by Mark Teppo
A spike of pain went through the base of my spine, and my legs gave way. I banged my face against the floor, and lay there, squirming like a stuck bug. The spike reversed, coming back up and exploding in my brain, and I cried out. My vision flared white, and in the stark emptiness that the ossuary became, I saw a negative man seated on a black throne. Black flames licked from his naked skull, and his chest was a ferocious storm of black smoke. You cannot be rid of us, Philippe said. That is not the way.
"I . . . am . . . not your pawn," I gasped through the pain.
We are all pawns, he reminded me. There is always a grander game than the one we control.
I don't want control," I said. "I just want to be free."
You always have been, he said, leaning forward. You are free to make your own choice. That is why I cannot tell you what you must do. His eyes glittered with black tears. Do you understand, my son?
When I reached for him, the vision vanished, and I was left groping for nothing in the dark. In my head, I could still see him sitting on that chair—the colors all normal now—the memory of those last few moments in the library before I spiked him. The expression in his eyes.
Philippe knew what he had been doing; he knew the pain his death would bring to those he considered his children, but he also knew the alternative was much worse. He chose his own fate, willingly, because that was the right path. The hard path, but the right one.
You are free to make your own choice.
In that conundrum lay the obstinate madness of his actions, of his long manipulation of his fellow Watchers. He couldn't tell us what his plan was, because to know of it would be a temptation. What if we could change it? What if we thought we could make a better choice?
But we couldn't. He was Hierarch. His understanding of the Weave was deeper and wider than any vision we would have. He Knew, and had twisted the threads so as to bring about the end he had already Witnessed. Did it mean we were on predetermined paths that we couldn't change? Probably. But to walk those paths meant we had to chose them ourselves. I was in the thick of a war for the succession of the Hierarch that had its roots nearly a decade back, and in the midst of all the coming conflict, I didn't know who I could trust. I didn't know who wanted what, and from that ignorance, Philippe knew I would have to make my own decisions.
He knew I would be loath to participate in this game of vengeance—if that is, indeed, what it truly was—but if I didn't know the rules of the game or what my designated role was, then I couldn't act counter to it. I couldn't try to extricate myself from this pattern.
Besides, there was a carrot. Make it personal, Philippe had said to me one night, back when I had been a young student, craving any bit of knowledge he deigned to give me. Always make any conflict personal. That way they hand you their thread and ask you to twist it.
I couldn't trust any of the Watchers. But there was one person whom I could trust.
Marielle.
It couldn't get much more personal.
I started crawling. I had a long way to go.
X
Eventually, my cell phone chirped, and the tiny signal meter climbed to two bars. I was close to the surface. Another icon appeared in the menu. Voice mail. I dropped the phone back in my pocket. It could wait a few minutes; I was almost there.
The dry smell of the dead had gotten more pervasive in the last half-hour, and the texture of the walls had started to even out. Several of the rooms I had passed through had niches in the walls, and the floors were polished by the tread of many years. This area was more recently used.
My internal compass had been thoroughly fucked by the soulquake, and even though the ley energy had gotten progressively stronger as I had made my way through the tunnels, I hadn't been able to sync myself to the natural grid. There was too much noise, both in my head and from my surroundings, which led me to think I was moving through sections of the Parisian underground that had been heavily used to inter bodies. The only thing that leaves more psychic history than the bones of a church are the bones of people.
I thought I was under Père Lachaise, and the heavy iron gate barring my further progress confirmed that suspicion. I was on the wrong side, though, as the location of the lock proved. The keyhole had been filled in and the mechanism had been welded together. Parisian officials didn't want to fill in the tunnels, but they certainly didn't want anyone to think going further into the old tunnels was an option. Nothing short of an acetylene torch or some C-4 was going to open this gate. Or magick—the occult key of blunt force. When subtlety wasn't an issue.
The bars were cold and hard and I was more tired than I realized; it took me a while to bend the Chorus to the task.
On the other side of the gate, the tunnels were clearly marked and I soon found a metal door. With a handle, even. It led me into the cramped basement of a maintenance shed, and at a desk near the ground-floor door, I sat down and checked my voice mail.
Marielle, returning my call. She was clinical and precise in her message. She didn't explicitly tell me to crawl off and die, but the sentiment was clear in her tone. She ended it with a long sigh, silence, and then, in a quieter voice: "Call me back."
I did, and she answered it on the second ring. "I got your message," I said.
She was quiet for a moment. "I probably wouldn't have said what I said if you had answered."
"Well, it was good that I didn't. It needed to be said."
"It didn't. I—I know you, Michael. I know you well enough. You didn't do any of it to hurt me. It's just . . . "
"I have a crappy way of showing affection," I provided for her.
She laughed, and it sounded like something came loose in her chest when she did. "Yes," she said, "Yes, you do. You're like a cat who kills birds and leaves them in my shoes because you want to give me a gift."
"I am sorry."
"I know." She exhaled noisily.
"I kept the message," I said. "So I can play it back later, when I'm tempted to do something nice for you."
"You think that'll be enough to stop you?"
"I hope so."
