The Getaway God (19 page)

“Have you ever been in an ossuary?”

“I'm not sure I know what that is.”

“They have one in Paris. Vidocq will tell you about it. It'll be great pillow talk.”

“It's something gruesome, isn't it?”

“I'll let you be the judge.”

“Go home,” she says. “And stay in. Both of you.”

“That's the plan.”

I start out and stop.

“Candy is going to be okay, right?”

Allegra washes her hands.

“She'll be fine. I'm sure it's just a Jade-­specific virus or something. I'm reading up on it now. Don't worry so much.”

I nod and head out the front.

“Tell Kas I'll see him tonight,” says Fairuza.

“Have him show you his new hat. And make him tell you where it came from.”

I
DON'T EXACTLY
lie about who fixed up my neck when I get home, but when Candy guesses it was a Vigil medic, I don't correct her. It will bug her if she knows I've been talking to Allegra, and after her being sick and my discovering I'm a serial killer suspect, it would be nice to have a few hours free from drama.

I listen to Candy practicing guitar downstairs in the rehearsal room. Fairuza comes over around eight and disappears with Kasabian into his inner sanctum. Chinese delivery shows up soon after. I watch
Three Extremes
upstairs. It's all gloriously boring.

Candy comes up around eleven, bright-­eyed and sweaty from practice. I haven't seen her this happy in days. The sofa is wobbly from when we broke the leg, so we head for the bedroom, where the furniture is sturdier. The only casualty is a bedside lamp shaped like the
Cowboy Bebop
spaceship. Personally, I'm not sorry to see it go.

“I think you did that on purpose,” she says.

“I'd never do something that underhanded.”

“Right. Don't worry. I intend to replace it with something more hideous and embarrassing.”

“I hope it doesn't get broken too.”

“You better. Each new lamp I have to get will be worse than the one before. Trust me. I know where to get more cute kittens, talking robots, and pink monsters than you can shake your ass at.”

“Understood. I'll guard future lamps with my very life.”

“Good boy,” she says, then kisses me and lies down.

For a while, lying in the dark, it feels like nothing is wrong at all. Then I hear the rain battering the window and I remember that pretty much everything is wrong.

I don't remember falling asleep. I'm just lying beside Candy and then I'm somewhere else.

It's a strange mix of the Angra subway cavern and the scene at the hospital. The meat chapel is surrounded by rough, raw stone, the bone sigils bright red in the reflected blood light.

The thirteen crucified bodies writhe on their inverted crosses, crying and gasping for air like they aren't quite dead.

I look at the walls, but can't see the sigils. They jitter like liquid mercury, forming and re-­forming themselves into new shapes. They don't hold any one long enough to make sense and then I understand that I'm not looking at their symbols, but at the Angra themselves.

From a spiral of skulls all shattered on one side steps a golden woman. Her skin is patterned like circuit boards and snake scales. On her head is a headdress with swept-­back wings. Half of her face is missing. An empty eye socket above a nonexistent cheek and a jaw stripped of its golden flesh are all that's left on her right side. Though she's in pain, with half her skull revealed she's stuck in a perpetual half smile.

I say, “I remember you.”

She nods.

“We met in the water, as the building fell into the ocean.”

“Yeah. Kill City. You grabbed my leg. You tried to drown me,” I say.

The other side of her face smiles. She folds her hands.

“That was before I knew how special you are.”

“Are you the Flayed One or the Hand?”

“Neither,” she says, drawing herself up. “Call me Ten Thousand Shadows. I hear all truths and lies, every whisper and secret told in the dark. There are no mysteries to me among mortals.”

“Are you all torn up because that's all of you that can get through to this dimension or because you were always uglier than me?”

She turns her head giving me a good look at her wounds.

“The Terrible One did this to me when he threw us out of this universe and into chaos. Your God calls himself a God of love and mercy. See what his mercy looks like.”

