watching

Thirteen crows. A murder. The child counts them from the tucked-away Manhattan park rhimed in ice and soiled snow that (two days after it first fell) is lamentably far from virgin. The boy is wrapped in a scarf and his parka while his mother walks the aged and limping German Shepherd; the chill vivifies it, and the animal snaps its jaws at dirty white slush. Her hands are full with its leash, and she doesn't see her mesmerized child watching the crows, who watch him back.

Later, the boy dreams in violet, in pure and electric washes of vibrant color like the gleam from a perfect amythest struck by sunlight.

But in the park, they perch on the branches of a warped bare oak, all of them facing the same direction as if they share common eyes. When they take off again (in a single mass, a shuddering strike of synchronous wingbeats that cause the woman and the dog to look up; the air trembles with a near-seismic quail that prompts the dog to whine and her to shiver under layers of warm fabric and perfume), the birds follow the mercury trail of a silver Mercedes Benz just then speeding past.

Later, they hunch over the telephone wires near this rundown hotel or that townhouse. They are a feathered shadow mass, occasionally sending their raucous voices into the air. It's a sound like rust or an old wound, and it's hard to tell whether they might have once sung beautifully. The disconcerted hearer jerks awake in a cold sweat after night falls, with a strange understanding of something terrible haunting the mind's fringes, something too oceanic vast to comprehend awake, and there's relief when the razored edges of the dream finally fades with daylight.

Thirteen crows. They watch (watch over) the precious Twelfth; the two; and the First out of Eleven, One plus Ten.

They are warm in the winter freeze, smelling like jasmine and rust mingled with December sunlight.

equation

Full—full—full for the first time in forty days and forty nights, but there's something wrong, like a hitch in the equation. I'm basking in the lunar glow, a lunatic high, my footsteps light and (almost) easy along Fifth Avenue as my breath escapes in delicate steam-wisps, like ghosts, like the thin fragrant haze of ritual incense. It's her I smell, the (elder) sister, Doll with a long breathy vowel, I'm perfumed in her like a dog rolling in sweat and smoke and crushed bittersweet weeds and (dahl)ias.

And I'm on the verge of dancing—but my guts are inexplicably clutched by an alien feeling outside of me and inside of me, like a golden thread through my center (connecting me to what?) being pulled taut and tugging, drawing hard.

I have to stop, my fingers pressed to my mouth (cold as snow, hot as blood), to keep from vomiting.

And I don't know why. I don't know why.

eclipse

In the bleary late-morning shine, with my body—not just my body; flesh is symbol, not meaning—weighing heavy on the layers of down, Egyptian cotton, the rumpled nest of my bedsheets, I remember Luna Dahl. She drives fast and visceral back into my awareness, the delicately scattered imperfections across her naked skin, the charming crooked smile, the mortal loveliness of asymmetry and flesh-and-blood heat. I remember the way I’d left her before wandering into the wasteland, the garden’s salted earth. The way I’d filled her, the way she’d filled me, but only shallow. A sip, a taste of her.

An engine without momentum, machinery robbed of inertia, I pull my body free of the fabric trap and, when the cool air gazes my fevered skin, sit up wondering if she’ll invite the devil back with open arms, with the open heaviness of her legs. I can almost smell her: that unmistakable scent, dark and animal and raw that clings to skin for hours afterward, and I only have to breathe in to remember, to nearly taste her again. The same way I’d saturated her with my scent deep, deep, deep down to the fragile trembling girl-core.

I drag a dry tongue across my mouth and the sharpness of my teeth like the jagged ivory whiteness of a beast’s maw. I don’t want to sip now, to taste. I want to feed. Devour. Consume. The want is a pressure in the back of my throat, heat against my fingertips, an unbearable livewire urgency in the loins. And as I slip out of the bed and rise to my feet, aching with the emptiness of my freshly-reworked vessel, I wonder if Luna Dahl will break.

kindred

Brande has another one in his retinue—his cadre of demons. My attention has been elsewhere for long, too long, and I can't say what's happened to his Persephone, or that Phin girl. Dear Bobbi's schoolgirl schoolmate, with that damned lovely uniform, and I remember the strip of it in the alchemist's pocket, and I wonder how Bobbi's skirt would shred under my clutching grasp, if I unmasked Cerebé and drank in her scent, her warmth, her faith, her fear, her love—drank it and gnashed it between a beast's ragged, ivory dagger teeth.

