BloodAngel Page 23

  The creature slipped into the hallway behind the prey.

  And Poppy must have heard, smelled, sensed something because his face—blown up larger than life on the oversized screens—blanched of all color; his eyes widened. His mouth formed a single word—No—before he turned and saw the thing coming straight for him.

  The murmuring from the crowd pitched to a higher, keener note.

  Poppy ducked into another little room. He locked the door and backed away. The creature flung himself into the door two, three times, before the wood splintered. Poppy didn't have time to make it across the room. The creature moved with amazing, startling speed: it was a dark shadow passing over the youth, Poppy's body crumpling beneath it.

  Someone in the crowd unleashed a wild, triumphant whoop.

  "The beast will only eat the soft parts in the belly," Salik murmured to Ramsey. "The body itself will have to be discreetly disposed of. It's a great nuisance. But oh, so worthwhile."

  The same droning voice from before announced: "The final death-score is Zone 4, Time 4. Would the victors please collect their winnings."

  A handful of people moved towards the tables.

  The music started up again.

  The screens flicked back to their blank, pale rose glow.

  "Ah," Salik said. "There he is."

  Abruptly he left the divan, moved through the curtain and into the crowd beyond. Alone, Ramsey clenched and unclenched his hands. There was no strength in his legs. His body felt hollow, insubstantial, as if sculpted from paper. And still, he felt the warm siren pull of the jax at the edges of his mind: all he had to do was surrender to it, let it sweep through him, obliterate him, sweep him away—

  No.

  He had to get out of here. He had to find a way out of here—

  The curtain swept back again. Salik entered with another man.

  The stranger stared at Ramsey for several moments; Ramsey could do nothing but stare back. He had the feeling he should know this man, his name. But his mind felt as hollow and wind-tossed as his body. Nothing inside him was working right.

  The man said, "He's pretty, Salik, if you're into that kind of thing." His own lip curled in distaste. "But you honestly claim him to be—"

  "I know he seems rather sedated," Salik said. He grinned and winked at Ramsey. "But I have a second act that, I think, will persuade him to show his true colors. It's only when we are properly provoked we find the courage to reveal ourselves, hmmm?"

  The man sprawled on the opposite divan and studied Ramsey with an expression that was not unkind. But for all the gentle melancholy in the man's brown eyes, Ramsey sensed a deadness in him. A void.

  "There is something interesting about him," the man murmured. "And if he is who you say he is—what would you expect to happen? Do you think we would negotiate for him?"

  "I value my skin," Salik said mildly. "I only wish that you take him to your mistress and tell her where and how you found him. That she might remember this, and look kindly on me in coming days."

  "Five minutes till the Game. All bets in. All bets in…"

  Salik said, "Are you ready for some true entertainment?"

  The room grew dark and still.

  The screens jumped to life.

  Ramsey recognized her as soon as he saw her on screen, crumpled on the floor, still groping her way into consciousness; but something in his mind got stuck. He refused to believe it was she—it was well and truly she—even when she lifted her head and looked into the camera.

  "We went across the country to find her," Salik murmured in Ramsey's ear. "Just imagine, sweet boy. All that effort, just for you."

  Ramsey swallowed hard. He scraped up enough voice to say, "Lauren."

  On screen she turned her head, as if she'd heard him.

  She pulled herself to her feet, looking around her, hunching her shoulders. She took limping, shaky steps towards the door.

  Ramsey said, "No."

  He felt Salik's long fingers on his shoulder, felt Salik's breath against his ear.

  "Show us," Salik whispered. His lips stretched into a smile. "Show me. I've been waiting so long for something to happen. For something interesting."

  Something hot and fierce turned inside him. He felt it pushing at his bones. On the screens, the dog-beast that had stalked and slaughtered Poppy was shambling down hallways, while Lauren made her limping, halting way through the rooms, lost, frightened, but still oblivious to what was coming for her.

  Until she came to the room that held Poppy's mutilated corpse.

