Armor of Roses and The Silver Voice

by Marjorie M. Liu

  So we walked, we limped, we hobbled down the sidewalk; and we were not alone. It was a crowded Saturday night. People everywhere, young and old.

  And demons. My demons. My little boys.

  Red eyes glinted in the shadows, watching us from cracks beneath closed doors and in the spokes of hubcaps. Above my head I heard whispers, and the rasp of claws against stone; and another kind of hum in the air that was partially from the throats of the demons in my hair, but mostly the city: engines rumbling low and warm, and the thrum of hot electricity running through the veins of the buildings around whose roots we walked. I heard laughter, glass breaking, a throb of music from the open door of a bar; a groan from an alley and the long liquid rush of urine hitting concrete; and a small dog, barking furiously from an apartment above our heads.

  I saw no zombies in the crowd. Zombies, who were not the living dead, but humans possessed by parasitic demons who had managed for millennia to slip through cracks in the prison veil. The parasites could take over a weak mind, and turn a human host into little more than a puppet, a means of creating pain and misery: dark energy that was more than food.

  We reached the parking lot, a parcel of concrete stuck between two office towers and bordered by a low wall covered with thick ivy and splashes of graffiti. Claws rasped, and I glanced to my right as Zee tumbled from the shadows beneath a scarred Pontiac.

  He was only as tall as my knee, mostly humanoid, and preferred to stand with his shoulders hunched, the tips of his black claws dragging against stone and leaving narrow grooves. His small face was angular as the point of a knife, each thick strand of his hair razor sharp. A series of spikes rode down the length of his spine. His skin was the color of coal mixed with mercury, and I knew from experience that it was indestructible. Nothing could kill Zee or his brothers.

  But the party in the ocean was over. His red eyes were solemn. I straightened with concern, as did Grant. Dek and Mal, who had begun to poke their heads from my hair, went very still.

  “Maxine,” he rasped. “Got company.”

  Grant glanced ahead, to his left where the Mustang was parked in the maze of cars, and narrowed his gaze. “One person. His aura is weak.”

  Weak. Which was another word for dying. I gave him a quick look, then slid out from under his arm, kicked off my heels, and flew across the concrete on light, silent feet. Raw appeared from under a car, bounding ahead of me to sweep broken glass out of my way. He was a blur of darkness beneath the strained cold fluorescent streetlight, and thankfully, no one else was around to see him.

  The same could not be said for the man bleeding to death in front of my car.

  He was on the ground, propped against the bumper with his cheek resting on chrome. Old man, maybe in his seventies—mostly bald, with a ring of feathery hair around the back of his head that was white as snow. Hands large and grizzled as leather meat hooks clutched his stomach, blood seeping through his fingers.

  A lot of blood. He was sitting in a puddle of it, and even in the bad light I could see that his dark slacks were as glistening and soaked as the white dress shirt that stretched crimson across his soft torso.

  His closed eyes snapped open when I was less than three feet away. A brilliant blazing gaze, sharp with pain—but even sharper with intelligence. He looked at me with such intensity, I stopped in my tracks, swaying.

  “Finally,” he whispered, his English heavily accented, though I could not place the origin.

  I heard the rushed click of a cane behind me, but it was a dim sound compared to the roaring in my ears. “Sir. We’re going to help you.”

  I snapped my fingers. Moments later a wad of gauze padding was flung at me from the shadows beneath a car. The old man did not seem to notice, which was what I had hoped for—though I could not account for the way he looked at me, with hungry recognition, as though I was someone he had not seen in years.

  I picked up the gauze, and held out my hands. “Don’t be afraid.”

  He grimaced. “Never. You look . . . the same.”

  I froze, and then forced myself to move again, stepping close, walking barefoot in his blood. It was shockingly warm, and squelched beneath my toes.

  He had not been shot. Stabbed, multiple times in the same spot. Defensive wounds covered his arms, and there was a gash along his throat that I had not seen earlier.