I'm shuddering shuddering shuddering in the dark—I'm shaking with it. I want. I want. I want.

Corbin has left my rooms exactly as I left them, and Ophélie's little half-century-old camera stares at me with its single eye from the shelf, its lens catching the light that spills through the open balcony door. I leave the lights off. It's more comfortable like this, listening to the soft distant rush of traffic from an Italian leather armchair in the grand style, and reminding myself that the world's still here. Almost how I left it.

Except Eurydice. And Brande himself is harder, somehow, shut off. The power's shifted and a new balance has been negotiated, to account for—yes, for Thirteen. I can't ignore the connection. I may be an autonomous factor, but I've become part of their equation. They've become part of mine. Calling Brande a brother (my dear, dear brother) and the child little sister, little sister somehow was unavoidable, inevitable, the cosmic machinery aligned just so.

The girl. Why these girlchildren? My O, Bobbi, Phineas, Eurydice—if she can properly be called a child, this nothing-doll, this manufactured soul that's lovely, sickeningly lovely, because Brande cannot create something that doesn't indulge him.

I want.

Remarkable, how our tastes coincide.

I wonder if I would have wanted his Mercedes, too. But she, like my O, is a relic. Like the bones of saints, like the splinters of the True Cross, except that the religions to which they belong are ours: churches we tear from Father's hands, faith we draw into our mouths (greedily) despite His tyrant greed, steeples we plunge upward like knives into his creation and rework it, reform it, raze it down to raise it up. There's resonance, harmony when I hear him, feel him speak of Mercedes, of Mercies. If we meet, if I call, if she comes, if my legions coax her back from the other side of the Pale, though only for a moment—how could I not, how could I not simply kneel at her feet and bow my head (as I would for O) wretched black dog that I am?

But the fact remains that I want. That I need.

Faith.

Worship.

Sacrifice.

out of order

i am in a million fragments
i am ravenfeathers curling in the fire, scattered ash
i am a black crane
i am alive

I am at the beginning of the world. My shell is blasted and broken, and tiny eternities have passed since I could draw myself together into a shape I recognize. A face that belongs to me. Hands. Limbs. Flesh and bone, sweat and blood, sinew and skin. My still-seared self burns—but let me burn, let me burn, because I'm still here.

And so is the world. And somewhere, a distant note of white music, I can hear the resonance of my dear priestess, her essence still connected with mine. I can't open my eyes—I can't scatter them and find her, look at her darling girlchild face, but she's still here. Arielle—Holden—even Gabriel, I can't be certain.

But the alchemist exists, surely. We've unfinished business.

At the beginning of the world, the landscape is as blasted and ancient as I. Sterile. Empty. I need blood. Faith. Fear. Love. Hate. Anything. A vassal to take in my hands and drain dry.

First, to rise. From ashes.

in order

Rain falls in a delicate staccato rhythm against the GTO’s windshield. Streaking water smears the shine from oncoming headlights across the glass. I’m parked along Lexington beside a line of old brownstones at three o’clock in the morning. This restless body needs sleep; but for now I’m substituting Dunhill Internationals and tar-black coffee steaming bitter from a Styrofoam cup.

Still—my essence sings with Arielle's prayer, spilt from my mouth last night and repeated from hers in a circuit like golden ouroboros. Its residue lies sharp-sweet on my tongue with the taste of honeyed manna and a coppered tartness like blood.

And the memory of Bobbi Pascal White's precious worshipping voice—Aren't I your humble vassal, My Lord? (she said)—is days old now, but I can feel the fading echo mingled with Arielle's in my soul, in my reverberating crystal bones. Soon the resonance will be entirely gone—I struggle to preserve it, to remember how Alice (in a genuine pinafore) charged my bloodstream electric to the fignertips, galvanized my nerves like fine-spun gold wire. So much faith in just a few simple words—almost equal to those wild witches atop the Teufelskanzel, the Hexenaltar, with their defiling rites, their devil-glorifying screams.

