Murder of Angels (36 page)

“The Weaver,
she
sent you here?” it asks and taps the glass again. “She sent you here to
stop
me?”

Only a dream,
Marvin thinks again, wringing nothing like comfort from the possibility.
There’s not a monster in Niki’s bedroom, and it’s not talking to me.

“Whas’ wrong? You got no tongue, blackie?” the thing asks, and now its wide, porcine nose is pressed smack against the mirror, steaming up the glass. “Did the Weaver take your tongue so you couldn’t go telling me her
secrets
?”

“I don’t know who the Weaver is,” Marvin replies, because it’s only a dream, and surely it’s okay to talk to monsters in bad dreams. “I’m afraid I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’re
afraid
?” it grunts and cocks its head to one side, smearing its nostrils across the mirror. “If not the Weaver, then the red witches, those filthy
whores
in their
filthy
white towers.”

“Strike two,” Marvin says, and he laughs; the monster snorts and taps hard at the smudged glass again. “You’re going to break that,” Marvin says. “It’s an antique.”

“I bet it
is
the witches,” the thing says, arching its right eyebrow in such a way that the dead-white eye on that side of its face bulges halfway from the socket. “I bet you my hide
and
eyeteeth it’s the witches who sent you here.”

“The only witch I ever knew ran a New Age bookshop down on Castro—”

“Liar,”
the monster snarls, and specks of thick black saliva fly from its lips and add to the mess on the mirror. “They
sent
you here, just like the Dragon sent me, to find a piece of
her
and take it back. They want the same thing, the Dragon and the red witches, to stop the Weaver, only they want it for different
reasons
.”

“A
piece
of her?” Marvin asks the thing at the dressing table.

“The
Hi-ero-phant,
blackie. A smidgen of the darkling girl that the Weaver’s called down upon us all, the one who holds the day and night in her dirty little bitch’s fists. But one
hair
is all we need, one hair or a baby tooth or a snip of fingernail, and we’ll send her back here
forever
.”

“Why don’t you turn around and face me?” Marvin asks it, and he glances at the table beside the bed—the blue vase and the wilting Peruvian lilies, the alarm clock that reads 8:45
A.M
.—and then he glances back at the monster. It’s still watching him through the snot- and spit-smudged mirror, and Marvin thinks the expression on its long, angular face must be wariness.

“Ah, you would like that, wouldn’t you,” it growls. “But I know the law. And now I
know
you’re from the witches, trying to trick me like that. Thas’ how they operate,” and the monster picks up Niki’s hairbrush.

“Of course,” Marvin says, looking from the brush clutched in the monster’s hand to the vase and back to the brush again. “Yes, of course you do.”

And it’s only a dream, only the most ridiculous fucking nightmare that he’s ever had, lying here in Niki’s bed and talking with an ogre in broad daylight, but the way it’s gazing at the brush, the way it’s
smiling
—those obscene lips curled back to show uneven teeth like chunks of coal, the wicked triumph on its face—and then it begins to pick strands of hair from the bristles.

“One for the ravens, one for my wishes,” it snickers to itself in a tuneless, nursery rhyme singsong. “One for the ladies, and one for the fishes.”

“I’ve insulted you,” Marvin says, thinking of Sylvia Thayer’s wolves as he reaches for the vase on the nightstand. “You know the law.”

“Turn from the mirror and lose your way,” the monster mutters absently, inspecting a single strand of Niki’s hair with the tip of its scabby pink tongue. “Turn away from the mirror, Mossrack, and you’ll
never
come home again. Yes, I
know
the law, I do.”

The vase feels very heavy in Marvin’s hand, thick glass and at least half full of water, and he sits up very slowly, until the balls of his feet are touching the chilly floor, and the monster’s so close that he could reach out and touch it, too.

“It’s a lifeline, that mirror,” he says, and the monster nods its massive head and pulls another hair from the brush.

“Five for the horses, and six for the foxes—”

“Without it we’re lost,” Marvin says, tightening his grip on the vase, “both of us.”

