by Laura Bickle
Anya wrapped her arms around Sparky, who burped against her ear. She wrinkled her nose. His breath smelled like sulphur. “Sparky is not a psychic vampire.”
“Not saying he is. Just that he might have some survival mechanisms that we don’t know about yet. I mean, you don’t even really know where he came from,” Brian pointed out.
“My mother gave him to me,” she challenged Brian, daring him to continue. This was rocky ground for her, and he knew it.
“But where did she get him?” Brian pulled up a bar stool.
Anya let a curtain of hair fall over her face. Her chin-length hair was handy for hiding behind. “I don’t know. He just always was around. My mom said he used to curl up in my bassinet with me when I was a baby.”
Jules snorted from a safe distance across the bar. “And to think I was nervous when my wife let the cat sleep with our daughter.…”
“Can you ask your mom sometime?”
Anya’s jaw tightened. This was not terrain she’d covered in her relationship with Brian. Not yet. “She’s, um, not around anymore.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Brian stared down at the steam his fingerprints made on the glossy bar, outlining his hands.
“Don’t be. It was a long time ago.” Anya wound her fingers under Sparky’s armpits. Brian said that she used Sparky like a security blanket in a lot of ways. Maybe he was right. But she needed the little guy. She didn’t really need anyone else—not the members of DAGR, not even Brian. But she would admit to herself that she needed Sparky.
A wheelchair squeaked along the polished bar floor. Ciro, the owner of the Devil’s Bathtub, pushed up to the bar. His ebony face was creased with sadness. He held a photo album in his deeply lined hands. Anya noticed how much they shook when he handed it to her, the album pages opened like heavy birds’ wings that smelled of mothballs.
“That’s Bernie,” Ciro said, pointing to a faded snapshot of a group of men wearing plaid pants and collared shirts. Anya judged by the cut of the collars and the fading orange hue of the photograph dyes that the picture had been taken in the 1970s. The interior of a bowling alley sprawled in the background. Ciro’s shaking finger pointed to a man with muttonchop sideburns and a meticulously trimmed, elaborate mustache. Even back then, Bernie sported glasses and a paunch.
Anya’s gaze trickled to the other faces in the photo, grinned as she saw a younger Ciro lounging beside the ball-cleaner. Anya could see the swagger in his posture—he was a young man with the world at his bowling-shoed feet. Young Ciro had hair. Lots of it. His Afro spread out of the view of the camera, as meticulously groomed as a topiary. She bit back a laugh.
“Hey, it was the style back then.” A gleam of humor and pride flickered in the old man’s eyes.
“It’s the style again, Ciro.”
Ciro self-consciously rubbed at his bald pate, smiling at the handsome image of his younger self. He’d kept the beard and mustache, but the Afro was long gone. “Time and follicles wait for no man.”
“Is this how you know Bernie? From a bowling league?”
“Not just a bowling league. The League of Smooth Operators. We were league champions for three years, till half the team got sent to ’Nam.”
“Did you guys bowl after you got back?” Anya wasn’t sure how to ask how many of Ciro’s friends came back.
The old man shrugged. “Some of us. Off and on. But it wasn’t the same.” He tapped Bernie’s picture. “Bernie was always an odd duck, even then. Though that was a time of… well, I guess you could say it was an era of spiritual exploration.…”
Max snorted and pantomimed smoking a joint.
Ciro gave him a dirty look. “That’s not what I meant. I meant that Bernie was into weirder stuff than the rest of us. And I don’t just mean drugs.”
“Like what?” Anya leaned forward. Ciro was DAGR’s demonologist. He’d forgetten more names of demons than Anya had ever known. For someone to be into weirder shit than Ciro was saying a lot.
“Bernie was obsessed with the idea of astral travel. Out-of-body experiences. He insisted that he’d been all over the world.”
“I didn’t think that humans could go to the astral plane,” Anya said. “Isn’t that the same as the Afterworld?”
