No Rest for the Wicked–Part 2: Unchosen

2: The Church of Transcendent Renewal

He was driving the fastest he’d driven in his life. Each side of the highway had four lanes, sometimes five or six. Semis groaned past him; sporty vintage convertibles with vanity plates set a breeze whistling in his ears. He drove faster.

There was no landscape out here, just white lines and exit signs and billboards. If there were hills, valleys, rippling fields, he didn’t know about it. He passed two closed exits in a row, both for something called Sunnydale. The crater town. What would you tell people–"I’m from a town that’s a heap of dust"? He flicked the radio on and flicked it off. He passed minivans and schoolbuses. He crawled through a construction zone where hard-hats with ornery squints stood around sipping McDonald’s coffee. The clock on the dashboard said 12:05.

LOS ANGELES 21

SAN BERNARDINO 64

Maybe there was no day or night here. The Starbuck’s kiosk at the rest stop was hopping, full of bawling kids tugging at their parents’ waistbands. He imagined taking one of the adults aside, serious as a cop. Now ma’am, you aren’t really going to buy that kid a frappuccino, are you? For society’s sake, don’t. He’ll be a speed freak by the time he’s twenty.

He had wacky thoughts like that sometimes in lines, under fluorescent lights. But for society’s sake? Crap.

He had hit his dad. He had hit. His. Dad. Hit him. How long had passed since he hit his dad? An hour? Two?

Back in the car, he saw a cop and slowed down a little. The cop disappeared, and he floored it again.

Not hit, he thought. Really not hit. The word is pushed. Only when you push people they generally don’t fall down and sit in the road looking up at you with blank, bled-white faces just as if you’d hit them.

Or did they? Maybe when he pushed them they did.

The crickets in the shrubbery had been scraping away. Everybody was up, even Mercy. She’d followed him when he came out swinging the duffel bag. Mom had a trowel; she’d been re-potting impatiens. The TV was still on.

Why had they all come out? It wasn’t a school-night. He didn’t have a curfew. Sometimes he took the duffel bag over to Tracy’s house, full of homework and junk food and Playstation cartridges. But he hadn’t been seeing Tracy or anyone much lately.

Dad had on his plaid bathrobe that looked like something a crazy great-aunt would wear. "Where are you heading this time of night, Connor?"

He’d planned to be totally honest. He hadn’t been. "I’m gonna check out the UCLA campus. Take a tour."

Mercy had to pipe up then. "You said it was a zoo there, not a school."

It was his dad’s fault for looking so serious then, so ultra-serious. As if he’d just seen Connor toss an axe, a rifle and two jumbo garbage bags in the backseat instead of the duffel.

There was no call to look at him like he’d already gone postal–not when his voice was level and his words made perfect sense.

Pushed. He had pushed. Protected his space, really. There was no need to put a hand on his arm.

But then Dad had sat in the gravel staring at him, and the other two hadn’t said a word. Mercy gave a little squeal and hugged Mom tight around the waist, hanging on her, hiding her face in her shoulder. Mom looked at him the way she did when he scraped his chair too hard on the dining-room floor. Not angry, just sort of taken aback.

He stood there for two or three seconds, but that was too long. He half-saw, half-heard the black plume of the big driveway pine stirring over their heads. He had climbed it for the first time when he was seven– Dad giving him the boost up, Mom yelling at them both when she got home. ("He could have cracked his skull, Ben!")

He yanked open the car door and got in.

They were still posed like that when he backed out, caught in his headlights. Like a picture–not American Gothic, but something edgier in a modern art museum. American Family Lets Wayward Son Go. He thought he saw his father reach up and grab his mother’s hand.

* * *

He’d been to L.A. for the museums when he was a kid, and again last year for a science fair. Each memory of the place was tied to others he’d rather forget–stuffing himself and vomiting beside a hot-dog stand, watching an old drunk urinate over a curb, overhearing Jenny Cunningham tell some other girls he kissed like a queer.

So why did it feel like coming home?

Maybe because it’s ugly, he thought. Maybe because, like me, it has no night or day. Maybe I’ve got to the age where I like ugly, as long as it has bright lights and moves fast.

Or maybe I’m just getting over-dramatic.

Whatever it was, it had started back in May with the nightmare.

