Murder of Angels (39 page)

It really doesn’t matter if you don’t believe or understand what I’m saying. You
will.
Niki’s on her way back to Cullom Street. She’s received the mark. You’ve seen it, on her hand. Niki Ky is becoming the Hierophant, and she’ll open the gates. She’ll unleash the Dragon.

“Is she a friend of yours?” he asks, and “Yeah, she’s a friend of mine,” Daria replies.

“Then you should know she’s in danger. Spyder’s not right.”

“Spyder’s a goddamn basket case,” Daria says and starts walking again. “Spyder’s the fucking poster girl for schizos.”

“No. I don’t mean because she’s crazy. I mean, she’s not
right
.”

We have to be there to stop her. All of us have to be there to stop her. All the worlds are winding down. All the worlds are spinning to a stop. Find her, Daria, before the jackals do. Before
I
do. If I find her first, I have to kill her, and I’ve killed too many people already.

“Spyder’s not right,” he says again, as if she’ll understand him if only he keeps repeating the words over and over. “If you care about your friend, you’ll keep her away from that house. Robin knew about Spyder. She tried to tell us, and now she’s dead.”

“Yeah, well, now Niki’s dead, too, spooky boy, so I guess you’re a day late and a dollar short, and we’re both shit out of luck.”

And then the moments and seconds are collapsing around her, playing-card houses and sand-castle dissolution, a sudden and furious implosion of time with her standing somewhere much too near ground zero. She sits on the hotel bed in Atlanta, holding her cell phone, and at the sunlit table with the white bird. She stands in the alley with Walter, and grips the brass knob to the front door of Spyder’s house.

Only one moment…

And she opens the door.

And the house is full of light.

Silver-white light draped in shimmering, Christmas garland strands and floating lazily on the bright air, lying in tangled drifts upon the floor. Daria shields her eyes, opens her mouth to call for Niki, or only to stand there slack-jawed and stupid at the sight. But then she hears the hurried, scuttling noises at her back, something big coming up the steps, coming fast, and there’s a crash as a piece of the porch trash tumbles over, and she doesn’t look, steps quickly across the threshold and slams the door shut behind her.

And she stands very still, remembering how the threads burned her, stands listening as they settle gently across the floor and furniture, the sound of them like falling snow. And she also remembers finding the open hole leading down to the basement. Remembers the warmer air rising up from that pit and the incongruous scents: mold and earth, jasmine and the sweeter smell of rotting meat. And the imperfect blackness pooled at the foot of the stairs, the dim red-orange glow at the center of that pool, blood-orange glow, and there was laughter from the hole, insane and hateful laughter.

“You don’t have to do this again,” the white bird informs her, preening itself now that it’s finished with the biscuit. “You saved Niki Ky
that
night. Some mistakes we only have to make once.”

“Mistakes? You think it was a mistake, saving Niki?”

“Did I say that?” the white bird squawks and peers suspiciously up at Daria, squinting its red eyes in the glare of the sun. “I don’t think that’s what I said at all. I think your head’s stuffed full of cotton, old woman.”

“I just fucking
heard
you. You said, ‘Some mistakes we only have to make once.’”

“Why would I have said a thing like that? The Hierophant is our savior. Without her, all is lost.”

“Liar,” Daria hisses, and she turns from the bird to watch the traffic outside the cafe’s window. She wonders if Alex is ever coming down to breakfast, and if the cafe really closes in five minutes. If the white bird’s a liar, the macaw might have been lying, too.

“We’re wasting time we don’t have to waste,” a woman says, and when Daria turns back to the table, the white bird is gone, and there’s a pale woman dressed in scarlet robes sitting across from her, sitting in her father’s chair. The woman is very young, younger than herself, probably younger even than Niki. Her hair is neither blond nor brown, some color in between that Daria can’t recall the word for, and her brown eyes are desperate, but not unkind, and seem to lead away somewhere safely beyond the borders of this dream.

“While there’s still time, you have to listen to me, Daria Parker. I’m Archer Day. I called you at the airport—”

“I came to the house.”

“You brought policemen with you. That was stupid.”

