BloodAngel Read online

  A female voice from beside her murmured, "Have you been in it yet?"

  Jess glanced over.

  The woman beside her was staring glassily into the distance. "The Maze," she said. "Have you been in it yet?"

  Jess said, "Where is it?"

  The woman pointed past the camps, deep into the lake bed. Jess, frowned, seeing nothing—

  But then, as her eyes adjusted, the high, molded walls of some kind of structure resolved into view, shaped from the sand itself so that it was difficult to distinguish from the landscape behind and around it. There was something built atop it—what looked like some kind of stage, constructed out of wood, primitive and makeshift and yet visually powerful.

  "How far do you think it is?" Jess said.

  "Maybe a mile. Maybe two. I haven't been out that way yet. You have to be invited," the woman said, "but they say we'll all get invited. One by one by one."

  "What's so special about the Maze?"

  But the woman looked at her with such naked incredulity that Jess knew the question was a mistake. She mind-reached for a charisma spell, then gave the woman her brightest smile. She wasn't sure if it would work. The woman stepped back, as if she'd been stung, then blinked again at Jess.

  She said, "Is there… is there some way I can help you?"

  "I need a change of clothes," Jess said.

  "I think you look great."

  "I need to look like I belong."

  "Come with me," the woman said. She paused, then said, with a tentative smile, "My name's Cecilia."

  She led Jess past a blue canvas dome; through the wide openings Jess saw psychedelic images playing across the canvas while people nodded off on dirty couches; one girl crouched between a man's legs, her head bobbing in his lap while his hands played in her hair. Several RVs were parked in a neat row behind the dome. A group of burly, naked men hooted at them from one of the rooftops. Cecilia waved at them, taking the key from her pocket and unlocking the door.

  The air inside the camper held the smell of garbage and urine. Cecilia disappeared behind a curtain, came out with bright scraps of clothing. "You can have any of them you want," Cecilia said, smiling hopefully. "You can have all of them. You can keep them." She dangled each small piece for Jess's approval. Jess chose black velvet hot pants, a halter, a black cap that had angel printed in rhinestones above the visor.

  "Can I get you anything else? You want some water? Some beer? I've got—" She opened the fridge, scanned the contents. "I've got cheese," she offered hopefully, "and leftover chicken, if you're hungry. I've got—"

  "No thanks."

  "—A few hits of E," the woman continued, "and some coke, and a little bit of jax, if you need—"

  "I'm fine," Jess said. "But thank you."

  "Anytime." The woman looked at her with the naked, bleeding devotion the charisma spell had wrought; soon the spell would fade, Jess knew, and this woman would wonder what the hell she had been doing, offering clothes and drugs to a stranger. But now she wanted only to please, and even as Jess felt repulsed by the clinging, tendrilous quality in the woman's eyes, she also sensed the seductive edge of it. The pull of being looked at as if you were a god.

  "Please stay," the girl said now. "Please stay. Stay with me. Stay—"

  Jess left the camper, the screen door slapping shut behind her, the woman's entreaties in her ears.

  A dog was sitting in the dirt, right in front of her. Medium-sized black dog with fringed ears. The animal cocked its head as if in recognition, gave a cheery wave of its tail, then trotted away.

  * * * *

  People were smiling at her. Jess smiled back, arranging her features into a dreamy, drifting expression, just another pretty girl in provocative costume. "Hi, Angel," some of the men and women said, reading the rhinestones off her cap.

  One by one, Jess reached out and touched them.

  They cast pleased, startled looks at her… then slipped off into the crowd, in different directions, taking a small piece of her along inside them. One by one, Jess tuned in to the different gazes of the men, for a brief moment seeing what they saw: three men in a tent painting glitter polish on their toes; thirtysomethings with yuppie haircuts sitting around an RV, chopping vegetables; fire-dancers spinning wands of flame as the sun sank into the jagged rise of rocks behind them; a yellow dog digging behind a truck. Her perspective had splintered all across the festival but she saw no sign of Ramsey.

