Nothing was squeezed in the backseat between Laine and a diminutive purple-haired girl who called herself Sioux. Sioux pulled a little knife from her boot and passed it over to Laine. “See what Veronica traded me for that Cramps poster? It’s fucking sharp!”
Laine fingered the tip of the knife and yelped as the blade pierced his skin. “Seriously! That hurt.”
A spot of blood glistened on Laine’s fingertip, wet and black in the orange light of the highway. Nothing bent and took Laine’s finger into his mouth and Licked the blood away. Laine lay back smiling. Nothing touched his tongue to the spot, questing for more, but Laine slid his other hand under Nothing’s chin, tilted Nothing’s face up, and kissed him deeply, wetly, hugging him close.
“I’ll miss you,” said Laine into Nothing’s mouth, and pushed Nothing against the back of the seat and kissed him again.
Then Sioux leaned over and licked Nothing’s throat, and Laine’s hands were in his hair and Sioux’s hands were on his thighs, sliding up under his shirt. Nothing closed his eyes and smiled into the darkness. His friends had disappointed him in every other way, but they certainly knew how to give a good send-off.
The others waited at the bus station with him until Jack put a nickel in the gum machine and kicked it over when no gum came out. Then the old man who sold tickets made them all leave, and Nothing sat alone in the dark waiting room, looking at the frosted glass of the ticket window, the dingy scrolled ceiling high above, the shiny pink bald spot on the back of the old man’s head and the way his ivory-colored hair straggled over the buckle of his dirty visor.
Nothing took out his Dylan Thomas book, but there was no light to read by. He looked at his hands in his lap. Two weeks ago he’d put on some of Laine’s black nail polish, but most of it was gone now. He examined the chips and flecks that were left. They looked like shapes on a map, like tiny states. Maybe like the places he was going. He cupped his hands over his face. They were scented with vodka and smoke, with Laine and Sioux. He felt his eyes closing.
The old man’s bawling voice woke him a few minutes later. “Coach boarding for Silver Spring, Fairfax, Wash’ton DC, Fredericksburg…” Nothing felt for his backpack and stood up. Now he could get started.
The bus smelled of cigarettes and prickly upholstery and some heavy sweet disinfectant. Nothing decided he liked the odor. A few heads lifted to stare Wearily at him, then drooped back against the dark windows. He took a seat in the back and lit a cigarette. The bus shuddered, heaved a sigh, and pulled away from the station.
Nothing smiled at himself in the window. He was on his way. His journey had begun. He was already a little closer to home.
11
Several hours after Nothing climbed the steps of a Greyhound bus in Maryland, Christian opened his eyes and saw dawn bleeding palely across the New Orleans sky. At first he could not remember why he was lying on the riverbank, why his clothes were wet with mist and his limbs so stiff and cold. He could not think why it seemed strange to see another dawn, why he had never expected to open his eyes again.
Then the whole night came rushing back, and he gave an involuntary shudder and let the relief and the fury wash over him. Relief because he had not wanted to die at the hands of one like Wallace, so clumsy and drained of passion; fury because Wallace should not have been able to defeat him, Wallace with his tired, ancient eyes. Christian’s belly should be warm and heavy with Wallace’s blood now; Wallace should be drifting away along the river bottom, the water filling his eyes, the creatures of the mud beginning to nibble at his hands.
Christian sat up and examined himself. There was a scorched hole in the fine black cloth of his shirt, its edges perfectly round. He undid the top two buttons. The bullet had shattered the third one. In the center of his chest was a shiny pink scar, the skin pulled tight and slightly rippled. There would be no matching scar on his back; Wallace’s bullet was still in him, and there it would stay. It was not the first.
He had bled only a little. There was a crust of dried blood on his skin, ringing the scar, and the ground where he had lain all night was stained dark red. But the spot was small, hardly worth noticing. The fool, he thought with a touch of incredulity. He had to destroy my brain or my heart, and he had his chance at either one, and the old fool missed my heart by an inch. With an intensity that he had not thought himself still capable of, Christian wished that Molochai, Twig, and Zillah had been there. They would have taken Wallace’s silver cross away, thrown it in the river, and ripped Wallace’s throat out, joking all the while.
