BloodAngel Page 14

  Resisting the urge to come right out and say, Get lost. For your own good. You're too young for this, don't know how bad this shit gets.

  "It's my stepfather," the girl said. "I need to talk to Asha. I know she'll help me. It's my stepfather."

  He reached out for her, gathered her cold thin fingers ; in his own, pulled her forward. He lifted his voice: "Everybody else, good-bye. Come to the desert. We'll see you in the desert."

  Some grumbling, swearing, boot heels scuffing on pavement, but the group began to drift apart. People knew how it worked.

  The girl said, "Can I wait with you? I won't do anything—" Her fingers clutching his sleeve. She smelled of baby powder, cigarette smoke.

  "Just shut up. I mean, just please be quiet. Please. Okay?"

  She nodded.

  In the room she hunched in the chair in the corner, her knees drawn up against her chest, as if determined to take up as little space as possible. "I appreciate this," she said. "I really do."

  "Whatever."

  "My name's Carrie."

  "Nice to meet you, Carrie. Remember what I said?"

  She nodded vigorously. "I'll be totally, perfectly quiet."

  He went to the window, drew aside the curtain. He saw his own ghost in the glass. He tried to cast his mind into the night outside, past the parking lot and the shutdown downtown streets to wherever Asha was roaming. It seemed to him, lately, that his body could sense hers, or not his body exactly but his blood: when she was close by it actually kind of… hummed, turned electric, as if she had thrown a switch deep inside him (should have left it turned off, a voice kept insisting in the back of his mind, you should have run away from her, killed yourself to get away from her, and he told that voice to shut the fuck up and get the fuck away from him) and when the singer, his singer, was absent for too long he felt twitchy, edgy, nervous. He felt the ground opening beneath him.

  But now, the outside dark carried the answering charge of her presence. He looked at the girl and said, "She isn't far."

  But then, she never was.

  * * * *

  He had felt the change working deep inside him the moment they arrived in LA. His music came back to him. Like an avalanche unleashed in his skull, thundering its way to release. He was writing again, he was on his guitar again, itching for other instruments as well. Asha's shadow ghosting over him, Asha's voice fueling him, as the white fire at the pit of his belly sprang hotter, higher.

  One weekend he drove up to Malibu, went walking on the beach. Dolphins came close to shore, cresting just inside the waves. He watched them as long as they would let him. He watched the sun set. He closed his eyes and took lungfuls of air, as if the salt could scour him clean. I'm clean, he would think. True—he hadn't touched heroin, had barely thought about heroin, since that day her small figure had appeared alongside the highway—and not true. Some new contamination was twisting in his blood cells—but such a small price to pay. The music had come back to him. There was so much more ahead. Music that no one had ever heard before.

  Music that could steal your soul. His own soul was already gone, he figured, traded away in that motel room after Brett died—Because if she isn't the devil, then she is damn close—and he was surprised by how little this bothered him. Music was the force, the godhead: it spoke every fucking language, it came down through time and crashed apart barriers. What was his soul, what was anyone's, in comparison?

  * * * *

  She came to him, sometimes, in the middle of the night; he'd rise awake to find her tangled round him, her body fitted fluidly to his. He'd breathe in the scent that always clung to her, coppery like blood, sour-sweet like carnage. They did not have sex—that wasn't what she wanted from him, if she even wanted it from anyone—although at times he felt as if they were… melding; as if he could look down and see her limbs melting into his, her blood pumping through his veins.

  He never looked down.

  Why me, he would ask her, and he did not know if he spoke those words or if she lifted them from his brain.

  Because you were calling me.

  His mouth twisted wryly.

  I didn't realize.

  You've been calling me for centuries.

  Her mouth against his throat. The hot touch of her tongue. Tasting him.

  You create the music of angels, she said. Dark angels. It has always been so.

