“Have a look at your hand,” he said. His voice was thick, a rich golden brown that thrummed in my ears and did nothing to ease my discomfort.
Glowering, I slowly eased upright and removed my damaged, dirty glove. It revealed soft white skin, as pale as magnolias and nearly lineless. The hand that had been pinned with the shard was now seamlessly repaired, and to my surprise, no longer covered in blood. I flexed my fingers experimentally. There was a deep twinge in my palm, but I could form a fist and bend my fingers back and not scream.
“Not bad,” he said. “Not my best work, but I was fighting that HookWyrm the entire time. That, and I literally feel like something a dog threw up on the sidewalk.”
“You smell quite a bit nicer than that.” I only realized what I’d said after I said it. “I mean… you smell like a mage. Magic. Thank you.”
His expression curled into slyness with incredible mobility. He pinched his tongue between his teeth as he smiled, a weirdly sensual gesture I’d never seen a person make before.
I cleared my throat, glancing down. He was still mostly undressed, and averting my eyes from his face didn’t help. “Where is Talya?”
“She’s busy eating one of the dead guys outside.” Angkor shrugged and reached for the jar of honey. “She’ll be fine once she’s had enough calories. We’ll know she’s shifted back when we hear hysterical screaming.”
While Angkor spooned honey out of the jar and ate it like yogurt, I picked myself up off the bed. My muscles were stiff with fatigue, but it was not the screaming hot pain of deep wounds and burgeoning infection. The deepest punctures still hurt, and they still felt like lacerations, but they were no longer three inches deep. Manageable. I pulled my ruined glove back on and offered Angkor a hand.
“Thanks.” He got to his feet, the teaspoon still in his mouth. He’d eaten about half the jar, but his dark skin was still greenish with exertion and he swayed to balance. His face and hair were damp with sweet floral sweat that clung like perfume to his body. It was mouthwatering and infuriating at the same time.
“You shouldn’t have exerted yourself,” I said. “You’re not going to be good for anything now.”
“I just need something to eat,” he said. “No chance of that for a long time, though.”
“We have food,” I replied. “Can you take your own weight? I need both hands to properly use a pistol.”
He replied by gently freeing himself from my support. His expression was one of focused will. Sick as he was, he had the air of someone used to pushing his body to limit. “Not the kind of food I can eat. I’m a Hound. I hunt Gift Horses.”
I felt the parasite throb with a dull echo as my mind instinctively tried to synapse with Kutkha and failed. I caught up the Wardbreaker, fighting the urge to level it at Angkor’s face. “You… hunt them? For food?”
“Hunt. Capital H. I’m a keeper of the Pact.” He turned to me, and quirked his lips with a lazy feline smile. “Though if you let me suck you off, that would do.”
My mouth opened, then closed. My teeth clacked together. “Wh-?”
“You possess the raw essence of life.” He gestured with his head towards my crotch. “You know, that whole Crowley ‘fire within the reed’ thing? HuMan pleasure is hard tack rations for a Hound, but it does the job.”
I’d never wanted to backpeddle away in mortified horror and lunge forward to snap someone’s neck at the same time. Immovable object and irresistible force combined to leave me burning scarlet, furious and confused. After a moment of fraught, painful tension, I took a single step away from him. “Uhh… no. Thank you.”
“Okay, that’s fine. I just noticed that you had a bit of a ‘reaction’ before, and I was like ‘Hi there! Maybe he’d be interested.’” He held up his hands in surrender, and I had the momentary image of pinning his slender wrists back against the wall and digging my fingers in until he gasped in pain and threw his head back, bearing the long line of his throat.
As my pulse throbbed and my head pounded and my body did things I wasn’t sure I wanted it to do for a man, ever, I did the only sane thing. I bought my gun up and retreated as fast as I could, jaws clenched, breath coming hard and fast through flared nostrils.
“Hey, Alexi, we can’t do this.” Angkor held up his hands “Do you want DOGs? Because this is how we get DOGs.”
“The fuck is wrong with you?” This wasn’t the kind of thinking and feeling a professional wetworker could never allow to clutter his mind.
