Last Plane to Heaven (41 page)

It rained for days, as if this were February and the Pacific storms were pouring over the Coastal Mountains one after another. Danny performed the Daily Observances and leafed through the
Booke of Dayes
in his quiet moments to see what else he'd missed besides the Reversal of Indifference. Mostly he let Sky take care of the land and wondered when he'd see Father Sun again.

Mom seemed distracted, too. Danny knew she loved him, but she was so busy with her work and taking care of the house, she didn't always remember to hug him like their therapist said to, or feed him like their doctor said to.

That was okay. He could hug himself when he needed, and there was always something to eat in the kitchen.

So mostly Danny mooned around the house, watched the rain fall, and wished he could take the bus to Lowe's to look for new magical herbs in the garden center. He wasn't allowed TV, and there wasn't much else to do except read
Mother Urban
or one of his fantasy novels.

Except as the days went by, the rain did not let up. First Mom became angry about her tomatoes. Then he saw a dead puppy bumping down the gutter out front, drowned and washing away in a Viking funeral without the burning boat. The news kept talking about the water, and how the East Side Sewer Project wasn't ready for the overflow, and whether the Willamette River would reach flood stage, and which parks had been closed because the creeks were too swollen to be safe.

Danny watched outside to see if the Asian girl came by again on her bike. He wanted to ask her what to do now, what to do next. There was no point in climbing the roof to ask Sky—the only answer he would get there was a faceful of water and Oregon's endless, featureless dirty cotton flannel rainclouds.

If anything, Sky was even less informative in such a rain than when Father Sun shouted the heat of his love for the world.

So Danny sat by the dining room window looking out on the street and leafed through
Mother Urban's Booke of Dayes
for anything he could find about rain, about water, about asking the sun to return once more.

He read all about the
Spelle for a Seizure of the Bladder,
but realized after a while that wasn't the right kind of water.
Maidens' Tears & the Love of Zir Hearte
had seemed promising, but even from the first words, Danny knew better. Still, he'd studied the lists of rose hips and the blood of doves and binding cords braided from zir hair. Closer, in a way, was the
Drain Cantrip,
though that seemed more straightforward, being a spell of baking soda and vinegar and gravity.

Danny tried to imagine how much baking soda and vinegar it would take to open up the world to swallow all this rain.

The news talked about people packing sandbags along the waterfront downtown. All the floodgates were open in the dam at Oregon City. A girl drowned in the Clackamas River at Gladstone, trying to feed bedraggled ducks. A grain barge slipped its tow and hit a pillar of the Interstate Bridge, shutting down the Washington-bound traffic for days.

All his fault. All this water.

He prayed. He stood before his altar and begged. He even tried the roof one night, but only managed to sprain his ankle slipping—again—on the way down. And he read the
Booke of Dayes
. Studying it so closely, Danny realized that Mother Urban must have been a very strange author, because often he could not find the same spell twice, yet would locate spells he'd never seen before in all his flipping through the book.

Meanwhile, his own mother complained about the weather, set buckets in the living room and bathroom under the leaks, and sent Danny to the basement or his bedroom more often than not. Something had happened to her job—too wet to work outdoors at the Parks Department—and she stopped using the TiVo, just watching TV through the filter of gin all day and all night. He wasn't sure she slept anymore.

Danny was miserable. This was all his fault. He never should have listened to the Asian girl, never should have killed those mice, not even for a ritual. If only he could bring them back to life, or set that stupid, fateful star back into the sky.

He couldn't undo what was done, but maybe he could do something else. That was when he had his big idea. It couldn't rain
everywhere,
right? If he worked the ritual again, somewhere
else,
the rain would leave Oregon behind to move on. Things would be better again, for Mom, for his neighbors, for the people fighting the flood. For everyone!

Excited but reluctant, Danny caught five more mice. He put them in a Little Oscar cooler with some newspaper, along with cheese and bread to eat, and pounded holes in the lid with a hammer and a screwdriver so they could breathe. He gathered the rest of his materials—the silver athame, duct tape, the brass bowl, the bottle of Costco olive oil, the Ronson lighter fluid—and stuffed all of it in his dorky Transformers knapsack.

