BloodAngel Page 22

  Her eyes flashed bright green. "What do you think?"

  "I think you want family, blood ties. Even after all this. I think you got lonely."

  She laughed. "You know what loneliness is, Brother? You think you can comment on mine?" She made a gesture, and two of her children moved forward. They were smiling, giggling. The young man, Kai noticed, was missing his little finger, the stump still raw and healing. They touched him, and he let them; they unbuttoned his shirt, drew it off his body. The sun blazed across his skin.

  Asha stepped aside.

  "Lay yourself down," she whispered. "For me. For me."

  He did as he was told, stretching himself on the rock, spread-eagled, the stone sun-warmed and rough against his back. The women drifted around him, fastening the leather cuffs around his wrists and ankles. He was shackled, anchored to rock, made part of the landscape.

  "I will be thinking of you," Asha said. She placed a hand against his chest, traced a line across his belly. "Brother."

  The sky arced above him, white and empty and blinding. He closed his eyes against it.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  "Walk with me," Asha said to Lucas. Another phrase she had learned off the television.

  He turned and looked back through the heat-shimmered air to the big man bound to the rock. The others had also begun to drift away, back toward the camps, although some of them would return to watch when the bird came. It would be quite a show.

  "Is it real?" he asked, although he no longer knew just what the word meant. Here, especially, where reality was slicing open. This was the desert. These were the borderlands, the wastelands, the no-man's-lands.

  "Real enough," Asha said. Then: "Thinking of her?"

  "What?" Genuinely not understanding.

  "The bit from your dreams."

  In his surprise—and something else, maybe a brief touch of panic—his first instinct was to lie. "I don't know what you're talking—"

  He didn't see her hand move; he just felt the slap, the nails in his flesh and dragged across his cheek. Even as he staggered back, he felt the heat along his skin, the wounds cauterizing; he touched his face and felt not wounds but scars, thin and ridged, laid across his face.

  He felt, then, the flare of rebellion he had felt in the yard after the snake: the same blind urge to destroy her. As if he could. Asha was staring at him, that acid-green stare that could burn through everything.

  "Why lie to me?" she said. "Why lie over this?"

  He shrugged again. "I saw her," he muttered. "She was with Kai."

  "Kai."

  His name like a cup filled with rage and longing. Lucas looked at her in the bleached-out landscape, wanting to understand, but she had turned her face away from him. She could have killed Kai, yet it seemed as if the thought had never entered her mind—or Kai's. The expression on his face inside the car: he knew what lay in wait for him, yes, but it wasn't extinction. Or wasn't simply extinction: who knew how these things worked? Real enough. It was possible Asha only killed out of disgust or annoyance, or to eat; possible she had other fates in store for those who intrigued her. He thought of the festival, the large domed tents barely visible from here, the worn-smooth mountains rising just beyond them; even as he watched he could see a new line of vehicles tracing a path towards it, dust billowing up like flags. It was possible Asha didn't want to kill the world; possible she wanted to consume and seduce it. Or maybe to her it was one and the same.

  She had stepped away from him and was looking at her brother in the distance. The sun was now high overhead. Poor bastard, Lucas thought. Asha said, her voice sounding oddly, curiously young: "This woman was with him?"

  "When I picked him up. Yes. I invited her to come along"—unable to keep the smile from his voice, not bothering to try—"but she declined."

  "I catch glimpses of her," and again Lucas heard puzzlement in her voice, "but I don't know—I don't know—" She paused again, stark white sunlight falling over her face, the bone-colored sand stretching beyond her. And then, surprising him, "Do you think he loves her?"

  "I don't know," Lucas said. Then, speaking on instinct, not sure why he believed this but absolutely sure it was true: "Yes."

  "Like the others?"

  Not knowing what she meant by this, but not having to. "Not like the others," Lucas said, and couldn't stop himself: "She's not like anyone."

  Asha's face was smooth and blank, the light blazing up behind her eyes. She was studying him, and he let himself open up to her: why lie over this, why conceal? Why, indeed?

