by Chuck Wendig
Mookie sniffs. “See, that’s what makes us bad guys. We do the right thing, it’s on accident, or because the right thing just so happens to be the selfish thing. I don’t wanna save the world. I wanna save my kid. The world can go fuck itself.”
“Mook, sugar, you don’t have to—”
“Nah, it’s fine,” he says. Big underbite jaw chewing on nothing but his own guilt, spite, and rage. “I’m good with being a bad guy. Because bad guys get shit done while the good guys hang back like fucking pussies.”
Skelly laughs. “Watch your tongue, big fella. Woman’s pussy’s a lot tougher than a man’s balls. Those dangly things of yours are like over-ripe plums. Our lady-caves are meant to withstand birth. We’re pretty much bulletproof down below.”
He shrugs. “Fair enough. Let’s assume I mean cat when I mean pussy.”
“Let’s assume.” She runs a hand up his arm. Fingers turning inward, nails gently raking the meat of his bicep. “Here’s to being bad guys, then.”
He turns toward her. She presses herself against him.
“Here’s to it,” he agrees.
Her hand slides to the hem of his jeans. Thumbs circling the button there. His body tightens. Muscles against his own skin. His heart—the one that’s not all his anymore—starts thudding like the hooves of wild horses across the hard earth.
“You can watch your tongue with me anytime,” she says. Licking her lips. And that’s all it takes. The wall damming up the waters cracks like a thundershot and suddenly she’s on her tip-toes and he’s bending down and their mouths meet and teeth crush together and lips hungrily devour other lips. He picks her up. Sets her down on one of the bar tables. His belt clatters open under expert fingers. He hooks her pants with a pair of thumbs, doesn’t even bother with the buttons, just starts hiking them down as the two of them growl and gasp and try to consume one another—
“You open?”
Mookie spooks, stepping back. Skelly hops, starts hiking her pants back up.
Werth stands at the door. Leering. “Guess you are open,” he says.
“Goddamnit,” Mookie says. Running a hand along his sweat-slick scalp.
Skelly puts a hand back on his hip. “Later,” she says in a small voice.
Werth hobbles into the room. As he passes by Mookie, he taps the dangling belt with the back of his hoof-nailed hand. “Buckle up, buttercup.”
“Fuck you, goat.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Werth says. “I notice nobody invited me to this party.”
“Hey,” Skelly protests, thrusting an angry finger. “We tried to find you.”
“You were gone,” Mookie snarls.
“I got shot. I didn’t wanna get shot again. I went to ground.” He licks that dead tooth of his. “You saying you don’t trust me now?”
“Should we?” she asks.
Mookie answers that question: “No. We shouldn’t.”
Werth’s smile freezes, but any pretense of mirth dies there on his face. “I suppose that’s a fair assessment. I wouldn’t trust me either. Awfully convenient, me coming back like this. Dead goat walking. Showing up just when you need me. Disappearing when the shit hits the fan. I get that. But you’ll see. I’m in. I’m here to help you, not hurt you.”
“We’ll see,” Mookie says.
“You learn anything?” Werth asks.
Mookie and Skelly look at each other. Both almost invisibly shrug.
“Yeah,” Skelly says. “I got something.”
She tells the story. Fyodor. The girls. Lacey. And she tells him what they learned: a restaurant called Kolbasnaya. In Little Odessa—which is to say, the Russian neighborhood within Brighton Beach. “It’s there. The book.”
“How do we get it?” Werth asks.
“We have five days to steal it,” Mookie answers.
“So, you’re thinking heist.”
“Not my strong suit. But yeah.”
“I can like a heist. That could work for me, sure, sure.” He winks one eye as if in thought. “Like the Murray Hill job.”
“Uh-huh. Gonna have to call in some favors,” Mookie says. “If they’re keeping the book there, you can be sure it’s not just sitting on a fucking counter back there in the kitchen. Probably in a safe. Probably protected.”
“Five days ain’t a long time to plan and perform.”
