Ian Tregillis - Something More Than Night

by Ian Tregillis

  The woman staggered. The lamp shattered at her feet. Molly slowed her fall until her husband could catch her.

  * * *

  Molly found herself standing in another cemetery, this one just a few blocks from Santorelli’s church, as the eastern sky turned gray, then pink. When all was said and done, four of the dozen parishioners had died in the months since receiving their Indulgences. The rest lived in constant fear of falling asleep. For some, it was a low-level dread. For others, a shrieking drug-fueled anxiety. But they all had it. They whimpered in their sleep. They sweat and cried and twisted the sheets. They cowered from something they had glimpsed but could not understand. Just as Molly’s touch had broken Ria’s mind, a fleeting brush with the Pleroma had warped their psyches. The dreams were the mind’s futile attempt to make sense of something incomprehensible.

  Molly wondered—had this happened in the past? Had there been a time when angels moved freely among humans, unconcerned with the consequences? Was the genesis of religion a desperate need to make sense of a cosmos bestrode by terrifying alien beings? To find comfort in the incomprehensible? The nightmare visions varied a little bit among the Plenary Indulgence recipients though they shared a belief system. Which begged the question of how Molly might have perceived the Choir if she’d grown up elsewhere, surrounded with very different cultural expectations. What if she had lived in ancient Egypt? Or India?

  Unlike the most abstruse details of the underlying physical structure of the MOC, the answers didn’t unpack themselves when Molly asked these questions. Vast as it was, the knowledge the Virtue had pumped into her mind came up short on this front. Because the angels were indifferent about how people perceived them. Bastards.

  Meanwhile, people were dying.

  What did you do to these people, Santorelli? Did you know what your Indulgences would bring into their lives? Or were you forced into this, like Bayliss?

  Gabriel must have known about this. But … had he caused it, or was he trying to prevent it? Or was he watching out of idle curiosity? Had knowing about it gotten him killed? Or had somebody been trying to stop him? And what was the point of all this? What did it achieve for anybody?

  Sunlight glinted off Lake Michigan. Molly rode it west, back to Anne’s apartment. Anne had shifted in her sleep, tossing the blanket off, but had not awoken. The apartment still smelled of dinner, but no sweat, no stress, no fear. Molly had banished the nightmares. All it took was an angel’s touch. An angel had put them in Anne’s mind, via the Indulgences, and another angel took them away.

  She pulled the blanket back over Anne’s shoulders. Then she curled up in a ratty armchair, watching Anne snore in dreamless sleep. But Molly was too deep in thought to notice when the light of dawn ricocheted from the pot rack in the kitchen. Sunlight flitted across Anne’s eyes. She stirred.

  “Hey.” The words came out heavy, slurred by passage through undissipated sleep. “You’re still here.”

  “I’m still here.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Watching you,” said Molly, because it was true and she didn’t know what else to say. Then she winced. But Anne was sleepy and didn’t seem to notice how creepy it sounded.

  Anne smiled, a long wide grin, slow and unstoppable as the rising sun. “That’s sweet.” She yawned, rubbed her eyes. “Have you been sitting there all night?”

  “Nah.” The yawn was contagious. Molly’s jaw popped. She asked, “You seemed to be sleeping pretty well. Did you have the dreams again?”

  Anne stretched, kinking and unkinking each leg and arm in sequence. She blinked. “No. You know what? I don’t think I dreamed about anything last night. Not that I remember.” Another yawn. “Wow. This is the hardest I’ve slept in I don’t know how long.”

  “Thank heaven for small miracles,” said Molly.

  17

  SIZING UP THE COMPETITION

  I kept the soul fragments in a coffee can. The dull little dinguses were nearly indistinguishable from the grounds. I gave the can a few shakes for good measure. Then I returned the coffee to the kitchen cabinet, and added an extra lock to the door to my apartment.

  It used to be that things were quiet and simple. The way I liked it. But then Gabby had gone and gotten himself scratched, and I had gotten tangled up with flametop, and it had been one damn thing after another ever since. Trouble was her business. That cluck had me wrapped up so tight I spent most of my time staring at the back of my own head. Much more of that and I’d save a small fortune on corkscrews.

