Embers (25 page)

In his vision, he’d made the city a temple to a new age. And the view was breathtaking.

Anya bent down to examine the dates of his work. Most of these were not recent, dating from the late 1990s. The only work she found of this year’s vintage was at the end of the exhibit, a depiction of a park on the waterfront where warehouses now stood. It wasn’t a blueprint, elevation, or a schematic. Instead, it was a simple sketch. The charcoal on this drawing was still fresh; Anya could smell the acetone of the fixative on the page as she bent near it.

The central figure in the park was a woman leaning on a railing, looking out at the water. The woman wore a long, dark coat, and her hair was pinned off her neck. A torque shaped like a salamander was wrapped around her throat. . . the throat of a woman who was an exact likeness of Anya.

Mimi’s voice curdled up in the back of Anya’s head.
“I think he likes you.”

Anya’s fingers wound in her own necklace, feeling Sparky moving against her skin. Perhaps Sparky could feel Mimi moving within her.

“Do you like it?”

Anya started. Ferrer was at her elbow, looking over her shoulder. His breath disturbed a tendril of hair on the back of her neck. Anya stifled a shiver, and Sparky growled. He was dressed in a black suit and white dress shirt, eschewing a tie. Hands casually resting in his pockets, he looked every inch the dark, brooding artist.

Mimi’s voice whispered in her ear:
“Yum. I think I like him.”

Anya ignored her and glanced at Ferrer. “Is this your vision of the new world? The world after fire?”

Ferrer laughed. “As it’s clear that you’re not wearing a wire. . .” His gaze roved over her bare shoulders and arms, the laces of her corset. “I can tell you that, yes, it is. And you look. . . amazing.” He took a step back to look her up and down, from the top of her head to the toes of her shoes. “That dress. . .”

She lifted an eyebrow and told him matter-of-factly,
“Thank you. It’s from a fetish shop.”

The voice that came out of her mouth wasn’t hers; it was Mimi’s. It tasted like charcoal. Anya bit down hard on her tongue to shut the demon up. It was a bad sign that the demon’s control had extended from her hand to her mouth.

Ferrer smiled. “You continue to surprise me.”

“Your drawings are lovely,” she told him in her own voice, turning the subject away.

“Thank you. But it’s clear you don’t think much of the measures it would take to bring them into reality.”

“I think you’re a monster,” she said coolly. “And I will catch you.”

“I have no doubt that you’ll try.” He glanced at the crowd, busily murmuring over his work. His attention slid to the door. “Would you like for me to show you another monster? A relative of Sirrush?”

“How about you tell me where Sirrush is?”

“Nope. That’s secret. But I’ll show you his brother.”

Anya leaned forward and backward on her stripper heels, deliberating. Ferrer was a monster, not to be trusted. For whatever reason, he’d fixated on her—for all she knew, he’d feed her to Sirrush for lunch. But. . . there was an undeniable aura of magnetism about him. He was the only other Lantern she’d met, and she wanted to learn more about him. He was a monster, but he was like her.

And surely that’s worth something?
She didn’t know if the thought was her own, or Mimi’s. Sparky slithered around her neck like a hot noose.

She swallowed, then decided. “Show me Sirrush’s brother.”

He took her hand. His skin fairly crackled against hers, and she smothered a gasp. He glanced back at her, and she was certain he felt it, too. Ferrer led her from the gallery, lifting a velvet rope up over the exit. She ducked under, allowing him to lead her into the darkness of a side corridor.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Ancient Babylon.”

He led her into the light of a much larger gallery with ornate ceilings. Bits of ancient weapons, mosaics, and urns glimmered behind glass. Anya paused before a broken piece of frieze under glass. A figure of an armored woman stood beside a lion, holding a sword in one hand, and a lotus blossom in the other. Her hair was plaited in braids underneath her helmet, and her feet were the claws of an eagle.

Drake followed her gaze. “That’s Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love, war, and sex. She was based on the Sumerian goddess Inanna. She wasn’t a typical goddess of romantic love. All of her consorts wound up enslaved or dead.”

