Murder of Angels (25 page)

“Screw this,” Alex mutters. “I’m going to get a nurse,” and he starts for the door, but she yells at him to stop. On the windowsill, the bird blinks its red eyes and cocks its head to one side.

“You’re sick, and you’re very tired,” he says, and she can hear the strained, brittle force in his voice, a thin disguise for exasperation and his own fatigue; he shakes his head and rubs at his eyebrows again. “You’re hallucinating. It might be a reaction to the medication, or even DTs.”

“I don’t have the fucking DTs.”

“How the bloody hell do you know that? You’re an alcoholic, and you haven’t been really sober since God wore diapers. How long’s it been since you had a drink? Hell, must be coming up on at least ten or eleven hours now, right?”

“Alex, I’d know if it was DTs.”

“No, you wouldn’t. That’s why they call it bleeding
delirium
.”

Daria looks back at the window, and the white bird is still there, head cocked, its white feathers tinted ruddy by the fading day, its eyes so fiercely intent she knows that she’d go blind if she stared into them too long. And maybe, she thinks, she
has
gone crazy, and that’s her punishment for all the years she spent denying the things she saw in Birmingham, that terrible, impossible night in Spyder Baxter’s old house on Cullom Street. Her punishment for the lies she told Marvin and Dr. Dalby, for the way she treated Niki, and it would serve her right if she spends the rest of her life locked up somewhere, babbling about white birds and ghosts and the nightmares she’s kept secret for almost a decade.

“If you get a nurse, I’ll just say I didn’t see it. I’ll tell them I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“If it’s a reaction to the medication—”

“Then I’ll get better, or it’ll kill me. Right now, I don’t really care, either way.”

The bird taps impatiently, insistently, at the glass, and Daria shuts her eyes, trying to remember everything that Niki said to her on the plane. All the parts she’s already told the doctors, because they wanted to know
everything
that happened to her, everything she felt, and all the parts she held back. Niki in her blue coat, asking her to make promises she couldn’t keep, Niki frightened and desperate and rambling on and on about breakfast at a truck stop with jackalopes and something that she’d buried in the ground on a cold December morning ten years before.

“I don’t care
what
you tell them,” Alex says. “You can tell them the Pope’s joined the bleeding C of E for all I care, but I’m going to get a nurse.”

“Fine,” Daria replies. “It’s just as well,” and she peels the two strips of tape off her skin and yanks the IV from her arm. There’s only a little blood, not as much as she expected, and the trickle of saline from the hollow stainless-steel needle.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing now?” Alex demands, and the bird caws and taps approvingly at the thick glass.

“I’m getting out of here. So you go and find that nurse. Or a doctor. I’m sure there’s going to be an assload of paperwork.”

“Bollocks. You had a goddamn heart attack. You’re not going
anywhere
until—”

“I don’t believe that you or anyone else can stop me. Not unless the laws in Colorado are a hell of a lot different from the laws in California, and I don’t think they are. Where did they put my clothes?” And Daria sits up, one hand covering the puncture in her left arm, and she swings her legs over the side of the bed. But then her stomach rolls and her head spins, and she has to sit still and wait for the dizziness and nausea to pass. From the window, the white bird spreads its wings wide, flaps them a few times, then starts pecking at the glass again.

“Look at you. You can hardly sit up straight, and you think you’re well enough to leave.”

“I don’t know whether or not I’m well enough to leave. I just know there’s something I have to do, something for Niki, and I can’t do it lying here.”

“Niki is
dead,
” Alex growls, and then he’s standing directly in front of her, his strong hands on her shoulders like he means to hold her down if that’s what it takes. “There’s nothing else you can do for Niki. Right now, the only person you have any chance of helping is yourself.”

“Take your hands off me,” she says, blinking back the last of the dizziness, and when she looks him in the eyes it’s easy to see how scared and confused he is, easy to see that he’s only going through the motions because these are the words he thinks he should be saying. Something he heard in a movie or a television show, borrowed resolve, secondhand determination, and “Take your hands off me,” she says again, and he does.

“Do you think you have to kill yourself now, because you couldn’t save her? Is that it?”

