by Gemma Files
Uh huh, Goss thought back, suddenly far too tired for fear, or even sorrow. So maybe it’s time to get the fuck out too, huh, while the going’s good? “Minish” yourself, like the old chant goes...
Perhaps, yes. For now.
He looked to Camberwell, who stood there shaking slightly, caught off-guard for once—amazed to be alive, it was fairly obvious, part-cut throat and all. Asking ‘Lij, as she dabbed at the blood: “What did you do, dude?”
To which ‘Lij only shook his head, equally freaked. “I...yeah, dunno, really. I don’t—even think that was me.”
“No, ‘course not: Yphemaal, right? Who sews crooked seams straight...” She shook her head, cracked her neck back and forth. “Only one of ‘em still building stuff, these days, instead of tearing down or undermining, so maybe it’s the only one of ‘em who really doesn’t want to go back, ‘cause it knows what’ll happen next.”
“Maaaaybe,” ‘Lij said, dubious—then grabbed his wound, like something’d just reminded him it was there. “Oh, shit, that hurts!”
“You’ll be fine, ya big baby—magic shit heals fast, like you wouldn’t believe. Makes for a great conversation piece, too.”
“Okay, sure. Hey...I saved your life.”
Camberwell snorted. “Yeah, well—I would’ve saved yours, you hadn’t beat me to it. Which makes us even.”
‘Lij opened his mouth at that, perhaps to object, but was interrupted by Hynde, his voice creaky with disuse. Demanding of Goss directly—
“Hey, Arthur, what...the hell happened here? Last thing I remember was doing pick-ups outside, and then—” His eyes fell on Journee, widening. “—then I, oh Christ, is that—who is that?”
Goss sighed, equally hoarse. “Long story.”
By the time he was done, they were all outside—even poor Journee, who ‘Lij had badgered Katz and Lao into helping roll up in a tarp, stowing her for transport in the back of the one blessedly still-operative truck Camberwell’d managed to excavate from the missile-strike’s wreckage. Better yet, it ensued that ‘Lij’s back-up sat-phone was now once again functional; once contacted, the production office informed them that border skirmishes had definitely spilled over into undeclared war, thus necessitating a quick retreat to the airstrip they’d rented near Karima town. Camberwell reckoned they could make it if they started now, though the last mile or so might be mainly on fumes.
“Better saddle up,” she told Goss, briskly, as she brushed past, headed for the truck’s cab. Adding, to a visibly gobsmacked Hynde: “Yo, Professor: you gonna be okay? ‘Cause the fact is, we kinda can’t stop to let you process.”
Hynde shook his head, wincing; one hand went to his chest, probably just as raw as Goss’s mouth-roof. “No, I’ll...be okay. Eventually.”
“Mmm. Won’t we all.”
Lao opened the truck’s back door and beckoned, face wan—all cried out, at least for the nonce. Prayed too, probably.
Goss clambered in first, offering his hand. “Did we at least get enough footage to make a show?” Hynde had the insufferable balls to ask him, taking it.
“Just get in the fucking truck, Lyman.”
—
Weeks after, Goss came awake with a full-body slam, tangled in his sleeping bag and coated with cold sweat, as though having just been ejected from his dreams like a cannonball. They were in the Falklands by then, investigating a weird earthwork discovered in and amongst the 1982 war’s detritus—it wound downward like a harrow, a potential subterranean grinding room for squishy human corn, but thankfully, nothing they’d discovered inside seemed (thus far) to indicate any sort of connection to the Seven, either directly or metaphorically.
In the interim since the Sudan, Katz had quit, for which Goss could hardly blame him—but Camberwell was still with them, which didn’t make either Goss or Hynde exactly comfortable, though neither felt like calling her on it. When pressed, she’d admitted to ‘Lij that her hunting “methods” involved a fair deal of intuition-surfing, moving hither and yon at the call of her own angel voice-tainted subconscious, letting her post-Immoelization hangover do the psychic driving. Which did all seem to imply they were stuck with her, at least until the tides told her to move elsewhere...
She is a woman of fate, your huntress, the still, small voice of Eshphoriel Maskim told him, in the darkness of his tent. Thus, where we go, she follows—and vice versa.
