Ian Tregillis - Something More Than Night

by Ian Tregillis

  How could they? METATRON speaks to mortal men not as a thunder to make them quiver and quail, but as a whisper that turns their hearts.

  “—but I got in the car to turn on the radio and that’s how the airbags saved my life when that goddamned drunk came screaming around the corner; maybe he was watching the sky, too, I don’t know, all I know is he didn’t have his lights on and couldn’t see Jennifer standing all agog…”

  I would have sighed, but his voice cracked into plenty of pieces for the both of us. I thought about Gabby again.

  As a distraction, for the both of us, I asked, “How’d you meet her?” while smoothing the creases from the secret memory I’d pinched from Gabriel’s Magisterium. And soon he was droning on about high school and a broken smartphone. That was a surprise; he seemed old enough to launch into a story about inkwells and pigtails.

  They say it’s all in the wrist. Sometimes it’s even true. A little flick—I channeled Kivinen in that—and the gossamer shimmer of a memory fragment settled over the old man’s shoulders like a cowl. He twitched, brushed away a phantom cobweb, and then the middle of his soliloquy was all about how his beloved Jennifer expanded her vocabulary when she was a little girl by crouching beside her parents’ bedroom door. He’d appropriated Molly’s memory into the recollections of his dead wife.

  I stood. “I’m sorry for your loss. She sounds like quite a gal, your Jennifer.”

  His face folded into a scowl. “Who’s Jennifer?”

  I pretended to cough, covering my mouth before the smile gave the game away. Philo Vance signed out less than an hour after he’d arrived.

  Not a bad afternoon’s work. Entropy was running its course, destroying the connection between Gabriel and flametop, and I had a few C-notes lifting my fallen arches. I paused on a bench in the foyer to fish out more small bills; seemed a good idea to apply a parting coat of polish to the orderlies, and to keep the hackie pliant. No, not a bad afternoon’s work at all. I made certain to congratulate myself on that front.

  But pride goeth before the fall.

  The addle-brained sad sack and his sob story about celestial light shows got me thinking about Gabby again. I’d been doing my best not to think about him because it was a slippery slope. To be fair, though, and somewhat to flametop’s credit, she was a double handful of distractions. If not exactly the kind of distraction I’d prefer from a dish like her.

  But now Gabby was at the forefront of my mind as I headed for the cab. I had to leave the same way I came, else somebody paying attention might notice old Philo arrived but never departed.

  Poor Gabriel. He’d become mixed up with something terrible. But what? Or whom? He’d run afoul of some serious torpedoes, if they could rub one of the Seraphim. And just how did they manage that? This, more than anything else, was the frightening part.

  Such were my thoughts as I emerged from the home with its jacaranda blossoms and ocean-view verandah, this place where the pony set went when the tug of entropy became too strong to ignore. Out I stepped, into the scents of oleander and sea salt, into the crash of surf and the whisper of my shoes over mosaic tiles, while the question of a murdered angel made a Möbius pretzel of my thoughts.

  Nothing struck me as amiss when I climbed into the hack. The overlay was so smooth, so seamless, that I didn’t even notice when I slipped into the Pleroma. Only after the driver turned around did I realize I’d been played for a sap. His human pan had become the countenance of an ox with starlight in its eyes; his human arms, a pair of snapping vipers; his doughy human body, a wheel of ice covered inside and out with eyes of quicksilver.

  A Throne. The bulls had found me.

  10

  MINUET FOR TWO ANGELS

  The Plenary Indulgence recipients lived in and around Chicago. That made sense, after all, because so did the priest. Molly had never been to Chicago, and had only heard second- and third-hand of the city nestled alongside Lake Michigan, its mixture of grandeur and decay. But she wondered, after a bit of reflection, if she needed to know a place to find it. Even Bayliss had managed to overlay his Magisterium on an earthly laneway back in Melbourne, and he was so weak that he actually paid for Martin’s taxi rather than whisking him back to his hotel. And damned if she’d be outdone by him. So what was there to stop her from deciding reality included a passage to Chicago at the back of her coat closet?

  Nothing. Not a damn thing. Except the fear of getting her ass kicked by METATRON again. That shit hurt.

