Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  You can’t follow me, Niki says, her voice drifting up from some place so deep and black that Daria has never even dared imagine it, some endless, muddy plain where there’s only night that runs on forever in all directions. A silent wilderness of fins and spines and the stinging tentacles of blind things, the rotting steel and wooden husks of drowned ships, and countless suicide ghosts mired in the ooze and labyrinths of their own condemning thoughts.

  You can’t stop me, Daria tells her.

  It’s all a dream, Daria. It’s only a bad dream.

  And now there’s something floating towards her, a paler scrap of night dividing itself from the greater darkness, and at first she thinks it’s only a curious seal or maybe, if she’s very lucky, a shark come along to finish what she’s started. But then she can make out Niki’s face, the empty sockets that were her eyes before the hungry jaws of fish, her hair like seaweed strands swaying gently about her gray and swollen cheeks.

  Not what you think, Niki mumbles, her clay-blue lips and a flat gleam of beach-glass teeth; where her tongue should be there are only the nervous coils of a tiny octopus nestled in her mouth. You can’t find me here. I didn’t mean for you to follow. Then the tattered girl holds out her right hand, and the ball bearing glimmers faintly in her ruined palm.

  I’ll never find it, Daria thinks. Not after ten years. I’ll never find it again.

  Not if you don’t try, the octopus in Niki’s mouth replies, and then her body comes apart like sugar in a cup of tea, dissolving back into the night and the bay, and Daria is alone again. She tries to remember a prayer she knew ages and ages ago, when she was a child and still thought someone might be listening, but suddenly her memories seem as insubstantial as the vision of Niki, and the fleeting, slippery words remain always just beyond her reach.

  And the moon is growing larger again.

  And has turned the color of a drowned girl’s skin.

  Daria opens her eyes and blinks at the warm late afternoon sunlight pouring in through the hospital room’s window, a pale yellow-orange wash across the rumpled white sheets of her bed. The window frames a western sky that is broad and turning brilliant sunset shades of violet and apricot. And the dream is right there behind her, still close enough that she thinks it might continue if she’d only shut her eyes again and let it. Right there, so at least she’s spared any sudden, startling disappointments when she remembers exactly where she is, and what’s happened to Niki, and why Alex is sitting here watching her and trying too hard not to look worried.

  “Hey you,” he says, and there’s the faintest suggestion of a smile to warp the corners of his mouth, but the smile gives up and becomes something else.

  “Fuck,” Daria whispers, and turns away from the window and Alex Singer and the setting sun.

  “Would you like some water?”

  “Unless you’ve got vodka,” she replies, and licks at her chapped lips, her throat so dry it hurts, and she lies still and listens to the sound of him pouring water from a plastic pitcher into a paper cup.

  “I talked to Marvin again,” he says. “He rang, just before you woke up,” and Alex holds the cup to her lips and supports her head. She only drinks a little, because it’s warm and tastes like chlorine, then pushes his hand away, and he sets the cup down next to the blue pitcher on the table beside the bed. He presses one hand against her forehead like someone checking to see if she has a fever.

  “I don’t want to start crying again,” she says.

  “I know, love. I know you don’t.”

  “I told her I was coming, didn’t I? I fucking told her I was on my way,” and Daria stares at the IV tube rising from the soft inside of her left elbow, a couple of strips of tape to hide the needle, to hold it in place, and she lets her eyes follow the tube up to the bag of clear fluid suspended from a metal hook beside the bed. “When are they going to stop pumping me full of that shit?” she asks Alex, and nods at the IV bag.

  “I don’t know. You were awfully dehydrated.”

  “Alex, you were sitting right there. You heard me tell her I was coming home. I know you heard me.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “I did. I heard everything you said,” and then he moves his hand from Daria’s forehead to her right cheek. His skin feels cool and dry and familiar, his rough fingers to remind her of so many things at once, things that didn’t die with Niki, and she turns away from the IV bag and looks up into his gray eyes, instead. Those eyes the first part of Alex Singer that she fell in love with, even before his music, eyes like smoke and steel, and she knows that she’s going to start crying again, and there’s nothing she can do to stop it.