  She could feel him out there, his presence galling her, pulling at her, but he was like fog. He was everywhere and nowhere. Her gaze went, again and again, to the glimpse of the sand-sculpted structure at the other side of the lake bed. The Maze.

  We'll all get invited.

  One by one by one.

  The red sphere throbbed in the sky, so swollen and low that Jess imagined she could throw a spear right into the heart of it… and it would explode into blood. Staring at it, she felt a cool wind sweep down over her, and she thought she heard a whisper in her ear.

  Come home.

  Bloodangel.

  And then, the barest whisper of a name:

  Zakrial…

  But then it was gone.

  Something new entered the air, slowly creeping through the festival: silence. The different threads of music from the different camps were fading out. They were replaced by a low hum of anticipation, expectation, rolling electric through the air. The random drifts of people began to coalesce, began to move away from the camps, deeper into the lake bed. Jess kept to the edge of the crowd, watching. People were coming out of tents and campers, chatting to each other, but their voices were muted, their expressions reverential, as if they felt themselves crossing onto holy ground. It was as if a signal had gone out through the air, summoning everyone, but Jess had missed it.

  She asked a girl, "Where's everyone going?"

  The girl looked at her oddly. "It's time."

  "Time for what?"

  The girl shrugged. She seemed about to say something else, then changed her mind and repeated, "It's time."

  At the edge of Jess's vision something exploded into light and flame. She wheeled toward it, but it took another moment to comprehend what she was seeing. Two of the fire-dancers were kneeling on the sand. One of them was burning. The other one raised a metal can over his own head, poured liquid on himself, and then, grinning, struck a match and dropped it in his lap. The flames swam up his body.

  Someone started screaming. "Put them out! SOMEONE PLEASE! PLEASE! Put them out! Put them out!" Arms reached out from the passing crowd, wrapped round the screaming man, and pulled him back into the flow of people.

  The fire-dancers continued to burn. One of them threw up his arms, his screaming resolving itself into a single word: "ATONE," he screamed. "ATONE—" before he collapsed on his side, still burning.

  The wave of people surged over them, swallowing them up.

  * * * *

  The camps and vehicles soon thinned into nothing. Out here there was only the desert, the wind kicking up veils of sand. Jess blinked and rubbed the grit from her eyes. The dust storm thickened until she could only see a few feet in front of her. Etched inside the blowing sand were suggestions of people, hints of the crowd that moved all around her. She surrendered to their current, let herself move along with them, into the sand and wind and dazzling whiteness until the winds died, and the sand settled, and she could see again.

  The only thing out here was the Maze.

  Sculpted from the desert, seared and baked in the sun, the walls rising fifteen, maybe twenty feet, the wooden stage elevated a few feet above that, a strip of twilit sky visible through the narrow space between. Jess scanned the walls for entrances, but the thing looked as impenetrable as a medieval fortress. Illusion, quite possibly: any doorway would be camouflaged, sand walls opening onto more sand walls.

  No one was approaching the Maze; the front lines of the crowd kept their distance, as if respecting an invisible barrier. Jess flashed back to the ring of broken glass i
n Del's chamber, marking out the space that belonged to the demon alone.

  Once more, the winds picked up, flinging dust. The sun slipped down the sky, slowly melting against the horizon. Floodlights switched on, carving great paths of light through the dust storm. Jess heard the distant hum of a generator.

  And then, a figure appeared on the stage above the roof of the Maze, emerging from the wind-whipped dust as if born from it.

  A murmuring swept through the crowd, then intensified as other figures took their places behind the singer, their shapes barely discernible in the dust. And despite herself, Jess felt a thud of excitement; whatever this was, this was also a rock concert. Anticipation ripped through the crowd and set the air vibrating.

  A woman's voice said, "Thank you for coming. I'm in love with you all," and the band broke into the first song, the opening chords like waves that gathered, crested, crashed across the desert.

  Asha.