  It was one thing to flex her angelic juju in the privacy of her own apartment. Quite another to do it on Earth. Last time she tried it, she destroyed Ria, incurred the wrath of the Voice of God, and, apparently, made enemies of all the other angels in Bayliss’s Choir. It made a woman skittish about trying again. On the other hand, how much worse could it get?

  So she pushed aside the woolen peacoat with epaulets (it still had one of Ria’s hairs on the shoulder), dodged a falling mop, and emerged from the shadow of an elevated train. A relentless wind dusted her skin with ash lofted from distant dead towers; the skyline leered at her like a mouthful of broken teeth. The air carried the scent of poisoned lake bed, and the ground rippled in time to the moods of the lake. It was faint, the trembling, but persistent beneath the electric thrum of traffic and wistful creaking of deconstructed skyscrapers.

  The gusts teased her hair into disarray. Curls fluttered across her mouth, her eyes. Molly imagined her pocket contained a velvet ribbon, and it did. While tying her hair back she realized she hadn’t consciously chosen her apparel, but it had changed again when she emerged on Earth. Now she wore a satin vest over a high-collared shirt and jeans with thin pinstripes. For some reason she was barefoot. It took a moment’s focused concentration to change that.

  A river of pedestrians flowed past her sheltered spot on the leeward side of a rusted steel pillar for the El. People listening to music, laughing in one-sided conversations, frowning, lying to each other, running, eating vat-grown hot dogs and dripping relish on the sidewalk. Molly hadn’t stood amongst so many people since before she’d died. (How long ago was that? How much time had passed on Earth? Did her phone still work? It couldn’t have been too terribly long; she still recognized some of the fashions on the passersby. She even had the same pair of boots as the woman carrying out a very loud breakup with her boyfriend.) She was out of practice when it came to reading the flow of body language in a large herd. Walking in a crowd meant feeling the subtle signs and weathering constant negotiations of space and speed and impetus. But these people couldn’t see her. What if she jostled somebody? Was she apt to leave a trail of brain-dead vegetables if she lost her concentration? How many lives would she destroy if she got this wrong?

  But if she didn’t try, if she didn’t get to the bottom of this, the Cherubim would come for her again. Or something worse. Plus, if she wanted any hope of helping Ria and comforting Martin—witnessing her death must have pushed him over the edge; he was using again, she knew it—she needed practice. She needed to learn how to be a human being in a human space. She’d done it all her life, but now she didn’t know where to begin.

  Molly took a long, steadying breath while watching for an opening. It came in the form of a fat businesswoman tottering on uneven heels. The current of pedestrians swirled around the slow-moving obstacle like water around a river stone to leave eddies of stillness in her wake. Molly stepped forward to slip into the crowd …

  … And it parted before her.

  Nobody flinched away from her; nobody lurched or dodged or backpedaled. There were no ripples, no distortions in the flow of pedestrian traffic. Yet somehow there just happened to be a little bubble of empty space right where she wanted to be and right when she wanted to be there. Again and again and again, one footstep after another, the bubble paced her. If she weren’t dead, she might have thought she had a wicked case of body odor. But no matter how she moved, or where, the natural currents of the crowd gave her exactly the space she needed. A tourist lost her map to a
gust of wind and just happened to jump aside to catch it as Molly passed. A man heading into a boutique to shop during his lunch break happened to hear somebody calling his name, a friend across the street, and turned around just before he would have stepped in front of Molly. A man pushed his stroller behind an El pillar, overcome with a violent sneezing fit. A woman walking a pair of Weimaraners came up short because her dogs cowered when Molly’s shadow passed over them.

  Molly wondered if any of these people were aware of what they were doing. She doubted it.

  It was kind of cool. But on the other hand, and after just a few blocks, it was isolating. These were her people, her species. She was still one of them in her heart and in her head. But the entire world tied itself into knots just to avoid her, as though she were a leper. Jesus, even the wind got into the act.

