In Veritas

by C. J. Lavigne

  He closed his eyes then and stood breathing, swallowing back the taste of bile and the ache of the stranger’s madness at his back. He almost missed the pull of Privya’s desperate need. He almost thought he could still feel it. He wasn’t sure his knee was going to take any more stairs.

  He sighed and shifted to the far side of the staircase, moving away from the wall and stretching his freed hand out to the side. “Right,” he said. “If you’re not going to kill me, I could really use some help.”

  He could have died in that moment, he supposed, if she’d chosen to attack him, too. If she’d even tried to take his hand, skin to skin, he might have lost himself in her spinning depths. He might have just fallen backward on the stairs.

  He didn’t care.

  He felt the bloody mess of her sleeve under his hand (a whisper of death again, the memory of terror). When he closed his fingers around her forearm, she bore him upward. They walked two steps. She paused for him on the third.

  “My name’s Colin,” he offered, between gasps. “Not that you care.”

  They walked upward together as the stairs smoothed out and then finally opened to the narrow corridor between walls. Colin stopped only a moment, to catch his breath and look at the tunnel and sigh.

  It didn’t occur to him until much later that the stairway didn’t seal itself behind them.

  [IMAGE: Colin and Jihan, standing together; she has a hand under his elbow. He is small and skeletal; she is nearly a foot taller and muscled like a gymnast. He’s wearing his oversized coat and leaning on an old, battered cane. He’s looking up at Jihan; his eyes are glowing, sparkling like stars. She’s wearing ill-fitting clothing—an old sweater, jeans, boots. She has Verity’s stained and crusted scarf tied around her upper arm. She has a knife in her free hand. She’s staring at something unseen.]

  18

  Session Transcript February 2, 2014 (from manual notes; recording not working due to persistent power blackouts)

  SJ: How are you feeling today?

  VR: Cold.

  SJ: I’m sorry; the heat isn’t working. Can I offer you another blanket?

  VR: No. It’s okay. I’m sorry it’s cold.

  SJ: Did you do something to cause it?

  VR: (pause—significant?) No.

  SJ: Why do you think the power is out?

  VR: I don’t know how power plants work. The turbines stopped.

  SJ: Yes, they did. The police want to know if you saw anything happen before the lights went out. You’re my patient, though. Anything you tell me will be safe.

  VR: No.

  SJ: Excuse me?

  VR: That isn’t true.

  SJ: What makes you say that?

  VR: (no response)

  SJ: You understand you need to speak with me as a condition of your continued release? Your guardian ordered these visits.

  VR: Yes.

  SJ: All right. Let’s start again.

  FEBRUARY

  It isn’t easy to rush when Verity and Santiago must wait for Colin, but someone has already handed the angel a crumpled mass of fabric, and he pulls the vast coat to his shoulders, wings folding expertly beneath before he lurches to the wall. He turns to Alan, his sapphire-star gaze swirling bright despite the bruises around his eyes. “Can you do it? Can we follow her?”

  Alan is staring at the door; thought folds his forehead as he frowns. “I almost had it,” he says again. “It’s almost in me. I’m not what I was.”

  “So that’s a no.” Santiago slips past Colin in one sinuous motion and sets his hand on the doorknob. “We’ll run it. Vee’s place isn’t far.”

  “Everyone stay here,” adds Colin, raising his voice to carry, reed thin, down the hall. “I’m not dealing with anyone else puking outside.” More quietly, he adds, “Christ, what’s she doing now?”

  Verity isn’t sure if he means Privya or Jihan, but she doesn’t have time to ask before Santiago opens the door that isn’t. They all three slide through, footsteps quick, into the cramped utility closet and then the dim lobby beyond. Verity has lost track of Ouroboros, but the shadow creature emerges from Santiago’s sleeve and drops in an inky line to the floor, where it expands in a smooth rush to the long, furred form of the dog.

  Verity pushes the door open and braces herself for the city outside. Bank Street is an assault on her senses. A passing car is a scream, its tires gliding on dirty snow.

  Behind, Colin makes a sound as though he’s been punched just beneath the ribs. Verity knows how he feels. He chokes, “What are we even—are you sure?”