  “You can’t start blaming yourself for this.”

  “Yes, I can,” she says, and the tears cloud her vision and leak from the corners of her eyes. “I left her there. She begged me not to go and I went anyway.”

  “You did what you had to do. Niki was very sick, and you did everything you could to keep her safe. You pissed away the last ten years of your life trying to keep Niki safe, and it’s almost killed you.”

  “No, that’s not true. I didn’t do everything. I was always too afraid to listen—”

  “Stop it,” Alex says, pulling his hand away, and he takes a quick step back from the edge of the bed. The anger in his voice like straight razors beneath worn velvet, and his gray irises spark with something that Daria doesn’t want to see, not now or ever, so she closes her eyes. She tries to wish herself into the dream again, down to the freezing, silent wastes where no one will ever find her, that night without mornings or horizons and only the blind, indifferent fish and Niki’s fraying ghost for company. But it’s deserted her, left her stranded here in this white antiseptic place choked with sunlight and people determined to keep her alive.

  “You almost died on that goddamn plane,” Alex says. “You heard what the doctor said. Your fucking heart stopped beating, and you were real fucking lucky that they didn’t have to take you straight from the bloody airport to the morgue.”

  “She’s dead, Alex.”

  “Yeah, Daria, she’s dead. She jumped off a fucking bridge, and if you’d been there maybe it wouldn’t have happened, maybe she wouldn’t have killed herself until next month, but you weren’t there, and now she’s dead, and that’s something you’re going to have to find a way to get through.”

  “You’re a son of a bitch,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut tighter, tasting her own hot tears leaking into her mouth, salt and snot and stingy drops of herself her body can’t spare. Alex has started tapping his fingers hard against the side of the bed or the table with the blue pitcher, and she wants to scream at him to stop, to fuck off and let her be alone.

  “Right. Maybe that’s exactly what I am,” and Daria thinks he doesn’t sound half so angry as he did a moment before, that he sounds more like someone who only wishes he could stop talking before he makes things worse. “Maybe I’m a son of a bitch, and I’m sorry as hell about what happened to Niki. But you didn’t kill her and I’m not going to let you lie there and convince yourself that you did.”

  “You don’t know,” she says. “You don’t have any idea,” and she opens her eyes, is about to tell him to please stop tapping his fucking fingers when she sees the white bird perched on the windowsill. It pecks at the glass with its beak, three times in quick succession, tap-tap-tap, then stares at her through the glass, its tiny, keen eyes the color of poisonous berries.

  Do not fail her.

  The Hierophant will need you, at the end.

  “Oh God,” she whispers. “Turn around. Turn around and tell me that you see it, too.”

  Alex doesn’t turn around, but he glances over his left shoulder and then back at her, and she can tell from his expression that he doesn’t see the white bird, that he doesn’t see anything there at all.

  “What is it?” he asks. “What do you see?” and How am I supposed to pretend there’s nothing there? she thinks, unable to take her eyes off the white bird. How can I pretend there’
s nothing, when it’s right there, looking in at me?

  “Daria, tell me what’s wrong.”

  “A bird,” she says, “a white bird,” and he glances at the window again.

  “I don’t see a bird. I don’t see anything.”

  “I know,” she whispers, and the bird pecks at the glass.

  Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.

  “I saw it on the plane, after Niki came to me, right after the pain started.”

  Alex rubs at his furrowed eyebrows and sighs. “That was a dream. You know that was a dream. I heard you tell the doctor—”

  “Maybe I only thought it was a dream,” she says and wipes her nose with the back of her hand, speaking as softly as she can because she’s afraid of frightening the bird away. Or she’s afraid it will hear her, and she’s not sure which. “Maybe I was wrong.”

  “There’s nothing out there, Daria,” and he turns and walks across the room to the big windowpane, stands silhouetted against the garish Colorado sunset and raps hard on the glass with his knuckles. The white bird doesn’t fly off, but it glares up at him and ruffles its feathers.