  And it wasn’t just the pedestrian traffic. The traffic lights changed the instant Molly reached a crosswalk. She lingered in the intersection, just to fuck with the world a little bit, and to see how far she could push it. People flowed around her. She even turned against the flow of traffic, but still her progress was as smooth as though the city were deserted. So she leapt at random, a good yard to the right. But at that very same moment a taxi along the curb threw its door open, which forced a speeding bicycle messenger to lay his bike on the pavement to avoid it—and, thus, Molly.

  “Crap!” she cried. Nobody heard her.

  The bike skidded under the taxi. Its rider tumbled to a halt on the street, moaning and cursing. He wore a helmet, but the street was rough. His leg should have been bloody hamburger embedded with the detritus of a fallen city. But when he rolled over, his leggings had the characteristic sheen of a synthetic spiderweave. The biosilk had protected him from worse injury, but he was still pretty banged up. His helmet fell apart when he rolled over. Blood from a deep gash along his jaw fell like a curtain to cover his neck, and the abrasions on his face were stippled with gravel. Molly ran to him.

  “Holy shit, man. Do you need to see a doctor?”

  He seemed wobbly. She put an arm around him to help him find his feet. But instead of answering, the messenger shivered at Molly’s touch. Like Ria. Then the ancient El came clattering and screeching overhead, casting a long dark shadow over the scene, and all of a sudden Molly could remember how the fall had knocked the wind out of her and the thin crust of snow on the rails crunched as she turned over just in time to see the tram and feel the sharp hard metal crushing her, cutting her, killing—

  Molly ran. Storefront windows shattered in her wake.

  She didn’t know where she was when she finally slowed to a walk, only that the sidewalks were less crowded here. Was that characteristic of the neighborhood, or the end of the lunch hour? Lake Michigan wasn’t far; she could still smell hydrocarbons in the dead water. The people here were skinnier, their eyes downcast, their apparel no longer teetering on the razor edge of modern fashion. More ruin than grandeur in these city blocks ringing with distant police sirens.

  She crossed a stone bridge over a channel or canal; she could taste the green dye of Saint Patrick’s Days long past. When she laid her hand upon the chiseled balustrade, she had a vision of the men who’d quarried it and the shifting tectonic plates that created it back when evolution was just starting to experiment with a central nervous system. The granite was born after millennia of infrasound rattled the earth, the mating call of continents. It sounded like the death cries of the last whales, but a hundred million times slower. And she could hear those cries, too, their echoes indelibly etched in the water beneath her feet. Sorrow and fear and lonely terror … When she flinched, a jagged crack zigzagged across the roadbed.

  What she really needed at that moment was a shot of tequila. But that was a pipe dream as long as she was a ghost to the world, unless she stooped to stealing booze. But that made her think of Bayliss. She might have returned to her apartment to conjure up a bottle, but she had work to do in Chicago. And the Pleroma wasn’t safe for her. A fetid wind rose off the lake, gusting through the steel canyons of the city. Molly stuck her hands in her pockets and followed the canal toward the lake, her thoughts a jumble of crying whales and murdered priests.

  She had stashed in her pocket the bundle of memories from the Plenary Indulgence recipients. Bayliss spoke of reading the memories and slipping inside them as though doing so were trivial, but Molly hadn’t even figured out how to disentangle them from one another. What had been a flock of origami cranes in Bayliss’s hands had become a knotted tangle of yarn in hers. When she tugged on one loose end of a random memory it stretched, snapped off, and evaporated. It left her fingers sticky with the residue of an angry text message sent in the wake of a lost child custody hearing. Untying the memories would take delicate work. She’d hoped that a solution would present itself as she brought them closer to Father Santorelli’s church.

  Her elbow nudged a lady wrapped in a turquoise serape. The woman glared at her. She stank of cigarette smoke and poisonous pride, prescription painkillers and warm wet iron.

  “Sorry,” Molly mumbled. She’d gone a few steps before she realized what had happened. Eye contact.

  “Hey!” The woman didn’t hear her. Molly spun, ran a few steps, caught her by the forearm. “Hey! Hi!”

  The serape woman shook her head as though clearing it. This time her eyes didn’t focus when she glanced in Molly’s direction. She scowled, pinched the bridge of her nose, and sagged against a light pole. Molly released her before she caused another stroke. Her hand came away wet; blood trickled from artificial stigmata on the stranger’s palms, tracing rivulets down to her elbows when she raised her arms. But they’d seen each other. Molly was certain of it.

