The Lucifer Messiah (25 page)

She got up, with great difficulty, and slinked over to where she had been sitting earlier. From her coat, set down on the chair, she retrieved a blade. It was like a long hunting knife, or possibly a very short sword. The single edge of it glinted, obviously sharpened to a razor-edge.

Arachne turned back to Scylla, dreading the return trip across the little room. Every moment left her more and more drained.
If she kept talking,
she thought,
maybe that would keep her awake long enough to free Scylla.

“I have watched over you, so that you might molt without harm, and soon I will take my own rest, but before I do, might you indulge me one thing?” she asked, dragging her legs in Scylla's direction like they were tied to boulders.

“Whatever you wish.”

“Your fall from grace. Charybdis would never discuss it. You two were once the greatest of us all, next to the Morrigan herself. Inseparable and glorious. Yet you have not seen Charybdis for decades, and you no longer occupy the guardianship of the Keeper.”

“Is your single wish to torment me in this captive state?” Scylla joked.

Arachne was too tired to appreciate the humor.

“No, I would like merely to know
how.
How came you and Charybdis both to fall so far from the favor of the Keeper?”

Toweling off her exposed torso with her lower arms, Scylla raised her four upper limbs, and breathed deep and long. She spoke while her legs continued to squirm, with
anger that had nowhere to go.

“We failed the Morrigan. And we have been punished for it ever since. Forbidden to speak, or to even see one another until our failure has been remedied, for all these long, long years.”

“And now you mean to do so? To correct some old mistake?”

“No.” The reply was simple. “It appears that our failure will go un-reconciled. I only fear that Charybdis has not now led me to some new mistake which will eclipse our previous transgression.”

Arachne was now before her, the gleaming blade poised.

“You don't believe in the Prophecy of Lucifer?” she asked, cutting at the hard substance that entombed Scylla's legs.

“On the contrary, I think no one believes it more than I do. I've lived it. For the last thirty years I've hunted him, the most elusive man in the world. But now that I am within reach of my goal, I have yielded to the whim of my lost-beloved.”

“I suppose we'll do almost anything for love,” Arachne answered.

She had made a cut, but needed to chop at it to break the crystalline material.

Just then, however, a furry claw gripped the outside windowsill, and then a second. Neither Arachne nor the preoccupied Scylla noticed the intrusion. A moment later, Lycaon's snout poked in through the open window, right at the moment that Arachne hacked her hardest into the
lower section of Scylla's imprisoned form.

The beast raged. He did not pause for a moment to consider.

Teeth bared, paws outstretched, Lycaon surged from the open window with a growl. Arachne saw him, but her reflexes were slow, the change had dulled her senses. She did not react in time to defend herself.

His swipe caught her across the chest, tearing her flesh and drawing blood. The blade went flying out of her hands.

Scylla screamed.

A second slash landed on Arachne's jaw. Spared the sharp nails by only a fraction of an inch, the force of the blow was still enough to send her reeling.

Her head tilted backward as she fell. When she struck the floor, a long cut opened, spilling red onto the dirty carpet. She was out cold before the blood really flowed.

Satisfied, Lycaon turned, but he found even his own bestial heart sink when he saw Scylla.

Arachne's blade had flung loose, and plunged deep into her gut.

The sun had been set for some time. The city had once again fallen into a shadowy freeze when Charybdis returned to the lights of Times Square, and the room where she had last seen Scylla.

Her middle-aged, West African features were gone now. Only her lanky, thin frame remained to suggest her
former attributes, and she had already taken a few moments to shave the hair from her head when she had emerged from the slumber. Other than those details, her appearance, like all those of her kind, had altered radically in the space of little more than thirty-six hours.

Now she was pale. Her skin wasn't snow-white, although the blood surging beneath it lent her a rosy shade, which was especially evident in her eyes and her fingernails. Her face was angular, with a hard chiseled jaw-line that looked more male than female, although her anatomy was certainly of the latter. That aspect of her current form was a bane she had long ago learned to tolerate, but had never embraced.

She opened the door without a key. It was a skill she had learned in Vienna, during the time before she had come under Argus's sway, prone in those younger days to life on the fringes of the law.

It was immediately clear upon entry that the place had been ransacked. The nightstand and its Bible had been overturned, and the one chair in the room had lost two legs. The bed was soiled with some dark liquid, maybe blood; the filth of the sheets made it hard to say. In the middle of the carnage, the sticky remains of the cocoon sat empty. It was as though the shell was waiting, patiently, undisturbed by the violence that had evidently erupted all around it.

Of Scylla and Arachne, though, there was no other sign.

She had traveled back to the church quickly, but in her heart, Charybdis sensed that her long wait might finally be over. Perhaps the end had now come for she and Scylla.

Argus was watching for her. He approached as soon as she entered.

“Has something gone wrong?” Argus asked. If she weren't already deathly pale, he might have noted how sickly she looked.

“I've lost her, again,” was the only reply she could manage.

“Scylla? What do you mean?”

