BloodAngel Page 29

  Not a moon.

  It was… concave.

  Zakrial. A cool wind of a voice, blowing in from another realm, blowing through the—

  Something he was supposed to remember.

  False moon. Not a moon.

  Just another doorway.

  Not a moon. An exit.

  His wings beating long and hard now, lifting himself towards it—

  Zakrial. Time to come home.

  —And then, for one moment, staring into the rich red expanse of it, seeing how it reached through the sky, tunneled between worlds. And, deep at the other end, he saw the long slim silhouette, saw the rise and flex of wings like his own.

  Come home, come home, come home.

  Zakrial turned again and gazed at the scene spread out below. It was like something from hell; maybe it was one of the hells. He locked eyes again with Bakal, and made his decision. He dropped toward the ground even as the other chose her moment, then, and leaped for him, her arms stretched out toward him, and in the half-moment before they met he cast his mind out toward her, saw his opening, and took it.

  He reached into her soul before she could even realize his intentions. It was like falling into an inferno. No room to think or breathe, no oasis here, no water anywhere—she was raging, raging, no longer knowing why—she was pain, and fury, and hunger, and blind twisted instinct. I was put in this world to burn it. But she was the one who'd been burning all this time. And he had someplace cool and quiet to offer her: a realm gone beyond war, beyond apocalypse, where even a thirst such as hers could be obliterated.

  Kill you, she said. Kill you.

  He said: Come with me.

  He had his arms around her, crushing her against him. He pulled them both up through the sky, the blood-rain, and she was squirming and slippery in his arms; he rose up against the false moon, his own shadow falling into the face of it. And then he flung them through. He felt the vessel-body drop away from him, felt the red light close itself around both him and the demon he carried, the demon he held by the very soul, the two of them lashed together so tightly they could have been one.

  * * * *

  She was aware of herself falling, cold air streaming past, and pain that blazed through her body in a dozen different places. She was falling and she didn't know how to stop herself; she was falling to her death and too battered to care.

  But it was then she felt gentle hands on her body, a voice whispering in her ear: My love. My love. Her descent began to slow as invisible arms caught and held her, slowly bringing her to the ground.

  She looked down and saw Kai far below. She closed her eyes and focused her mind on him, focused on moving her body more deeply into his magic, to make his task as smooth and effortless as possible. And then her feet were touching the earth as gently as if stepping down from a plane.

  And then he was there for her to fall against, his real arms wrapping around her: flesh and blood had never felt this good, this warm, this loving. She nestled into him. He said nothing; he stood there and held her.

  It was truly raining now, clear cold natural rain drumming the desert. Mutilated bodies slipped into crevices that were slowly but surely rumbling closed. The survivors were scattering in all directions: some were taking down their camps, packing cars, driving off; others were wandering into the horizon, looking for a road, a highway, a group to join. Jess didn't know what would be left of this night, or how people would begin to explain it, make sense of it.

  Across the lake bed a near-giant of a man in a ripped leather jacket caught her eye. They held gazes for a moment, as the rain slashed down between them, and the man lifted his motorcycle helmet in a kind of salute. A helmet, Jess knew, that was covered with coyote fur. She watched as he turned and walked away, and she wondered where on this huge plain of nothing he was headed.

  "What will happen to the Hellriders?" Jess asked.

  Kai thought for a moment, then said, "I don't know. Some of them will find a place to sit down and expire; they'll be eager to go back into death. And others…" He shrugged. "The others might last for a while. They'll find some old spark of themselves to hold on to, they'll take it as far as they can. Life tends to have that kind of character. It insists on persisting." He put his arm around her shoulder and turned her around, to face the figures approaching them.

  "This is my Pact," he said.

  They stood around her, the other Summoners, tall and imperious, and nodded at her as their names were announced. Makonnen. Daki. Romany. Eagan. Isolde. Javiera. Sato. Asadel. Tristan. Adrian.

  And Mina.

  "Hello, Jess," Mina said. There was a deep scratch along her right cheek.

  The one named Eagan, a tall burly man with dark hair and blue eyes, turned to Kai. "We didn't contain all of them. The early ones, the first ones who drank from the bloodangel—they'll be moving through the borderlands, into the real world."

  Kai nodded. "We'll have to hunt them down."

  A broad grin split Eagan's face. "Aye," he said. "It will be fun."