Mookie shrugs. “We got what we got.”
“Let’s plan this thing,” Werth says.
They get to work.
*
It’s midnight by the time Werth rolls back into the city. He takes the train from Jersey to Penn Station. His old apartment is gone, rented out—but he hasn’t been gone that long, and he’s still a guy who knows a guy. Who he knows is a landlord named Flores, an El Salvadoran he quietly erased from Zoladski’s shit-list way back when. Flores had taken some Blue from a couple of thugs that got dead in a tussle with the Majestic Immortals—just stole it off the bodies like a magpie—and Zoladski wanted the debt of that act paid in blood. Werth saw an opportunity to make a friend, so he took it.
Now he’s glad he did. The Organization is gone, but Flores? Flores remains.
Flores has an apartment building. A holdout from all the gentrified bullshit going on here—a real doghouse compared to some of the nicer buildings going up in the vacant lots. He said he had a room, and so Werth is living there, rent-free, until everything is done and his time outside the Deep Downstairs is game over.
He unlocks the door. Catches the first whiff of cat piss—no cats in this apartment, but someone must have had a fucking herd of cats in this place, cats with poor piss-control because they sprayed the place down like it was on fire. Werth hobbles inside.
A dead man sits on his bed.
A dead man in red robes. A dead man without skin.
The hood is pulled down. Rumpled around blood-slick shoulders.
“Oh,” Werth says. “Goody.”
“The work is not done,” the Skinless hisses.
“Who the fuck are you? I know you? You guys have names or what?”
“We have no names. We need no names. We are squires in service to the Skinless King—”
“I’m not much of a history buff, but I seem to recall squires are in service to knights, and knights are in service to kings. Something like that.”
“We are squires—”
“Jesus, fuck, I heard ya. Tell Oakes it’s fine.”
The man’s throat pulses and shudders like a frog’s throat during a croak. The man’s nose shifts, as if something from inside is moving it—like he’s being puppeted. And he is. The hand of the puppeteer emerges as the cultist’s jaw creaks open, bones cracking—black, slick tentacles emerge. Waggling about like a serpent’s tongue tasting the air. Werth feels his own inhabitant squirming inside. Sliding around his heart. Slithering up his ribcage, playing it like a xylophone. His dead guts move aside. His shoulder wound—now healed, mostly—pulses and threatens to erupt.
Pain shoots through him. Not just physical pain. But something deeper. His mind recounts a host of miseries. One memory in particular: he’s ten years old and his father is drunk (again), holding him down on the couch (again), pinning his arms and telling him in gory, brutal detail exactly what it was like when Werth’s own mother died on the operating table. When Werth lived, a “squalling little shitbabby,” and his mother died in a gush of blood and waste—her torn open by hooves and horns she couldn’t even see. Papa didn’t know Werth was a monster, not really, but he called him one anyway. As if he could sense it. Once in a while the old man’s nose wrinkled up like he could smell the musk coming off him, the goaty, heady stink...
Suddenly, the memory recoils. As if dragged away back into the dark.
Werth drops to one knee. His hip throbs with pain. The memory of a bullet.
“I said—” He bleats, then clears his throat. “I said it’s fine.”
“Pearl is not to get that book.”
“He won’t. He won’t. I’ll make sure of it.
”
“Do not disappoint your King.”
And then the Skinless stands, lifts its hood, and leaves the room. Silent as a breeze sliding along a wall.
PART FOUR
NORA
23
The daemon families have their divergent purposes. Bloodlines with inherent drive reinforced by years of repetition and expectation. The Woodwines are isolated; masters of the wilds, the fringes, the borders. The Bellbooks are prophets, magicians, ritualists. Those of the Gravehorse are the arbiters of the memories of the dead, historians and record-keepers. (And necromancers, to boot.) Hogstooth are gluttons, plain and simple: beast-masters and brutes. The Wormsong are madmen. Deranged, dangerous, a mirror broken into a thousand shards. The Glasstowers are masters of power, temporal power: money and politics. They are greedy and capable rulers and they do not rule merely by default but by millennia of talent—a blade sharpened to a soul-splitting edge. The Candlefly clan have long claimed to be the power behind the throne: manipulators and assassins, but too many treacheries against the Glasstower establishment have put them on the outs. As for the Lambskey—they were too good to live. Too noble, too virtuous, to nest in the branches of this blighted tree. They have been gone from this world for a long time, and will remain so until all collapses again into chaos.
