Murder of Angels (44 page)

“Nothing belongs
anywhere
. Nothing’s ever anything but what we
choose
to make it, what we have the
resolve
to make it.”

The bridge lurches and shudders beneath them, a million bones all set to rattling at once, and a geyser of flame a thousand feet high rises from the molten sea off to Niki’s right.

“He’s coming,” Spyder says, and she laughs. “And he won’t be alone, Niki. Oh, no, my father is a serpent, and he’ll bring his lieutenants, Michael and Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel and the rest of the mangy lot, and their jackals that hunt the Nephilim, and he’ll bring other things, beings you can’t even begin to imagine.”

“No, Spyder. The Dragon isn’t your father. And there are no angels here. Maybe
it
thinks these things are true, but that’s only because you taught it to believe them,” and Niki glances quickly at the sword lying near the edge of the rattling, swaying bridge. Spyder catches her looking at it and smiles.

“
So
…maybe you want to fight after all,” she whispers, and wipes blood and flecks of glass from her face. “Go on ahead. Get it, if that’s what you want. I’m not going to try to stop you. But you better hurry. There’s not much time.”

“I loved you. I don’t think you have any idea how much I loved you.”

“You think I don’t love you? I fucking left, I came
here,
because it was the only place I could be and not hurt you. I’d already hurt so many people, Niki. After Robin—”

The bridge shudders again, and the geyser of fire falls back into the sea, only to be replaced by another.

“Listen to me, Spyder—”

“—I wasn’t going to let him have you, too. I wasn’t going to let anyone else die just so he could keep hurting
me
.”

“You didn’t kill Robin. She tried to get to the dream catcher. She broke into the house, and the black widows in the tank killed her, or they made her so sick she froze to death.”

“I
put
it there,” Spyder snarls, and her lips are pulled back to show her broken, bloodstained teeth, and her face has become a vicious mask of fury and loss.

“You put it there to keep them all safe from him, from your father.”

“No, Niki. I put it there because I was scared that they would all leave. My father was a serpent—”

“Your father was only a
man,
Spyder. A very sick man who thought he saw angels, who hurt you because he was crazy and thought you wouldn’t let him go to Heaven. You told me that yourself.”

Far away, somewhere in the hublands, in the stony bowels of Melán Veld, something gargantuan stirs, awakening from endless nightmares, and the horizon burns white as the heart of a kiln, the fissioning heart of a nuclear explosion, and the sky is filled with the blare of trumpets.

And suddenly the pain in Niki’s hand has become almost unbearable, and she bites her lip to keep from screaming. As if answering the Dragon’s call, her wounded hand has begun to change as something cancerous bubbles from the hole in her palm. A blackness to reshape her bones and flesh and skin, and in only another moment it’s reached the place where the blue-gray exoskeleton ends at her wrist and has begun to melt through her armor.

“There’s no more time,” Spyder says. “You have to make your choice now.”

Niki gasps, struggling against the pain to drag enough breath into her lungs that she can speak, but her voice is only a hoarse whisper. “I’ve already made my choice, Spyder.”

And as a third fountain of lava rises from the magma sea that divides the hub from the wheels, the Dog’s Bridge shakes so violently that cables snap and sections of the high piers begin to crumble and fall. Niki falls too, and lies staring up into the widening portal that Spyder’s opened above the bridge. It’s a sort of mouth. She can see that now. A toothless mouth of clouds and wind, and its throat runs across hyperspace infinities to a collapsed dead end. It has begun to pull at her, the same irresistable tug she felt in the place of colored strings, the pull that dragged her back into the temple by the Yärin. That pull or something close enough. She looks away from the portal and watches as Spyder walks across the swaying bridge and picks up the sword.

“I’m no good with scripture,” she says. “But I think you’ve heard that line about plucking out the eye that offends you, or cutting off the hand, or whatever it says. At least, I think that’s in the Bible. Maybe it’s Shakespeare.”

“Please, Spyder,” Niki croaks, and glances back at the widening gyre above them. “Close it.”

“You need to pay attention, Niki, because this is going to hurt. Even now, he’s trying to take you away from me, and I have to stop that from happening,” and Spyder kneels down beside her, the sword gripped in both her hands. “Someone really should have done this days ago.”

Niki wants to ask what she’s talking about, but her throat has gone too dry, her head too full of pain, and the white light approaching from the hublands, too filled with the trumpets and the portal’s nagging pull on her soul.

“He wants to make you like him, because then I’ll have to hate you.”

Oh,
Niki thinks, understanding come too late for her to do anything but turn her head to one side, her cheek pressed against the bones, and watch as Spyder struggles with the broadsword. She’s using both arms, and it’s still all she can do to lift it. And then Niki sees the fingerless, palpitating thing that her right hand has become, a tumor of scales and spines, and there’s a single bloodred eye staring back at her as its corrosive secretions eat away at her wrist.

“I’m sorry,” Spyder says and brings the sword down, severing Niki’s hand at the wrist and burying the blade deep in the deck of the Dog’s Bridge. The one-eyed thing squeals and tries to wriggle away, but Spyder catches it and flings it over the side, into the flames.

And the pain is gone.

Niki turns her head to face the yawning, rotating maw of the portal again.

“It had to be done,” Spyder says. “You’ll be stronger now. You’ll
see
.”

