Larque on the Wing (17 page)

“Pardon?”

“Nothing.”

“It's no joke, Lark. You've given yourself away and given yourself away until you're nothing but a soul with its butt hanging out. You don't know how much danger you've put yourself in.”

Her heart stopped momentarily from hearing him describe so precisely the naked sensation she had been feeling. But her jaws kept moving. Good food. She wanted to eat.

Argent said, “If Florrie were here, she could blink you without even thinking about you.”

“Good thing she's not here, then.”

“Would you listen to me?” He raised his voice a notch. “It's not just Florrie. You might get so that anybody with an opinion of you can do it. Imagine, if a grumpy preacher looked at you and thought, ‘whore of Babylon,' and that's what you were? Or you might not even last till that happens. You might just fade to nothing, blow away in the wind.”

She did not want to hear what he was saying. It was strange enough just to be with him, and it peeved her that he could not have waited until after lunch. She had wanted him to give her this meal, and now it was ruined. She flared at him, “What do you care? I could have been blowing in the wind all these years for all you cared.”

He said, “Just because I'm a rotten father doesn't mean I can't wish you well. Let me help.”

Before she could shape a suitably biting retort, Shadow walked in, probably awakened by their heightened voices. He did not stagger, but every step was taut and careful. Argent jumped up to steady him, lowering him to a seat. Lark ran to the sofa and brought a knitted blanket to wrap around him.

“You're not explaining it very well,” Shadow said to Argent. Because of the quiet affection in his voice, the words did not sound harsh.

“You do it, then. She'll listen to you.”

This was true. Lark listened to Shadow.

“It's because you've split that you're likely to be in trouble,” he told her. “You've lost …” He stopped, staring at his own injured hands on the table, then started again. “People, most people, are like flowers with three parts, three petals that overlap. One part is the child. Whatever you were as a child, everything you feared, everything you wanted or dreamed, it all stays with you. One part is the parent. Whatever your mother or father or teachers told you or wanted you to be, that is a part of you too. And the rest of you is self, your own unique mind and will. One part in three. But it all overlaps, it is hard to tell most of the time how much is self, how much is child, how much is—”

“I am not my mother,” Lark objected with vehemence.

“Call it training, then,” Argent said softly. “Same thing.”

“Yes.” Shadow looked up at Lark, his gaze strangely opaque. “Please don't fight me, please listen. The spirits you call doppelgangers, most often they are one of the parts, are they not?”

She thought about it. The shoe seemed to fit—not that it proved anything. “Yes,” she said warily.

“When you first came to see me, you had the child part of you along with you as a spirit. How did that happen?”

Even though he sat half-naked, with no truthteller's token in his bruised hand, something about Shadow demanded honesty and received it. Lark thought about Sky better and more carefully than ever before. When she finally spoke, her voice was low.

“I think I had forgotten about her. I think she came to remind me.”

“The adult self had taken over. Yes, I see. And then the child rebelled. She was spirit when I met her, but she is solid now?”

“I thought she was that night for a little while. But then when Mom blinked me, she looked terrified and just disappeared into thin air.”

“That is another problem and a serious one.”

Lark remained silent, staring without seeing, thinking about Sky. Part of her lightness, the thinness of her substance, she decided, was because of being without Sky. There was no real weight of seeing in her anymore. It had been days since she had noticed a new color or trick of the light. Not much by way of dreams in her anymore either. Not much wanting to be a cowboy or anything else. Not much fun. Not much playfulness.

“Besides Sky,” Shadow went on, “there is the most recent doppelganger—”

“The Virtuous Woman,” Lark supplied sourly.

Her tone made his face hint at a smile. “Good name for her. She is parent, is she not? Argent says she reminds him all too strongly of your mother.”

Being without parent was perhaps not a tragedy. Yet—it might be better to have an anchor of heritage, some weight of tradition, some bedrock of The Way Things Are Done to stand on, some limits. And certainly it would feel better to have Hoot. And the boys. All her sense of family was gone. There was not much by way of steadfastness and fidelity in her anymore. Not much to feel right about, either. Not much to feel good about in a moral sense.

