Free Darkness Calls by Marjorie M. Liu Page B

if the armor was my finger, if it had evolved so without me realizing it, and that perhaps I was becoming some archaic medieval cyborg. I had used everything short of a chain saw to remove the damn thing, and nothing had worked. I had been told it would come off only at my death—and I believed it now. Yet another legacy. Another mystery. An object that fulfilled the desires of its bearer, but with a price.
    The armor had once been much smaller, little more than a ring.
    It had stopped raining. The streets were slick. I drove into downtown Seattle and ended up at Pike Place Market. It was not entirely a conscious choice. I was attracted to areas where the prison veil was thin, and the market—caught between land and sea—was thinnest of them all. Things got loose on a regular basis, though only from the first level of the veil, which housed the rats and cockroaches of the demonic race—those zombie-makers, which had crawled to the top of the food chain in the absence of their stronger brothers and sisters. When the prison failed, when their powerful brethren locked in the outer rings were let loose, those parasite bastards were going to suffer as much as humans. Not that I felt sorry for them.
    I parked the Mustang on the north side of Pike Place Market and took a long walk. Just one of the crowd. I searched for dark auras, but found nothing on the crowded cobble-stone street except humans dressed for a Northwest winter: fleece, jeans, those damn ugly sandals and wool socks, with umbrellas and hoods and baseballs caps to ward off the intermittent rain. Expressions grim and tired as the storm clouds hovering overhead. No one looked happy. But then, this was Seattle. Putting on a dour face was practically part of the wardrobe.
    Mr. King filled my mind. I remembered his voice, wet and smacking with half-chewed food, and Byron was suddenly in my thoughts, as well.
    They always want something. Some just take longer to get around to it.
    I had been shot at, and nearly killed. Grant was heading for what most certainly felt like a trap, and the priest who had invited him had called me a singularly unique name. And then, that piggish little man. Coming to pay a call. To see how things stood.
    All of those disparate pieces belonged together—I could feel it in my gut—but it was like having a box full of fingers, and not knowing which part of the hand I should attach them to.
    I was on the south side of the market, near the big pig statue whose name I had forgotten—except for the fact that Zee and the others always wanted to eat the damn thing. Tourists all around me; and some locals. Everyone minding their own business. Cars, shops, chatter. I watched it all and suddenly felt like the only normal person in a surrealist landscape; as though the world were wavering into something peculiar and alien, while I stayed the same: outsider, unchanging, caught in time. Little more than a constant stranger.
    Near me stood a tall bald man wearing dark sunglasses, an earring, and a white MSU sweatshirt. He held a little boy in one arm, a camera in the other, and when he saw me glancing in his direction, he pointed at the giant pig that other parents had plopped their crying children upon. “Would you mind?”
    Zee rumbled ominously on my skin. I almost said no—wondering what, exactly, this man would say if he knew about all the demons sleeping on my body—but the kid in his arms looked at me with big blue eyes, and I was a sucker. I took the camera, and snapped some shots for them. It was another surreal moment, gazing through a lens at those smiling faces; baby bouncing and his father making little bunny ears with his fingers.
    I wondered how long they would live when the prison veil failed.
    I passed back the camera, waving good-bye as the man’s son continued to ride the pig, patting its head with a chubby hand and laughing delightedly. There must be a way to stop it . You have to. It can’t be hopeless.
    Some way, somehow. I had