Matchbox Girls

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  “I’m right here, you know,” said the kaiju, aggrieved.

  “That’s a problem you could solve anytime,” snapped Corbin.

  The kaiju ignored him to address Marley. “You could at least say thank you, sweetheart.”

  “Do you have a name?” she asked him, as she inspected Corbin. He had several wounds on his arm and torso, and a chunk missing from his shoulder. She thought a leg might be injured, too, but she wasn’t going to ask him to take his pants off while the kaiju was still there unless Corbin mentioned it.

  The crooked smile returned. “I try not to, but they do make paperwork easier. My last driver’s license claimed I was Severin something-or-other. I liked the sound of it. Severing.”

  “He’s in the books as the Whispering Dark,” muttered Corbin, wincing. “Low priority due to his focus on single targets. Asshole.”

  “Mmm. Low priority. I’ve lived a very, very long time as ‘low priority,’ raven boy.”

  “Old. And thus, very, very dangerous,” concluded Corbin. “As I said, when celestials reincarnate, they retain the same personality but lose their memories of their previous existence. Newborn kaiju are barely more than rabid animals. The longer they’re allowed to survive, the better they get at staying alive and wreaking their own particular brand of destruction.”

  “And see how good I am at staying alive? You owe me your life now, boy.”

  Corbin’s jaw clenched. Marley touched his arm and then pulled her hand away. “So what now? Is Absolven gone for good?”

  It was Severin’s turn to look irritated. “No. He ran away rather than fight. Maybe if somebody hadn’t stopped me from bringing him down…. well. He'll recover, and return. Humanity makes you people so resilient. And of course, the half-breeds must always stick together, even when they’re otherwise trying to kill each other.”

  Corbin’s hand twitched and Marley grabbed it, wrapping her palm around his long fingers. After a heartbeat, his fingers curled lightly around hers. Severin noticed, his gaze resting on their linked hands, and his smile made Marley feel dirty.

  “Are we running away again?” asked Kari. She was still holding her sister’s hand.

  “The security of the building has been seriously compromised. The power Ettoriel's flinging around, to shut down an entire hotel...” said Corbin, gazing off into space.

  “Compr—?” frowned Kari.

  “Shattered. Broken. Shot to hell,” said Severin helpfully.

  Kari’s brow wrinkled. “I thought compromise meant sharing?”

  “No, compromise means surrender. That means to give up.” Severin smiled over at the kids, and Marley shook herself.

  “It has two meanings,” she said, and glared at Severin.

  He mouthed something at the kids—she couldn’t tell what—and all her rage and hatred came boiling back. She suddenly didn’t care about old grudges surfacing inside the hotel room. She was ready to press some new ones herself.

  Corbin’s fingers squeezed her hand lightly, and she took a deep breath. “And yes, we have to go someplace else.” Marley paused, looking at Kari’s sulky face. “But I agree, we can’t run forever.”

  “It’ll be over with one way or another soon enough,” said the kaiju. He sprawled in a chair. “The raven boy knows. Tell her, raven boy.”

  Corbin paused and then disentangled his fingers from hers, running his hand through his hair. “If the angel is planning on doing a major ritual, something that will affect the world Geometry, he has to do it on a specific date. A day and a half from now.”

  Marley glanced at the date on the weather channel still muted on the television. “August…thirteenth? What’s so special about that?”

  “It’s not an annual event. It’s a celestial conjunction, but one that involves the Machines of Heaven rather than stars. A valence day, it’s called.”

  Marley remembered. “Penny—the angel—said something about a valence event.”

  Corbin nodded, but before he could speak, Severin said, “The Hush was created on such a day. And the Covenant.”

  Glumly, Corbin said, “Yes. The functions shaping Creation can be altered at a high valence point. Sometimes. Occasionally. They mostly don’t stick. We got lucky with the Hush.”

  “Did you? How nice for you,” the kaiju said, as if the topic bored him.

