BloodAngel Page 5

  Now, he tipped back the lawn chair until he was looking up at the house. His eyes made sudden contact with Ramsey.

  Ramsey stepped back from the window. He had nothing against the foyer crowd. They thought they were movie stars, rock stars, CEOs. But high school would end soon enough. The real world was coming for them.

  The letter was still in his hands. His name and address were printed in block letters in black felt-tip pen. No return address. He ripped open the envelope and a folded slip of paper fell to the floor. Ramsey stooped to retrieve it and as he plucked the paper off the hardwood a sense of wrongness flooded through him, even before he turned the paper over and saw more words printed in black felt-tip, stark and cold as any ransom note:

  I know what you are.

  The world will burn

  because of you.

  The breeze moved in through the window, carrying the scent of Lauren's cigarette. His hands went cold. The cold slipped through his body and hollowed out his stomach.

  He ripped up the letter and envelope both. Went into the bathroom, rained the pieces into the toilet. It was only then he realized he should have checked the postmark.

  Chapter Nine

  Cocooned in the tiny second-floor study, Ramsey checked his e-mail, sent off a few replies, then surfed some music and skateboarding sites.

  But the real, the important business was darkhouse.com, a site for fans and writers of goth fiction. Whenever Ramsey lay in bed, insomniac, the way he'd done the last night, he passed time by writing something in his head. Now he went into the "poetry" room and dumped his latest from mind to keyboard. He was too lazy for titles.

  Untitled

  By Nemesis

  This is the battle of longing and belonging.

  (the nest that cradles and protects you vs. sunstroked highway)

  You long for home and the leaving of home.

  For the highways/roads and avenues/trails and pathways

  Sun a hand on your neck that guides you

  Night a thing that comes down soft like cashmere.

  You long for pretty girls and silken adventures

  For a world that cracks at your feet like an egg

  You long to lose yourself.

  You long for the one who will find you.

  Ramsey went from there into the site's chat room, where he found some of the usual suspects.

  Lizardking: … nemesis, my man, you're back. I really liked that last piece you posted, that untitled thing on apocalypse? It rocked. Seriously, man.

  Nemesis: thanks. I just put up a new one

  Tigerlily: … are u a night writer, nemesis?… you seem so in touch with the ebb and the flow of the night… its energies, its powers…

  Flake: your stuffs a bit obscure for me. Sorry, Nem.

  Nemesis: don't worry bout it

  Lizardking: Are you ever gonna get your work together? Send it out for publication or something?

  Nemesis: no

  Tigerlily: but writing should be your LIFE. Writing is your SOUL & u should commit to your SOUL! What do we have in this life if we don't have our SOUL?

  Flake: … pizza… beer?

  Voices were rising from elsewhere in the house, catching his attention. He glanced up from the monitor. He heard Lauren say clearly and loudly, "Why can't you just respect my decision?" followed by a low, male voice he assumed to be Paul's.

  Not his business. Ramsey swiveled back to the screen. The chat was going on without him; Tigerlily and Soothsr were arguing over a plot point from a vampire TV show Ramsey never watched. He was scrolling through the lines of transcript when a dialog window opened up in the corner of the screen:

  Lizardking (whispering): Nem baby? You there?

  Lizardking (whispering): These idiots are boring the crap out of me. I wanted to chat privately for a moment…

  Ramsey grinned, touched fingers to keys.

  Nemesis: What up, dude?

  Lizardking: something you might be interested in. your apoc. piece made me think you'd like this. Go to bloodangel.com and check out the song, then e-mail me. Tell me what you think.

  Nemesis: is this you or your band or something?

  Lizardking: I wish. A friend turned me on to it. Fucking amazing. You seem pretty cool so I thought I'd pass it on… You should come into the desert with us. I'm putting this group together. I'm in San Francisco, where are you?

  Nemesis: the desert? camping or something?

