Excerpt: Azure City

I’ve probably shared this with you before, but it’s been a while and there are new people on the list (hi new people!) and Azure City comes out in a couple months and it’s what is currently open as I finish last-minute revisions so… here is the current nearly-final draft of the beginning of Chapter 1: The Ghost Town.

If you have read the Dangerous Spirits series, or at least Black Angel, the characters will be familiar to you, but if you haven’t, no worries, the book catches you up.

Port City was the largest city in the Union, but lately to Athos it had felt empty. This was, he was sure, related to being laid off two and a half months ago. When he had a job, he had a purpose for being out in the streets and he was part of the crowd on the sidewalk, rushing with intention. Now the crowds flowed around him when he left the apartment to get coffee or to go down to the corner market, and without purpose, it was harder to match their pace. Worried about getting in people’s way as a short grey fox who walked with a cane, he shrank to the sides of the street, tail wrapped around himself so it wouldn’t get stepped on. The people in the crowd became a mass of shadows with substance, flitting past him and then gone.

He’d stopped at the same coffee shop every morning for years, and the baristas at Jolly Bean had gotten to know him. But now he came down three hours later, when the shifts had changed and Chip the coyote wasn’t working anymore. He sat in the coffee shop from nine to noon for a couple weeks, sending out resumes, until school let out at PCU at the end of May and idle students filled the coffee shop every day.

Athos found five other coffee shops in a two-block radius, but he liked Jolly Bean’s coffee, and three of the five were Starbucks, which would be good for Wi-Fi but less so for coffee, and in the end he just got his Jolly Bean to go and took it back to the apartment, where he sat in his home office—really a large alcove off the living room, separated by a curtain—with his macaw Billy and looked out his window at the fire escape of the building across the way. He’d dressed in his collared shirts for a month after being laid off, then had switched to t-shirts sometime when the weather turned warmer. Today he wore a plain light blue tee to go with his black jeans, which wouldn’t have been comfortable outside for long, but in the air-conditioned apartment were just fine.

Meg said that his sense of alienation was tied to his loss of work, and he supposed she should know. But on this morning in late June, knowing why he felt so alone in a city of millions didn’t help him cope with that feeling.

He opened his email to see if any of the jobs he’d applied to had written back, with a grim certainty that they had not. On average, three out of four applications went completely unacknowledged, while the others got a form response within a week thanking him for considering them, but (1) his resume didn’t suit their needs; or (2) they weren’t hiring for that position anymore; or (3) they weren’t hiring at all anymore. The only exception was one personal response from a cheetah he’d worked with years before telling Athos how sorry she was, but the company had gone bankrupt and was closing up shop, and if Athos found anything she might be good for, to drop her a line.

Today was no different: no responses. He closed his email and looked up at Billy. “Just you and me again today, pal,” he said.

Billy squawked, and the way the light hit his blue and yellow feathers was pretty enough that Athos snapped a few pictures and then uploaded the best one to Insta. He scrolled through the usual pictures there, people’s birds and their breakfasts and dinners, one spectacular ocean sunset from a friend on a sailing trip. He tapped the heart for the ocean sunset and for the bird pictures, and for Fran’s breakfast, because he and Fran had worked together until six weeks ago and he felt he ought to be supportive.

At the top of the screen, a red dot indicated that he had a message. He tapped there and it came up, from a user named allaspots. Curious, he sipped his coffee as he read:

Hey Athos—do you still go by Athos? It’s been forever lol. Anyway it’s me Allan Bell, the hyena from high school. It looks like you’re in Port City and I’m coming out there next week. Let’s get together! I got something to show you, something we would’ve loved in high school. Text me if you want and we’ll figure it out. I get into town July 3^rd so dinner that night?

He’d added his number and signed it “-AA-,” which looked strange to Athos, though he knew it was their high school signoff. Something about it didn’t feel right to him. He stared at it for another several seconds and then shook his head, flicked his ears back and front to clear them. It had just been years since he’d seen it, since he’d thought of himself as part of that group. That was all the feeling was.

Strange signoff aside, the contact felt warm and welcome. During the day, most of their friends worked, and after Jordan had apologetically told him a month ago that she didn’t have time to discuss the latest vampire movie in quite this much detail because she had to finish up a presentation for her board, Athos had tried to be more considerate of other people’s workdays.

Across the street, a lion with ribbons in his mane stepped out onto the fire escape to smoke a cigarette of some kind. Through the open window, Athos caught a whiff of marijuana, but that was almost always the case these days. He had a few cookies and a bag of gummies in the kitchen, but he had so far successfully resisted the temptation to spend his days stoned, as some of his unemployed former co-workers had taken to doing. Not that he thought less of them for it, but he felt that for himself, letting his drug consumption bleed over into the days would be a tacit acknowledgment that he wasn’t expecting to get a job anytime soon.

And of course, he hadn’t. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to.

Afternoons he spent working on his book. In six weeks, he’d written a partial outline, the introduction, half of the first chapter, and two paragraphs of the second. The idea for the book was sound: a non-fiction examination of supernatural phenomena. He believed in it and believed people would be interested, and he had a significant number of experiences to write about that he’d experienced firsthand or been told about secondhand. The events had stuck with him, enough that he’d written them all down soon after, with the idea of this book in his head as early as a decade ago. There was nothing out there as extensive and grounded as this, and there was a huge appetite for supernatural stories.

