Star Harbor Nights

"One for the observation deck," the woman said.

The Astronomer Tower, corporate headquarters of Pendleton Publishing and the home office of the Star Harbor Astronomer newspaper, was a popular tourist draw for its ninety-second floor observation deck. For a nominal admission fee, the general public could command a sweeping view of the city's skyline.

"We're closing soon," the ticket seller informed her.

The city's night skies initiative prevented them from keeping the upper levels of the building illuminated after dark, meaning the Astronomer Tower was never used for stargazing.

"That's not a problem," she said, forcing a smile. "I will be coming back down quickly."

Two couples and a family with a little girl disembarked from the elevator that she got on. She was alone for the trip up. There were a couple teenagers smoking in the far corner, but that was the extent of the late crowd.

A tinny voice announced that all guests should head to the elevator within ten minutes. She looked at her watch. Official sunset was less than three minutes away. She moved over closer to the guard rail, which was itself inside a cast iron fence. With one minute to go, she quickly and quietly stepped out of her shoes, hopped over the guard rail, and began climbing over the fence.

The bored attendant finally noticed her when she was almost over the fence. There was no real edge on which to stand on the other side. She stayed, one leg swung over the barrier, watching the seconds tick by on her watch. Numbers flashed through her head. It took a human body only eight seconds to reach ninety percent of terminal velocity. It would take her less than seven seconds to plummet the four hundred and fifty meters or so to the ground.

Timing was everything to her.

Suicide was an unforgivable sin.

Murder was not.

With three seconds to sunset and the attendant shouting, jumping and grasping at her ankle, she launched herself out into space. "Forgive me, God, for what I do!" The words were in her heart, but torn away from her lips by the rush of wind. Three seconds didn't sound like much, but it was enough to plummet almost ten stories. It still wasn't enough time to offer any more heartfelt a prayer for forgiveness, but she tried anyway.

Then the sun, already hidden behind the curtain of buildings, sunk below the invisible horizon, and it wasn't prayers spilling out of her but laughter, high and mad and loud.

 The Astronomer Tower was the tallest building in the area, but in another two seconds she'd fallen another sixteen stories and she was within the deepening shadows of the urban canyon. Arms flailed out, seeking purchase upon the darkness. Her fingers scrabbled and clawed at the dusky shadow-stuff, but it wasn't yet fully formed... it was like trying to climb a wall of gelatin. Great gobs of the stuff were shorn off in her hands.

It slowed her fall, though.

Others might have used the time to think. She would use it to act. If you stopped to think about the impossibility of trying to save yourself from a fatal plunge off the side of a skyscraper, you were already screwed. If you stopped to ponder the plausibility of ripping shadows to shreds and sculpting the ephemeral tatters into great black bat wings in order to glide in a haphazard sort of spiral down to the street instead of simply plummeting straight down--the former, incidentally, being exactly what she did--you might as well not even bother trying.

She touched down hard, though a lot softer than she could have, and laughed even harder as the wings faded back into shadow. She shook her head at the folly and the inventiveness of the woman who'd thrown her off the building. The puta was getting smarter, or perhaps worse, more desperate.

It didn't matter. La Luna Nueva, the New Moon Woman, was back on the streets of Star Harbor. Even better, she was already warmed up.

"Now, what the hell was I supposed to do tonight?" she asked the stunned crowd who had witnessed her fall and her miraculous save. "Was it something to do with killing some Bone Lords?"

Nobody seemed to have an answer, so she answered for herself.

"No, no, not right," she said, frowning fiercely. Then she smiled. "It was everything to do with killing some Bone Lords."

She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored glass of a nearby office building. It was all wrong.

"But first, a change of clothes," she declared. She looked down at her fingers, pale and cold as the distant moon. The nails, which were painted some kind of pale peach color and topped with a glossy clear coat, became a black with zero gloss. They lengthened, and sharpened.

A quick, practiced movement down the front of her rather disheveled pantsuit slit the blouse, skirt, and undergarments down the front without touching her skin. She stepped out of the whole ensemble as easily as she would have shrugged off the jacket. In place of the outfit, deepening shadows clung alluringly to her pale form.

The bitch hadn't been carrying a pocketbook. Was there any ID in the clothes? Luna decided she didn't care. When the sun came up, it wouldn't be her problem.

She was on the job.

"What do you mean the Bone Lords are all dead?" she demanded, holding the weasely little man by his neck and shaking. "They can't be all dead, because I haven't killed them all yet."

"It's all over the street," the man, Jeremy "Slick" Johnson insisted, holding up his hands in a gesture of completely redundant surrender. "Those nut jobs offed themselves, or each other. I don't know... from what I hear, all that was left was skeletons."

"That is what happened to the group I fought last night," Luna admitted.

After her shift began at sunset, she'd popped into the Sands for a few drinks and a few hands of poker, then had gone out hunting. She'd only put a couple down before the writhing and screaming began. It had both amused and irritated her. These memories were only now coming back to her. She didn't question it, or the fact that it hadn't occurred to her earlier. Knowledge flitted in and out of her mind like the moon passed behind clouds.

"So you know about it," Slick said.

"Of course I do," Luna said. "I was only testing. You wouldn't dare lie to me, would you, Slick?"

"Never," Slick said. "I'm the, what, like the go-to guy for information, right? That's what everybody says. Why would I want to endanger my reputation, and my business, by yanking your chain?"

"You'd endanger more than that," Luna said, letting go of him.