He had dreamed a whole confusion of things, oily black and red–mostly fighting. There were things from the city news in it, like the Cult of Jasmine and the black sun, and other things that made no sense except in the dream-way you forget as you wake. Parts of it made him feel hot and swollen with need, and other parts made him so cold he thought his heart would stop. There was a tall man standing in a cage doing nothing much, and for some reason the man made him want to run or sink through the floor. He’d woken to find himself sprawled on the deck, his throat itching, staring at the stars.

He had never sleep-walked before. For a few weeks he feared it might happen again.

But there were no more dreams, no more disturbances. Only he noticed that smells were smellier–to the point of being an ongoing nuisance–and that it was getting harder to sit still. His body seemed to want to move, and when it did it often moved in unruly ways that broke glass and knocked books off shelves. He had always packed a punch for his size, people said (figuratively speaking, since he had never been in a fight except for the disastrous run-in with a bully). But until now he had never thought twice about wrestling his sister to the ground, or smacking a wall in frustration over a calc problem. He had had to learn not to do those things.

That summer he spent most of his time in the little woodland meadow on the far side of the creek. The grass was tall and unkempt and he lay in it. Not reading, not doing anything but watching clouds shred in the sky and the sun turn the trees to a shiver of light. It seemed to him that he had never noticed all the wildflowers and insects in the grass. They seemed complicated, nifty, sometimes even miraculous. He brought cuttings home. Mercy laughed at him.

But when he started having the grey-outs– run-together memories of things he had done and people he had hit without knowing why– he found it helped to think of the insects and flowers whose names he had learned. Japanese beetle. Indian paintbrush.

Maybe, he thought, that’s what I needed to be able to come back to the city. Just to know that somewhere the world is blue and green and full of a lot of hyperactive living things, all growing and scurrying under a yellow sun. It matters to know that.

But that made no sense. It was the city’s asphalt-neon ugliness that was new to him, even if it did sometimes seem to blur into the dark places in his mind.

* * *

He parked in front of a strip-mall store called Wendy’s Perfect Nails and slept in the backseat. A year ago he would have dismissed the idea. (What kind of neighborhood is it? What if I’m cited for vagrancy?)

Probably not the greatest neighborhood. Faith’s tastes were on the seedy side, and she wasn’t expecting company. At least not his.

Back in the mountains, he’d found her motel by inhaling deeply into the Salvation Army-issue sweatshirt she’d left crumpled on a gravestone. Yes, by smelling. It was kind of gross, he thought, though he liked her smell–sweat-salty, powerful, with a hint of cheap cherry candy (or lip-gloss?) and an afterbite of iron.

There was only a handful of non-touristy motels on Route 33. He’d found the one soon enough.

Faith was still out when he came. Maybe she’d gone to find that pizza. But it was just as well. The way she’d said cowtown had told him she wouldn’t be sticking around much longer, and there were things he had to know.

He scaled the wall of the motel–funny, but even stucco has footholds when you look–and got himself up on the sill.

She’d left the window open, which made things easier. The room was thick with her sweat-cherry-iron smell, over an even thicker permanent layer of cigarettes and sex and Lysol. Clothes were tossed everywhere.

I’m not a stalker, he thought, and went to look at the pad by the telephone.

Faith’s handwriting resembled the careless loop-de-loop patterns made in the sky by advertising planes. After five minutes of diligent decoding he managed to parse out:

There are two maybe three.

Valley. Parthenia Hills? Van Nuys?

Mallrats.

Emily Eigen. Clawed pompom girl. [smiley-face] Missing September. Dad teaches UC Irvine. Only report on file.

1 witness. Seem semi-trained style sucks.

[with a border of tiny skulls and flowers] ANGEL? WHERE ARE YOU?

Then, at the very bottom of the page:

Parthenia Hills Motor Inn. Gothic and 10^th.

* * *

The Parthenia Hills Motor Inn was a crescent of dirty-cream stucco strung between a used car lot and a skeevy-looking Licensed Chiropractor. There was an aboveground pool with a high iron fence around it.

He stood on the sidewalk with his hands buried under the arms of his oversized Army surplus jacket. It was nearly two. A sharp scent wafted from the burly junipers that grew close to the building, darkening some of the windows. A trumpet-flower climbed a trellis outside the motel office, and he heard a fat, lazy bee enjoying it.

The woman in the office wore round green glasses. As she gave him back his license, her leathery hand trembled.

"I’ll give you cash." He had skimmed it off his college savings.

In the room, he locked the door and threw himself on the bed. It was neat enough, but there were old stains on the carpet, and he knew exactly what each one of them was.

He closed his eyes. Through the transom came a faint breeze.

