Petra unfurls a streamer and holds it above her head, tying the end neatly to a ceiling hook. She’s dressed like the Pit girls, in a shift that hangs on her shoulders like a shroud, gray with soot. Her feet are bare and her hair is dense and stringy. She’s humming, lips pressed tight over gray teeth, arranging the streamers so they hang down like paper vines, green and blue and purple. In the riot of color, she looks strangely monochromatic.
“I thought you might like it if I did decorations,” she says, pivoting carefully on the tabletop.
For a moment, I just stand in the doorway with my mouth open and my hair a tangled nest around me. When I speak, it’s in a flat, dull voice. “It looks nice.”
My hands feel weightless. I have to lace my fingers together and squeeze, just to prove they’re still connected to me.
Petra steps down from the table. “Is everything okay? You seem upset.”
I nod. The floor seems to shift under me and I can’t catch my balance.
“Here, sit down. I know something to cheer you up.”
Taking me by the hand, she leads me over to the vanity where she situates me on the little stool and opens the makeup box. She sorts through my collection of cosmetics and selects a tube of dark lipstick. I tell myself that this is right. It’s familiar, and now my life will go back to normal. It doesn’t work. I’m already considering the next step, the next possible move.
Petra applies the lipstick deftly, careful to follow the precise shape of my mouth. My reflection stares back at me with blank features and hard, blazing eyes. Petra just tucks her hair behind her ears and keeps her own face turned away from the mirror.
Her father is one of Lilith’s Pit demons and it shows in the shape of her thin lips, the grayness of her complexion. If she were vain like some of the others, she might lie. She might at least say she was the daughter of Belial, who built the foundry and the forges back when the city was nothing but a few crooked shacks above a pit of molten rock. He’s gray-faced, but angelic under his layer of soot. People might even believe the story if she told it often enough.
She doesn’t lie though. Instead, she shuffles and looks at the floor and everyone knows that she belongs to some gaunt, shambling artisan. She doesn’t belong in the Spire, but she’s here anyway, because she’s Lilith’s daughter.
Our other sisters mock her sometimes, call her Ash-Girl or Maid of the Metal-Workers, but I don’t mind her iron fingernails or her huge, heavy-lidded eyes. Better to be ugly and sure of what you are than to spend your time like I do, staring into the mirror, wondering if I’ll turn out to be just another one of the Lilim.
Petra begins to line my eyes with a burgundy eye pencil and I let her, fighting the urge to stand up, to pace between the window and the door because if I’m moving, then I can at least pretend I’m doing something, instead of just thinking about how to proceed.
“This is to make you seem flushed,” she says, steadying my chin and sweeping pink shimmer over my cheeks. “So you look warm and friendly. Like a regular girl.”
I fold my hands in my lap and don’t say anything. She likes to make me up in fresh, soft colors my sisters would never wear and usually, I like to let her do it. Now though, all I can think is that Obie is gone, and even with my face powdered pink, accented with burgundy and taupe, I feel colorless.
Petra reaches for the eye pencil again. Holding it like a calligraphy pen, she studies my face and then begins to draw lightly on the top of the vanity, smearing the makeup with the tip of her finger. The chin and mouth of a girl materialize, followed by dark eyes, the suggestion of a nose, a scribble of shadow to mean ear, jaw, neck. The drawings are always temporary. They burn off as soon as the furnace is open.
Suddenly, from out in the hall comes the sound of heels on the stairs.
Footsteps echo around us like the crisp tinkling of bells and Petra drops the pencil. “Your sisters are coming.”
“It’s all right,” I say. “They can’t do anything to you.” I don’t point out that they’re her sisters too.
She doesn’t answer, only crosses the room and slips into the closet as Myra and Deirdre sweep in together, arms linked. They stop in front of me, looking eerily similar—two dolls in elaborate outfits.
The Lilim deal in seduction. When one of them holds a man, he feels the heat of her body like it’s flooding him. She soothes him with the warmth of her breath, but really she’s robbing him of his dreams and his memories, everything that makes him who he is.