  * * * *

  In the small, dark clubs they played he watched Asha grow as a performer, her voice discovering its range of expression. It was elastic, that voice; it encompassed worlds. Lucas had never heard anything like it. Her voice entered into him, so that soon he couldn't compose anything without imagining that voice as the center. He knew they were feeding off each other. They fattened up, and the performances drained them until they were lean and hungry and desperate all over again, looking at each other, clawing new ways back into that music, that edgy throbbing howling bass-slapping skull-crashing soul-stirring music. And in gig after gig, Lucas felt the reaction from the audience grow stronger and deeper, that connection sometimes so intense he wondered why it just didn't manifest itself in a physical form: a tunnel of flesh and blood rising round them, band and audience both, enclosing them, making them as one. Music was community. Music brought together strangers all looking for the same transcendence and oblivion of self. The song entered you and you entered the song; you and it understood each other. You were no longer alone. Onstage, Lucas scanned the faces of the crowd and saw the rapture overtake them, bodies jumping, arms writhing in the strobe-lit air, eyes turning up in bliss and gratitude and adoration. In those moments, they all understood each other.

  From the beginning of their tour, he was surprised by the audience they drew. As if word had raced ahead of them—which he supposed it had—and given people time to prepare for their coming. They did no promotion, no radio shows, not even posters tacked to telephone poles. They showed up and played, and people showed up to listen. They were somewhere in the Midwest when Lucas realized that some of the faces in the audience were familiar.

  It was the redhead who clued him in.

  He saw her in the front row of a club in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was wearing jeans so low-slung they barely cleared her pubic bone. Her breasts were large, bouncing freely beneath the thin cotton of her T-shirt; her hair was thick and red and wild. He had a five-second fuck fantasy right there, as his hand moved along the fretboard and Asha howled into the microphone, and then he shifted into the next song and the redhead melted into the crowd and he forgot about her.

  Until nine days later when he saw her again, this time in a bar in a town a long way from Lincoln. This time Lucas also recognized her two friends: the towheaded skinny boy with the rings through his eyebrows, the short girl in the lace bustier. Lucas glanced over the crowd and—unless he was imagining it but no, didn't think so—saw other faces that set off echoes of recognition. And he saw, that night, the first painted blue symbol on a girl's cheek, glittering in the half-light.

  In the gigs, the places, the nights that followed, he began searching the crowd for faces he knew he'd seen before, and then for the glistening blue shapes and signs and symbols that were showing up, with slow but building regularity, on naked shoulders and arms and midriffs. People were tracking them from gig to gig, Lucas realized, and the wet look of fervent devotion he saw in all those upturned gazes reminded him that fan was short for fanatic. And he could feel the force beneath the music, ripping into him, tearing up his hands as he played. He would look at Asha, wailing on the lyrics, and think again, If she isn't the devil, then she is damn close.

  And yet, in the grip of the music, he didn't care.

  In the grip of the music, it all seemed worthwhile.

  One night, he had just loaded the amps in the back of the van and was heading into the club to settle up with the cheap asshole owner when movement from the alley snagged his attention.

  Asha was there, standing just outside the club's side door. There was a small group
of people around her, including the redheaded girl; Asha leaned over and kissed her on the mouth, then again on the forehead, and the girl rocked back on her heels. A guy dropped to his knees and hugged Asha's legs. The singer pulled his hair, slapped at his face, and laughed. The guy wouldn't let go of her.

  Asha looked over and saw Lucas.

  And smiled.

  * * * *

  Later that night, she said, "Do you really need so many answers, Lucas? Isn't it enough just to play the music?"

  "It was," Lucas said. "But now—"

  "—You want knowledge? You want to open up that little box?" She made a tsk-tsking sound. "You might go mad."

  "I think I'm already there."

  "No. Not quite."

  "Where is this leading, Asha? Where is all this—"

  She moved too quickly for him to see; suddenly she was crouched on the bed beside him, touching his face with her hand. Her touch was slithery-cool. He wanted to pull away from her, but also to bury his face in the curve of her throat. He did neither.

  "—Leading?" he whispered.

  "The desert," she said. "My children are heading out there even now."

  "Your children."

  "In the clubs. Outside the clubs. Now I sow. I cultivate. But soon will be the harvest."

  "And I thought they were just our number-one fans."

  "But they are. They adore you, Lucas. They'll worship you too, if you let them."

