Four Roads Cross (16 page)

“More like play designated hitter.”

“Is that a sports thing?”

“It's like a designated driver, only if I'm too drunk to hit someone, you do it.”

“Sounds fun,” he said. “My Alt Coulumb nightlife's a half century out of date, and the last time I chose a bar in this city I ended up brainwashed. You know a place?”

She bared her teeth at him, though hers were somewhat less pointy. “I can think of a few.”

*   *   *

Tara stood beside Shale on the skyscraper's roof. Aev had left them—flitted off to brood on the abyss. They watched the horizon and the water, neither wanting to speak first.

Shale gave up the contest. “You can't fly.”

“I can,” she said. “Just not in Alt Coulumb, thanks to your ever-so-progressive local interdict.”

“The skies belong to the Lady,” Shale said. “It would be a perversion for you to fly through them.”

“That's what counts as perversion for a gargoyle? You must have a boring sex life.”

“Reproduction works differently for us.”

“I bet.”

Shale shifted uncomfortably. “Our poetry can only be read from the air. How will you read it if you cannot fly?”

“I was hoping you'd carry me.”

“You trust me to do that?”

“No,” she said, with more nonchalance than she felt. “But I figure dropping me would cause more trouble than it's worth. And after all you've done tonight, you owe me.”

A calculating silence ensued.

“I have apologized for the face thing,” she said. “Every time I've seen you. Except for this afternoon, when you were on too high a dudgeon for me to get a word in edgewise.”

“You've seen me maybe three times in the last year.”

“I thought you needed space to heal.”

“After you cut off my face.”

She rolled her eyes. “There's not even a scar.”

“Where should I hold you?”

Tara had not given much thought to that question. “Around the waist, probably.”

“Very well.” He grabbed her about the waist and jumped off the building.

Psychiatrists and headshrinkers from realm to realm associate dreams of flight with sex for a reason. The thematic and mechanical differences are obvious—fewer bodily fluids tend to be involved in flight if all goes well, and the typical flight's also short on funny faces. But there's a breathless novelty to the first touch of both that experience tends to mellow. A flightless being's first takeoff introduces her to a new dimension; the twentieth time her case team boards a dragon gondola to some mid-Kathic city that barely rates a dot on the map, the rush fades. Spend enough time away from skies or sheets, though, and the novelty returns.

It had been a long while since Tara last flew.

At first the sensations blurred together: rush of wind, lurch in stomach, pull of gravity, talons pressed against her ribs, terror of the monkey brain realizing its body has jumped from an impossibly tall tree toward a branch it can never, ever catch—

And then the quaking of her obliques, because she hadn't thought through the consequences of her entire weight resting against Shale's hands. The gargoyle's claws pressed into her diaphragm. Far below, streetlights bounced and circled, and streets wove together. “This isn't comfortable,” she wheezed. “Maybe if I were to lie on your back?”

“It wouldn't be steady. There are wings there.”

“Hm.” She puzzled through the issue as well as she could while hanging doubled over from a gargoyle's claws.

“How did you find me?” Shale asked.

She'd hoped he wouldn't ponder that particular detail. “I left a tracking glyph under your skin last year.”

He dropped her.

She screamed at first, no denying that. Best get the scream over with and turn one's attention to the inciting issue, to wit: falling. Not quite enough altitude for the soul-parachute trick, too far from neighboring buildings for magnetism to help. She spun as she fell, which made things harder, the world by turns sky and walls and rapidly approaching road and walls and sky again—she spread her limbs, twisted to counter the spin and control her horizon line—she could lasso the buildings, or else Shale, if she could get a bead on him when she spun skyward again—

She hit stone far too soon, which was an unpleasant surprise, but she wasn't dead, which she found more agreeable. The stone she'd struck was moving, and warm to the touch. When her senses righted themselves, she realized she lay on Shale's back. His wings beat three, four times—the ripple of his shoulder blades' muscle reminded her of lying on an inflatable raft in surf on her spring break trip to the Fangs back in school—and they rose again. She swore in five languages, then started to slip; panicked, she caught his hold of his wing, which veered them abruptly left until she let go. At last she locked her arms around his neck, and her knees at his flanks. He was taller than her, which helped. His wings pressed against her sides on the updraft, but not tight enough to hurt.