There’s a story that says my mother has a magic kiss, and that’s why my sisters turned out how they did. When Lilith met my father, he was broken, and when she kissed him, she drew his grief from him like poison from a wound. She took away his hopelessness, gave him back his valor and his strength. The common version is that she did it because she loved him, but there’s nothing loving about what the Lilim do.
They call it the fix, like something in them is actually broken, but feeding on misery and desire doesn’t cure them. Every time they do it, they just crave more. It’s all they talk about.
“You awful little hypocrite.” Deirdre’s voice is like mercury, thick and quick and silver. She has on a black strapless dress, fine as smoke, held together by thin chains and pulsing with embers. She’s smiling like she’s never enjoyed anything more than the idea of my being a hypocrite.
“Daphne, Daphne,” Myra croons, wagging her finger at me. “You bad girl. Why didn’t you tell us you had a yearning for broken boys?” Her lips are the wet, red color of blood and candy. Her dress is silver, showing devastating curves, the body I do not have. Fastened to her back are a pair of wings, fashioned out of wire. They dance and jitter as she comes closer, flashing wildly.
“I don’t,” I say, not knowing how to explain the fragile line of the boy’s bowed shoulders. Not wanting to share the feeling of his fingers tangled with mine.
Deirdre picks up a framed photograph of Marilyn Monroe, smiling down at it contemptuously.
I snatch the picture back and set it on the table. “Don’t touch that.”
Marilyn looks kind behind the glass, hopelessly soft. Surrounded by tangles of streamers and silk ribbons, Deirdre looks like a molten-lipped monster.
Myra slides her arms around my neck. “You can’t lie to us, Daphne.” Her voice is a trembling band of silver, her mouth soft against my ear. “I know you want the fix as much as we do. It’s only a matter of time.”
She lets me go, twirling away to poke through drawers and cupboards, running her fingers over my collection of padlocks. Her enameled nails hiss and ping against the steel. The sound fills my room like steam escaping.
Deirdre sighs and smiles, backing me into the corner by the vanity. She touches my face, smoothing her thumb against my cheek. “You’re so lucky your father was an angel. Your teeth are almost perfect.”
When she brushes my lips with the tip of her finger, I shrug her off and retreat behind the sofa. “Leave me alone.”
She grimaces at the red smear on her hand, then wipes her fingers on her dress. “Are you wearing lipstick? Honestly, Daphne. We have to get you some real makeup.”
Her own face is expertly made up in the colors of the Lilim, red embers and white ashes. Her mouth is hot with melted brimstone and soot is smeared black in the hollows of her eyes. I shake my head, staring off over her head. I know that if I don’t respond—if I just wait—they’ll get bored and leave.
“Oh, come on, don’t you want to play with the boys? Don’t you want to know what it’s like? They go crazy for us on Earth.” Creeping around the sofa, she leans in like she’s about to kiss my cheek. “They worship us.”
I stand with my palms pressed flat against the wall, but she only snaps her teeth beside my ear and dances back, eyes glittering wickedly. For a moment, I consider it—consider the possibility that I could go to Earth with them and instead of looking for someone to prey on, I could look for Obie. But it’s too impractical going with the Lilim. They won’t be any help.
&
nbsp; Deirdre gives me one last sly smile and turns away. Then she and Myra link arms again, smooth, practiced, like there’s never been a time when they weren’t holding onto each other. When they slink out the door, it’s with a laugh and a wave, without looking back.
“You can come out now,” I say, watching the shape of Petra sway in the shadows.
She creeps from the closet to stand next to me. With the palm of my hand, I scrub the lipstick off my mouth.
Petra hunches her shoulders and turns toward the window. Outside, the sky is gray like ash. “Will you go hunting for the fix like your sisters do?”
