Conspiracy of Angels (15 page)

Other shapes moved around her, coiling at the edges of her hair or twining around the flowing legs of her midnight silk pantsuit. Vulpine, feline, winged and scaled, I saw hints of countless animal faces, but mostly, I saw their eyes.

At least one of them winked at me.

Lil turned her head as if following the gaze of the animal. Then she was speaking, but her words and mouth didn’t line up properly, the sound and action stuttering out of joint.

“Step out,” she said, echoing strangely. “…’s not good… in too long.”

I reached out to touch her, and couldn’t. It wasn’t that my hand ghosted through her, like it had with Ballcap. I was half expecting it to. Instead, I got this unpleasant electric tingle in my fingers, the closer they got to where she stood. The further I tried to press into the wash of light and color spilling around her, the more resistance I felt.

It hurt.

She must have felt something as well, because as I extended my hand closer to her aura, marveling in spite of the pain, her head snapped around and she stared right at me. Well, mostly right at me. Her gaze was off by a few inches.

“…’m serious!” she called. All of the animal faces shifting in and out of her energy turned wild eyes on me. As one, they loosed a warning growl—a sound that was much clearer than her voice. Taking the hint, I pulled my hand away and tried once more to get to my feet. My legs were a little less shaky this time, as the clinging cold of the cacodaimon faded.

Shifting my wings for balance, I finally managed to get into an upright position, reaching out to the wall to steady myself. The bricks weren’t right, feeling squishy somehow. Rather than trying to get a clear look, I simply pulled my hand away. I wiped it on my jeans.

The space of the alley loomed dark around me, far too dark for the time of day. Jagged portions of night and shadow angled unevenly upon one another, each caught in a perspective skewed and strange. As I tried to adapt to the sensations, I stumbled over something. It was a dead woman. She lay scattered in pieces on this end of the alley. Her decapitated head had fetched up against the wall at a mostly upright angle, and her eyes gazed up at me, as if they were pleading.

Only a heartbeat later, she was standing there whole, and then she was running from the mouth of the alley to that same spot. She flickered again, and now she was struggling with another figure, indistinct and featureless, like an imperfect projection.

The whole scene flickered again…

And then the alley was empty.

Memories.
I was looking at memories burned so deeply into the space that they had substance and weight. The events replayed continuously, flickering against themselves. I was somehow standing on top of them and in them at the same time.

I couldn’t shake the intelligence in the woman’s eyes, though. She wasn’t simply an echo. She seemed like a real person trapped in that awful moment where another human being had stalked her, violated her, then tried to erase her very person-ness by hacking her to pieces.

So I looked away. I had to. Each time she flickered through the space, she stared at me as if she expected me to do something—yet I had no idea how to help.

Then I had bigger things to worry about. A chillingly familiar sound echoed from the mouth of the alley. There was an answering hiss a short distance away. Cacodaimons. The other two lurched into view, one just behind the other. On this side of reality, they cast shadows that were darker yet, their blacker-than-black forms both sharper and more intense. The bodies they rode were little more than husks—dull and hollow and not worthy of attention.

Abruptly light began to spill from the arcs of my wings, hissing against the darkness. Before I could even think about it, I was running full tilt down the alley toward the newcomers. Shrilling my name, I called the blue-white fire to my hands, and though I was aware of a painful tugging sensation at my very core, the power came—and it came in force.

The heat and brilliance coalesced into the wickedly curved blades and I closed my hands around their comforting weight. Fueled by a terrible fury, I gave the riders no quarter. I slashed them with single-minded purpose, gravely wounding one even as the other tried latching onto my shoulders. I felt searing pinpricks of cold at the back of my neck and the base of one wing, but most of its burrowing appendages scrabbled uselessly against the jacket’s thick leather.

With the first one down and dispersing, I turned my attention to the other, reaching backward to pull it off while at the same time flailing with both wings. All of my perceptions narrowed to the fight with my prey. The cowardly thing turned tail and attempted to flee. Determined not to lose it, I launched myself after the scurrying shadow just as it whipped out of the alley.