“I need my clothes, Alex.”

“Then you can bloody well find them yourself,” he says and turns to leave, is halfway to the door when he pauses to look at the window again, and Daria looks, too. But the white bird is gone, if it was ever really there.

“I can’t do what you did, Dar. Maybe that makes me an arsehole, but I can’t waste my time trying to help someone who won’t even
try
to help herself,” and then he leaves the room and pulls the door shut behind him, and she’s alone with the window and the setting sun and the not-so-distant mountains turning black and purple, stretched out like a barricade beneath the darkening sky.

After the bamboo gates are raised for them, and Spyder leads Niki from the ramparts of bone through narrow, serpentine streets, streets filled with shadows and lantern pools and nervous, suspicious whispers, they come, finally, to a tall door the color of butterscotch candy. It has a tarnished brass knocker and a symbol Niki doesn’t recognize painted in red. Spyder knocks four times, waits a moment, and then knocks once more.

“So, when
will
the sun come up again?” Niki asks, craning her neck to glimpse the uneven sliver of night sky exposed above and between the steep walls and steeper rooftops of the closely packed houses. Those whirling, alien stars, writhing points of blue-white fire, and Niki wishes there were anything up there she recognized, anything sane, a dipper or a bear, Polaris or a zodiac lion.

“Later,” Spyder replies and knocks again, and Niki isn’t sure if she means that the sun will come up later or that Spyder will answer the question later, but she doesn’t ask which. Her feet hurt almost as much as her bandaged hand, and she just wants a place to lie down, a place to sleep and not have to think about everything that has or hasn’t happened since she left the hotel on Steuart Street. Maybe she can figure it all out later, or maybe she’ll wake up in the room with Marvin and lie there staring at the ceiling, forgetting this dream and relieved that she never has to see those stars again.

“I need to sleep, and I need to take my meds,” she says, and Spyder turns and glares at her, the gem between her eyes pulsing softly to some silent, secret rhythm.

“You can’t take those pills anymore. Not here.”

“I can’t just stop like that. I’ll get sick. You can’t just stop taking Klonopin, Spyder. I might have seizures or convulsions or something.”

“Not in this place. You don’t need that shit here. I should have made you dump it all into the sea.”

And before Niki can argue with her, the butterscotch door opens and candlelight spills across the threshold. The old woman clutching the candlestick is very thin, a stooped scarecrow of a woman in shabby gray robes, and she stares out at them from the matted salt-and-pepper hair that frames the angles of her pale face. Her eyes are open so wide that Niki can see the whites all the way around the irises, and she looks scared or surprised or both.

“Weaver,” she whispers, her thin lips drawing the word out, stretching it so it becomes almost another word entirely. “We feared you were lost. We’d almost given you up for dead. There were signs—”

“There were complications,” Spyder tells her. “The Dragon is closer than I thought.”

And then the old woman seems to notice Niki for the first time; her eyes grow even wider, and she puts one bony hand over her mouth. “Is it truly her?” she asks, mumbling between her fingers. “Is
this
the Hierophant?”

“Are you going to make us stand out here on the doorstep all night long?” Spyder asks impatiently, but the old woman is still staring at Niki and doesn’t answer her.

“By the spokes,” she whispers, and a dank, salt-scented breeze causes the flame of her candle to gutter. “That I should ever have lived to see such a thing. Better I’d died a child.”

“It’s cold out here, Eponine Chattox,” Spyder says. “We’ve walked all the way from the Palisades, and we’re hungry and need to rest.”

“Yes,” the old woman says, and her hand slips slowly away from her mouth. “I imagine that you do.”

“You should ask us inside.”

“Should I? I’m not so sure. Perhaps I should strew myrrh and nettle across the groundsill and nail all the windows shut. Perhaps I should recite all the Points of Refutation backwards.”

“Do you think your mistress would approve?”

“I think my mistress has no idea what she’s letting into her house,” the old woman named Eponine says, but she steps aside, anyway, and now Niki can see a long, dimly lit hallway beyond the cramped foyer. “I cannot keep you out,” she says, speaking directly to Niki this time, instead of Spyder.