“I should have been there; I should never have let Arachne stand in my place. We are the cursed Argus, all of us cursed by this damned affliction!”

It was not the first time in his long life that Argus had heard such sentiment. But never from Charybdis, one of his most studious pupils. He attempted counsel.

“Settle yourself, you must explain.”

They sat down then, out in the open of the cathedral, like penitent and clergy. In all the centuries of her Church, however, no such figures as these had ever conversed under the sanction of Rome.

“I ventured out to the hotel where I had left Scylla in her cocoon. Arachne had volunteered to watch over her while I underwent the change.”

Charybdis was clearly upset, but she maintained her poise. It was the way she had been taught that a man always acts, many years ago, when she was still a child.

“And?”

“They're both gone. There were signs of a fight, furniture overturned, broken glass from the lamps. Some blood was left on the floor, and stray tufts of Arachne's hair as well. But other than the remains of Scylla's cocoon, there was nothing. No way to tell where they had gone, or why they had left.”

“The Morrigan must have known of Scylla's whereabouts. And if she has Arachne, she may now know of ours.”

“What shall we do, master? It would seem our plans have come to naught. Lucifer has left us, and now we may have been exposed to the Keeper.”

The wise old creature did not appear nearly as upset as his younger protégé, and he answered with a calm nod.

“Speak with Mr. Sicario again.”

Charybdis shook her head.

“Why?”

“Lucifer may be done with us, but I do not think we are entirely finished with him yet.”

T
HE CATHEDRAL HAD ALMOST CLEARED OUT.
T
HE IN
vitation of the Morrigan, and the rejection by Lucifer had drawn many of Argus's followers away. Most had already departed to the announced gathering place, leaving only the stragglers to keep the ancient one company in his fire-ruined palace. Among the eaves and the rafters there hung the remains of their strange transformations, cocoon shells and dried slime interspersed between the masonry.

Perhaps because there were so few of them still left in the place, or perhaps simply out of frustration, Argus had now released Vince from his “prison” in the room beside the altar. The wounds from his encounter with Scylla still hobbled him, though. As much as he desired to flee, he could barely yet walk.

In any case, the gaze of the pale figure who sat day and night on that chair atop the altar was on him at all times. Even if he could have run, he knew that Argus would see him. Somehow, the bizarre creature never seemed to sleep. At least two of those glaring red eyes were open at every hour.

So Vince found himself left to watch the few figures that remained in the church. Some were still in the process of emerging from their slumber, others simply milled about, gathering their things and periodically coming and going through the hole in the floor at the cathedral's center.

One in particular caught Vince's attention as she wandered through the aisle between emptying pews. Unlike the many, many strange things he had seen since first being brought to the surreal place, she was human-looking, and eerily statuesque, as though some hidden god had breathed life into a forgotten Bernini or Canova, liberating the form from its marble confines. She was, like many others, bare as a newborn, though utterly careless of the fact as she walked in plain sight. He marveled as he watched her every move, walking with a delicate, smooth stride as fluid as the river waters that rushed along not so far away.

For a long time he stood idle at the foot of the altar, in the shadow of the half-toppled Eucharistic offertory, studying her, captivated by her every gesture. So enrapt was he in fact, that he neither heard nor saw the mollusk-like creature that slithered up beside him.

“You should find your place, my friend. The last of us will be leaving soon,” it said, in a voice that was deeper than any he'd ever heard before, though enunciated with the accent and diction of one well versed in the King's English.

Vince did not respond. He had already grown immune to the very bizarre things that circulated through the church. Or maybe he'd just become numb all over, he didn't know. Whatever the case, he wasn't the least bit
startled by the slimy, gray-skinned being that was now beside him. He was a bit sickened, however, by the pair of flittering stalks that grew from his face, each one crowned by a disturbingly conscious eye.

“Hmm. I know him. His name is Medea,” the British snail-thing said, his soft yellow underbelly distending as he spoke.

“What? No, I'm looking at her,” Vince said, pointing toward the woman.

The shell-less mollusk laughed. He nodded the best he could with his oversized and altogether unwieldy head.

“I know. That's who I'm talking about. He's lovely isn't he?” it replied.

“I'm sure I don't know what you mean. What are you trying to say, that
that is man?”
Vince answered, forced to hold back the nausea in his gut when he finally looked full on at the slug-beast.

It laughed, and placed a flipper-like appendage on Vince's shoulder, unaware that its very sight repulsed him.

“You must be new. I'm sorry. I remember my first one too. Quite a shock isn't it?”

Vince stared back blankly.

“I'm called Glaucus. And you are?” it said smiling, sort of.

“Vince. At least that's what my friends call me. My parents named me Vincenzo, but no one's called me that in years.”

“So it is your first time then. Well, we'll have to see to it that you shed that human name, and take one among
your own kind.”

Vince ignored the statement; he was too fixated on the
woman.

“Medea, you say? Why do you keep calling her a man?” he asked.

“Because that's what he is, or at least was, and likely will be again,” Glaucus replied. He was clearly enjoying his chance to tutor someone unversed in the ways of his folk.