I think of the boy in the terminal, even though it’s not my right to want him. His arms were wet and I want to believe that the flutter in my chest is only astonishment at how the water ran down his skin in perfect drops, wonder at the miracle of surface tension. My hands feel numb and sticky, and his blood will burn off soon enough, nothing left to prove he ever existed.
“No,” I say, trying not to let my face change. “No, that’s low. It’s common.”
I sound utterly certain, like it’s the truth. But really, I don’t know the answer. There is only the memory of myself, standing over the boy. The feeling of being unable to move or look away, and I know my sisters’ hunger is in me, too. It’s sleeping deep somewhere, murmuring in my blood, and that knowledge scares me more than I can say.
ABSENCE
CHAPTER SIX
The strange fluttering I felt in the terminal is gone, and in its place, there’s another feeling that’s just as hard to name. It beats in my chest like a war drum. With no way to reckon time, it feels like only a moment since Obie left, and also like forever.
I’m lying on the floor of my room, picking apart the fuses on a string of Black Cat firecrackers and lighting them off one by one. Every explosion makes a sharp popping sound and I lie on my back, tossing the lit crackers into the air. They burst above me in a shower of noise and blackened paper.
On Earth, a person could be badly burned, but here, the flash of sulfur and charcoal doesn’t matter. Nothing leaves a mark. I keep hoping the noise will jar something loose in my head, but it’s hard to know how to spring into action when I’ve never had to do anything before. The palms of my hands are black from all the times I let the crackers explode too soon.
I light another one, then set it on my chest and wait. There’s a brief impact that shudders through my ribs when it goes off, but that’s all. The muted bang of the explosion is the only sound in the whole world.
Until my mother starts screaming.
The sound is shrill, reverberating in the stairwells, and I lie perfectly still. I’ve never even heard her raise her voice.
Then she screams again, raw and anguished, ringing down through the tower of empty rooms. I can feel it in my teeth.
I scramble to my feet and bolt up the stairs to the roof, slamming through the gate and out into the courtyard. She’s standing alone in the middle of the garden, staring down into the reflective surface of the sundial. Her back is straight and her hand is pressed against her mouth.
Around her, the vines are growing out of control, squirming up from the beds, crawling in a silver network over the roof.
I fight my way through the tangle and then stop, because it’s occurred to me that if I keep moving forward, eventually I’ll reach her and then we’ll be standing side by side and I don’t know what to do. I’m used to her dreamy and distant, cold and cruel. The sight of her standing perfectly still in front of the sundial is all wrong, and it is terrifying.
“Mom,” I say, and my voice sounds so tiny that it barely exists. When she doesn’t react, I say it again. Then I shout it, trying to make myself heard. To make her see me. “Mom! What’s wrong? What happened?”
“He isn’t there,” she whispers. It comes out sounding thick and choked. She points to her own reflection. Her eyes stare up at me from the sundial, storm-gray and fathomless.
I stand with my hands held out, but not touching her, never touching. “What do you mean? Who—who isn’t?”
“Obie.” She leans closer to the sundial, staring into its flat, sliver face.
We’re motionless and silent, standing five feet apart in the middle of the garden.
“What are you talking about?” I say, more impatiently than I mean. “What did you see?”
She turns to face me and her eyes are so wide and glassy they look like polished steel. “Darkness, a flutter of shadows. Daphne,” she whispers. “There was blood.”
The roof is a flat expanse of engraved tile, full of stories and poems, but the vines are growing over it now. At my feet, they’ve covered words like love and sea and war. There’s just the shining tangle, leaves as sharp as thorns.
“Shouldn’t his blood have protected him?” I say. “Didn’t it turn to acid, or burn or something?”
Lilith’s face is impassive, half-turned away. “It didn’t do anything.”
“He can’t have just disappeared,” I say, talking fast and breathless. “How did it happen? Did you see who hurt him?”
But she doesn’t have to tell me what she saw. I know the answer, the penalty for demons who choose a life on Earth.
“Is he dead?” I say the word with precision, even though it feels like a solid object in my throat.
My mother stares down at me, showing her teeth, which are small and straight and very gray. When she clutches at her hair, she looks like an animal.