  I had to clear my head. I needed friendly company. I needed to get shellacked. A willing girl and an open bottle can cure a host of ills.

  The telephone rang while I brushed my teeth. But I was too busy spitting in the sink to pay it any heed. I rinsed, spat again, scraped my face. Seemed like forever since I’d had some quality time with a joy girl. But I took my time; I’m not some lowly skirt chasing tomcat. Happy ladies take a shine to the fellas who clean up nice. Fellas like me.

  I slipped my best unopened bottle of rye into the pocket of my overcoat. Didn’t bother with tumblers and ice; we’d ring room service. Maybe we’d put the house chef to work, too. Surf and turf if the wren could tuck in or maybe a salad niçoise, hold the anchovies, if she couldn’t. I still had a few leaves of cabbage left over from hocking Gabriel’s feather so I wasn’t on the market for some fleabag joint with a revolving door and hourly rates. The occasion, and my mood, called for something flossier than my usual haunts. Ladies enjoy a night on the town with a high roller. I departed my Magisterium and shook the dust of the Pleroma from my heels.

  I went with a soft-spoken brunette dish. Recent events had put me off redheads and their wicked jaws. She was a nice girl with big eyes, a tiny mouth, and a long slender neck just begging for a string of pearls. But I wasn’t feeling that flush. She told me her name was Violet. It was the best kind of lie, the kind you wanted to believe because it matched her eyes. I lied in kind, and told her my name was Bayliss.

  We took the bottle to the Blue Room. I knew a guy there. He rolled the eyes when he saw I’d brought my own, but gave me a break on the corkage and treated my date like a lady. She liked that. Liked to dance, too. And wasn’t I pleased to see she could flow to the old stuff. Sometimes you pick a good one. I was overdue for a run of good luck.

  “How’s a girl like you familiar with music like this?”

  The music was slow, her body warm, her dancing slower and warmer still.

  “Aww. Half this job is role playing,” she said. “You meet all sorts in this line of work. Lots of freaks and creeps.” She swayed, shimmied, and did something to my insides.

  “Which one am I?”

  She chanced a look at my eyes but flinched away. Hid it well, though, by laying her head on my shoulder. “You, I can’t figure. You didn’t climb all over me the minute we met.” I’m a gentleman. I don’t paw. “Usually that means you’re looking to pretend I’m a real date, willing to pay anything just so I’ll gasp out an ’I love you’ or two when you heave yourself on top of me. But I don’t get that sense from you, either. You’re a strange one.”

  I drank my rye. Violet was a gimlet girl. She nibbled the lime and didn’t make a face. I liked that.

  We danced, and drank, and never pretended it wasn’t a business relationship. She danced like somebody who listened to the music, nothing like the full-body grand mal seizures that passed for hoofing it these days. She had genuine rhythm. That boded well for the rest of the evening. Dancing with Violet, I could almost forget what it had been like to ride in one of the penitentes’ close sweaty bodies. Almost.

  “You ever step out with a penitente?”

  What an old-fashioned twist: she blew a raspberry. “Those kooks? They give me the willies.”

  “You and me both, sister. You and me both.”

  We turned some heads on the dance floor. She was a cut above the usual bims and frills that passed through a place like this. Violet lined up more business while I settled
the tab. Solid work ethic, that girl.

  She took my arm. I’d picked a hotel along the waterfront, so we blunted the sharpest edges of the hooch with a slow stroll along the bay. Not too slow, though; I was paying by the hour, and her old-fashioned dancing left me with an antique case of the hot pants. The gimlets had her pie-eyed just enough that I chanced stitching together a few shortcuts through the Pleroma. If she did notice anything off-kilter, she didn’t squawk. What a trooper.

  Our room had a wardrobe with real wooden hangers. A bed, too. I helped Violet out of her coat, hung it in the former, and tried not to look too obviously at the latter. I called down to room service for a bucket of ice and a bowl of strawberries. Violet kicked off her heels and sidled into the bathroom like she’d never stopped dancing.

