“Who do you think it was?”
“I have no idea. It just makes me nervous.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t just -people looking for a place to get out of the rain for a few hours?”
“Maybe. Maybe seeing the city like this is just making me skittish. I’m scared.”
She puts some gauze on the wound and tapes it into place. I hate the feel of tape on my skin.
“If it happens again, call me. I’ll check out whoever it is.”
“Thanks. That makes me feel better. There. All done.”
I put on my shirt and coat. Allegra sees the dirt on my pants and boots.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Have you ever been in an ossuary?”
“I’m not sure I know what that is.”
“They have one in Paris. Vidocq will tell you about it. It’ll be great pillow talk.”
“It’s something gruesome, isn’t it?”
“I’ll let you be the judge.”
“Go home,” she says. “And stay in. Both of you.”
“That’s the plan.”
I start out and stop.
“Candy is going to be okay, right?”
Allegra washes her hands.
“She’ll be fine. I’m sure it’s just a Jade--specific virus or something. I’m reading up on it now. Don’t worry so much.”
I nod and head out the front.
“Tell Kas I’ll see him tonight,” says Fairuza.
“Have him show you his new hat. And make him tell you where it came from.”
I DON’T EXACTLY lie about who fixed up my neck when I get home, but when Candy guesses it was a Vigil medic, I don’t correct her. It will bug her if she knows I’ve been talking to Allegra, and after her being sick and my discovering I’m a serial killer suspect, it would be nice to have a few hours free from drama.
I listen to Candy practicing guitar downstairs in the rehearsal room. Fairuza comes over around eight and disappears with Kasabian into his inner sanctum. Chinese delivery shows up soon after. I watch Three Extremes upstairs. It’s all gloriously boring.
Candy comes up around eleven, bright--eyed and sweaty from practice. I haven’t seen her this happy in days. The sofa is wobbly from when we broke the leg, so we head for the bedroom, where the furniture is sturdier. The only casualty is a bedside lamp shaped like the Cowboy Bebop spaceship. Personally, I’m not sorry to see it go.
“I think you did that on purpose,” she says.
“I’d never do something that underhanded.”
“Right. Don’t worry. I intend to replace it with something more hideous and embarrassing.”
“I hope it doesn’t get broken too.”
“You better. Each new lamp I have to get will be worse than the one before. Trust me. I know where to get more cute kittens, talking robots, and pink monsters than you can shake your ass at.”
“Understood. I’ll guard future lamps with my very life.”
“Good boy,” she says, then kisses me and lies down.
For a while, lying in the dark, it feels like nothing is wrong at all. Then I hear the rain battering the window and I remember that pretty much everything is wrong.
I don’t remember falling asleep. I’m just lying beside Candy and then I’m somewhere else.
It’s a strange mix of the Angra subway cavern and the scene at the hospital. The meat chapel is surrounded by rough, raw stone, the bone sigils bright red in the reflected blood light.
The thirteen crucified bodies writhe on their inverted crosses, crying and gasping for air like they aren’t quite dead.
I look at the walls, but can’t see the sigils. They jitter like liquid mercury, forming and re--forming themselves into new shapes. They don’t hold any one long enough to make sense and then I understand that I’m not looking at their symbols, but at the Angra themselves.
From a spiral of skulls all shattered on one side steps a golden woman. Her skin is patterned like circuit boards and snake scales. On her head is a headdress with swept--back wings. Half of her face is missing. An empty eye socket above a nonexistent cheek and a jaw stripped of its golden flesh are all that’s left on her right side. Though she’s in pain, with half her skull revealed she’s stuck in a perpetual half smile.
I say, “I remember you.”
She nods.
“We met in the water, as the building fell into the ocean.”
“Yeah. Kill City. You grabbed my leg. You tried to drown me,” I say.
The other side of her face smiles. She folds her hands.
“That was before I knew how special you are.”
“Are you the Flayed One or the Hand?”
“Neither,” she says, drawing herself up. “Call me Ten Thousand Shadows. I hear all truths and lies, every whisper and secret told in the dark. There are no mysteries to me among mortals.”
