BloodAngel Page 24

  His eyes moved to the sky again, and it was still falling, the blue-burning thing, except it was some kind of creature, it was some kind of man, like an angel, a burning angel like nothing he'd ever seen in Sunday school, dropping down towards him—falling right over him—he could see the smooth white face now, the dark and panicked eyes, he could hear the screaming, and smell the ash and cinder—

  * * * *

  —You were screaming and dreaming as you fell—And then he was no longer the boy but that burning falling figure, flinging himself from the Dreamlines, burning a hole through the worlds with his own pain and fear and fury, nothing to hold him or stop him from falling, he was scrambling, panicked, utterly exposed, the air like acid eating away at him, and then, across the vast gulf of space, he saw the boy, a small figure on desert ground—Falling, falling, straight into the boy.

  * * * *

  I'm sorry.

  I didn't know what else to do.

  You were dying anyway.

  * * * *

  He was stumbling to the side of the highway and waiting for a car, a double-souled creature in a human body, he was waiting to see what would happen next so maybe then he would know what to do. He couldn't remember anything. Who am I? I don't know. Where am I? I don't know. Do I have parents? I don't know. No, don't think about that. Don't think about that at all.

  A lady in a shiny new Toyota found him, fed him, and bought him new clothes. The lady thought she might keep him. She'd always wanted a child of her own, and a boy such as this would do nicely. She took him through several states and told him to call her Mommy. He didn't call her anything. He didn't speak at all.

  One morning he started to bleed. The blood soaked through the back of the flannel shirt she had just bought him at a Wal-Mart and she saw it and screamed and ripped the shirt off his body and then screamed again. He couldn't see the wounds on his back, but he could feel them: long and jagged, from shoulder to waist. His wings, trying and failing to assert themselves, to find bodily form in this realm, this body. So sorry, wings, he thought, and bid them good-bye. He felt the wounds closing over, the wings giving up. He could feel his blood pumping itself anew inside his body; it was changing, he was changing, as the wing-blood caked and crusted on his clothes. It had become strange blood, a stranger's blood. Not his. But the lady no longer wanted him. The blood was on his clothes. She was parking the Toyota in front of a police station, pushing him out of the car: "Go. Just go."

  * * * *

  The next time the doors opened, the air was grainy with dust and dusk, and no longer warm. Lucas stood over him for several moments, and Nemesis stared at the long slashing scars on the man's face. Lucas muttered, "Poor bastard," and Nemesis thought, Same to you.

  Nemesis was aware of himself being lifted, but he couldn't feel the other man's arms beneath his back and knees, couldn't feel anything. His body had been jaxed all the way into a dead zone—no longer capable of motion or sensation.

  A useless vessel, he.

  Lucas carried him for a while. At some point Nemesis sensed rather than saw Asha fall in beside them. They passed through a large collection of camps: domed tents, some RVs, other vehicles, cables snaking along the ground. He caught drifts of music: classic rock from one direction, reggae from another. They put the camps behind them and walked on, toward nothing but a grinning horizon of tumbledown rocky hills.

  "Here," Asha whispered.

  This place looked familiar. A lifeless sweep of sand, ringed by black rock: this place used to be a lake, once, in ancient times. He could feel that long-gone water echoing up through the alkali. The last gasps of sun churned the horizon to froth. "Here," Asha said again.

  The wind kicked up, then, blowing dust around their bodies. He imagined the gritty way it must be feeling on his skin; he imagined the dry chalky taste that must be in his mouth. Lucas continued to stand there, immobile, holding him; when Nemesis glanced at his face he saw the deadness in the man's eyes, the tight rigid line of the man's jaw. But behind that shut-down look, the man seemed to be considering something. Hiding inside himself.

  The air was churning and whipping with dust, leaching out what light of the day still remained. And still, the dust storm continued to thicken, the beige-orange sand rising up off the ground, molding itself into high, curved walls. Two doorways appeared in the sand, one to their left and one to their right, and beyond those passageways Nemesis saw more walls climbing the air, sculpting more rooms and hallways.