  “So is Ettoriel trying to remove the Hush or not? Zachariah said he was, right? But you don’t think so?”

  Corbin grimaced. “If he was, I’m sure 'Severin' here would be helping him instead of chasing off his servants. Although he is more subtle than the usual kaiju...”

  Suddenly the kaiju was in Corbin’s face, one finger pressed against Corbin’s forehead. “Listen up, raven child. One: I don’t care about your precious Hush. It has never inconvenienced me in the slightest.” He flicked out a second finger. “Two: I’d rather kill an angel than work with one. Three: Don’t make me change my mind.” There was a frozen moment, as Corbin and the kaiju stared into each other’s eyes from a distance of about six inches. Then the kaiju’s mouth curved up into a hard, feral grin. He leaned even closer and whispered in Corbin’s ear.

  Corbin’s reaction was instant: He shoved the kaiju so hard that the creature actually flew away from him and hit the wall. He slid down it until he was crouching on his heels, still smiling. No, not just smiling, laughing to himself.

  Fresh blood darkened a bandage on Corbin’s arm. “Thank you for your help,” he said coldly. “Do you have any other plans in that direction we should know about?”

  “Well, as long as I’m here, I’m plugging the hole in the security. And if I stay here while you leave, nobody will notice you fleeing the scene, at least for a time.”

  “Oh, thank God,” muttered Marley.

  “No, thank me,” said the kaiju. “Thank my self-control, honed through many years of not being serially murdered by the raven boy’s friends. Because you are such a tasty snack that I don’t really want to let you get away.” He considered. “Either of you.”

  * * *

  Marley stepped out into the hotel parking lot. The endless smoke-twilight had finally turned to night, but that only made the flames easier to see. On the near mountainside, she could make out individual blazes and their fuel: candle flames consuming the chaparral, matchstick flames burning a tiny doll’s house. Steam billowed from the fire eating the home as a helicopter fought the hot air nearby, but the weather was too dry and the fire too hot. There was land burning that hadn’t burned in a long, long time.

  Shouting in the parking lot dragged Marley’s gaze away from the distant inferno, and she pressed her back against the wall instinctively. A work crew comprised equally of staff in suits and staff in overalls worked at cleaning up the disaster area the lot had become. She wouldn’t have noticed before, but now, with recently educated eyes, she was pretty sure magic was going on. The hotel staff and occupants had woken up from the glamour that had kept them from knowing of the conflict outside, and now they were cranky and confused. It was, she gathered, unusual even among the supernatural set to blink and realize you’d spaced out through a mythological monster tearing up the place.

  Her rental car, at least, was fine, tucked in a corner away from the main swath of destruction. Had Corbin moved the fight away from their escape vehicle on purpose? She turned to ask him as he came out the door behind her, but then thought better of it. He was still sullen and cold, not quite rude but definitely unfriendly. Whatever the kaiju had whispered in his ear had transformed him.

  The kids trooped out behind Corbin, but Severin the kaiju had stayed in the room. When Marley had left, he’d been on a bed, snickering at a gory action film. He’d waved without bothering to look at her, a dismissal from his attention, and she’d been glad of it. But she wondered if he’d show up again. If he did, she hoped it would be in a place with more room to run.

  They loaded up the car and left in silence, directed around the recovery work by an angry man in a nice suit who seemed simult
aneously furious that they were leaving, and glad to see them go. Corbin had spoken and then argued with a similarly dressed man who had appeared at the room door as they were preparing to leave. Explanations had been demanded, and Corbin had turned the demands back on the concierge with aggressive, angry remarks about the hotel security. He’d been furious, and the kaiju had laughed at him, and that had made it worse.

  Marley peeked at Corbin from the corner of her eye while they waited for the light to change at an empty intersection. His mouth was tight, his jaw hard, as he stared out the window.

  “If you look in my backpack, right back there, there’s a sheaf of paper I wanted to ask you about. Next to the Lullaby Plaything. A folio of a book. I’m pretty sure it has some kind of enchantment on it. That’s possible, right?”