“Jerk,” she said.

“Witch.”

“Fair.” She laughed. They spiraled higher into the night.

*   *   *

Matt and Sandy Sforza almost came to blows over the question of who would host the Rafferty girls. Neither wanted to let them go home alone. Sandy thought they'd be more comfortable with a woman, but the room Sandy and Lil shared was barely large enough for the pair of them, let alone three guests. Matt's place was closer to the edge of town, and his boys could share a room, though Simon would complain.

All of which would have meant nothing if the Rafferty girls didn't want to go with Matt, but when he asked, Claire said yes. She'd tended to Ellen and Hannah after their father collapsed, after the Stone Man left, after the Blacksuits came.

Sandy gave them a lift in her wagon; she still lived, and parked, near the market, though the last decade's rising rent had forced her and Lil to carry their lives on their backs snail-like from apartment to apartment until they bought their present coffin. Matt did not know if she stayed for the commute, or for her pride. Sandy's people had lived near the market since they first came from Telomere; so had Matt's, but he'd got in too many fights over the old ways with his old man back when his old man was the type to fight with fists to care much for history. Bruises and swelling obscured the ways things had “always” been.

Matt's father claimed the way things had
always
been went back to the Old Empire, to legions marching in conquest for their blood-cult masters. As far as Matt was concerned, that
always
ended when the Adornes shipped out from the Old World. Some people in Alt Coulumb had an
always
of equal age—the families who'd lived here since first light—but growing up, Matt realized that in spite of the stories his dad spun, his
always
was just the way the world had worked in the twenty years from the day he became a man to the day the city outpaced him. Old Adorne couldn't understand that the Paupers' Quarter near the market had become a place where uptown nobs and smart-dressed folk like Ms. Abernathy lived for the cheap rent and what realtors described as the “charming street scene.” Dad once said anyone in a suit who walked west of Sixteenth deserved what was coming to them.

Matt himself was nearing the end of his
always.
The city his sons knew, he didn't. Maybe that was why you had kids these days, when you didn't need them to work the farm: so you could learn from them how to live in peace after your always ended.

He sat next to Claire and across from Ellen and Hannah in the back of Sandy's cart. Ellen had fallen asleep on Hannah's shoulder, and Hannah herself slept against a flour sack, and Claire stared behind them into traffic, cross-legged and awake. She rocked with the rhythm of the wheels. Sandy's left front shock needed work. Ray's second cousin was a mechanic, did his novitiate with the church before he decided he liked marriage more than metal, and found Mike. Maybe Matt could talk to Ray, ask him to have his cousin give Sandy's shocks a look some night. While Sandy slept, of course, because he doubted she could pay and he knew she wouldn't take charity.

Matt let his thoughts run because he had no idea what to say to Claire, and because the silence had wormed between his lips and down his throat into his stomach where it rolled with each rattle of Sandy's left front wheel.

Matt had never spoken with the girls alone, though he'd worked beside them for years. He knew their father well enough, but the man was a colleague and his daughters were his business.

But the man had hit Matt with a stick, and Sandy, when he wasn't any drunker than he had been before in Matt's presence and (gods) even at Matt's urging. The medic had shined a light in Corbin Rafferty's eyes, numbed the cut on his scalp and stitched it closed, and the whole time Rafferty hadn't moved.

“I don't know what happened,” Matt said. “I've never seen your dad act like that before.”

“I have,” Claire said.

“I mean, I've seen him drunk.”

“That's not drunk,” she said. “It's what happens when he's sobering. He hits whatever's near. Breaks furniture.”

“He hits you?”

“He hasn't,” she said. “Yet. We keep away. Lock ourselves in our rooms.”

“You don't need to say anything you don't want to.”