“Seriously. Don’t ever point a gun at a Hound.” The sensual promise drained from his face, leaving it sharp and hard and focused. “When I look down the Black, the NO looks back. It sends demons through the gun, Alexi. Big bad ones. You should know that for a fact.”
It took me a moment to digest his words over the humiliating, painful rush of blood to my various organs, and the furious sense of threat that overwhelmed sense, overwhelmed rational thought.
Sense and reason. I was a mage, even if I was a crippled one. My Will asserted itself, and I lowered the muzzle of the pistol, grinding my teeth until they creaked. “I know what DOGs are, you patronizing... you..."
The memory of Zane's earnest confession stopped me from using the slur, and it died on my lips. In years past, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about saying something like that, but Angkor and Zane had both saved my life. I could learn.
Angkor sighed, though from relief or exasperation, it was hard to say. I knew one thing: he wasn’t scared of me, except perhaps for the awareness that he was in danger of being shot or DOG-bit. You could pretend calm in a situation, but there were just some things you couldn’t fake. His pupils were normal. He wasn’t shaking. His hands were steady, and no sweat beaded on his upper lip. I might as well have been pointing a remote control at him.
“Look, I’m sorry. I’ve had a rough few weeks. My mouth is working faster than my brain.” He lowered his hands, voice thick with contrition. “And I’m not used to Hounds being so…euun… chaste?”
“If they’re not chaste, then I’m not a Hound.” My eyes narrowed.
“Well… technically…” Angkor shuffled in place, biting his lip for a moment. “If you’ve ever eaten the flesh of a Gift Horse, you’re a Hound. It marks you for life. You maybe didn’t know it at the time, but when you ate that heart or drank that blood, your whole body dumped all of its old cells and regrew them on a slightly different genetic code. An improved code, in case you’re worried.”
“Are you serious?”
“There are all these ancient viruses written into our DNA. Gift Horse blood kind of… cleans them up a bit.” Angkor shifted his hips in a way that drew my eye and sent a fresh injection of imagery and confusion straight to the brainstem. “So, when I was healing you, I could see all the signatures of Horseflesh. I wasn’t like, trying to pry or anything. I had to make sure everything I did was in line with your body’s code, or ‘fast healing’ turns into ‘catastrophic cell die-off’ pretty quickly.”
“Noted.” Rescuing this man from the Deacon and his merry band of eyeless freaks was beginning to look like yet another poor decision on my part, but I couldn’t deny that he’d hooked me with something I’d been craving for weeks, maybe months. Knowledge. Deep, powerful knowledge of a subject that I’d only begun to skim.
I was reaching for the bedroom doorknob when a high-pitched female shriek of horror ripped through the air. I winced as dark blue and white flashed behind my eyes.
“Ah, there we go.” Angkor sighed, and held the pistol cupped as he drew up beside me and peered around the edge of the door. “The Lion King has left the building. And now the crying starts.”
Chapter 34
We sidled out into the hall like a fire team, careful to look up as well as around on our way out. Talya’s sobbing racked the tattoo parlor, louder and louder as we reached the entry to the tiled room. She was nude, slumped on her knees, alternately flapping her hands and trying to bury her face in them. The floor looked like someone had been fi
ngerpainting in blood. Her hands were covered in it, and she’d managed to smear it over her belly, thighs and hair in her desperation to get clean.
“Talya, Talya, come on, it’s going to be okay.” Angkor passed me the pistol and went to her empty-handed, crouching down in front of her and catching her wrists as she tried to claw at herself again. “It’s going to be okay, alright.”
“Ya… s’yel… ya s’yeh-s’yeh-“ She was hiccoughing so hard that she couldn’t get the words out. It was clear she was beyond English. I kept the guns at my sides and down low as I joined Angkor to the side of her.
“You did nothing wrong,” I said to her in Russian. “Talya, listen to me.”
“I ate them!” She shrieked at me in the same language. “This stupid thing… this… other me… it… I..!”