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
Ernesto Candlefly hangs by his feet.
He has no borders, no margins. Everything is consciousness and all his consciousness is pain. That pain is loud, a lighthouse beacon burning awareness of anything else to cinders and char. He is a broadcast signal of anguish. A bonfire seen for a thousand miles.
The creatures of the dark taunt him. Gray shapes down in the gloom. Goblinfolk hissing. Pelting him with wet shit. Spearing milk-spiders with sticks, thrusting them upward—the blind arachnids doing the only thing they know to do, which is to squirm and skitter and bite, bite, bite. The venom goes through him again and again. His body seizes. Everything feels like he’s birthing a thousand kidney stones through every hole he has. Like his bowels are kinking and his heart is going from grape to raisin. He vomits the venom up and then it begins anew as another pack of gobbos comes to taunt him.
Day, night, week, month, time drags, loses meaning.
The dark whispers. The god-worms send their hate.
Snakefaces creep along. Emerging from stone, invisible, then seen.
They remind him of his failure. That, a far greater pain than any.
Sometimes he dreams. Or hallucinates, maybe. He sees his wife, Renata. His two children, Oscar, Adelina. Oscar with his spit-slick hair—that little curl that hooks the space above his eyebrows. Adelina with her dark brows and beautifully cruel smile. Renata tells him again and again how she is not his wife anymore. How she is again a Glasstower. Then she slits the children’s throats with a crystal blade and he has to watch them bleed out. Again and again, over and over, as the shadows laugh.
His body withers. His hands are arthritic claws. His skin suctioned tight to atrophied muscle and narrow bone. His teeth clack. His nails scrape at the walls and break. The rope above creaks and complains. He cackles and weeps.
And then the day comes that all that ends.
The day comes that everything seems to fall away as he is brought back up out of the hole, back into the church, and out into the light once more.
*
He shivers underneath the blanket. The jet hums. Outside, blue skies carry clouds that look like wisps of stuffing plucked from a child’s bear. He can’t stop looking at them. His forehead against the glass. The sound of the plane carried through the hinge of his jaw, through his skull, into the deep of his ears.
A hand on his arm. He cries out and pulls away. Coward, he thinks to chide himself. Standing there is the woman. Aurora Candlefly. One of the family, but one he does not know well. Young. Pretty. Hair the color of straw, straight like a garden waterfall. She looks soft, gentle, as cooling and calming as a puddle of milk. Her voice is that way, too: it’s easy, comforting. But he can hear what hides behind her voice, too: a whetted edge, glass from a broken mirror, a commanding cruelty.
She is, after all, a Candlefly.
He thinks for a moment what that would have been like: to teach his two children what it takes to be a member of the family. To whet their blades. Preparing them for the world would be cruel and it’s no longer his job—
It’s hers. Renata. Which means she will not raise them as Candlefly but, rather, as Glasstower. Of course, the Glasstowers won’t care for them because they’re his children, tainted by that “treacherous Candefly blood,” one of them will say.
His children must rise above it.
That will whet their blades, he thinks.
That, or snap them in half.
He shudders and barely contains a sob.
Aurora sits. “How is the blanket?”
“Where are we going?”
“You haven’t touched your meal. Or the cocktail.” In front of him is a plate of food. Veal sweetbreads and a knuckle, like from Santceloni. Saffron rice. A small bounty of vegetables lining the edge of the plate. Beyond the plate itself is a martini, but coming off it is a whiff of something. Sherry. Palo cortado sherry. Instead he grabs for the water bottle, and crushes it in his hand as he swallows another mouthful. The hand that grabs it is no longer skeletal. The flesh, though, remains striated with stretch marks. And his muscles, while already healing, are weak. The doctor, Guillermo, said they will not return to full strength, not easily, not without effort. Ernesto wept in the man’s arms.