“And you don't need to hear anything you don't want to,” she said. “You never have before.”

He thought about blindness, and said nothing.

“Thank you for offering us a place to stay,” Claire continued. “Ellen will be grateful.”

He wasn't sure how to take that, so he left it.

*   *   *

The doom that came to Chez Walsh looked like Cat in leather and denim, with Raz in tow. Raz still wore his whites; Cat had stopped by the temple to change, and left him waiting under the gaze of a goddess who was no longer blind. Cat didn't go out often these days, but she still kept clothes in her locker.

“Promising,” Raz said when she led him down the Pleasure Quarter alley. Puddles of gray water reflected buzzing rooftop ghostlights and brightly colored billboards bearing images of smiling men, one of whom—a toothpaste ad—had been aftermarket modified with a spray-paint ball gag and the tagger's circle-trumpet glyph.

“You'll like this place. I used to come here all the time.” And it felt so good to be back—good and shudderingly transgressive. She'd left this life and these alleys behind, left the joy of fang in vein. But tonight she had fought pirates, saved a hundred people from misery, polished off a protracted operation. Triumph flushed her. She was done running from herself—time to celebrate how far she'd come from the addled addict of a year before.

Raz stepped over a fishnet-stockinged someone enjoying a chemical sleep in the lee of a metal trash bin. The someone had bandages up and down their arm. “Folks don't clean up after themselves in this part of town?”

“She's fine,” Cat said.

“The bandages, I mean. Impolite not to close your people up.”

“They're a fashion statement.” Bass pounded beyond the unmarked ironbound door.
THE RATS!
screamed a chalk sign on the wall beside the door, sharp-edged balloon letters flanked by lightning bolts. The chalk bore the same circle-trumpet glyph, which Cat bet belonged to a new artist on the block.

“Ravings of madmen?”

Cat shook her head. “That's the band. They're great, actually. We're in luck.”

The door opened. Bass flooded the alley. The sleeping someone tossed. Two young men staggered out, arms wrapped around each other; the lighter-skinned one had fangs. The bouncer pushed a larger, angrier guy out after them. He recovered his footing and ran back toward the bar, but the bouncer's gloved fist clipped him on the jaw and he fell, hit the wall, and slid down to join the crumpled someone, who drew away into a fetal position by reflex.

The bouncer filled the door: a broad-shouldered woman with angular muscles and short spiked orange hair. Cat remembered her from the bad old days. “Hi, Candy,” she said, and thumbed left at Raz. “I brought a friend.”

“I don't think she's convinced,” Raz said, and flashed the woman a smile with a little tooth.

The bouncer opened for them like a second layer of door. Cat tipped her as they entered the pulsing dark, the dancing strobes, the surging mass of sweat and flesh and black lace where she'd spent too many years of nights.

It felt like coming home, to a home smaller and shabbier than remembered but still homey. Pool tables in front, unoccupied, beside the bar. Stage on the back wall, cage fronted in case of zealotry, dance floor ringed by private booths. The smoke of a hundred cigarettes congregated in the ceiling. “I missed this place,” she said. She'd taught herself to dread Walsh's bar while getting sober, but here it was, a refuge where she'd passed hard times. She loved it, though she didn't trust the way she loved it, like an echo of an unheard noise.

“Good music,” Raz said, bobbing his head almost in time with the beat.

“Ms. Elle!” A voice from the bar, round and big. She turned and with unechoed joy saw double-chinned Walsh, a year grayer but his paunch and big arms and pockmarked face unchanged. He raised one arm above a row of patrons bent over their personal drugs. “Come here.”

“Walsh.” She slapped him a high five over the rounded back of a man with a lizard's head. “How's the life?”

“Fat and happy. Didn't expect you to take my advice when you were last here. It's been a while.”

“And a while again,” she said.

“Haven't seen you before, sailor.”

Raz's hands were deep inside his pockets. “Nice place you have here.”

“What's tonight's poison?” Walsh asked. “Some choice kids on the floor today, if either of you are looking for a fang.”