Something More Than Night (31 page)

I flicked that fragment into the can. I paused for a draw on my dying pipe before queuing up number three—

A metal collar clamped around our neck, another around our waist, two more around our forearms. The cold surgical table made gooseflesh of our naked chest. This impromptu clinic wasn’t listed and it wouldn’t exist tomorrow. All we could see were floor tiles with a drain in the center, and a corner of the room where two walls of mirror-bright nanodiamond came together. Through a fringe of eyelashes we caught vague reflections of the others, an unlicensed surgeon and our sponsor. Her reassuring touch pumped warmth into the small of our back.

“It doesn’t hurt at all,” she whispered. We sought her face in the reflections, sought more reassuring lies, sought to impress her with a confident wink. But we couldn’t see her face because, just for an instant, it was obscured by starlight flickering in the burnished diamond. We blinked, looked again, but then the laser scalpel was unzipping my flesh and we were too busy trying not to scream because
penitentes
eschewed anesthetic. We bit our tongue. Tears ran freely—

Who was that? Had she seen me? Had she looked into her poor sap’s eyes and realized the passenger seat wasn’t empty? My pipe had smoldered out. I left it alone.

Fragment number four found us attending Mass. Fragment five found us weeping, sitting on a toilet seat, staring at a pregnancy test. Fragment six landed us in the middle of a sales meeting; we spent half the time pretending to pay attention and the other half reminiscing about the previous night. Our coworkers didn’t know of our life outside of work because we hid our wounds under bland business attire. Secretly, we sneered at them.

Fragment seven put us in another club, this one lit by twisting vapor trails of luminous mist. We stood at a bar, ordering a drink. Our fellow
penitentes
wiggled on the dance floor, bodies and rhythms twinned by the mirror behind the bar. A sister
penitente
leaned backward on a stool, resting her head atop the bar, mouth agape; others held her steady while the bartender mixed a drink right in her kisser. Cute trick. One of the surrounding penitentes squeezed his stigmatic palm to dribble sterile blood into the mix. “Communion Wine,” we called this drink. The bartender handed him a swizzle stick: a short piece of green plastic molded into the shape of a pirate’s cutlass. But in the mirror it became a sword blazing with the fires of Creation.

We gasped. He paused in his fiery stirring to look up. We ran a hand over our eyes—

Close one, that. I paused to empty and repack the pipe after that one. It took several mouthfuls of sweet, cherry-flavored smoke until I could no longer hear the receding whistle of the bullet that had just parted my hair. I wasn’t the only member of the Choir taking a ride in the hollowed-out monkeys. Bits and pieces of Pleromatic overlay followed us like pieces of a tenacious dream that refused to dissipate upon the arrival of morning. It came through stronger on the high rollers, manifesting as glimpses of ancient starlight and flaming swords and who knew what else. Resolving to keep my own weak-tea glamour on a tighter leash, I went back to work.

Around and around the world, variations on a theme: snatches of family life, snatches of work life, snatches of club life, snatches of love and hate and hunger and sorrow, woven throughout with cuckoo pseudoangelic malarkey. Here and there, but glimpsed only in the corner of the eye, my fellow
penitentes
sprouted wings of brass, and third eyes, and scorpion tails. I wondered if my hosts could see them, too. I figured they could, and that they attributed this to burgeoning religious epiphany. In striving to emulate us, to emulate their warped and limited misconceptions of us, they became us. Or so they believed. The poor saps didn’t know they were possessed. What a bunch of suckers.

Such were my thoughts as I eased into my next host, who was crammed between two bulky
penitentes
in the backseat of a car. Two more
penitentes
rode up front, including the driver. We were somewhere in the Midwest, entering a one-horse town where half the storefronts had been boarded over. Our companions in that cozy little clown car had the windows rolled down. We caught a whiff of river water. It seemed familiar, this place, but I couldn’t place it. This was our first visit, as Bayliss or penitent loon. The jane in the front passenger seat was speaking to the driver. We eavesdropped.

“… the library first. If she isn’t there, we’ll go to the apartment.” With that, she flicked one dainty bleeding palm toward the hardware store sliding past on our right. Nice manicure.