  The woman staggered away. A gust of wind flipped the hem of her shawl. A low-cut blouse revealed that the tops of her shoulder blades were matted with surgically sculpted gore and artificial pinfeathers. The seep of antiseptic blood had stippled the cream-colored top with crimson.

  Molly started to follow, but was caught short by a faint vibration in her vest pocket. She reached inside to massage the jumble of stolen memories. One twined itself about her thumb. A fragment of an awkward office Christmas party tugged at her like a magnet. It relaxed when she turned away from the canal but squeezed, almost painfully tight, when she resumed her course toward Lake Michigan. Just like Bayliss and the silver feather. Her mind wandered while she followed the tugs of memory in her pocket.

  The cyclist and the taxi got her thinking again about Bayliss and the night she died. He had, in certain obnoxious ways, gone native: he smoked, he hung out in shitty diners, he spoke and even dressed like somebody straight out of an old film. How long had he been on Earth? And why? According to him it was because he’d heard something disturbing. What rumor could be so frightening that he turned his back on Heaven? He didn’t say, but Molly had a fairly good guess on that front. Which begged the next question: how the fuck do you murder an angel? And again, why?

  The memory thread pulled her west, toward the lowering sun. Shards of sunset glinted from the walls of an urban canyon. Shades of pink and tangerine glowed on stark sheer walls of glass and steel that hadn’t yet been deconstructed and replaced with nanocomposite, stonefoam, and bioweave. Stringy fragments of the associated memories loosened and unspooled while she walked. Furtive kissing in a supply closet, the taste of rum and cake on somebody’s lips, an opened door, a lawsuit.

  It wasn’t so hard to piece things together once she had a few minutes to think clearly without getting killed, or assaulted, or trapped in a kaleidoscopic memory palace, and without lobotomizing a former lover. She hadn’t truly considered everything Bayliss had told her; until now, she’d been too distracted.

  Gabriel had been the Trumpet’s guardian. Now he was dead, and everybody and their flame-faced brother was looking for the goddamned thing. It didn’t take a genius to put the two together. He’d been killed—somehow—because somebody or something wanted the Trumpet for itself. The why of it still elu
ded her, but the rest of it seemed logical based on what little she knew.

  These were entities with the power to kill immortal beings. She was lucky she got away with a ransacking.

  It seemed reasonable to wonder if the people who had killed Father Santorelli were connected to the same plot that led to Gabriel’s death. Were they covering their tracks? What had the priest known? And why had Gabriel been so interested in the Plenary Indulgence recipients? What had he learned before he died?

  And why am I stuck trying to figure this shit out? I’m not a detective. I just want my life back. Molly wondered if that were even possible. Why, with all this power at her disposal, couldn’t she become mortal again? Why couldn’t she put things back to the way they had been? It didn’t seem like so much to ask. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about the Trumpet or the Pleroma or any of Bayliss’s bullshit. She wanted to be left in peace.

  On the other hand, METATRON had lost its shit when she tried to take back five measly minutes. What would it do if she tried to take back her own mortality? To undo her own death? Bayliss hadn’t tried to resurrect the priest. Probably with good reason. “Dead is dead,” he’d said.

  The memory threads threw another loop around her thumb, practically dislocating it until she veered north again. The crunch of spilled breakfast cereal beneath work boots, the aftershocks of an earthquake, memories of a life on the Pacific Rim led her to the lakeshore. Organic LED lamps winked on around the broad curve of Lake Michigan as the sun disappeared behind the urban horizon and the first silver threads of incinerated space debris threaded the purple sky. Molly could taste the toxins in the soil here, too, just as she had in Minneapolis. But here the water stretched to the horizon and beyond, a vast inland sea to dwarf Lake Calhoun. With a bit of concentration she could also hear the cold pure chime of glacial melt; the end of the previous ice age tingled like static electricity across the bare flesh of her hands and neck as cataracts of meltwater first filled the basins of what would become the Great Lakes. How many wheelbarrows, how many human lifetimes, would it take to rehabilitate this place? How much human passion? How many Rias? Molly sighed.