But the fury faded even as he recognized it, and Christian sat quietly in the breaking light for several minutes, resting his head on his drawn-up knees, unable to identify his new emotion. As he pushed himself to his feet and gathered his cloak around him, he realized what this was, his reaction to waking healed and alive and still alone. It was disappointment.
Last night’s trash lay tranquil in the gutter as he made his way home. The toe of his boot connected with a plastic Hurricane glass and sent it skittering across the pavement. The noise was too loud in this early-morning calm. Christian caught the odor of the sticky drops left in the bottom of the glass: rum and passion fruit gone sour, a rancid pink smell. The glass rolled into the arch of a courtyard where green and golden light was beginning to filter down through mimosa branches. The smell of the blossoms reached him, rosy-delicate, clear as the smell of water.
The Quarter was nearly quiet. Christian trailed his hand along the walls, along wrought-iron gates between high ornate pillars of brick and stone, along the doors and windows of the dark shops, the sleeping bars. He passed an all-night diner and caught a stew of breakfast odors: the savory, greasy smell of sausage and eggs and coffee for those on their way to early-morning jobs, hot fried oysters and the sliced ham and vinegar tang of po-boys for those who had been out drinking all night, who would soon head back to cheap hotel rooms and drab boardinghouses for sodden daytime slumber. He felt his stomach shift, last night’s nausea raise its head, roll over, and settle back into uneasy sleep.
The sky was brightening more quickly now. As he turned east from Bienville onto Chartres, the nascent sunlight caught him full in the face. Again came pain that burned through his eyes and seared his brain. Christian flung up his arm and sagged back against the wall. The bricks were rough and cool. He pressed his face to them, resting for a moment. His eyes felt scorched. When he had to venture out into sunlight, he always wore dark glasses, a wide-brimmed black hat, gloves, and dark loose clothing that he could huddle into. This morning he had only the cloak to pull around him. Already he was beginning to be blinded by the new day, and he was so very tired. The sidewalk seemed to stretch endlessly before him, shimmering and baking in the sunlight.
Surely his bar was just ahead. He groped along the wall. He had to rely on his sense of smell, but the mélange of odors confused him; he could not tell where he was. Was the bar in this block, or the next? He couldn’t have crossed Conti yet. Idiot, he told himself. How long have you lived here? How many nights have you walked this street? You should carry a map of scents in your head, in your very being….
He forced himself to concentrate on separating the smells and identifying them. Here was the slimy sea-smell of the trashcans behind an oyster bar. Here was a sewer smell, brown and gassy. Here was the leather trade shop, black tanned hides and chrome and the dizzying chemical bite of butyl nitrate, and that meant his bar was only a few doors down.
He felt his way to it and let himself in. There was a separate street entrance that led straight up to the rooms, but Christian usually came in through the bar because that way he knew he would meet no one on the stairs. For a long time he stood in the lightening gloom of the bar, breathing the dark dust, the ghosts of liquor and beer and all the drinkers who had been here. If he breathed in deeply enough, he thought he could still catch the scent of Wallace Creech, the dry sick smell.
Wallace. Poor Wallace, who thought he had killed his nemesis, his daughter’s su
pernatural defiler. What would he do when he discovered otherwise?
Christian closed his eyes. He would not think about Wallace now, would not plan. He looked around the room, saw the dark wood of the bar, the bottles gleaming softly on their shelves, the colored light filtering through the unbroken stained-glass window. In here the light could not hurt him.
But his eyes were sore, exhausted. He climbed the stairs to his room and burrowed into bed, into his own comforting, familiar smell. Cool dry skin and ancient spice and a hint of something darker, something thick and garnet-colored and faintly rotten. The smell from deep inside him, where the blood never quite washed clean. Borne away on the river of it, he slept.
