Murder of Angels (10 page)

Do you really think there’s any difference?
and she hopes that voice is only hers, her own voice from her own sick head, because she honestly isn’t in the mood for Danny Boudreaux right now. No time for anything that might slow her down, no hope but movement, and she stands up and goes to the sink, twists one of the brass knobs, and in a moment hot water is gurgling into the porcelain basin.

“You wanted her, and now she has you, forever,” exactly what Danny said at Alhazred, and that’s what the face in the mirror says when she looks up from the sink. But it isn’t her face in the glass, and it isn’t Danny’s either, this haggard young man with eyes like stolen fire, eyes like the last breath rattling out of a dying man’s chest, but then he’s gone, and she’s staring into her own dark and frightened eyes.

Niki raises her left hand and cautiously places her fingertips against the mirror, half expecting her hand to pass straight through, nothing solid there to stop her. But it’s just a mirror, and the silvered glass is smooth and cold and reflects nothing but the lost girl she’s become, the lost woman, and she looks back down at the water filling the sink.

“All I have do is make it to the airport,” she says, wishing she were already in Boulder, and so many opportunities to back out had come and passed her by; over the Rocky Mountains and safe for a while with Mort and Theo before she has to see this shit through to the end. Niki shuts off the tap and lowers her right hand slowly into the clear, steaming water; it doesn’t hurt half so much as she expected, and she wonders whether that’s good or bad, watches with more curiosity than concern as her blood starts to turn the water red.
Just like Moses,
she thinks, and it annoys her that she can’t remember which number plague that was.

“How are you doing in here?” Marvin asks, and she turns her head towards the bathroom door, making sure he’s really there and really him before she answers.

“I think I’ll live,” and he comes closer, then, scowls down at her hand, and by now the water looks more like cherry Kool-Aid.

“Damn. You realize we’re going to have to get that stitched closed again before we leave.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say,” and she lifts her hand out of the water so he can look at it more closely.

“Yeah, well, bleeding to death would probably be a lot more inconvenient. God, Niki, how did you even
do
this?”

“I already told you that,” and she did, but Marvin shakes his head anyway.

“Well, at least it doesn’t look as if there’s any infection setting in,” and he opens the medicine cabinet, his own little ER stashed away in there, and takes out a sterile gauze pad and a roll of surgical tape, a plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “This will probably do until we can get you to a doctor, if you’ll go easy on this hand.”

“The flight’s at nine,” she reminds him.

“We’re not going to miss the flight, and if we do, we’ll get another one.”

“I want to ask you something,” but then he pours the peroxide over her hand and it stings, foams the ugly color of funeral-parlor carnations. “Shit, Marvin,” she hisses and tries to pull her hand away.

“Don’t be a pussy. What do you want to ask me?”

Niki waits until the stinging starts to fade, until he’s rinsed her hand and dabbed it dry with a fresh washcloth and has started bandaging it again.

“It’s kind of personal,” but he only shrugs.

“Sex, drugs, or politics?” he asks, and “Neither,” she says, and he glances up at her.

“Then it has to be religion, right?” and Niki nods. “I was Catholic,” he continues, “once upon a time. Ancient history.”

“So you don’t believe in God anymore?”

“I believe we’ll find out when the time comes,” he says and takes a small pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet to snip the sticky white surgical tape. “Whether we want to or not.”

She doesn’t say anything for a moment, watches him working on her hand while she weighs words in her head, words and their consequences, and she can tell it makes Marvin feel better that there’s finally something he can do for her.

“What if you’re wrong, and we never get to find out? It’s kind of presumptuous, isn’t it, assuming that dead people get all the answers? Maybe they don’t know any more than we do.”

“My, but we’re in an existential mood today, aren’t we?”

“It’s just something I was thinking about yesterday morning, that’s all. How terrible it would be to be dead, to be a ghost and know that you’re dead, and still not know if there’s a God.”

“Is that how you think it works?”

“I don’t know what I think anymore,” Niki says, and then Marvin’s finished, has started putting everything back into the medicine cabinet, and the bloody water is swirling away down the drain. “But I’ve seen ghosts, and they don’t seem very happy about it. Being dead, I mean.”