  Verity can feel the last shreds of clarity ripped from her, delicate and irretrievable as spider webs torn in the wind. The city street trembles around her. “You asked me,” she says, somewhat helplessly. “I was sure.” When she looks back, Colin and Santiago are framed by the tattered edges of concert posters plastering the theatre windows. In the clouded daylight, Colin is the colour of frozen wheat. The lines around his mouth are savagely carved, and he leans against the taller magician, his hand clutching the head of his cane. Santiago is paralyzed by an uncharacteristic uncertainty, his dark gaze darting from the angel to the street and back again.

  Verity feels the dog sliding by her thigh, neither warm nor weighted, but somehow substantial all the same.

  “Go with Ouro,” says Santiago finally, looking to Verity as he sets a hand under Colin’s elbow. “We’ll be behind.”

  “You’ll be faster,” concedes Colin. “But be careful. I don’t—Jihan takes care of herself. But if Privya wanted to keep us away, something’s damn well wrong.” He shakes his head.

  Verity is already jogging down the street. From behind her, she hears the angel call, “Be careful!” again, and she almost trips on it, but she keeps one hand wrapped in shadow fur and lets Ouroboros guide her. The city passes in streaks around them, whipping hot and cold across Verity’s face. She has to dodge the discordant whine of a passing bus; the advertisements along its side shriek, and she can taste the condescension lodged in the number of a local dentist. A radio station’s logo slimes itself across her skin. She isn’t as fast as she’d like. Urgency pools in her lungs.

  “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” she confesses, gasps punctuating her words. Ouroboros doesn’t answer her. She isn’t surprised. Her boots crunch in dirty snow, and the dog is deathly silent. They half-slide around the corner.

  A storm has come up on Second Avenue. Verity recognizes the feel of it: thick, quiet, filled with dragons. There are wings gathered around her, and flashing spots of eyes in the snowflakes, wild and dying.

  Unlike the storm on the river, this one is spotty; it comes in rolling clouds of sleet. There are holes in it that Verity can see through like ragged patchwork—a white whirl, a beating wing, then an instant’s clarity and the familiar line of the houses down the street before snow swallows them up again. The wind heaves sickeningly against her and then is replaced by Ouroboros as the dog presses against her leg. She drops her palm to the dog’s head as she walks, and wishes she’d taken time to put on gloves.

  The air tastes of ice and the salt sweat of desperation. Somewhere behind her, half dreamed, she can hear the low fierce whisper of the angel swearing.

  Potential stings in the air—power, edged with the faded richness of the approaching Chalice. Here, the storm rages against the full weight of the afternoon city, hurling itself improbably against shingles and tree trunks and the alien smoothness of the cars parked along the meters by the sidewalk. As before, it circles. As Verity walks further down the street, she moves into the calmer eye. For just that quarter of a block, she sees no moving traffic, hears no blasting radios; the windows and doors of the houses are frosted thickly shut. She breathes the frail perfection of the moment.

  Verity stands with snow whirling at her back and is not surprised to find that her house is at the epicentre of the twisting flakes. At the steps of the house, battling figures surge like the storm in miniature. Several are Privya’s people, or at leas
t Verity assumes so, judging by the presence of Shauna; the others she doesn’t know, and she can process little except an array of coloured winter jackets, knitted toques and the flash of long knives. At the eye of that blade-cyclone is Jihan, moving almost too quickly to follow. She still wears an old pink sweatshirt and jeans, plain brown boots, her hair smoothly braided, Verity’s scarf around her arm. She has her newly sharpened knife in one hand, now splattered with red. Her face is emotionless, but her booted feet are quick in the snow as she ducks a fist, half-turns, and parries a switchblade as it comes in. She moves without practice or style, but rather with a peculiar precision, milliseconds in advance of every falling blow. Her knife slashes across the inside of a young man’s wrist, but she’s already shifting away, sweeping her foot to catch at Shauna’s ankle.

  It feels like a dying coal smouldering at the base of Verity’s spine. She fights the urge to remove her coat in the middle of the winter gale. She feels dragons whip past her back, and then Ouroboros tears silently away from her fingers and past her, launching itself at a quilted red jacket and a tangle of braided brown hair.