"Me too. Though, there isn't much else that you could—"
"I could burn your house down."
"I've moved since the last time you were here, and no, I'm not taking you to the new place." There was some levity in her voice now, the pain of our history fading away into the endless well of memory. The imprint of my actions and the consequences would always be there, but we were moving past the recent incident. They wouldn't be forgotten—like all sins, they never are—but the other reasons we were bound to each other were reasserting themselves.
I glanced around the shed. "How about you come to my place?" I said. "It's a little small and smells funny, but it's cozy."
"Where?"
"Père Lachaise."
She didn't answer right away, and I thought I had lost her.
"Were you there?" she asked finally.
Father Cristobel spun in the Chorus, a tiny knot of light sparking within their serpentine fog. She knew what had happened at the Chapel of Glass. She hadn't known I was there, but news of the chapel's destruction would have certainly been heard by the Watchers by now. My being at the cemetery—in relative proximity to the church—couldn't be a coincidence.
"I was," I said. "I'm so—"
"No." She cut me off. "You can't have been responsible."
"No, I wasn't. Well—"
"You're not at fault, Michael. You can't take that weight, nor will I accept it from you."
"He—" I tried again.
"Tell me later," she said. "It doesn't matter right now. You are safe. That is good enough."
My chest tightened, the Chorus grabbing my heart. I tried to speak, and found myself as tongue-tied as a ten-year-old boy with a crush on his babysitter.
"Can you find the grave of the painter?" she asked. "The one who shares a name with my godfather?"
David. Jacques-Louis David, the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century paint
er who had been the herald of a new neoclassical style. He had a tendency to pick the wrong team politically, first Robespierre and then Napoleon, which made him rather unpopular in his death. Still, art was art and a number of his paintings hung in prominent places in the Louvre.
"Yes, I think so." I glanced around the shed. There had to be some sort of reference chart. If not here, then near any of the entrances. Through the tiny window of the shed, the light was russet and gold. Sunset already. The gates were closing soon, if not already.
"Meet me at the entrance nearest his grave," she said, reading my thoughts. "Half-hour."
On a shelf near the door, I found a dog-eared guidebook to the cemetery. Once I figured out where I was, finding David's grave and the nearest entrance was easy.
The guidebook offered the trivia that David's grave only held his heart. The rest of him was buried in Brussels. I knew how that felt.
Marielle showed up in one of the ubiquitous smart cars that were everywhere in Paris. A tiny two-seater that wasn't much more than a bubble of glass and aluminum lashed on top of an engine and drive chain. We rubbed shoulders, and every time the car went over a bump or a hole in the road, I nearly fell into her lap. In other circumstances, I would have found the constant physical contact terribly distracting, but as it was, I kept feeling like I should apologize.
"You need to stop that," she said while we waited for a light to change.
"What?" I asked.
She was wearing Escada. It was a scent I would always associate with her, and trapped in the tiny cab of the car, it became a narcotic. She was wearing a sienna-colored v-neck sweater beneath her long coat, and a slender strand of pearls lay across her clavicle and the hollow of her throat like a chain of moonlight. "That hangdog expression," she said. "It's like you've got more bad news."
"Sorry," I said.
"That too." She glanced at me, light dancing in her eyes. "I'm a big girl, Michael. I'm not a glass figurine." The light changed and she took her foot off the brake. "I'm going to need your strength. Not your sympathy."
"Okay." I swallowed heavily, pushing down the weight of the—call it what it is—the guilt. The Chorus took the weight in, swallowing it as easily as they swallowed the dreams and fears of other souls. "Did you know," I said, changing the subject, "David's body isn't buried in Père Lachaise?"
"I know," she said. Glancing over her shoulder, she changed lanes. I shifted my gaze to the steering wheel, but not before she caught me looking at her throat. "He was declared a revolutionary after his death. He wasn't allowed back in France."
The car slowed and she turned a corner, slipping off the main road onto one of the tiny side streets of Paris. In the smart car, the road seemed wide enough, but with the two rows of parked cars it would have been a tight fit for any American-sized car. I was always amazed at how much denser the cities were in Europe, especially after spending a few months in Seattle. It was a constant topic of conversation in that city about the tight navigation of the hilly streets, but they were wide open compared to Parisian streets.
"There's a regulation actually," Marielle continued, "concerning the distribution of body parts in Père Lachaise. Since David's heart is buried there, they had to remove the heart of another person."
"Seriously?"
"Chopin's. His heart is buried in a church in Poland."
"But his body is here? Because David's isn't?"
She laughed at my expression, and after a moment, I joined her. "I can't believe I fell for that." The laugh knocked something loose in me. Like ice falling off a roof in early spring. A thaw coming to the old, cold country.
"It's true," she said. "About Chopin."
"But there isn't a law."
"No," she admitted. "But some say the heart is the seat of the soul, and that the rest of the flesh is just raw meat." There was still a mischievous note in her voice, but the Chorus felt an echo beneath it, a sub-harmonic tone that reminded me of the psychic pulse she had manifested earlier.
The Chorus resurrected a memory of the painting in the narrow hall at the Chapel of Glass, the watercolor study of Christ and the flaming heart. The gift to Mary.
