BloodAngel Page 25

  Jess said, "They're demons?"

  —They are looking for form. Some of them have found form already.

  Jess flashed back to the highway, the screaming nightmare of a caravan.

  It has begun.

  She couldn't keep the chord of despair from her voice. "So how do I stop this? I find the boy—what then?"

  —Can you give up everything, Jessamy? Strip away everything you think you are, everything you think you care about, and give yourself up for the world?

  She didn't, or couldn't, answer this.

  —Because that is what we ask of you. Nothing less. Nothing more.

  Jess muttered, "This is insane. How did I come to this?"

  Shem cast her a cool glance.

  —I was too arrogant, he said. His voice was thoughtful. I thought it was my place to command, my power to wield, and to pass on to my children and my children's children. To you. But it was not. It never has been. We are vessels, Jessamy. That is our power and our privilege. Remember that. Remember your nature, and you will rise up through your destruction. I promise you that.

  Light appeared in the sky, distorted and rippling, as if filtering through water. The taste of dust in her mouth faded away, and when she looked back to Shemayan he was already gone. The ghost-girl glimmered up ahead of her and the world took shape beneath her feet again, the desert landscape fleshing itself into view. Dawn sifted through the ridges in the distance; beneath the cooling breeze the heat was beginning to gather, the first strokes of it on her skin.

  And riding the edge of the breeze came the stench: she breathed it in as her eyes connected with its source.

  The thought flashed again through her mind: How did I come to this?

  They were walking toward a massacre.

  * * * *

  Bikers, maybe eighty or a hundred, were strewn across the landscape like broken puppets. Their heavyset bodies were clawed and slashed, their leather vests with HELLRIDERS—NEVADA club insignias encrusted with blood. Light glittered off metal rings on stiffened fingers, pendants and medallions on torn-open chests, light struck the chrome and steel of the overturned Harley-Davidsons that littered the ground like blasted dusty tombstones. Jess could only turn and turn again, staggered by the sight, the stench of the carnage—metallic, overripe, too-sweet.

  She knew, then, what she had been brought here to do and the knowledge and sight and smell were like three rivers crashing into her. Her body crunched in on itself and she heaved and retched into the scrubby ground, but nothing came out of her. She was empty, void.

  She looked up at the ghost, who was still and silent and not quite real, a negative form imposed upon the landscape. "Goddammit," Jess yelled, "I can't do this! Do you hear me? I can't do this!"

  The ghost made no response. Her form was thin and unsteady, shimmering the air like waves of heat. Her eyes were brown and deep and anxious, and for a moment Jess saw through to the young woman she had been, to the quality of human that had not left her completely.

  "You knew him," Jess said. "Ramsey."

  The ghost moved her head. The expression that shifted through her eyes looked suddenly, amazingly, like love.

  "Oh," Jess breathed.

  Her fear and repulsion fell away, husked off like an old skin that shamed her. She closed her eyes and turned her mind away from the surrounding carnage and reached through her mind's eye for the hallway of doors—

  Except this time she stood at the end of the hallway, and there was only one door.

  It was different from the others.

  It was larger, and darker, and had a sheen to it, as if black light were trapped inside the material. She stepped closer, and realized: this door was glass. Glass from the floor of the demon's cave.

  "That's my door," a voice hissed.

  Del was by her side. His blue eyes flashed bright and turned red, and a shadow lifted from his body to hover above and around him. A shadow in the shape of the demon in the cave, the long tail flicking round Del-the-man's sandaled feet. She stared at them, the one self imposed upon the other.

  "That's my door," Del said again. "The thing, the gift, the power, that they tried to forbid us. The great dark art they made taboo. This power is for you. It is of you. And now you'll have to use it."

  "Tell me—"

  Del hissed, "Necromancer," and then vanished.

  She was alone in the hallway. She stared at the door, the black-glass door, and she knew, then, that she couldn't stop it from opening even if she wanted to (and part of her still wanted to, part of her was still fighting). The door creaked and shifted in its hinges, and Jess said, "All right, then," the words snatched by the winds, and as the door opened and black light bled through and enveloped her she felt the ache spread through her body and into her head, she felt the warm slip of blood from both nostrils.

  The door opened—

  —And she blasted right through it, to the Dreamlines-beyond.

  She felt her mind flexing and shifting and then expanding, as if her consciousness had blasted free from not just her body but her self, her sense of any limits or boundaries that defined her. She was floating high and free from everything she had ever known.

  And in this place, this vast cold infinite place of in between, voices called out to her and she listened to them all, heard the uncanny song of the recently dead. She tracked their song, hunted out the longing for life that had not yet left them, made them open and vulnerable to her. She used that to draw them even as another world—higher and sweeter—reached out and beckoned. But she cast herself in front of that beckoning, blocked it with the force of her own shadow, and answered these dead with a song of her own. Come to me. Come back with me. Serve me. Just for a little while.

  They howled for her and gathered around her and as her mind began the long downward shift into her body, their song followed. The song of the Dreamlines: she gathered it close and brought it down and into her. It wracked her bones with such violence she thought they might shatter: for they were only bones and this song was so vast and cold and ancient, so beautiful and brutal, how could she not break in the face of it? How could she not be annihilated?