Corbin arrives on schedule, three fifteen, pulling up behind my convertible in an unmarked van. He unfurls his umbrella as he steps down, crosses along the driver's side to the front of my car, and sheilds me from the rain when I open my door to stand and join him. Just two suits in Harlem during the dead of night. Nothing suspicious.

"I can't dissuade you, My Lord?" Corbin asks, and I feel his faith mingle with theirs in a low-pitched harmony within my saturated substance. In the Kingdom of Man—shall we call it Malkuth, Brande?—those who are not men can offer but little to each other; but I drink in Corbin's offering readily, and love, love him for what he gives—my comrade, my brother.

Unbidden, words come to my mind, and I hate them but cannot argue: For all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had.

"No," I tell him, and he walks with me toward the back of the van. This is business, an obligation I must fullfill now, should I be unable later. The spoils of war—transaction with Vega in exchange for earthly wealth, tribute to the nearly-broken Red Rider. Corbin throws open the back of the van, and in the rain-riddled light of the nearest streetlamp, the stock of rifles gleam inksplash black. More than enough for a private massacre, and three more vans are coming.

"Good. Be sure Vega gets everything we agreed on. Add a few more for what I did to his sister."

"His sister?" But Corbin answers, obsequious even when the Creole drawl struggles to mask apprehension: "Thy will be done, My Lord."

Holding the umbrella above my head (the humidity clings to my skin, rain droplets spattering the cuff of my jacket and the hem of my pants where the broad dome doesn't quite protect them), Corbin sharply swings the rear door shut with his other hand. We don't speak. I know what he wants to ask.

"You won't take anyone with you? Me, Merle? The alchemist or one of the Riders?"

And I tell him again, like I told him before: No. My vassals must continue to watch for the new high priestess of the Church of Julien March—just like you have your High Priestess, isn't that right, alchemist?—and Brande can't be trusted. The man or the menagerie of devils, I'm not certain which is the unstable element. It doesn't matter. I don't need them.

I don't need the Red Rider or the Pale. If their only choices are between the pounding hoofbeats of revelation and remaining the Children of Man—then let them continue as they are. The world overflows with ugly monsters already.

The way Corbin's looking at me, when I offer him one of my cigarettes, and we pass the lighter's flame between us, I think he might actually doubt. Not in me—but doubt that I'm ready, that I'm strong enough, that I'll return from the other side of the world. He's seen my feet of clay. He knows gods can fall. Like I did. Like he did. But we stand in silence, our backs to the van's rear door, sheltered by silk stretched taut across the umbrella's steel ribs. A trickle of water slips down the leg of my trousers into the inside of my shoe; but I don't mind.

And he finally asks, "What if she kills you?"

I want to laugh, but I swallow it, feel the burning rawness in my throat the cigarette stirs up again when I draw in. I watch the ember-bright end of the paper; if I dropped it now or flicked it across Lexington (a brief firefly arc) the flame would die the moment it hit wet pavement.

"She won't," I tell him:

"If she did, the world would be over by the time I got back."

mad

A million lights, a hundred million make up New York City at night—and Alice is somewhere down there, down the rabbit hole or past the looking glass. I can’t see her, and the not knowing drives me mad (mad, mad, mad as a hatter). But whiteness is temporary; she belongs to my kingdom, where she’ll be greeted with celebration; and if her little heart ceased beating, I would feel it in my own, even blackened and brimstone-blasted.

I watch from the condominium’s balcony. It’s a high perch, and this reassures me, but height makes no difference whether I’m man or raven-eyed beast. The Shewolf must have charmed, persuaded, seduced one of the Seventy-Two—Ronove?—into concealing the child with enough force that I can’t—I can’t, I can’t see her.

But she’s here, she’s living flesh and blood. Which means that, unless that little nuisance of a bitch actually makes good and delivers the White child unharmed, I can find her. Not with my legions, not with faith or glory, but with the skin and bone that I’ve built in a latticework over them. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve played the bloodhound.

And when I find my lost Alice, I’ll tell her that the fruit was sweet (eat me, drink me), and she should have another bite.