When he awoke, the light seeping around the edges of the window shade was diffuse, milky, no longer bright and searing. Outside on the street, twilight must be drawing nigh. The streetlamps would blink on soon, softly illuminating each corner through opaque glass panes, and all the children of the French Quarter would come out to play.
Christian lay flat on his back, tangled in sheets that were not so very much paler than his skin. He pulled tendrils of his hair over his shoulder and twisted them as he daydreamed, and he stared at the delicate brown and cream pattern of water marks that had spread across the ceiling over the years, almost too dim to see in this fading light. He was not planning, not worrying, not even truly thinking. He was only waiting for full night to come, for he knew it was time to leave again.
This had happened so many times before. He might live in a place for five years or fifty before anyone became suspicious of him. But someone always became suspicious, and he always moved on. It was easier than trying to hide from them; it made him less heartsick than fighting them. When he was young he had fought them, and he had never lost. But he always had to kill so many. Eventually he realized that when he was not killing for lust and hunger, he hated it. Breaking the fragile span of their forty or fifty or eighty years made him feel vicious and cruel. He could outlast them; he could return long after they were dust and bones.
And it was most important to remain secretive, to remain a little afraid. For even if he killed them all, tore their throats out one by one, there were always more. This was the one thing he knew Molochai, Twig, and even Zillah would never recognize: no matter how invulnerable they thought they might be, their race was few, and the others were many.
Once he had been found out, they would rain down upon him. They would scream for his blood in return for the blood he had taken, and they would have it no matter what the cost.
Wallace might not be so dangerous. Not by himself. He was old and alone; perhaps he would have no friends to tell. But Wallace had God, and the godly. He belonged to a church. Christian knew the eagerness of the religious to believe in evil and their lust to crush it. To do something tangible in return for the intangible reward they spent their lives awaiting. Wallace by himself might not be so dangerous, but his faith could be deadly.
And so it was time to leave again. It was easier than being on his guard all the time, easier than slapping a hundred crucifixes out of a hundred hands, easier than ripping into a hundred terrified faces. Let Wallace die believing he had avenged his daughter.
Christian packed a very small bag. There was little to pack; for a long time now possessions had seemed fleeting and cumbersome, and his room was almost bare. He brought his day clothes, his hat and gloves and glasses, and he brought the money he had saved from the bar. He kept it in a box under the bed, but there wasn’t very much of it. No one else would have been able to afford the rent and the upkeep—the bar was so far down Chartres, and no one ever came in until ten—but Christian had none of the expenses of a usual human life. He did not need food; he did not go out drinking. His enjoyments were more exotic and carried a potentially higher price. This money he would spend along the way, for gasoline. He could get more money when he needed it; there was always work for a good bartender. With a glimmer of hope, he put three bottles of Chartreuse in his bag. There was no telling whom he might meet on the road.
It had begun to rain, and the street was deserted. This was cold, grimy rain, rain that drifted down from the sky like broken spiderwebs and danced on the hood of Christian’s car as if possessed by some mindless elemental joy. The golden cones of brightness beneath the streetlamps shimmered like spirits. Rain misted up from the sidewalks and rose back toward the sky. The clouds hung low and leaden, reflecting back the light of the French Quarter dull purple, like light seen through thick dirty glass.
Christian turned onto Bourbon Street. The rain hadn’t stopped tonight’s carnival. Crowds huddled on the sidewalks and made occasional mad dashes across the street, like fish darting between brightly lit riverbanks. The street was a riot of lights. Glittering gold ribbons, pink and green martini glasses, a giant red neon crawfish. He drove past Jean Lafitte’s Old Absinthe House and remembered when it had first begun serving that bitter liqueur. The sign proclaimed Since 1807, and Christian had to trust it. His memory was good, but he had been in and out of the city in those years, more restless then. He had seen Lafitte, though, a handsome, sensual man who could hold forth on any subject and draw an audience whether he knew what he spoke of or not. Christian’s eyes had met Lafitte’s across a crowded barroom one night, and Lafitte had pulled a face at him, toothy and menacing, then winked.