  The whirl of figures on the step surges—Jihan again, a knee to someone’s solar plexus, a low slice following. The heat is streaks of red in Verity’s eyes; she strains to look through and past for gangly limbs and a familiar thatch of short dreadlocks. She doesn’t realize she’s holding her breath until she tastes a hint of golden spark and sees Jacob half-sprawled on the porch by the front door. He’s sitting legs splayed, a hand to his forehead, blood running down his face.

  Shauna lunges for those same front steps but Jihan is already in motion. Her kick lands directly in the centre of the other woman’s lower back, propelling Shauna forward into the staircase banister. The old wood splinters but holds, and Shauna collapses in a fold of faded down jacket. Jihan has already launched herself toward a scowling redheaded teenaged girl.

  At first, Verity doesn’t understand why anyone would attack Jacob, but when she turns her attention across the street, she sees Brian standing rigid with concentration, his eyes and lips already lined with hoarfrost. Privya is next to him, two feet shorter, her hand laced through Brian’s frozen fingers. All Privya’s attention is on the fight across the way, but she makes no move toward the violence. The fist of her free hand is clenched, dripping a steady stream of blood to the ground at her feet.

  Verity can taste Brian’s strain; she can feel, too, the strands of Privya’s bloody power reinforcing the storm and warring with the electric shock of Jacob’s presence, a jarring rumble through the smooth copper whirl of the blizzard. Her breath is a struggling bird.

  Privya’s people are patchwork and threadbare; they taste of desolation and life unravelling. They are very much like the refugees in the walls of the theatre. In fact, Verity is fairly certain she recognizes a young man with a buzz cut and a face the same colour and texture as a fresh date. He is lined before his time. His bared teeth are yellow.

  Ouro slams into the buzz-cut boy; its long snake tail whips out, wrapping around his neck and jerking him to the ground as the dog darts away. The prone figure is still, but lacks the chill static of death. Jihan is a whirl showing no such mercy. There is blood on her knife; there are bodies on the steps. The crowd of attackers is down to six.

  At the top of the steps, Jacob is shuddering and trying to get his long legs under himself, one hand pressed to his bleeding head, the other grasping for the wooden porch railing as he pulls himself upward, his back against the door. His foot slides and he falls back, cringing. It is nearly palpable, the way the storm trembles uncertainly around him. The twist of his mouth is both pained and incredulous.

  Verity casts a quick glance again toward Privya and Brian, then circles toward Jacob, trying to make her way to the porch steps by moving along the outskirts of the fight. Violence and dragon wings sing in the air, making the sidewalk heave beneath her feet.

  No one pays attention to her. The remaining assailants are now warily circling Jihan and Ouroboros. Jihan stands at the ready, seemingly watching no one as she gazes into the middle distance. Slaughter is smeared on her sweatshirt and across the flawless line of one cheekbone. She holds her knife loosely in her right hand; if she breathes at all heavily, it doesn’t show. The dog tracks its own circle around her, pacing counter to the attackers. Verity skirts carefully around, heading for the steps. Shauna, who has regained her feet and is noticeably limping, casts her one quick glance and then dismisses her, turning her attention back to Jihan’s crimson-drenched weapon.

  The storm whirls and hums in patchwork imperfection. Verity almost can’t see past the flare of Jacob’s blood and the sharp taste of the snow against her skin. She grasps the banister and keeps one hand free, fingers spread, as though she might somehow fend off one of the combatants on the lawn. Facing the fight, she manoeuvres herself around the post at the bottom of the stairs.

  The instant before the heel of Verity’s boot touches the lowest step, Jihan whirls. Her knife traces a low, brutal slash through the air that sends a sallow boy in a ragged camouflage vest tumbling backward in panic, though he is a good three feet away. Jihan ignores him, and the way Ouroboros lunges to protect her from a roundhouse punch when the woman to her left thinks she has an opening. The dog only goes for the woman’s wrist. Verity suspects Jihan would have been less kind.