  Lizardking: check it out and get back to me. my e-mail's carma@quicktime

  Nemesis: ok

  Lizardking: shit, out of time, out of money, and this place is closing anyway. Gotta go.

  Nemesis: ok see you

  Lizardking: I think so yeah

  Ramsey returned to the main chat room to say goodbye to the others and then closed it down. He typed in bloodangel.com. In the moments the website took to load he listened to the sounds of the house: a car starting up in the driveway, the da-da-dum of the theme music from "Law and Order," clinking sounds from the kitchen.

  And then.

  Stark black letters on an acid-green background:

  TRANS

  (under construction)

  And below that, drawn in stark, simple lines, a road winding off to a vanishing point and the silhouette of a hitchhiker. And below that:

  ARE YOU READY FOR YOUR JOURNEY?

  He ran the cursor over the image of the road and clicked.

  Nothing.

  He clicked on the hitcher's silhouette.

  A dialog box appeared on the screen, image of little papers flying out of a little folder as the song downloaded. Ramsey waited, tapping his fingers on the desk. He heard screams coming off the television in the den. Someone had just discovered that episode's dead body.

  The downloading completed.

  The song started: drumbeats rising up, stark and tribal and catchy.

  Then the heartbeat of a bass line.

  Mournful swell of lead guitar. Keyboards.

  It was interesting. A hard-core violence of guitar and drums, nailed through with fat juicy beats. Definitely not radio-friendly. MTV wouldn't be playing it either. It didn't really work, except… except, well, yeah. It worked. It worked fine.

  And then, after long minutes of just music: the voice.

  Her voice.

  You were screaming and dreaming when you fell, she sang, but on that first listen—and then the second and the third—Ramsey wasn't listening to the lyrics. She could have been singing in Swahili for all he cared; what mattered was that melody, stark and brutal and haunting and pounding, stabbing through his skin, amping up his heart; what mattered was that voice, like honey mixed with broken glass, raw and rich and sweet and deep and thick and wounded, starting out soft and rising into the bridge and exploding with the chorus while the guitar throbbed and wailed behind her and the drums counted out an otherworldly heartbeat. Ramsey fell back in the chair, closed his eyes. He let the song go through him. Go into him. That female voice like nothing he'd heard before, that didn't seem fully human, a disembodied thing drifting up out of the computer like magic. A voice of pure magic, singing just for him.

  * * * *

  The song was still thrumming in his veins when he went upstairs.

  The door to Lauren's room was open. She was sitting at her vanity table, wearing low-slung pajama pants and a snug black tank, and she was looking straight at him.

  "Ramsey?"

  He didn't respond. His mind was too full of the song.

  The world is breaking down/There are dark things on the wind/And the wild cry inside you just gets stronger…

  "You seem different," Lauren said.

  She was studying him in the way he now found so familiar: as if he were a question that needed an answer. He wondered if she was any closer to finding one. Her hair was braided into two plaits, hanging down along her shoulders. It was an odd look for her. She was holding her left hand beneath the table, out of sight.

  She said, "Come here."


  He had not been in her room before—at least, not since she'd moved home and reclaimed it with her things, her light vanilla scent. There was a pair of ballet slippers on the windowsill. They were crushed and broken-looking: the satin worn through, discolored, the blocked-off toes stained with blood.

  Lauren lifted her hand from beneath the table, displayed a pair of scissors. "You haven't been very friendly to me."

  "You haven't been friendly to me."

  She snipped at the air, then set the scissors on the table and fiddled with one of her braids. "I guess that's right," she admitted.

  "I guess so."

  "I heard a story about you." She watched him in the mirror. "I heard you don't remember anything about your life before the age of seven."

  He shrugged.

  She continued, "I heard you, like, just wandered into a police station in St. Paul and your clothes were covered with blood. And you wouldn't say anything. People asked you what your name was, where you lived, where your parents were, and you didn't say anything. You didn't answer any questions."

  That wasn't true, exactly. When they had asked him how old he was Ramsey had held up seven fingers.

