here better than the CIA.”

Zoë had forgotten the woman’s spy background. “You were in the hospital?”

Mae nodded. “They thought I was crazy. Me!”

Zoë blinked and looked away. “Can’t see how they could do that.” She drained her dainty cup. “Not that you haven’t been a delightful host, and a heroic savior—again—but I should probably go see a doctor. Can you direct me to the surface?”

Granny Good Mae jumped up. “Of course I can! It’s nearly ten o’clock, and the urgent care is still open. I’ll take you to my friend Ben. He can fix you right up, and”—her voice lowered—“he has a back door.”

The thought of walking to Ben’s or even her own apartment made her want to cry, but she nodded. “Right. Let’s go.”

Bakery Under Starlight, owned by the incubus Carl Boatwright, is a small slice of magic on Fifty-First and Eighth. Carl does all his own baking and most often works the register as well so he can have constant contact with his customers. Carl is an odd incubus; he doesn’t feed off of pure sexual energy, but the passion people have for baked goods; this of course fuels his talent for baking, which is substantial.

His food caters mostly to humans, but some pastry-loving coterie can find plenty to eat there. Go for the croissants, stay for a latte, and be sure to take some muffins home. The interior is bright and sunny, not the most welcoming to many coterie, but he does stay open until late for the photophobic.

A
fter forty minutes in the shower, Zoë was finally clean.

She wrapped some gauze around her still-oozing shoulder, rewrapped the cut on her forearm, and frowned at the hole she’d gouged in her hip. The cut was quite deep, and there was no way a wound received in the sewer would heal cleanly.

Granny Good Mae sat on her couch, waiting patiently for her.

“Did you see if Arthur was home?” Zoë asked.

“He’s not,” Granny Good Mae said. “He’s still at Public Works. They’re working on the Apep problem.”

“I wonder if they found the one that I was, uh, in.”

“Oh, I doubt it. But I can assure you they’re looking for it. Shall we take you to the doctor?”

Zoë sighed and looked at her bed, mournfully. She’d rather lie there and bleed. “I guess so, yeah.”

Benjamin Rosenberg was busy, but he waved at Zoë and sent a colleague in to see her.

The doctor, a harried woman from Tennessee (“My name’s Dr. Morrison but everyone calls me Becca Sue!”), tried to get out of Zoë what she had been doing in the sewers and if she was going to try to sue the city, but Zoë gave evasive answers until Dr. Morrison let it slide. The gash in her right shoulder needed twenty-three stitches and she would have a handsome scar. The
one on her left hip was tougher, being too wide to suture. Dr. Morrison carefully packed it with gauze and taped it securely.

Dr. Morrison insisted—after finding out if Zoë was pregnant or not—on a course of both Cipro (for water-loving bacteria) and clindamycin (for gangrene bugs) to counter whatever nastiness Zoë had encountered in the sewer, and then she was released with an admonition to return in two weeks, rest, and keep her injuries clean.

Also to watch for severe stomach problems as a side effect of the drugs. Great.

“Thanks, Becca Sue,” Zoë said as she left.

It was one in the morning by the time she left the urgent care clinic. She wanted nothing more than her bed, but remembered she should check in with work, and possibly Public Works.

“Took you long enough,” Phil said as he answered.

“Thanks, I’m fine. Don’t be so worried, you’re embarrassing me.”

“What happened to Apep?”

“We incapacitated him. Then Arthur cut him in two. Then he turned into two demons, and Arthur had to fight the other one. I got eaten by the first one, but Granny Good Mae saved me. Then I passed out for a while. Both Apeps are still in the tunnels, as far as I know, if you’re worried about him.” Zoë’s voice was light.

Phil ignored her snark. “Where are you?”

“Just left Benjamin’s clinic. I’m going to head to my place by way of a pharmacy. I’ve had enough adventure for the fucking day. I’m not going back out.” She hung up the phone, surprised at her own anger. What the hell was she doing working for vampires and letting demons loose on the city?

Lucy arrives tomorrow night.

She didn’t know if it was her own thought, or something else’s, but she ignored it. Let someone else deal.

She found an all-night pharmacy a couple of blocks from her apartment and sat under the glaringly painful fluorescent lights as she waited for her medicine. She thought about Becca Sue and wondered what a country house-call kind of doctor was doing in New York City. Did the coterie have anything to do with it? Perhaps she was simply paranoid and seeing coterie wherever she looked. But she hadn’t guessed wrong yet…

She paid for her meds, completely sure the pharmacist was a human, and felt better about her instincts. Which made her wonder again about Dr. Becca Sue. Phil might know. But she was damned if she’d ask him—she was tired of his know-it-all mentality. Even if he did know it all.

When she got to her apartment, she was so tired she didn’t even think to knock on Arthur’s door to see if he was home, to tell him she was alive.

Inside, all the blinds were closed and Phil sat on her couch, waiting for her.

“Shit,” she said.

The vampire wore a heavy gray cable-knit sweater, looking like a slightly rounder version of a J.Crew model and not quite the bloodsucking fiend she knew him to be.

“You look like hell,” he said.

She stared at him blankly as she locked the door behind her.

“You’re not angry with
me
, are you?” he asked.

“I think I have a right to be a little angry with you,” she said. “I entered this job to work for a publisher. I wanted to make books. I was looking to start a new life in New York.”

He smiled. “Well, you certainly did that.”

She flopped on her couch, wishing he would look a little chagrined
or nervous or uncomfortable. He was so damn sure of himself. “I got eaten by a snake tonight, Phil.”

“You’re doing a good job. On the book, I mean,” he said. “You have a meeting with the writers this afternoon at three.”

She glared at him, then glared at her watch. Three thirty a.m. “So I don’t get a day off to recuperate?”

“I moved it from eleven a.m.,” he said mildly, as if he had done her a favor. “Besides, you got a couple of cuts. You didn’t lose a limb or get turned or—”

“Fine, fine,” she interrupted. “So I’m peachy. I spent most of the night in a sewer, and I’m nearly dead after getting eaten by a snake, and I’m exhausted and sleep-deprived, but still peachy. And I have a meeting tomorrow. Today. Whatever. Why are you here?”

“We need to prepare for tonight,” he said. “We discovered she’s coming into LaGuardia. We can go to meet her.”

Zoë deflated. “Why me? Why do I have to stop her?”

“Because you’re a target. Because she’s messed with you and you want revenge. Because you know her better than anyone here.”

“She’s cold and ruthless. She cares more about owning something than loving it. She sees her husband as her property. She doesn’t love what she has, but she’ll be damned if she’s going to let anyone else have it. And her concept of revenge is overblown and intense and apparently never-ending. There. You know everything I do. I’m exhausted. And I’m hurt. I can’t fight anymore, Phil.”

She leaned her head back on the couch and her eyes fell shut.

She’s threatening you. And your city.

“And I’m damn tired of whatever voice is in my head,” she grumbled to herself. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes.
“All right. There’s a deli on the corner. They open at six. I’m going to take my antibiotics and about ten ibuprofen, and make some tea. Then I’m going to lie down on my bed and get a nap. After the deli opens, you are going to call them and order me a Reuben with horseradish and a large coffee. I need food and caffeine to keep going. After I have eaten, we can head to the office and I will meet with your writers. And then we’ll face Lucy.”