"Do they?" I said cautiously. "Well, they say a lot of things. In fact, they are always talking. Mostly gossip and innuendo, really."
"Is that so?"
"Absolutely. You can't trust them. Nothing but conjecture and speculation. Internet forum talk. All baseless."
"Really? What if they said you and I were sleeping together?"
"That was a long time ago, and no one knew."
She looked at me.
"Okay, Antoine knew. But he's not the gossipy type."
She turned the wheel and the tiny car slid through a gap between two parked cars. A narrow gate blocked our path, and with a mental command much like the opening spell she had used on the train, she exerted her Will on the barrier. It responded, rolling back on tiny wheels, and she eased the tiny car through the portal into the inner courtyard of the building. There were several other cars parked in the octagonal courtyard and she backed into an open space. The front pointed toward the gate. Quick escape, if we needed it.
Switching off the engine, she leaned toward me as she opened her door. Her eyes were dark pools, and the Chorus pulsated in time with her heartbeat. "It wasn't that long ago," she said quietly.
She led me up a flight of stairs to a tiny second-floor apartment. The living room looked out over the courtyard, and judging by the lack of a television and how empty the pair of bookcases were, as well as the position of the only comfortable chair in the room, watching the neighbors was the primary source of entertainment. A stub of a hallway led to a bathroom and a single bedroom. Around the corner from the door was a tiny nook and kitchen.
Marielle filled a teapot from the tap and put it on the stove. "There should be fresh clothes in the wardrobe," she said. "You can take a shower too, if you'd like."
I nodded. "Where are we?"
"Somewhere safe. A friend's." She nodded toward the picture window. "The others are across the courtyard. We'll join them when you're ready."
"The others?"
"Loyalists. People who we can trust."
I wandered over to the window and lifted the edge of the curtain. The window of the second-floor apartment across the way was lit, though the curtains were drawn. "How many?" I asked.
"Eight."
"That's all?"
"Here, yes. Things have gotten bad, and we don't know who we can trust. We can't afford to meet openly." She opened the cupboard and took down two plastic mugs with lids.
"How bad?" I asked.
"We're not sure. It has been difficult to get accurate information. Some of the rank have just gone into hiding—we hope—and they're waiting out this whole affair. The rest—" She didn't finish, and she didn't need to. The rest were ending up like Father Cristobel.
"What are they doing?" I nodded toward the other apartment
Marielle snorted. "Talking, mostly."
I let the curtain drop. "I guess I'll go get cleaned up."
She nodded distractedly, busy spooning loose tea into each of the two mugs.
I didn't think much about the war council going on in the other apartment while I showered. Instead, my mind kept wandering back to what she had said just before getting out of the car.
It hadn't been that long, nor had there been any sort of serious relationship in between. Granted, what Marielle and I had shared during my time in Paris couldn't be considered serious, as the specter of whether or not she was still dating Antoine hovered over us. She had said it was over, but I had always suspected she had neglected to tell Antoine that fact. Or, if she had, neither of them had really believed their separation was permanent. I wasn't Rebound Guy, more the Transient Mysterious Stranger. Not the healthiest of relationships, but compared to the others I'd had, it was pretty cut-and-dried. We liked each other—a lot—and knowing that circumstances were going to doom us at some point, we simply lived in the moment.
The arrangement worked until the duel on New Year's Day.
The Chorus had been obsessed with Katarina, and so I had never been fully able to commit my heart to Marielle, and she had a connection to Antoine that remained steadfast throughout our relationship. We were both bound to others, but that hadn't diminished the intensity of our attraction to each other. You can love more than one person—the human heart has such capacity—but you will never be completely resolute in your attention. There will always be the distraction of that other person in your mind.
Even with Reija—and Rose, too—there had been the ghost of Katarina. But now that the Qliphotic shadow was gone, I was no longer as divided as I had been. I could give my full attention to Marielle.
There was only one annoying detail: the spirit of her father floating in my head. Kind of a mood killer. Unless I could figure a way to lock him out.
I gave that some thought while I stood in the shower. It kept me from thinking of other things. Like the slope of her neck, and the way a pearl kept nestling in the hollow of her throat. Like a soap bubble, a tiny moment of time caught in a sphere of magick.
On the morning of the new year, the city slept, exhausted from the midnight revelry of the new aeon. We had survived the millennial change, regardless of how you counted the first year of the next century, and the parties had been flush with the release of all the pent-up panic and apprehension that had unconsciously filled our hearts during the last years of the old world. It was a new world—this shiny twenty-first century, this third millennium—and while everyone slept off the hangover of the old, the new was still too young to be fully aware. We were outside of time for a few hours, between midnight and daybreak, where nothing mattered. Where nothing was true but the breathless promises exchanged during the ebb and flow of our rhythm. For a few hours, wrapped in the midnight cloak of cosmological renewal, we could pretend the past and the future weren't connected. We could close our eyes and forget our fears, thinking such elective blindness did, indeed, wash away the stains of our history. We could forget our petty jealousies and febrile paranoia. For a few hours.