All he needed was money for a bus ticket to Seattle. They wouldn't even notice the extra rain there. Mom never really slept, but she was full of gin all the time now, and spent a lot of her day breathing through her mouth and staring at nothing. Danny waited for her noises to get small and regular, then crept into her room.

“Mom,” he said quietly.

She lay in her four-poster bed, the quilted coverlet spotted with gin and ketchup. Her housedress hung open, so Danny could see her boobs flopping, even the pink pointy nipples, which made him feel weird in a sick-but-warm way. Her head didn't turn at the sound of his voice.

“Momma, I'm hungry.” That wasn't a lie, though mostly he'd been eating the strange old canned food at the back of the pantry for days.

She snorted, then slumped.

“Momma, I'm taking some money from your purse to go buy food.” There was the lie, the one he'd get whipped for, and have to pray forgiveness at the altar later on.
Mother Urban's Booke of Dayes
was very clear on the penalties for a Practitioner's lying to the Spirit Worlde.

But without the money, he could not move the rain. Besides, surely he'd buy food on the way to Seattle. So it wasn't
really
a lie.

He reached into her purse, pushed aside the pill bottles and lipsticks and doctor's shots to find her little ladybug money purse. Too scared to count it out, Danny took the whole thing and fled without kissing his mother good-bye or tucking her boobs back in her dress or even locking the front door.

*   *   *

Danny's pass got him on the number 33 bus downtown. Even in the floods, Tri-Met kept running. The bus's enormous wheels seemed to be able to splash through deep puddles where cars were stuck. The rain had soaked him on the way to the bus stop, and at the bus shelter, and even now its clear fingers were clawing at the window to drag him out. Danny clutched his Little Oscar cooler and his Transformers knapsack and stared out, daring the rain to do its worst.

If he made the rain mad enough, and Sky, who was both mother and father of the rain, maybe it would follow him to Seattle even without the Reversal of Indifference.

*   *   *

The Greyhound station downtown had a sign on the door that said
NO SERVICE TODAY DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER.
Danny wasn't sure exactly what “inclement” meant, but he understood the sign.

He sat out front and stared at the train station down the street, crying. It was in the rain, no one would notice him in tears. The Little Oscar emitted scratching noises as the mice did whatever it was mice did in the dark. He knew he should draw out
Mother Urban's Booke of Dayes
and try to work out what to do next.

Then the girl on the bike showed up again. She came splashing through puddles with a big smile on her face, as though this flood were a sprinkler on a summer lawn. The bike skidded sideways in front of him, splashing Danny with grimy water. She leapt off like she was performing some great trick, and let her bicycle fall over into the flooded gutter.

“So how's your edge, Danny?” she asked brightly.

He couldn't remember that he'd ever told the girl his name. It wasn't like he knew hers. “Th-this is all your fault!” he blurted.

Somewhere out in the rain a ship's horn bellowed, long and slow. The bus station was near the waterfront, Danny knew.

The girl's grin expanded. “Somebody's going to hit the Broadway Bridge.”

“You s-set me up.”

“No, Danny.” She leaned close, her hands on her knees. “I just told you how to do what you wanted.
You
set you up. A Practitioner must know zir Practice.”

He was startled out of his growing pout. “You know everything about the
Booke of Dayes,
don't you? Tell me, how do I fix this?”

Another laugh. “Think,” she said. “Smart kid like you doesn't have to go to Seattle to stop the rain.”

“I been doing nothing
but
think for days!” The tears started up. “People been drowning, that p-puppy, Mom's got no w-work, the tomatoes are rotting…” Danny screwed his eyes shut to shut the tears off, just like Mom always made him do.

When the girl's voice spoke hot-breathed in his ear, he squeaked like a duct-taped mouse. “What's the name of the ritual, Practitioner?”

“
R-reversal of Indifference.
”

“What does that
mean
?”