Then I learned that the wings weren’t merely for show. With a massive down stroke I leapt and caught up to the rider, all in one swift motion, driving both blades into its back and pinning it to the ground. It shrieked and writhed, and I slashed the knives down and outward, yanking them through the meatiest portion of its form.

With a final agonized hiss, the cacodaimon dissolved into so much black goo.

A coughing roar drew my attention from the kill. The big cat trotted up behind me, causing me to pull back. It chuffed once, then bumped its head against my hip as a rumbling sound somewhere between a growl and a purr poured from deep within its throat. Its jaws were flecked with an oily black substance that seemed to drink in what little light was present in this not-quite physical space.

My diamond-edged fury swiftly fading, I turned to meet the creature’s eyes. It lifted its head as if to acknowledge me, then shouldered me aside and began to
eat
the cacodaimon. I swallowed thickly, trying desperately not to imagine what one of those horrors might taste like.

The big cat didn’t seem to care, however. It hunkered down over the kill and tore great gobbets of dark flesh with its powerful jaws, swallowing them hungrily. At least that explained why the cat hadn’t joined my fight with the other two.

It had stopped to eat the first one.

T
his still left me with a problem, and it was a big one. I didn’t know how to get back to the flesh-and-blood world.

At least I knew where Lil was waiting. Amidst all of the shadows crowding this place, it was hard to miss her glow. So I headed in her direction. It was slow going, however. Had I really chased the cacodaimon that far?

As I moved, aches flared to life all over. In the middle of combat, I’d ignored the various stings and blows. Now there was no denying the pain dished out by my adversaries. Points on my hands, legs, neck, and wings all throbbed unpleasantly, and an answering pulse pounded in my head. If this was what victory felt like, I really didn’t want to try defeat.

I tottered as I fought to stay upright, each step costing me more than the last. My wings hung like weights against my back, and the thundering pain in my head progressed to the point where all I had was tunnel vision. Only a pinprick of sight remained, edged with pulsing patterns of light and void.

It was my name that pulled me out of it.

Not Zachary. The other one.

* * *

Lillee leaned over me as I lay blinking up at clouds backlit by early morning sunshine. I think she might have slapped my face a few times, though if she had, I’d hardly felt it.

“Get up!” she demanded, jerking on my wrists. “What were you thinking, staying in there so long?”

Groggily, I let her try to hoist my lanky frame. Getting up. Getting up was good. Getting up meant I wasn’t dead.

As Lil wrestled me into a sitting position, I started feeling as if I could breathe again. My vision cleared by degrees, though my arms and legs were still watery with over-exertion. It felt like I had run a marathon. Scratch that. It felt as if I had run a
marathon
of marathons. Finally I lurched shakily to my feet, then waved Lil off, doubling over and holding my gut.

“Sick,” I announced, then proved it by tossing my breakfast all over the pavement. Lil danced nimbly away from the splash zone, guarding the polished leather of her expensive boots.

“Serves you right,” she said. “Crossing into the Shadowside is like deep-sea diving. You can’t stay down indefinitely. Why didn’t you come out when I told you to?”

“Didn’t know how,” I croaked, scrubbing at my mouth, my other hand on the wall to steady me. Then I gestured at the two crumpled forms at the mouth of the alley. “Plus, cacodaimons.”

“Yeah, about that…” Lil responded, glancing significantly at the two bodies.

They were twitching. More like convulsing. Pinkish-gray sludge seeped from their noses and the corners of their eyes. Seeing it, I almost threw up again, only this time there was nothing left to spew.

“What the hell’s going on with them?” I managed.

“Something that shouldn’t be happening,” she murmured quietly. “This whole thing—it’s not right.”

I watched with mounting horror as the two well-dressed business people who had played host to the cacodaimons thrashed and jigged in the dirt. Their mouths were working to form words, yet nothing but gibberish came out. The sound swiftly degraded to an awful keening as unnerving as the insectile call of the cacodaimons themselves.

“Can’t we help them?” I asked.