  Nemesis closed his eyes and put his mind out into the Maze. And suddenly he was the Maze, and the Maze was him, spinning itself out of his own bones, his own energy. He was branching out into hallways and sharp turns and dead ends, into domed and long and closet-sized rooms, as the Maze fleshed itself out across this dead ancient lake. It sucked up life from Nemesis, it pulled life up from the ground and down from the sky. As the edges of two different realms brushed up against each other, then crossed. As here, in this place, the boundaries slipped open, and many things became possible, dark and light things both. Here was the Maze. Here was Nemesis at the heart of it.

  * * * *

  Nemesis heard their footfalls as the first ones came for him, echoing through the walls of the labyrinth.

  He was aware of Asha looking at him; she didn't touch him, no one touched him, but he knew it was she who made him lift from the ground. Like magic. It was magic. He hung in the air, suspended, his arms lifted to either side. A pleasant, floating feeling. He saw the figures come through the doorways, approaching with awe in their faces. They were in their late teens and twenties, clothes grungy from the desert, hair matted with dust. Maybe eight or ten of them. He saw the knife in Lucas's hand but he didn't feel the first cut, or the second, or the third. He saw but couldn't feel the mouths pressing against those newborn wounds, licking and sucking at his blood.

  Asha crouched on the floor, watching.

  And then her voice slipped neatly into his head:

  You were their puppet. You were their little war-angel monkey, forced to perform for them. You don't have to fight for them anymore. You can be as you are. At peace.

  One of the men who was drinking from him stepped back and wiped his mouth. He grinned, said, "Thanks, kid," and turned to Asha. He dropped to his knees.

  "I enjoyed your brother very much," Asha said softly. "Yours was a generous atonement."

  The man left the room. In the hallway outside, Nemesis heard him give a shrieking cry of excitement and triumph. A young woman was stepping up to him now; he could see but not feel the tangled mass of blonde hair that fell over his arm, as she lowered her mouth to the wound along his wrist.

  Is this fate any worse than what they condemned you to? They made you a slave for eternity.

  Asha was looking at him with gentle eyes.

  But I will give you sleep. I will give you final peace.

  Memory flickered: he remembered slaughter, and screaming. He remembered the magic-user who called himself Shemayan. I will release you. I will send you home. But he had not. He had broken every vow, and Nemesis now found himself here.

  So let them drink from this body, if they wanted. It wasn't even his. It had been on borrowed time for all these years. Let them drink and eat it all up.

  Asha was still looking at him.

  I was put in this world to burn it. And so it must be.

  He didn't care. This world wasn't even his. And perhaps it, too, had been on borrowed time, was in need of some kind of ending.

  And so.

  Let it burn.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  She couldn't shake off the feeling of descent. She looked straight ahead, the highway cutting a swath through desert, morning light slanting over leagues of beige-yellow sand and rock. Yet Jess continued to feel that she was going down, that despite all evidence to the contrary the ground kept sloping and sloping beneath her.

  Jess pulled over to the side of the road, stopped the car, reached for one of the bottles of water that rolled on the
floor. She sat inside the silence for several moments, gulping water, then got out of the car, door slamming, squinting down both sides of the highway.

  Straight.

  Flat.

  No reason to be feeling this weird vertigo.

  Heat and dust and silence, the sky hammering itself into the flat white of noon. And again she had that feeling of—

  Tilt.

  As if her mind were playing tricks on her, as if drugs had skewed her perceptions and the desert were coming at her, into her, from weird angles. She had the feeling of passing into a new land—a strange land—no longer attached to one world or the other.

  This, then, must be slippage.

  She pulled into a gas station. She was standing with the nozzle in her hand, sunlight glancing off broken glass on the pavement, when she noticed a camper parked in the corner. Two men and two women were hanging out alongside it, passing a joint back and forth. Smoke drifted in the dry air.