He wasn't stupid! Danny concentrated, like they'd always tried to make him do in school. Reversal … reversal … The meaning hit him suddenly. “You can turn something around from either direction,” he said with a gasp.

She clapped her hands with glee. “And so…?”

“And so…” Danny let his thoughts catch up with his words. He could see this thread, like a silver trail in the sky, tying a star back into place. “And so I can make Sky stop thinking about rain on Portland, make Sky take the rain back.”

“Bravo!” Her eyes sparkled with pure delight.

“Wh-what's your n-name?” he asked, completely taken in by the girl's expression.

“Geneva,” she said, serious but still amused. “Geneva Fairweather.”

*   *   *

He squatted on the bench in front of the Greyhound station and opened the Little Oscar. Five sets of beady eyes looked from a reek of piss and damp animal. Danny already had his duct tape out, but when he reached for the first mouse, he remembered that it was the edge that counted. Geneva Fairweather had said you could work most rituals with a sharpened paper clip and grass cuttings.

So maybe he didn't need to kill three mice. Or even tape them into tiny mummies to bind them. His fist would hold the mouse. The athame was sharp enough to prick three drops of blood from the mouse's back. The poor animal squirmed and squealed, but it was not dead. He folded the blood into a corner of paper torn from
Mother Urban's Booke of Dayes,
and followed the ritual from there.

Within moments, the rain slackened and Father Sun peeked down for the first time in three weeks. Danny turned to Geneva. “See? I could do it!”

A distant bicycle splashed through the puddles. She was gone.

Still, it didn't matter. Danny knew he'd done something important. Real important. And Geneva Fairweather would be back, he was sure of it.

As for Danny, if he could do this, how much more could he do?

What effect would a Reversal of Indifference have on his mom?

Clutching his bus pass, Danny walked back toward the Tri-Met stop. He would study
Mother Urban's Booke of Dayes
all the way home.

On the bus, he noticed for the first time the tiny illustration of a girl on a bicycle that appeared somewhere on every page of
Booke of Dayes.
Sometimes inside another illustration, sometimes tucked within the words, sometimes on the edge.

Had she been there before?

Did it matter?

The mice rustled in his jacket pocket. A pungent odor told Danny they were already making themselves at home there. That was fine with him. Smiling, he pricked his finger with the athame, right there on the bus, and watched the blood well like a fat-bellied ruby. Once he got home, some things would begin to change.

 

Angels v: Going Bad

The last of the angel stories, and probably the nastiest. I've always had a fascination with the mythology of the Rapture, and the idea of what the world would be like under demonic reign. Or maybe this is just how I see life in Portland.

“Innocence always was a recipe for disaster.” Sesalem kept one hand on the issue .38 that protruded from the holster at his back like a warm, black egg stuck halfway out of the hen.

A nervous habit.

Corpses made him nervous.

Fork-Foot, his Infernal Liaison, walked around the body, kicking it with needled claws. Sesalem winced at this contamination of evidence. Eight feet tall, jeweled with glittering scales, and armored with Infernal Immunity, there was little the detective could do to influence the demon.

“Not innocent.” Fork-Foot growled like machine screws in a blender. “Stupid.”

The alley was narrow, three stories of age-blackened brick on each side lined with greasy Dumpsters. Portland had been a nice town, back before the Rapture. Now they were lucky just to keep the murder rate down.

It was no comfort that a good number of the victims got up off their tables at the morgue and walked out. Or sometimes clawed their way from the earth, much later.

“She came down here,” Sesalem said. He framed his thoughts into a narrative as he always did when working a case. “For … something. To find help, to offer help. Not to score, I don't think. Though someone scored
off
of her.”

The victim was perhaps sixteen, African-American with short, wiry hair. She'd been carrying a canvas bag from the Albina Church of God in Christ All-Saved and wearing a white sundress. At least, they assumed it had been a sundress. Covering her head, the bag had been tugged off by a forensics tech who now waited for the detective to finish his meditative contemplation.