  * * * *

  She returned to the motel room just before midnight. Lucas could tell from the lack of color in her eyes and lips that she had not been feeding that night. Her gaze went directly from him to the girl in the chair. "Hello," Asha said brightly, in the way she'd learned off one of her television shows. "What's this?"

  The girl was frozen in the chair. Her eyes went wide, her hand gripping the armrest.

  Asha clucked her tongue. "Carrie Levin. You should be at home." Her smile turned sly, mocking. "You should be in bed. It's a school night."

  The girl scrambled off the chair and came towards her, her head and shoulders bowed in a way that struck Lucas as odd, unnatural, until he realized the girl was deliberately making herself smaller than the singer.

  "My stepfather," she said softly. She glanced up at Asha, peering through hanks of bleached hair. "And my mother does nothing."

  "I'm not a counselor or a social worker or a cop, Carrie. What makes you think I can help you?" Her standard response, her ritual.

  "Your music," the girl said. "Your music."

  "So you have something for me?"

  The girl only stared, her mouth working silently.

  Asha said, not unkindly, "You have something for me? You are prepared to atone for me?"

  The girl nodded, stepped back a little, the color leaching from her face. She opened her purse and fumbled out a steak knife. She looked at Asha and said, "You want… You want a finger?"

  "Or a toe," Asha said gently. "You decide."

  The girl crumpled to the floor and pulled off her shoe, her sock. She positioned the knife above her little toe and did not hesitate. Lucas glanced away, but still heard the crunch of bone. When he looked back, the girl was taking a roll of medical gauze from her purse, wrapping it around her foot. Her eyes were lit up like beacons.

  She folded the severed toe in a white cloth and offered it to Asha. "Is it enough?"

  Asha touched her thumb to the girl's cheek. She folded up the cloth and slipped it into her jacket pocket. She looked over at Lucas. "Come," she said.

  He felt the tidal pull of her presence and knew that no was a word he had become incapable of saying.

  "Fuck it," Lucas said, and sighed. "I guess I'll drive."

  * * * *

  The girl's house surprised him. From her cheap clothes and cheap hair he had expected something much more modest than the Colonial-style house that sat inside its own several acres. A dog was barking behind a high wooden fence. The girl led them up the arc of driveway, through the door into a spacious foyer. A staircase curved up to a second-floor landing. The girl called out, her voice breaking only slightly, "Mom? John?"

  No answer.

  From upstairs came the thump of techno music.

  The girl stood in the foyer, beneath the chandelier, refusing to look at either of them. Asha glanced around her with interest, her hands hooked through the belt loops of her jeans. She wore a ripped and grimy T-shirt, wide leather cuffs on both wrists. She looked calm and very young, innocent inside the clothes, like a suburban teenager playing at being bad.

  "Steven!" a man's voice yelled. Footsteps in the hall. A man went to the base of the stairs without noticing any of them. "Steven, would you turn that shit down!"

  The music went on unabated.

  The man turned and saw them. He was middle-forties or so, tall and well built with only a slight paunch, in corduroys and a brown sweater and slippers. He adjusted his glasses, as if to see them better, and said, "Carrie? Who are these people?"

  Carrie mumbled something Lucas couldn't hear.

  "Carrie? Would you answer me please?"

  Carrie hitched in a breath, said, "This is—"

  "I'm a friend of your stepdaughter's," Asha said. She smiled at the man and stepped towards him, tilting her head to an unnatural angle.

  The man's eyes widened and he took a step back.

  "She tells me you've been fucking her," Asha said pleasantly, "very much against her will. True?"

  The man's mouth opened. He looked from Asha to Carrie, placed both hands against his stomach.

  He said, "What—"

  "Oh," Asha whispered, "it is true. It is so true." She drew closer to him and he tried to back away from her, looking at her in open-mouthed amazement, but tripped and fell to the red-gold-blue Persian rug. Asha crouched beside him, fluid and quick, and before the man could react she was grasping his face in both hands.

  "You introduced her to fellatio when she was eleven," Asha whispered, "and anal intercourse when she was thirteen. True, true, true."