  Asha and her band, belting out the music inside the drifting veils of sand. It was a primal, stripped-down sound, Asha's voice against guitar and drums. Spotlights came on, cutting white swaths of light across the stage, picking out the shapes of the drummer, the guitarists. Cheers and yells went up from the crowd. The song ended, and the dust storm calmed as if on cue, sand sifting to ground like a curtain coming down. Asha moved to the edge of the stage, into clear open view, and the audience responded with a ferocity of its own: stomping in the sand, arms outstretched and hands turned to fists as if beating the music from the air.

  Asha said, coyly, like a young vixen on a television show: "So you came. I knew you would."

  The roar that answered her was deafening.

  There were no microphones, Jess realized, and yet Asha's voice rose and rolled across the desert as if the air itself caught and amplified it. Asha lifted her arms and said, "You've brought me such a gift. The gift of yourselves," and the audience screamed. Asha waited for the roar to subside, and when it showed no sign of doing so made calming gestures with her arms. "People come into the desert to find God. Are you looking for a god? For any god?"

  The roar rolled through the crowd, peaked—

  "Are you looking for trans…"—Asha paused, and grinned—"… cendence?"

  —And descended on the desert in an avalanche of sound, shouts and cries and whistling, palms beating together—

  "Look at me." Asha's voice rising, the sound of pure majesty. She wasn't just playing rock star, Jess realized; now she was prophet as well. Or perhaps she didn't distinguish between them. "Look into me. And I will give you—"

  —Feet stamping the ground, people shifting and twisting against each other—

  "—Yourselves. You want God? You want to be gods? Look in the mirror. Look into your own eyes and see into infinity. The infinity of you. That is your beauty. That is your truth. There is nothing else. Only a world that will enslave you."

  The crowd was chanting, fists pumping air: you. The word shaped itself out of the air, rising from those upturned faces. You.

  "And we are not slaves," Asha yelled.

  The chant took on a metronome beat: you. You. You.

  "I've brought you a gift."

  A stillness swept down through the crowd, eyes fixed on the Maze and the small, bright-haired woman who stood atop it.

  "The best gift. Some of you have tasted it already. But first…" Asha came to the edge of the stage, looked into the crowd. "But first," she said again, and grinned. "Who has her? Where is she?"

  "Hello, sweet thing," a voice said in Jess's ear.

  The man from the gas station was suddenly beside her. He was still wearing the zebra-striped pants. He grinned into her face, then made a quick gesture. The crowd closed in on her.

  And as they closed in on her body, she felt them closing in on her mind. Hands pulling and lifting her into the air, until she was stretched out as if on a sacrificial altar. She reached into her mind, for the magic, and for the first time since her training it was denied her; it was like opening a door onto a brick wall. She could feel the hum rising up from the crowd, like a foul odor permeating her body, its outstretched arms like waving tentacles, clasping her limbs, her torso, passing her across and among themselves to the stage. Then: she wasn't sure how it happened, darkness dropping across her eyes, the cold strange feel of a different set of hands on her, lifting her up—and for a panicky moment, the feel of nothing around or beneath her—am I levitating? Am I—but then the moment was over, she was dumped onto a hard rough surface. Beneath her, people were laughing.

  She was onstage.

  She stood up shakily. The world was spinning; she took a moment for it to right itself, for her eyes to adjust to this new vantage point. Sun-liquid horizon, black tumbledown ridge and dense mosaic of cars and tents in the distance. And beneath her, all around her, was the mob. The audience. The bright, violent merging of bodies, faces upturned like rows on rows of small moons, gazes collecting in a laser beam of attention that impaled her, kept her in place. They were screaming, jeering, yelling at her; but in that shocked moment all sound went away and she saw only those mouths—all those mouths—twisting open.

  Feed us.

  Again. And again. And again.

  She was in motion then she was reeling back, spinning—

  And then she saw Lucas.

  He stood near the back of the stage, in beat-up jeans and a dirty white T-shirt, his guitar hanging slack off his body; his eyes, as he looked at her, were flat and dark and hard.

  She backed away from him. Her mind felt clouded and she fought to clear it, shaking her head, but she only felt increasingly disoriented. He watched her, playing a quick riff on his guitar, then said, quietly, as if answering a question Asha hadn't asked, "That's her."

