The club’s lights flooded the street with enough illumination that Chan could see every face clearly in the orange-and-yellow-tinted glare, but he ignored them all. He stopped long enough to text a message to Barbara:
“Sam’s gone.”
He wanted to throw away the phone then, rip off his jacket, discard everything on him, and run, run just to be anywhere else. Instead, he forced himself to stay still. He thought of the man his friend had been, and then he added two more lines:
“He told me to thank you for sending me.
“His last words were that I should tell you he loved you.”
Chan tucked his phone into his jacket and walked away from the club, away from his past, and into what remained of the night.
* * *
MARK L. VAN NAME has published four novels (One Jump Ahead, Slanted Jack, Overthrowing Heaven, and Children No More) as well as an omnibus collection of his first two books (Jump Gate Twist); edited or co-edited two previous anthologies (Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology and Transhuman), and written many short stories. He is the CEO of a fact-based marketing and technology assessment firm, Principled Technologies, Inc., and has worked with computer technology for his entire professional career. He has published over a thousand articles in the computer trade press, as well as a broad assortment of essays and reviews. He has also created and performed three spoken-word shows: Science Magic Sex; Wake Up Horny, Wake Up Angry; and Mr. Poor Choices. For more information, visit his web site, www.marklvanname.com, or follow his blog, markvanname.blogspot.com.
His afterword:
* * *
Diego Chan and his world have been knocking around in my head for quite some time now. This story is their debut.
Like so many other urban fantasy settings, his world is one in which vampires and other creatures exist, but in it, as in ours, government regulations and political groups and all the other complicating factors of everyday life play important roles.
Diego is also a character who fascinates me, a man who makes his living in an unusual way and who lives a very different life from most of us.
The heart of this story, though, is none of that. In this tale, Diego has to deal in a very brutal way with the loss of a very close friend, a friend who ended up on a path Diego could not support. Many, probably most of us have had that experience, watching someone who mattered greatly to us turn down a road we would not follow. Saying a final goodbye, really writing off such a person, is incredibly hard—even when the act is not the extreme one that Diego has to take.
As time permits, I plan to write a series of books in which Diego discovers just what he is and, ultimately, why he is what he is.
BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN
CAITLIN KITTREDGE
Outside Lawrence, Kansas
1947
I am reborn in fire.
I am a fallen star, burning up, steam rising from my skin.
Naked under a night sky that unfurls endlessly, untainted by mountains or cities, I stay very still. Even then, I don’t know what’s really happened.
It takes me some time. After I sit up, draw my knees to my breasts, feel the frozen dirt under my flanks. See the twenty-foot circle my arrival has burned into the winter-dead cornfield. Watch stray snowflakes melt before they even get within a foot of my skin.
My bare skin. My flawless, new bare skin.
I manage to get up after a while. I’m sick and empty. My nerves burn and my bones ash and my skin gives off radiant heat that leaves a trail of black footprints branded into the mean, ice-crusted snow.
I look up. Up at the stars, Orion and Scorpio and Ursa Major spinning over the flat, featureless land all around. The stars are older than me. But not by much.
There’s a road. A state route, paved and slick with black ice. I stay on the edge. I don’t know the fragility of this new form, cooling like an ingot just from the furnace. I’ve lost everything. I am completely new. I could, for all I know, be completely human.
Fuck, I hope not.
I walk. There is no sound, nothing but the wind and the clouds and the crackling cold.
I’m cold.
I’ve never been cold before.
After a time, a truck comes. A rattlebone Ford, pitted with rust, driven by a man in a feed cap. He stares at me. I stare at him.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks, finally.
I look down the road. It’s a ribbon of ink across the dirty page of this place. I suppose it’s as good a road as any. “Wherever you are,” I said. His open mouth joins his stare.
“I’m headed for Topeka,” he manages.
I walk around the truck. The engine shudders and rattles. The fan belt shrieks. I get in the passenger side. “Topeka sounds all right with me,” I say.
He grinds the gears hard enough to bring out a little smoke. There’s a variety program on the radio. A man is singing about a woman who did him wrong. I sympathize, even though I’m the woman.
The road rolls on. My savior watches the road. I watch him.
I see the sin on his soul, the burden and the stain. I see the young girls in diners and truck stops. I see their twisted faces and his nubby hands on their necks. I see the red knot at his center, the murderous impulse.
Maybe I’m not human yet. Not entirely.
I wrap the man’s jacket around myself as we drive. He asks me questions. I don’t answer.
I see his last girl, rolled in a tarp in the bed of this rusty truck, and left behind in a cornfield just like mine. I feel the hunting knife in the pocket of this jacket.
I watch him drive then, switching gears until I’m sure I’ve got it.
A sign whips by. A hundred fifty-two miles to Topeka.
I touch the edge of the knife.
I might be all right here on earth after all.
Eden, Kansas
Five years later
1.
Across the room, I watched my reflection in the mirror. I’d started the night with my hair rolled up and the nicer of my two decent dresses washed and pressed. My dress was on the floor by the wardrobe. My hair fell into my face, cutting dark lines across my vision.