“Charming,” Anya murmured, but she couldn’t tear herself away from Ishtar’s stone face. There was something compelling about her image. . . the heat, the serenity, the fearlessness she sensed in her posture and the lift of her chin.

“There’s a myth that I particularly like about her descent to the underworld.” Drake unwound the ribbon of the tale under the stone goddess’s glare. “Ishtar descended to the underworld to retrieve one of her lovers. . . or to conquer the underworld, depending on who’s doing the telling. She passed through the seven gates of the underworld, surrendering a piece of her clothing in exchange for passage through each one. She arrived, naked and unarmed, before her sister, Ereshkigal, the goddess of the underworld.

“Ereshkigal wasn’t happy to see her. She visited sixty plagues on Ishtar and strung her corpse up on a hook in her throne room. All romantic love died on earth in her absence—

even the beasts of the fields stopped mating.

“The gods made a bargain to retrieve Ishtar, in order to save the future of civilization. Ishtar was revived and escorted out of the underworld by Ereshkigal’s demons. But the demons wouldn’t permit her to be freed unless someone else took her place in the underworld.”

“I imagine that demons were much the same then as they are now,” Anya observed, unconsciously lifting her hand to her burnt sternum. “Mercenary.”

“Yes.” Drake’s eyes followed her hand, but he didn’t comment on it. “The demons followed her as she wandered the earth. Ishtar rejected each human who they suggested be sent in her place, for she saw good in each one she met and couldn’t bear the thought of exiling them to the underworld.

“At last, Ishtar came up on her husband, Dumuzi, who hadn’t been mourning in her absence. She told the demons to take him instead. And Dumuzi was hauled to the bottom of hell to be hung as a corpse on a hook for his lack of sympathy.”

Anya lifted a brow. “A very unusual goddess.”

“She was quite ruthless, in her way.” An inscrutable smile played upon Drake’s mouth.

“But she is not what I meant to show you.”

He led Anya to a case holding a blue mosaic tile. “This is part of the Ishtar Gate from the walls of Ancient Babylon, the eighth gate to the inner city. It was built by Nebuchadnezzar II about six hundred years before Christ. The Processional Way, the path of Ishtar’s priestesses, passed through this gate. It was decorated with symbols of creatures sacred to the goddess Ishtar: lions, dragons, and bulls. This is one of the Sirrush, the dragons, from the gate. There were originally more than three hundred dragons, one to represent each one of the ancient world.

“There is an old story called ‘Bel and the Dragon,’ describing one of these great serpents in a temple that Nebuchadnezzar built. The story goes that the Sirrush had been worshipped as a god.”

Anya leaned forward to stare at the glazed blue tile. A border of red and white flowers surrounded the figure of a golden dragon, with a long tail, four clawed legs, and a sinewy body. Its forelegs were feline paws, and the hind legs tapered into an eagle’s talons. Horns crowned its head, like the Horned Viper sigil. Even in miniature tile, the Sirrush had a spidery, poisonous grace about it.

“This is the type of creature you hope to summon? A Sirrush?”

“Only a creature with that kind of power could scour this place clean of the decay.” His fists were balled together.

Anya touched his sleeve. “I know what those kids did to you. But this isn’t the answer.”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand. I gave everything to this city. Everything. They took my sight. . . I can’t see perspective anymore. I can’t draw even the simplest building plans with one eye. All I have are the old plans you saw tonight, the ones I drew before the attack.” Pain laced his voice, and Anya could not imagine what it had cost him to lose his vision, his livelihood, his passion. . . She guessed it would be like losing her own arm. “Now, I can only draw in two dimensions. . . like a child.

“It’s time for me to start taking back,” he told her. His free hand was pressed to the glass over the tile. The heat from his skin condensed water droplets on the surface.

She felt sympathy for him, for his terrible isolation. She understood. Her hand, unbidden, reached toward his, laced in his fingers against the glass case. His fingers knit in hers, knuckles whitening. A fine spiderweb of scars laced over his hand.