  Asha. Jess turned, turned again, but couldn't see her. The fog in her head thickened, crowding out all thought, all ability to make a plan—

  It was as if an invisible noose were tossed round her throat and yanked. Jess's hands flew to her neck; she gasped, felt herself stumbling forward. And now she saw Asha at the front of the stage. Asha cut her hand through the air and Jess felt a force drive her to her knees, in front of Lucas.

  He continued staring at her, then smiled a little, lifting his guitar off his body and setting it down beside him. Jess tried to move, but it was as if she were clamped in place; it was an effort to draw in air. Lucas gazed down at her, then ran callused fingers along her jawline, pressed the backs of his knuckles against her mouth. She tried to turn her face away and could not.

  "So pretty," Lucas said.

  There was a force pressing down on her shoulders, nailing her knees to the stage; there was a force that trapped her voice in her throat. She could not speak, could not move, could not find anything from her training with Kai that would counter this. She could only flick her eyes to Asha.

  "Take her, if you want her," Asha said.

  Lucas looked back to Jess with that flat, dead gaze she had never seen in her dreams. But that was dream, and this was the real Lucas: the man who nodded at Asha now, his hands whispering against his belt buckle, Jess pinned to the ground in front of him, horror turning over in her gut and other images flashing through her brain:

  Twelve-year-old girl on her hands and knees.

  That's entertainment. That's entertainment—

  "This isn't quite how I pictured it," Lucas said. A smile cracked across his mouth. "But still—"

  It was as if a bomb went off. The floor rocked up beneath her and sent her tumbling. She landed hard, taking the impact on both forearms, but realized she could move again. Her limbs were her own again.

  Asha had turned away from her.

  A collective sigh rose up from the audience, and then came the sound of voices hissing. People either surged back or were forced back as a group of figures stepped forth, staring calmly at the stage. One man stood at their center, and Jess knew him before he even slipped off his hood; knew him from the way he moved and held himself; knew his height and shoulde
rs and cool deep presence that flowed up from his body.

  "This is mine," Asha said. Her own voice was measured, but Jess picked up on something red and pulsing and chaotic, pushing against that self-possession. "I am owed this. Brother."

  "The world owes you less than nothing," Kai said.

  He raised his hand, and pale blue lightning arced from his palm and slammed into the stage. There was a cracking, sizzling sound, and the air took on the smell of singed wood. Vibrations rolled like waves across the stage, knocking Jess off balance.

  A murmur of delight swept through the crowd.

  "My brother," Asha whispered. "You should have stayed on the rock." She gestured with one hand, and the drummer lifted into the air, as if an invisible hand had picked him up by the collar of his shirt and swung him out above the stage. For a moment he dangled there, suspended, and Jess saw the expression on his face. He seemed not just resigned but enraptured, his eyes closed, his face turned and offered to Asha.

  He burst—neatly and calmly—into flame. Asha flicked her wrist and the human fireball slammed toward Kai. Kai deflected it just in time and people scattered as it blasted into the sand. Flames leaped and retreated and the blackening corpse became visible. People were screaming, and Jess saw the edges of the crowd breaking away, dissolving, as people pushed and stumbled their way back from the Labyrinth. They began streaming across the lake bed in the direction of the camps. But even as some began their exodus the vast majority of the audience was drawing closer, tightening in on Kai and the tall ones who encircled him. Jess could feel the hunger, the greed, the eagerness to see what happened next. This spectacle. This entertainment. From the mingled screaming, one voice rose and shaped itself. Jess realized it was Asha herself. Her voice spiraling up through the octaves, her head tossed back: a shadow slipped out from Asha's body and rose above and around her like the hood of a cobra. Asha lifted both hands and fire streamed out from her palms, toward the Summoners. Fire slammed into the ground and spread like water across the desert surface, glowing bloodred: unholy, unnatural fire.

  "You knew," Asha hissed. "The first time you saw me, you knew. You only had to recognize me. I was yours, and you were mine. Family. Blood calls to blood."