A brick-and-glass monolith on State Street, the Harold Washington Library devours an entire city block in downtown Chicago—an impressive feat of architecture, and also Duncan’s daytime resting place. Like most grotesques, Duncan has a penchant for dramatic buildings.
Kelsey finds him on the broad balcony that circles the top floor. She lands beside him, drops down on one knee in a quick obeisance, and straightens. Duncan seems pensive tonight, and the rain slicks his shale-gray skin giving him a polished look. The feathers of his headcrest are the color of olivine—a deep greenish hue that darkens to black when wet.
Staring out over his city, he says, “What news of the Old One?”
Kelsey spits over the rail with savage disgust. “It has begun taking human lives, and messily. The police are investigating already. Problematic.”
“Find out what they know. Use it if you can.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
He turns to look at her, meeting her reluctance with a stern command in his eyes. “How do you think? The Change, of course.”
She spits again. “Fantastic.”
The first time, she was only a child and she thought she was dying. Her claws shrunk to useless, flat nails; her pale gray skin soured to a disgusting pink shade; her silver crest feathers yellowed like old paper and curled into strings of hair. Worst of all her wings melted away, feathers deliquescing and bones softening like hot wax, and the drops of her flesh vanished before they hit the ground as if the limbs had never existed.
She lived, but sometimes wished she hadn’t.
The other grotesques called her “half-breed” and “werehuman.” It didn’t matter that pure bloods were rare; it didn’t matter that few if any of them could claim a heritage untainted by humanity. The Change cursed her alone, and so she grew apart from them.
As she takes to wing, Kelsey’s stomach clenches with disgust at the thought of becoming that version of herself she has fought so hard to suppress. Duncan sends her forth to the task as if the Change were a gift and not a reason for shame. He knows what it costs her, but it doesn’t matter. Anything and everything in service of the city.
Kelsey wonders: if she is not a true grotesque, why does the city still compel her? Surely her human-self would let her sense of duty slide.
The question will have to wait for tomorrow night. Sunlight pales the cloud cover to the east, dull gray light invading the orange city-glow. She already feels the sluggishness of dawn pulling at her, turning her wing-strokes clumsy. She flies south to the university—her beautiful neo-Gothic university—where her own daytime resting place awaits. She takes her post atop the stone archway of Hull Gate and settles down, camouflaged by the city’s glamour to look like an architectural flourish, a gargoyle of the inanimate stone variety.
The city sighs relief as somewhere out there the Old One quiets too. Kelsey’s eyelids slip closed.
The storm blew off during the daylight hours, leaving the night cold and newly dry. Kelsey stretches her wings in the fading twilight and launches into the air to begin tracking the groans and shivers of the streets. The Old One has awoken, too, and the city hunkers down to endure the long hours ahead.
Tracking is slow business. The Old One keeps to a particular course for several blocks, then suddenly zigzags as if it knows it’s being followed and is trying to shake her. She must stop often to listen for the worst creaks and complaints from the pavement below. Perhaps if she were faster, perhaps if she could see her quarry—but “perhaps” is worth its weight in air.
So she keeps moving.
Up ahead the city wails softly to itself, the sound emanating from a spot too ravaged to send out a louder distress call. Another alley, chosen more hastily than the last kill site. Happenstance, or escalation? If the Old One is escalating, this won’t be the only tonight. Kelsey drops onto the edge of a rooftop to survey the damage.
The scene below is a blood splatter analyst’s wet dream: the full five liters sprayed in a spectacular starburst that spans the alley and climbs the brick walls on either side. No one is allowed close to the body—or what’s left of it—before the photographers finish their work, lest they trample the evidence.
A pair of detectives huddle off to one side, alternately staring and trying not to stare at the bloodbath while they wait for the forensics team to give them the okay. One of the detectives is tall and too narrow at the shoulders for his height, so his trench coat hangs loose on his skinny frame. The other’s somewhat shorter, somewhat older, and working on his coffee-and-donuts belly.
Kelsey drops quietly to the ground several yards away from them, landing barefoot on the wailing blacktop. Her clothes will be a problem soon—shorts and a tank top and no shoes in the middle of October—since her grotesque-form doesn’t mind the cold. Nothing to be done about it now.
With a deep breath, Kelsey reaches within herself for the closed door, the locked vault, the sealed box—every mental metaphor she used to suppress her blasphemous other half—and she spins the locks, releases the seals, turns the knob and
The Change snaps through her more swiftly than the first time, the pressure of being bottled up making for a rapid release. She wavers on her too-small human feet with their useless short toes and almost meets the pavement the hard way before her new sense of balance kicks in. The cold starts to seep into her weak human flesh. Time to get this over with.
Twisting a scrap of glamour around herself, Kelsey fashions a fluffy coat and shoes that do nothing to warm her shivering human-form. At least she’ll look a little less odd. She lifts the rest of the glamour slowly, sliding into the realm of human awareness as if strolling into view.
The tall detective notices her first and closes the distance in six strides. “Ma’am, I need you to get behind the line. This is a crime scene.” He puts a guiding hand on her elbow, though she does not let him pull her away.
“No explosives,” she says softly, looking past him at the remains.
He freezes. Then his hand drops from her arm to hang limp at his side. “What did you say?”
“You won’t find any traces of explosives,” she elaborates. “Just like the last one. Or have there been more?”
Not so subtly he sweeps back his trench coat to rest his hands on his narrow hips, the right one within easy reach of his gun. “If you could come with me, I’ll need to ask—”
“No. No police stations, no interrogation rooms. When you’re ready to talk, you tell me what you know about the case, and then I’ll take care of your problem.” She waves a hand in the vague direction of the carnage.
“Look, I don’t know who you think you are sweetheart, but this is a homicide investigation.”
“You’re out of your depth. You need my help. Call me when your ego deflates enough to admit it.”
Kelsey tosses a folded scrap of paper between his feet, and his eyes track it. By the time he glances up again, she has wrapped herself in the glamour and faded from view.
After her first Change, she went to Duncan for guidance. Or for penance, or absolution perhaps—she didn’t know what she expected from him, but whatever he could give, it had to be a step up from the hollow dread inside her.
She explained to him what had happened, though she doubted he hadn’t already heard a secondhand account. Still, he let her speak until she fell quiet, then let the silence stretch for several seconds.
Finally, he answered, “And what would you have me say to this?”
“Well,” Kelsey hesitated, knotting her fingers together. “Should I leave the clan?”
Duncan frowned. “I do not know. The city will decide.”
She looked away, cautiously persistent. “You could decide.”
“If you’re looking to me for a way out, for an excuse to run from your duties, you’ll not find it here.”
“We all know I am an abomination, not fit to serve the city.”
Duncan’s mouth quirked. “If you truly believed that, you would not need to ask my permission to go.”
One on the North Side, one on the South Side. Kelsey decides to wait for the detective’s call at an intermediate location, or as close as she can get to one. The Tribune Tower just north of the Loop has a glamour relay atop it and comes with additional benefits, such as five hundred feet of gloriously intricate neo-Gothic limestone facade. She lands on the highest peak of the building, with a pleasant view from above of the eight flying buttresses that circle the uppermost floors.
With architecture like that, the Tribune has its own grotesques, but luckily they’re away from their roost for the night. Kelsey needs to tap into the glamour relay, and she doesn’t want to be disturbed.
