BloodAngel Page 27

  Kai was silent a moment, his head bowed; then he lifted his face towards her and said: "Not always."

  "Stay alive, Kai. Stay alive, and let me kill everyone around you. There must be atonement. Hear me? There must be atonement."

  "This has nothing to do with atonement."

  Asha smiled. "Even better."

  The crowd was surging towards Kai and his companions—his Pact, Jess recalled, her mind seizing the word—lifted their arms, forming a circle around him with a foot of space between each figure; Jess saw pale blue light leap from hand to outstretched hand, gathering speed and intensity as it slipped from figure to figure, and then it was slipping through and around them, blue light spiraling up around each body and slipping down along outstretched arms, crackling from hand to hand, until the circle of Summoners formed a barrier of blue, snapping energy. A man threw himself into the space between two Summoners, then screamed and leaped backwards, his face and arms laid with welts, as blue light sizzled in his hair.

  Protected, at least for the moment, inside his Pact, Kai seemed focused entirely on Asha. The pale blue energy was dancing through his body, streaming from his hands with the force and bolt of lightning, slamming into the Maze, tearing holes in the walls and roof, sand crumbling to sand, as Jess felt the stage roll and tilt and shudder beneath her. Asha stood on the edge of the stage, laughing; she bent her body backward until her hands touched wood and she crept along the edge of the stage as easily as an insect. Kai's spells were blasting all around her but nowhere near her; it was as if she had surrounded herself with an invisible wall. Kai turned his hand palm-up to the sky and the lightning changed to what looked like blue darts, curving through the air, raining across the Maze, exploding into bursts of flame wherever they made contact. The crowd was surging and pushing towards the perimeter of spellcasters, not quite daring to touch them, daring only to get so close and no closer, but Jess saw their longing to tear Kai to pieces or die trying, and Jess saw the strain on the other Summoners' faces and knew they could only protect him for so long. Asha lifted a hand and gestured, and smiled; she was playing with him. She was playing with all of them, and Kai was playing along, to distract her from the real task at hand.

  Find the boy. Release the boy.

  It was time for her to get moving.

  The whole stage shuddered and shifted. She couldn't keep herself from falling, she tumbled and scraped along the rough surface. Someone screamed: a high, piercing note, hovering in the air, clear as glass. Jess looked to the desert floor far below her and saw cracks webbing out across the hard-packed earth like a shattering windshield; loose sand slipped into the widening crevices.

  From between them, from deep inside the earth, shadows rose, pulling themselves up into air: formless things seeking form, moving into the crowd. Someone screamed again, and then was silenced. Jess felt the change in the air, the change in the audience below her, as shadows played across faces and bodies, probing, hunting; some were left alone, and others were penetrated, shadows hovering on their skin and then absorbed.

  Asha screamed something unintelligible at Kai, her lips wrinkling back from her teeth. She flipped back onto her feet, lifted her arms. Shadow streamed out from her body. "Try not to die, my brother, even as everyone around you—as we kill them and eat them—"

  The sound was faint at first but then louder. The high keening cry of battle. It lingered in the air, then gathered intensity, ferocity. And then they were appearing from behind the ridge, roaring through the bloody twilight, engines revving, and they descended, the Hellriders, rows on rows of them, their wheels churning up the desert as they ripped into the crowd, whooping and hollering, some of them standing up on their bikes in unnatural feats of strength and balance, some of them whipping tire chains. Their eyes were like burning holes, their skin gleaming-pale against black leather. The dead, Jess thought. They were dead. They were undead.

  And they were hers.

  And, as if sensing this, people were falling back and away from them: from the chains and knives and spinning tires. The mass of crowd broke apart into groups, the Hellriders circling round and through them, howling and keening; there was the pop-pop of gunfire as someone shot out the tires of one bike, the Hellrider who rode it leaping up onto the seat, then springing off the bike and into the air and onto the back of the man who still wielded the gun, driving him into the ground. Shadows swarmed over them like piranha.

  "Demons?"