  “What if you’re not supposed to see it?” she asks, and the bird looks away from Alex and goes back to watching her. “Maybe it’s only here for me, so I’m the only one who can see it.”

  Tap-tap-tap.

  “Jesus, it’s right there.”

  “Screw this,” Alex mutters. “I’m going to get a nurse,” and he starts for the door, but she yells at him to stop. On the windowsill, the bird blinks its red eyes and cocks its head to one side.

  “You’re sick, and you’re very tired,” he says, and she can hear the strained, brittle force in his voice, a thin disguise for exasperation and his own fatigue; he shakes his head and rubs at his eyebrows again. “You’re hallucinating. It might be a reaction to the medication, or even DTs.”

  “I don’t have the fucking DTs.”

  “How the bloody hell do you know that? You’re an alcoholic, and you haven’t been really sober since God wore diapers. How long’s it been since you had a drink? Hell, must be coming up on at least ten or eleven hours now, right?”

  “Alex, I’d know if it was DTs.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. That’s why they call it bleeding delirium.”

  Daria looks back at the window, and the white bird is still there, head cocked, its white feathers tinted ruddy by the fading day, its eyes so fiercely intent she knows that she’d go blind if she stared into them too long. And maybe, she thinks, she has gone crazy, and that’s her punishment for all the years she spent denying the things she saw in Birmingham, that terrible, impossible night in Spyder Baxter’s old house on Cullom Street. Her punishment for the lies she told Marvin and Dr. Dalby, for the way she treated Niki, and it would serve her right if she spends the rest of her life locked up somewhere, babbling about white birds and ghosts and the nightmares she’s kept secret for almost a decade.

  “If you get a nurse, I’ll just say I didn’t see it. I’ll tell them I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “If it’s a reaction to the medication—”

  “Then I’ll get better, or it’ll kill me. Right now, I don’t really care, either way.”

  The bird taps impatiently, insistently, at the glass, and Daria shuts her eyes, trying to remember everything that Niki said to her on the plane. All the parts she’s already told the doctors, because they wanted to know everything that happened to her, everything she felt, and all the parts she held back. Niki in her blue coat, asking her to make promises she couldn’t keep, Niki frightened and desperate and rambling on and on about breakfast at a truck stop with jackalopes and something that she’d buried in the ground on a cold December morning ten years before.

  “I don’t care what you tell them,” Alex says. “You can tell them the Pope’s joined the bleeding C of E for all I care, but I’m going to get a nurse.”

  “Fine,” Daria replies. “It’s just as well,” and she peels the two strips of tape off her skin and yanks the IV from her arm. There’s only a little blood, not as much as she expected, and the trickle of saline from the hollow stainless-steel needle.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing now?” Alex demands, and the bird caws and taps approvingly at the thick glass.

  “I’m getting out of here. So you go and find that nurse. Or a doctor. I’m sure there’s going to be an assload of paperwork.”

  “Bollocks. You had a goddamn heart attack. You’re not going anywhere until—”

  “I don’t believe that you or anyone else can stop me. Not unless the laws in Colorado are a hell of a lot different from the laws in California, and I don’t think they are. Where did they put my clothes?” And Daria sits up, one hand covering the puncture in her left arm, and she swings her legs over the side of the bed. But then her stomach rolls and her head spins, and she has to sit still and wait for the dizziness and nausea to pass. From the window, the white bird spreads its wings wide, flaps them a few times, then starts pecking at the glass again.

  “Look at you. You can hardly sit up straight, and you think you’re well enough to leave.”

  “I don’t know whether or not I’m well enough to leave. I just know there’s something I have to do, something for Niki, and I can’t do it lying here.”

  “Niki is dead,” Alex growls, and then he’s standing directly in front of her, his strong hands on her shoulders like he means to hold her down if that’s what it takes. “There’s nothing else you can do for Niki. Right now, the only person you have any chance of helping is yourself.”