The problem was that all these experiences had happened not to him, but to Meg and her good friends. He’d been lucky enough to be present for some of them, and to have heard the accounts of others soon after they’d happened, but they weren’t his stories. He had promised—recklessly, he sometimes thought in hindsight, without regretting the intent behind the promise—that he would scrub the personal details of the stories, but that was proving hard to do because the stories were intimately personal.

What was going to set him apart if he couldn’t use the things that nobody else knew about? He’d seen a ghost, but absent the context that proved it was a ghost (which he couldn’t use) and corroborating statements from the other people present (which Meg, Sol, and Alexei wouldn’t provide), his story boiled down to “I saw what looked like a homeless person dressed in a Siberian soldier’s uniform, and then things got very dark and then he was gone.” That was barely enough for a paragraph, let alone a keystone chapter in a book.

But he still believed in his book, and Meg did too, which meant a lot. He’d sent her a draft of the first chapter with most of the personal stuff cleaned out of it. If she approved it, he’d pass it on to Alexei and Sol.

After an hour and a half of research, he’d added a paragraph to the second chapter and called two potential sources, leaving messages, by the time Meg got home. Hearing the click of the front door brought a wag to his tail. “Hi!” he called.

“Hi,” Meg called back. A moment later the otter appeared in the doorway and Athos stood. He held his arms out and Meg walked into them, bringing her brown-furred nose to his.

Sometimes when he held his arms out, she just shook her head if she didn’t feel like a hug, but she almost always came in for a nose-kiss. Today she hugged him back, then settled her paws on his shoulders while his remained on her hips. She felt warm and solid, reassuring and anchoring him to the world. The stiff fabric of her blue suit gave a little under his paws, and the scent of dry-cleaning chemicals wafted to his nose along with the delicate pine scent she dabbed onto her collar each morning. “Good day?” he asked.

“Pretty good. Good session with Patient G. The others were just fine.”

“G was the one with…” Athos found it easier to keep track of Meg’s patients now that he didn’t have a job to keep him busy. “The anxiety around family gatherings?”

Meg nodded. “They opened up more today about one incident they remembered but hadn’t really processed. Dr. Copina said afterwards that I did a really good job navigating them through it.”

That was as detailed as Meg ever got in talking about her sessions, for privacy reasons. “That’s great,” Athos said. “I’ve got chicken marinating for dinner if you want to draw for an hour or so.”

“Not tonight.” She gave him a smile. “Kinda tired and nothing’s inspiring me, so I’ll hang out with you if that’s okay.”

“Always.” His tail wagged.

“I read that first chapter of your book over lunch,” she said, and the faltering of her smile told him what she was going to say before she went on to say it. “I like the writing. It’s really good.”

“But?”

She sighed. “I know you dressed up the Baron Delacroix story so it couldn’t be traced back to me, but…I still felt anxious, reading it. I know it’s a big part of your idea and I’m really sorry.”

“No,” he said, fighting back disappointment. “I promised I wouldn’t use it unless you felt comfortable with it. I’ll—I’ll keep working on something.”

“Did Sol get back to you?”

“No, not yet. I mean, he said he’d think about it, but it sounded more like ‘I don’t want to do that but I’m being polite’ than he was actually going to think about it.”

She reached out and rested her paw on his wrist, which meant a lot. Her love and sympathy was welcome, but it didn’t help him get any farther with his book. And if he didn’t have his book, what the hell was he going to do with his days? “I can talk to him if you want,” Meg offered.

“No,” he said, “but thanks. I don’t want to put pressure on him or anything.” And then, because this conversation was headed toward a dead-end, he cast about for other subjects than Meg’s high-school friends, and that reminded him of what he wanted to tell her, something that wasn’t about his book at all. “Oh! I got a message today from Allan, my high school friend.”

Meg frowned slightly, then her expression cleared. “One of the ‘straight A’s’? Was that the gay one or the lesbian? What a great name for your group, in retrospect, huh?”

Athos splayed his ears. “There were only two of us. Allan’s gay. He knew it at the time, so it was kind of ironic.”

The frown returned. “You know ironic has to be when other people know it’s ironic, right? I coulda sworn you told me there were three of you.”

That strangeness feeling from the signature returned. Had there been three of them? “No, it was just me and Allan,” he said. “Anyway, Allan’s coming to Port City in a week. He wants to have dinner or something on the 3rd.”

“Sure,” Meg said. “Wait, that’s in six days. He wants to see us first thing when he gets into town?”

Athos disengaged from the hug to check his message. “Huh. Yeah, he says he gets in that day and wants to see us that night.”

“Seems a little urgent when he hasn’t talked to you in, what, ten years?”

“Um, let’s see, I think last time was when I asked if he was coming to the five-year reunion and he said no, so that would’ve been a little before when I met Alexei, so, yeah, ten years or eleven.”

“What could he have to tell you that’s so urgent he wants to see you the day he arrives, but not so urgent he can’t tell you in a message?”

“I don’t know.” Athos stared down at his phone.