The Shambling Guide to New York City (8 page)

Z
oë would not have described herself as an anxious person, but when things did manage to faze her, she had to admit to a nervous stomach. After the Godfrey/Lucy incident she had lost five pounds hiding in her hotel room, her digestion rebelling against her. She tried to look at it as a positive, as she needed to slim down a little anyway, but she wouldn’t be writing books recommending the “anxious bulimia” diet.

In the few days leading up to the start of her coterie managing editor job, she managed to vomit only twice, both times after waking up from anxiety dreams involving working in a dungeon, and Phil chaining her screaming, drooling coworkers to the wall to keep them from devouring her—only to attack her himself, biting her neck and draining her dry.

Other than that, she was fine.

Phil had said her first day would be Tuesday, November 2, to get her started on a new pay period. November 1, he informed her, was the Day of the Dead, and a coterie holiday.

She took advantage of her time in October to do research, bemoaning the fact that there was very little current coterie information. Part of her panicked at that—how was she going to deal with modern coterie?—but another part, the writer, the editor, began to think and wonder what holes were there and how she could fill them. There were hints that many coterie in the eighteen hundreds had developed a new, peaceful relationship
with humans by striking deals with undertakers and sometimes even doctors to get food from corpses so they could avoid murder.

Did that still happen? Someone had to supply the coterie in Italy’s Entrails with their fare. If they worked with humans in morgues and, she guessed, blood banks, then there had to be more humans who knew about the coterie.

Was that why Phil had brightened up (as much as he did brighten) at the thought of a book on coterie intended for humans? Perhaps, but it wouldn’t serve a large audience.

She also learned that many undead needed to feed only once or twice a week, as the life they fed on was quite sustaining to their limited needs. They were metaphysical needs, the human remains representing a life force that drove the undead. Their food wasn’t like her food, which needed to constantly create energy to make her organs run.

Never a spiritual or religious woman, Zoë had to shake her head at this. A pint of blood kept a vampire going for four days? She got woozy if she didn’t have a mid-morning snack. And it wasn’t the blood at all, but what the blood represented: life force. If vampires were so passionate and depicted as sexy beasts because they fed on life force, why were zombies not depicted as the scholars of the coterie world?

Her reading showed that zombies were different beasts altogether. The lurching, mindless state only happened when they reached a certain level of hunger; as long as they always had a good supply of brains on hand they functioned just fine. Zoë learned with a smile that they
were
considered the brainiacs of the undead world, due to their frequent consumption of “brain food.”

She found depressingly little information on the economics of the coterie world, and still had only a passing understanding of
what hell notes and blood tokens were. She wondered if a book on coterie economics might be useful at some point.

On the Sunday before her first day, she actually went to a Catholic church, but didn’t spend much time in Mass since she knew next to nothing of the rituals. She thought about filling an eyedropper with holy water, but didn’t know if it would work—or, if it did, if her employer would look at her as if she were carrying a loaded gun into the office.

She didn’t steal the holy water, but she did note the address of the church for future reference. Best to be safe.

That night she took it easy, going over basic rituals. Dealing with the coterie would be like being a page at the United Nations trying to keep up with all the different protocols. Take greetings, for example. Zoë read that vampires were, on the whole, formal and preferred to shake hands. Zombies didn’t want to be touched, they didn’t like their flesh sloughing off.
Can’t blame them.
Many demons were eager to touch you, but would usually see it as an opportunity to suck your life force out, so it was best to meet them with your hands full to avoid any skin-to-skin touch.

There were so many other races to worry about. Zoë had been shocked to note that there was more than one kind of vampire: those that sucked blood, those that sucked the will to live, those that sucked life force… she began making notes in her notebook to keep with her to remind her of what to do—or, in many cases, what not to do.

Never look a brownie in the eye. Never accept an invitation from one of the fae folk. Never sleep with an incubus.

(Had Godfrey been an incubus? It would explain a lot. It would also take all responsibility away from Zoë… she felt like a coward thinking that.)