  “Take your hands off me,” she says, blinking back the last of the dizziness, and when she looks him in the eyes it’s easy to see how scared and confused he is, easy to see that he’s only going through the motions because these are the words he thinks he should be saying. Something he heard in a movie or a television show, borrowed resolve, secondhand determination, and “Take your hands off me,” she says again, and he does.

  “Do you think you have to kill yourself now, because you couldn’t save her? Is that it?”

  “I need my clothes, Alex.”

  “Then you can bloody well find them yourself,” he says and turns to leave, is halfway to the door when he pauses to look at the window again, and Daria looks, too. But the white bird is gone, if it was ever really there.

  “I can’t do what you did, Dar. Maybe that makes me an arsehole, but I can’t waste my time trying to help someone who won’t even try to help herself,” and then he leaves the room and pulls the door shut behind him, and she’s alone with the window and the setting sun and the not-so-distant mountains turning black and purple, stretched out like a barricade beneath the darkening sky.

  After the bamboo gates are raised for them, and Spyder leads Niki from the ramparts of bone through narrow, serpentine streets, streets filled with shadows and lantern pools and nervous, suspicious whispers, they come, finally, to a tall door the color of butterscotch candy. It has a tarnished brass knocker and a symbol Niki doesn’t recognize painted in red. Spyder knocks four times, waits a moment, and then knocks once more.

  “So, when will the sun come up again?” Niki asks, craning her neck to glimpse the uneven sliver of night sky exposed above and between the steep walls and steeper rooftops of the closely packed houses. Those whirling, alien stars, writhing points of blue-white fire, and Niki wishes there were anything up there she recognized, anything sane, a dipper or a bear, Polaris or a zodiac lion.

  “Later,” Spyder replies and knocks again, and Niki isn’t sure if she means that the sun will come up later or that Spyder will answer the question later, but she doesn’t ask which. Her feet hurt almost as much as her bandaged hand, and she just wants a place to lie down, a place to sleep and not have to think about everything that has or hasn’t happened since she left the hotel on Steuart Street. Maybe she can figure it all out later, or maybe she’ll wake up in the room with Marvin and lie there staring at the ceiling, forgetting this dream a
nd relieved that she never has to see those stars again.

  “I need to sleep, and I need to take my meds,” she says, and Spyder turns and glares at her, the gem between her eyes pulsing softly to some silent, secret rhythm.

  “You can’t take those pills anymore. Not here.”

  “I can’t just stop like that. I’ll get sick. You can’t just stop taking Klonopin, Spyder. I might have seizures or convulsions or something.”

  “Not in this place. You don’t need that shit here. I should have made you dump it all into the sea.”

  And before Niki can argue with her, the butterscotch door opens and candlelight spills across the threshold. The old woman clutching the candlestick is very thin, a stooped scarecrow of a woman in shabby gray robes, and she stares out at them from the matted salt-and-pepper hair that frames the angles of her pale face. Her eyes are open so wide that Niki can see the whites all the way around the irises, and she looks scared or surprised or both.

  “Weaver,” she whispers, her thin lips drawing the word out, stretching it so it becomes almost another word entirely. “We feared you were lost. We’d almost given you up for dead. There were signs—”

  “There were complications,” Spyder tells her. “The Dragon is closer than I thought.”

  And then the old woman seems to notice Niki for the first time; her eyes grow even wider, and she puts one bony hand over her mouth. “Is it truly her?” she asks, mumbling between her fingers. “Is this the Hierophant?”

  “Are you going to make us stand out here on the doorstep all night long?” Spyder asks impatiently, but the old woman is still staring at Niki and doesn’t answer her.

  “By the spokes,” she whispers, and a dank, salt-scented breeze causes the flame of her candle to gutter. “That I should ever have lived to see such a thing. Better I’d died a child.”

  “It’s cold out here, Eponine Chattox,” Spyder says. “We’ve walked all the way from the Palisades, and we’re hungry and need to rest.”