Ciro shook his head. “You’re confusing the road with the destination. The astral planes do include the Afterworld, but much, much more. Not all of those places are happily, heavenly ever after. Astral travel reveals intersection points that connect our world and allow travel to those planes… shortcuts.” The old man sighed. “But, in general, yes. Humans don’t go there. Not without paying a terrible price.”
Anya recalled the anguished expression on Bernie’s face as his ghost was pulled out of the room. “I can visualize that.”
Ciro continued. “When Bernie said he was plane-hopping back then, we thought he was just tripping. But once or twice he managed to bring physical objects from his travels.”
Anya’s eyebrow crawled up into her hairline. “Really?”
“Small stuff. Chinese coins, crucifixes… One time he came back with a piece of stone he said was from an archaeological dig in Egypt. That kind of thing. Though such apports aren’t totally unheard of in the metaphysical literature, substantiated reports are pretty uncommon in modern times.”
“He had a lot of junk in his house. Things that smelled like magick. Swords, jars of skeletons, charm bags…”
Ciro nodded sadly. “He hasn’t changed much, then. He started getting into dealing magickal artifacts in the early eighties. Didn’t care about the provenance or the background of the items, or who he sold them to. He was in it for the money. He brought some really ugly stuff around the bar.… Once, he brought a piece of armor he swore had come from a demon. Stuff that reeked of evil. I told him to quit, before he picked up something too big for him to handle.”
“What did he say?”
“Said that he wasn’t using the things he sold, had no attachment to them, so he was safe. He said that he was just the conduit. I told him that didn’t matter. Sometimes things attach to you.”
Anya’s fingers fluttered to the collar around her neck. She understood that kind of attachment better than most.
Attachment wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, Anya had decided. But she still trod carefully.
Too carefully, she knew, for Brian.
Brian pulled his van into the driveway of Anya’s tiny one-story house. It was the same as every other house on her street, except for the huge, leafy maple tree in the front yard and the fact that the shutters were green. Everything else was identical as far as the eye could see down the block: fading siding and aging brick, curling roof shingles, and postage-stamp-sized lawns, illuminated by the glow of porch lights. Spring was summoning leaf buds from square-trimmed shrubs and the trees, though it was still too early for the grass to need cutting.
Anya had lived here, in the Detroit village of Hamtramck, since she was a child. Different houses, but all much the same… The house she’d lived in with her mother, the one she’d lived in with her aunt and uncle, and this one all had the same layout that she could navigate with her eyes shut. All stood in the comforting shadow of the massive St. Florian Roman Catholic church. But things were a bit different than she remembered as a child. More bits of trash blown up against chain-link fences and never removed. A few more fire hydrants marked out of order. No traffic going to or from the now-closed auto plant down the road. People left their porch lights on all night, as if the wan glow might keep some of the darkness at bay. When Anya was little, her mother would have called it a waste of electricity. But it seemed necessary, somehow, now. It was a futile hope, Anya knew, but still instinctive. Humans gathered around light, like campfires, to feel safe.
Brian’s breath fogged the glass of the van. “Do you want me to come in?”
Anya weighed the question for a moment, and she knew that he felt her hesitation. The pulse in the collar she wore around her neck felt sluggish. Sparky was sleeping, so she sai
d, “Sure.”
She popped open the door and stepped onto the cracked driveway, pulling her keys from her jacket pocket. Brian crossed to the back of the van and shuffled in the pile of wires and boxes of ghost-hunting gadgetry. He rounded the corner of the van with a cardboard box in his arms.
“Whatcha got?” she asked.
“A present.” He balanced the box on his hip as she unlocked the door. “A little something for your house.”
Anya frowned. She supposed that her decor could have used the improvement. Compared to Brian’s usual milieu, a bird’s nest of wires and electronarcanum, her house probably looked pretty spartan. Furnished in spotlessly clean used furniture, the living room was nearly perfect in its efficiency. Anya liked it that way. Most days, she came home from work covered in ash, and the hardwood floors were easy to clean. She was compulsive about keeping bits of her work out of her sanctuary, and the cleanliness managed to create the comforting illusion of order, much as her neighbors’ porch lights created the illusion of safety.
Brian set the box down in front of the coffee table.
