Free The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty Page B

theft of her soup to respond right away. She signaled the waiter and asked for another bowl of soup, then asked the woman if she wanted anything else to eat.
    “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 witha 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