  Lucas had materialized beside her. He spoke casually, as if they were high in the bleachers watching baseball.

  "No," she said, "they're mine," and couldn't help the pride in her voice. She said it again: "Mine," as the wheels churned up sand, as gunfire sounded again and a Hellrider at the far edge of the crowd slumped in his seat, motorcycle crashing to ground and skidding into the audience. People were leaping away from it, screaming and laughing. Shadows slithered through the air. Many Hellriders were on the ground now, with brass-knuckled fists and knives and tire irons. Fire swarmed across the desert floor. She said to Lucas: "Take me to the boy. Do it now."

  He laughed. "You think I'm gonna make it that easy?"

  She considered what to say next: I don't think Asha owns you. Not truly, but then she noticed the marks on his face that she had never seen in her dreams. She spoke on instinct, threading her voice with contempt: "Nice scars."

  His punch caught her on the edge of the jaw and sent her wheeling. She feinted more disorientation than she felt, saw him coming from the corner of her vision and shifted into magic, the mind-blow hitting him squarely in the chest and sending him back, stumbling, but not as far or as hard as she hoped. When he came at her again he was limping, surprised, grinning. "Come on," he said. "Come on, little girl." As the air filled with smoke and screams and the smell of endless burning, Jess focused on the man from her dreams. She lifted her hand and summoned again, felt an odd painless scorching rip through her as blue fire formed at her hand and streaked towards Lucas. Holy shit, Jess couldn't help thinking, it works, and she tried it again, the fireball forming more quickly this time. Lucas was coming at her, ducking and twisting, but blue fire scorched the side of his T-shirt: he dropped and rolled, extinguishing the flame, and was up again with such grace and speed that Jess could sense the magic in him: different from her own, but guiding and protecting him all the same. "Not bad," Lucas was yelling, teasing, "for a girl." Gunfire sounded again, bullets slamming into the stage around her. She saw Lucas move, again with that astonishing speed, and she moved too late; he grabbed her, forced her up, swung her towards Asha.

  "Watch," he hissed, his arm clamped around her throat. "See what my lady can do."

  Asha had lifted her hands towards the sky. The clouds opened up and poured out rain. Not just rain: Jess saw the dark color, tasted salt as hot thick drops fell on her lips. Blood. The sky was raining hot blood. The ground churned into thick, red mud. The flames only leaped higher, as if the rain were fuel. She twisted inside Lucas's grip, pulling both their bodies around; a Hellrider passed through her line of vision, bike crashing and skidding in the mud; at once people fell on him, blades flashing; someone had an axe; within moments they had hacked off his legs, his arms. The Hellrider did not scream or cry out. He lay there and waited.

  Lucas said, "It's not too late to change sides—"

  She looked to Kai in time to see the perimeter fading, the blue light dimming in intensity, one Summoner falling to his knees. A handful of people slipped through into the Summoner circle and hurled themselves at Kai. He blocked them with ease, pointing at each person, using the magic to fling them back into the audience. A large man in leather S/M gear with shadows clinging and rippling over his body came at Kai from behind, whipping a chain; Kai turned before Jess had a chance to scream a warning, and sent lightning into the big man's body. The shadows scattered up and away from him, dissipating into air; the man stared at Kai and dropped to his knees, blood gushing from his mouth. Kai turned to face other attackers. He would last a while
, Jess knew, but eventually all the Summoners would fall. Sheer numbers would overwhelm them. We are not what we were. She looked into the scene below her. Fires raged and burned even as blood soaked the ground; members of the audience were fighting the Hellriders, the Summoners and, in places, each other. Their bodies made twisting, writhing shapes in the near-dark. One of the cracks in the ground was slowly widening; two men wrestling in the mud cried out in surprise and terror as they were sucked into the earth. The air filled with shouts and screams, scattered gunfire, the thump of bodies slammed to ground, and a low atonal humming that came from everywhere and nowhere, rising up from the very earth.

  Jess scanned the stage for Asha and realized she was gone.