“Mom, is he dead? Did you see what happened?”
She shakes her head, a short, quick little shake. “It was very sudden. He was walking through a park, past a frozen fountain. Then there was a spray of blood on snow, and like that, he was gone.”
I fight the temptation to stroke my mother’s hair. I’m reluctant to touch her at the best of times, but especially now when her eyes have gone flat and empty. She looks combustible.
I wonder if I was wrong to ask Beelzebub to be the one to talk to Obie. Maybe if I’d come to Lilith instead, told her about Obie’s plans to leave, she could have dissuaded him. He’d be safe now. But it’s always felt unnatural to go to Lilith for anything, and even now, the idea seems foreign. I never even thought to ask her for help.
“He’s my son,” she whispers, crossing her arms over her chest and digging her fingers into her bare shoulders like she’s trying to make me understand something vital.
I’ve always known that she preferred him to the rest of us, that she valued and praised him, when her general state has been to tolerate me and despise the Lilim. But if I ever resented the way she liked him best, seeing her now would have cured me of it. Her fear is real. It’s as if something has finally cracked inside her, letting the true, unguarded core of her show through. It’s shocking and for just a moment, I catch myself wondering what it would take to make her care for me like that.
“Don’t worry.” My voice sounds quiet, but steady, and that’s reassuring. “We’ll find him.”
Lilith only stares into the sundial. Her garden is awake now, rustling all around us. I shake myself free from the tangle of vines growing over my feet, then clamber up onto one of the benches. The line of her profile is straight and proud, the very image of the woman on the wall, but her eyes have a wild, hunted look. From the safety of the bench, I study her face like I’m seeing her for the first time. Her long, narrow eyebrows and her pale mouth. Her throat is smooth. The little hollow at the base of it looks delicate enough to tear like paper, and I don’t understand how I ever could have believed that she was indestructible.
“I’d track him down myself,” she says, gazing down into the sundial. “If I had any way to leave the city, I’d raze Earth to find him.”
She stands amid the rustling leaves. After a moment, she lifts her head and her vines fall still. She’s never talked about leaving. About how deeply she’s been punished for her disobedience and for standing beside my father. She’s never before talked about being trapped.
For the first time, it occurs to
me to wonder if the reason she’s constantly pushing me to be more like my sisters is because it eats at her to see me sitting quietly when she would run if she could. I’ve never been fierce or brave, though. I’ve never been impulsive. It’s always been in my nature to consider things carefully and then decide upon the best solution. Except, sometimes the circumstances change. Sometimes things get so complicated and so bad that your nature just doesn’t matter anymore.
“I can’t leave the city,” Lilith says again, turning to stare into my face. And then she smiles. Her eyes look desperate.
I clasp my hands in front of me and look up at her. “But I can.”
In the museum, Beelzebub is counting out a stack of Russian banknotes and tossing them onto the desk in groups of twenty. I don’t have to ask him what the money’s for to know that he’s already on his way out again. The nine millimeter handgun is lying out and the desk is covered with combat knives and loose papers.
When he looks up, I can tell there’s something wrong with my expression, because he stops counting and gets to his feet. “Everything all right?”
I cross the little office and stand in front of him. “We have to help Obie. My mother saw something in the mirror—she saw blood, and all I can think is that Azrael’s found him. You said it would be okay! You said it was safe.”
Beelzebub waits for me to finish. Then he holds up his hand and gestures for me to sit. “Slow down. Is it possible your mother’s confused, or under some sort of misapprehension? These things do happen from time to time.”
Time. The great, elemental force of Pandemonium is time, the cessation of time, the freezing of it. I know this like I know epic poems and algorithms—information to collect and memorize. But I don’t know it the way people do on Earth, born into it and bound by it. There, parents become grandparents and widows and corpses. Children grow up. Here, it’s like there’s no time at all, only distance, sprawling on and on forever, and every moment we spend deliberating could be an hour on Earth.