The Edge of Ruin

by Melinda Snodgrass

  “I didn’t give notice or anything. The last guy who tried to leave got locked up. Jacobson. They say it’s because he refused to go out there, but I can’t help but wonder if he got locked up because he’s a Jew. Next it’ll be the blacks. All the old hates and distrusts are coming to the surface. The world’s gone a different kind of nuts.”

  The same old nuts, Grenier thought, but what he said was, “You seem very sane.”

  “Yeah, now.”

  “What did they do for you?”

  “Who?”

  “The doctors.”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  For Grenier a certainty began to grow. It was all too perfect. He was going to do his bit to try to fuck his former masters.

  “It wasn’t the doctors who fixed me, but this young guy, Richard Oort. I don’t remember much about him, but there was this sword.”

  “With a blade as black as space, shot through with glittering points of light like the swirl of stars, and when it’s drawn you feel the bass tones growling and reverberating in your chest like the notes of a massive organ,” Grenier said softly as he remembered.

  “You know him,” Marten said.

  “Oh, yes.” Grenier softly stroked the bandage over his stump.

  “I’ve got to reach him. Have him help my Sam like he helped me.”

  “I’d like to find him, too.” And Grenier clenched his left fist, and felt his phantom right hand also close. “For a lot of reasons.”

  * * *

  The bar wasn’t nice enough for Bourbon Street. It was a few blocks and a universe away from the French Quarter, especially the new Disneyfied version of the French Quarter. It was dark and, even in January, hot, and it stank of spilled booze, cigarettes, mold, and infrequently washed bodies.

  Doug Andresson couldn’t pay for the shot and the beer that stood on the bar in front of him. He’d used what remained of his money on the last round. He watched the head of the beer go sliding down the side of the glass, and for some reason it reminded him of the white foam that would run out of the horses’ mouths when his uncle broke the new broncos. Sometimes the fat old bastard would apply the bit so hard that the foam would turn red with blood. He was just as mean of a bastard as his brother, Doug’s father.

  The memory brought other memories, of a belt laid hard across his back and thighs. It was after his father’s beatings that his mother would send him off to Uncle Frank’s ranch, separating the father and son. Doug had vowed he’d kill the man. Cancer had done it first.

  Doug fumbled in his pants pocket for the can of tobacco. Pulling off the lid, he pinched off a plug and thrust it between lip and gum. The bottom of the can showed silver through the rich mahogany of the tobacco. He was almost out of that, too. He needed money, and he needed it fast. He weighed the pros and cons between a B&E in the Garden District or a mugging on Bourbon Street. Big, fancy houses often had dogs or alarms, and drunks were usually easy. He’d make up his mind after he finished his drink.

  It wasn’t supposed to have been like this. He was supposed to be on easy street. Grenier had promised him power, respect, and money, but those dickheads couldn’t find their asses with both hands, and when the FBI had shown up they’d either dithered or fought. Only Doug had had the brains to head for the property line the minute that big helicopter had come roaring in. All those promises about how he was going to be taken care of, looked after—it was just more crap. He was broke in New Orleans, Grenier was in jail, and eventually the cops would come after him again. They always did.

  There was always a level of rage that bubbled all along his nerve endings, but now a new emotion twined around that life-sustaining feeling—melancholy and loss. He studied the fading bruises on his knuckles, legacies of the blows he’d delivered to the cop’s face. Grenier had said Doug was special, but because of that little faggot Doug had never found out if he actually was special.

  It was time to drink. He spat out the plug. It hit the stained wood of the floor between his feet with a wet splat and formed a starburst pattern. It was kinda pretty. He picked up the whiskey and downed it with one quick swallow. The heat from the alcohol burned the hot place on his gum where the plug had rested, and it felt like he’d swallowed smoke. He chased away the fire with the cold of the beer, draining the mug in five long swallows. He then pushed back from the bar and started for the door.

  “Hey!” The bartender’s basso shout almost hurt Doug’s ears. “You haven’t paid for that.” The Cajun accent made musical mush of the words.