  Verity only has the time for that fleeting thought before Jihan’s mirror-steel eyes are focused on her—direct, blank, tainted with cracks of yawning madness. In the singular space between heartbeats, she thinks Jihan might throw the knife. She remembers—always she remembers—the helpless, frozen feel of metal sliding between her ribs. Her free hand shields her gut.

  “I only want to help him.” Verity blurts the first thing she thinks of.

  “Vee?” That’s Jacob from behind her, slurring and stunned. His voice is like a bruised apple.

  Jihan doesn’t move. She only watches Verity. The rest of the street might as well not exist. Then she shifts her weight and closes her left hand into a fist, a half-second before the boy in camouflage comes barrelling back into her range. The steel eyes whip away.

  Verity can breathe again. She whirls and darts up the last steps to where Jacob now leans against the front door, one hand still pressed to his head. Blood drips between his fingers and soaks through the shoulder of his plaid fleece shirt. “Vee,” he says to her again. “What the fuck?” His eyes aren’t quite focused, but he struggles to fix on her face before his attention drifts past and then he blinks, squinting. “What the fuck?”

  It’s all she can do to grasp the front of his shirt and fixate on the familiarity of him in the maelstrom. She knows the exact pattern of his mussed hair. It loosens a coiled binding within her that she didn’t know was there. “Are you okay?”

  “...No?”

  “Fucking hell!” Colin’s voice is ragged with torn feathers and the brown exhaustion of a leaf finally falling. Verity wraps her fingers in bloodstained fleece and cranes her head to look back at the street.

  At the steps of the house, Ouroboros is shaking its prey as though the man were a rat.

  “Goddamnit, stop!” calls Colin again. The black dog drops the man to the ground and launches itself back into the fray; Jihan has already slipped aside, half a breath ahead, to give it room. The woman drives her knife into one man’s gut while she kicks a red-jacketed girl in the throat. Privya’s people are down to three.

  As Verity turns to face the street, she sees Colin has dropped to one knee beside a fallen body, his twisted leg extended to one side and his cane abandoned in the snow. The trench coat heaves unnaturally around him as his wings spread for balance beneath. She knows he’s glowing, but in the smattering of sunlight that creeps through the stuttering snow, it’s hard to tell. Only the taste of it is pure and honeyed, cleansing her throat.

  At first, Verity can’t find Santiago, though she knows he must be near; she spots him pressing to the brick wall of the duplex across the street as he slips
behind Privya and Brian. Brian’s frosted features are screwed tight in concentration, his skin translucent as ice. The snow whirls around him, eating the street. Privya only stands, bleeding, watching her people die, her lips set and her eyes like black fire. The rest of the street comes to Verity in quick flashes of image: Ouroboros, its head low and its sinuous tail lashing. Bodies on her lawn, beneath the spreading tree. Pools of crimson. The glint of dragon eyes in the snow. Verity’s skin burns, but the banister under her hand is cold, and the sensation of Jacob behind her is loose and oddly lukewarm.

  Jihan and the dog now rule the front lawn unopposed; the bodies crumpled around them are not all moving. The boy in the camouflage vest is sprawled at an unlikely angle, legs askew, crimson marking the snow in a spray behind him. A whirl of white renders Privya and Brian barely visible at the far edge of the storm; Santiago is lost in a rise of rolling fog. The street is eerily quiet, save for the occasional bubbling groan and the faint silver ring of dragon wings.

  With the sun obscured, Colin is aglow; light blooms in his eyes like fireworks or deep-water algae, swirling brilliant and ancient from the depths. His hands are pressed to the neck and wrist of the woman he kneels by. His attention is fixed on her bloody face. He has forgotten the wings that spill from beneath his coat and swoop to either side, slightly raised for balance. They are inky spans against the swirling whiteness; the fraying edges of his feathers gleam with green and gold.

  “The hell is that?” Jacob’s voice is both unexpected and soft, the syllables slurring.

  Verity looks back; Jacob is working to focus past her. A dawning recognition sings in the curve of smile just beginning at the corner of his lips. The other side of his mouth is frowning; it is a slanted expression, both pleased and puzzled, marred by the rivulet of blood that continues to run slowly down the edge of his nose. His lips move slightly, silently, as though he is sounding out an uncertain new word.