“Are you afraid of them?” he asks, not exactly changing the subject, and he closes the medicine cabinet; Niki looks at the mirror, but the only reflections she can see there are hers and Marvin’s.

“There are worse things than ghosts,” she replies.

“Like wolves?” he asks her, and Niki doesn’t answer, glances down at the floor, instead. There’s a single red drop of her blood spattering the tiles.

“We should hurry,” she says, and Marvin doesn’t reply, and she waits impatiently while he takes time to wipe the floor clean again.

Thirty-five thousand feet above the mesas and buttes of Monument Valley and Daria stares through the tiny window in the 767’s fuselage, watching the sunset turning the tops of the clouds all the brilliant colors of the desert below. Flying into night, deep indigo sky ahead and fire behind them, and soon there will be stars. A cramped seat in coach because she’s too worried about money these days to spring for first-class tickets when this will get her to Atlanta just as fast. She has her headphones on, an old Belly album in her Discman, Tanya Donelly singing “Untogether” to simple acoustic guitar, and it makes her miss Niki that much worse. Music from the year they met, though not exactly the sort of thing she would have listened to back then. Too busy trying to keep up with the boys to suffer anything so pretty or vulnerable, too busy learning to be harder than she already was, and for a moment Daria thinks about digging a different CD out of the backpack at her feet. But the song ends, and the next track is faster and edgier and a little easier to take.

She closes her eyes, so far beyond sleepy, but it’s a nice thought, anyway, dozing off to the soothing thrum of jet engines, and then the man sitting in the seat next to her touches her lightly on the shoulder.

“You’re Daria Parker, aren’t you? The singer,” he asks, only a very faint hint of hesitation in his voice, and she almost says
No, I’m not. No, but people are always telling me how much I look like her.
She’s done it plenty enough times before, and it usually works.

Instead, she opens her eyes, the sky outside the window a shade or two darker than before, and “Yeah,” she says, and the man shakes her hand. Nothing remarkable about him, but nothing unremarkable, either, and she wonders how anyone could look that perfectly average. He introduces himself, perfectly average name she’ll forget as soon as he stops bothering her and goes back to the computer magazine lying open in his lap.

“Wow. I
knew
it was you,” he says. “I never would have recognized you, but my daughter has a poster of your band on her bedroom door. She’ll die when I tell her about this.”

Daria slips her headphones off and tries to remember all the polite things to say to an inquisitive stranger on an airplane, the careful, practiced words and phrases that neither insult nor encourage, but she’s drawing a blank, and he still hasn’t stopped shaking her hand.

“What’s her name?”

“Alma. It’s a family name. Well, my mother’s middle name, anyway,” and he finally lets go of her hand, has to so he can dig out his wallet to show her a picture of his daughter.

“How old is she?” Daria asks as the man flips hastily past his driver’s license, a library card, and at least a dozen credit cards.

“Fourteen. Fifteen next month,” and then he passes the wallet to Daria and the girl in the photograph stares back at her through the not-quite-transparent plastic of a protective sleeve. The sort of picture they take once a year at school, yearbook-bland sort of photograph your parents have to buy, and aside from one very large pimple, Alma looks almost as average as her father.

“She has every one of your records. Even an old cassette tape she bought off eBay, from when you were in that other band, the Dead Kittens.”

“Stiff Kitten,” Daria says, correcting him even though she probably shouldn’t, probably rude, but he just nods his head agreeably and takes the wallet when Daria hands it back to him.

“Right, yeah. Stiff Kitten. Anyway, she paid seventy-three dollars for that old tape, if you can believe it.”

“I don’t even have a copy of that myself,” which is true, her last copy of the demo she recorded with Mort and Keith lost before she and Niki moved to San Francisco. “I haven’t heard it in years.”

“Well, let me tell you, I sure have. She plays it constantly. I keep telling her she’s going to wear it out. Personally, I prefer your newer stuff.”

“Me, too,” she says, and the man laughs.

“Would you mind signing something for her? I hate to bother you, but she’d kill me—”

“No, it’s okay, really,” relieved that they’ve gotten around to the inevitable and he’ll probably stop talking soon, hoping that she doesn’t
look
relieved, but running out of chit-chat and patience. Just wanting to shut her eyes again, put the headphones back on, and with any luck she can sleep the rest of the way to Atlanta.