  As she lifted the nozzle from the tank and replaced the cap she mindcast toward them. When she glanced up again she saw auras surrounding each of them: slithering gray, shot through with bright red. But what struck her was how the auras bled into each other, so that the four of them looked linked together, their energies merged and binding, as if together they made up one creature.

  She closed her eyes, cleared her mind, and when she looked again the auras were gone.

  "Hey."

  She turned. A towheaded man dressed in lace-up zebra pants was coming out of the kiosk, chewing on red licorice. "You headed where we're headed?" There were faded jax-marks on the left side of his face. His eyes were bright, the whites threaded through with blood. "All by yourself in that lonely car. Why don't you join up with us?"

  "No thanks," Jess said.

  He tore off another piece of licorice, chewed and swallowed and leered. "Suit yourself."

  The group got back into the van, doors slamming. Jess turned away, toward the kiosk, to load up on bottled water and PowerBars.

  * * * *

  Kai, she thought. I wish you were here. With me. Right now.

  Out of nowhere an image of a dark bird lifted itself into her mind's eye: she saw the strip of ragged flesh that dangled from its beak. Kai, she thought, Kai, oh, oh, Kai, and then she drove the car off the road, wheels churning through sand and sagebrush, not even fully braked before Jess was spilling out through the door and vomiting into the sand, the knowledge of her own loneliness, aloneness, driving through her like a javelin.

  When she looked up again, lifting a hand to her mouth, she saw the haze of worn-down mountains in the distance.

  But something else had appeared, pulling itself up beyond those rocks. A red circle in the sky. A moon where no moon should be. She leaned against the car, staring at that odd red sphere: mark of the bloodangel.

  She could hear Kai's voice in her mind:

  It has begun.

  * * * *

  Time twisted in on itself.

  When the sense of descent overcame her again, she was determined to ignore it. But she couldn't shake the feeling that the ordinary highway was the illusion. The ground had opened up and dropped her onto the other road, the true road, now hurtling her downward at greater pitch and speed.

  And then the earth began to shake.

  Her first thought was that she had a flat tire. Jess pulled over and stopped the car.

  Things grew still again, and quiet.

  She flung open the door and got out. The dusk had suddenly, savagely deepened, shadows long and thick, sun a smoldering line that rode the horizon. A wind kicked up, blowing sand. The cacti were stunted and spiky in the half-light.

  Something was wrong.

  She looked out toward the mountains and tentatively mindcast toward them. What she felt was a cold dark thing that slashed her gut and reeled her back, a fierce dark energy tunneling towards her. She got back in the car and drove it off the road, then hunkered down in the seat, trying to make her body, her mind, as small as possible, as if she could wipe away her entire presence and melt into the landscape.

  There was a rumble in the distance, like thunder, only it wasn't anything that nature had produced, not in this world. The sound lifted into a scream: rage and fury and pain and the desire to make pain: all mingling, thundering down and around the highway, tearing across the ground. Jess lifted her head just enough to peer out the window.

  They were coming from the opposite direction, a convoy of cars and RVs, maybe eight or nine of them. People were leaning out the windows, upper thighs balanced on the frame, upper bodies curved up and back as if made of rubber, arms flailing, hands clawing the air. She heard the high keening and shrieking of wind and realized it wasn't the wind: it was them, these people, these howling and contorted faces. As the cars screamed past she saw mouths and chins smeared with blood, she saw a woman holding up a severed head with long brown hair and a bearded face, the neck stump ragged and chewed. She saw more faces pressed against back windows, hollow-eyed faces whipping and bobbing and shaking on stem-like throats; she saw long slithering tongues lashing the air.

  These faces.

  Looking directly at her.

  Grinning.

  And then came a great, groaning, subterranean sound, a roar that boomed up through the earth. She felt the ground buckle, the car rear up beneath her, and she braced herself against the dashboard and ceiling. She was pitched sideways, her head slamming back against the window. Red light flared behind her eyes. Then the pounding started, like rocks or blows raining on the car from all around. The roof, the doors, punched in against her body. She curled up, shielding her head, gasping into her arm while she waited for it to end. What's happening, the voice in her mind was screaming, what's happening what's happening what's happening what's happening—

  * * * *

  She opened her eyes to darkness.