He didn’t know which room she was in, only that he was facing it. She was there. Perhaps stretched out on her own bed, napping the day away and waiting for night to fall in a graveyard somewhere. Waiting for the visitors to leave and the gates to close and the dark pockets of foliage between the stones to rustle and bring forth… whatever they bring forth.

He slept without dreams and woke to find tawny slivers of sunlight reaching the base of the TV console.

On the way out, he crouched behind one of the spiky bushes to get a look at the four windows on her end of the crescent. One had blinds down. Two were obscured by the same massive stand of juniper, but he saw a flicker of TV-light between the fronds. The last one reflected sunlight.

He scrabbled his way into the narrow corridor behind the bushes and crept until he was right under the sill. There was the distant whish of a shower, and over it he heard a girl’s husky tone-deaf voice singing, "And I don’ wanna ever feel… like I did that day…"

Better to go before she got out, in case she’d lied about not smelling things. Not a stalker, he thought again, sliding through the bushes to the end of the cedar-chip bed. Next time I’ll knock at the door, and if she laughs and tells me to fuck off, I… well, I just won’t.

* * *

Parthenia Hills was just a flat piece of land with wide streets and strip-malls and car dealerships and little brick granny houses and sleek stucco apartment complexes with pools like dimestore brooches, and he couldn’t tell where it ended and the next town began. He was hungry, but everything was either Denny’s or a tiny storefront with a name like Jewel of the Nile. He didn’t want to wait under fluorescent lights, and he didn’t want to sit at a table and be served by someone who would look at him and wonder where he came from.

He was being paranoid. "Trust him to come back when he’s ready, Ben," he could almost hear his mother saying. "We’ve always trusted him, and it’s worked so far."

And even if this time they didn’t trust him–well, he had turned eighteen.

Somehow he had got behind a knot of middle-aged yuppie-types who were laughing and flapping their hands as they talked. They must have just veered across the street. He could see others strolling from parked Beetles and Subarus over there–sleek cars in pretty pastels. New cars slid down the street and began jiggling themselves into line.

It was more people than he had seen since he first started walking. Was there a club opening somewhere at seven PM, or maybe a new wine bar?

Jostled between two groups, he heard a woman’s voice say, "I practiced my blocking on Thursday when we had this little prick of a client in the office. He started in with his spiel, and I just thought, Fill me, light. And it was like Her light came and covered him and made him almost bearable. You know?"

He turned. She was a youngish woman, bronzy-blonde and pretty, with a filmy flowered scarf around her neck. The odd thing was that the man with her also had a scarf, though he had tied his around the arm of his charcoal-grey jacket. The ends wafted behind him, catching the light.

Connor saw where they were going only when he was almost there himself.

It was the best house he had seen in all of Parthenia Hills. It took up a good chunk of the block, and it was framed in dark wood and vaulted in the center. Parts were as low as a ranch house, and others reminded him of a cathedral. It was like–he searched his memory-bank of trivia–it was like Frank Lloyd Wright, sort of. There were little brown and gold stained-glass windows in shapes that looked like TV test-patterns, and jagged black ledges that stuck out for no reason. It was a space-age house as secretive as a Victorian. Even its foliage was different from the rest of the block: sharp dark cedars and glossy-leaved Asian-looking plants. A placard beside the open double doors read:

CHURCH OF JASMINE’S TRANSCENDENT RENEWAL.

WE STILL FEEL THE LOVE–DO YOU?

COME EXPERIENCE IT DAILY 7PM, SUNDAYS 4.

Connor stepped to one side of the flowing crowd and stared at the placard. He had a dim sense of having been cheated.

The stream of talking, laughing, scarf-wearing people slowed to a trickle. He could hear them burbling contentedly inside, like a fountain swelling and ebbing in a sunny basin.

A tall man stopped and peered curiously at him. "Don’t you want to go in?"

Connor shook his head without thinking.

"Too bad," said the man. He had a thin, inquisitive face and a vaguely British intonation. Over his arm was a scrap of floral-print fabric that looked suspiciously like a skirt. "Nothing’s expected, you know. We don’t bite. You can just come in and rest if you like."

He shook his head again, averting his eyes.

When he glanced back, the man had gone.

The doors stayed open, but no one went through. Connor could hear a piano picking out the first bars of "Walking on Sunshine." The congregation forced itself into the ragged semblance of a choir.

Somehow his legs brought him into the foyer. It’s to get a look at the inside of the house while they’re all busy worshipping Jasmine, he thought.