"Right, see? No reason to," Slick said. He rubbed his neck. "But, you know, this thing I do, it is a business... so, um, most people pay me."

"You see a coin purse?" Luna said. She glanced down, though as far as she could tell, the concealing shadows were in place. "Don't you dare answer that. You tell me something I don't know, and maybe I'll come up with something for you."

"That's fair," Slick said.

"So... you got anything else?"

"Uh, no."

"That's what I figured."

With no other leads, Luna went back to the spot where she'd last seen any Bone Lords alive... a run down old house in a run down old blue collar neighborhood. They'd filled it with their symbols and ritual paraphernalia, plus enough candles to hold birthday parties for an entire retirement community.

She let herself in through the broken window. It hadn't been broken before she showed up the night before... the cultists cared enough about keeping their hideout a secret to keep up appearances that much.

Except for the fact that the candles were out, the inside of the house was exactly as she remembered it... down to the skeletal corpses splayed out around the living room.

"I guess nobody knew or cared to report the bodies," Luna said. She started to chuckle, but it died in her throat.

As soon as she'd said "bodies", it hit her... the skeletons were still there, but the bodies of the two she'd killed before the spell took over were gone.

There was a rustling sound behind her. Out of reflex, she didn't turn around, but tried to see with the moon's eye. Whenever the moon was out, Luna could see everything that it didn't... anything that was not touched by moonlight... but this house was dark in more ways than one. The symbols painted all over the walls stopped the eldritch sight from reaching inside, leaving her flesh-and-blood eyes only the scant moonlight which filtered in through the curtains to see by.

The darkness gave her plenty of other options to work with, though. She grabbed a candle off the floor and scooped up a patch of blackness with her other hand, rubbing it around rapidly with her fingers until it burst into a dancing dark semblance of flame. She lit the candle from this. The black light it cast was visible only to her, but it illuminated everything.

Candle in hand, she turned and faced the source of the sound. She was hardly surprised to find herself looking into the hollow eye sockets of a walking skeleton... what else could it have been?

A roundhouse kick shattered its ribcage and spine, while giving her a sweeping overview of the rest of the situation. All around her, the dead were rising... eleven in all. She kicked out at one as it rose. It moved jerkily, like footage of a marionette collapsing to the ground viewed in reverse. Her bare heel crushed the thing's forehead to powder, and she turned to elbow another and punch a fourth in the jaw.

That was four down, leaving... eleven. She turned full circle to watching the first skeleton somehow re-integrating itself, the smashed bone pieces pulling themselves back together and levitating back into place.

"This could be fun," Luna said.

The whole group had got to their feet now and lumbered towards her as one. "Lumbered" described the style of gait, but not the speed. The things were very light, and fast moving. She lashed out with a blurry display of punches and kicks, using only one arm as she still held the dark candle with the other.

She pulverized each grasping arm and leering face, only to see them reconstitute themselves almost immediately. It was a futile exercise, except that it was, as she had said, fun... exhilarating, even, the way the ride down from the roof of the Astronomer Tower had been.

She didn't know how to keep them down, yet, but it wasn't as though any of them could do anything to hurt her, either...

Then, she got a little too careless, and one of the skeletal things latched onto the wrist of the arm that held the candle. She felt icy fingers plunging through her heart. She gasped.

Luna had sometimes wondered, in her more philosophical moments, if she even possessed a soul. The moment the dead Bone Lord touched her, she knew that the answer was yes, she did have one... and it was being ripped from her. She turned and yanked herself away with such force that the thing's arm detached from its body, though it still clung to her, filling the very center of her being with icy, palpable dread.

Worse, her frantic maneuver plunged her into the midst of several others, who immediately latched on.

She shrieked, dropping the candle. It rolled around on the floor, black flame still sputtering and casting foul black light that only she could see. She felt like she was dying, and worse, being torn in five directions at once. She tried to wrench herself free, but the skeletons just moved with her.

She stumbled, kicking the candle.

Its black flame licked on her own aura of shadows... licked, and caught.

The flames raced upwards, and in an instant, Luna herself blazed with the improvised dark energy. The icy grips relented at once, and the skeletons fell backwards, but it was too late for them. The dark flame raced up the length of their limbs, burning bone away to nothingness, leaving neither smoke nor ash.

The remaining skeletons, the one whose arm had been clinging to her and six others who had not yet touched her and thus had been untouched by the flame, seemed somehow hesitant to approach.

Luna smiled.

If anybody had been alive in that house to see it, they would not have found it to be a reassuring smile.

She said something in a very old language that she didn't often remember that she spoke.

The bone things hesitated a moment later, then flung themselves at her. If a skull could show expressions, theirs would have been murderous.

It was distressingly short work.

When it was done and she had extinguished her aura, she pondered on what had happened. Was it the shadows that had consumed the skeletons so completely? That struck her as ridiculously unlikely. While the power she served was far removed from whatever unholy energy animated the undead Bone Lords, the latter force was unlikely to find darkness to be wholly inimical.

It had to be the flame, then... the things the Bone Lords had become were so vulnerable to fire that even the idea, the mere shadow of it could destroy them utterly. What would the real deal do? Luna resolved to find out. She'd have to pick up some supplies... like a lighter. A really good one, like the refillable metal ones they sold at truck stops.

If Slick had been telling the truth, then this wasn't an isolated incident... there was a whole city full of boneheads she could torch.

If not, she could always use the lighter on Slick.

Either way, the night was young... and it belonged to Luna.