She finally made herself some tea, took a hot bath, and went to bed early. Plenty of time to worry about faux pas on her first day.

Zoë got up early on November 1 and headed to the train station for a dry run to see how long it took to get to Fifty-First Street. (And when she got there, might as well get breakfast at Bakery Under Starlight. She didn’t know what Carl put in his croissants, but she was convinced it had to be pure crack.)

In forty-five minutes she exited the train and figured giving herself an hour’s commute time would work. She headed north to Bakery Under Starlight, people-watching as she went.

People in cities were so anonymous. She realized they could be anything and she wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t really been looking. It made a weird sort of sense: hide a zombie in a crowd of people who don’t look at one another, even if a lot of people are around, and it’s bound to blend in. Put it in a rural environment with people who know everyone and everyone’s business, and a zombie stands out like a necrotic thumb. Cities were perfect for coterie.

A man wearing dark sunglasses despite the cloudy November day passed her on the sidewalk. He had a quick gait that she would have assumed was a precise, metrosexual style of walking, but something reminded her of that water sprite from the office, Morgen. They were walking in the same direction, so Zoë didn’t have to deviate from her path to watch him. He was dressed well, but a little underdressed for the weather, wearing only a linen suit and no coat, while everyone else was bundled against the unseasonable cold.

The man, to Zoë’s delight, walked into Bakery Under Starlight. She followed him and took her place in line behind him.
Zoë had a hunch that one did not come out and ask if someone was coterie. It probably had the same etiquette-ignorant grace as asking someone what race they were. Still, she was dying to know.

When it was the man’s turn in line, he smiled at Carl. Behind the glasses, he was quite handsome. “Morning, Carl,” he said. “Can I have a Tibetan Blue tea?”

Carl nodded and got a mug ready. “Can I tempt you with a pastry?”

The man grinned wider. “You know you always can tempt me, Carl.”

Zoë shuffled her feet, suddenly trying not to eavesdrop on this blatant flirtation. The man bought two scones along with his tea, and then it was Zoë’s turn. She greeted Carl by name.

“I didn’t think to see you again,” he said, his voice losing its flirtation.

“Your pastries are unmatched, how could I not come back?” she said, smiling, hoping to mend the tension between them regarding the incident of the old homeless woman. “So, do you know everyone?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Pretty much. I’ve got a lot of regulars. What can I get you?”

Catching the cue that he had no desire to talk to her, Zoë made her breakfast order and then sat down with her coffee and pastry.

The café was crowded, but Zoë looked around and realized that a lot of the patrons had a similar…
oddness
about them, like the man she’d stood behind. Some moved with an unearthly grace. Some had hats that sat oddly on their heads, ill-fitting hats that looked as if they had a more important job than just being fashionable. Others had coats with collars pulled up high, and one man looked gray and ill, like a zombie that hadn’t started peeling.

Zoë was the odd woman here. She realized with a start that it was a coterie establishment, like Italy’s Entrails.
That’s why Carl knows everyone. That’s why John was in here.

She looked at the man behind the counter again. There was absolutely nothing otherworldly about him; he seemed like a normal, tall, muscular man, flour dusting his shirt, making his dark hands much lighter than the rest of him.

Zoë shrugged. She had a lot to learn. Maybe she’d be able to tell coterie from humans after working with them for a bit.
It would make life easier, that’s for sure.

A couple of hours drifted by as she read more books on coterie. She sat at the same table she’d been at when she had applied to the job at Underground Publishing. After getting a refill, she checked the bulletin board again. Beside the Underground Publishing flyer now hung a notice about a lost hellhound, a request for a carnivorous-plant sitter while the owner was on vacation, and a flyer advertising the grand opening of a Chinese restaurant, the Jade Crane.

Zoë frowned. That seemed rather out of place among the other, more specifically coterie-focused flyers. Was the Chinese food more tailored to coterie? Chinese coterie? Or was it for coterie who preferred eating Asian people? Zoë shuddered. That one was a little too morbid for thought. She took note of the restaurant’s address and realized it was just a few blocks north. Lunch sounded like a great idea.