He made an earnest effort to study the exposed beams and the lamp with a slanty red shade. But he was aching with a strange curiosity that had nothing to do with architecture. It kept him from resisting when his legs acted up again and took him through the door to the left, straight into the midst of the congregation.

He sat as far back as he could and slid low on his folding-chair. The roof made a sharp inverted W perhaps thirty feet overhead. Sections of it were made of a frosty glass that let in light.

It was a magnificent room, echoing as the nave of a cathedral. But something else had hold of him, and the fact that he did not understand or welcome it only seemed to make it stronger.

It wasn’t the service–if you could call it one. The thin man who had spoken to him turned out to be the high priest, or maybe the emcee. He stood tall at the podium in a T-shirt and rumpled khakis, holding forth in his fine-grained mid-Atlantic voice, calling on people in the audience to come and join him.

Some people he only chatted with, as if he had run into them at the water cooler. ("How’s it going this week, Dave?" "Over that cold yet, Nancy?")

Others he asked to give "testimonials." The woman who had dealt with a prick of a client told her story in excruciating detail, and afterwards everyone murmured and applauded. Several more people told stories in the same vein. One girl sang a quavery version of "Alone Again (Naturally)," which seemed to Connor like an odd choice. But everyone applauded that too.

"What makes us feel alone?" It was the emcee, smiling dazzlingly with his long white teeth. "Leslie, what do you think makes us feel alone?"

"The truth?" said the girl. And everyone applauded again.

"Now, I’m going to ask you to go into the past," said the emcee. "I’m going to ask you to take a step back into the dark tunnel of the first week after you discovered She had left you. And I’m going to ask you to go even further. Back into the dark hour when you first stopped feeling Her love."

A new tension ran through the room. All around Connor people were balling hands into fists, screwing mouths into grimaces, rocking silently back and forth in their seats.

As he glanced from them to the emcee, a white flash of anger made him blink. What right did the man have to make them suffer? He hadn’t felt it for himself, this love, whatever it had been exactly…

"What happened to you in that moment, friends? What did you see? What did you feel? What did you experience when the scales fell from your eyes, or more precisely when they were ripped?"

"The truth," groaned a baritone in the front row.

The rest of the congregation took it up, solemn and sour as monks. "The truth. The truth." "Blood," said a woman three seats down from Connor.

"Filth," said someone else.

"Garbage. Maggots."

"Decay."

"The truth," said the emcee. "The truth for us all." He fumbled under the podium and came out with something tucked in the crook of his arm.

It was the floral-print skirt. Connor felt like laughing, but at the same time his gorge rose. It was wrong to wave relics about this way, as if the bits of cloth and skin that clothed a savior had power of their own.

There was something wrapped in the skirt, something cabbage-sized and hard. He could see by the way the Englishman held it.

"The truth makes us choose, and takes away the best choice. The truth puts us in chains. The truth disheartens us. The truth betrays us. The truth kills us, because death IS the truth."

With his free hand, he swept the bit of flimsy cloth off the object and held it up to the light.

With a part of his brain that was oddly calm, Connor perceived that the object was a human skull. It was brown with age like something in a museum, and it appeared to have had a run-in with a cannon-ball. There was a gaping hole where the nose should have been, and a matching hole in back. The jaws and eye-sockets had a shocked, crumbly look to them.

Even as he registered these details, another part of his brain decided that it was time to slide out of the chair and onto his knees. He lowered his forehead to the parquet floor and rocked back and forth so as not to see the obscenity in the Englishman’s hand. Above him people were shifting uncomfortably, uttering little whimpers of dismay.

A hand rested tentatively between his shoulder-blades. A woman’s voice said, "It’ll be OK, son. Just forget you ever saw it."

"Let him be!" said the emcee. There was a rougher edge to his voice, as if he were surprised. "He isn’t here for the same reasons we are. Todd, Gary, bring our guest up!"

They each took an arm and hoisted him to his feet. White light poured from the vaulted roof. He went where they guided him, shuffling his feet, twisting his head so as not to look at the podium. He saw a skinny dark-haired girl’s face in the crowd, askew with embarrassment and fascination.

Then the world tipped and slid like the vaulted ceiling. He was on the floor with his arms wrapped round his knees, the shadow of the podium covering him.

"Get him up, you dolts, for God’s sake."

He was on his feet facing the emcee. As soon as he realized this, he clamped his hands over his eyes and held them there.