  Doug turned slowly back to face the man. The bartender was big, red faced, and fat, with a sweat stain at the neck of his T-shirt. The sandy hairs on his forearms stood up like the bristles on a pig and blurred the anchors and mermaid tattoos that adorned the freckled skin.

  “Not going to.” He patted his pockets. “No money,” Doug said. And then he smiled. His special smile.

  The big man’s glare faded into nervous confusion, and he lost some of his color. Suddenly he seemed like a flaccid balloon. “Well … well, you get out of here, now. Don’t want deadbeats. You just go on.”

  With a jaunty little half wave, half salute, Doug left the bar. Maybe he was special. He had a special kind of crazy that made people afraid. And someday he’d use it again on Richard Oort.

  * * *

  Rhiana Davinovitch nervously touched the earrings running from the tops of her ears down to the lobes. Where once they had been cheap Kmart junk, they were now real diamonds, emeralds, and pearls. She walked over to the hotel window, reveling in the play of muscles and tendons in her legs.

  In her father’s dimension she wore a different form, and it wasn’t a comfortable one. She was glad to be back in the universe that housed Earth. Maybe it was because this world had birthed her. Her mother had been human.

  Rhiana looked over to where her father, Madoc, sat watching CNN. Madoc wore his human form, but with the impossibly narrow face, upswept brows, and glittering eyes he still didn’t look human, not really.

  Rhiana looked back out the window at a sunny California day. Droplets of water from the sprinklers glittered on the leaves on the avocado tree that offered privacy to their cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It seemed weird to be back in California. Her foster parents were only a few miles away, sitting in their tiny 1940s tract house in Van Nuys. Years ago they had driven onto the grounds of the famous hotel just off Sunset Boulevard, and hotel security had reacted to her dad’s built-up pickup truck. Her father had blustered, but ultimately they had left without ever crossing the portals of the lobby. Now she was staying here.

  There was a knock. Rhiana opened the door. The warm air blew into the over-air-conditioned cabana, carrying the scent of clipped grass and star jasmine and the heavy aftershave of the man at the door. Jack Rendell wasn’t what she had expected. Since he had been presented as the replacement for Mark Grenier, she had been expecting another unctuous, older man. Someone to play the role of reverend-as-daddy, but Rendell was young, early thirties at most. He topped six feet, and the tall frame supported an athlete’s musculature. His features were regular and handsome in that corn-fed, all-American way that you expected to see in a war movie from the 1940s. But there was an expression deep in his hazel eyes that belied that impression. Something cold and hungry and calculating lived beneath the pleasant exterior.

  Rendell was a wildly popular spiritualist with a cable show, the occasional special on network television, and lucrative speaking tours where he put grieving people in touch with the “beloved departed.” Unlike many of that ilk, he was not a fraud. Instead he was a major magical talent. Even as introductions were made and handshakes exchanged, Rhiana could feel the power coming off him in waves. It was to be her task to teach him control of his magical ability.

  Rendell held her hand an instant too long, stood a fraction too near, and allowed his gaze to drop lasciviously to her bosom. Rhiana longed to be older and sophisticated and know how to handle this. Instead she jerked her hand away and retreate
d.

  Madoc began the meeting. “Grenier is gone. He made bail yesterday, and vanished.”

  “And this matters how?” Rendell asked. “Isn’t he useless now? I don’t see any way for him to fuck us up.”

  The slow pullback of Madoc’s lips revealed sharply pointed teeth. Rendell sucked in a quick breath. “I agree, but it would have been so pleasant to punish him for his failures.” The tip of his tongue flicked out, and Madoc licked his bottom lip as if tasting that punishment. Madoc returned to the moment. “So, are you ready to approach the Cardinal of Washington, D.C., with your ‘visions’?”

  “Are you ready to back them up with a miracle?” Rendell countered. Madoc nodded. “I have a question,” Rendell added.

  “You may ask it,” Madoc replied.

  “Why aren’t you using one of the other heavy hitters from the Religious Right to inoculate the gate? Why come to me and the Catholic Church?”