  I reached for him. “Sir, move your hand. I have something to put on your wound.”

  The old man shifted, but it was to reach into his pocket. I did not pay attention to what he removed, but crouched close, pressing the gauze against his wound and pushing down. He groaned, panting for air. Trembling so violently his teeth chattered. Pink foam flecked his lips.

  I glanced over my shoulder. “Grant.”

  “I called nine-one-one,” he muttered, drawing near. “Five minutes, they said.”

  We did not have five minutes. I glanced down at my right hand, at the armor glinting along my fingers, and tightened my jaw. I could do this. I could move us through space to a hospital. I could even take us back in time, though that posed a whole other range of risks.

  But I never got the chance. The old man grabbed my hand, and squeezed with surprising strength—staring into my eyes with that same unnerving intensity. “You have to end it. We thought . . . it was over, but we were wrong. We were wrong . . . and she tried . . . to warn us.”

  I stared, but the old man was not delirious. There was too much clarity in his eyes, a profound need that was hard and cold, even terrifying. His desperation was the only thing keeping him alive—but that was fading, too.

  “Maxine Kiss,” he whispered, chilling me to the bone. “I have a . . . message . . . from Jean.”

  I knew only one Jean. My grandmother.

  Heat roared through me. He pushed something into my blood-soaked hand. A flat plastic card, and a flap of leather.

  “Finish what she started.” He breathed brokenly, but I was too numb to ask him what he meant. The old man’s eyes fluttered shut.

  “Maxine,” Grant murmured, bent over his cane, his fingers brushing my shoulder. “He’s almost gone. I can see it.”

  Even I could see that. My eyes burned from seeing it. I heard sirens in the distance, and Zee crept close on all fours, peering at the dying old man with peculiar familiarity. Raw and Aaz were close behind him, twins in every way except for a dash of silver on Raw’s chin. Dek and Mal uncoiled from my hair, making small sounds of distress.

  “Ernie,” Zee rasped, but the old man did not open his eyes. All his intensity, his desperation, had bled out of him. His breathing slowed. His muscles relaxed.

  I watched him die.

  Grant’s hand tightened on my shoulder. I sat very still, hardly able to breathe—afraid to breathe—a small part of me crushed with inexplicable grief. I did not know this man, but I felt like I should have. I should have.

  Zee sighed, running his claw through the old man’s spreading blood. He placed the tip on his tongue, tasting, and glanced over his shoulder at the others, shaking his head. I would have to ask, but not yet. I could hardly swallow around the lump in my throat, and there was an ambulance coming; and with them, the police.

  I tore my gaze from the old man, and glanced down at what he had given me. The plastic card was a hotel key, and I held it up over my shoulder. Grant took the key without a word, and slid it quickly into his pocket.

  The other item was far less mundane. It was leather, and covered in an intricately inked design that resembled roses. But it was not normal leather. At least, not from anything that had moved on four legs.

  I was holding a flap of human skin.

  2

  NO escape. The old man named Ernie was dead in front of my Mustang, but even if his body hadn’t been blocking the car, it would not have felt right to simply leave him. He had been murdered. Murdered,
while looking for me. And those two things, I feared, were related.

  The police arrived with the ambulance. We stood aside as the EMTs checked the old man’s vital signs and came to the obvious conclusion. And then we stepped aside even more as the police cordoned off the area and took us back to their vehicle for questioning.

  Before they were done, a black sedan rolled up. Two familiar men got out. They took one look at us, whispered to each other, and then walked to the dead old man. Hovered, crouched, poked and prodded with latex gloves on their hands. I tried not to watch them. Or think about the hotel key and leather burning a hole in Grant’s pocket. Red eyes blinked lazily from the shadows, and two hot tongues rasped the back of my neck.

  When Detectives Suwani and McCowan were done with their cursory examination, they held three plastic bags, which they passed off to one of the uniforms waiting on the sidelines. Then, with careful deliberation, they walked over to where we were waiting.