Her words cut as she retched, clasping at her stomach, and then vomited a bloody mess of torn fabric and metal onto the ground. I stepped back as she went to hands and knees, throwing up what looked like sections of zippers and D-ring buckles, pieces of half-digested nylon and plastic. Anything she’d eaten that was inorganic came up again. Angkor winced, and patted Talya on the back as she choked and hacked.
“Oh my god.” She caught the three words out in a strangled grunt before it kept on going.
“Listen to me.” I went to one knee on her other side, trying to avoid the blood and gristle on the floor. “Listen. These men were dead. They were already gone, Talya. You did what you needed to do to live.”
“No, no no no no.” Talya heaved and wept, her face a red mess of tears, blood and snot. She looked no older than twelve like this, her tenuous maturity stripped away by trauma. The violent retching was already beginning to subside. Weeder bodies were as efficient as they were alien.
“It’s alright,” I said. “You didn’t hurt anyone. Your Chiah, your Ka, it knew they were gone. It wanted you to live.”
She peered at me through swollen eyes, and then at Angkor. Wordlessly, she knelt back, and then folded against his chest and curled her fingers in against his skin, shoulders hunched, head bowed. He held her close, one hand around her back, the other over her hair, and murmured wordlessly as he rocked her. I stayed down, unsure of what to do, but suspecting that it required staying in place to provide support or comfort, or at least a translation.
Angkor seemed to know what he was doing, at least, and Talya gradually sagged into his arms. The hiccoughing and gulping slowed.
“I’m sorry,” she rasped. “I can’t control it. I don’t even remember wh-what happened.”
“You were hurt very badly,” I replied. “Duke freed Vanya and fought his way out to help him escape. He went the same way as Mason. It’s that knife he was stabbed with, I’m sure of it.”
“I can guarantee it is,” Angkor said grimly. “The Temple have StainedGlass weapons.”
“Somehow, I doubt you’re talking about artful church windows. Tell me everything in the car,” I said. “We need to get back to the clubhouse, and soon. Vanya has an army at his command. He’s the Organizatsiya’s recruitment specialist. If he’s got mental sway over Duke and Duke talks, he’ll lead them straight to the clubhouse.”
“Josie’s in there. Clubhouse. Clothes.” Talya croaked. She pushed herself back gently from Angkor, and I looked away as she stood and stumbled away into the house.
“Man… she’s so young,” Angkor said, once she had left.
“She’s not that young. Even someone hardened in the street would have a fit if they inadvertently committed cannibalism.” I picked myself up and started for the bedroom. I needed my holsters, my familiar, and the other small things I had left over from my trip to the warehouse.
“I don’t mean her HuMan self. I mean her entire Axon. Her soul, you know.” Angkor shook his head. “She’s a freshly minted shocktrooper. The latest in Anti-Morphorde technology.”
“But the American Lion is extinct,” I called back.
“Exactly,” he said. “When prehistoric super-predators start getting incarnated back on a world like this, it’s a really bad sign.”
The trip to the clubhouse was tense. I drove with Binah riding on my shoulder, her face to the wind as she meowed excitedly out of the car window. Talya was huddled in the front seat, a sheathed machete in her lap. Angkor took up the backseat. He had claimed Talya’s shotgun and the axe that Duke had tried to murder me with. Now that we were on the road, he was all business. When I checked in the rear-view mirror, he had his eyes closed, his face still and composed with the quiet concentration of a magus. He was surely communing with his Neshamah. It made me sick with envy to see it.
“You said something about stained glass weapons before, Angkor.” I called back to him, pushing the car as fast as I dared. We really, really did not need to be pulled over tonight.
“StainedGlass. Say it like a German noun. Like you’re capitalizing words together.” He didn’t open his eyes. “You seem pretty smart. How much do you know about the history of the Wars?”
“Some of it. Please feel free to rehash.”
Angkor sighed. “Short version of the history of Everything is that our reality is basically a huge beastie floating in a sea of hostile nothingness, right? It used to have a shell. That shell was Eden, also called the Ah-Za-Naur, or the Glass Land. The shell got broken when the NO-thing figured out how to mimic the behavior of living things. It broke the shell and the whole thing collapsed like a cell wall.”
