Work Text:
Cities have souls–that’s common knowledge. It’s what makes people fall in love with them, and work for them, and build for them, and live and die for them. Cities have souls, so it’s no wonder they have dæmons.
They appear largely unobserved. Streets are full of people and dæmons and animals all going about their business; it’s not difficult to blend in.
But cities aren’t people, and the shapes their dæmons take aren’t animals, not quite.
* * *
Boston is a city of alleys and twisting roads and in the back streets of the north side something walks through the snow, the drifts muffling a sound that is like men shouting, or maybe children crying, and hiding footprints that are brown as molasses.
Often, something ambles up through Jamaica Plain, leaping from rooftop to rooftop with one ragged ear cocked, claws just barely retracted and fur stiff with salt, until it naps on the gravestones in Granary. It watches visitors through lazy eyes and and washes its coat until it shines in the sun exactly like the dome on the Capital Building.
In the harbor, a long shadow undulates under the ships and slips into the pipes that empty into the water, and the sound that echoes out from the sewers is like looms clacking.
* * *
Chicago has an enormous shaggy shape that wanders down Michigan undisturbed in the small hours of the night when the sidewalks have been rolled up and blows sweet-smelling breath on the people sleeping in the parks.
Sometimes a body, hard-shelled, welded and determined, swims the path of an familiar river in the body of an alien one, and wings from rooftop to rooftop in the Loop with feathers that smell like smoke.
Something lean with fangs the color of old iron strides under the El tracks and walks the whole city a thousand times over before the sun sets.
* * *
In New Orleans, there’s something huge and pale and toothed that slides through the sewers and frightens the sanitation workers, leaving behind the smell of smoke or sugar or rot.
Or sometimes there’s a shape that smashes bottles on the levees, and crows from the windows of the French Quarter at two o’clock in the morning, and tangles its antlers in the Spanish moss in the first hours of the dawn.
There’s something that dances in the thickest part of the crowd on the corners during the parades, the part packed shoulder-to-shoulder immovable, with beads and chains looped around its wrists.
* * *
They watch as people move through their homes–their children, their supplicants–and they wait. They see people fall in love, and work, and build, and live and die.
They watch, and they wonder.