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“He’s not my pal and yes, he’s gone. Who are you?”
“I’ve had my eye out for you and then I see him fitting you out with a bug claw. I just naturally assumed that you two were buddies.”
I circle around behind him, trying to get a better look.
“Who are you?”
He shrugs.
“Who is any of us really?”
“Don’t get cute.”
“I was born cute. You’re the monster.”
I get out the na’at and hold it where he can’t see and walk over until I’m close enough to get a good look.
It’s Mr. Muninn. Only not. It’s one of his brothers. They’re not just twins, they’re the same in every detail including the clothes, except that where Muninn is all black, this one is all red. The angel in my head makes a sound I’ve never heard it make before. I put the na’at back in my coat.
“What’s your name?”
The round man bounces his heels off the side of the building.
“Kid, you couldn’t pronounce my name with three tongues and a million years to practice.”
“Muninn told me his.”
“Did he?”
“Didn’t he?”
The red man holds up his hands, the fingers spread wide.
“Five brothers. Each of our names and consciousness corresponds to a color. Yellow. Blue. Green. I’m red, as you might have noticed. Muninn is black, the sum of us all.” He ticks off each color with a finger. “Now, if you were the literary type or had ever read a book in your life, you might know that the mythical Nordic deity Odin traveled with two black ravens. One was called Huginn. Guess what the other was called?”
“Muninn nng.01C;Munamed himself after a bird?”
“It’s his idea of a joke. Don’t hate him. He’s the youngest.”
The angel in my head stops making the funny noise and finally gets out a single word: Elohim.
The red man is looking at me. I get the feeling he can read me a lot better than I can read him because I can’t read him at all.
“Are you . . . ?”
“Yep.”
“All five of you are?”
“Yep.”
“Mr. Muninn, too?”
“I think we established that when we established that he’s one of us five brothers.”
My head is going funny again. My stomach twists. I’m swamped by a fascination and anger that I’ve been carrying around a lot longer than the eleven years I spent Downtown.
“Muninn lied to me. I thought he was one of the few people I could trust.”