The man tears a subscription card out of the computer magazine and Daria signs one side of it with a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket. “To Alma, be true,” and “That’s nice,” the man says when he reads it. “That’s very nice. Thank you. She’ll be tickled pink.”

Daria almost laughs, the very last thing in the world she would have expected him to say,
tickled pink,
and then she sees the tattoo on the back of his right hand. Fading blue-black-green ink scar worked deep into his skin, concentric and radial lines connecting to form a spider’s web, and he sees that she’s staring at it.

“Stupid, isn’t it? Had that done when I was in college. My wife says I should have it removed, but I don’t know. It reminds me of things I might forget, otherwise.”

And Daria doesn’t reply, gives the man’s pen back to him, and he asks her a couple more questions—what’s it like, all the travel, the fans, has she ever met one of the Beatles—and she answers each question with the first thing that comes into her head. Forcing herself not to look at the tattoo again, and then the stewardess comes trundling down the narrow aisle with the beverage cart. The man asks for a beer, a lite beer, and Daria takes the opportunity to turn away and put the headphones over her ears again. Outside, it’s almost dark, a handful of stars twinkling high and cold and white, and she stares at them through her ghost-dim reflection until she falls asleep.

N
iki wanted to call a taxi, but they took Marvin’s car, instead. A very small concession, she thought, give and take, only something to make her seem a little more reasonable. On the outside, the old VW Beetle looks like someone’s been at it with a sledgehammer and a crowbar; inside, it smells like mold and the ancient, duct-taped upholstery, the fainter, sweeter scents of his cologne and something she thinks might be peppermint Altoids. A puttering, noisy punch line of a car and “How much
does
Daria pay you?” she asks him, though
How much
doesn’t
she pay you?
seems more to the point.

“Enough,” he says, turning off Steiner onto Fell, the streetlights much, much brighter than his wavering low beams.

“Obviously not enough to buy a new car,” she mutters, thinking that Marvin won’t hear her over the Volkswagen’s clattering engine, but he does.

“Yes. Enough to buy a new car, if I
wanted
a new car. I’ve had Mariah here since I started college. She gets me everywhere I need to go. How’s the hand feeling?”

“It hurts.”

“More or less than before?” and Niki thinks about that for a few seconds before answering, staring down at the bandage, thinking about Cafe Alhazred and the old man at the museum who wasn’t Dr. Dalby.

“Just about the same,” she says, finally.

“Well, then. It could be worse.”

“I
don’t
need to see a doctor,” she whispers emphatically.

“Yes, Niki, you do,” he says, and she wonders how he can hear anything at all over the racket the car’s making. “You do, and you will. We’re not going to argue about this.”

She sighs and holds her aching hand up, rests it against the cool, streaky glass of the passenger’s side window. And wonders again if maybe this whole thing isn’t just a trick to get her to the hospital, a trick to keep her in San Francisco. Maybe Marvin didn’t really call the airport at all. Maybe he called Dr. Dalby, instead.

Maybe they’re already waiting for her at the hospital.

You just get her here, and we’ll take it from there.

Thorazine and restraining straps, needles and pills and perhaps it wasn’t even Marvin. Maybe Daria set the whole thing in motion before she left the house.

“We’re going to do this,” Marvin says resolutely. “But we’re going to do it
right
. I’m not sure you understand how serious that cut could be if it gets infected. Hell, for all I know it’s
already
infected.”

“It doesn’t feel infected. It just hurts some, that’s all.”

“Trust me,” Marvin says, squinting at the street through the Volkswagen’s dirty windshield. “We’ll be in and out and on our way in no time.”

He’s lying,
Danny Boudreaux whispers from the backseat, his ghost’s voice like venom and sugar.
You know he’s lying, Niki. I can see it in your eyes.

She glances reluctantly at the side-view mirror, and there’s nothing in the backseat but their luggage, half hidden in the darkness behind her.

“I never said that I didn’t trust you, Marvin,” and so he smiles a nervous smile for her, then wrestles the stick into third.

“It was just a figure of speech, you know that. Don’t start getting paranoid on me, Niki.”

