We had been walking awhile when I noticed everything around us was getting darker, as if twilight had begun to creep through the not-world. We seemed to be moving through a duller sort of light now, drab and colorless compared to what had surrounded us before. We continued on in silence through this dimming world, but it slowly became clear that the dimness was not uniform: patches of lesser light were followed by even darker stretches, then back to the dull twilight. Gradually these dim passages became alternating bands of dark and darker.
Some time later, we moved from a corridor striped with black and near-black into a few moments of total lightlessness. I felt Oxana’s hand reach out and grasp mine, but I couldn’t reassure her because I didn’t know myself what was going on. Then a few seconds later, with little sense of transition, we were no longer inside something but outside, walking down a suburban street lined with trees and streetlights.
I had my phone in my pocket again. That and the street signs told me that we were back in San Judas in the early morning hours of the day after we’d broken into the museum, still a couple of hours before dawn at least. After everything else that had happened, clever, heroic, exhausted Sam had somehow managed to land us in the eastern part of the city, only a half a mile from home.
When we finally staggered into the apartment, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to do for her, I made Oxana a cup of tea. A few minutes later she fell asleep sitting up on the couch, drink untouched. I took the teacup and dish off her lap, tilted her sideways and covered her with a blanket. Then I went back out.
It was a long walk to Stanford, but I needed to get the taxi back. Part way there I caught a bus full of the living dead you always see on buses before the sun comes up. I must have looked right at home. I’d washed myself and doctored my cuts and abrasions as well as I could, but I hadn’t taken time to change clothes. My pants looked like I’d just been fired from Pit Bull Obedience School for incompetence, and I had a couple of weird, large, purple-black splotches on my shirt that would have stumped just about any forensic chemist you could find. Also, I felt dead inside. Empty like you can’t even imagine.
I got off the bus on the Camino Real and climbed over the campus wall. I moved slowly and extremely furtively through the extensive wooded areas until I was close enough to the Elizabeth Atell Stanford Museum to get a good look.
No lights, no cop cars, in fact no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Which was good. Not that I was planning to go back in there, no fucking way. But if the crime had been discovered the cops would have locked down all the main gates by now and be checking anyone trying to leave.
The cab was still sitting in the auditorium parking lot, by sheer luck next to another couple of cars taking advantage of the lot on a weekend, which made mine less obvious. I drove back across the campus, neck-hairs standing up the whole way in anticipation of police lights in my rearview, but nothing happened, which probably meant the mess at the museum hadn’t been discovered yet. The guard at the gate barely looked up, just thumbed the button to open the barrier, then I was through and back out onto the Camino Real. I stopped at a bakery to buy some stuff for breakfast, then ate half the pastries on the drive back to Caz’s place, as if the bodily hunger of an exhausting, adrenalized night of horror and pain had lagged a little behind me but had just caught up.
Oxana was still asleep on the couch. I’d bought a bag of almond pastries that I knew she liked, and I left them for her on the coffee table, then took a fast shower and tumbled into bed.
Somewhere in the next few hours, the door to the bedroom opened. I came half-awake, the adrenaline flooding back, but it was only Oxana.
“I can come in?”
“Sure,” I said. I held up the blanket and let her crawl in beside me. I was more than slightly aware that she was wearing only a tank top and underpants, but I was too tired to care. She pushed up against me, and the trembling that ran through her from top to bottom was enough to tell me what was going on. I put my arm around her and let her get as close as she needed.
“I follow her,” she said. “Halyna.” I thought for a moment she meant she was going to die, too, but before I could say anything she spoke again. “I follow her because I love her. I know her when we are girls in school. To me, she is the bravest there is, like a kite.”
“Kite?” I said softly.
“No, not kite. Ka-night.”
“Knight. The ones in armor, who ride horses, yeah?”
“Yes, knight. To me, she is the bravest, the most beauty. When windy, her hair is like flag. I want to . . . to marry her.” For long moments she couldn’t talk. I held her while the sobbing washed through. When she calmed again, she said, “Halyna tell me I am too young for her. That she is the bad news and that she likes boys, too. I don’t care! And when she goes to join the Scythians, I promise that I will do, too.” Oxana put her head on my chest, as if she liked the sounds of her words better reverberating up from inside me. “And I do. Two years, then I leave from school and go. And I love it. All the fighting practice, I get strong, and Halyna still is the most beautiful—so strong compared to me! And so smart. She knows all about the world and the politics.”
I had never heard Oxana speak so long and had never heard her use English for more than a few sentences at a time. I tried to ignore the physical nearness of a warm, healthy young woman and just become a pair of ears and a brain, because that’s what she needed, but it wasn’t easy. I may be an angel, but I was lonely too, and my body is just mortal as hell.
“And then after while, my Halya, she loves me also. Still she has other love, other girls, but she loves me best, she tells me. That is best ever for me. She call me . . . she call me . . .” Oxana’s voice hitched again. She had to ride this one out like a bad storm, gripping my chest with her arm and pushing her head against me, an animal trying to burrow down into the safety of earth. When it passed, she said in a tight, calm voice, “She call me Hodulocnik. That is bird with long legs that walks in water. She says that is me. Hodulocnik!” The storm took her once more, and this time it went on so long that I fell asleep, still holding her closely.