  A bellhop delivered the ice before it had melted, and for that he earned a decent tip, but nothing extravagant. He would have understood had he seen the dish. He wished me good night and bowed out. But I’d just enough time to set down the ice and the strawberries when he knocked again. I figured he’d taken a closer look at his tip.

  I opened the door. Molly said, “Miss me?”

  Inwardly, I moaned. Outwardly, I groaned. Molly stepped around me. The ice and the strawberries earned a quirked eyebrow; her lips settled into a little moue of disapproval when she saw the heels and the closed bathroom door. She doesn’t miss a trick, flametop.

  I held the door open, hoping she’d take the hint. Take it outside. No soap. “Not that it ain’t a pleasure to see you again, but what say you we put this on hold until tomorrow? It’s late and I’m wrecked.”

  She sniffed the air between our faces. “You’ve been drinking, I see. Having a good time?”

  “Don’t get sore, angel. One snootful of rye doesn’t make a fella tight.”

  My date emerged from the bathroom, a sylph in silk. That long graceful neck continued all the way down her pipe stems. She wore a postage stamp and not enough ribbon to hold it in place. I feared she’d catch pneumonia from the icy scowls flametop flung at us.

  She struck a pose and gave me a smile that should have melted the ice. Then she noticed Molly.

  Violet wilted.

  Molly said, “Wow, Bayliss. And here I thought you couldn’t get any classier.”

  Violet asked, in a tone of bored and idle curiosity, “Are you the wife or the girlfriend?”

  Bored because she’d probably seen this scene a dozen times before. Idle because it was no skin off her nose either way; she’d already made most of her green for the evening, and did it all without taking off her shoes. A banner night.

  Molly hiked a thumb over her shoulder. “Put your clothes on and get lost,” she said.

  Violet gave a bored shrug and disappeared into the bathroom again. The lock clicked.

  Molly wheeled on me. “You unbelievable jerk,” she said. And then socked me in the kisser. I toppled backward over the ottoman, hands pressed to my face.

  “Ouch! What gives, you damn cuckoo frail?” My voice sounded like it was trying to wriggle through a soda straw.

  “That’s for not telling me the truth about METATRON and the MOC.”

  She loomed over me. I inched backward. Soft carpet in this joint.

  “What are you yapping about? I told you all about it. Maybe some details slipped my mind, but so what? I gave you the headlines.”

  “Details? You call the Jericho Event a detail?”

  Oh. That.

  Flametop wound up for a swift kick with her pointed boots. I was getting a little tired of playing punching bag for all the crazy dames in my life. Careful, Bayliss. It’s becoming a habit with you.

  My date emerged from the bathroom again, looking like she’d only ever gone in there to powder her nose in the first place. Looking like a nice, respectable girl a guy could take for dancing and drinks. Took her all of two seconds to survey the situation. She’d seen this scene a few times before, too. I’d wager the argument was usually about infidelity rather than the teleological origins of reality, but, you know, details. Molly paused in her abuse long enough for me to say good night to my date. She was the heart of kindness.

  I helped Violet into her coat. As she stepped into her shoes, I kissed her on the cheek and said, “It was swell.”

  “Sure. See ya.” And then she was out the door.

  I listened until the ding of the elevator told me Violet was well and truly gone. I looked around the room, looking to see if she’d left behind anything, like a handbag, or her lips. She hadn’t. I sighed, then turned to flametop. “You’re a real piece of work. There’s no parade you can’t rain on, is there?”

  “Shove it. Don’t play the victim card with me.”

  Something warm and wet tickled my nose. I put a trio of fingertips to my upper lip; they came away warm, wet, and red. Flametop had done a real number on me.

  I perched at the edge of the bed and squinted at her. “You seem different. You get your hair done?”

  Molly reached into the bathroom, tossed me a washcloth. I wrapped it around a handful of ice from the bucket and pressed the bundle to my face.

  By way of answering my question, she set aside her human form and momentarily became something else. None too graceful, this transition: she stumbled through it like somebody hopping around late for church with one leg stuck in a new pair of trousers. But for an instant she blazed so brightly it seemed a miracle we didn’t leave my silhouette scorched into the wallpaper. Maybe we did. The bruise-colored afterimages shimmying through my field of vision made it hard to tell. Afterimages of wings and things. Then she snapped back into her human form. A faint heiligenschein glow clung to her skin. It faded slowly away as she got it under control, like somebody turning the dimmer switch on a ceiling fan.