"Coward," said the Englishman in a very low voice. To the crowd he explained, "This boy has been touched by Jasmine."

A ripple of excited whispers. "Touched by Her." " Touched by Jasmine." "What does that mean? Is She still in him?"

They were wrong, so terribly wrong. So wrong that he might have to tell the truth.

He let his hands fall and looked into the crowd, his eyes resting briefly in other eyes that were full of hope, dread, surprise, embarrassment, curiosity, dawning disappointment.

"Listen," he said hoarsely. "Listen. I helped make Her and I killed Her, so I know. There’s no renewal. She’s gone, dead, totally gone, do you under–"

A long, bony hand had hold of his wrist. He yanked, forgetting to skimp on his strength.

But it didn’t matter. The emcee had pressed the maimed skull against his right palm.

For an instant he couldn’t move. He felt the rough edges of the hole under his fingertips, and he knew that if he were to fist his hand it would fit there like a glove.

But that was not all. The skull was cold, and he felt hatred crammed in it, emanating from it. It was a hatred so strong, so murderous, so inclusive, so final that for once he couldn’t say it was his own.

(Had he hit his father? He had.)

Then he could move. The cold was gone. His knees softened; he thought he might fall.

But he only stood watching the blood well from his palm. It welled from three wounds like tiny half-moons and trickled between his fingers, warm and sticky and real. It crawled over his knuckles and down his arm. He raised the hand and shook it, and blood-drops spattered on the parquet and went rolling off the edge of the lectern. It hurt the way flesh-wounds do–bright, itchy; nothing like touching the skull.

"Stigmata," someone stage-whispered.

"No. Not bloody stigmata," said the emcee. "Don’t bring your Catholic-school ghoulishness in here, friend. I tell you, She touched this one. She marked him. And I mean to find out why."

* * *

"She inhabited you of course," said the Englishman in a cavalier way. "Voice in your head, swamping your will, telling you what to do? Maybe she even spoke in your voice."

"I don’t remember."

He stared at the circle the teacup made on the inlaid table. His head felt as bland and blank and soft as the white gauze they’d wrapped around his hand.

"Nobody ever forgets, lad." A different tone now: coaxing. "They may want to, but they don’t. What charm did she put in you?"

A streetlight shone fuzzily outside. He closed his eyes. "I don’t know."

"It must have been strong, because you’re stuffed to the gills with magics. Whatever it is, someone didn’t want you using it."

In the distance, something made a scraping sound. There was a smell of sulfur and then a more pungent, clove-like odor he couldn’t identify.

"Frangite texturam magi. … Damn fine work, this. Solvite vires. Haec donate mihi… Looks like someone’s got quite a shop set up. Knots and more knots. Restitute memoriam perditam. Come on, boy, you ought to have a few thoughts in your head now."

He opened his eyes. A thin blue flame was burning in a bronze basin.

"Try it again… reach your mind back."

Without meaning to, without wanting to, he did. And now it was as if a dark space opened in the cobwebby whiteness. He saw himself opening his palm. Candles were burning. His shirt was red.

"What did she give you?"

He saw a face in the low light: a face made of separate living things that moved. Like Medusa’s hair. Its eyes were fixed on his. Judging eyes, guileless eyes, kind eyes… and now he saw that they had his mother’s expression when he had pushed his father. Close to appalled, but forgiving.

"She didn’t give me anything," he said. "She tried and I tried, but I couldn’t take it."

He pushed off the chair and stood up. The room and the Englishman stank of magic.

The emcee sprang to his feet, his eyes glittering with reflected flame. "I beg to differ, my friend. You’ve got plentiful reserves, if only you knew how to access them. Did you take part in the violence after She left us?"

"I’ve got to go."

It took him a moment to locate the door among the shadows and the odd sparkly reflections from polished wood.

"Oh no. Now really, old chap. Who sent you to me?"

The room was smaller than it looked. He tucked his right hand protectively against his side and turned the knob with his left. The door rattled but didn’t open.

"Now, that isn’t necessary. I’ve got a few more questions. You can’t come waltzing into my operation and play havoc with my flock and my magics and just run off back to mummy, now can you? Was it Angel?"

He pulled harder. The door didn’t rattle anymore, but it didn’t open either. "This is magic?"

The Englishman took a little sarcastic bow. "Now see here, boy. I can feel the old W and H touch all over you. They’ve got some right fine weavers, if a little industrial for my taste. If the boss had his shiny-faced public-school prat rig you up and sent you to test me out, you can tell him–"

Frustrated, he turned to the long black window. The Englishman’s reflected face was fed-up too, but it had a steady underlayer of sneer that made Connor want to hit him. As if he knows all kinds of things I don’t.