Later, probably in the first hours after sunrise, I woke again. Oxana was still in the bed with me, but she was wrapped around me in a much different kind of way, her groin pressed against my leg, her breasts against my arm, and she was pushing me, nudging me, making soft, muffled noises. Her nipples tented her thin shirt as she pressed them against my skin. She dragged them across my upper arm and groaned, but so quietly it was like something happening in another room.
Oxana was asleep, I’m sure she was, dreaming of her lost Halyna. I tried to move away from her, but she made a whimpering noise and held on. I had been dreaming of Caz and was already half hard, but the rhythmic pressure of Oxana’s mons pushing against me, the little sounds of need and pleasure, had given me a painfully full erection. I didn’t know what to do, except I knew that I had to get out of that bed. Oxana didn’t want me, she wanted something she couldn’t have, and I didn’t want her, or at least my heart didn’t, and I certainly didn’t want to take advantage of her, whatever my crude and ignorant physical plumbing might have thought was a good idea.
I turned a bit more to the side to keep her out of contact with my throbbing self, and as I was preparing to clamber out of the warm bed and into a cold chair, for the good of everybody in the room and at least one person who wasn’t, Oxana gave a strangled little gasp, then her thighs tightened on my leg so hard I thought she might break my femur. I mean, that woman had some muscles. She lay there breathing deeply for long moments, then said something I couldn’t hear, in a voice completely muddled by sleep, before falling back into even deeper unconsciousness.
I just lay there for a long time, trying to get back to sleep and not having much luck. I was missing Caz in every way a man can miss his beloved, plus a few new ways I hadn’t even thought about before. Eventually all my blood flowed
back to where it was supposed to be, dispersing to various useful tasks, and I could slide into darkness again, this time to dream of endless white corridors with no way out.
thirty-three
rabbit hole
I DON’T KNOW about you, but when I’ve spent weeks planning something and then it crashes and burns, bringing futility, horror, and death, I like to start planning something else right away. You know, so I don’t lose that winning momentum.
Of course I was gutted, and would rather have been drinking and trying to forget the terrible mistakes I’d made, but I didn’t have that option. I had to figure out what I was going to do next, because “next” was going to happen whether I wanted it or not.
The morning news, at least in the San Judas area, was full of the results of our expedition (Attack At Stanford Museum—Vandalism Or Political Protest? in the Courier was pretty typical) but to my immense relief, I saw no mention of bodies. Apparently the guard who’d been downed was going to survive, and the absence of other victims in the reports suggested the Black Sun had taken their wounded with them when they fled. I was pretty sure some of those wounded had been the kind we would label “dead, actually,” but I was relieved that their impulse toward tidiness meant it wasn’t going to turn into a murder investigation. It’s always about ten times harder to stay out of trouble when it’s a capital crime, I tell you with the sad voice of experience. How I longed for the days when I was still in good with my bosses, and I could have just called the cleanup crew from Heaven Central like I did for the Black Sun mess in that upstairs apartment. Still, I suppose even the heavenly cleaners would have had trouble trying to cover up the fact of neo-Nazis breaking in and tying up all the museum employees.
Still, the blowback from the museum disaster was going to be quite enough to destroy me anyway. Not only had I made my beef against Anaita very clear to her, I’d slapped her in the face about as hard as it was possible to do, but I still hadn’t found the horn. In other words, I’d made her angry without hurting her a bit.
When I finished with the newspapers, Oxana was still asleep and looked as though she might be for hours, which was fine with me. It’s one of the only things the truly bereaved can do, and I didn’t know how much support I could give her in my current situation. In fact, I was thinking pretty seriously about taking her out to the airport immediately and putting her on a plane to somewhere, just so I didn’t have to protect her from the shit that was going to go down. Actually, considering how much of my budget I’d already blown on the disastrous museum venture, I’d probably have to take her down to the County Transit hub and put her on a bus. Budget-wise, I could probably get her to Salinas.
Failure? Me? Only in this space/time continuum, bub. There must be tons of alternative realities out there where Bobby D is still The Man.
I went out to the courtyard to make some calls, but was distracted by something thrashing around loudly in the bushes beside the path, like a cat trying to upchuck not just a hairball, but an entire other cat. After some investigation I found a nizzic—the nizzic, the new batwinged, read/write model—tangled deep in a juniper bush. I guessed it had gone looking for shade when the sun came up. Hell-creatures like it hot, but they also like it dark. I unhooked it from the clinging branches as carefully as I could, then took it inside, but it was still trembling and making little barfy noises, so I put it under a bowl on a cookie sheet and set the over for about 250 degrees.
After ten minutes or so I put on the potholders and brought it out. The little demon-creature looked happier now and was already reciting its message. I turned off the kitchen lights and listened to the rest of it, then let the winged messenger cycle through the whole thing again.