  "And you," Asha said. "You, also. You want her."

  He didn't respond.

  "Why this one?"

  "I don't know."

  "There are so many others. So many."

  "I know."

  "Is it the competition?" she spoke wryly, disdainfully. "Is she the grand prize?"

  The way the man—the prince, fucking royalty, if you could believe that—had looked at him in the car, not just at him but all the way through to something small and naked inside. I was hoping you might surprise me. You could have been great on your own. Kai's easy assumption of his own superiority. And running beneath everything he said to Lucas had been something else: I am here because I choose to be. You hold no power over me. You are the personal assistant, running errands, little more.

  You could have been great, Lucas. You could have been great.

  "Partly," he admitted.

  "I could take her," Asha said. "This woman of my brother's, this prize. I could spend a little time with her. Then give her to you. Would you like that?"

  "I don't exactly want to eat her heart, Asha."

  Asha laughed. "She'll be yours to play with. She'll do anything you want, as often as you want, with as many people as you want. She'll do it with dogs if you want. Anything to entertain you." She paused for a moment, then added, "And then, when you get tired of her, we can eat her up together."

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  "Excuse me."

  A shadow fell across her table. Jess looked up. A twentysomething man in an orange windbreaker hovered over her, backpack sloping off his shoulders. His eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses, even though he was indoors, even though it was foggy outside.

  "Would you mind if I joined you?" he said.

  "Actually," Jess said, "I would."

  It was six-thirty in the morning. She was sitting in the corner of an all-night doughnut shop, the air rich with yeast and coffee; she had been sitting and staring through the window without seeing anything except that impossible face, that face from her dreams, taking Kai away from her.

  Kai. Her hands tightening on the coffee mug. You withheld too much from me. What the hell is going on? What the hell do I do now?

  But she already knew the answer.

  The map he had left behind in the hotel suite.

  "I'm just totally starved for, you know, some conversation," the guy said, sliding into the booth opposite her. "I mean, some normal conversation. I've been hitching for forever, feels like, and you wouldn't believe the freaks and weirdos—"

  She was about to tell him to get lost—choosing the way she was going to phrase it—when she gave him a second look.

  Something about him seemed familiar.

  He adjusted his sunglasses, smiled brightly at her.

  "So," he said, "let's do it. Let's make small talk. What's your name? Where you from? What you doing here?"

  "Would you mind taking off your sunglasses?"

  "I'm a little, you might say, I'm, well, I'm very sensitive to light. I'm a sensitive, sensitive boy."

  Her suspicion broke wide open. She stared at him in wonder, snaking her head, saying quietly, "Bullshit."

  His smile faded.

  "All right, then." He slipped off his glasses and dropped them on the table. His eyes were very bright, very blue, and she knew them at once.

  "Del," she said.

  "When are you going to open my door, little Jessamy?" He leaned across th
e table. "It's there, it's waiting for you. You can't avoid it forever. It's my gift. It's your power. I did it from the goodness of my heart—"

  She reached out to touch him. Her fingers grazed his sleeve and felt nothing; she grabbed at his arm and her hand went right through him. He was empty air. He glanced down at her hand as it passed through his chest and he lifted his eyebrows and giggled.

  "It's my gift," he said again. "Try it, you might like it."

  "Tell me what it is," Jess said. She remembered that feeling from his cave: as if a shard of black glass had driven deep inside her brain. She felt it there now, cold and edged, cutting deeper.

  "You're running out of time. Out of time. So get ready for a whole new world." He winked at her. "My regards to the handsome prince."

  And he vanished.

  But he had never even been, she realized; at least, not in a physical sense. She glanced around her. The waitress was pouring coffee for the old man at the counter. Two transvestites were clucking over an issue of People magazine at a back table. No one was paying attention to her. Jess fumbled money out of her wallet, dropped it on the table, got the hell out of there.