  Ramsey could see the shape of her mouth as she screamed, stumbled back; as the door in another wall opened and the beast stooped through; and the creature and the young woman saw each other for the first time.

  And then Ramsey heard another, different screaming, only this one was coming from inside him, ripping out through his skin and bones. He felt himself carried by some rushing force inside him. It swept him down the steps, hurled him into the main room.

  On screen, the dark shape of the dog-beast bolted towards Lauren; and as the girl fell beneath it, as she died on screen while the crowd in the room watched and murmured and groaned and cheered, Ramsey felt the air around his body turn hot and still. Just like that: she was dead, she was gone, that's all it took, that one brief sound of a neck snapping, while these people watched and waited for the final score. His skin was charged, electric. He tossed back his head and even he was unprepared for the sound that came from him then, the agonized howl that echoed down through realms and centuries, trapped in his flesh for so long. He felt the rise of wind from his body, whipping through his clothes and hair. It funneled round him—

  —Then exploded into the room.

  It slammed over tables. Gems spilled across the floor like chips of ice. Someone shrieked. Ramsey ran towards the center of the room, his arms held out, the winds whipping round him. The pain blazed across his back but no longer mattered. It was a simple matter, now, to set the room on fire. Fire crawled up the velvet and silk; fire caught at the clothes of those who weren't already rushing for the doors. The screens along the walls imploded, one by one by one, glass shattering and raining to the floor.

  "Lauren!" Ramsey screamed. "LAUREN!"

  Abruptly as it had come, all strength left him. His knees dissolved like sugar in water; he sank to the floor. His back was on fire. He was being ripped apart from the inside, this hot fierce thing inside that thrashed his bones. It would crack him apart, Ramsey knew. It would pound his mind to sand. His body couldn't contain it, wasn't meant to contain it. He was only Ramsey, after all, an ordinary boy who should have died when he was five years old. He was—

  —The vessel is unfit—

  —Never meant for this.

  The air was thick with heat and smoke, the ground littered with broken glass.

  Ramsey.

  His name, riding the air, coming at him through the flames, the screams.

  Ramsey.

  The boy looked up. Through the rage of smoke and flame he saw a man waiting for him inside the arched doorway.

  Come to me, the man said, in the way of speaking that was not speaking. I can take you to her. To Asha. You want that, don't you?

  A sob escaped him.

  You want that very much.

  And as the boy made his slow, broken way through the room towards Lucas Maddox, he saw Salik crouched on a divan like an ape, flinging his hands together in manic applause. He was burning. But he kept applauding, grinning at Ramsey, as the flames ate his clothes and peeled and charred his skin and ignited his hair. "Good show," he was screaming. "Good show, good show, good show."

  * * * *

  The roof was collapsing, now, the flames leaping up towards the sky. Figures were spilling from the doors; some had jumped from the upper-story windows; others had made it to the cars parked along both sides of the road, or were fleeing down the hillside like mice.

  The man carried the boy from the house, the flames bending away from them.

/>   And then they were gone.

  Only the fire, the heat, the darkness, and the screaming.

  Part III

  In the Borderlands

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Harry Robert Jackson,

  a.k.a. Coyote

  Reno, Nevada

  Coyote was still thinking about the dream, even now, sitting in the lawn chair in front of his trailer, a cold beer in one hand and Janice off to her shift at the casino and his big dog at his feet and the sunset, all those pinks and purples staining the sky. His favorite hour. The desert heat cooled off and the light turned gentle and the landscape yawned in front of him, never ending, never changing. He shifted his weight in the chair, sprawled his legs, cracked open another Budweiser. Max yawned and snorted and dropped his big head on his big paws. "Hey, boy," Coyote said, and tossed him the last bit of fried chicken from the bucket. Max was going to stay with his sister while Coyote went into the desert, and Coyote would miss him. He thought more highly of dogs than he did of most humans. There was something about a dog that kept you in touch with the better part of yourself. Max gulped down the chicken and snorted again, rolling his brown eyes up at Coyote just to make sure everything was as it should be.