  Suwani was a slender black man, not quite as tall as me, but lean, with a sinewy strength that started at his hands and wrists, and no doubt reflected the rest of his trim body. McCowan, on the other hand, had already lost most of his neck behind his sagging chin, and the rest of him was built like the love child of a dump truck and an elephant. Big, lumbering—kind of cute, kind of soft, kind of bullheaded—kind of this, kind of that, which I suspected was just a mask, given that his eyes were anything but dull or dithering.

  Suwani gave me a sharp once-over, but only McCowan stared at the low neck of my dress, his gaze traveling down my legs and then up again—barely reaching my face. Grant cleared his throat. “Gentlemen. I wish we could have met again under better circumstances.”

  I wished we had not met again at all, but those were the breaks. Suwani nodded, and looked at me. “Did you know the victim?”

  “No,” I said. “We were coming back from a party, and found him in front of my car.”

  “You have a bad habit of collecting corpses,” McCowan replied. “Last time we met there was a dead man who had your name in his pocket. And now another corpse just happens to be found beside your car. You sure you didn’t know him? Or that he didn’t know you?”

  Grant frowned, and this time when he spoke there was a faint melody in his voice, soft and filled with a thread of that old familiar power. He could do things with his voice. Change people. He could reach inside the heart of a soul and make something new. I could not imagine a more dangerous ability—nor a man whom I trusted more to wield it.

  Grant was the last of the Lightbringers, just as I was the last of the Wardens, and the two of us should never have met. But we had, and now I was the only person who could keep him alive while he used his gift. We were bound together. Our hearts shared the same steady rhythm. Even now, I felt his pulse riding mine, soft and warm as a coil of sunlight.

  “What did you learn from his body?” Grant asked, his voice sliding through me with a shiver. I could not be affected by his power—nor the boys—but I felt the ripple nonetheless. Zee said it tickled. I had told the little demon that it made me uneasy.

  Suwani blinked. McCowan swayed ever so slightly. But then their gazes cleared, and the black detective coughed into his hand. “He had a gun in his possession. Recently fired. Shots were reported near here less than an hour ago. We were called out to investigate, which is why we arrived so quickly.”

  “He killed someone?”

  “We don’t know that,” Suwani said, and then frowned, as though he wasn’t quite certain why he was talking so much. “But there was a body, a young man. Heavy drug user. His arms were so eaten up with needle tracks he had started injecting into his leg.”

  “Anything else?” Grant held his gaze, but this time it was McCowan who stirred.

  “The old fellow’s name was Ernie Bernstein,” said the burly man, rubbing his brow as though he had a headache. “Israeli passport in his suit jacket, along with a thousand dollars cash. Nothing else on him except for that gun.”

  Nothing except a hotel key, and a piece of human skin.

  And a message from my grandmother, dead now for more than thirty years.

  THE distinction between human and animal skin was subtle, especially when aged and treated. Human skin was softer than animal, fine and supple, even more so than lamb; and thin, with a delicacy that belied its inherent strength. Most people would have been unable to tell the difference. That I could was not something that made me proud, but I had seen human skin before, dried and preserved for horrific reasons. It was not something I would ever forget. And it was on my mind now as Grant and I climbed the steps to his apartment: the entire top floor of the former furniture factory that housed his homeless shelter.

  The detectives had driven us home to the co-op. My car was part of evidence. Luckily, there were three little demons in my life who were capable of playing housekeeper when they wanted to, and when I had opened up that door—slowly—there were no knives to be found on those vintage leather seats; no chewed-up baseball bats, rusty nails, decapitated teddy bears, or issues of Playboy. Sixty seconds of good hard work. All they had left behind was a decorative square pillow that had not been there before, and that had I LOVE THE POLICE embroidered on it in big red letters.

  My boys. Such comedians.