“
You
know that,” the monster grunts, and now it’s beginning to sound exasperated. “You know that
perfectly
well. Without the mirror, there’s only the void waiting to claim us. Even the red witches and their darky bastard lapdogs fear the void. Cold, cold,
cold
without ends, without even beginnings, either. No blackness in the void, ’cause there’s never been so much as a spark of light to divide the one from the other.”

“Sounds a lot like South Dakota,” Marvin says. “I spent a whole week there one January. Sweet piece of ass, but he wasn’t worth South Dakota.”

The creature stops sniffing at the dark strands of Niki’s hair and glares at Marvin from the looking glass. A glare from those boiled-egg eyes so filled with contempt and confusion that he almost sets the blue vase down and waits for the nightmare to find another way to end.

“Your
skin
would look nice on the wall of my burrow,” it says and grins again. “A sorry shame you’re there,
behind
me. Perhaps, though, if you came closer.”

“What comes after the foxes?” Marvin asks it and, before the monster can reply, he hurls the vase at the mirror. It sails past the thing’s right ear and, for a moment, the entire world is lost in the sound of breaking glass.

And then Marvin is alone in the bedroom again, the sun shining in through the parted drapes, and he stares at the mess the monster’s made of the dressing table, the hairbrush lying there, the reflecting shards of mirror and the Dresden blue vase, bent flower stems and water dripping from the cherry wood, the lipstick tubes scattered across the floor.

And he starts waiting to wake up.

In a narrow upper berth, somewhere far below the deck of the smuggler’s four-masted barque, Niki lies wide awake by candlelight, staring at the planks only a few inches from her face. Scarborough is in the berth beneath her, trying to sleep off his seasickness. There’s a tin pail on the floor beside his bed, half filled with vomit, but the air smells so bad down here that the odor from the pail is only a very minor nuisance. Air so redolent that she imagines she can see it passing before her eyes, almost as thick as the mist at the Palisades, the sour-sweet-spicy odors of mold and salt water and rot, the stench of fish and greasy tallow smoke and human filth. The hull is cold and damp to the touch, wood and pitch and the sea right there on the other side. From time to time, she hears the mournful calls of things that sound like whales, but she has a feeling there aren’t any whales in this ocean. Maybe it’s the enormous creatures that the walls and foundations of Padnée were built from, instead.

“Scarborough,” she whispers, “are you awake down there?”

There’s no reply, so maybe he isn’t, and she should just leave him alone, let him sleep while he can, and she goes back to staring at the ceiling and listening to the timbers creak around her. It doesn’t seem that long since she rested in the bed in Esme Chattox’s house, that soft bed so much better than this hard, mildewed bunk, and there’s really no point trying to sleep. She’d be up on the deck, but Malim came back and ushered them both below, for their “own good,” he said. So she spent half an hour or so going through her backpack, emptying it, inventorying its contents, then neatly repacking everything before she zipped the nylon shut again. Her pills are in there, and she almost took them out of habit, went so far as opening the Klonopin bottle, but then she thought about what Spyder said and screwed the cap on again. Not so much because of Spyder’s opinion that she didn’t need her medication here, but because her head hasn’t felt this clear in years. So long since she’s thought clearly, thinking free of the haze of psychoactive drugs, that she can’t be quite sure she’s
ever
thought clearly before this very moment.

Her infected hand is itching beneath its latest dressing, the one the doctor in Padnée gave her. She wonders if he’s dead now, too, and she wonders how bad the wound beneath the bandage looks. It hurts a lot less, so maybe that’s a good sign.

“Scarborough,” she calls out, louder than before. “Are you awake?”

“I’m dead,” he moans. “Leave me alone.”

“Did I wake you up?”

For an answer, she can hear him retching into the tin pail again and is surprised he could have anything left inside him to throw up. Malim ordered him to drink water from the brown ceramic jug on the floor beside the pail, so maybe he’s just vomiting the water.

“I fucking hate boats,” he groans.

“I think you pissed off the captain, calling his ship a boat.”

