BloodAngel Read online

  Bloodangel

  Justine Musk

  Synopsis

  Jess, a rising young artist who is haunted by her parents' death and her uncle's abuse, paints strange, wild portraits of a teenage boy lost in the desert. It is the face of Ramsey, a skate-punk, bookworm foster kid who appeared in a police station at the age of seven, covered in blood.

  When a burned-out rock'n'roll star enters into an unholy alliance with a mysterious hitchhiker, and the forces of pre-biblical good and evil start to stir, Jess must unravel the truth about the boy's identity—and her own. Her quest will take her to a place deep in the Mojave where magic is real, demons exist, and an underground rock'n'roll band has the power to bring on Apocalypse.

  For Elon

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks goes first to Shirley, Terry, and Erin Wilson, my family; to Mark Clements and Donna Levin, whose respective excellent workshops saw me through the first pages of the early drafts; to Marta Zieba, Tiffany Ward, and Mary Beth Brown, whose critiques proved invaluable; to Hugh Hodges, my favorite accidental professor; to Andrea Somberg, Jennifer Heddle, and Liz Scheier, for their charm, intelligence and professionalism; to Terri Brown-Davidson, Jim Ruland, Tony L Hines, and the rest of the talented Zoetrope crew, for their continuing support, advice and inspiration.

  Since this is a book in which music features prominently, I'd also like to acknowledge Alabama 3. Their albums Peste, Power in the Blood, and Exile on Coldharbour Lane were all played obsessively during much of this writing.

  And finally, the song lyrics attributed to my character Lucas Maddox were written by Hugh Hodges.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part II

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part III

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Epilogue

  Bio

  Prologue

  The Summoner

  Crowe's Crossing, England, 1399

  Death came to the village, and the tall man followed.

  He was no longer a prince. He had let his old name go, with grief and reluctance, and had not yet chosen another.

  He stood in the shadow of an old twisted elm, his hood pulled low on his face, and watched as they buried the bodies. These people were still odd to him: so many of them so pale and ruddy, so coarse in manner, and short. Short-lived.

  The air reeked of sweat and sewage and rotting flesh, of smoke curling up from stone chimneys.

  The magic shifted inside him. Soon, he knew, these corpses would be remembered differently. The villagers—the men raining dirt into the mass grave, the women and children who stood back and watched—would forget the clawed-out chests and throats, the strange deep marks of teeth.

  They would recall bubonic welts that had never been, testify to spells of sickness that had never happened.

  Or rather: had not happened here.

  Not here, where the demons had been.

  Part I

  Dark Muse

  Chapter One

  Lucas Maddox

  California, Spring 2005

  The girl came from nowhere.

  The Chevy crested the hill and she was there, walking alongside the highway, duffle bag slung across her shoulder. She held out her thumb. Lucas thought of a trigger cocking back.

  "You like that?" said Brett Carmichael, the driver. He glanced at Lucas and grinned, light sparking off his steel-rimmed glasses. Tom Waits drifted from the car speakers: "Romeo is bleeding…"

  Yeah, he's bleeding. The thought gave Lucas a melodramatic pleasure. He can't stop himself.

  He said, "Don't stop. Pass her by."

  "What the fuck?" Brett was guiding the car to the shoulder. Yellow grass sloped away from the road, thinned out to sandstone cliffs. "I think she'd be a much more stimulating companion than you, my friend. No offense."

  "None taken." Lucas unrolled the window, breathed in salt mist air. He was starting to feel as jagged as the coastline. Not just yet, he told himself—told the fat-bellied monkey sinking claws into his back—not just yet. Just wait a bit.

  The girl was studying them through the windshield. She wore beat-up jeans, a too-big leather jacket. Her white-blonde hair was cropped short, mussed up. Lucas saw the razor cut of her cheekbones, the long line of her throat. He turned away.

  "Hey," Brett called out to her. "Where you headed?"

  She stepped around to Brett's window. Her voice was too low for Lucas to hear.

  Brett said, "What a freak of a coincidence. So are we."

  The girl opened the door and tucked herself into the backseat.

  "I'm Brett Carmichael," Brett said, smiling at her in the rearview mirror.

  And they were on their way again, eating up the sweeping coastline lengths of Highway 1.

  "This guy beside me is Lucas Maddox. You'll have to forgive him. Lucas is kind of a loser now—no offense, Lucas—"

  "None taken."

  "—But he used to be in a band called Slippage, you remember them?"

  The girl's voice was flat and hoarse. "No."

  "They had this single, "Black Box." Really cool lyrics, you know, a bit morbid, inspired by some plane crash—"

  "Trans-Unity Air," Lucas said. "Went down off the coast of South Africa. Lots of people died." The song, that music, those days in Seattle: stained futons and cockroaches, peanut-butter dinners, streaming backbeat of rain. Paula in his arms, her warm, honey skin.

  "You'd recognize it if you heard it—Lucas, sing it for her."

  "No."

  "Just a bit of it?"

  "No."

  "I'd sing it," Brett said, "except I'm a shitty singer. Couldn't do it justice."

