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the light and the dark blending into my glass. I picked it up, tucking the vial into my bandolier, and raised it to her.
    "Thank you, Baba. Please call on me if you have need." I sipped the drink, set it on the bar with a bill and turned to go, but a thought grasped me at that moment, cold and hard. Something Baba Yaga had said. I turned back to her. She raised one eyebrow, waiting. "Baba," I asked carefully, "How was my grandmother an opponent? "
    She looked at me for a time. Then the ice queen bartender leaned forward and winked, one eye briefly brilliant with life and mischief. Then she stood, disinterested, and I gulped my drink and shuffled off downtown to begin a proper wake for the woman who had raised me.

VI
I want to reach my hand into the dark and feel what reaches back
    * * *
    The service was short and heartfelt. They laid my grandmother in the earth in quiet dignity, with a few words from a Catholic priest who had known her for longer than I had been alive and some murmured thoughts from her few friends. She'd outlived most of them. I stood at the end of the line afterwards, shook hands and endured the memories of all those old women intent on telling me what an adorable infant I'd been with a smile.
    There were nine people at the grave besides myself and the priest, who shook my hand last and walked away to give me time and space for a family goodbye. I waited until he was out of sight around the trees before raising my head to the surrounding woods. "You can come out now."
    Dozens of shapes, some nearly human and some entirely not, emerged from the shadows. Some walked. Some drifted. Some simply weren't and then were , a moment later. Those I had known were there but had been unable to point to came to the graveside with me to pay their respects to my grandmother.
    I had had no idea how many of the New York dispossessed knew her. As I moved in their circles, toes dipping in the pools of myth and immortality, I had come to understand that she was a Power among them. Perhaps not one of control, or retribution, or of wealth; but a Power nonetheless, whose presence they would miss.
    The tall, ice-faced woman knelt before the grave, quickly, and did something with her hands before standing and walking past me. She spared me one glance of her sapphire eyes, but they flickered once with the persona behind them, something rare and gifted only to me on this afternoon in our shared loss.
    A nondescript man with a cellular telephone headset and Middle Eastern features came forward to look at the tombstone. I didn't recognize him, but when he turned to leave, he nodded to me, once, and was careful not to touch me. I bowed to him them, and when our eyes met again I placed my right hand to my breast and the hard shape there. He smiled once, pleased, and hurried off.
    There were dark shapes near the ground that sniffed about her grave and then scurried away without looking back. A glowing form hovered over the open cut hole for a moment before floating upwards and out of sight despite a moment when I could have sworn that it was looking at me. And so it went, the gods and demons of New York paying, if not tribute, at least acknowledgement to the passing of a human who had known them.
    When the last of them had gone and the graveyard was quiet, I shoveled earth thrice on the coffin and went home.
    In my apartment, the same small one near the Hudson where she'd raised me, I looked at the desk in front of me and the objects arrayed there. A pocket watch, gold and white and ornate; a crystal vial, and a stone spear point. The three of them, free of their leather prison, represented the most powerful of the talismans I had collected in my years of negotiating and conversing with the powers of New York. Two of them I knew intimately. The third, the spear point of Bobbi-Bobbi, I had little idea how to use. My talent could feel the power in it, crackling, different from the smooth ripples of the vial or the glow of the watch, but I