“I’ve always trusted you. You and Daria both. The two of you, you’re the only people I have left in the world now, aren’t you?”

There’s a red light up ahead, and Marvin shifts down again, grimacing at the noises coming from the transmission. “Easy, girl,” he says, and Niki isn’t sure if he’s talking to the car or to her.

Listen to me,
Danny whispers urgently from the backseat.
Listen to me while there’s still time. You know damn well what’s going to happen when he gets you to the hospital. You know they’ll lock you up again.

“You don’t have to whisper,” she says, glancing back to the mirror and the pile of luggage. “He can’t hear you.”

You don’t know what he can hear, Niki.

“Who are you talking to?” Marvin asks, flipping a lever for the right turn signal, and the car comes to a stop at the intersection of Fell and Divisadero. A teenage girl on inline skates and a homeless man in a baggy pink sweatshirt and cowboy hat cross the street in front of them.

“Myself,” Niki tells Marvin. “I’m talking to myself,” but she can see he doesn’t believe her, the look in his eyes, his hesitant frown.

“If you’re hearing voices again, you need to say so. You know keeping them a secret only makes things worse.”

Lying nigger fag,
Danny Boudreaux sneers, but she’s pretty sure it’s not Danny’s voice anymore; some other voice back there, words ground against words like metal grinding metal, like the Volkswagen’s worn-out transmission.
You know better, Niki. I fucking
know
you know better than to trust this faggot son of a bitch.

“I don’t hear
anything,
” she insists, biting at her lower lip and turning away from the mirror, staring up at the traffic light, instead. “I don’t hear anything at all.”

“You know you can tell me the truth,” Marvin says, and he steals a nervous peek at the rearview mirror, so maybe he
can
hear the voices.

This time they won’t stop with the drugs, Niki. This time you’ll get electroshock. This time—this time they’ll plug you in and fill your head so full of lightning you’ll never think of anything else ever again. Just white fire and crackling sparks trapped inside your skull with no way out until it burns you to a cinder.

“Is that really what you think?” she replies, replying to the crankshaft, gear-rust voice in the backseat, not Marvin, but he nods his head, anyway.

I can smell the smoke already.

“Yeah, Niki. That’s really what I think. I think you know that you can trust me.”

The stoplight like a crimson eye blazing in the chilly November night, a single dragon’s eye peering into this world from someplace else, peering in and finding her trapped inside the ugly little car with Marvin and the ghosts in the backseat. She’s cornered, rat in a cage, rabbit with no place left to run, and in another second or two, it’ll tear its way through, shredding the space between worlds in its steel and ivory claws.

He has more eyes than you could ever count. If you had three eternities, you’d never count them all.

“We’re going to the airport,” Niki says quietly, shutting her eyes so she doesn’t have to see the dragon seeing her. “You’re taking me to the doctor, and then we’re going to the airport.”

“Yes. That’s exactly what we’re doing.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, Marvin? Not ever? Not even if you thought it was for my own good?”

“No, I wouldn’t lie to you, Niki.”

They’ve prepared a special place for you,
the voice from the backseat purls.
You should know that. Here
and
there. A place where no one will ever find you, not even Spyder.

“I
need
to believe that, Marvin. I fucking
want
to believe that,” but she’s reaching for the door, her hand around the handle before her eyes are even open, and he sees her and grabs her shoulder.

“What are you doing, Niki. I told you—”

“I can’t take any chances. You don’t know what’s at stake. You don’t know—”

“I
can’t
know what you won’t
tell
me.” And now he sounds frightened, more frightened than angry. The light changes, crimson eye blinking itself to emerald green, and he looks at it and then quickly back to Niki.

“Please, Niki. I need you to let go of the door handle. The light’s changed.”

“Yeah, but it’s not looking for
you,
Marvin, is it? It’s not fucking looking for you,” and it scares her how small and far away her voice sounds now, like she’s watching a movie or television and the volume’s been turned almost all the way down; her heart so much louder than her voice, her heart grown as wide and endless as the black California night spread out overhead.

Claws to tear through time and space and anything in between, anything in its way. Claws to tear the sky, to tear your heart apart—

“You can’t even
hear
it.”

“I’m going to pull over now, okay? And I need you to be still, just long enough for me to pull over, and then we’ll get out of the car if that’s what you need to do.”