“Why are you afraid of me?” Niki asks her, and Eponine stares down at the flickering flame of her candle.

“You might as well ask me why the day fears night,” she says. “Or why the living fear death.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Spyder grumbles, taking Niki’s good hand as she steps quickly past the old woman. “Sometimes I think Esme only keeps her around to scare away the peddlers and street preachers.”

Niki looks back, and Eponine Chattox is busy tracing invisible signs in the air with a crooked thumb and index finger. Her lips move silently, and Niki thinks she must be praying.

“She doesn’t want me here,” Niki says.

“It’s not her house,” Spyder replies and pulls Niki along, past closed doors and a staircase and a noisy contraption of wood and metal that isn’t exactly a grandfather clock, past walls hidden behind mustard-colored wallpaper and decorated with paintings of landscapes that seem almost as alien to Niki as the writhing Van Gogh stars.

“Then whose house is it?”

“It belongs to her niece, Esme, the fish augur who opened the passage beneath the bridge for you.”

“Oh,” Niki says and starts to ask what a fish augur is, but she’s really too tired to care and half suspects that she wouldn’t understand, anyhow. As long as there are beds here, or people who don’t mind if she takes her boots off and falls asleep on the floor, fish augurs can wait until later.

“Esme is a great enemy of the Dragon,” Spyder says, as the hallway turns left and ends abruptly at a door marked with the same red symbol as the entryway to the house. “Most of her family was taken by the jackals when she was still just a kid. Without Esme, I never would have found you.”

“Spyder, I’m so tired. Can’t we rest now, just for a little while?”

“We can rest after we speak with Esme.”

“Right,” Niki sighs. “Unless I drop dead from exhaustion first,” and she touches the center of the symbol painted on the door—bright scarlet enamel on the dark, varnished wood.
It’s like touching ice,
she thinks,
or Jell-0,
because now the door seems to quiver slightly beneath her fingertips, and then Spyder snatches her hand away.

“You have to be very careful what you touch in this house. It’s best if you don’t touch anything at all.”

“But what does it mean? Is it some kind of magic?”

“It’s a warning.”

Niki inspects her fingers, checking to be sure they’re all still there and that the door hasn’t marked her somehow, hasn’t left some incriminating stain or brand on her skin. “A warning to who?” she asks.

“A
warning
, Niki. And that’s all you need to know.”

“I think there’s a hell of a lot I
need
to know,” Niki mumbles, and wipes her hand on her jeans. “A lot of things you’re not telling me.”

“Sometimes knowledge is a luxury we can’t afford,” Spyder says, and knocks at the door. Niki watches as concentric ripples spread rapidly across the wood, shock waves beginning at the point where Spyder’s knuckles rapped against the muntin, then spreading out and out and out until they vanish at sensible horizontal and vertical boundaries. Edges of the door, edges of the world, and
Back when most people still thought the world was flat
, Spyder told her at the Palisades.

I should probably be really freaked out by that,
Niki thinks, still watching as the last of the ripples race themselves towards iron hinges and the ceiling and door frame boards. But perhaps she’s seen too much, too fast, and nothing will ever amaze her again. The thought is vaguely comforting, and so she doesn’t bother asking Spyder why the door doesn’t know the difference between solids and liquids. And then it swings open, and there are rickety-looking steps leading down into darkness beneath the house, and the hallway fills suddenly with the moist stink of mildew and sea water and dead fish. Niki covers her mouth and tries not to gag.

“Follow me,” Spyder tells her, as if she has any choice in the matter. “Stay close, and be careful. These stairs have seen better days.”

“What’s waiting for us down there?”

“Just Esme,” Spyder replies, and then she’s through the doorway and the old steps squeak like angry rats beneath her feet. Niki lingers a moment, looking back down the long mustard-colored hall, past the strange paintings, and Eponine Chattox is standing next to the thing that isn’t exactly a grandfather clock, staring back at her.

“Come on,” Spyder calls, her voice echoing in the stairwell, and the old woman turns around and walks away, trailing candlelight and fear.

“Yeah,” Niki says. “I’m coming,” and she hurries to catch up with Spyder.