  No response from the girl. Lucas shifted in his seat and glanced back at her; she was huddled up against the window, hands pressed between her knees as if trying to warm them. She was very thin. Breakable. "You okay?" he said.

  She didn't answer.

  Glancing again in the rearview mirror, Brett said, "What's your name, honey?"

  She shrugged.

  After a moment, she said, "Asha."

  "No last name? Like a supermodel. Like one of the fabulous people. You're pretty enough to be fabulous, you know."

  The girl was looking directly at Lucas. Her mouth twitched.

  Brett said, "So what's a slip of a thing like you doing alone on the big bad road?"

  "I'm looking for someone."

  She was staring at him, at them both, her head cocked to an unnatural angle.

  "A boy," she added.

  Brett whistled. "I'm a boy. And you're looking right at me."

  Her eyes closed and she leaned her forehead against t
he window. Beyond her, on the other side of the highway, the bald, lion-yellow hills ranged on and on.

  * * * *

  "Here we are, buddy," Brett said, guiding the car into a roadside rest area. "Here we are. You can go set yourself right again." He turned off the engine. He was looking in the mirror at the dozing girl.

  Lucas grabbed up his knapsack and got out of the car. The mist was thinning, burning off. Blue and yellow flowers pushed up through the ground, and the air exploded with the cannonball-boom of the surf. He walked to the low-slung building that housed the restrooms. Hunkered inside a stall and unzipped the bag.

  Ah, ritual. Watch the stuff dissolve: bubbling amber in your spoon. Summon up the vein: blue-green worm against your skin.

  The spider-bite of needle.

  The plunger beneath your thumb. The push. The downward glide.

  And then.

  Float off.

  You are smooth and creamy again, you are smack-dab in the caramel center.

  The world tilted away from him and slowly, slowly tilted back. He wandered back out into the sunlight. The day had turned very bright.

  The car was empty.

  They were gone, the girl's leather jacket husked off in the backseat.

  Once, in Reno, Lucas had surprised Brett with a girl in a motel room. He saw the glint of the knife and the blood on her breasts and got the hell out of there, sat down heavily on the curb of the parking lot. He even considered the police, but briefly, because he was a one-time drug offender with stash on him, enough to feed that fat-bellied bitch of a monkey until he hooked himself up in LA. Police were not Lucas-friendly. And he had done enough kinky shit of his own—not like that, a voice kept yammering in the back of his mind, she's just a baby—that he was hesitant to draw such hard-core conclusions.

  So he did nothing.

  Later—he didn't know how much later—Brett found him smoking in a corner of an all-night coffee shop. Brett dropped down beside him, plucked the cigarette from his fingers and stubbed it out in the green plastic ashtray. It was a fantasy thing, Brett said. A role-playing thing, you know? He studied Lucas for a moment, then said carefully, She's a lot older than she looks.

  Right, Lucas said, and took a sip of cold coffee. And realized, with a knife-edged clarity he had not experienced since Paula died, that once upon a time he would not have tolerated the company of a shit like Brett Carmichael. Once upon a time he would have bashed the fucker's head in.

  Now, as gulls wheeled and surf shattered on the rocks, Lucas tugged off his shirt, let the sun bake down on his body. He leaned against the car. He had been waiting for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes when he caught movement from the corner of his eye.

  He turned.

  Saw an animal in the yellow grass.

  He blinked twice, looked again.

  Skittering crab-like on all fours: animal-girl in jeans and stained white T-shirt, sun glinting off her pale hair. He thought: No.

  And the girl stood in front of him.

  Smiling.

  Everything was becalmed, everything was creamy. Run, his brain was screaming at him, this is fucked up, but the connection between brain and body was cut. He stared at the girl and could only think how cute she looked, innocent, as she took the dripping knot of dark-purple muscle out from inside her T-shirt and held it in blood-soaked hands, as she lifted it to her teeth. She tore off a piece, chewed and swallowed as if eating a roast beef sandwich. "Hey," Lucas said again. His voice like fluff in his mouth. "That's his… That's…"

  She ran a hand across her mouth, smearing blood like lipstick.

  "That's his goddamn heart. His heart. His heart—"

  "Lucas," she whispered, and reached up to touch his face.

  The pressure of her fingertips, her deep carnal breath.

  "Lucas," she said again. He unloosed a groan, felt his legs melt away from him. He was on his knees in the dirt and the girl was stepping behind him, slipping her arms beneath his shoulders. He had the strange sensation of being lifted without effort.

  In the arms of a slip of a girl.

  "Lucas."

  And in the moment before he blacked out, Lucas Maddox seized on the impossible fact this was not a dream, not a drug.

  She had come for him.