  Carrie looked on, her body swaying like a charmed cobra's.

  "I—" The pronoun a guttural syllable in the man's throat. Asha had her hands along his cheeks, was staring into his eyes. Lucas thought of a demented faith healer.

  "True, true, true," Asha whispered. Tears were spilling from the man's eyes now: water tinting pink, then turning to blood. "So how do you live in daylight? You shut yourself off to your nature. You pretend you aren't the man who goes into her room, shoves the pillow over her face, says if she tells he'll put her family back in that dingy little trailer park. In daytime you pretend that that nighttime man isn't you. But guess what. It is you. It is you. Daytime or nighttime, you're the same man."

  Blood began to gush from the man's nostrils, spilling over his lips, dropping fat red stains on the Persian carpet. Asha pressed her hands against his cheekbones. Lucas heard bones cracking. The man's glasses fell from his face, to the floor, and Asha smiled gently and crunched them beneath her knee.

  The man's eyes filled with blood.

  He opened his mouth and screamed.

  It was a high-pitched, unfurling sound, and there was an answering crash from elsewhere in the house. Footsteps hurried down the hallway. Right away Lucas noticed the resemblance between the girl who'd brought them here and the woman who stood in front of them now; she was surprisingly young, dark blonde hair framing a fine-featured, angelic face. It was the kind of beauty a woman could trade on, Lucas thought, use to negotiate herself into a better life.

  "John," she screamed, and Asha whirled on her.

  The singer made a sharp, shrieking noise and thrust out her hand—Lucas thought wildly of a traffic cop—and the woman's body tilted back until she should have fallen, yet she hung there suspended, hands flailing comically at the air, and then her body dragged itself back along the floor, heels scraping across the carpet, and the woman screamed again as something invisible, impossible, picked her off the floor and slammed her high against the wall. It pi
nned her there.

  Vivid crunching sound of bones, one by one by one, as the woman's chest imploded beneath her silk blouse.

  Asha stood. The man was convulsing by her feet, hands clutching his face, blood gushing from his eyes and nose and mouth and ears. Asha ignored the sounds he was making and turned to his wife. The woman's breathing was a gurgling, broken thing.

  "You lost your girl," Asha said. And Lucas thought, in that moment, that Asha's voice sounded not vicious or vengeful but… wistful, as if part of Asha's mind was no longer in this house but casting into memory, addressing not this woman but someone else from a long time back. "You sold her out. So now she's mine."

  The woman's head lolled against her shoulder.

  "That's just the way the world works," Asha said.

  Asha flicked her fingers.

  Lucas saw the life pressed out of the woman's eyes. Her body turned limp and fell to the floor. Asha knelt beside it, her hand slipping beneath the woman's blouse, groping for the heart.

  The girl Carrie slumped to the floor. She rocked back and forth, keening softly. Her stepfather was still thrashing. Lucas glanced up—

  —And saw the teenage boy watching from the landing.

  He was pale, lanky, brown hair in his eyes, wearing a black T-shirt with holes in it. Jesus, Lucas had time to think, I used to look like that, before the boy turned and ran deeper into the house.

  Lucas stepped over the bleeding, convulsing man and took the stairs two at a time. He stepped into a long hallway and paused.

  He felt something turn over in his blood—something that felt and tasted like Asha—and in that moment he knew where the boy was. He could feel the boy's presence, a warm and pulsing thing, beyond a door to his right. Lucas pushed it open. A teenage boy's room: messy, smelling of dirty laundry and grilled cheese and stale marijuana, posters of rock bands and women in bikinis on every inch of wall space.

  A bathroom, Lucas saw, opened off the left corner. The door was slightly open. He could feel the boy, that hot animal energy, beckoning him from beyond. He strode towards it until he saw a thing that stopped him like a blow to the groin.

  The boy's stereo and CD collection. This corner was lovingly organized. The CDs were lined up like little soldiers, or stacked neatly beside the speakers, awaiting selection and usage. Except for one. It had been pulled from the ranks and tossed atop the shelf where it stared up at Lucas now.