“You're saying—” Lark's voice shook. She stopped and tried again. “You're saying, once they become solid, I've lost what is in them?”

Shadow hesitated, a truthteller's distanced sheen in his eyes.

Argent put in, “We're just saying we're worried, young'un.”

Shadow said slowly, softly, “We don't really know, Skylark. We've never met anyone quite like you before.”

Still tired—unusually tired—Lark took off her boots and napped that afternoon on Argent's pueblo tan sofa accessorized in sandstone and desert rose. She understood now the deep resonance she had felt the first time she set foot in his apartment. Not just because of the decorator colors, though her ability to cash in on fashionable color schemes was a knack she might well have absorbed from him. And not just because of his tidiness—she barely remembered that aspect of him, so much at odds with her own slobbish tendencies. Mostly, the pang in her heart had been a reaction to his art. Some of the paintings on his walls had been around the house when she was a child—in the attic, because Florrie didn't like them. But on rainy days Skylark had gone up there and stared into them and ridden between their mesas in her mind.

Lightly sleeping, she dreamed of Sky. The place of her dream was wide open, made of sunset and rimrock and canyonland. Shadow was there, too, dressed in his customary black, but riding the white horse. Sky rode the black horse, laughing like an angel, and her arms were white wings.

The sound of a raised voice woke Lark. “I fucking don't believe it,” someone was saying angrily.

Lark got up groggily and sockfooted to the next room to see what was the matter. The speaker was Argent, standing rigidly at a window.

“The cunt. How did she fucking do it?”

Lark frowned, not much liking the way he spoke of women. If being male meant calling women names, then maybe she ought to forget it. Forget that, and forget finding her father. How would it ever be possible for her to think of this corny silver queen, this stud who reeked of Buff-Brite, as her daddy? She wasn't even sure how she felt about him as a friend. There was not much warmth in him except for his gentleness for Shadow. And right now even that was slipping. Shadow was heading toward him from the bedroom, wavering a little as he walked into the hallway, and Argent did not even stretch out a hand to help. Argent was mightily upset.

Lark stood at a different window and looked. Down on the corner of Popular Street was a solitary picket marching punily back and forth with a sign that said SODOM MUST BE DESTROYED.

“She shouldn't fucking be able to get in here,” Argent ranted. “Since when do we let her kind of bitch in here?”

“She has the power to find her way in,” Shadow replied quietly, “just like Lark and Sky.”

Lark blinked at him in surprise, then looked down at the marcher again and gasped. It was the Virtuous Woman, poodle perm and all. Sleepy, Lark hadn't recognized her feminized self at first. Probably she hadn't wanted to. She hadn't recognized something familiar about the V.W.'s placard either, but now she did. The large letters of SODOM MUST BE DESTROYED appeared to be drawn in rose madder oil paint. And the sign itself was—

“My canvas!” Lark cried out. “The bitch! She's gone and put a broom handle through my canvas!”

Her outcry must have been piercing enough to penetrate Argent's wrath. He stopped raving to turn and stare at her. Shadow looked at her also, and for the second time that day she saw the ghost of a smile move one corner of his lovely mouth. But for once she did not want him to smile.

“My canvas,” she tried to explain. “My art. She's taking my art!” It hurt her more to see the Virtuous Woman with that canvas than it had to see her with Hoot. Which made sense in a way. Hoot was Hoot, her big dear husband, but her art was her self, her soul.

Still watching her with cloudy eyes, Shadow was no longer smiling.

“I've got to find Sky,” Lark whispered to him. She had not meant to whisper, but her voice quavered away.

Argent gave her a hard look. “You think finding Sky will help what's happening out there?” He pointed at the window. What he had said was not so much a question as a challenge.
Clean up your mess
, he seemed to be scolding.

Shadow laid a quiet hand on his arm. “Help me get dressed,” he said. “I need to go see a gypsy.”

“What!”

“Lark could use some advice,” Shadow said in his level way, “and so could we. It's time I went to see my boss.”