  She mindcast beyond the car, sensed the empty air of aftermath. The door was twisted in the frame and difficult to push open. She let her body spill to the ground. The scent of desert earth, sharp as chalk, filled her nostrils. She looked at the car, banged up and overturned and useless.

  I'm sorry, she thought. I failed. I failed.

  I'm so sorry, so sorry.

  The air had cooled. The blaze of midday now seemed distant as another planet.

  She limped to the car and grabbed her jacket from the backseat. As she pulled it on, her fingers touched a small, smooth shape inside the front pocket.

  She took out the stone. The tiger's eye.

  … Someone will come from the Dreamlines to guide you. A ghost, most likely, although sometimes it's a demon.

  Jess did not hesitate. She lifted her arm, reared it back, let fly with all the force in her body. The stone slipped through the darkness and disappeared.

  Jess stared after it and shivered.

  A figure began to emerge from the darkness. It cast off its own light, a slim pale body slicing through the shadows.

  Kai, she thought, and hope leaped against her chest. But as the figure drew closer Jess saw that it wasn't, couldn't be him.

  It was a woman.

  She carried nothing in her hands, yet emanated light like a firefly. She made no sound, no footsteps. She was less than a whisper in the dark.

  Ghost.

  And then the woman, barely more than a girl, stood in front of her. They eyed each other across a space that looked narrow yet felt deeper than any chasm Jess could imagine: a chasm of death, and knowledge of death. The ghost had a young, dark-eyed face, dark brown hair falling almost to her shoulders. She wore a white dress, gauzy, something a dancer might wear; she wore ballet shoes with the toes blocked off to dance en pointe. The shoes were crusted with old blood, even as fresh stains soaked and spread through the satin.

  The dancer tilted her head, smiled sadly at Jess.

  Jess said, "Do I know you?"

  The girl lifted her shoulders, as if to say, Does it matter?

  She turned and glanced over her sho
ulder, and Jess realized she was being asked, or told, to follow. They moved off the road and deeper into the landscape, the highway slipping into darkness behind them. Jess stared up at the false moon, the red mark that hung in the sky as if nailed there, that did not move but let the sky move itself around it; it seemed larger than before, more misshapen, and a bolder, more smoldering red. She was mesmerized. It didn't seem… solid, like rock, but hollow and filled with red light. It was then she began to see them: the blurred shapes moving elsewhere in the dark, faint lights of different hues—blues, yellows, lavenders—picking out the forms, the rippling suggestions, of bodies drifting. For a brief moment she thought they were people carrying lanterns; for another moment she thought they were ghosts. She peered harder at them, trying to make out more form, more detail, but they eluded her: they were shadows on shadows, riding air. There and then gone. She rubbed at her eyes, wondering if this was some kind of mirage, the desert equivalent of northern lights; she saw a slender, purplish shape undulating off to the left of her and then it, too, was gone.

  —Keep walking, a voice hissed in her ear, and she felt a cold touch on her shoulder, guiding her back toward the ghost, guiding her on.

  —You must not get lost. If you do you will never find your way back.

  She glanced beside her.

  He was the barest suggestion of a man, his form and features faintly sketched against the dark. Yet his presence overwhelmed her, his energy entering inside her so that she could taste him: he was dry and parched, he was dust turned to dust.

  Who, she started to ask, but then his name rose up inside her body as if her own blood were echoing it back to him.

  She said, "Shemayan."

  The mouth carved out a smile.

  —The world has slipped open, little one. It does not happen often. But it has happened here. And they—Shem gestured at the oddly lit shapes slipping past them through the dark—they can sideslip into the desert, one by one by one, where Asha's fans are waiting. They will drink of the bloodangel. Human body and demon spirit will be one, and they can leave the borderlands and move into your world.