  "Where's the boy?" she said to Lucas. She wasn't fighting him anymore, choosing to relax into his grip. "Where is he?"

  Lucas hissed into her ear, "We can all hang out. We can party like rock stars." He spun her around, still gripping her by the throat; she clawed at his hands, but she could sense the magic moving in and around him and felt her own power dissolving. She forced herself not to panic. They stared at each other; and the dead expression in his eyes began to splinter, something else shining through it: glee, Jess thought. Elation. He was getting off on this.

  He kissed her on the mouth, hard, his tongue slipping between her lips and she bit down but he was too quick for her, his body rocking away from hers as he threw her to the ground. She landed on elbow and hip. He was loping along the edge of the stage, then dropping to his knees and lifting a trapdoor. He paused—looked back at her and grinned—then disappeared down through it. Jess ran after him, skidding and sliding on the bloody stage, her eyes connecting for one brief moment with Kai's as he stood below her. I love you, Jess thought. Flinging the words out towards him, as the crowd fell on him, and she threw herself beneath the stage after Lucas.

  * * * *

  A blind plunge into a claustrophobic space. The walls were too high and narrow. It felt as if they were closing in on her.

  She forced herself to slow down, calm down. She mindcast into the space around her, searching for any sign of the boy, and felt the jerk of his presence like a fish on a line. He was not far.

  "Jess…"

  A hissing, drawn-out female voice.

  A figure moved in the shadows just ahead.

  She said: "Who are you?"

  "Jess…"

  Something was… off. Jess mindcast again, probing this presence for any information, but came up against a flat cold feeling that made her step back in revulsion.

  She heard a faint click, and then blue light swarmed the narrow corridors. The figure she had half-glimpsed in the shadows turned out to be herself. She was staring at her own startled expression in the mirrored wall at the end of the corridor.

  But then her reflection smiled at her, murmured, "Jess …" and faded. It was not her own magic; it was something, someone else.

  A different, familiar voice said: "I want to apologize."

  This voice came from all around, as if it on loudspeaker, but at the same time possessed a sly, warm undertone, a lover's tone, rubbing up against her ear.

  "Lucas," she said. "Where are you?"

  "Oh," he said breezily, "I'm around. The question is, sweet thing, where are you?"

  She was backtracking down the corridor. She saw an opening to her right and stepped through it. The hallway branched in three directions, her scattered reflections gliding out along the walls. "Jess," the reflections were saying, "Jess." She tried to shut her mind to them. It was difficult. They moved and shifted all around her, these splintered images of her own self, grinning and waving and leering at her, beckoning her onward.

  She cast her mind out again, toward the boy, felt his warm jerking pull from elsewhere in the Labyrinth. She chose the left opening.

  "I want to apologize for what happened on that stage," Lucas was saying. "Not our little tussle, which I enjoyed. I hope we get to do that again. But before that. For that incident that had you… well, you know. On your knees."

  "Don't worry about it," she muttered. She stopped again, glanced at her choices. Left, right, or straight ahead? She chose the latter, following the darkened corridor as it veered slightly left. One of her reflections—this one a gaunt, sallow version, as if in the last stages of cancer—was hissing at her as she passed.

  "It's not like I wanted you to give me a blow job in front of thousands," Lucas was saying, and she could hear the grin in his voice. "On this one thing, Asha was wrong. I'm not looking for that kind of puppet. At least, not with you."

  She was now choosing her direction with more confidence. She knew she was angling in toward the center, where the boy was, his presence like a hot wind she was walking straight into.

  "Even if you find what you're looking for," the disembodied voice mused from all around her, "you think you're going to get back out of here? Do you have a plan, Jess?"

  She didn't answer.

  "What exactly do you think is going to happen to you?"

  "I'll probably die," she said.

  "And you're okay with that?"

  She came to another intersection and veered right. The reflection that confronted her was bloated and blue, floating high inside its mirror-space. Jess tried not to cringe.

  She said, "Where are you, Lucas?"

  "I can offer an alternative option."

  "Why are you hiding from me?"