“What is it?” She sidled up beside him, and his arm wrapped around her waist.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time here, so…” His chin rested on the top of her head. “I took the liberty of getting you a television set.”
Anya blinked. Thanks to Sparky, she kept very few electronic devices in her house. Hell, he blew up her last microwave and destroyed a can opener a week ago. “Um, I hope that Sparky doesn’t…”
“If he blows it up, he blows it up. I thought it would be fun to try, though.” He kissed her cheek. “He’s pretty much left us alone lately.”
Anya smiled against Brian’s chest. A petulant salamander could be a distraction in a relationship. Sparky’s need to demand attention at inopportune moments had been a serious handicap in her previous relationships. It was very difficult to get in the mood with an invisible mewing salamander perched at the foot of one’s bed. But Sparky seemed to be less needy now. Last week the salamander had allowed Brian and Anya to sleep spooned up on her worn velvet couch, without so much as a peep.
Anya still felt a twinge of reticence about becoming involved. Everyone she’d ever loved had disappeared from her life. And she didn’t want that to happen to Brian. He was too important to her, and she was too afraid of screwing things up.
She felt Brian nuzzle the top of her head, felt his arms stiffen and his chin move back, almost imperceptibly. She realized that she still smelled like work: like death and magick and the grease stain on Bernie’s floor. The psychic grime on her made her skin itch.
She pulled back, stood on tiptoe to kiss Brian’s top lip. He had a tiny scar on the upper left side of his mouth; she’d never asked where it came from, but she loved the feel of it. “Let me get cleaned up.”
“Only if you promise to come back.”
She slipped away from him, down the dark hallway that smelled of lemon wood polish, to the cold white tile of the bathroom. A dozen yellow rubber duckies stared down at her with cartoon eyes from a shelf as she undressed. The salamander torque remained next to her skin; it always did. She’d never taken it off, even as a child.
Closing the door, she tugged her shirt over her head. Her nose wrinkled. Her clothes smelled like charred bacon. Absently, she ran her fingers over the scar on her chest, the remnants of a burn mark. White, shiny scar tissue spread over her heart in a star-shaped pattern that was slowly darkening. It wasn’t a mark from an ordinary burn—this had been left by a demon, a demon she’d barely survived. It shouldn’t have happened. An ordinary demon could not have done to her what Lilitu had. A Lantern could devour ghosts and demons at will, burning them up and destroying them. Lilitu had been the exception.
But a lot of things happened that shouldn’t; unpredictable things like the grease stain that had been Jasper Bernard, reeking on his charred floor.
Anya cranked up the heat on the shower and stepped into the steam. She thrust her head under the hot water, trying to rinse the image from her mind. Her toes tickled the breast of a yellow rubber duck bobbing around the drain. This duck was a demon duck, looking sinister with red horns and a red plastic tail curving over his back.
She shut her eyes, feeling the water dribble over her lips. She rubbed the juicy tang of mandarin orange body scrub and a handful of salt over her skin, scouring it red. She might not be able to rinse the image away, but she could at least scrape away the smell. She could scrub herself clean of all the death and magick and pretend to be normal, to have a normal evening with a normal man.
A corner of her mouth tugged upward. That was what she loved most about Brian: He was ordinary. Stubbornly non-magickal and a skeptic to boot. While she smelled like unseen and intangible things, spirits and fire, Brian dealt with what was solid and could be touched. Circuits. Machines. The cold tang of metal and silicone. Everything reduced to ones and zeros, to binary code, on or off. There was something comforting about that knowledge, that he had a tight grip on things that were irrefutably real.
Somebody had to.
She towel-dried her hair. No matter how hard she scrubbed, she never was able to shampoo away a faint smell of burn. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell; it smelled of wood smoke. She’d burned her hair off several months back in an encounter with one of Sparky’s relatives, nearly burned to a cinder herself. It had grown back dark and straight, but it felt soft and fine as ash.
She shrugged into her robe, covered with cartoon yellow ducks. She padded out into the hallway with her death-stinky clothes balled under her arm, en route to the washing machine.