  * * * *

  Isolde was the one who brought her to the boy. They had placed him in a nest of sleeping bags in one of the tents, rain pattering off the canvas roof. Ramsey's skin was blanched of all color, his legs and arms crisscrossed with wounds. She wasn't sure if he was even breathing. Jess laid her hand on his chest. "Don't die," she whispered. "Stay in this world for as long as you can."

  She felt, rather than saw, the presence manifest itself on the other side of the unconscious youth. It was the girl, the ghost, who had led her in the night. She looked at Jess with deep brown eyes, and placed her own hand possessively on the boy's chest.

  "Let him stay a while longer," Jess murmured.

  They held gazes for a moment that felt never-ending. The girl gave a slight nod, then faded from view.

  Ramsey gasped for air. "Sleep," Jess said, and touched his forehead. "Sleep deeply, and heal." She didn't move from his side until Kai Youngblood knelt beside her, and put his arms around her, and kissed her throat and face.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Gabe had been in these rooms for a long time, ever since, drunk, he veered into the wrong lane and headlights came blaring into him. His world filled with sound—the crash and screech of metal on metal—and one of the guys in the backseat, screaming—and then turned to dark.

  When he woke up—

  Except he hadn't. What he had done, instead, was like opening your eyes deep underwater. He had come back to a sense of himself, but it was the thinnest and palest of senses.

  He drifted.

  Every so often sounds filtered down from the world outside him—voices—he caught snatches of medical terms he didn't understand and, once, Chelle's voice. She was talking to him (he couldn't make out the words) and crying. He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to say something, anything. But then he was descending again, down through all the layers of himself until there was nowhere deeper left to go, and little hope he'd find his way out.

  * * * *

  Down here, there were many rooms. He could spend the rest of his life drifting through them (and recognized that as a likely possibility). Every room he had experienced throughout his lifetime was down here, and more: rooms from television shows and favorite movies; rooms glimpsed through strangers' windows; rooms seen in magazines and read about in books; rooms taken from his own imagination, never existing anywhere else except here, inside him. Eventually, he sensed, he would open a door that led not into a room but his own death. He didn't know if that would be ten days or ten years from now; he had no way of counting off time.

  So he drifted.

  Beyond every door he opened, in each room he stepped into, he expected the pale final face of his own mortality.

  He did not expect Jess Shepard.

  * * * *

  "Hello," she said.

  She was sitting on the silk-upholstered couch in his parents' Long Island living room, dressed in jeans and a black tank top, her hair in a loose, untidy knot.


  He was too stunned to speak.

  "I'm sorry," Jess said, "that I couldn't get here any sooner."

  It was the first time he'd ever tried to speak, down here in the bottom of himself. His words sounded echoey and hollow, as if he were speaking in two different tones at once. "That's okay," he managed.

  "Not much time for talk. We have to go before I forget."

  "Forget what?"

  "The way out. You have to understand. I'm new at this."

  He was bewildered.

  Jess smiled and stood up and stepped around the coffee table towards him. As he leaned into the scent of her, a sense of loss cut through him, even though she was right in the room with him, they were together.

  Jess stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the throat.

  "Let's go," she whispered.

  She took his hand and led him back through the rooms, all the rooms through which he'd wandered. He wanted to speak, but she was intent on their direction, stopping several times to consider this door or that door. But she chose with confidence, and although Gabe didn't know how or why this was happening, he never lacked belief in her.

  So it came as no real surprise when Jess stood in front of the last door with her hand resting lightly on the knob. She turned to him and said, "Gabe…"

  He touched her shoulder.

  She said, "I wasn't the one for you."

  He thought about this a moment, then said, "I know."

  "Now go," Jess said, and opened the door for him.

  Not taking his eyes away from her, Gabe stepped across the threshold.

  * * * *

  Simple enough to open his eyes. He sat up in the hospital bed, the frame creaking beneath him, and spent a moment examining the tubes that ran in and out of his body, the bandages and bruises on his forearms and the backs of his hands. The light that came through the window was the watery, early-morning kind. From below he heard the grind of a large vehicle downshifting. Traffic noise. He was in love with traffic noise. It meant he was back in the world.

  He looked up in time to see a nurse pass by the doorway. A moment passed, and then the nurse doubled back and stood in the doorway and stared at him. She was holding a clipboard. She stared at him some more and he smiled at her and waved. She dropped the clipboard.