  "Hiding," he echoed, and laughed.

  Another faint click, and the light disappeared.

  She stood enfolded within a deep and perfect blackness.

  Lucas said, huskily, "Come find me."

  The light came back on.

  She was no longer in a labyrinth of any kind.

  People roamed around her, sleekly and expensively dressed, holding glasses of red wine, champagne. There was laughter and conversation. The walls were white and pristine and hung with art; through breaks in the crowd she glimpsed bold, striking paintings. The style was familiar, and even though—or because—she had never seen those works before, she turned away with a coldness in her stomach.

  "Champagne?"

  A waiter stood before her with a tray, the light dancing off the flutes.

  "No," Jess said. "What is this place?"

  The waiter blinked at her. His face remained carefully polite. "The Museum of Modern Art."

  "In New York?"

  Just the slightest touch of wryness. "That would be the one."

  "What…" Her mouth had gone dry. "What show is this?"

  "Hers," he said, and gestured to a tall slender woman in blue who stood with her back to them, engaged in conversation with a circle of admirers, gesturing with her glass of red wine to make a point. She had silver hair pinned up in a chic, untidy knot.

  "Who—" Jess said, but the waiter was gone. She moved through the crowd, toward the silver-haired woman, but then paused. Her chest felt hot and tight.

  She turned instead to the paintings.

  Portraits done in flat, bold colors, unexpected angles: arresting, incisive, exploding off the canvas. And then she came to the one of the youth in the desert, jagged rock rising behind him, sun bleeding through sky. She knew the title before she read the small card affixed to the wall beside it: Heir of Nothing.

  "Nice," Jess murmured, lifting her voice to whoever might be listening. "Nice trick. Well done." She glanced again at the woman, the artist, near the center of the room, now posing for a photograph.

  "No trick," Lucas said. "Only you."

  He was beside her. He wore jeans and a black leather coat; he held a glass of red wine in one hand and a stuffed-mushroom appetizer in the other.

  "Is this…" Jess was looking around her: the vivid, concrete detail. "Is this real?" The question slipped out before she could stop it. "This is just illusion. This is…"

  "It's real enough," Lucas murmured. He nodded towards the silver-haired woman in blue. "That person—that fifty-five-year-old woman you were on track to become—revitaliz
ed the American art scene, brought it back down to the people. Well," Lucas muttered, glancing around at the well-heeled attendees around him, "some of the people." Juice squirted as he bit into the mushroom.

  The artist turned, and her face came fully into view.

  Fifty-five, Lucas had said. Her gaze glanced off Jess… and then came back again in shocked recognition.

  They stared at each other across the room.

  Just an illusion, Jess told herself.

  And yet it was hard to believe this wasn't real as concrete: the air-conditioned room that thrummed with conversation, the glint of wine in Lucas's glass, the loose tread of footsteps as people passed from painting to painting, and this other woman, this strange, older version of herself: her stance, her expression: the mingled arrogance, defiance, and melancholy that Jess recognized as very much her own.

  "This was all for you," Lucas whispered in her ear.

  "This was the path your life was supposed to take. You could still have it. If you were to join me."

  She was feeling dizzy. She took a step back, and suddenly had to fight to catch her breath. The woman was still staring at her, the blue eyes turning flat, cold, accusatory. As if to say, Who are you to deny me this. Who are you—

  "All you have to do is say yes," Lucas said.

  —To deny me?

  "Say yes to Asha. Say yes to me." He had his hand on her arm.

  Yes. It was, Jess thought, such an overripe syllable.

  "No," she said, as if arming herself with the word and shrinking behind it, protecting herself from her own desire for what she saw around her. The beauty. Such beauty broken out from her own mind and heart and talent.

  "Shame," Lucas said softly, and then it was all gone.

  They stood in darkness again.

  Jess closed her eyes. She counted off the beats of her own heart. When she felt centered enough to speak, she said, "Is that how Asha got you, Lucas?"

  He didn't answer.

  "With promises of beauty and greatness?"

  "I have something else to show you," he said.