She drew back. She could feel Mimi’s darkness coiling in her gut, feeding on her visceral attraction to Ferrer. Like a worm, she could feel Mimi burrowing into the cold soil in which she’d buried her physical desire for so many years. She felt it welling in her chest like groundwater, suffusing her with an unreasoning need to feel his skin hot against hers.

Ferrer caught her, one hand slipping behind her neck and the other pulling her trapped hand to his chest. Sparky growled around her throat. Ferrer’s breath scalded her cheek, and his mouth dipped toward hers.

She tried to turn away, but the darkness in her gut and her chest reached out for him, for the burning light of another Lantern. The kiss was powerful enough to bruise her lips, it stole the breath from her lungs. She felt her body leaning into his, drinking in the raw

power she sensed shimmering beneath his skin. She felt his aura flare red, seeping into the surge of amber light she felt filling her throat.

It felt. . . God, help her. . . it felt like the purest sense of belonging she’d ever known.

She reached her hands up to his face, fingers trailing over the scars on his brow. Under her palms, she felt his pulse quickening, humming through his blood vessels. She could feel it, now: the irresistible force of nature that burned everything in its path. His body pressed her against the glass case, and she felt the heat of the fire before her and the ancient spirit of the dragon behind her.

Underneath her own skin, she felt blackness sidling toward him, pressing her chest to his. Tangled in her own desire, the tendrils of darkness wanted to feel that fire pressing against every inch of her body, wanted to feel it burning away her fear and her sense of aloneness.

She gasped, breaking away from the kiss.

Sparky lashed out, biting Ferrer on the shoulder like a striking snake. Ferrer stumbled back, startled, as Anya slid away from the cabinet. Sparky pooled around her feet, growling.

Ferrer’s hand clasped his shoulder, but he smiled.

Anya walked away as fast as her stripper shoes would carry her, clicking on the marble in time with her pulse. In her head, she heard Mimi giggling.

Ferrer called after her, “You’re a part of this now, Anya. You can’t walk away from it.”

She forced herself to put one foot in front of the other. She might not be able to walk away from the case, but she could sure as hell walk away from him.

“For now,”
Mimi whispered in her ear.
“Only for now.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ANYA’S DREAMS WERE CROWDED that night.

She dreamed she was running in the vault of the ice cave, searching for Sirrush. Sparky ran beside her and the little girl from the pop machine was far ahead of her, braids flying. No matter how hard Anya ran, she couldn’t catch up with her, to hold her back from running into the darkness where she knew Sirrush waited.

Behind her, she felt Mimi’s fetid breath on her neck. Without turning, she could feel the demon overtaking her, feel the acidic tongues of the demon’s filaments snatching at her skin. Still unable to fully draw human shape, its amorphous shadow was hot at her back, shifting and oozing as it pursued.

She slipped on the ice, her hands and elbows crashing down to the cave floor. The demon reached out and grabbed Anya’s ankle with a black tendril spiraling around her leg. Where it touched, it burned like acid. Mimi dragged her back, howling. Splinters of ice dug into her forearms and knees as she kicked and struggled in Mimi’s grip.

“You won’t escape me, little Lantern. I’ve been waiting a long time for someone like
you.”

She had thought Mimi to be nothing more than a nuisance, a childlike trickster. But now she felt the full magnitude of the demon’s hunger.

Sparky skidded, turning to attack the demon. Mimi lashed out, knocking Sparky ass over teakettle. He yelped as if he’d been hit by a car, and tumbled out of her periphery.

“What the hell do you want with me?” Anya growled.

“I want. . .”
The diaphanous black shadow loomed over her.
“I want to wear your skin
like a dress, little Lantern. I want to feel every skip and beat of that glowing heart.”
Mimi reached into Anya’s chest and squeezed, bringing tears to Anya’s eyes.
“I want to taste
your tears and know the flavor of your blood. I want to experience every ache and
yearning in your pathetic little body.