"You can tell him it isn’t quite fair now, is it? And hardly worth his time."

The window shattered with Connor’s first kick. He ducked and covered instinctively, but the shard that lodged itself somewhere in the fat part of his forearm barely hurt. Only his hand still throbbed. He dodged over the jagged teeth sticking out of the frame, feeling glad this wasn’t one of the stained-glass ones.

The Englishman had crouched at the initial impact and covered his face. Now he rose, lunged forward and shot a long arm through the gap, clutching at Connor’s bad hand. There was a red scratch on his wrist, and he was smiling.

"We do have power, don’t we? Don’t worry. Go your merry way, the guv’nor and I will hash it out tonight… Maybe I’ll even have him reimburse me for the damage."

* * *

He ran for blocks, feeling the breath come sharp and rusty in his throat, holding his right hand close and letting the left one slice the air. Back in the business district, he saw a fire escape in the stripy orange light and grabbed the end of the ladder. After that he didn’t think, only climbed.

On the roof of the building he felt a breeze. Salsa music came from a window across the street, and he sat against the low wall listening.

There had been another roof somewhere when he was feeling like this–bereft, adrift. He remembered walking with his fists clenched at his sides, a red cloud in his vision. Sirens were whining below, but to him they were more than sirens: they sounded alive, angry, like monsters, as if they were calling him back to a place where he could use his rage. Was it all because of what She hadn’t managed to give him?

But the street below was silent, and gradually the vision faded. Soon he was calm enough to register the rumbling in his stomach. His hand still felt unstable, broken, as if the tiny wounds might split at any moment and bleed through the gauze.

Funny that he remembered that, after everything else that had happened. Who got off calling him a coward? He had risked missing the admissions deadlines to come here. Maybe more.

It was nice and cool up here. He had a brief, blissful fantasy of vaulting from rooftop to rooftop, all the way back to the Church of Transcendent Renewal. But it wasn’t going to happen in a sprawl like Parthenia Hills.

Who was he kidding? It wasn’t going to happen anywhere.

He clattered back down the fire-escape, stopped halfway and took a gander at the ground. Two more stories down: it really didn’t look far.

Before he knew it, he had let go. There was no Matrix-style moment of suspension. The ground came up fast and knocked the wind out of him. He had taken the impact on his knees, and they ached, but after a moment he was able to stagger to his feet and walk down the street as if nothing had happened.

I really do have problems, he thought.

He followed a thin scent-trail of juniper and carpet-mold back to the Motor Inn. Faith’s window was dark.

Maybe he could track her wherever she’d gone: it was a tempting thought. He wouldn’t mind some company, even the kind that seemed determined to pretend he didn’t exist. But why jump the gun when he might still get something to bargain with: something she could use?

* * *

The town was so dead that he expected to see tumbleweeds in the intersections. All the street-signs were super-sized and blindingly bright, like something on an airfield. The only sign of life was a white-brick strip mall where teenagers struck loutish poses under the magenta TCBY sign.

He drove past the Church, parked and backtracked on foot, staying low and to the shadows. What had Faith said? He was good at the stealth thing.

He crept over the iron fence and in between rubbery bushes. The window he had totalled was at the far end of the house, just beyond a cement court that held a couple of garbage cans and a blue-box. The jagged gap and the shockwaves in the glass were still there, though someone had swept up the pieces.

He didn’t know what else he had expected. Magic Shatter-Be-Gone? But there was a light in the room, and he could hear the murmur of voices.

One of the people attached to them smelled like sulfurous flames and old books and a recent Thai meal: the Englishman. The other’s scent made him pull back at first. It was bone-dry and acrid at the core, overlaid with a stale rankness that he thought came from the blood of something that had died a while ago. An animal. A slaughter-house worker?

He edged closer and flattened his back to the wall, trying to catch words. It was surprisingly easy.

"… arrangement only lasts as long as I don’t hear about you trying to harvest these worshippers."

"… which Madam Peace-on-Earth herself had no qualms about. I hear she harvested them by housefuls."

"You’ll keep their hands off everything but their wallets, and if I had my way you’d be on the street competing with the Hari Krishnas." It was a man’s voice, low and testy. "I know about that unholy relic you’ve got under your altar, Ethan, and I don’t like it."