She steps closer. I back up. Even while she's trying to keep this form, she can't hold entirely still. Every time she moves, for a split second she blurs into something else. A bird skeleton. A crawling patch of furred fungus. A giant treelike thing, so twisted and knotted it looks like it grew in a hurricane.

“Trust me, lady. I know all about God's bad side. I've been on it most of my life.”

“You are Abomination,” she says. “As are we. You owe this God and his pitiful creations nothing.”

“Yeah, but I like donuts, so what am I going to do?”

“Join us. Summon us to this realm and we'll raise you up to be Angra Om Ya. Stark, savior of the true rulers of the universe.”

“And here I thought you liked me for my boyish charms.”

“Call us. Bring us through and you can have anything in return.”

She undoes a clasp on her golden gown and it falls to the floor. She's beautiful. The half of her that's covered in skin. The rest looks like Thanksgiving leftovers a ­couple of days past their prime.

“Even if I wanted to help you, I don't know how to use the Qomrama.”

She reaches out her almost meatless hand.

“Don't worry. We'll teach you.”

“How?”

The golden woman fades away, replaced by the swirling skeleton-­fungus-­tree thing.

“We'll speak again.”

“Goody.”

She's gone.

I hear a sound and turn to the reliquary. The rubies on the skull are gone and blood pours from the hole in the forehead. It spills onto the floor and pools in the cracks. I turn to go down the tunnel, but there's no way out. Blood pours from the skull and the sigils on the wall, covering the floor. I climb onto the filthy gurney to get away from it. It dawns on me that this whole thing has been a trap. That the cavern is going to fill with blood and that I'm going to drown. I should have been nicer to Ten Thousand Shadows. Or maybe had less Aqua Regia with the movie last night. Either way, this is a hell of an end to a shitty day. I hold my breath and try to get as close to the ceiling as I can. In a few minutes it won't make any difference.

I come awake to Candy shaking me.

“Wake up, goddammit,” she says.

I choke on my own spit and gasp for air.

“What's wrong with you? You're thrashing all over.”

It takes me a ­couple of minutes to get my breath.

“I'm fine,” I say. “Just weird dreams.”

“What kind?”

I sit up. Rub a hand over my face.

“I was in a cave with the Angra. They were talking to me. One was. Ten Thousand Shadows. She wanted me to summon them.”

“Who is she?”

“The one I saw in Kill City.”

She pushes my hair back off my forehead.

“It was just a dream. How could the Angra be talking to you?”

“I've always had funny dreams that way. And that chop-­shop prick bit me. Maybe we made some kind of connection.”

“Or maybe it was just a damned dream. You're all stressed out about work. You get hurt and you remember the one fragment of an Angra you ever saw.”

“You're probably right.”

“I'm always right.”

Candy pushes me back down onto the bed and pulls the covers over me.

“Should I tell the Shonin about it?”

“Definitely not,” she says. “You said Wells is trying to connect you and Saint Nick. All anyone over there needs to hear is that you're having pillow talk with an old God.”

“Good point.”

“I'll be back,” she says, and gets out of bed. A minute later I hear her in the bathroom throwing up.

I'll call Allegra tomorrow about those goddamn tests.

I
N THE MORNING,
the bite is just bruises and a scab. There's no fieldwork or car chases scheduled for the Vigil today, so Candy heads off to help out at the clinic.

At Vigil headquarters, instead of the sneers and behind-­the-­back comments I usually hear, there's dead silence when I walk through. Julie Sola and Vidocq are coming out of the break room. Vidocq has a cup of tea and Sola is carrying a container of yogurt.

I say, “What's with the silent treatment around here? Did I suddenly get boring?”

“Just the opposite,” says Vidocq.

Sola peels back the lip from the top of the yogurt and sticks in a spoon.

“Everyone knows about what you did yesterday. The flaming sword.”

“The Gladius.”

“You have to understand, even with all the fundamentalists around here, angels are still mostly an abstraction. To see something like that right in front of their eyes, well, you blew a few ­people's minds.”

Vidocq says, “That silence you hear isn't boredom. It's awe.”