  He gave her an unreadable look and then rifled through the bag until he found the papers. He glanced at it and then flipped through it. “It’s encoded. Locked to a specific key. The owner’s touch, probably.”

  “But it’s decoding itself, look and see.”

  Corbin shrugged. “Where did you get it?”

  “At Zachariah’s house. It seemed odd. Out of place. As if somebody wanted me to find it.” It seemed obvious now that some kind of magic had been present.

  “What’s the point of wanting you to find a book you can’t decode? Oh, right, you said this was at Zachariah’s house.” He made a disgusted sound. “With time and the right resources, I could remove the encoding. But it’s not going to happen in the next couple of days.”

  Lissa, quiet and withdrawn since the kaiju had returned to the hotel room, suddenly said, “Can I see?”

  Marley felt Corbin looking at her inquiringly. She said, “Not—not right now, sweetie.”

  “It shouldn’t hurt her. It’s a passive working.”

  Marley shook her head. “The magic may be harmless, but the words might not, and I told you, it’s decoding itself.”

  Corbin glanced through the pages. “He said. I kind. Really good. Cat.”

  Marley blew out her breath, suddenly exhausted. “Look, I don’t understand magic, and I don’t understand everything the kids can do. The Lullaby Plaything didn’t react the way you expected it to. Until we can explain that, I really don’t want to let them play with other things I don’t understand.” She met Lissa’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, sweetie.”

  The little girl looked away, out the window. Again, Marley felt uneasy. She didn’t know how to deal with children who were angry at her. Her friends, she could coddle and scold and snap at, but the dependence of these children was too new.

  “I told you, it’s just an encoding. It’s not going to react strangely to them, because it only exists in two states, on and off.”

  “Then why is it decoding itself? Did somebody install a dimmer switch?”

  Corbin frowned at her and then down at the book. He remained silent for a while, his fingers twitching. Marley continued driving, making her way to a fire evacuation shelter they’d identified before leaving the hotel. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but it would be a place to rest, and both Corbin and the kaiju had assured her that the angel would have personal and magical difficulties hunting her amidst so many humans. Angels want to protect humans, whispered the kaiju’s voice in her memory. And the raven child’s precious Hush will limit the angel's abilities to act without harming them. The glamour he's borrowed can only go so far.

  A crowd wouldn’t stop you, she’d observed, and she’d been proud of how steady her voice had been. You and that cop on the side of the highway, in front of all those people.

  I chose my prey carefully.

  “The spell isn’t degrading,” Corbin announced, as they drew close to the evacuation center and the traffic thickened. “It’s just very, very slowly unlocking.”

  “Not keyed to the owner, then.”

  “You sure it’s not yours?” he asked, and she couldn’t tell if he was teasing or not.

  She gave him a puzzled glance. “Why would you think that?”

  He almost smiled. “Because then I could still be right.”

  Then they were caught up in the parking chaos and the evacuation center check-in. The expansive lot was filled with RVs and trailers, some of which seemed to provide food service. Volunteers guided the traffic to empty spaces far, far away from the evacuation center itself. The fires were just a blaze of orange light on the night-shaded mountain from there, although the smell of wood smoke was inescapable.

  The evacuation center itself was a stadium, filled with row upon row of cots, with tents down less-busy corridors. Families had set up house on many of the cots, pulling them closer together in little family groups. A subtitled news channel was displayed on one of the big overhead screens, while on another, an animated movie played. A lot of people were lying down, but there didn’t seem to be much sleeping going on.

  Corbin fidgeted with the encoded book while Marley checked in. As soon as she herded the kids to the cots they’d been assigned, he drew her attention to it once again. “I wonder if it’s reacting to specific celestial genetic proximity.” He half-gestured at the girls, who were bouncing on a cot.

  “You mean, like the Lullaby Plaything did?”