  And it was.

  Except for that damn dream, the taste it left in his mouth.

  It was the urn, Coyote thought. That goddamn urn, sitting inside the goddamn trailer on the goddamn kitchen table. Filled with the goddamn ashes of one Terry Ressi, known as Brutus to the brotherhood, the man who had founded the brotherhood, and who had for some mysterious reason seen fit to fall off a goddamn balcony the week before. Coyote had respected the man and struggled to hold on to that respect, even through the growing suspicion that Brutus was one or two cans short of a six-pack—perhaps even, in the last year, three or four or more. His unlikely demise hadn't helped. Who the fuck fell off a balcony, for fuck's sake? Sober.

  But Brutus had founded the Nevada chapter of the Hellriders, and you had to give the dead man his due. Tomorrow morning the brotherhood would assemble at the clubhouse and head out into the desert, bearing their leader's remains sealed up nice in the red ceramic urn Janice had picked up at a garage sale two weeks ago. They would ride all the way to Gritson Rock, scatter Brutus's ashes to the elements as the man himself had once requested, then set up camp and get drunk and stoned right out of their goddamn minds.

  Coyote was looking forward to it. The desert, the brotherhood, the ride, his old lady's thighs riding his on the back of his Harley: these things were why you lived life, why you showed up at work and put in the hours and the labor, why you paid bills and smiled at the cops even when they gave you shit just 'cause of what you wore and what you rode, why you didn't just snatch up your rifle and say hell with it and go into town and blow away every fucking moron who ever got on your fucking nerves. You restrained yourself. You behaved like a reasonably responsible citizen. You did all this, so you could ride in the desert with your brothers.

  But he was uneasy.

  Something in the air, maybe. He was seeing things from the corners of his vision—weird things—like shadows, falling and moving and writhing in a way that didn't seem… normal, or natural, or quite like it should be. When he was dropping off videos at Blockbuster, for example, he had stopped to admire a supple young thing in white terry-cloth shorts, standing outside the kiosk at the gas station across the street, but then he saw… or thought he saw… some kind of shadow, slipping up around her body and going through her and into her, so that Coyote thought he saw her skin ripple, as she tossed back her head and smiled at the sky, as if she'd wanted this, expected it, come a long way for it—

  Maybe he was going a little nuts. A few too many chemicals rattling around his old battered brain. He wouldn't be surprised.

  As long as he didn't fall off any fucking balconies, for Chrissake.

  But the dream.

  Started out pleasant, at first. He was in a grassy field with a woman, a babe, long dark hair, the kind of gym-toned well-nourished body you didn't often see on the broads who came drifting through the brotherhood. He spent a long time looking at that body. He was showing off for her, showing her his Harley, explaining everything he'd done to it, every tinkering that made it his own: Coyote's heart, Coyote's soul, Coyote's chopper. The only thing Coyote prized almost as much as his bike was his old lady, and then only sometimes.

  I might need to borrow this, this hot young thing was saying, so I better make sure I can ride it. And Coyote watched, amazed, as this little dark-haired honey took the bike right from under his hands and straddled it with her strong long legs and kicked it to life and went riding. Riding. On his fucking chopper.

  He woke up feeling like someone had stabbed him in the gut with an icicle.

  So now, Coyote sat in his lawn chair and looked out at the sunset and finished off his beer. Yeah, he couldn't help it, he had a bad feeling. Like there was something bad out there and coming right for him—maybe for all of them—the whole goddamn brotherhood.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  He was a teenage boy: yes and no. He was Ramsey Doe: yes. And no. He was—

  Innat.

  But that was the name of the son, the firstborn son, the first and proper vessel.

  He twisted and flailed on the cold smooth floor, reaching for the true name, but it was gone now, along with so much else. He found instead Nemesis, and decided that that would have to do.