  Lauren said, "So that really happened? That's not just some kind of, you know, urban myth?"

  "Who told you this?"

  "Paul. He used to live there. I mean, my parents must know, from your file and everything—but it's not the kind of thing they'd talk about. Paul said he remembered it from the papers, TV, because his mother used to talk about you at dinner, she felt so sorry for you."

  "It wasn't my blood," Ramsey said. "They ran tests. It wasn't my blood."

  "And you couldn't tell them what happened to you?"

  "No." His voice sharper than he'd intended.

  "You didn't remember anything." She sounded awed. He could tell what she was thinking: Like something from a movie. Except it wasn't any movie, it was him, his life. "You didn't even remember how to speak?"

  "I remembered how to speak. I just didn't want to. I didn't want to speak for two years." He had drawn a lot of pictures. Everybody in the world, it seemed, had wanted him to make pictures, sitting him down again and again in front of crayons, paper, paints.

  "And so they never figured out—"

  "Your walls are bare," Ramsey said.

  She was so startled she left off her question. Ramsey glanced round, taking in the empty walls, the off-color rectangles where posters had been. He could feel that hot wave of clarity breaking over him, washing up through his very bones. "They were dance posters. Baryshnikov, right? I bet you loved Baryshnikov. I bet he was your first big crush when you were a little girl, even though he was already kind of old by then. I bet you saw, White Nights fifteen times."

  "Nine," Lauren said. She swiveled in the chair and looked at him. "Nine times. You get this stuff from my mother?"

  "You took down all those posters the night you got back, right? 'Cause your knee hurt so bad and you were so pissed off. And I bet you did something dramatic with them. It wasn't enough to just throw them out. You had to take them somewhere and…" He paused, then in his mind he saw it: the leap of flame, the curling and charring and crumbling of glossy paper.

  "… and burn them."

  Lauren's mouth had fallen open, her head jutting forward: a graceless pose of incredulity. Ramsey barely noticed. He was following it through in his mind, trying to think of where she could burn the posters. "The barbecue on the patio," he said.

  "It was five in the morning," Lauren said. "I thought I was being quiet."

  She had tucked her good knee against her chest, her slippered foot balanced on the edge of the chair. She hesitated, then added rather dryly, "And then I roasted marshmallows for breakfast."

  "Because now you can eat what you want."

  "I can get as fat as I want and no one will kick me out of anything." Her eyes narrowed a little. "So what are you, Sherlock Holmes?"

  "Hardly."

  "You spying on me?" But from the puzzled expression on her face he could tell, even as she said it, that she didn't believe it.

  He didn't bother to answer.

  She persisted, "Then how… ?"

  "So what are the scissors for?"

  "Why don't you tell me? You figured out all that other stuff."

  "Are you really going to cut off your hair?"

  Lauren hugged her knee to her chest. Then she picked up the scissors and held them out to Ramsey. A new expression opened up through her eyes: a mixture of daring, delight.

  She said, "Do it for me."

  He looked at the scissors, then back at her. Her mouth was curved in a smirk… or the beginning of a genuine smile.

  "You can't be serious."

  "You can figure out that stuff about the posters," she was baiting him now, enjoying this, and he found himself ducking his head in response, "but you can't figure out if I'm serious?"

  "Go to a salon. Get it done by a pro."

  "No. I mean, a salon wouldn't… Having it done at a salon just wouldn't…"

  He picked up the thought for her.

  "… Be symbolic enough," Ramsey concluded.

  A moment passed when she didn't say anything. And then the smirk opened up into the smile, going into him like sunlight. "Well," she said. "I guess you kind of understand. I didn't think anyone would."

  He took the scissors from her.

  "You have beautiful hair," he said.

  "I've had it like this since I was ten. For dance. You know? It was for dance."