“Something about him becoming thirty thousand miles tall. But the first virus, in essence,” I said.
“Right. So the pieces of Eden got scattered all around the Theosphere. Most of those shards were absorbed by GOD’s body as it began to stir up from the sudden pain and exposure. A lot of them embedded, still healthy and vital, but small. Some of them, especially the powder fragments, got infected and turned bad, and they’re in evidence in the world around us today. You know how viruses have those thirty-sided crystalline heads? In biology, we call those things nucleocapsids: they’re this bizarre crystal structure that carries the payload of RNA that a virus uses to change a cell.”
“Right.”
“That nucleocapsid head of a virus is like nothing else in nature, and that’s basically because they’re tiny fragments of a ruined Eden. The common name for this is StainedGlass, because, you know.”
Talya shuddered on the seat beside me, her hands tightening around the machete.
“StainedGlass is a kind of monster in its own right, once it gains enough mass. It carries a kind of Morphorde called a Yen.” Angkor’s eyes flickered open. “Yen is a virus that attacks your soul. It goes straight for your Phitonic mass, which is like… the energy that powers you to exist in concept and in reality. It corrupts you and turns you into a vector. It’s one of the few Morphorde that can infect Weeders. With enough Phi, it can replicate itself into shards big enough to be shaped into weapons.”
“Like the sacrificial knife the Deacon was using.” Fear lanced through my chest, and I gripped the steering wheel more tightly. “I was stabbed with glass like you describe. Mason vomited it on me.”
“Yeah,” Angkor said. “You were.”
I pressed my lips together. “Will I have this Yen?”
“HuMans have more resistance to Yen than Weeders do,” he said. “Because we’ve got a barrier between us and our soul. What the virus does is tempt you to break the wall down. They call it a Yen because it causes hungers of various kinds. Physical, sexual. You start wanting more and more stimulation, and depraved behavior scratches the itch. You rape, you wallow in filth, you crave money, power, fame. It eats at you until you break down and it can get into your soul. It’s like rabies in that way, but instead of needing to bite people to feel relief, you do nasty shit to yourself and other people.”
“Or children,” I said.
“Yeah.” Angkor shifted uncomfortably. “Or children. But I think you’re going to be okay until we get the HookWyrm out. If you have it, you’ll know once you’re back in contact w
ith your Axon.”
Turn signals, change lanes, take the exit. The air was becoming hazy, and it smelled unpleasant. I focused on the moment, moving through the familiar activity of driving to clamp down on the nausea curdling in my gut. “Is there a cure for it?”
“Yeah. Gift Horse blood.”
Well, we were all out of that. I’d killed the only Gift Horse I knew of. I turned onto Marcy Street, and slowed as the haziness thickened to fog and smoke that pressed through the gaps in the windows and doors. It stank, sweet and rotten and pungent. It obliterated the sky in a brownish-violet miasma, but further down the road, we could see red and orange light struggling violently against the cloak of filthy magic.
Strange Kitty was burning.
Chapter 35
Small figures passed in and out of the fray on the road ahead, and then a large one as an insectoid creature stumbled down the gravel pathway. It was a skeletal black scorpion the size of a minivan, screeching through three severed heads that had been melded into one tri-lobed horror. Its back was on fire, and it was hacking at small figures swarming around its feet.
“Brace!” I gunned the engine and aimed the car.
Wide-eyed, Talya fumbled the machete out of its sheathe as we thundered down the road. The rats and possums that were attacking the scorpion scattered when they saw us thundering towards them, but the Morphorde only spun around, front legs raised like a tarantula’s. The car was big enough and the hood sturdy enough that we hit the DOG like a snowplough. It screamed with a high, tortured whistling sound as its legs crumpled and it collapsed. I backed up, tires screeching on the wet road, and drove at it again as it stumbled up to its knees and coughed a gout of slime onto the hood. The stuff melted the windscreen where it spattered, but it rolled off the paint and we hit it with a satisfying crunch. The Morphorde went under the wheels, limbs flailing.
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