“Yes,” Niki murmurs, tasting blood and bile, and
This is what I do now,
she thinks clearly.
This is what happens next, and then it will end.

And the absolute gravity of the portal pulls her from herself, tears her from the dying shell of her body, and she doesn’t try to fight.

This is how the story ends,
and she only regrets that Spyder will never grasp
why
this is how the story ends, and that Daria is dead, and those women sacrificed in the temple of the red witches, and Marvin will have to find another girl to save from the wolves. The portal draws her in like a lover, the last and most perfect lover that she’ll ever know. Niki can hear Spyder screaming down on the bridge, Spyder shaking her limp body, and she can also hear the trumpets of the angels, and the armies of the Dragon pushing their way towards the Dog’s Bridge.

And then the portal closes, sealing itself shut around her.

You are brave,
Niki thinks, remembering Pikabo’s Kenzia’s chant,
and you will shame us all with your forfeiture. By your sacrifice might worlds be saved.

But the red witch never would have understood this either; Niki knows that. She can feel the cloud walls of the portal beginning to close in about her as she ends the storm that Spyder began, and knows that the portal is sealed at both ends. And without her, or the philtre, or the house on Cullom Street, Spyder will never build another. Niki opens her arms wide as galaxies swirl about her,
through
her, colliding and reforming, one star system cannibalizing another, and in the silent death and birth of universes, in the most infinitesimal sliver of a second, the collapsing star named Niki Ky winks out, and winks in, the pulsar rhythm of her being, and eternity rolls on.

And the mother Weaver at the blind soul of all creations
still
dreams in her black-hole cocoon of trapped light and antimatter, her legs drawn up tight about the infinitely vast, infinitely small shield of her pulsing cephalothorax. Satisfied, she draws tight a single silken thread, one worldline held taut between her jaws, and snips it free to drift in the void. And then she collects a second, and sets it free, as well.

These things happen.

These things happen.

Her black matter spinnerets work endlessly in her sleep, dividing time from space and stitching the two together again.

And her daughters, grown to fat, long-legged spiderlings in electrostatic egg sacs laid in the spaces between worlds, emerge at last from the squeezing, oscillating tidal forces of their mother’s singularity to scramble across the swirl of the hole’s vast accretion disk.

And to drift free across the sky.

M
arvin flips open the rusted snaps on the battered black guitar case, flipping them up one after the next, and then he opens it. The morning sun glints unevenly off the twelve-string cradled in worn crimson velvet, shining off wood and varnish scuffed and scratched by all the years that this was the only guitar Daria Parker owned. The one she found cheap in a pawnshop and played for spare change on Pearl Street in Boulder. But she put it away in the attic when they bought the house on Alamo Square, putting away that part of her life, though sometimes Niki would sit up there alone and pick at the strings, pretending she knew how to play, or only pretending Daria was there to play for her.

He looks up at the wide sky stretched out above Horseshoe Cove, only a few shades lighter than the surging blue of the sea. The waves slam themselves against the granite edge of the continent, spraying foam and stranding fleshy stalks of kelp, and above him, the white gulls wheel and dip and cry out to one another.

The sun was barely up when Marvin left the city, locking the front door of the house on Alamo Square for the last time before he drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and then north along Highway 1, the decrepit Volkswagen sputtering and complaining all the way to Bodega Bay. And then he turned west, towards the sea, driving until the roads finally ended, and he hiked the rest of the way, carrying the guitar case in his right hand and the brass urn with Niki’s ashes tucked securely into the crook of his left arm, a small backpack strapped across his shoulders. The November sun was warmer than he’d expected, even with the northerly wind, and by the time he found the trail leading down to the water, he was tired and hot and sweaty.

He came here once before, with Niki, almost a year ago now, and they watched birds together and hunted sea urchins and anemones among the tidal pools. He likes to think that Daria would have been happy here, too, if she’d ever had the time to see it.

Marvin opens the urn and carefully transfers Niki’s fine gray ashes into the hollow body of the twelve string. Then he sets the empty container down among the slippery rocks and opens his pack. There are flowers in there, only a little worse for wear; four yellow roses for Niki, yellow roses with petals fringed in red, because those were her favorites, and for Daria, a single white rose. He threads the thorny stalks of the flowers in between the guitar strings.

For days, he tried to think of something appropriate to read or say. There was a memorial service in the city, no bodies but a lot of people there who said a lot of things, mostly things about Daria and her music, and how they wished they could have gotten to know Niki better. So maybe everything’s been said that needs saying.

He lifts the guitar, holding it up and out to the sun and sky and the screeching gulls, and wishes there were more of Daria here. But they found nothing in the hole burned by the fire in Birmingham, nothing at all. A fire that made CNN and MSNBC because no one had ever seen anything like it before, or anything like the hole it left in the melted limestone bedrock of the mountain. So the old Fender will have to do, and he knows that’s the heart of her, anyway. Marvin stands up and casts it out into the Pacific; it lands in the water a few feet from shore, only a soft splash, and the twelve-string has become a funeral ship, its long neck for the bowsprit. He can hear the strings singing softly above the noise of the surf.

“No more wolves,” he says, “for either of you.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of
Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels,
and
Daughter of Hounds.
Her award-winning short fiction has been collected in four volumes—
Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love;
and
Alabaster.
She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her partner, doll maker Kathryn Pollnac.

www.caitlinrkiernan.com

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