“Are you all torn up because that’s all of you that can get through to this dimension or because you were always uglier than me?”
She turns her head giving me a good look at her wounds.
“The Terrible One did this to me when he threw us out of this universe and into chaos. Your God calls himself a God of love and mercy. See what his mercy looks like.”
She steps closer. I back up. Even while she’s trying to keep this form, she can’t hold entirely still. Every time she moves, for a split second she blurs into something else. A bird skeleton. A crawling patch of furred fungus. A giant treelike thing, so twisted and knotted it looks like it grew in a hurricane.
“Trust me, lady. I know all about God’s bad side. I’ve been on it most of my life.”
“You are Abomination,” she says. “As are we. You owe this God and his pitiful creations nothing.”
“Yeah, but I like donuts, so what am I going to do?”
“Join us. Summon us to this realm and we’ll raise you up to be Angra Om Ya. Stark, savior of the true rulers of the universe.”
“And here I thought you liked me for my boyish charms.”
“Call us. Bring us through and you can have anything in return.”
She undoes a clasp on her golden gown and it falls to the floor. She’s beautiful. The half of her that’s covered in skin. The rest looks like Thanksgiving leftovers a -couple of days past their prime.
“Even if I wanted to help you, I don’t know how to use the Qomrama.”
She reaches out her almost meatless hand.
“Don’t worry. We’ll teach you.”
“How?”
The golden woman fades away, replaced by the swirling skeleton--fungus--tree thing.
“We’ll speak again.”
“Goody.”
She’s gone.
I hear a sound and turn to the reliquary. The rubies on the skull are gone and blood pours from the hole in the forehead. It spills onto the floor and pools in the cracks. I turn to go down the tunnel, but there’s no way out. Blood pours from the skull and the sigils on the wall, covering the floor. I climb onto the filthy gurney to get away from it. It dawns on me that this whole thing has been a trap. That the cavern is going to fill with blood and that I’m going to drown. I should have been nicer to Ten Thousand Shadows. Or maybe had less Aqua Regia with the movie last night. Either way, this is a hell of an end to a shitty day. I hold my breath and try to get as close to the ceiling as I can. In a few minutes it won’t make any difference.
I come awake to Candy shaking me.
“Wake up, goddammit,” she says.
I choke on my own spit and gasp for air.
“What’s wrong with you? You’re thrashing all over.”
It takes me a -couple of minutes to get my breath.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Just weird dreams.”
“What kind?”
I sit up. Rub a hand over my face.
“I was in a cave with the Angra. They were talking to me. One was. Ten Thousand Shadows. She wanted me to summon them.”
“Who is she?”
“The one I saw in Kill City.”
She pushes my hair back off my forehead.
“It was just a dream. How could the Angra be talking to you?”
“I’ve always had funny dreams that way. And that chop--shop prick bit me. Maybe we made some kind of connection.”
“Or maybe it was just a damned dream. You’re all stressed out about work. You get hurt and you remember the one fragment of an Angra you ever saw.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I’m always right.”
Candy pushes me back down onto the bed and pulls the covers over me.
“Should I tell the Shonin about it?”
“Definitely not,” she says. “You said Wells is trying to connect you and Saint Nick. All anyone over there needs to hear is that you’re having pillow talk with an old God.”
“Good point.”
“I’ll be back,” she says, and gets out of bed. A minute later I hear her in the bathroom throwing up.
I’ll call Allegra tomorrow about those goddamn tests.
IN THE MORNING, the bite is just bruises and a scab. There’s no fieldwork or car chases scheduled for the Vigil today, so Candy heads off to help out at the clinic.
At Vigil headquarters, instead of the sneers and behind--the--back comments I usually hear, there’s dead silence when I walk through. Julie Sola and Vidocq are coming out of the break room. Vidocq has a cup of tea and Sola is carrying a container of yogurt.
I say, “What’s with the silent treatment around here? Did I suddenly get boring?”