  * * * *

  He woke up in a hotel room, the cheap kind where the television remote was bolted to the nightstand. Someone—he didn't think who, wasn't ready to think who yet—had left him a glass of water. Lucas fumbled it to his mouth, took sloppy gulps. He leaned over and vomited. The glass rolled from his fingers, his head crashing back to the pillow…

  … Floating through memories gone warped at the edges. Back on the road with Slippage, the grind of the early days: Bill Clinton still rising, grunge and heroin chic and Gulf War aftertaste and Pulp Fiction and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Jeremy" and they were living off music and coffee and cigarettes and tequila shots lined up in seedy Seattle bars…

  When he opened his eyes again, something was missing from him but he couldn't pinpoint what that lack, that absence, actually was. His hands flew to his chest: seeking the wound, the blood. But he was intact.

  Lucas gasped for air like a swimmer breaking surface, pushing up against the headboard, thrashing off the sweat-soaked sheets.

  Asha was waiting at the foot of his bed.

  He wasn't sure he was seeing correctly. He couldn't be seeing correctly—

  Because the girl was perched on the bed's footboard, her bare, long toes curled round the edge, gripping it, her body hunched and balanced in a way that didn't seem, couldn't be, possible, her arms crossed loosely over her knees. She wore a white cotton shift with dark stains on the front. The cropped, tousled hair gleamed in the light shafting in between the curtains. Her lips were wet and red.

  She said, "Hello, Lucas."

  His mind buzzed with static; it was a moment before it cleared enough to send up a thought, a transmission—

  "What the fuck?"

  Asha cocked her head to the side.

  "What the fuck are you?"

  She only looked at him.

  He didn't think it was that complicated a question.

  "A fucking vampire? Just tell me—"

  "No," she said. "Although it's the same kind of hunger."

  Her skin was so white it was almost translucent; there was something bruised-looking beneath her eyes, and the rest of her face had a raw, naked look to it.

  "I've been away for a very long time," she whispered.

  She looked at him, eyes shining.

  He said, "You killed Brett."

  She shrugged.

  "Not that I care," he added. "The dude is not worth crying over."

  She ripped out his heart and ate it. She ate his fucking heart—That voice in his brain spiraling upward, starting to scream again—Do you understand the depth of the bizarre shit you are in here? Do you?

  But even if he was going to die, get ripped apart like Brett, he was no longer sure he cared much. The good parts of his life were done. The pain would suck, certainly, but it would end soon enough. The world wouldn't waste time crying over him, either.

  He sank back into the bed.

  "Tell me what you are," he said wearily. "And what the fuck you want from me."

  "My full name is Bakal Ashika." She was smiling a little. "I have reinvented myself. That is the American way. I have watched many hours of television." The smile opened up into a grin. "I'm looking for someone."

  "A boy."

  "Yes. Mine. They owe him to me."

  "Who—"

  "But I will share him with you. And with others."

  He didn't see her move. She was just, suddenly, there: crouching above him on the bed, crouching on him, except he couldn't feel her at all; she was weightless, she was gossamer, the sun-shaft breaking like waves around her pale head. Oh you angel, he suddenly thought—it was from a song he'd written but never recorded, a song for Paula, dying Paula, who took the gun one bright Spanish morning
and walked down the path, out of view, and he broke as he watched but knew enough not to follow—you're a bad, bad angel. He had thought of it as a love song, a pleasingly twisted one. Except it was no longer for Paula, and it was no longer a love song.

  "You need to sleep," Asha whispered.

  She placed her hands on his face, experimentally.

  "Let your body recover."

  And it was then he realized what he had only sensed on waking: the absence of addiction. For the first time in a decade, his body felt cleansed. He didn't need anything, nor was the monkey-part of him plotting the where and when of the next fix. Inside this new, shiny lack, he felt… at peace.

  "Sleep," Asha whispered. "And then we can make music."

  "I don't do that anymore."

  Her green eyes fixed on his. Something sparked inside him, jolted through his veins. Maybe the monkey hadn't left him after all, had morphed into something new. He felt the floor of his consciousness crumbling away beneath him; poised over the fall, he mumbled, more from curiosity than anything, "What did you do with his body?"

  She looked at him, chewing on the knuckle of her baby finger.

  "Brett's body," he said.

  She took the knuckle away from her mouth.

  "I was very hungry."

  He heard the answer without registering it. He was falling into dreamland: warm beach and Paula on the sand, her blonde hair lifting in the breeze, her hand resting lightly on a picnic basket filled with fruit. She was healthy and smiling and waiting for him. He sank down beside his woman and fed her chunks of papaya and watermelon, keeping his gaze away from the bloodstained horizon and the dark things that stalked it.

  Chapter Two

  Jessamy Shepard

  New York City, summer, 2005

  On the subway, darkness flashing past the windows, Jess Shepard noticed the ad. A model was holding up a credit card. Some fervent anticapitalist had vandalized the girl's face, red paint streaming from the corners of both eyes. The model smiled on, showing all her perfect teeth, as if she didn't know she was bleeding.

  * * * *

  "Someone was looking for you."

  They were preparing to hang the Heir of Nothing show, paintings spaced out along the polished parquet floor. Jess was stepping around their edges, sipping coffee from a stainless-steel travel mug, examining the paintings in this new context. Ejected from her studio, finished and framed: they were Art now, they had prices and promo material.