The Last Smile in Sunder City (The Fetch Phillips Archives #1) - Luke Arnold Page 0,30

The devil would have to wait.

“Okay, little ones. You happy to walk yourselves home or do I need to call your parents?”

“Fuck you.”

Here we go. Little redhead’s balls finally dropped.

“Something to say, Curly?” I asked. “Ready to defend your noble cause? Of course, you look like you’ve done this dance a few times. That’s where all those nasty holes in your clothes came from, right? Taking hits from shivs and shrapnel while fighting off Magum on the mean streets of Sunder City? Looks to me like they were cut with kitchen scissors.”

He pulled back his jacket to reveal a long knife. He unsheathed it slowly, making a big fat moment of it, like we were all supposed to gasp. At least he held it the right way around.

He might have practiced a few pretend fights in the mirror but his lunge was sloppy. I dropped my steel, grabbed his attacking hand and twisted him around. When I was done, I’d taken his spot in the circle, with my back to the wall, just in case his leadership had inspired a last-minute assault.

I didn’t need to worry. The kids flanking him cowered back on instinct. I held his knife-hand away from me and a twist of his arm locked him in position. Then I raised my other hand and whipped him across the face.

It wasn’t a big hit. It wasn’t an angry hit. It was the shittiest little slap I could manage. It made us both look stupid. So I did it again. And again.

It didn’t feel good and it didn’t feed the devil but it proved my point: he was no leader, I was no great adversary, and no boy in that room was tough enough to say anything about it. Even the pale-faced blubberer with the broken knuckles was crawling towards the door. After a dozen little slaps, each less exciting than the last, I put my boot into his backside and kicked him across the floor. He tripped over his feet and landed on his knees.

“Everybody out,” I said, as casually as possible.

They shuffled quickly to the exit. Redhead looked up at me with nervous little eyes and I pointed a finger at his half-pink face.

“You. Stay.”

10

It didn’t take much to get the kid to talk. I asked him where this Dog-man was and he told me: Stammer Row. A filth-filled alley behind the buildings that fronted Main Street. Backdoors and dumpsters and plenty of walls to hold back the wind. In my desperate days without a bed, I’d always sought out lonely places to sleep: abandoned buildings or subway cars. I preferred solitude when I fell on misfortune, but my time out in the elements had never been for long. After a few weeks on the street I might have sought out some kind of society too.

I was a stranger on Stammer but I didn’t look out of place. Uptown, among the elites of the city, I might worry about fitting in. With my patched-up clothes and alcoholic stare I blended into Stammer like a local.

The street was full of lean-tos and curled-up figures under sheets of old cloth. The floor was lined with palettes and crates to drain the water from beneath them. During the winter, they would be huddled in groups, all pressed together or wrapped around their neighbors. I suppose it wasn’t only the cold but the companionship. I was almost jealous. I couldn’t recall the last time someone fell into my arms for the night. I guess I could always go down to Stammer if I felt like a cuddle.

The faces paid me no notice as I passed them. Despite the range of species, every resident looked remarkably similar. Each visage was covered with the same creases, the same sadness and the same gray shade of city dirt.

Beneath a brown blanket that had once been white, a balding stump of a tail rested on the cold cement. I coughed and the bundle shifted, revealing a somewhat familiar face.

“Oh no.” The words slid out my mouth without thought of sensitivity. “Pete.”

All Lycum went through a change when the Coda hit, causing the half-Human–half-animal combination to became unstable. One of Pete’s eyes was blue, the other topaz yellow. His nose was mostly Human but one nostril was stretched wide and painted black like burnt leather. His face, head and body were covered in scrappy patches of mottled fur. He had one Human hand and one that was a twisted mixture of fingers and claw. Amongst