"Master has spies everywhere," said the Englishman acidly. "Maybe you’ve grasped that I’m a showman now? And a show needs props for the big moments."

"If the contract didn’t predate me, you’d be performing strictly for coyotes. But if I hear anything about a renewal, transcendent or otherwise…"

The Englishman gave a snorting laugh. "Please. Chaos has been kind to me. It’ll be quite the chilly day in hell before I decide to revive the Princess of Peace."

"You couldn’t if you wanted," said the testy voice gruffly. "But what’s this I hear about bringing children up on stage and slashing holes in their palms to look like stigmata?"

It went on that way. The testy voice/dead smell had heard about today’s performance somehow or other. But Connor was surprised to hear the Englishman invent a perfectly innocent-sounding explanation.

"The boy’s part of my act, is all. Found him at the runaway shelter and paid him fifty bucks to writhe and bleed and speak in tongues. If you were in the biz yourself, Angel, you’d know you lose your meal-ticket if you can’t provide some fireworks now and then…"

The testy voice carped on, making threats and setting all kinds of conditions. He had to be some sort of Mafia middleman, Connor decided. Maybe there was a special branch of the Mob set up to deal with magic. Maybe they had their headquarters in a slaughterhouse and met at midnight to cast spells over pools of stale blood…

He shifted his stance against the wall and yawned, stretching his stiff joints. Still, he felt his hunch had been confirmed when he heard the false priest of Jasmine say breezily, mockingly to the other one, "All settled then, boss. See you in court!"

After that came silence, which jolted him fully awake. So they were done.

He ducked into the tunnel of succulents and snaked his way back around to the front of the house. A long midnight-black limousine was just sliding up the street.

The car stopped, idling almost soundlessly. In the house, half of the great black double door opened.

He held himself tight against the wall, peering through a ragged keyhole in the foliage. A dark figure came down the front walk and passed under the streetlight. It was tall and looked normal enough, but it still smelled of dead things.

It paused and tilted its head into the light. He drew in his breath. It was the man from the cage.

He didn’t know how he knew. Something about the angle the man’s long coat made to his calf, or the arrogant, slightly brutish jut of his brows and nose. It all matched up: the voice, the face, the smell. The talking–Why does he talk so much? he remembered thinking. Why doesn’t he just kill one of us? But for all the talking, the man had a way of moving that was elastic and powerful, ready to spring, and he had had that in the cage too. It was why you weren’t supposed to come near the bars.

For now, Connor didn’t think it out. All he thought was that he would have to stay as still as he could, and if possible not breathe. Breath carries your scent.

The man stayed that way for a long moment. Once he tipped his chin up a little further, trying to catch a hint of something on the breeze. He frowned.

Connor felt his bandaged hand making a fist. Had he made a sound? Dislodged a twig that might creak and grate against others? Rolled a pebble under his sneaker? The thought made him more angry than afraid.

But the stranger only gave an irascible little shrug and strolled down the front walk. The door of the limo opened.

Silhouetted in the greenish light of the car’s interior, the man from the cage looked almost harmless. Leather coat, artfully scruffy hair–like some actor playing a hitman on a soap, Connor thought.

The door snapped shut. Like a great dark predatory sting-ray, the limo unmoored from the curb and left as quietly as it had come.

* * *

There was light behind her curtains now. He could already hear music jolting the walls, something with an angry rap and a prominent bass-line. He knocked hard, pulling back when he heard a warning crick from the flimsy door.

"Hiya." She looked blank but happy, as if she were stoned. She wasn’t.

"Hi."

She stared at him with her dark-lashed raccoon eyes, misleadingly sweet. "What’s your name again?"

He shut the door behind him and stood against it.

The music came from the TV, overflowing with vast rippling images of bling-bling and boot-ay. The sodden remains of a pizza-box rested on the stained carpet beside a half-empty six-pack of Corona. On the landfill that was the bed, he caught a glimpse of some wood-and-leather contraption that looked like a weapon.

He crossed his arms on his chest and got right to business. "Look. This Angel you want to find. It’s to kill him, right?"

Faith bounced hard on the bed and stood up again. She looked more alert. "Who’re you and what the hell are you coming in here talking shit about Angel for?"

"You know who I…" He shrugged. "I’m nobody. I’m interested in what you’re doing."

"So did somebody send you to hire me to kill the vamp? ‘Cause been there, didn’t do that, my friend."

"Vampire? Is that it?"