  “Because of the involvement first of the FBI and now the military.” Madoc shot Rhiana a sideways glance.

  And that was her fault. She had offered Richard’s rescuers a piece of information that brought in the cavalry. Despite being his child, despite his seeming forgiveness, she still had a fluttering in the pit of her stomach.

  Because he never misses an opportunity to remind me of my transgression. Which probably makes his “forgiveness” not all that sincere.

  “Word has filtered out that there are demons there,” Madoc continued “The Catholics are perceived as the go-to guys on demons and exorcisms.” He gave a thin smile. “And once the Virginia compound has been rehabilitated it will give us a nice rallying cry for the fundamentalists: that the Papists have taken control of the place where the Lord will arrive for his Second Coming.”

  Rendell absorbed this, nodded slowly. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. When you address your followers I want you to strongly suggest that science and scientists are evil, and that they will block the efforts to bring back the age of magic and miracles. We need the scientific community neutralized and eventually destroyed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We don’t want any dissenting voices,” Madoc said smoothly.

  And we also don’t want anyone looking too closely at how I bound Kenntnis. For while Rhiana had used “magic” to summon the power, it was physics that held the creature trapped. It was possible that physics could offer a means to free him, and Kenntnis/Prometheus/Lucifer unbound would put an end to their conquest of this world.

  “… and we especially need an interdiction of nuclear weapons.” Madoc’s words penetrated Rhiana’s wandering thoughts. “As hostilities increase we want to make certain that the violence is planned, limited, and carefully directed.”

  Rendell looked up from where he was taking notes on his BlackBerry. “I thought you guys fed on death.”

  Madoc turned his head slowly and regarded the human. Rhiana saw the black spikes flaring from his human form, anger made manifest. Rendell seemed unaware. “You are mistaken,” Madoc said. “Death itself is like eating ash. It’s fear, hate, grief, despair, and agony that offer the most nourishment. We would rather have a thousand Rwandas then one Hiroshima.”

  “Got it,” said Rendell. “Oh, I put out the word to my viewers about that guy you wanted to find, and we got—”

  Madoc held up a minatory finger. “We are done for now. Let me walk you to your car.”

  Rhiana frowned at the door that closed behind them. What was it that he didn’t want her to hear?

  She pulled a penny out of her pocket. Set it to spinning and glowing, summoned the power, and sent a tendril undulating among the trees and bushes lining the stone walkway. She took out her cell phone. The spell reached out and touched the BlackBerry in Rendell’s pocket, turned it on, and linked it to her cell. Their voices came through clearly.

  “He’s in New Orleans,” Rendell was saying.

  “And I’ve got someone in New Mexico. He’s going to kill the paladin, and get the sword for us,” Madoc said.

  Shock at Madoc’s words caused her to drop the phone; the link shattered, and her phone fused into blackened metal and melted plastic. Rhiana had tried not to think of him since their parting in a dell in Virginia, but now Richard Oort’s chiseled features filled her mind. She wanted him; to love and to punish, to torment and impress, and now Madoc was going to let him die.

  “You promised! You promised!” Rhiana whispered. Her throat was tight and small.

  The moment the words were uttered she felt foolish and naive. What were Madoc’s promises really worth? Richard was just a human, albeit a unique one, and Madoc and his kind were here to conquer and enslave humans.

  Rhiana swept up the destroyed phone and thrust it deep into a pocket. She had to warn Richard. She came up short, picturing how that beautiful face would freeze in aristocratic disdain, how cold those pale blue eyes would become. She had betrayed him. It was foolish to think Richard would ever trust her again. But she had to try. She picked up the hotel phone.

  * * *

  Dr. Angela Armandariz, Albuquerque’s chief medical examiner, walked past body-filled gurneys that lined the hallway. She took this as a clue that there was no more room in the drawers in the actual morgue. She sighed, and gave up any hope of dinner at a reasonable hour. It was a New Mexico tradition to celebrate New Year’s Eve with gunfire. This year it seemed that everyone had decided to shoot not into the sky but at each other.

