The Shambling Guide to New York City (9 page)

“I have soup,” the woman said, as if Zoë were stupid. “I don’t need anything else.”

Zoë shrugged, and after the waiter left, she told the woman, “I have no idea what a talisman is.”

The soup was going into the woman’s mouth faster than Zoë could track, and she didn’t spill a drop. “You are human. Working with coterie. You have no talisman. You carry no weapons. You’re going to last one, maybe two hours.”

“Hey, how do you know I’m unarmed?” she asked, forcing her voice to stay a whisper.

The woman stopped eating long enough to meet her eye. “I can always tell.”

“I can take care of myself,” Zoë said, hating how petulant she sounded.

“You ever fight a hungry vampire? A mad zombie? An incubus?”

Zoë’s eyes flicked to the other patrons again, and she sighed. “No.”

The woman nodded. “You’re stupid. But I will teach you. Come with me, I’ll keep you alive.”

She stood then, and left the room, her braid swinging. A few of the patrons looked at her with fear on their faces.

Emotions warred within Zoë: irritation at this woman’s audacity in insisting Zoë would die, annoyance that she fueled the fear Zoë had been fighting, and a small, intrigued glee that she had, perhaps, found a kindred spirit.

She dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table and ran after the woman.

Zoë caught up with her halfway down the block. The woman walked with purpose, not meeting anyone’s eyes, more like a Wall Street broker than a homeless woman.

“So what’s your name, anyway?” Zoë asked, putting her hand on the woman’s shoulder to slow her down.

Immediately the hand was trapped in the woman’s strong grip and twisted in a way that caused shooting pains up Zoë’s arm. The woman kept walking. “You don’t grab someone in the city. You just died.”

“I just died?” Zoë asked, trying to get her hand free.

The woman let her go. “If I had been something else, you would have died. You have no reaction time, no common sense. She has faith in you, Zoë-Life, but I do not.”

“Who are you? Who is
she
? Where are we going?” Zoë shook her hand, trying to get feeling back into her numb fingers.

“I am Granny Good Mae. You will meet her in time. Right now we’re going to the park.”

They made it to Central Park, which was sparsely populated on the cold day. Granny Good Mae found a good-size rock with
a view of the Lake and sat down. “You have many questions. So do I. We must get to know each other.”

“Uh, OK,” Zoë said, and sat down beside her.

Granny Good Mae watched a jogger run past in a sweatshirt, shorts, and gloves. “You came with me—not without question, but you came with me. Why were you so trusting?”

“Because you are the only other human I’ve met who knows what’s going on. I wanted some answers from the outside.”

“How do you know I’m not one of them?”

“Because they practically wet themselves when they see you,” Zoë said bluntly. “When I first saw you, I thought they were just mad because they didn’t want a homeless person in their swank café. But at lunch today it was more obvious—you terrify them.

“And now it’s my turn,” she said before Granny Good Mae could reply. “Why have you taken an interest in me if I’m so hopeless?”

“She told me to,” the woman said simply. “And maybe I needed someone too. But I don’t think so.”

She
again. Zoë wondered if Granny Good Mae was a schizophrenic.

“OK. How do you know about the coterie?”

Granny Good Mae lay back on the rock as if it were a feather bed. “Ahhh, how indeed. I was the child of an American soldier and a Japanese woman. A zombie bit my mother when I was a girl. My mother was a doctor. She had me serving the coterie of my village, stealing brains from the mortuaries, mostly. I returned her to death when I was twelve after she tried to attack me when the food supply ran low. At that moment I dropped the name she had given me, I was No One, and began studying how to hunt them.”

Zoë listened in rapt silence. Was this for real?

“I had tried to understand the balance of the human-and-coterie relationship, but if one of them attacked a human, there
was no more balance. At first, my skills were self-taught. It was a matter of necessity. After I killed my mother, the food supply was fully cut off for the coterie in my village. They started attacking humans. Since I knew the coterie, I was the only one who could protect my people.”

She paused and stared at her hands, with their short chipped nails and many scars. “I failed. The coterie doomed themselves when they finally overtook the village, once they had eaten everyone, there was no one left to eat. This is why they need a balance with humans, you see. They can’t overfish their ocean. I escaped into the mountains. I was faster than the zombies and the vampires couldn’t follow me during the day. I ended up at a monastery that was under siege from zombies. I had my grandfather’s sword, and I easily identified the alpha zombie and destroyed it. This distracted the remaining zombies, allowing the monks to leave the fortress and attack. Together we defeated the horde, and the monks took me in as repayment. They taught me their martial art, s
shén lièrén, death hunting, which is focused on coterie hunting. They also taught me the branch of herbalism that uses hell note magic combined with herbs to support people attacked by coterie. When I was seventeen, they called me an adult and sent me to my father, who worked at the Pentagon.”

“Did you tell him what you knew about the coterie?”

“No, no one would have believed me. When I was older, I got a job in the CIA thanks to my father’s connections. I became an assassin. I left China in shame and ended up, later, here. Which is where I call home.” Her eyes had gone misty.

“Wow,” was all Zoë could think to say.

“How were you planning on staying alive while working with creatures who think you’re a walking, talking cheeseburger?”

“Phil told me he would keep me safe in the office.” Zoë felt very naive.

“And outside?”