  * * * *

  Later in the week, after Chelle's tears had dried up a little and she could start to think about such things, she would tell him the strange thing that happened to her the day after he woke up. How she was coming up from the hospital cafeteria, looking forward to hearing her brother's voice again, watching the expression in his open eyes, when she passed a woman in the hallway. The woman wore a dark hooded coat hanging open over faded jeans. Something about her height, the way she moved, was familiar. Chelle turned, in time to see the woman also turning, looking at her.

  The woman said, "Chelle."

  It was Jess Shepard. Or rather, Chelle told her brother, it was and it wasn't. This woman was leaner and harder than the friend Chelle remembered; her skin, the kind of pale, sunburn-friendly skin that never tanned, had darkened to a light gold color, and her eyes. Chelle paused, and when she spoke again her voice held an edge of awe. Jess's eyes were a fierce, electric blue, and there was a moment when they flashed so bright that Chelle had a thought—

  —She's no longer fully human—

  —An absolutely impossible thought.

  She was too startled to say or do anything. She could only stand there like a tall piece of furniture as Jess came up to her and hugged her fiercely. "Go to your brother," Jess whispered in her ear. "I'll see you around."

  "Jess—"

  But then Jess Shepard was gone, striding down the corridor. She slipped through a door and it banged shut behind her.

  "Jess," Chelle said. There was a mystery here she wanted—needed—to crack open. In less than a second she made her decision and was through the door, down stairs, down another hallway, until she pushed through a fire door and ran out into an uncertain New York morning. Jess was at the corner on the other side of the parking lot, and she wasn't alone. Chelle saw—when she came to this part, she hesitated a moment, then took a breath and continued—she saw a tall man in a light wool overcoat and a teenage boy carrying a skateboard. They were standing together, the teenager saying something to the older man, as they waited for Jess to join them. Then the three of them crossed the street and turned the corner, out of view.

  "Jess," Chelle yelled one final time. She had competed in track all through high school and college and although she wasn't in that kind of shape anymore, she was still fast when she wanted to be. But by the time she reached that corner and looked in all directions, Jess and her companions were gone.

  Epilogue

  The man came from nowhere.

  That was how it seemed to him now, stepping along the sun-scorched highway. His skin had darkened to a deep tan it had never been before, a shade that still surprised him—stunned him—when he saw himself reflected in the grimy mirrors of gas-station restrooms. He came from nowhere; he was no one; he had nothing.

  Nothing, except an open vista of possibility.

  Nothing, except possession of himself.

  Nothing, except the ability to create music that could tear your heart out.

  And the dog, trudging beside him, panting in the heat, tail held rather daintily at half-mast. The black dog with the fringed ears that he'd named Ronin. Lucas had him too.

  * * * *

  The world had changed, even if the world itself didn't know it. But he knew. The first, early demons (the early ones will be rewarded) had been given physical expression, had slipped all the way out through the slippage borderlands. He was looking forward to meeting a few. It was just a matter of time. What would happen after that—what he would choose to do after that—Lucas didn't know.

  For now, it was enough to walk, and feel the sun on his skin, and dream.

  He thought a lot about the painter. He had dreamed about her the night before; neither of them had said anything, she only turned her back to him and slipped off her shirt so he could see her new scars. Narrow white ridges ran from her shoulder blades to the small of her back. He found them quite beautiful. He had the urge to touch them, but she was already stepping away from him.

  He told her: This thing with us will go on and on. The way it always has.

  Because she was out there too, in the world, moving through it; and they would find each other again, the way they so often had, in life after life after life.

  Bio

  Justine Musk (born Justine Wilson in 1972 in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada) is the author of BloodAngel, published in 2005 by the ROC imprint of Penguin Books. BloodAngel is a contemporary fantasy novel, similar to works by Dean Koontz or Stephen King. However, since the protagonist is empowered, rather than running scared from an unseen monster, the book is closer in feel to a sophisticated version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer than classic horror.

  Her second book, Uninvited, was released in 2007. Uninvited is an unrelated work intended for young adult readers. A sequel to BloodAngel, Lord of Bones, was released in 2008. A third book is currently underway, with no release date set.

  Justine lives in Bel-Air, California, with her entrepreneur husband Elon Musk (founder of PayPal and SpaceX), five boys, and three dogs.