“What do you want?” Daria asks, and suddenly the dream doesn’t feel like a dream at all, as though the flowing, undecided fabric of her unconscious mind has congealed, and now she’s trapped here and will never be able to wake up again.

“It’s not too late,” the woman says. “But this time you have to come alone. This time you come alone, or you never see Niki again.”

Something taps on the cafe window, and Daria sees that it’s the white bird, stranded on the other side of the glass. Its beak is striking the windowpane so violently that there are tiny sparks.

“The bird can’t bring her back to you,” Archer Day says. “Nor can the Weaver. I’m the only chance you’ve got. Come before morning. After that, it may be too late. Theda won’t sleep forever.”

“Who’s Theda?”

“Bring the philtre,” Archer says, and when she stands to leave, the window shatters, spraying diamond bits of glass across the table, across Daria’s lap, and the white bird is torn apart in the flood of darkness pouring in to wash the brown-haired woman away.

And it all feels like a dream again.

Daria holds the dead and broken bird in both hands, its blood oozing thickly from the spaces between her fingers and dripping to the ground charred black as soot. There is no cafe now, and no sunlight, and no potted philodendrons. She stands alone on a high and rocky place, beneath a night sky choked with smoke, and jagged lightning tongues lick greedily at the ruined and burning world below.

“I’m sorry,” she says to the bird, and it seems as though there are other things she ought to say, but she can’t think of any of them.

“It’s no fault of yours,” Spyder says, and Daria turns to find her standing only a few feet away. But this woman is not the Spyder Baxter she remembers; there’s a glowing red gem set into the skin between Spyder’s eyes that’s the same color as the dead bird’s eyes.

“She was my courier. She never expected to live through this.”

“Where are we, Spyder?”

“A place. A time the Dragon is preparing for us all. The red witch is insane, you know, but you have to do what she asks. Niki needs you.”

“The red witch,” Daria murmurs, repeating the three words as she turns to face the blasted landscape stretched out below her, as she stoops down and lays the dead bird’s limp body on the heat-cracked stones.

“She told you her name was Archer Day. It’s not, but that isn’t important. She was sent to stop me, but she’s fallen now. She’s renounced her vows—”

“And she has Niki?”

“Niki needs you, Daria.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” but now there’s something stirring in the depths of the flames, something enormous made of scales and teeth and leathery wings, and a rain of ash and embers has begun to fall from the scorched clouds.

“You didn’t die that night,” Daria says. “You only found another place to hide, didn’t you? And you’re still trying to use Niki—”

“Shut up,”
Spyder snarls, and the ground rumbles beneath Daria’s feet. “I’m here because I tried to
protect
Niki. I gave my life, I loved her so.”

“Is that why she’s dead?”

“
That’s
why she’s dead,” Spyder says, “and
that’s
what you have to save her from,” and as if it’s heard her and knows the cue, the Dragon rises from a smoldering jungle of twisted steel and strides across molten asphalt highways, its tireless, searchlight eyes hunting, hunting, hunting, and now Daria knows exactly who it’s looking for.

“My father was a serpent,” Spyder whispers in her ear, Spyder standing so close that Niki can smell her, vanilla and patchouli and Old Spice cologne, hate and spite and bitterness. “My father opened his eyes one day and saw angels following him, and
this
is what they made of him. And, in return,
this
is what he made of me.”

Daria looks down, and there’s a horde of white spiders, a billion pinprick dots swarming ankle-deep around her feet and flowing over the edge of the cliff to meet the Dragon’s gaze. She wants to scream, wants to open her mouth wide and never
stop
screaming, but she doesn’t, stands absolutely still and silent instead, while all their scurrying, jointed legs brush across her bare skin. And when they’ve gone, there are only bones and feathers where the white bird was.