“I hadn’t thought that through,” she admitted.

“You’re dead again, then.”

Zoë shivered. “What was this talisman you asked me about?”

Granny Good Mae extended her arm, and her ragged sweater pulled back. On her wrist was a brand, a circle with a curved icon like a fang in the center. “My mother gave me this after she turned. If you work among coterie, this labels you as a human who is an ally, one who should not be touched. Of course, they are not supposed to touch any human against their will, but we wouldn’t need police if humans did what they were supposed to, so why do we assume the coterie will do what they are supposed to?”

Zoë winced at the puckered skin surrounding the brand. “That can’t have been pleasant,” she said lightly.

“Your story now,” Granny Good Mae said.

Zoë was almost afraid to tell; she felt like Roy Schieder looking at his appendectomy scar while shark hunters told their war stories. “Mine isn’t nearly as interesting, but”—and she told her story, complete with Godfrey and Lucy—glossing over some of the more shameful, hiding-in-a-chest details—and ending with the decision to check out the Jade Crane restaurant.

“My boss, Phil, the vampire, has promised I’m protected inside the office,” she said again, trying to convince herself more than the old woman.

“Here is your problem,” Granny Good Mae said, staring into the cloudy sky. “No matter how much they trust you, they will never teach you how to protect yourself against them. They don’t want you to learn how to turn on them. They are not like us. They’ll even tell you that if you ask them. Any coterie who tells you otherwise is trying to get something from you, probably food. Even if you’re working with them, or for them, you
can never forget that. To most of them, you are a talking bowl of noodles. Sentient noodles that can be useful, but still more tasty than anything else. And if you forget that, you will be doomed.”

Doomed. She didn’t like the sound of that.

“But I will teach you,” Granny Good Mae said. “Come see me. Mornings. After work. Weekends.”

“All of that?” Zoë asked, hoping she had misheard.

“You should have been training since you were ten. We have some catching up to do.”

Zoë groaned.

Winter is a prime time to visit New York, as people are bundled up to the eyes against the cold. Coterie with more nonhuman features have a better chance to wrap coats and hats around themselves and blend in with the humans in the daylight.

In the summer, the city’s oppressive heat makes movement easy only under the dark of night, as most people are wearing as little as possible. Bundling up for camouflage attracts more attention than horns and a tail.

The downside to this is that if your body normally runs hot, making a coat and hat oppressive, then in the winter you’re forced to settle for the nightlife. But you’re probably here for the nightlife anyway, right?

Z
oë rubbed the bruises on her forearms and ribs; training with Granny Good Mae had been more intense than she had expected, and she wasn’t really in shape for a two-hour workout. But the woman had put her through the paces last night in Central Park, learning what she knew, then showing her the attacks of the different coterie. Zoë had been amazed that the woman had told her more about coterie in two hours than she’d learned in two weeks of research.

This morning, all she’d had to do was run three miles. At least Granny Good Mae had met her in Brooklyn so she could get a shower afterward.

Zoë still wasn’t sure where the woman slept.

Unless you got her on the topic of “she,” Granny Good Mae seemed more like a zealous trainer than an insane homeless woman. Zoë considered telling her she could make a lot of money as a personal trainer, but after an hour with the woman, it became clear that she was exactly where she wanted to be, dirty clothes and reputation and all.

After her vigorous workouts, Zoë was aching and exhausted as she walked into the destitute theater that was her new office. She left the sunlight behind and entered the tomb-like basement full of monsters, with few exits.

Good lord. I’m crazy.

“Hello?” she said tentatively into the theater, and immediately
felt stupid. She had every right to be here, and she knew where to go. She quickened her pace and went through the door leading backstage.

An irritated voice drifted out of one of the dressing rooms. “Morgen, will you ever learn to respect my space?” The voice was feminine and booming and frightening, as if being sent over a loudspeaker. This was a woman Zoë would never want to cross.

She poked her head into the dressing room. This one was much larger than Phil’s, as if for the chorus, with a line of lit mirrors and dressers down a long wall. Only two people sat in the office at that moment: Morgen, the pink-haired sprite, who perched on the edge of a desk, grinned down at a black-clad, black-skinned gothy woman with long black hair, who gripped a heavy book in her hands and glared up at Morgen. Her dark eyes glinted. She was black, not like of African descent, but black like a shadow. Inky, almost. Zoë’s eyes swam briefly as if they wanted to get lost in the void that was this woman’s skin.

“This is my sacred area,” she said. “You have to ask first.”

The water sprite shrugged. “If I had asked, you wouldn’t have let me in.”

The woman put her book down. “Fine. What do you want?”

Morgen leaned over, and the woman tried not to flinch at her disrespect of the space. “The new managing editor. She’s human.”

“Aye, that’s what Phil says,” the woman said, moving a philodendron away from Morgen’s encroaching backside. “He said she’s strangely astute and has lots of experience with publishing. She’s not affiliated with Public Works. He said it’ll be nice to get new blood in here.”

“That’s good to know,” Zoë said. “Although I don’t like the phrase ‘new blood.’ ”

The women’s heads whirled around to look at her. Morgen grinned; the gothy woman’s eyes narrowed. Zoë nearly took a step back: the woman didn’t have any whites; her eyes were all black. Zoë could barely determine features on the shadow in front of her.