Goss took a breath, tasting his own fear-stink. Are you here for me? he made himself wonder, though the possible answer terrified him even more.
Oh, I am not here at all, meat-sack. I suppose I am...bored, you might say, and find you a welcome distraction. For there is so much misery everywhere here, in this world of yours, and so very little I am allowed to do with it.
Having frankly no idea what to say to that, Goss simply hugged his knees and struggled to keep his breathing regular, his pulse calm and steady. His mouth prickled with gooseflesh, as though something were feeling its way around his tongue: the Whisper-angel, exploring his soul’s ill-kept boundaries with unsympathetic care, from somewhere entirely other.
I thought you were—done, is all. With me.
Did you? Yet the universe is far too complicated a place for that. And so it is that you are none of you ever so alone as you fear, nor as you hope. A pause. Nonetheless, I am...glad to see you well, I find, or as much as I can be. Her too, for all her inconvenience.
Here, however, Goss felt fear give way to anger, a welcome palate-cleanser. Because it seemed like maybe he’d finally developed an allergy to bullshit, at least when it came to the Maskim—or this Maskim, to be exact—and their fucked-up version of what passed for a celestial-to-human pep-talk.
Would’ve been perfectly content to let Camberwell cut her own throat, though, wouldn’t you? he pointed out, shoulders rucking, hair rising like quills. If that—brother-sister-whatever of yours hadn’t made ‘Lij interfere...
Indubitably, yes. Did you expect anything else?
Yes! What kind of angels are you, goddamnit?
The God-damned kind, Eshphoriel Maskim replied, without a shred of irony.
You damned yourselves, is what I hear, Goss snapped back—then froze, appalled by his own hubris. But no bolt of lightning fell; the ground stayed firm, the night around him quiet, aside from lapping waves. outside, someone turned in their sleep, moaning. And beyond it all, the earthwork’s narrow descending groove stood open to the stars, ready to receive whatever might arrive, as Heaven dictated.
...There is that, too, the still, small voice admitted, so low Goss could feel more than hear it, tolling like a dim bone bell.
(But then again—what is free will for, in the end, except to let us make our own mistakes?)
Even quieter still, that last part. So much so that, in the end—no matter how long, or hard, he considered it—Goss eventually realized it was impossible to tell if it had been meant to be the angel’s thought, or his own.
Doesn’t matter, he thought, closing his eyes. And went back to sleep.
WHEN I’M ARMORING MY BELLY
Much later, he would recall the exact moment when he finally forgot his own name: Face-down on a bumpy mattress smelling of semen and Vicks, with Goran pushing and biting into him at once—dry drag and relentless ache, icy and burning in equal amounts, the full Isobel Gowdie daemon lover treatment. Wasn’t like it’d never happened before, and yet, that particular time…something broke, never to be repaired. He felt it run out of him like the blood itself, greedily lapped and savoured: Waste not, want not.
When they flipped him over, meanwhile, Cija came settling onto him from above like Fuseli’s nightmare or Munch’s red-headed whore-dream, her teeth almost meeting around the bed of one nipple—with him in too much nethermost pain even to fuck forward ‘til she made him, reached back to dip her too-sharp thumbnail right into the seat of his deep, laid-open hurt and pressed inward. His hips bucked in a jerky frenzy, and she just laughed to see it; that same laugh they all had, a rippling silver-glass tri
ll, delighted most by the spectacle of damage. Her insides milking him hard enough to bruise all the while, wet and tight and numbing-cold as a close-packed box of snow.
They gave him a bath that night, let the grime and blood soak off in rivulets, exposing all his wounds—healed and unhealed alike—to their careless exploration. Cija ran some sort of hotel shampoo-packet through his hair that smelled of sage and lemon, and exclaimed in surprise at the result: “Ve-ry pret-ty,” she said, her “outside voice” (as he’d come to call it in his own mind, to distinguish it from either the half-glimpsed roil of thought or that off-putting subvocal communication they used amongst themselves) just a bit too rough, too slow, still tinged with whatever original accent she’d had, even after being run through their million-year proto-tongue Creole as a filter.