  "There's a poem by Robert Browning." He felt uncomfortably close to babbling, but couldn't seem to stop himself. "About this guy who goes psycho on his mistress and wants her to stay with him forever, you know, be his forever, never ever ever leave him. So he strangles her with her own long hair. So that way he gets his wish."

  "All the more reason to cut it off."

  "Your mother will kill me," Ramsey muttered, and something about the way he said that made her laugh, and then he laughed as well. He picked up her left braid, felt the weave of it between his fingers, then scissored it off at the base of her neck. The braid came away like a cord unplugged. She watched in the mirror. Her eyebrows lifted a little. He picked up the remaining braid, worked the scissors through it, and then it was done.

  Lauren leaned towards the mirror.

  Thick, choppy hair ending just above her shoulders. She shook it out, ran her hands through it. Her whole face seemed different: older, angular, less pretty, more serious. "I like it," he told her.

  "I feel like I just got hatched," she said, "from all that hair. Now I'm shiny-new."

  "You're an odd one, Lauren Campbell."

  Her grin widened. "So are you."

  "I'm a freak," he admitted.

  She was looking at him as if that wasn't a bad thing.

  * * * *

  "I fought with Paul," she said, a while later.

  It was past one in the morning, and they were talking in hushed voices. Her parents were asleep at the other end of the hall. She had stolen some scotch from the downstairs liquor cabinet. "Single malt," she informed him. "Twelve years old. Never drink it younger." She was smoking a Marlboro Light, tapping ash into a coffee mug, her body angled so that the smoke drifted out the open window. He refused her offer of a cigarette. He wasn't touching his scotch, either, but she didn't seem to notice.

  "Paul wanted me to go to his parents' cabin this weekend," she said. "His parents are going to be there, right, and they know my parents and my parents trust Paul and everything, so it's no big deal."

  "But you said no."

  "I didn't expect him to be so pissy about it."

  "Be careful with him."

  The words slipped out before he even realized he was going to say them. Lauren squinted at him, laughed a little. She flicked ash into the coffee mug. "You sound parental."

  "Sorry."

  "No, it's fine. It's cute, even. What have you got against Paul?"

  "I don't know. Just a feeling. It so
unds stupid, I know—"

  "I respect feelings. Intuition. It's not just women that have it." She extinguished the cigarette and lifted the mug to the windowsill, out of sight, as if the remains of her smoking disgusted her.

  Ramsey said, "You don't want to go to the cabin because of your injury?"

  "Maybe that was part of it," Lauren said. "But it's something else. I wouldn't tell Paul what it was and that's why he got angry. I haven't told my parents either. My father would say I'm wasting my money and my mother… God knows what she would say. She has some strange ideas." She looked directly at Ramsey. "They think I'm going shopping with Aimee tomorrow."

  "I won't say anything."

  "I know. Otherwise I wouldn't tell you."

  "So—"

  "I was thinking you might like to come along."

  He was too surprised to respond.

  "This person we're going to see? Maybe he could help you, your mysterious past and all." Lauren scratched the back of her neck, said, "You know something? I haven't told anybody this, but for a while I got—I got kind of obsessed with tarot cards. Look." Using her bed for support, she hopped over to the night table, opened the bottom drawer, and removed a bundle of yellow silk scarf. She brought it back to Ramsey, unfolded the sunny fabric.

  "Tarot cards," she said again, fanning them out along the floor. "The funny thing is, I don't believe in them. But after the thing with my knee—I got addicted to them. I never gave readings to anyone. I just did them for myself. Over and over."

  The cards were medieval in theme: characters in long flowing clothes who had slipped out of an Arthurian romance. Cups and wands, swords and pentacles. They meant nothing to him.

  But one card snagged his eye like a fishhook catching seaweed. A dark-haired woman in a long blue dress sat between two pillars. She clasped a book with a scarlet binding. Her eyes were very blue.

  "… Just felt panicked," Lauren was saying. "And looking for answers, I guess… You know?… You ever get like that?" She paused, then said, "Priestess."