  Pallid feet, the big toes adorned by tags, thrust from beneath sheets like displays on a butcher’s counter. Her eye was caught by the title on one toe. Dr. Kenneth Wilson. The body on the next gurney was also a “doctor.” She counted seven before she reached the double metal doors of the morgue.

  Frowning, she lifted a sheet on the last body. Three long gashes stretched from the skull to the groin. The skin and hair on the skull were laid back, revealing bone. The gashes in the groin went deep into the soft tissue. She gently laid the sheet back down, and checked the other six. They all displayed the same horrible mutilations.

  She went into the morgue and keyed the intercom to her assistant. “Hey, Jeff, what’s with the medical convention in my hall?”

  “Not that kind of doctors,” Jeff’s voice buzzed through the cheap speaker on the intercom. “They were some kind of big brains going up to the Santa Fe Institute. The staties found the van off the side of the road.”

  “Those wounds didn’t look like your average car wreck.”

  “That’s just the start of the weirdness. Diego said the van looked like it’d been clawed open. From the inside,” he added.

  “Uh, thanks, I think.”

  Angela wrapped her arms around herself, trying to banish the sudden chill that wasn’t entirely due to the big coolers and fans in the morgue. She would need to tell Richard about this. She hit PLAY on the cheap boom box, and U2 throbbed through the morgue. Angela slipped the strap of the big rubber apron over her head, snapped on her surgical gloves, and flexed her fingers.

  She walked to the stainless steel autopsy table. It held the naked body of a young Hispanic man. Bruises covered his chest and face, as if a mad tattoo artist had lost control of the needle. The head was caved in on one side. To her practiced eye the groove looked like a baseball bat. The waxy skin depressed under the scalpel’s blade. She drew it down the length of his chest. A red line, formed by muscle tissue and a bit of sluggish blood, followed the path of the cut. She wondered why she was bothering; cause of death seemed pretty fucking obvious.

  She was distracted by the bang and squeak as the double doors were thrust open. “Put ’em in the hall. There’s no room in here,” she called over U2, not bothering to look up.

  The music cut off abruptly. Angela whirled, ready to rip someone a new asshole. She relaxed when she saw Lieutenant Damon Weber. His square-jawed face sagged with fatigue, and the dark bags hanging beneath his eyes made him look like a raccoon.

  He swiveled his head from side to side, counting the
gurneys, but it was a slow and careful movement, as if his neck were made of glass and would snap if he moved too quickly.

  “Yes, I am up to my ass in dead people,” Angela said.

  “At least you don’t hear them,” Weber said with the briefest of smiles.

  “In this wonderful new year I wouldn’t put that beyond the realm of possibility. What do you need? And please don’t say a report.”

  Weber shook his head, grimaced. Angela pulled off her gloves and tossed them in the trash. “Here,” she said and indicating a wheeled metal stool. The big cop sat down, and she set to work massaging his neck. It felt less like muscles than like metal bands shifting beneath the skin. He groaned and allowed his chin to fall onto his chest.

  “I need Richard to come in. How do you think that’s going to go over?” The words were muffled, trapped by the tucked chin.

  “Like you don’t know the answer to that,” she said, recalling the discussion at the Lumina offices five days before.

  Judge Robert Oort had harangued his son for forty-three minutes. Angela knew; she had kept time. In this he had been ably and brutally assisted by his daughter and Richard’s sister Pamela. Pamela had arrived in Albuquerque the day before, been given a crash course in the World According to the Lumina, been touched by the sword, and had instantly assumed a position of authority.

  There were facial similarities between the siblings. They both had high cheekbones, pointed chins, and translucently fair skin, but Pamela’s eyes were dark gray rather than pale silver-blue. Richard’s held a sweetness and a vulnerability. Pamela’s were sharp and judgmental. Pamela was attractive with soft light brown hair. Richard was gorgeous with silver/gilt hair. Angela wondered if that cosmic unfairness had added to Pamela’s seemingly constant irritation with her brother. Angela found the young lawyer insufferable, and she said so now.