The Nimble Man by Christopher Golden, Thomas E. Sniegoski Read Free Book Online

He made me He broke the mold."
    The last board came away from the frame with a metallic
shriek as the old nails were torn from the wood, and the door stood revealed.
    "Allow me," Doyle said, sliding back a corroded
deadbolt on the door with some minor difficulty. The rusted joints squealed as
he yanked the door open, a damp, ancient smell wafting out to greet them.
    "Smells old," Eve observed, following the mage
through the doorway and out onto what appeared to be another, far more
antiquated version of a subway platform. "Even by my standards."
    "It should," he replied, raising his arm to shed
further light upon the forgotten chamber. "It's been sealed up tight since
1899 when the major construction was begun on the subway tunnels above us. This
was part of the old Grand Central Depot."
    There was definitely something to this place, Eve thought,
something in the air that hinted of a power as old as Creation. Whatever was
going on here, there was more to it than rains of toads or some antisocial
sorcerer hiding out. She walked the platform, her footfalls leaving prints in
the inch-thick dust that had settled there since the close of the nineteenth
century.
    "Very good, Lorenzo," she heard Doyle say to
himself, his voice as sibilant whisper in the lost station. "But not good
enough."
    She sensed movement close by, the stale air rushing around
her, and turned to see a shape shambling out of the darkness of the tunnel they
had just journeyed through. Eve tensed for a fight, but it was the homeless man
who had tried to warn them off before. She frowned. Doyle had cast a spell
before to blind people back on the platform to their presence. But this filthy
creature had seen them.
    He leaped up from the tracks to the platform, where he
landed without making a sound.
    "It appears there is more to our poor soul than meets
the eye," Doyle said. "I'd thought madness responsible for his
resistance to magick. Now it seems not."
    The man strode toward them, his duct-taped shoes making a
strange scuffing sound upon the concrete-and-dust-covered surface of the
platform.
    "What gave him away?" Eve asked, watching the
figure with a predator's gaze. "It was the seven-foot jump that clinched
it for me."
    "I'll leave you to deal with this complication,"
Doyle said, his voice reaching her from somewhere on the platform behind her, "while
I endeavor to bring our search to an end."
    Eve didn't respond to Doyle, choosing instead to keep her
eyes upon her would be attacker. "Don't want any trouble," she told
the man.
    The homeless man stopped his advance, glaring at her with
eyes that now seemed to glow with an eerie inner power. "The Mage must not
be disturbed," he roared, in a new and terrible voice.
    She wondered if he was possessed.
    But then the man began to grow and his clothes tore as his
musculature was altered, bones twisting grotesquely along with his flesh. As
she watched the transformation, she doubted that this thing had ever really
been human at all. Spiny protrusions erupted from the new flesh beneath the
old. The creature reared back, stretching to its full height, and she saw that
it had more than doubled in size, torn skin hanging from its body in tatters.
    "For nigh upon a century have I guarded this place,"
its voice rumbled through a mouth filled with jagged, razor teeth. "I
shall not fail in my duty now."
    It came at her then with speed belying its size. She dodged
from its path, leaping onto the wall and clinging there, insectlike.
    The demon fixed her in its gaze, head cocked, yellow eyes
glinting with surprise. It tilted its head back and sniffed the air as she
hissed. Eve sprang at it from her purchase upon the wall.
    "Vampire," it growled in disgust, slapping her
viciously away, the sharp protrusions that adorned its body shredding the soft
suede of her Italian coat as well as the delicate pale flesh beneath.
    Eve rolled across the filthy floor and came up quickly,
coiled upon her haunches. She felt the bestial side of her