The bare mattress rubbed against my bare stomach. The guy behind me—Ron or Sean, I couldn’t remember—dug his fingers into my hip bones and pushed me against the edge of the mattress with each thrust.
It hurt, but not bad. I’d been hurt a lot worse. I’d started this life hurting, burning alive. And Ron or Sean didn’t even want anything too special—a little shoving, ripping my underthings, fingers clawing runs in my stockings and popping the elastic on my garters while he’d held me down on the bed. He didn’t have any particular sin on him, besides being drunk and horny. He was a country boy, passing through Eden on his way to somewhere better. Most of Maybelle’s customers were just like him. Passing through.
He grunted. “Come on, baby.” His rhythm increased. I tried to keep from rolling my eyes in the mirror. Ron or Sean wasn’t going to win any prizes for longevity. I made some obliging noises, and tossed my head a little bit so my ruined curls waterfalled down my back.
Ron or Sean slumped against me, hot sour-mash breath on my neck, his chest pressed against my back. After a few heartbeats he straightened and pulled up his pants, buckling his cheap belt and fishing around on the floor for his cheap shirt. Doris had turned up her nose at Ron/Sean when he’d come in. He looked poor. He was poor. But he was also grateful, and the grateful ones paid you, every time.
“Damn, honey,” he said. I rolled over and sat on the edge of my bed. My garter belt was the only thing still on me, but I put it back in place. Straightened my seams, and fished my hairpins out of the sheets.
“You ever come through Eden again, you come on back,” I said. “You’re a real nice guy.”
Ron or Sean grinned at me. His teeth were crooked and brown. Arkansas farm boy’s teeth. Ah, there it was. He didn’t get dates with nice girls. Girls who cared if you looked like Cary Grant versus Robert Mit
chum. “You just bet I will, babe,” he said, and put a ten down on the dresser before he grabbed his hat and left.
I picked up the money and shoved it into the old sock that served as my safe deposit box, taking out four half dollars to give Maybelle her cut.
The arthritic grandfather clock down in the parlor was chiming two a.m. I got a robe and pulled my hair back any which way.
I was off the clock. I went downstairs to find a drink.
2.
Let me tell you a little secret about angels. Not all of us are good. Not even half of us. The word “angel” isn’t even proper. It’s Greek, a derivative of angaros, “messenger.” “Harbinger” is a better word.
And we fall. We fall all the time. Seraphs are delicate creatures, and when sin enters them they can’t sustain like a human. We fall. I did.
See, there isn’t God in the angry-daddy-in-the-sky way humans understand. There is a Hell, of course. And a City. Where I lived, with the other seraphs. All that separates a seraph from a demon is a little bit of wickedness in their heart. A little bit of red, human blood beating in their veins.
There are spheres, but not in the elegant, impassable way you’re imagining. The City and Hell and Earth are more like passengers crammed together on a railway car, overlapping, purses spilling into each other’s laps, spare change rolling up the aisles.
So yeah, there are angels. Angels and demons and everything in between that has a bit of one bloodline or the other. And believe you me, some of the nastiest motherfuckers in this sphere come from angel blood.
Don’t let it worry you. Chances are, you’ll never meet or see one of us. Chances are.
There are a lot more than seven sins. Used to be, it took a lot for an angel to fall. It took an act of extreme cruelty, an act worthy of a human. Lucifer was real. I’ve looked into his eyes and touched his hand, to give me strength before battle. He was beautiful, because we were all beautiful. All shades and colors of it. Beauty is predatory camouflage. Because we’re all predators, make no mistake. Lucifer was beautiful, a warrior and a thinker.
He still started a war. He still lost. And he still fell. Other than that, though, consider most of the holy books long, boring bedtime stories. Nothing is as clear-cut as all that Old Testament junk.
As the spheres weaken and the lines bleed, more and more of us fall. Some go straight through and end up in Hell, become demons or Nothingness, part of the howling void in between everything. More of us end up here on Earth, in shadow-bodies of ourselves, with shadow-wings and shadow-vision that lets us see sin, stripped of the majesty of the City.
We hurt and bleed and get hungry, need money like everyone else.
I could go on and on, about fallen angels and demons and my personal theory about the Great War, about how it tore something fundamental open between the spheres, the suffering of six million souls, the blood of two million more, Oppenheimer and his bomb. I could talk about my time in the City, and why I fell.
It’s not important. Just remember: There are angels and demons and we walk among you.
We see you, even if you don’t see us.
And God? Doesn’t give a shit.
3.
I slept late, because that’s what you do in a whorehouse—go to bed when you see the sun and wake up when it’s mostly gone. At least in winter, in Kansas. By three p.m. the light was already long and slow, draining out of the world.
Of course, Maybelle’s was a nice whorehouse. Better than the first rathole I’d worked at, in Topeka, where a man named Allendale ran the place, beat the whores, shot them up with dope, and generally made life a living hell. May didn’t stand for any doping, and she didn’t let johns beat us, unless they paid a whole hell of a lot.