Something hard dug into our ribs. We shifted. So did the loogans to our left and right. Which is how we came to realize they were rodded; it was the bulge of a shoulder rig poking us. Odd, that. This was a first. None of my other encounters with the
penitentes
had involved iron.

I took in more scenery, tried to draw a bead on how I knew this place. That got me nowhere fast. Sunlight glinted from the storefront windows of a café that used to be something else. We glanced quickly to left and right, inspecting the loogans from the corners of our eyes while the light distracted our conscious mind. When viewed through a Pleromatic veil, the faces of the muggs to either side of me were obscured by flickering sheets of flame. No wonder we were crammed like sardines; those hard boys had wings grand enough to scrape dust from the moon.

That’s when I realized how I knew this burg.

I had to warn flametop. We reached for our eye—

—but somebody grabbed our wrist.

“Going somewhere, Bayliss?”

The jane in front leaned over the back of her seat, leering at us through the ghostly flickering image of an eagle’s face. Her grip was stronger than the metal shackles in the impromptu surgical clinic. She clucked her tongue. It works better in a human mouth, though; her beak turned the clucking into the hollow clacking of cheap castanets.

“Who’s Bayliss?” my host asked. But then he glimpsed the things riding inside his fellow carpoolers and fell silent. A warm wet stain spread through our trousers.

“We did warn you,” said the woman with the angel inside her. I wondered if that was Uriel’s hand on the reins, but didn’t have a chance to find out. The loogan on my right reached for his shoulder rig. We tried to block him, but the human I wore had all the reflexes of a coma patient. We managed to get an elbow in his face before he could bring the heater to bear. But all that squirming kept leftie free to show some initiative. We heard the creak of leather and tried to duck. There was little room to swing a sap in that car, but damned if leftie didn’t gave it his all. He swung like a pennant race hung in the balance.

The cosh came down on the back of our head. My host’s human skull did its best impression of Humpty Dumpty. I figure that made me the yolk. I landed in darkness, and it wasn’t over easy.

18

THIS ISN’T COVERED IN THE ENCHIRIDION

Noontime sunlight shone on the river. A gusty wind carved ripples into the water; the ripples chopped the sunlight into glints and flashes like an old-fashioned disco ball. The flickering light tumbled up the valley to the bluff-top picnic tables behind the library. One flash contained an angel. The angel carried a picnic basket.

Molly shed her halo to emerge from behind the boxelder tree. She’d scouted the spot from inside. To a person gazing through the library windows, it would appear as though Molly had just walked around the building. She’d tried to find a balance between outright lying and giving Anne the vague impression that she was staying in another town down the road. Already the evasions and vague answers wore thin. But the longer she lied, the more frightening it became to step out of the closet regarding her true nature. The danger of rejection seemed so much greater, so much more painful. Anne wasn’t a violent person, but she could hurt Molly just as much.

Like the past several, Molly had spent part of the previous night keeping an eye on Martin. Immediately after her first visit he had struck out from his apartment in search of another fix. She transmuted that, too. It was a waste of money Martin couldn’t afford. Even with Molly’s share, the money he inherited from their mother wouldn’t last long. But if she could just keep his mind and body clear a bit longer, just a few more days, he’d be well enough to take up his old job delivering pizza. That would be a start.

Ria—well, her body—lay in a hospital bed in a much better part of Minneapolis. Her family had money. Not wealth, but more than Molly’s folks had ever had. As on the past several nights, after whispering Martin into clean, dreamless, nontoxic sleep, and after making the rounds to do the same with the PI recipients, she paced Ria’s ward like a insubstantial revenant, listening. If not for the hum and beep and click of the machines quietly keeping her body alive, Ria might have been an honored stateswoman lying in repose. She shouldn’t have looked so peaceful: no turbulent subconscious churned within her mind, no dreams haunted her lifeless brain. It hurt worse than anything. Worse even than what METATRON had done. Molly hadn’t yet gathered the strength to approach any closer than the ward itself. Each time she tried to approach Ria’s bed, to sit by her side and take her hand, Molly bounced from an impenetrable bubble of shame and guilt. It was hardest when Ria’s parents came to visit. Molly fled the tears because they made the guilt so heavy it threatened to suffocate her, but told herself she withdrew to respect familial privacy. Molly wondered if her lies and evasions sounded as hollow to Anne as they did to herself. She had tamed the dreams of the Indulgence recipients; she had fought Martin’s addiction to a stalemate; she hadn’t done jack shit to help Ria. She was afraid to try. It was easier to hate herself than risk making it worse.