  Chapter Thirty

  The jax took him high and far. Part of him was vaguely aware that he was in the back of a moving vehicle, that Poppy was beside him, but that part was just a flickering of perception—there and gone—before the jax grabbed hold of him again and sent him soaring.

  And then he was someplace else entirely.

  He was in a realm that was not of the earth he had known; but that was all right, because he himself was not of the earth, not all of him, not fully. It was a realm of peace and white light and harmony, all the more treasured for being so hard-won. But the bloodshed, the wars, were over now, and he and his kind had held this peace for three thousand years. They were warriors no longer.

  But then the hole came, ripping through his very existence; when time and place were sucked away and his world dissolved around him and he was falling through space and time; and it was cold, so cold; and his scream echoed through all the eons, all the worlds, but nothing could save him from falling.

  And then a deep blue fireball of light exploded around him.

  He thought: This is annihilation.

  My annihilation.

  And yet, when he opened his eyes, he found himself beset with new sensations. He was in some kind of stone chamber. His body had altered, taken on a new kind of… substance, materialism. He was contained in a flesh-and-bone cage. It was thick and heavy and clumsy. He reared back in panic, flexed his wings—

  Except there were no wings.

  Only pain, the seared and scorching kind.

  He fell to his knees and shivered on the stone.

  "You have fallen. You are mine now."

  He looked up, blinking. The pale luminescence of his home-realm had been replaced by harsh color, dark colors, and the light that streamed through the windows of this stone tower was yellow and hot. It hurt his eyes, his skin.

  "You will get accustomed to it. To everything."

  He forced himself in this strange clumsy body to turn toward the voice.

  The man who stood in front of him was tall, almost as tall as he himself had been in the other realm, in the other, true body. This man's eyes were very blue.

  The man murmured, "You know my name."

  And it was true. He felt the name surge up through his body. He tried to hammer it back down inside, knowing if he spoke it this stranger's power over him would be complete.

  But it ripped from him anyway: "Shemayan."

  "Yes," the man said. "I have need of you. But then I will release you. I will send you home. That is my promise to you."

  "Jess," he said. "Jessamy."

  The man looked at him, blue eyes shading into confusion.

  He couldn't stop this other name from tumbling from his throat. "Jessamy. JESSAMY. JESSAMY—"

  * * * *

  "Would somebody shut this kid up?"

  "Screaming and dreaming as I fell," Ramsey muttered. The part of him still connected to his Ramsey-reality flickered on again: they had stopped, there were hands on him, hauling him out of the back like so much cargo. Fresh, salted air swept over him. He gulped at it like a fish. "Shemayan," he muttered. "Shemayan."

  "Would somebody shut—"

  "Never mind, Gavin," another voice said. This voice was familiar. "Our boy Ramsey has a lot on his mind."

  Salik. His good hand reached out, touched Ramsey's face. And then the jax dealer stepped away, and Ramsey felt himself carried towards the house. Music, laughter, drifted through the open windows.

  And then the Ramsey-reality was going away again. He drifted high and sweet, a bliss-feeling, a jax-feeling. He heard voices from a long way away:

  "This one's for the Maze?"

  "Not this one. The other one. And the girl."

  He soared up and away, beyond the voices. For a while Poppy was floating in that space with him. Nemesis, he said. I'm sorry. We're going to die. I'm sorry.

  My name isn't Nemesis, Ramsey said.

  Your name is many things. It wasn't Poppy speaking now. It was the voice that had always been with him, that had entered him when he was seven years old and dying. You are War. You are Annihilation. You are Apocalypse.

  No, Ramsey said. I'm not any of those. I don't want any of those.

  It was what you were brought here to do. To fight for them. To kill for them.

  No, Ramsey said. Not anymore.

  The voice fell silent. Things turned dark.

  And for the longest time, there was nothing.

  * * * *

  When he opened his eyes again the scene struck him as so surreal he wasn't sure if he had come down or gone even higher; if he had gone all the way out of his mind.