For a restaurant celebrating a grand opening, the Jade Crane looked pretty dead, not to mention that the storefront looked thirty years old instead of new. Zoë squinted through the dirty window. A Chinese hostess sat behind a register, wearing a traditional red brocade shirt and black slacks, flipping through
a
Vogue
magazine and glancing at the clock. She looked to be about twenty-five, short and thin.

Zoë poked her head in. “Are you open?”

The woman looked up and narrowed her eyes briefly. After she gave Zoë the once-over, her face broke into a petite, toothy smile and she stretched her hands out. “Of course! Grand opening! Please, come in, sit where you like!”

Zoë smiled back at her and took a seat at the back of the restaurant, where she could people-watch. Or monster-watch. (
Coterie
, she had to remind herself.)

The woman brought her a menu and a glass of water. The restaurant was different from other Chinese restaurants in that it didn’t have the classic bamboo, lucky cats, or scrolls on the wall. Instead the walls were blood-red, making the room dark even in the sunny midday, and decorations were nonexistent. Zoë was the only person in the restaurant.

The woman came to take her order. Zoë ordered some soup and some fried rice. The woman nodded and jotted down the order on a pad. Zoë noticed there was a large scar on her wrist, a burn that looked like a symbol, but she didn’t get a good look. Two Asian women came in, laughing. The hostess bowed briefly to Zoë and ran to attend to them.

While she had been friendly and welcoming to Zoë, she practically groveled before these women. She bowed low several times and spoke in Chinese to them. They were older, one with a bun on top of her head, the other with a graying bob cut. Both were slightly overweight and dressed like upper-middle-class ladies who looked, honestly, out of place in this dirty restaurant. Zoë watched them carefully.

There. A red piece of paper switched from one of the women to the hostess, and she brightened and became, if possible, even more obsequious.
A hell note
, Zoë thought.

The hostess sat them in the middle of the dining room and called a young man from the back room to wait on them, whispering swiftly in low, tense Chinese. His eyes widened and he nodded.

Through all of this, Zoë was dying to find out who, or what, these very important women were. But the dining room began filling up for lunch, and Zoë became busy watching other people, trying to identify the men and women as human or not. The coterie began standing out once she knew what clues to look for. Ways of moving, ways of dressing, and the biggest clue: how the hostess treated them. She welcomed humans, but worshiped the coterie.

After that, the only question was whether they were vampire, zombie, fae, demon, or something else Zoë hadn’t learned about yet.

She pulled out her book and read it discreetly as the food came. She jumped when the empty chair at her table scraped across the floor. In an instant, she was looking into the wide eyes of the homeless woman from the café, who had sat down across from her without an invitation. What had Carl called her? Granny something?

“How did you hear about this restaurant?” the woman asked.

Zoë swallowed her mouthful of rice. “I saw an ad for it at Bakery Under Starlight,” she said. “I was craving Chinese, wanted to check it out.”

The woman nodded and looked pointedly at Zoë’s book, a manual for the Wraith role-playing game. “And the books?”

Zoë bit her lip. She glanced at the woman, then the other patrons, who had to be 75 percent coterie, and then back at the woman. “I’m doing research for my new job. I’m editing a travel book.”

The woman’s eyes widened. “And this travel book is focused on New York City?”

Zoë nodded.

“And the travel book is for…?”

Zoë looked at the patrons and swallowed. She couldn’t be obvious yet, she would sound ridiculous. She finally said, “I’m betting you know the answer to that.”

“Are you a zoëtist?” the woman asked, voice even lower.

“No, just an editor,” Zoë said.

The woman reached over and snagged the edge of Zoë’s hot-and-sour-soup bowl and dragged it across the table. She took a bite and chewed on a mushroom. “She said you weren’t a zoëtist. If that’s true, you should have a talisman. Where is it?”

Zoë was too shocked at the 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.