Combing her claws carelessly outward from the roots of his overgrown mop, bangs drooping almost to his lower lip now, and scoring away a bit of beard as she did; he damn well knew he’d looked a whole lot pret-ti-er a half-year back, ‘round when he’d first started his tour through the circuit—before he’d stopped bathing, or shaving, or talking to anybody he could tell had a pulse. And complaining, as she did: “You smell like us, but you taste like them. It’s very confusing.”
Goran shrugged, licking his fingers clean. “Smells like us, specific, ‘cause we just got done rubbing ourselves all over him. He’s not a toy, Cija,” he warned.
“But he could be.”
And: Yes, he wanted to say, yeah, I could. I can be anything you want. Let me, please. Let me.
Please.
But it hurt too much, and he didn’t know who he was anymore, and then he was gone for a while—extinguished, snuffed out, like a black wax Sabbat candle. He’d been up for what seemed like months, always in transit, passed like a party favour from pride to pride; his fever for assimilation through emulation had spiked at last, and he slept well, dreamlessly. Cradled between corpses.
—
That first bunch of ‘em he’d met in an all-night highway strip-mall drugstore, somewhere considerably closer to home. He’d seen them coming from a literal mile away, knowing in his gut how they could see him, too: not just background noise, potential prey.
That he stood out to them in some way which intrigued, itched at them the way scar tissue did—some frequency they were all tuned to, him and them alike, though he only got the fuzz and the beat, most times. Static and hiss, lost between stations.
“You smell like us,” the first one to look directly at him said, words echoing magnified through his skull’s orbit, in-mouth/in-mind. And: “I dreamed of you,” he replied, eagerly. “Knew you was gonna be here.”
“Of vampires? Not so special. Many do.”
“No, I dreamed you: Saoirse, Owain, Chuyia. Y’all met near the Black Sea, on a pilgrimage to Chorazin, right? ‘There to salute the Prince of the Air.’”
The first one (Owain) simply kept on looking at him, blinkless eyes almost all-white between slitted white lashes, with a faint black ring ‘round each iris and pupils like chips of ice. While the second girl, Chuyia—chai-scented hair in a braid to her waist, one gold strand fringed with small coins linking nostril to earlobe on the left-hand side—cast her red-tinged gaze down at her bare, clawed feet, and murmured:
“…perhaps worth examining at…closer quarters…”
Saoirse tittered and stroked his cheek, her own eyes eight-ball haemorrhage black, each twisted nail frosted a different, inappropriately candy-bright colour. “He’s certainly warm enough to seem edible, at least. Whatever else he might turn out to be.”
Owain shrugged the idea away, like someone ugly-drunk was trying to feel him up. Said: “Just another bug-eater, another would-be tool. There’s a new one every mile in this damn country.”
“No, I ain’t like nothin’ you seen before—nothin’ like them, anyhow. Never have been. But I am like you. I mean…” Adding, desperate, as they just kept on staring, fixedly: “Why would I dream you, your names and lives and all, if I wasn’t?”
“Why indeed?” Chuyia murmured, as Owain hissed, dismissively. But there was just enough room for one more in the van, as it happened—and after all, they were already hungry.
Their nightside existence turned out to be built far less on glamour and magick than on endless boredom, constant flight. Enabling it was steady yet stultifying work, almost as brain-dead as any other crap job he’d ever had—all but the blood part, coming hand-in-whatever as it did with sex parts of every possible combination. Though even that wasn’t exactly the way the books and movies had warned it might be: They needed far less than anyone seemed to think in order to keep going, far more often. Five small meals a cycle, just like that Caveman Diet the girls’ magazines kept talking up.
So he settled into the routine, head-first. Drove during the day, when they were asleep; booked the rooms, rented storage spaces, made sure the windows were well-taped over by the time they woke and the evenings well-stocked with a steady stream of treats—hookers fresh enough not to be too diseased, experimenting students, runaway junkie-wannabes who hadn’t quite connected with the habit that’d kill ‘em yet. And now, never would.
He healed fast, thought on his feet, made a nice chew-toy—and he could at least pass for human still, which none of them could. once they’d all done him enough in enough different ways, though, that really was it; they were done with him, and made it more than plain, no matter how he pleaded. The most (and least) they could do before leaving was throw him to a new pride, so he could at least try getting what he wanted out of them awhile.