Doc Pritchard was there when I came down. I hadn’t bothered to put clothes on, beyond my cream silk robe. My makeup was all over my face, a map of last night. I got coffee and went to stand in line. Doc Pritchard came every few months and gave us penicillin, a glance down our throats, and the usual stuff. He took his pay in trade, off the books. He was a real doctor, better than the vet Allendale had called when a john beat a girl named Nadine half to death. Pritchard had a practice somewhere over toward Eden proper, and a respectable wife who had no idea that when he said he was treating poor farmers, he really meant whores.
He came other times, too, to set broken bones and to take care of the problems that came with working in a place like May’s. Those calls cost extra. Doc Pritchard liked us to tell him he’d been bad.
“Don’t you look a sight.” Betty pulled a cigarette from behind her ear and gave it to me.
“Right back at you,” I said. Betty was bottle red, from somewhere south of Kansas, and built like a house. She had the biggest tits of any human I’d ever laid eyes on. If a john paid for two, Betty and I usually took it. It was good money, and if he tried anything funny there would be one spare girl to scream. Theoretically.
“Snowing again,” she said, and exhaled. Her hair was pinned up, waiting to fall down in soft curls that begged your fingers to run through them.
“Thrilling,” I murmured. The snow was fat wet flakes, the kind that entombs houses and highways, cuts you off from every other living thing. If it kept up, there wouldn’t be any business tonight. I might actually get some sleep, though I’d be down cash for the week.
“Elizabeth,” Doc Pritchard called. “I’m ready for you. And put that out.”
Betty smirked at me and sashayed into the parlor where Pritchard ran his exams, trailing smoke.
I felt the friction burns on my stomach from the night before. I couldn’t get pregnant, but I could get hurt.
Most nights I tried not to think about it.
The kitchen was the end of the long main hall in May’s shuddering seventy-year-old farmhouse, and I could hear a radio. Frankie, the big man she employed to keep johns in line and do some cooking and repairing, was moving around humming to himself. Cold draft wound around my ankles. May’s house was tight as a two-dollar street hooker after Fleet Week.
But it was a place, and I’d done all right here. My looks weren’t anything like Betty’s. I was on the small side, dark-haired and pale-skinned. Something like I’d been back in the City. The shadow-body. I looked vulnerable. Some men like that. Some kinds of men, who aren’t the kind a good girl would want to get mixed up with. Men where you can see the sin on them bright as a Klieg light, and twice as hot.
I smoked, and waited my turn, and listened to the radio. Somebody had killed a family over in Lawrence. Somebody else had won a baseball game against Kansas City.
And now, back to the music.
4.
I always liked walking in the snow. It was like walking in the sky, white and alone, except for your footprints.
Two thirds of a mile down the road, at a crossroads with the state highway, there was a filling station, and I went to get me a candy bar and Betty a magazine and both of us more cigarettes. Frankie would’ve gone, taken May’s old Packard, but I liked the walk. Wrapped up in a coat and some boots that were too big, the flakes drifted onto me, and the blacktop. By dark, the snow would be deep. By midnight, it would cover the whole world, as far as the eye could see.
The filling station had a neon sign on a pole, a jackrabbit that ran in place all hours of the day and night. You could just see the sign from the attic of May’s house. The station couldn’t see us at all. Whores out of sight, whores out of mind. Or something like that.
The clerk never looked me in the eye when I bought things. The fact I paid was the only reason he let me in the place. He was what people called “God-fearing.” He beat his wife and his daughter too, the sad hollow-eyed women who lived behind the station in the ramshackle little cottage with peeling paint the same color as the sky. He’d lost a son on Omaha Beach. I didn’t feel particularly sorry for him.
He grunted when I put the chocolate and the Parade and the two packs of Lucky Strikes on the scarred counter.
“Supposed to be a foot a
nd a half by morning,” I said. I don’t know why I bothered.
“You should give that up,” he said, pushing the pack of smokes at me. “Nice girls don’t smoke.”
“Guess it’s a good thing I’m not carrying that particular affliction,” I said. “Niceness.”
I don’t know why I even opened my mouth. When I fell, the fight fell right out of me. I treated myself like a human. Fragile and fallible and human. I didn’t pick fights. Fights meant pain, and I’d bled enough in my time.
“Whore,” the attendant said. Like it was supposed to cut into my flesh.
“Good eye,” I said. The bell rang happily when it released me back into the snow.
At the edge of the gravel lot, a car waited. I say waited because it crouched, engine running, cloud of vapor streaming from the tailpipe, gleaming chrome teeth and hardened black body ready to spring forward. Against the car waited a man, a tall thin shadow on the twilight snow.
“You sure are a long way from home,” he said. His suit was black and his teeth were white, like the cigarette clamped between them.
I stopped before him, and cocked my hip. “Likewise.”
The man in black unfolded himself from his car. The Buick purred on, even though no gasoline ran through its veins. Not that car. Never.
“You ditched the wings,” the man in black said.
“You used to be taller,” I shot back.
The man in black patted the Buick’s flank. “Things change.”
“I suppose they do,” I said. “What are you doing in Kansas?”
The man in black dropped his cigarette into the snow, and walked out into the crossroads. The snow was everywhere now, and his dark eyes, all darkness, no white, were like coals. “Same thing I always am,” he said. “You should go. Just keep walking.”
The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge Page 27