  He frowned at her. “I meant, if it’s linked to a person, it might also be set to be decoded by their offspring. Which would be why it’s decoding now.”

  Exasperated, Marley said, “Is there any way to test that?”

  “We could hand it to one of them and see if direct contact finishes the process.”

  Marley considered this. “You said genetic proximity. Wouldn’t a strand of hair work for that?”

  Corbin stared at her. Then, his words coming slow and distracted, he said, “Properly prepared it might. Just harvesting from the hairbrush would make the current decoding continue even away from the offspring, but I don’t think it would accelerate much. I said genetics, but it has as much to do with the personal Geometry of the individual. A little bit of that is contained within shed hair, but not enough without refinement.” He lapsed into silence, still looking intently at Marley.

  “Proper preparation. There’s a lot of that in this magic of yours...”

  He shrugged, looking away. “Some things take time. Some things don’t. If the kids are related to the key, testing that won’t take any time at all.”

  Marley took a deep breath and looked past the habit of anxiety to the catastrophe vision that had trained it. There was uncertainty around the twins, a wobbling she couldn’t quite identify, but between Kari and the encoded book, there was nothing worrying.

  She let out her breath. “Kari, want to help us with an experiment?” Kari bounced off the cot and over to the adults, looking up in interest.

  Lissa, who had been paying attention, said, “Why her?”

  Marley hesitated before telling the truth. “It will give you nightmares. But not her. And no, I don’t know why.” She glanced at Corbin, nodding for him to go ahead.

  He crouched down to face Kari, and took her hand. He touched one of her fingers to the paper.

  Even from where she was standing, Marley could see the writing on the top page writhe. It lasted only a few heartbeats before it settled into words she could read. Then a flash ran over the page, like the glare from bright sun. As it passed, the words faded away.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” said Corbin, yanking the book away from Kari’s touch. He crouched over it, muttering to himself, his right hand poking and pressing like he was interacting with an invisible touchscreen.

  “It was locked,” said Kari, looking on with interest. “You wanted it unlocked, right?”

  Marley dropped a hand on her shoulder. “I thought we did.” She could hear the hint of hysterical laughter in her own voice. “Well, it’s not like we’ve lost anything we previously had.”

  Corbin said, “I’m working on it. I think I can save most of it...”

  “Do you know what happened?” Marley sat down on a cot and let both gi
rls snuggle up beside her.

  “She hacked the charm. A brutal, nasty attack on its definition. The charm had a provision for a brute force attack, which was to destroy the contents.” His fingers continued to move as he talked, and he didn’t look up.

  Kari stiffened under Marley’s arm. “I was trying to help! Why are you so mean?”

  Corbin did look up then, surprise on his face. “What? How am I mean?”

  Big angry tears slid down Kari’s face. “You said I was a brute and nasty!”

  Marley pulled the little girl completely into her lap, hugging her, but glanced at Corbin to see what he was going to do. He looked flustered and irritated. “It was praise. You’re very talented. Later, I’d really like to know what you did.”

  Kari sniffed. “I said. I unlocked it.”

  Corbin mumbled, “Later. Right now, I need to work.” And he bent his head over the book, and said no more.

  -twenty-three-

  So Marley read the twins a book about Thumbelina, complete with extended critical discussion between the twins about princes, wings, and moles. When they were done, Corbin held out the papers to her.

  “I did save some of it. There’s quite a lot more readable than what we had before, anyhow.”

  Marley took it. “Is there anything useful in it?”

  Corbin shrugged. “It’s the diary of a high school girl. She talks about boys a lot. I only skimmed it, though. Maybe you can read it more closely?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “I want to go talk to somebody who might be able to explain to me why the kids are so... talented and interesting. AT is on her way here to stay with you while I’m gone.”

  “Not somebody you can just call up, I take it?”

  “Not with a cellphone, not if I want reliable answers.”

  She looked at him carefully, wondering if what he was about to do was very dangerous. The catastrophe vision unfolded—