“Fuck him,” Scarborough says, and then she hears him moving around below her.

“I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

“Don’t be. I was only dreaming about being sick.”

“I’m sorry,” she says again, anyway, and rolls over, putting her back to the hull of the ship. She’s using her pack as a pillow, because there wasn’t one in the berth. “Which is worse?”

“I really don’t think there’s much fucking difference,” Scarborough replies.

“Do you think he’ll do right by us?” Niki asks.

“Who? Malim?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I mean, who’s to say he won’t just dump us anywhere he pleases? Who’s to say he won’t cut our throats?”

“You’re a trusting soul.”

“I was just thinking about it, that’s all.”

“Don’t worry. He only gets his money when he delivers us—
alive
—to Auber. And he only cares about his money, so that’s where he’s taking us.”

Niki doesn’t say anything else for a while, lies still, listening to the faintly booming, sometimes shrill not-whale songs bleeding in through the walls of the ship, considering Scarborough’s logic as he climbs out of his berth and steadies himself against a beam. He uncorks the water jug, takes a mouthful, and spits it out onto the floor.

“Christ,” he grimaces. “It’s fucking brine.”

“Salt water?” Niki asks, and he curses and throws the jug. It shatters loudly somewhere farther back in the hold.

“Maybe I gave him too much credit, after all,” Scarborough says and spits again. “I’d give my left nut for a Coke.”

“Yeah,” Niki agrees. “A Coke and a Big Mac with fries and an apple pie,” and that makes Scarborough throw up again.

When he’s done, Niki apologizes, but he just sits on the floor, the cramped aisle between the two rows of bunks, and shakes his head. “Just don’t do that again,” he croaks.

“I have questions, Scarborough,” she says, because she does, and it seems like a good idea to change the subject. “Ever since this started, I’ve had questions, and no one’s even
tried
to answer them.”

“That’s what happens when you fall in with all these mystical snoke-horns—the Weaver and Esme, the lot of them—they don’t like answering questions.
None
of them do. Trust me on this.”

“What’s a ‘snoke-horn’?”

“That’s beside the point,” Scarborough says and wipes the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “You can’t get a straight answer from them with a yardstick and a level and a double-barreled shotgun,
that’s
the point.”

“Can I get straight answers from you?”

Scarborough looks at her a moment, his face as pale as cheese, and then he sighs and looks up at the ceiling. “We’re right beneath the foremast, I think,” he says.

“Is that a ‘no’?” Niki asks him.

“You’ve got this notion in your head that the answers are going to make it all better somehow,” he replies. “You think, maybe if you know what’s up, you might have some say in what comes next. Maybe you’ll even have a choice. Am I right?”

“Something like that.”

“You think it’s that simple? I expound, give you a neat little infodump to shine some light into that pretty skull of yours, and at last you’ll find yourself empowered against the forces of darkness and chaos?”

“But that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? I mean, that’s what Spyder and that talking white bird kept saying to me, that without me everything was lost. But how am I supposed to save anything when I have no idea what’s going on or what I’m expected to do about it?”

“It’s just horse shit,” Scarborough says and rubs at his temples. “The more I tell you, the less you’ll know. That’s how it always works.”

“Is that some sort of riddle?”

“No, Vietnam, it’s just the goddamn, sick-ass truth.”

“What’s the Dragon?” Niki asks, undaunted, and she leans over the edge of her bunk and looks down at him.

“You’re not
listening
to me—”

“That’s because you’re not
saying
anything. Now, tell me, what’s the Dragon, Scarborough?”

He pushes away the vomit pail and glares up at her, his bloodshot eyes and the sweat rolling down his face, bright beads in the candlelight. “I work for Esme Chattox. That’s what I do. Before that, when I was alive, when I was home, I worked for something even worse.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“What’s the fucking Dragon?” he mutters and stares at the floor between his knees. “Jesus, you get straight to the point, don’t you?”

“It’s not a
real
dragon, is it? I mean, not some big scaly lizard thing with wings and fiery breath.”