But the next bunch didn’t come across either, in the end—nor the next, nor the next after that. And slowly, he came to recognize that whatever mild affection any of ‘em might eventually develop for him was entirely predicated on points of difference rather than shared similarities, equally disturbing as they were on both their parts…that what had driven him towards them, in the first place, was exactly what inevitably drove them away in the opposite direction. That they liked him as he was, all (comparatively) weak, confused and buzzing with random pain—strong enough to take their abuse and live, to heal, but not scar-free. And never quite strong enough to stop them doing any damn thing they wanted with him, even if he’d thought to try.
Oh, they could enthrall, all right; he’d seen it done, on more occasions than he could count. But he was not in thrall to them, and never had been. What he did, he did with a clear mind and an even clearer conscience, willingly, in sure and certain hope of due recompense to come. of the Resurrection, and the Life.
What remained to be seen, however, was how many times a man could be lied to, and still keep on believing; much like any other faith in that way, he guessed, which he had to admit wasn’t really enough to keep him from being at least a little resentful.
Backsliding, his Momma used to call it, way back when—you know how to do right, just don’t wanna, do you, boy? ‘Cause there’s something in you that don’t fit with this world, something mean and dead and rotten to the core…and I’m gonna have to beat it from you like a damn rat-killing dog, ain’t I, so’s you’ll get at least a little better. Or so’s you won’t get no worse, anyhow…
Ignorant swamp-French bitch.
Momma kept Daddy in the old fall-out shelter under her own Daddy’s house, locked down fast, while her and him slept in a trailer in the front yard. At first, growing up, he’d thought it was some game they played between the two of ‘em, like other people’s parents did—but it went on far too long, never stopped. And one time she’d dragged him down there by the hair, twisting and kicking, with a cat she’d found him playing with hanging slack from her other hand: Let’s make this Daddy’s supper! Threw it in, then, and slammed the door again real quick. Made him watch what happened, after.
Holding him still all the while, his eyes peeled open with a thumb jammed in either corner ‘til stars bloomed at the limits of his vision, and whispered: This is why. Why you are the way you are. Why I gotta d
o like I do. ‘Cause you don’t wanna end up like that, do you, boy?
Nobody left alive could tell him exactly what had happened, though some certainly speculated (outside his earshot, as well as in it): Seemed fairly common knowledge how Daddy and Momma had married while still in school, Daddy swapping a low-grade sports career for injury and addiction, while Momma waitressed or hooked just enough to keep them both in generic prescription drugs. How he’d went out to score one night and came crawlin’ back at the crack of dawn, burned lobster-red, almost smoking; he knocked Momma down with a slap that unseated her upper-left bicuspid when she answered the door, then opened up a wound in her shoulder, and got busy.
And nine months later, in a sanguinary haze of emergency transfusions, that’s when he was born—with a full set of teeth, already snapping.
When he was old enough to make the highway on his own recognizance, he ran away; authorities brought him back real quick, so he just did it again and so on, ‘til she beat on him like he was a rug hung up to dry; daily, habitually, offhandedly. Like hurting him was her hobby. The last time, he made sure to wait ‘til she was asleep (roofies stirred in her beer, when she wasn’t looking), then set the house on fire. Tried to get Daddy to come with him when he saw him peering out through the shelter grate, but he just spat and yowled, and then it got too hot to stay. So either he survived or he didn’t, and then maybe they were back together in some better world, or at least well out of this one; he sometimes mused on how maybe he’d run across him on the circuit, one of these nights, so high he wouldn’t even remember how they were related.
Monsters are defined by what they prey on, what they hunt, Chuyia told him once, in a quiet moment. In the jungle, the most fearsome killers are those who know how to hide, to wait. To pretend. Because the best mask of all for strength is weakness, do you know that? Like Saoirse, with her I’m-lost, I’m-scared, Mister-help-me-please game; you’ve seen how efficient that is. And you would know that better than most, I think, at any rate: Little trap-door spider, so expert at concealment…do you even remember who you used to be, earlier that same night? Before you found us?