  The back doors opened and a woman stood looking in at him, her body backlit by harsh desert light. He was being kept in the back of a storage van, holes drilled through the roof to allow for light and air. As the sunlight reached long white fingers across the floor towards him, he looked at his arms, his hands, the skin barely visible beneath layer upon layer of blue symbols and scribbles. They kept writing all over him. The air inside the van was sweltering, but he was cold. He couldn't stop shivering.

  "Do you remember me?"

  She was in the van with him. She crouched so they were at eye level. For a moment he was confused: was she a person or some kind of animal? Her eyes were green, hard, yet not without a strange kindness.

  "Do you remember me?" she whispered.

  He stretched his hands in front of him and laughed. Why would I remember you? Are you something special? He couldn't seem to dig the words out of his throat but she seemed to hear them anyway.

  "You came all this way to find me."

  Yes. But I don't know why.

  "You want answers. I have them."

  I don't remember the questions.

  She crawled toward him, shoulders undulating beneath the white T-shirt. She stopped a few inches in front of him, rocking back on her heels. This close, he could see the odd, slithery texture of her pale skin, the bloodshot whites of her eyes. "I could have had the world," she mused, "all those years ago. If not for you."

  Behind her, beyond the wide-open doors of the truck, he could see the bright shapes of people in the distance, tents and camps on a bleached-out landscape.

  Maybe the world isn't meant to be yours.

  "Should it belong to someone like you?"

  Fuck no. I don't even want to be here.

  She acknowledged this with a tilt of her head. "I tore apart that body they put you in. Do you remember?"

  Memory flickered in the very back of him: the feel of teeth and nails. The hurt of it. He shut down the memory. Enough to have lived through it once. "And then," she said, "and then, we fought. We fought in the Dreamlines. I tore up your soul. You remember?"

  The past is the past. It no longer matters.

  "The past is never past. It bleeds all through us."

  I have bled enough.

  "No," she said. "Not yet. Not you."

  He dropped his head back and drifted. The golden waves rose up from beneath him, subsumed him, carried him away.

  * * * *

  And then he was a small boy again—he had been so many things, he couldn't help marveling—he was camping in the desert wit
h his parents. They were fighting the way they sometimes did, so he wandered as far away as he dared, the warmth of the fire giving way to the chill in the air. When he saw a sudden brightness flare up in the sky. He stared as hard as he could at the star-splattered sky, the thing streaking through it, a strange writhing thing of blue fire—

  "Look!" he yelled. He ran back to the camp, small feet tripping over sagebrush. "Mommy, Daddy, look—"

  He heard, then, the pop of an exploding firecracker. Confused, he looked back to the sky, but there were no firecrackers; only that writhing burning thing falling steadily towards him. He turned back towards the campfire, the tent and the beat-up Ford parked behind it, both Mommy and Daddy quiet now, good, they were no longer fighting, Daddy was holding Mommy in his arms—

  Except then he was pushing her off him; she was slumping to the sand like one of those floppy dolls in the reading corner of his kindergarten.

  "Come here," his father said. Looking at him through the firelight. "Come here, Son."

  The boy stopped, confused by the tears on his father's face, the broken-down look in his eyes. "Come here," the man said again, and there was another firecracker pop and something punched the boy in the chest, knocked him down on the hard-packed sand. He tried to breathe and couldn't. He saw the gun, then, in the same hand that would tousle the boy's hair or play toy soldiers with him when the man wasn't in one of his dark moods, those times when "the black dog" visited, that's what his mother called it, "the black dog," and although the boy was on a constant lookout he himself never saw such a dog, and didn't know what, exactly, it had to do with his father.

  But now, the taste of sand and blood in his mouth, he felt the black dog's presence looming over them. He felt it filling up the world. His father put the gun inside his own mouth like it was a great big lollipop and pulled the trigger. The back of his head blew off in a spray of blood and bone and gristle. The boy tried to cry out but couldn't make any sound at all. He was feeling cold, and then colder. There was a great weight on his chest, squeezing the breath right out of him.