“I want to know where we are going,” he insists.
“In due time.”
“I am your better,” he says. “I have sway—”
“You have nothing,” she says, her tone as sweet as condensed milk, but her words as bitter as burned orange peel. “You betrayed the family and so you are paria.”
Outcast.
“Then why... why have you taken me out of the dark. Why am I here?”
She simply smiles, then says, “Please eat.”
Then Aurora gets up and is gone.
He thinks to go after her, but weakness roots him to his chair.
He cries himself to sleep.
*
The plane descends. Outside, darkness. A smear of lights that end at an ocean. He is suddenly terrified. Fear crawls through him like a hundred cankerpedes. He imagines the wheels snapping off. The plane nosediving into the tarmac. The shrieking of metal and the welder’s rain of sparks and then everything broken apart in fire and death, his body rent to atoms, his blood painting the blackened fuselage, the—
Aurora taps him. The engine idles. The plane is on the ground.
“Welcome to Los Angeles,” she says.
*
They drive south in a black car. Through the abominable traffic of this city. A long stretch of parking lot, this highway. Aurora sits next to him in the back. Saying nothing. Sometimes he asks, “Why here? What’s here?” but the most she’ll say is, “Sit back, enjoy being out, Ernesto.” Then that soft smile, which he now knows is pedantic, dismissive, placating.
They take an exit.
The sun starts to come up.
They find a small dingy parking lot overlooking the Pacific. They get out. Aurora instructs him to take off his shoes, socks, and roll up his pant legs. He protests, asks why. “Where are we going? What is all this?” He feels like he’s going mad. Like this is some new level of his dreamworld, some profoundly detailed nightmare where he’ll awaken once more hanging there in the open mouth of Hell.
“You’re meeting someone,” she says.
And then she hops a small wire fence and begins to descend.
Ernesto thinks, I could run. An absurd idea, fleeing his own family. But his soul feels like a roach afraid of the light; he just wants to scurry away.
But he doesn’t. He finds resolve and draws it up like water from a well.
Then he follows after, nesting his socks in his shoes and carrying them along. Down a steep trail. Wildflowers alongside. A crag of rocks way down below, brown seals lounging. Aurora occasionally looks back after him. He can see the disdain on her face. The great Ernesto Candlefly, reduced to trembling bird legs and little yelps.
*
A sea cave, or cove, carved out of craggy stone. Calling to mind a frog’s mouth. Tidepools gather. Jellyfish plop about. Hermit crabs crawl. Aurora stands at the fore of the cave and stops, and extends her arm to Ernesto as if to say, Continue on without me.
And so he does.
That’s when he sees. There, in the shadows of the back of the cave—before it turns, before it becomes a dripping tunnel that disappears under the rock—is a small bistro-table. Two chairs. One occupied by a face he knows.
Nora Pearl.
She isn’t alone. Two others are with her.
One is a burned up little hot dog of a man in a jumpsuit, his one arm duct taped to the wrist. Candlefly recognizes him, though he doesn’t know why.
Two is a massive shape. A golem, by the look of it. White cloak soaked halfway up with seawater. Standing there in a brackish brine-pool. His eyes shine.
“I hoped we could time this out for sunset,” Nora calls to him, “but looks like that’s not an option. Still, it’s nice to see the sea, the sky, the everything.”
He swallows hard and tries to stand up tall, tries to put forth some sense of command, some kind of controlled majesty, but even as he walks he realizes he looks like a child pretending—the attempt is inelegant. Clumsy, even.
“Sit,” she says.
“Why?” he asks.
“Because we have things to discuss.”
He looks back at Aurora, as if to ask, Is this a joke?
But her smile is placid and placating.