“You see that goo leaking out of their ears?” she said. “That’s what left of their brains. Their nervous systems are mush. They must have been ridden for two or three weeks for that to happen.”

I stared at the two, unable to find words.

“I told you, cacodaimons are pure chaos—the antithesis of form,” she continued. “You know the line, about ‘the darkness upon the face of the deep’? Cacodaimons are what was here before. They don’t fit, and when they crawl in, they tear apart anything they touch.”

She shouldered my backpack and started walking.

“There’s a reason there’s a Shadowside and a skinside, Zack. If things like the cacodaimons manage to slink out of their holes, they have to hijack a body in order to interact. Generally, though, for them to even
touch
a vessel like that, the host already has to be broken.” She frowned, and stepped around the two convulsing forms with the air of someone avoiding nasty road kill. “These really don’t look the type. I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but we have got to go.”

“But they’re not dead yet,” I objected. “We can’t just leave them like this.”

“Yes, we can. They’ll be dead soon enough.” She produced a folding knife from somewhere on her person and held it up, the blade gleaming despite the shadows. With a wolfish grin, she asked, “Unless you want me to put them out of their misery.”

For a moment I didn’t know what to say.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I demanded.

She gave a careless toss of her head that sent her russet curls cascading down her back. She started walking away—then stopped once she realized I wasn’t following. Her eyes flicked restlessly around, peering across the train tracks to the run-down houses on the other side.

Looking for witnesses.

Ignoring her, I knelt unsteadily next to the two seizing bodies. Neither of them could have been much more than thirty. The woman wore a wedding ring—I wondered if she had a family. Her kids couldn’t be very old.

“Oh, come on, Zack,” Lil growled. “The police are going to be here any minute now, and there might be more cacodaimons lurking around. There shouldn’t be, but given what’s happened here, we can’t count on any of the rules.”

As I leaned over the woman, her lids snapped open, and I jumped. Her eyes were filled with blood, sightless and twitching. She spasmed so hard that her whole body arced up. Her collar pulled back and I caught sight of marks on her throat. They looked like fingerprints, deeply bruised, and they looked fresh.

My eyes flew to the man.

The marks were there, too, on his temple, under his ear, behind his jaw. If I didn’t know what I was looking at, I might have mistaken them for birthmarks.

“Lil?” I called, stumbling backward. “You said for cacodaimons to ride someone the person had to be broken?”

She grunted, still vigilant.

“That’s the way it works with living people, anyway—drug addicts, crazies. Fresh corpses are easier. They’re already empty.” Then she started to leave.

I pressed a hand to the space above my heart where wells of void tunneled through my being.

Empty.
I had a little taste of that.

I gazed one last time at the fallen couple. Whoever they were, they’d been gone the instant those marks were seared upon their skin. There was no helping them. So I hauled myself to my feet, and caught up with Lil.

S
he took the long way around to her car, and I nearly didn’t make it. I’d exhausted myself with that trip through the Shadowside.

Lil started talking about getting a room at a hotel. She wanted a nap and a shower, and thought we’d both be better off after a little rest. I couldn’t have agreed more, but I didn’t like the idea of bunking with someone who had cheerfully offered to slit the throats of a couple of innocents.

So I pulled the keys from my pocket and rattled off the address printed on the insert in the fob. When we arrived, she eyed the place suspiciously from the street, almost as if she was trying to remember why it annoyed her. I didn’t tell her it was Remy’s safe house until we were standing on the porch.

If looks could kill…

As safe houses went, I was expecting something less ostentatious than a three-story Queen Anne, but maybe that wouldn’t have been Remy’s style. There was nothing small or subtle about the rambling old Victorian. Painted a heather gray that looked suspiciously close to lavender, it had white gingerbread wainscoting and an honest-to-God turret. If this was Remy’s guest house, I wondered what the heck his real digs looked like.

“Remy gave you the keys?” she spat. “
Remiel?
We wouldn’t be here if I’d known this was where we were headed.”

I just glowered back at her, so far beyond exhausted that I didn’t care whose keys opened the lock, as long as a hot shower and a bed lay beyond the door.