The pirate had been drunk on absinthe, which produces visions. Molochai, Twig, and Zillah would have loved absinthe in its true form, before the poisonous wormwood was taken out of the recipe. But they had been mewling babes when it was banned in the United States in 1912.
Inside the strip clubs, spangles gyrated and flashed. Christian stopped his car for a crowd of people milling across the street. Soldiers, tourists, street-corner musicians—and the omnipresent children in black. He had seen those pale smudged faces before, in the clubs, in his arms… but no, those had been different faces.
Most of the crowd was drunk. Some turned and waved at Christian, and he lifted a gloved hand in return, half-smiling. Surely those could not be tears on his face. He had not cried in too many years. He could not remember what crying felt like. This was only leftover rain, dripping from his hair, pooling in his eyes.
Christian waved goodbye to the Bourbon Street crowd and wiped the rain from his cheeks. Then he turned north and drove out of town.
12
As early afternoon light touched her eyelids, the sleeping girl moaned and buried her face in soft black oblivion.
Her sheets and pillowcases had been plain white cotton until last week, when she had run them all through the washing machine with six packages of black Rit dye. Now they were a flat bluish-ebony color that stained her skin on hot nights. She nestled deeper into her inky bedclothes and flung an arm across the mattress. Empty space. No warmth or scent except her own, no reassuringly live flesh to press herself close to. The empty bed brought her awake with a jolt, and for a moment she panicked. Waking up alone robbed her of her frame of reference; she could barely remember who she was.
Then she saw the room around her, the posters on the walls, the paint-smeared easel, the clothes heaped on the floor of the big walk-in closet. Across the room she saw herself in the mirror of her vanity, eyes round and startled, pale face framed by tangles of long red-gold hair. She settled back with a sigh. She was Ann Bransby-Smith, and she was in her own room, safe in her own bed, and never mind the sick feeling it still gave her to wake up alone.
Not until she rolled over and hugged her pillow close to her did she realize that she had been thinking of waking up not with Eliot—even though she had spent most of last night with him—but with Steve.
Even the thought of his name made her heart twist. After all that had happened between them, Ann still sometimes wished she could wake up with him, see his dark hair straggling across the pillow and his intense face softened in sleep, reach over and glide her fingers along the muscles of his back. God, but he had always felt good beside her, on top of her, inside her.
&
nbsp; Well, almost always.
Well, except when he made her hurt like hell.
That was how she had started cheating on him in the first place: she’d wanted to have sex with someone who didn’t leave her sore the next morning. Once she had loved the sureness and strength of Steve’s touch, but drinking turned him rough and seemed to make his bones sharper. Ann woke with gnawed nipples, bruised hipbones, a throbbing ache in her crotch that turned to raw agony when she pissed. It was only good for an argument if she mentioned it, and she still desired him, so after a while she shut up.
And when she was honest with herself, she knew the rough sex wasn’t the only thing that had driven her away. It was the music as well. Steve had already started playing guitar when she met him, and at the time she had liked the idea of having a musician for a boyfriend. She was happy for him when he started getting good and excited when he, Ghost, and R.J. decided to form a band. R.J. had never wanted it as badly as the other two—he’d always been a serious kid, and Ann thought music was just too frivolous a calling for him—and had dropped out early, but he still sat in with them sometimes.
All that had been fine. But when it got too heavy, when it started to appear that Steve and Ghost wanted to make Lost Souls? their life’s work, Ann balked. She didn’t want to be a musician’s wife, spending months alone in Missing Mile while he toured, worrying about money during the lean years and groupies during the good ones. When they had started recording their tape, the final wedge was driven in. The all-night sessions, the hours upon hours Steve spent in Terry’s home studio talking about levels, tracks, spillage, and other incomprehensible things he never bothered to explain to his lowly girlfriend. He had never felt so intensely about her, Ann was sure.
At any rate, she had known Eliot would make a gentler lover from the first time she met him.
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