It all came together, and for a second he forgot vampires didn’t exist. He added, "I didn’t know you had to be hired to kill them, see. I thought it was like your calling."

"Not when they got a soul."

Faith took a step and narrowed her eyes. All of a sudden she gave herself a little shake. "Hey! You’re not from the law-firm. You’re the kid that almost wasted the Violet girl."

"Ten points!

She was furrowing her brow so hard that he forgot himself and smiled. "Hey, I’ve been the same person since you stopped me on the street last week. Are you like that dude from Memento with the short-term memory loss?"

Faith was still furrowing, as if he posed a near-irresolvable problem. He glanced past her at the thing on the bed. It looked like it ought to be in a museum, and he wanted to feel its weight and heft in his hands.

"Is that a real cross-bow?"

"Hey!"

He had begun to move. She stepped in front of him. "You’re not touching that. It’s for grown-ups. How’d you know I’m on the look-out for Angel?"

"I stalked you." He shrugged. What the hell.

"Yeah?" said Faith after a moment. She’d hitched her hands to her hips.

She still looked a little tipsy, but she wasn’t happy anymore. He had done that.

Without thinking, he said, "He comes to the place they call the Church of Jas–uh, the Church of the Transcendent Renewal, at Valjean and 8^th. He was there tonight to talk to the guy that runs it. Ethan Something. He left in a limo."

"Ethan did?" asked Faith, crossing her arms now. She squinted as if Connor were hard to see.

He shook his head.

"’Cause Angel ain’t exactly making bank to be riding around in a limo."

"Maybe he rented it."

"Maybe he did." She was chewing her lower lip, and he noticed that she’d painted her mouth the color of dried blood. Funny how he found it hard to be afraid of her, and hard even to mind when she brushed him aside. She was just being Faith.

"You got something going on with him?" he asked. "Angel?"

Faith actually blushed. "He pulled me out of a fix once, is all. Anyway, I’m not lookin’ for him for me. Folks I work for like to know where he is in case they need him."

"You work for the Mob?" He found himself cracking up, as if he’d meant to make a lame joke.

Faith looked mystified, and he suspected that she was itching to hit him. Not because he’d done anything, but because hitting is a good way to stop the crazy-talking and even the sane-talking.

The door had stuck on the carpet. He nudged it open with his toe. It wasn’t that he was scared of getting hit, he thought, but that he didn’t want to see her lose control.

"Where ya going, kid?"

"Back to the place I go when you forget about me."

Faith picked up a can from the dresser and took a swig. "Is that like, Never-Neverland?"

Already she looked a little happier, as if they were both in on a joke. But he knew it was because he was leaving, just as he knew she wouldn’t follow.

* * *

"Hey. Hey!"

He had been sleeping. She stood at the foot of his bed, and he knew her only by the spectral white blotch of her nightgown.

He mumbled something that didn’t make sense but meant "Let me stay unconscious."

"Can’t be helped," said the phantom.

He could see her a little better now, from the overexposed bosom to the dark thread round her throat to the eager, winking, mocking eyes. He could never remember her name, but he knew he hadn’t trusted those eyes since his first encounter with them. Why did he let her come?

"Lilah. It’s Lilah, Connor. Look, I’m on my way somewhere, but I thought it was time to fill you in on your little girlfriend’s rap-sheet. I’ll make it quick. Murder, one or two counts, depending on what you decide to call an accident. Anyway, innocent blood, bereaved families, twenty-five-to-life, yadda yadda. Sorry to break the news."

He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. "She’s not my girlfriend."

"Which is of course the most egregious of my lies," said Lilah. "You do think I’m lying?"

"Dunno."

He was too wiped to think about much of anything, including what egregious meant. He murmured, "It sounds like somebody wants me to hate Faith. Not you, though."

An eye winked at him. "You’re right about that, pumpkin. I could care less, but that doesn’t change the facts. She’s a little girl with a dark past, our Faithie–no hope and charity trailing her around. Funny how you seem to think Angel’s worse."

"He is."

He’d said it without thinking, and as he did he drew his hand out from under the covers. The pain was gnawing at it again. "He ruined Jasmine. He’s why all those people are so scared underneath. He took her away."

"Sometimes I find myself struggling to follow your logic," said Lilah. She tipped an imaginary pair of glasses up on her nose and disappeared. In the darkness he could still hear her voice.

"Peace is overrated, I’d say. Nothing like some angst to keep those dendrites flexing into old age. Not that it turned out to do me any good, but you get the picture… you always do, kid, don’t you?"

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