  “Well, well, well. Look who’s all grown up.”

  “No thanks to you, asshole. Do you even remember our agreement, or have you been spending all your time on hookers and blow?”

  Well. That’s gratitude for you. I said as much. “You know, I’ve taken a few punches for you since our last heart-to-heart. I’d just as lief let you fend for yourself from now on.”

  “It hasn’t been a picnic for me, either,” she said.

  “Anybody smack you with a phone book?”

  “No.”

  “Fancy that.”

  We compared notes over a bowl of strawberries. They were juicy and so was the gossip. I explained how I’d erased the evidence connecting her to Gabriel (she still pleaded innocent on that charge) and described my subsequent run-ins with the Thrones and Uriel. She told me about the PI recipients and their dreams of the Choir. I took the news well until she got to the part where the churchy types were turning up stiff. That’s when I choked on a berry.

  “Say that again. How many are dead?”

  “Four.”

  “And when did you say the Pole squiffed it?”

  “Last night, I think.”

  I cast my thoughts back to Sam’s rapid departure from my diner. The timing fit. Sam and his pals detected a new Nephil right around the time Molly’s pal punched out. So I told her what I’d learned about the Nephilim: what the Thrones told me; the failed attempt to evict one; and what Sam had shared. I worried she’d have another conniption when I hit the part about secret vaults and penitente souls. But by the end she looked like somebody had kicked her dog.

  “Jesus. How complicated can this get?” Flametop rested her head in her hands, twined her fingers through that curly coppery mop. “Maybe we just caught a break.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “I never know what you’re thinking. Most of the time I can’t even tell what you’re talking about.”

  “Enough sneering, already. Your face will get stuck like that. I’m thinking Father Santorelli’s prodigal sheep and the Nephilim come out of the same box. The former die on Earth and the latter pop up in the Pleroma.” I whistled. “What a slick racket.”

  “Yeah, but what are they?”

&
nbsp; I shrugged. She sighed.

  “Somebody went to a shitload of trouble to set this up. Why? What are the Nephilim for? What are they doing?”

  “Beats me. But I’m putting my money on nothing good.”

  “Well,” she said, “the good news is there won’t be any more. I cured the surviving recipients.”

  I blinked. “Come again?”

  “I’ve been making the rounds, banishing the dreams. Glimpses of the Pleroma. Whatever they are.”

  I tried not to sound too condescending. “Look. Angel. I know you’re feeling your oats because you’ve started to get the hang of things. But don’t let it go to your head. I’ve been around the block a few times and, I have to tell you, I don’t know how they’re playing this trick, much less how to fix it. So what exactly did you do when you say you cured them?”

  She told me. I responded by taking a long draw of rye because damn if it didn’t sound like she’d put the nightmares on ice for several nights running. This dame was one quick study. Who was she?

  Flametop fished a piece of ice from the bucket, inspected it for blood, and then, finding it clean, popped it in her mouth. It crunched in her teeth. “What else haven’t you told me?”

  “That’s all I know about the Nephilim. Pretty much all anybody knows. There ain’t more to tell because there ain’t more to know.”

  “Screw the Nephilim. What else haven’t you told me about Gabriel? Do you know how he died? You must have suspicions, or a theory. And what about the Choir? The Pleroma? The MOC, and METATRON, and God knows what else?”

  “Anybody ever tell you you’ve got paranoid tendencies? I’m your strongest supporter, lady. Your only supporter, if you want to get technical about it.”

  “First, you accidentally shoved me under a tram. But hey, that’s okay, because after all you were aiming for my brother. And then, after you dragged me into this whole fucking nightmare of a mess, you insinuated that my predecessor had simply chosen to move on, instead of telling me that he’d been murdered. You failed to warn me about METATRON, which led to all sorts of fun and made me the most popular woman in the Choir. And then, when I pressed you for details, you still somehow managed to omit the full story, and I had to learn about the Jericho Event from some freaky two-faced angel.”