Niki opens her eyes, blinks, and the first thing she notices is that she’s still holding Scarborough’s hand. Or he’s still holding hers. And the deck of Malim’s ship and the becalmed ocean and the devouring vortex with its crimson heart, so much like the gem between Spyder’s brows, have all been replaced by wavering firelight and shadows and a rough stone floor. The source of the firelight is a wide, triangular pit set into the floor at the center of the chamber; the air is close and reeks of unfamiliar spices and musky incense. Above them, wide strips of some fine cloth hang suspended from the ceiling, an elaborate confusion of vertical and horizontal lines, zigzags and multispirals, the strips of a vast, discontinuous tapestry. The firelight plays yellow and orange ghosts across the fabric.

“Hell, I should have fucking run,” Scarborough laughs, a hard and humorless laugh, and he cracks his knuckles. Niki nods and looks around her at the great chamber, this one a far grander thing than the fish augur’s magic bubble. The walls are constructed of massive blocks of the same gray stone as the floor, slate gray shot through with glittering silver-white streaks, like veins of mica or pyrite crystals. On the other side of the fire is an altar—there’s no mistaking it for anything else—a long stone table set at the clawed feet of a statue or idol so tall that its head almost brushes the roof of the chamber, fifty feet or more above them. There’s a rusty iron trough that leads from the table down to the fire pit, and Niki doesn’t want to think about what that means, or whether or not all those stains are really rust, so she looks back up at the statue.

“Where are we, Scarborough?”

“If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say we’re somewhere in the Melán Veld.”

“And that means—?”

“Bad shit, Vietnam. It means some real bad shit. Melán Veld is the sacrificial temple of the red witches of Nesmia Shar.”

“Yeah, well, I figured it had to be something like that. The way things have been going, I really wasn’t expecting happy pixies.”

And Niki stares up through the tapestry strips at the idol staring down at her with its faceted, maroon eyes, eyes that might be garnets, if there were ever garnets as big as basketballs. And she knows that she’s seen this thing somewhere before, this thing or something very much like it, and a moment later she remembers where. Those same powerful, feline haunches, the same four wings like ragged sails of skin and bone, the hooked beak, and she’s pretty sure it’s meant to be the same creature as the statue she saw at the Palisades, the thing that was almost a griffin.

“
They
brought us here, these red witches?”

“Like you said, it wasn’t happy pixies.”

“There isn’t much time left for questions,” someone says, a voice that streams like water over polished glass, that clear and easy, and a woman in long red robes and a sage green skullcap steps out of the shadows at the base of the statue. Niki can tell that she was very beautiful once, but she’s grown old, and there’s a terrible scar running across the bridge of her nose and both cheeks. Her hair is almost the same drab gray as the stone floor.

“You know, I’m so sick of hearing that I could fucking puke,” Niki says, and now there are other women stepping out of the shadows that lie along the edges of the chamber, dozens of women in identical, flowing cerise robes. A few of them wear skullcaps the same shade of gray-green as the woman standing near the statue, but most of them have simple white bandanas tied tightly around their heads. All of the women are barefoot, and the callused pads of their feet rustle softly against the rough stone.

“
Look
at her, sisters and daughters,” the woman on the altar commands, and now her glass-and-water voice is clouded with contempt and disgust. “Look at her very closely. This
girl
is the Hierophant, the chosen and willing tool of the Weaver, the one who has come among us, to
our
world, to set the Dragon and all of its agents free. Because of this girl, we have given up one of our own.”

In response, the red women standing around the walls of the chamber begin to talk among themselves, speaking in nervous, hushed tones, a flurry of shocked and angry half whispers. Niki releases Scarborough’s hand and takes a step nearer the fire pit and the altar and the woman in the sage skullcap.

“So, is this supposed to be some sort of trial?” she asks. “Is that why you brought us here? Are we on trial?”

“No,” the woman replies. “You’re already condemned, by your own selfish actions and by the actions of the Weaver. There’s no need for a trial, Hierophant.”

Niki glances back at Scarborough, but he’s staring at his feet or the floor and doesn’t seem to notice.

“I am named Pikabo Kenzia,” the woman says, and Niki gives up on Scarborough and reluctantly turns to face her again. “Here, I am Mother and Voice—in this hall, in this tower, and throughout the protectorate of Nesmia. I know well that the Weaver has kept many things from you, girl. She has never trusted the truth of matters to get her work done.”