Kelsey drops down into the alley like a stone, half shifting in mid-air so Novak will recognize her. She keeps her wings, though, to soften the landing.
The Old One’s many eyes focus on her and it exudes annoyance at her distraction.
She glares right back. “You think you know glamour, do you? You think you can use my city?”
The Old One huffs disdainfully and gnashes its teeth. Fleshy tentacles curl and whip through the smoke, eager to get on with its horrific business.
“I don’t think so.”
Kelsey goes down on one knee and places both palms against the wounded pavement. She can feel the threads of abused glamour twisted and knotted within the smoke cloud. Through her palms she senses how the wrongness radiates outward, disturbing the whole city. And if she focuses, she can feel exactly which threads to yank to make it all fall apart.
She yanks.
The integrity of the smoke cloud falters and the Old One lets out a surprised hiss. Then Kelsey flares her wings wide and reaches out through her palms to the pavement, the alley, the streets beyond, and she pulls the citylight into herself. She begins to glow with orange incandescence, the artificial light of a thousand streetlamps growing brighter and brighter until she fills the alley with blinding modernity and the Old One flees.
Kelsey lets go of the light and for a moment all she can do is cling to the blacktop, exhausted and blinded by her own trick. The city should not have lent her such an ability, not in her blasphemous state of being, but she is nonetheless glad that it did. With a sigh, she lets go of her wings and finishes the transformation into her human-form.
She stands and turns to face the shell-shocked Novak. The pavement has gone dead again, unfortunately while still wrapped around his legs. Kelsey stumbles over to him, shivering with cold and adrenaline, and she kneels down to coax the pavement off of him. After a minute of her gentle whispering, it melts back down and resumes its former shape.
Novak stumbles, almost falls. Eventually he finds his voice again. “A—are you a guardian angel?”
She blinks at him. “Even if I were, I wouldn’t be yours.”
“But … ” He leaves his mouth hanging open for a moment before shutting it and looking away. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Kelsey,” she says, with impulsive honesty.
“I … need to sit down,” he says but makes no move to do so.
Another wave of shivers runs through her fragile human flesh. “Let’s find somewhere warm. Come.”
It takes Novak three cups of coffee and half an order of cheese fries at an all-night diner before the interrogation instinct supplants the shock. After what he saw, Kelsey doesn’t see much use for denial, so she answers his questions more or less truthfully.
“So what are you, if not an angel?”
“A grotesque.”
“Are there others like you?”
“I’m unique,” she says, which is true though not the answer to the question he meant.
He shakes his head. “Look—it’s not that I’m not grateful, but why did you help me?”
“I protect.” She shrugs uncomfortably. “Humans, Lorefolk, the city itself … from each other. That’s what I do.”
“Lorefolk?”
“Things like me, and like it.” The pronoun alone makes her want spit again, though she contains the impulse. “And others like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
“It?”
“An Old One.”
He rubs his face with one hand, as if her freely given answers only serve to frustrate him more. “None of this makes any sense.”
She shrugs, not knowing what to say to that, and watches the waitress refill Novak’s mug.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything?” he says for the third time, in between questions.
She shakes her head. “Grotesques don’t eat.” Her human-form might be able to, but now doesn’t seem like a good time to experiment. She feels dizzy and lightheaded, and all knotted up in the midsection.
“You’re looking pretty human to me right now. Come on, try some.” He pushes the half-eaten plate of cheese fries across the plastic table-top towards her.
Kelsey picks up a single fry and puts it in her mouth. The sensation on her tongue is foreign, overwhelming, and not entirely pleasant. She works her jaw the way she watched him do and swallows it. Her midsection seems to respond, though she can’t parse out whether the reaction is positive or negative.
“So? What do you think?”
She frowns, considering. “Being human is problematic.”
Novak laughs. “Believe it or not, cheese fries are the easy part.”
She pushes the plate back across the table. She does not want to learn how to be human. Not now, not ever. This is a temporary alliance between two protectors of the city and nothing more. The task at hand is all that matters.
She says, “You should know: what I did in the alley with the light just spooked it, didn’t get rid of it for good. The Old One’s got your taste in its mouth now. It will come back for you.”
His hand holding the coffee mug freezes halfway to his mouth. He sets the mug down cautiously, as if afraid his muscles will betray him. “It could be out there killing people right now.”
“No, that’s not likely.” Kelsey shakes her head. “It’s you the Old One wants now.”
Kelsey rides in his car back to his apartment, and she gives him instructions to turn all the lights on and stay inside until dawn. Just in case, she walks a quick circuit of all the rooms, painting the walls with a subtle glamour of disinterest and distraction. Noto see here, move along. She hopes it will be enough. There is work to be done, and she cannot bring him where she needs to go. On the fire escape outside his window, she transforms back into herself and takes to the air.
She approaches Museum Campus from the north, flying low over Grant Park and Lake Shore Drive. The Field Museum, in all its Neoclassical glory, sits atop a well-manicured grassy hill with the Shedd Aquarium nestled against the lakefront some three hundred feet to the left. An expansive flight of steps leads up to the four massive Ionic columns of the museum’s north entrance. Kelsey cannot get in that way, of course, not in the middle of the night.
She shims open the latch on a top floor window, slides through the narrow space, and drops down into an empty office room. Peering out into the hall, she checks for cracks of light under the other doors; no one appears to be working this late. Good.
The upper floors, reserved for curators and research staff, are arranged in a disorienting grid of look-alike hallways. Kelsey finds the nearest stairwell and descends into the public-access portion of the museum, and the door at the top of the stairs swings shut and autolocks behind her.
She tried propping the door one time, but the electronic security system tattled on her and a guard fixed the problem before she got back. Funny how it’s harder to break out than in.
The second-floor balcony offers a stunning view of the marble-floored main hall below. The hall stretches all the way between the north and south entrances and holds some of the larger items on display, including two taxidermied African elephants and the biggest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the world.
The skeleton is named Sue. Kelsey doesn’t understand the desire to truss up dead things and show them off, and she especially doesn’t understand the need to name them. She wishes the humans wouldn’t clutter up beautiful architectural spaces.
One hop and she’s over the balcony railing, wings snapping open to guide her descent. She lands almost silently, nothing more than a whisper of claws on marble, and darts through a doorway on one side. She runs down a long hallway lined with more crass displays of dead animals. In the back, the hallway opens up into a high-ceilinged exhibition hall wherein her destination lies: a full size replica of a Maori meeting house.