  I carried my high heels in one hand, and held Grant’s with the other as he made his way slowly up the stairs. His jaw was tight, but not entirely with pain. It had been a hard night. Zee paced through the shadows ahead of us, while Dek and Mal—now that I was in a safe place—uncoiled from my neck and slithered down my arm to join Raw and Aaz in the shadows.

  “How long will you be gone?” Grant asked, when we were safe inside the apartment and its spacious golden comfort: oak floors, exposed brick, dark windows that filled the entire length of the southern wall—almost as many bookshelves built into the other. A grand piano stood in one corner, in addition to a cherry red motorcycle that Grant would never be able to ride again; and my mother’s trunk, pushed against the wall alongside the workstation where he carved all his flutes. His gold Muramatsu was the only exception, and lay gleaming upon the dining table.

  Zee and the others were suddenly nowhere to be seen. I headed directly to the bedroom, shedding my dress as I walked. Grant’s sharp intake of breath cut through my heart, and I tossed the slip of red silk at his face. I was wearing a lace thong and nothing else: a far cry from the cotton granny panties that usually covered my ass.

  “Not long.” I glanced over my shoulder, watching as he crumpled the dress against his chest and made a slow inspection of my nether regions. “And if I find any answers, I’ll come here first before I make any mission to mayhem.”

  “Hmm.” Grant limped after me, a bit more spring in his step. He dropped the dress and began unbuttoning his shirt, exposing his strong throat. The bow tie already hung loose beneath his collar. I turned to face him, backing into the bedroom, slowly enough that he caught up with me before I was hardly through the door. His gaze was dark with something deeper, more raw, than hunger, and I placed my hand against his chest, over his heart. I trembled, or maybe that was him. Both of us like kids.

  He covered my hand, and we stood unmoving. Just being with each other. As always when I was naked with Grant, he felt huge, permanent as a mountain, radiating heat as though lava burned beneath his skin. Immovable, resolute. I loved that feeling. I loved him.

  Grant brushed my cheek with the back of his fingers, his touch impossibly gentle, and then did the same to my breast. I held still, savoring the ache that spread through me; taking pleasure in the fact that we were here now, together, when everything in our lives said we should not be.

  “Be careful,” he said quietly.

  I kissed his throat. “You have ten minutes to show me how careful you want me to be.”

  THE name of the hotel written on the plastic key was Hotel Vintage Park. A quick Inter
net search had revealed that it was a boutique establishment located in downtown. I took Grant’s Jeep and drove fast, listening to the Strictly Ballroom soundtrack version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”

  Raw and Aaz sat in the passenger seat, legs dangling while they clutched teddy bear heads against their chests, white wispy stuffing trailing into their laps. Zee perched on my thigh, peering over the wheel at the road ahead of us. Dek and Mal, coiled around my shoulders, were busy singing a countermelody to the music on the CD player.

  “So,” I said. “Who was Ernie?”

  “Munchkin,” Zee rasped, placing his hands over mine to help me steer. “Little boy.”

  Not so little now. Not so alive. “My grandmother knew him when he was a child?”

  “War child,” replied the demon, leaning back against my chest to peer up at me with large red eyes. “Big bad war.”

  World War II. My grandmother had been in Hiroshima when the Americans dropped the bomb. Luckily for her, the blast had occurred during the day, while the boys slept on her skin. They had protected her until she could get free of the danger zone—just as they had protected me under similarly lethal circumstances. If I died, the boys would die—or so the family legend went. Ten thousand years of women, a single bloodline that Zee and his brothers had survived upon—and one that they had no intention of giving up.

  “I doubt Ernie was in Japan when my grandmother knew him,” I said. “Germany? Israel?”

  He picked at his sharp teeth with a long black claw. “China.”

  I frowned. “How and why?”

  “War,” he said again, simply, as though I should understand everything from that one word. Which I did not. Ernie Bernstein, I had guessed, was probably Jewish. And a Jewish child in China during World War II did not add up. Not yet, anyway.