“I don't like it.”

Sola eats a spoonful of her yogurt.

“It's too late now. Even the old-­timers only ever saw Aelita produce the Gladius, so they know you're at least as powerful as her. The younger ones, the ones who grew up with slasher movies and Ozzy, some of them think you're the Angel of Death.”

It's funny how you get used to things and then when you do them in front of other ­people it doesn't get exactly the effect you intended. I just want a paycheck from these ­people. The last thing I want is to be put in any category that Aelita is a part of.

“Maybe I need to shake their faith a little.”

Sola puts the spoon back into the yogurt.

“How?”

“A good, long nose pick might be a good start. Really dig for the mother lode.”

Vidocq laughs a little.

“Wait until I have gone home before you implement that strategy, please.”

I look at Sola.

“How come you're not all dazzled by my Heavenly awesomeness?”

“The first time I met you, you had just abandoned the latest in your long line of stolen cars. Not too angelic, if you ask me.”

“Good. The last thing I need are a bunch of Bible thumpers expecting me to walk on water or tell them what card they're thinking of.”

Sola, stirring her yogurt, and Vidocq start away.

“Just be your usual charming self,” she says. “The angel thing will wear off soon enough.”

“Before you go, call me an asshole loud enough for ­people to hear.”

She half shouts, “You always were an asshole, Stark.”

I nod a thanks and put my hand on the scanner to get into the Shonin's room.

He's inside with one of yesterday's captured chop-­shop ­people strapped to a gurney. They're both over by the 8 Ball. The Shonin glances up when I come in.

“How was hunting yesterday, fatty? There's a rumor you got some new scars.”

He doesn't have much in the way of lips left, so it's hard to tell if he's smiling.

“I heard one about someone using your skull as a bedpan.”

The Shonin turns away in disgust.

“You have a dirty mind.”

“Then stay out of it.”

“At least show me your new trick.”

“The Gladius? It's not new and it's not a trick and I'm not your dancing monkey.”

He turns back to examining the body on the gurney.

“Too bad. For a few second there, you sounded almost interesting.”

I watch the Shonin perform some kind of ritual over the chop-­shop guy. He has incense burning and there are a dozen potion bottles open on a nearby table. He moves his hands in a slow, twisting pattern over the dead man's body, muttering spells. The guy on the table has a nice gash along his cheek, exposing his teeth. It reminds me of Ten Thousand Shadows, but I push her out of my head. He snarls and snaps at the Shonin's hands. He looks like one of yesterday's Eaters. Whatever the Shonin is trying to do, I don't think it's going well.

I settle down in a chair across the room and light a Malediction. Yeah, they smell like burning tires, but this place is so full of incense, I can barely breathe. One more layer of stench isn't going to hurt.

The Shonin works for a few more minutes, waving his hands like he's shooing away invisible flies and muttering old spells low in his throat, growling so much it's almost like he's speaking Hellion. Another five minutes go by and he drops his bony hands to his sides. Mr. Chop Shop snarls and spits. He'd like to make the Shonin into his personal chew toy.

The Shonin walks to the table with the potions and drops into a chair. He scribbles some notes on a piece of paper and sniffs the air. He looks at me and goes back to his notes, not bothering to tell me to put out my smoke. He's not being polite or giving in to my baser instincts. He just knows that whatever it was he was trying, the moment has passed and anything that happens now isn't going to make it worse.

I drop the last half inch of the Malediction into a cup full of cold tea.

“What exactly were you trying over there?”

“Anything,” he says. “This is an Angra construct. I thought bringing it in close proximity to the Qomrama might have some effect on it.”

“I didn't see anything happening.”

“Neither did I.”

“How long have you been trying?”

He glances up at a Naval Clock on the wall.

“All night apparently. Ever since the marshals brought the bodies back.”

He leans back and pulls a loose strip of dried black skin from the back of his hand and drops it on the floor. It's not the only skin down there. I wonder if it's something to do with the poison book. First Candy and now him. Is everyone getting sick?