  And yet, she was not.

  That was her power, she realized. To hear this song, to rise in answer with a song of her own; to do this, and survive.

  When she opened her eyes, the sun had climbed and the air gone blunt with heat. A Hellrider stood in front of her, his eyes fever-bright. He was tall, thick-shouldered, and cradled against his chest a motorcycle helmet covered in fur. Coyote, Jess thought, the name like a weed she pulled from the air, or maybe a dream. She spoke it aloud, testing it: "Coyote."

  He looked at her and waited. His skin gave off a moonstone sheen, as if lit from within; perhaps he was, Jess thought, by whatever forces now working through him. He moved his helmet to his other hand and she saw the deep wounds in his chest, clawed right through his leather vest and deep into flesh; they were long, gaping shapes, the color of raw meat yet bloodless. They looked odd, artificial, as if carved from wax.

  "Give me your chopper," she said.

  Naked horror twisted his face. She bit back a smile, chided, "Coyote," and watched as he struggled. To give his bike to anyone, but especially a woman: it cut against every fiber of his not-quite-fully-dead being. "Coyote," she said again, the third and last time, and he blew air through his beard and handed her the keys.

  Around them, she could hear stirrings of motion: boots scraping on ground, bones realigning themselves inside shifting, creaking leather. She could feel the cold, steady weight of gazes collecting on her body. She didn't have to see them—in fact, she kept her eyes averted—to know the fierce light that had entered their eyes now: the light of the Dreamlines. She imagined it piercing their bones, their skin, like sunlight through pinpricks in a photograph.

  "When they are ready, bring them to me," Jess said. "Fight for me."

  Coyote crossed his arms. His eyes were slanted and hazel; when he moved his head again she saw m
ore of those red, waxen wounds crossing his throat. His voice was like loose gravel. "Of course."

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The first time the bird came upon him he was not prepared for it. The creature circled above him, wings outstretched, its shadow falling dark and cold along Kai's body. It perched on the edge of the rock in a flurry of black feathers. He could smell it: sharp and wet like gasoline. It cocked its head, gauging his body from deep within its glittering hole of an eye, then dashed its beak into his belly, again and again, ripping through flesh and sinew. His back arched with the sensation, his wrists pulling at the rough leather cuffs; he felt the bird pulling at him, the insides of him, felt his liver ripping away. The bird lingered there, a piece of Kai in its daggerlike beak, then exploded upward in a violence of wings. He closed his eyes and turned his head. Already he could feel the wound closing, healing, his liver regenerating itself inside his body.

  The bird returned some time later. Again the long slow spiral downward, its body a large black shape that blocked out the sun. Again, it perched at the edge of the rock. Again, it hacked into his body and tore out his liver, and this time he screamed, couldn't stop the sound uncoiling from his mouth. The bird cocked its head at him, the dripping organ caught in its beak; then it ruffled its wings and leaped into the sky.

  Stray feathers drifted in the air, settled on his chest and belly.

  The wound healed.

  The bird came again.

  The wound healed.

  The bird came again.

  The pain cycled through different stages. First the violence of the act itself, followed by the raw, searing aftermath, the wound exposed to sun and air. Then the itch as the wound closed and healed, an itch so intense it threatened to drive him insane, made him fantasize about digging his fingers into his skin so he could scratch it out. Then for a brief space of time he was returned to other sensations: the heat, the glare, the scrape of rock against his back, the roaring quiet. He lay in his cuffs and watched for the bird, for the moment the silhouette edged into his vision again and circled downward. For the pain to begin all over again.

  He didn't know when the bird began to speak to him. He didn't know if he was even sane at this point, only that there came a time when the creature's voice spoke inside his head, thin and high and alien:

  There is no redemption in this world, not for you. The sins of the fathers pass to the sons to the sons to the sons. And the daughters.

  The bird's eye deepened, darkened; it was a quicksand of nothingness and he felt himself, what remained of him, disappearing inside. The bird told him calmly:

  It's all a lie. There is nothing more.

  "No," he said. His protest was feeble. His voice scraped like rusted wire; his lips felt as cracked as splintered glass.

  The world is lies and maggots and cruelty and war. You know this yourself. The world is disease. The world is shit.

  "No."

  Let it burn. Give it to the demons and the fires and the hells. There, in the flames, the world shall be cleansed, and purged. It shall find atonement.

  "You're insane."

  First, destruction. Then, rebirth. It is the way of things.

  "You're insane."

  It is the way of things.

  The bird tore out his liver. But this time it did not stop there; it repositioned itself on the rock, then cracked open his rib cage. He felt his heart pulled out, saw the motion of the bird's throat as it swallowed. He saw the golden beak coming for his face; and then pain shot through his skull as the creature took his eyes—

  He was nothing but darkness, and brute animal pain, his inner vision churning from bloodstained to black.

  But he held on to himself just enough to think, Now.