  He was lying on a divan, screened in by drapes of red silk; from beyond the silk came conversation, laughter, set against some kind of world music; there were also shuffling, clicking noises, and the scent of candles and perfume. He tried to reach out, push away the silk so he could see. He couldn't make his body obey. His flesh felt like a spiderweb trapping the real him deep inside.

  Ramsey looked down at himself. He was naked from the waist up. His body was covered with glittering blue jax-marks that formed shapes like hieroglyphics.

  "You're awake."

  The silk curtain swept back. Salik was smiling at him. "I thought a little privacy was called for," he said. He folded his long body on the divan beside Ramsey and gestured to the gap between the curtains. "Isn't it fun?"

  It was a cavernous, high-ceilinged room. The walls were embedded with oversized video screens that cast a blank glow. Tables were arranged throughout the room, draped in velvet and silk. People dressed in suits, tuxedos, elaborate gowns, were gambling, although from the little that Ramsey could see these were not games he recognized: the cards were oversized and brightly, oddly designed; the roulette wheel was spinning many different balls of different shapes and colors; people were not using chips but what looked to be bits of glass, or maybe, Ramsey thought, they were actually gems, diamonds and rubies and emeralds and sapphires, all riding on the flip of a card, the drop of a ball.

  He searched through the crowd. He was looking for Poppy—even though Poppy, he knew, had betrayed him—but Ramsey saw how the people divided into two groups: those like him, young, dazed, marked up (and fucked up) with jax, lounging on the sofas and divans like dogs waiting for their masters. Some of them were mobile, drifting through the room, but they did not join in the gambling; they lingered at the edges, watching.

  The ones who gambled were elegant and imperious. Some of them, Ramsey saw, were spectacular: their height, their grace, their finely cut faces, bathed in the eerie glow from the video screens. And yet there was something sinister about them, as if that beauty exuded from their bodies, gathered and rolled through the room, contaminated the very air.

  "An elite, handpicked group," Salik whispered into Ramsey's ear. "They bring thei
r money, their beauty, their cruelty, their curiosity." He touched Ramsey's naked shoulders, his throat. Ramsey tried to speak. Could not. The jax-marks winked and gleamed off his skin, speaking their own brutal language.

  Salik smiled. "Are you really so weak? So easily contained? Can't you put on a show for me?" He leaned closer, so that Ramsey could smell the wine on his breath. "Come out of hiding," Salik whispered. "It's time. It's finally time."

  A voice rose and echoed through the room: "Five minutes till the Game. All bets in. All bets in."

  People gathered round the long tables at the far ends of the room. The air darkened; the electric hum of laughter and conversation died away. People were turning toward the screens.

  The hush deepened, became complete.

  The screens flickered to life.

  Poppy's face filled all of them.

  He was standing in the center of a small, empty room, hugging himself, looking around him. He was shaking. He didn't walk so much as stumble from the room, still rubbing his arms, passing from the view of one camera into the view of another. Now he was in a narrow hall, turning in a circle, gauging which way to go. There was a pulped, bloody mass where his nose should have been, and every so often his right hand came up to hover over it protectively.

  A murmur of anticipation swept through the crowd.

  A chill snaked around the base of Ramsey's spine.

  On a different video screen, another room flickered into view. A door slid open and a creature shambled out. At first Ramsey assumed it must be a man in a costume, because nothing on earth could look like that.

  Because monsters like that didn't exist.

  "Isn't it a prize?" Salik whispered, his hand tightening on Ramsey's shoulder. "I made it a long time ago. When I could still make things like that."

  The thing had a doglike head and a long thick body but a shuffling, shambling way of moving; one of its forelimbs looked stunted or twisted, tucked in against its chest. Ramsey saw the glint of long, curved talons.

  The thing paused. Lifted its large dark head. Sniffed the air.

  And then, after a moment, it shambled towards the far wall and passed from one room into another. It passed through a series of small, intersecting rooms even as Poppy, viewed on alternating screens, wandered through hallways, in and out of doorways. Ramsey's eyes skipped from Poppy to the monster that had Poppy's scent in his nostrils.