For the first time it began to connect in Lark that this man, Argent, really was her father. He shouted just like her father.

“No way in hell!” he was yelling. “You're not going anywhere except back to bed.”

Shadow shrugged, then grimaced with pain as he wobbled toward his dresser and tried to pull a drawer open with one hand while supporting himself against the mirrored wall with the other.

“Fucking fool!” Argent reached him and slammed the drawer shut. “Just fucking go lie down!”

Shadow turned painfully and looked at him, brows straight, eyes dark. Argent softened his voice.

“Idiot, you're not strong enough.”

“Truth, Argent.” Shadow's command, though not loud, plainly bore force. “It will not kill me to go see Davy. What is the real problem?”

“That I care about you!”

“That you don't like Dave.”

“It's the same thing! Fuck all, I don't trust the man and I never have. Who the hell is he, anyway? What do you know about him for sure? He could have been the one—you think he nursed you afterward, but how do you know he didn't do it to you himself?”

“Ryder! Just back off.”

Lark backed off instead. Lightning in Shadow's eyes told her that he was seriously angry. He would never have called Argent by that name unless he was furious, and his wrath made her suddenly aware that she was shamelessly gawking and eavesdropping. She retreated to the living room, where she could hear only occasional words. The two of them were keeping their voices low now, and their tones were more sorrowing than hostile.

“Only if I come with you,” she heard Argent grumble. Shadow had won.

“Just—stay home and soak your head.” Panting, Shadow was evidently struggling with jeans, or maybe boots.

“Let me help, for Christ's sake. Damn stubborn asshole.”

Lark could have used help getting into her own boots. The quarrel had not disturbed her, which was new—when ever had quarreling not disturbed her? Maybe part of being male was not always feeling a need to keep the peace? If so, good. Great, in fact. But she was having trouble with her boots because she was tired, still not functioning very well. One foot wedged halfway home. By the time she got herself together, Shadow had already picked up his battered black wild-West hat from the hall table, slapped it onto his head, and was struggling down the stairs.

“Would you wait a goddamn minute?” Argent yelled, his volume and obscenity levels noticeably waning. Shadow did not obey, but Argent managed to catch up and help him. “Christ, if pride had calories you'd be six feet wide.”

“No, you,” Shadow panted. “You eat it all the time.”

“Only because you—”

“Chill, both of you,” Lark told them, romping down the stairs past them. Her mood had swung suddenly toward glee. A satisfying idea, both practical and vindictive, had come to her and was making her legs happy. “I'll get us a car.”

Argent looked blankly at her. “How?” he asked. But Shadow had already guessed, and was starting to grin.

It was easy. The Virtuous Woman had parked the Chevette right around the corner, and the spare key was safe in its little magnetic holder inside the front fender. Lark unlocked the doors, and Shadow and Argent got in. “Nice car,” Argent said sarcastically.

Just because the carpet was all chewed up, the plastic upholstery splitting, and wires hanging out of the dash panel, was no reason for him to be rude. “It's transportation,” Lark snapped, taking five tries to start the wretched thing. Bought third-hand, it was what she and Hoot had felt they could afford at the time as a second vehicle for a woman who rarely went anywhere. It was a nerd car, and a junky one. Lark had never felt so justified in taking a vehicle without permission. It was hers, and she detested it.

Not that she was in the habit of stealing cars for any reason, rationalized or otherwise. This was a new experience, and it felt good. It felt daring. First her Kentucky Fried Chicken theft, now this. Life of crime. Heading down the wide road to hell.

She grinned wickedly and gunned the Chevette in the Virtuous Woman's ear as she sped past the corner of Popular Street. Glancing back, she caught a glimpse of a lipsticked monkey-mouth agape, a dropped broom handle.

“Shit a brick, Smurfette!” she yelled—rhetorically, as the V.W. could not possibly hear her. “Sooooo-ee!”

“That whole procedure was unwise and unnecessary,” Argent grumbled from the backseat. “She'll sic the police on us.”

“Stop being pissy,” Shadow told his lover, his tone weary but gentle now. “We only have to go across town.”