She paused in the doorway to her bedroom. Light from the street drenched the walls and floor. Her gaze picked out the stylized magick circle painted in black on the floor around her bed. It could be opened and closed with a simple gesture, to keep evil out and guarantee her a restful night’s sleep. Or it could keep a salamander out for a restless one.
She felt eyes upon her, watching in the stillness. They were her eyes, captured in a painting hung on the south wall. The canvas was treated with mineral dust that sparkled in the low light, and there was some small part of Anya that thrilled to see it: Her image was dressed in a black corset dress, her back facing the viewer, and she was looking slightly over her shoulder. It was the most sensuous, powerful work of art she’d ever seen. It had been painted by a former lover of hers, Drake Ferrer. He was many things: painter, architect, arsonist. He was also the only other Lantern she’d ever met. And he was dead.
But he’d captured this strange, compelling part of Anya, this shadow self that she couldn’t quite tear herself away from, looking out from black carbon and glittering mica. He’d called the painting Ishtar, after the Babylonian goddess of passion and war. It was the thing she most feared becoming, and she kept it close at hand to remind herself not to go there. Not to become a destroyer. Not to become like Drake.
The sound of voices startled her; she was too used to silence in her house. From the shadow of the hall, she could see Brian crouched over the flickering screen of the massive flat-screen television sitting on the floor, fiddling with the remote. Noiselessly, she padded down the hallway in her bare feet to his side.
She crouched next to him, wet hair dripping over her shoulder, feeling as oddly awed as a caveman hunkered down over a fire. The picture was clear as glass as Brian cycled through the channels: skinny fashion models bright as butterflies stalking a catwalk; a chef holding up a lobster; a woman speaking Japanese before a blue screen.
“Wow. Fancy.” She gave a low whistle of approval.
“Glad you like it.”
“Thanks. You didn’t need to do that. Really.” She chewed her bottom lip, afraid to ask: “But… where did all the channels come from? I don’t have cable.…”
“Don’t worry about that.” He gave a sly grin. Brian did some strange and shady things with technology, some things she didn’t understand and wasn’t quite sure were legal: surveillance equipment; voice re
corders; an insanely huge collection of techno music. Most of his toys wound up in the service of DAGR. But she never asked where he got his playthings, or exactly what sort of research he did for the university. None of them did.
She blinked at the image of a brutal nature show, a bloody seal pup barking as it tried to flee a polar bear across a white ice field. More than anything else she’d seen today, she knew that the seal pup would give her nightmares. “Um… could we watch something else?”
Brian clicked to the next channel. A woman paced a stage like a caged tiger on grainy homemade video holding a microphone. Anya guessed her to be in her early fifties. Dressed in a powder-blue pantsuit, she had bleached-blond hair that was meticulously teased in spiky fringes over burning blue eyes. Those eyes blazed with something more than fervor, but Anya couldn’t define it. A glass vial was suspended from a golden chain around her neck. Her voice was larger than her petite frame suggested, ringing like a bell over the heads of the audience:
“Nothing is impossible, my friends. With enough will and imagination, your dreams can come true, too. The universe wants you to be happy.…”
Brian grimaced and turned the channel.
“Wait. Go back.” Anya pressed her hand on his arm.
Brian clicked back, and Anya’s attention was captured by the yellow banner scrolling at the bottom of the screen: Miracles for the Masses. She recognized the name: It was stamped on the check fragment from Bernie’s fireplace.
“Who is she?” Anya asked.
Brian sighed. His god was pragmatism, and he had little patience for anything that didn’t work. “Have you been living under a rock? That’s Hope Solomon, head of some New Age pyramid scheme called Miracles for the Masses. She’s on every night on local cable access. Good for a laugh, but I feel sorry for the poor morons who send her money.”
Anya watched Hope smile beatifically at the camera. “She’s local, then?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately.”
“…and visualize the destiny you want, the destiny the universe wants you to have. But also apply will to make your wishes come true. Will is key. Will means action. And you can take action today to manifest your dreams by calling the number at the bottom of your screen.