And, as she had for the past several days, she prepared lunch for two in her Magisterium, and then met Anne for lunch behind the library. The basket was an antique wicker thing with a hinged wooden flap on the top. Molly had plucked it from the memory of a photograph she’d once seen of her parents on a double date with another couple. Today she’d brought basil leaves, balsamic vinegar, sliced tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella for a caprese salad, plus blue cheese, salami, and crackers for additional snacking. For dessert, she’d rummaged childhood memories of old Christmases for a pair of perfectly ripe pears. She also packed a bottle of sparkling water. Upon reflection she decided to avoid the blue cheese because she didn’t want to have bad breath if they kissed again. She hoped they would.

“This is extremely sweet of you,” said Anne, taking a seat across from Molly. The bags beneath her eyes had receded since Molly banished the dreams and granted her untroubled sleep. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I know I don’t
have
to. But it’s the high point of my day. For really real.” A face appeared at one of the windows. Anne’s coworker. Molly tipped her head toward the library. “He’s watching again.”

“I think he fantasizes about watching us make out.” They hadn’t, not since their first date. But that was okay. It was nice, this slow unfolding of trust and connection.

Trust?

Anne continued, “My guess is that he’ll go jack off in the bathroom this afternoon. Pervert.”

Molly handed her a plate and the bottle of vinegar. “Drizzle this on top,” she said, indicating the layered medallions of mozzarella, tomato, and basil. A cluster of whirlybird seeds from the boxelder tree cast swaying shadows across their lunch. One seed broke free. A gust of wind pushed it beyond the split-rail fence along the edge of the bluff. It spiraled down to the river, like a slow-motion helicopter crash.

“Wow. Hand-delivered gourmet lunch every day. I’m a lucky woman.”

“I only know how to make three or four nice lunches. Tomorrow it’s peanut butter and jelly on stale bread.”

“In that case, we need to talk about our relationship.”

She said it in jest, but Anne quirked her neck and shoulders like somebody finding balance on thin ice. Silently, subconsciously, her body shouted doubts and concerns. Part of her had sensed a secret.

And, as had become her habit, Molly changed the subject before those seeds of doubt took root in Anne’s consciousness. It wasn’t purposeful deception, she told herself. It was investigation, and possibly vital to her own survival. Plus she honestly wanted to understand Anne’s experience. She said, “Can I ask you more about what it was like when you received the Indulgence?”

For each night that passed without Anne adding a new sketch to her dream journal, she opened up a little more. Which brought Molly that much closer to understanding the Plenary Indulgences. Which, she was convinced, were the key to everything. The Nephilim made her queasy: Anne might have become one of them, if Molly hadn’t intervened.

Anne said, “Haven’t you ever heard the phrase, ‘Let sleeping dogs lay?’ Lie. Whatever. My parents’ priest is dead. I don’t see what any of this matters.”

“I’m sorry I’m always bugging you about it,” said Molly. “But I’m really curious about the experience.”

A boxelder bug ambled toward her plate, its red stripes almost incandescent in the sunlight. Anne shooed it away. She sighed.

“The idea behind a Plenary Indulgence is that it erases all temporal punishment for sins committed up until then. Unlike a Partial Indulgence, which just reduces the punishment. So, you know, they don’t pass them out like coupons. Or they’re not supposed to, anyway. It requires doing some charitable work or penance assigned specifically for the Indulgence, followed by the sacraments of confession and eucharist—you have to be in what’s called a ‘state of grace’—followed by prayers for the pope.”

Molly splashed more vinegar on her plate. She took a sip of fizzy water, then had to suppress a burp before asking, “Was that difficult?”

“I’d been to Mass with my parents countless times. So I knew the drill. In this case we, all three of us, had been assigned to various works, including recitation of the Rosary and traveling the Stations of the Cross while spiritually penitent.”