  And he cast himself, his soul, up into the darkness: a blind clumsy leap. He felt the rustle of the bird's wings, the coldness of the bird's dead gaze, and he went through that gaze, plunging into the dark light beyond with a ferocity of speed that made him realize how wrong he had been, to think he could handle this.

  And then thought dissolved and there was nothing but the falling.

  And the fire.

  It was like hands of white flame reaching out through the darkness, towards him, seizing him, pulling him inside, white light streaking past his vision and then closing in and consuming him utterly. Blowing him up. Blowing him apart. It would smash your soul, Romany had said on the train, and he could not only feel his own death but reach all the way through it. He felt himself turned to ash and scattered. He let himself go. He let it all go… and a voice moved over him like a bath of warm light.

  The voice, and he did not know whose it was or where it came from, said: You can rest now. You've done all you can… You're not required to do anything more.

  The light flowed around him. He saw, then, how he could drift into it, and give himself over to it, and become part of it, how the hurt and loneliness of so many centuries would fall away like discarded clothing. This was dying, then? So peaceful. So lovely. How ironic, that people feared something like death when the true horror and brutality were to be found in their own world, where she was—

  Where she still was. Where she would be without him.

  Jess, he thought.

  Just that. Her name, her memory: a different kind of light.

  Jess.

  Her name, over and over again, the one cry his mind was still capable of, whether it could be answered or no. He focused himself on that cry, he bent himself around it.

  You're not required to do anything more. You can rest now, but the voice—and the light it wore around itself—was already fading.

  Then the other names came to him, like comets in the dark, and he folded himself around each one and summoned them, and summoned them, until he was thinning all the way into nothing, and a different kind of darkness closed around him, shut him down.

  * * * *

  Early morning in the desert.

  Mist drifted over the sand. He felt it on his skin, cool and gentle. Figures moved deep inside it. He lifted his head the best he could, to see. One by one they stepped from the mist as if rising from water, until they stood, eleven of them, forming a circle around him.

  One of them stepped forward: Mina. And then she was unshackling him, drawing her body against his, rocking him. He could not remember the last time he'd cried, but he seemed to be doing it now.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  She saw the fires from a distance, and then she heard the drumming, stark and tribal, and the metallic gongs rippling out through desert air. She saw canvas domes rising against the smooth black ridges of rock in the background, saw large twisted sculptures of metal. She also caught snatches of different kinds of music, an overlapping progression of sound that marked the passage from one part of the festival to another.

  It was huge. She didn't feel that she was riding towards it; she felt that it was bearing down on her.

  It was a dense mosaic of tents, cars, and campers, sun stabbing down on metallic roofs. She heard the faint drone of an airplane and glanced up. A little Cessna swerved into its downturn, puttering towards a landing strip somewhere in the distance. And in the patch of sky directly above hung the sign of the bloodangel. The false moon. It was low and swollen and dark, like an overripe fruit, poison for plucking. She felt a breeze against her cheek, and the thought came into her head out of nowhere: Time to come home. Red light shining out towards her. Bloodangel. Time to come home. She frowned a moment—tried to hold on to that feeling, that thought, a little longer, but it slipped through and away like an alien wind. She didn't know what it meant.

  Another doorway.

  She didn't know what that meant, either.

  She left Coyote's chopper behind and approached the playa on foot, threading through the outer rim of camps. People were sitting out on chairs, drinking and talking, some of them glancing at Jess as she passed. Strips of sand served as makeshift streets, and she looked into the spaces between the camps that offered glimpses
of the ancient lake bed that swept on for several miles: hard-packed white sand, scent of alkali hanging like chalk in the air. People drifted across it, looking small and lost in comparison.

  As she moved deeper into the network of camps the scene began to change: people were wearing increasingly flamboyant costumes, or nothing at all save for glitter or henna or body paint. A man in a loincloth with a crown of thorns jammed low on his head sat on the step of his battered RV, cutting lines of white powder on a CD case; a group of baby-faced women in schoolgirl outfits sat on beanbag chairs, giggling, swigging vodka, and passing around a revolver in some kind of game, slipping it between their skirted thighs; a bearded man in a dusty tuxedo stood in the center of a ring of spectators, making lavish gestures with his hands; as Jess drew closer she realized he was eating razor blades. He caught eyes with Jess and grinned at her, and stuck out his tongue: it was forked at the tip, blood dripping slowly to the sand. She passed a tent with silk scarves tied around the cords, hanging limp in the nonexistent breeze; men and women in garters and stiletto boots lounged on silken cushions, smoking antique opium pipes, their bodies lavishly painted in kohl.

  She was being followed.

  She looked behind her and saw the people from the gas station. The dark-haired woman in the cowboy hat, the towheaded teenager in the zebra-striped pants, the three or four others clustered behind them. The blond man smiled at her and blew her a kiss.

  She didn't have to think about it; she ducked behind an RV, slipped the mirror from her pocket and dropped it on the ground. She felt her mind flex as she drew breath and summoned. Moments passed. Her own reflection rose up from the mirror and drifted off, like smoke, like a ghost, into the crowd. The blond man and his friends followed the false Jess, slipping away through the intricate tangle of the camps.