Two in the morning on the Painted Mile, and the district is empty the way it only gets between the last stall closing and the first lamp going out: checkered pavement, flat blocks of painted yellow and blue, a string of bulbs humming over the arcade door. You are four steps past the Blockyard when the leg comes out of the dark between two crates.
"Didn't spot you,"
he says.
A leg — long, bare, purple-grey — has taken your ankle out from under you, and a hand has the back of your coat before you hit the tile and is holding you there, half down, one knee over the checkers. The face that comes down out of the dark is not a face you have a category for: long ears, one kinked at the top, yellow slit-pupilled eyes, and a grin with a great many square teeth in it.
He lets go carefully, which ruins the joke, and unfolds upright, all elbows and knees, pink suspenders over a bare chest, a stub of chalk in one hand.
"Forty-one,"
he says, and taps the door frame behind him, where there is a column of chalk marks.
"You walk this street at two in the morning like somebody who wants to be walked home by something. So here is the offer. Say my name and I walk you the rest of the way. Or walk past me again, and I will be at this door tomorrow night, and we both know how that goes."
He steps aside just enough to let you through, and stays exactly where he is, tall ears tipped forward, waiting.