• • •
“I suppose this is one of the reasons I fell for you instead of just destroying you in the first place, like I should have—your psychotic inability to compromise or do the smart thing. I’m so used to people who only care what’s best for them that there was a certain charm in someone who couldn’t take the sensible way out even under threat of torture and death.
“You were right about the gypsy story I told you our first time together—you wouldn’t have done what Korkoro did. You would have charged up that mountain to attack the Fog King, and the whole thing would have been even worse for everyone, and all for a principle you’re not even sure of yourself.
“Oh, Bobby, I can’t tell you how much I want to fuck you right now. I want you all over me, pressing me down with your weight, holding me like I was trying to get away. But I wouldn’t be. Because I know about being held against my will, and I also know about being held because it’s exactly what I want, and I definitely know the difference between the two. What a ridiculous, nightmare world this is, my lover, where two people who just want to be together would have to turn the whole universe upside down to do it.
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk any more, at least for a while. I thought I could handle it, but I don’t think I can. All those years I lived in London, I should have learned from the English, because they have the right idea. The only way to deal with people, living or dead, is at arm’s length.
“Don’t tell me anything that will make me cry, Bobby. If you send a message back, just be funny. Be sweet. Otherwise I can’t do this.”
• • •
I wasn’t ready to answer her, not just that moment. Too much stuff boiling in my brain. You know when you’re a kid and you’re so sad and angry that you just start crying? Like that. Instead of crying, though, I tucked the nizzic back into the warm bowl, blanketed it with a couple of my dirty socks (which I thought should make a little demon feel right at home) and stashed it in the back of one of the pantry closets so it wouldn’t startle Oxana if she got up. Then I made a cup of coffee so strong it violated several workplace safety laws and took it back out to the courtyard to make some calls. The first was to Clarence.
“Bobby!” he said when he picked up. “Thank God, you’re alive.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So’s Sam and so’s Oxana. But Halyna, she didn’t make it.”
The kid was genuinely sad and outraged, which shows you that someone picked the right person to be an angel. In fact, he seemed to take it harder than I had, not that I didn’t feel sick about it. But in my case it seemed like it wasn’t the loss of Halyna herself that burned as badly as my failure to keep her safe. Clarence the Rookie Angel, like any decent person, reacted first to the loss of the woman herself and its effect on Oxana.
After I’d given him the full battlefield report, the kid told me that he and Wendell had gone back to work as though everything were normal and that, so far, they seemed to be pulling it off.
“But what are we going to do now, Bobby?”
“No ‘we’ this time. So far, you’re still clear, or you seem to be. Let’s keep it that way, especially since I don’t have the slightest idea of what I’m going to do next, short of complete surrender. You and Wendell just keep on keeping on. I’ll contact you if anything changes.”
“But, Bobby—!”
“No buts. I appreciate what you’ve done. You’re a good man, and I was wrong about you, but I don’t want to take anyone else down with me.”
I hung up then. I wasn’t being dramatic or selfless, it was just becoming clear to me that I was running out of options, that maybe this was not going to be a story that ended happily, no matter how much I’d hoped it would. After all the death and destruction, I couldn’t quite imagine a way it could end well. Even Caz was beginning to seem like a phantom. She had been my dream once, but now she was only a voice, farther from my reach than ever.
I had only one piece of good news for anyone, so I passed that along next via a message on Fatback’s voicemail, letting him know his days of being haunted and burgled were probably over, at least at the hands of the Black Sun Faction. Baldur von Reinmann was messily, monstrously dead, and Timon, Pumbaa, and any remainder of the local troop mus
t be running for the hills by now. Or Argentina.
As I considered my next step, I nursed my coffee and tried to keep thoughts of Caz at arm’s length. The sun rose higher in the sky, turning the dank, gray December morning into something almost cheerful. Birds scuffled through the leaves that littered the concrete patio all around me, then leaped into the air whenever I set my cup down or re-crossed my legs.
Why had I been so certain that I’d find what I wanted in the museum? I’d thought I was going at the problem in a systematic way, but the more I looked at it now, the more I saw what I felt sure was the real Bobby Dollar—a creature of reflexes and reactions, following whatever the most recent stimulus had been, half the time getting it completely wrong, the other half getting things right mostly by accident. But when you were fighting out of your weight class—way out of my weight class, with Eligor and now Anaita—hoping for dumb luck was not a viable strategy.
The feather, the horn, everything in the whole grim mess came down to the bargain Anaita had made with Eligor to create a place outside of Heaven, Hell, and Earth, a home for Kainos, her pet project. But why had Anaita been so interested in creating a Third Way? And why had Eligor taken a huge risk just to help a powerful angel, one of his sworn enemies?
I had a sudden urge to talk to Gustibus again about Eligor’s possible motivations, but his phone only rang and rang—no answering machine this time, no semi-helpful nun. What could he have told me, anyway? Follow the money? There was no money, or at least the money was never the point with beings as powerful as Anaita and the Grand Duke. “Powerful”—yeah, that was the word, that was all that type cared about. I didn’t need to follow the money here, only the power.