Liar,
the voice growls softly, unbelieving, and now it only sounds like Danny Boudreaux again. Only sounds like the strangled voice of a dead boy, not the vulcanized rubber tongues of damned and scorched machineries.
He’s just trying to save himself. He’s made deals, and if you get away, if he
lets
you get away—

Behind the Volkswagen, someone begins honking their horn, and Niki looks up at the green light again.

“I fucking swear to God, Niki, I am not lying to you,” and Marvin cuts the wheel, nowhere to park but the crosswalk, and for a moment, the still point between breathing in and breathing out, she can’t look away from the light, from the eye. Red means stop, green means go, go Niki, go
now,
while there’s still somewhere left to run.

“I’m sorry, Marvin,” she says and opens the door, jerking free of his grip and almost tumbling out onto the pavement, catching herself at the last and stepping quickly away from the car.

“Niki, don’t
do
this! Please,
listen
to me,” but she’s already turned her back on him and his musty car and all the other cars trapped there behind the sputtering Volkswagen. She’s not running yet, because none of this feels real enough to let herself start running, not just yet, but she is walking very fast, the soles of her boots loud against the sidewalk.

You
better
run, babe,
Danny says, and she realizes that he’s following her.
You better run fast, because you can bet he’s going to be coming after you any minute now.

Niki looks back over her shoulder; Marvin’s pulling over to the curb, and she starts walking faster. Her head’s grown so full that she can’t think—the drivers still blowing their horns because Marvin can’t get out of their way quickly enough, Danny and all the other voices, the ruby fire and green ice of the dragon’s eye. Everything getting in through her ears and her eyes, flooding her, and there’s no way she can shut it all out, no inch of silence left anywhere in her deafened soul.

Where you going, Niki?
Danny asks her.
Where you headed in such a goddamned hurry?

“You leave me alone,” she spits back, wishing there were flesh and blood left of him, something solid for her to dig her nails and teeth into, something that could bleed. “You’re dead. You’re fucking dead because you were too afraid to live anymore. You’re dead, so leave me the hell alone and
be
fucking dead!”

That morning you left me, that was the end of the world for me, Nicolan. That morning I trusted you, and you left me alone. I knew you’d never ever be coming back for me.

“Where am I going? Where the hell am I supposed to go now?” she asks, not asking
him,
not asking anyone, just repeating questions over and over and over because she needs the answers more than she’s ever needed anything in her life.

That’s not true, Niki. Not more than you needed me, not more than you needed Spyder—

“I said leave me the fuck alone! Get out of my head!” and she spins around, swinging at empty air, at the insubstantial, unresisting night draped so thick about her.

You’ll find the way. She believes in you, so I know that you’ll find the way.

Her own scalding tears to blind her, to blur the softening edges of brick walls and blacktop rivers, Divisadero Street become a smeared tableau, oil on canvas, and she thinks if she can only stand still long enough Marvin will find her and take her back home again.

You’ll follow the road that Orc took, and Esau. You’ll follow the road beneath the lake, the Serpent’s Road, because He’s watching all the other ways.

And this voice she’ll know when she’s forgotten every other sound in the universe, when even the stars have burned themselves away to nothing and the earth has finally ceased to spin. This voice seared into her mind so deeply, so raw, its touch can never heal, can never even scar; Niki screams and falls, and there’s nothing but the sidewalk concrete there to catch her.

They have set themselves against us, Niki, and they will stop at nothing, not until we’re all dead. Not until we are all held forever within the borders of fire and slag and—

“Spyder?” Niki sobs, one hand held up high, held out, and someone’s pulling her off the ground, pulling her back up into the world, into the light, into herself. “Oh God, Spyder, please help me make them understand.”

There are still two of you to stand against them. Bring him to me, Niki, by the Serpent’s Road, the road beneath the lake that burns.

Bring him down to me.

“Spyder! Wait—” but the voice has gone, and the night snaps suddenly back upon itself like a broken rubber band, something wound once too often. She’s standing on the sidewalk, and Marvin’s holding her so tightly she can hardly breathe. He’s crying, too, and she hangs on to him, hanging on for whatever life she has left that might be worth saving.