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.

whiteness

“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.”

—John Milton, Areopagitica (1644)

garden

The plant sits on an age-battered cedar table on the balcony, soaking air and light.

I wonder if she’s making sport of me. But no—the curling lines of her handwritten script are perfectly frank, guileless. Bobbi White feels and then writes in a clean translation from thought to fingertips, her only barrier the habitual formality of patrician language: the way she writes I am rather than I’m, quite instead of very, or her studied politeness when she asks would you kindly and won’t you.

Antiquated, genteel graciousness from a brat rich girl: how she ordered a venti out of petty irritation with me, and the barista from the no-name café had frowned mutely back.

Lingering ghost of fragrance, a hint of her Chanel No. 9 still clings to the letter between my fingers. She’d sent a gift with it, an apology for material destruction she’s hardly aware of causing. Now, a day after Corbin’s suggestion to pay the pretty child a visit, and I had declined out of—what? Selflessness, caution, or simple vain pride?

My pride tells me I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone, except as means to my ends. I take and use and throw away, because that’s the way it has to be, because if you’re lucky you’re all destined for the trash fires—Ge Hinnom, Gai ben-Hinnom—and Paradise if you’re not. If I don’t break you down and ruin you (I’m a predator, I’m a parasite) none of us will ever get what we want, deserve, our birthrights.

But she’s pure, pure, how pure. How far she could fall, how low I could bring her, how much power she could bring me. And (the cruel, indulgent thought makes me shudder with possibility, with Sartre’s vertigo of consciousness) how beautiful her soul would look regaled in black, lovelier than even its present whiteness.

But this isn’t truth, either; or only half-truth like the meticulous perfection of my face, like my false name. A prince of lies. I’m not protecting her. I’m protecting me.

She writes, the afternoon light through the open balcony door turning the letter’s pale cream paper into a sheet of soft gold, You will visit me again … You will, won’t you?

I can see her gift, the dwarf tree with its wizened twisting trunk and the diminutive fruit hanging from slim leaf-laden branches. Does she understand what something like that means to something like me? Watching the sunlight gilt the leaves’ edges, I can’t escape remembering the Garden: the vague and distant impression left stamped on my mind, its landscape another dream haunting the fringes of my ravaged memory.

Maybe, after all, she understands without knowing why.

expulsion

“And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”

—Genesis 3:22-24, The King James Bible

memoria

PART I

I emerge from a deep dreamless ocean of sleep. Cotton dryness cakes the inside of my mouth, and dull cramping aches nag my muscles along shoulders and spine. It takes me a few disoriented moments to realize I must have fallen asleep on the couch last night.

Corbin is letting the light in, throwing back the pinch-pleated linen curtains with the scrape of its brass rings and a heavy fabric rustle: sunlight streams from the window into the living room. When the glare strikes my eyes and I clench them shut again, I’m not sure whether I should thank or murder him for waking me.

“Bastard,” I finally tell him. It’s all that comes to mind.

He stands bathed in the sunlight, a man of roughly my own height and size, enough that he and I can share suits, and maybe that’s part of the idea. His is the spare utilitarian black of a funeral mourner or bureaucrat, dark like an eclipse against the window.

Dragging my fingers across my face, massaging the ghost of an ancient-feeling ache from my temple, I glance at Corbin’s tamely smiling face. Patient. Good-natured enough to accept my ingratitude without comment, shrewd enough to keep me from getting off easy.

“Late night, Master March?” he asks, playing the dutiful butler, the feudal manservant, my vassal, my right hand. But he’s making sport of me, even when his allegiance is unquestionable. Corbin’s got a slow, easy New Orleans drawl, softening the r in master until it melted away entirely, and my name transforms the same way: Masteh Mauch.

“Damn you,” I answer, aware of the irony, and I push to brace myself up on the armrest of the Italian leather sofa.

“Needed some time to think,” I tell him, when I’ve swung my legs around and straightened my back, settling into the davenport like a broad throne. I fell asleep with my shoes on, and the way the pinstripes down the three-thousand dollar Castangia suit twist with the careless wrinkles I left in it momentarily distracts my attention. I imagine white hairline serpents across a landscape of obsidian glass.

“Thinkin’ a lot lately?” he asks, briefly, efficiently moving around the room to straighten, to arrange the habitual mess of discarded ties and overturned ashtrays I leave behind me.

“What?” I ask. An old brass serving tray. He’s left on the sofa’s end table, and now that I’m aware of it, the scent of eggs Florentine and ristretto hits me with enough force that I forget about the cigarettes in my pocket, the low-frequency crave receding. Best of all, Corbin’s placed a heavy M9 (beautiful matte black, the magazine empty, the chamber clear, solid American warmachine) to rest alongside the sterling utensils like an apéritif.

“You haven’t been sleeping, My Lord,” the vassal clarifies, glancing at me briefly, soberly. He smiles with an easy caretaker’s humor. Knows me better than anyone alive; and he should, he’s been with me long enough. Corbin and Merle, the two of them.

“I’ve been restless,” I tell him succinctly, between a mouthful of eggs, toasted English muffin, and an espresso chaser that scalds my tongue. The heat, the sensitizing burn, grounds me in this body—the visceral pleasure of being flesh and blood, sinew and bone. Fucking gorgeous.

“Since ‘the White girl’,” he supplies, cutting to the heart of it without pausing or flinching. He uses my own turn of phrase instead of his, though the words are faintly incongruous coming out of his mouth. His brow pointedly rises, and Corbin’s slim white smile flashes bright against his smooth milk-and-coffee skin, the mulatto’s Creole complexion. And he says, gently baiting me:

“You’ve been sullen as an old crow since her ghost passed through. Why don’t you go pay the pretty child a visit?”

He’s more of a trickster than I am, with his practiced charm—the rough and tumble bayou warmth blended seamlessly with Old World French sensibility. I think he’d have chosen this guise even if it didn’t soothe me, remind me of where I spent my most cherished decades of the twentieth century. But Corbin would have loved Louisiana for himself, if he’d never chosen to follow me. He relishes the witching dusky-skinned women, the fever of Mardi Gras like a retelling of Venice Carnival, the moaning blues that gives a voice to what we’ve lost too.

But he can’t hook me this time. I shake my head, and he doesn’t press. I can still watch Bobbi Pascal White with my starfield eyes, my devil’s clairvoyance. The spy legions at my call are endless, perched raven-light on the power lines outside her private academy, riding the updrafts on soot-colored feathers, silently vigilant in the boughs of her bedroom elm. I’ve gifted her with summoning charms and the warding Seal of Solomon. She’ll be safe. Safer, I tell myself, without me.

PART II

We let a few minutes pass in silence. I’m savoring the lingering taste of coffee after the cup’s empty, the simple animal gluttony of a filled stomach. My eyes drift briefly to the nine-millimeter; but war can wait a little while longer.

With a few of my discarded ties gathered off the floor and draped over his arm, Corbin crosses the living room’s broad space—over impractical Saxony carpet, weaving past the antique furniture that I’ve bought at auction since the poltergeist obliterated the flat’s previous fixtures. My precious detritus. And he pauses by a hefty-looking cardboard box sitting next to the hallway that wasn’t there when I stumbled home last night.

“What’s that?” I ask, and curiosity’s got me leaning forward like a dog on a scent. Somewhere in the sea of my unconsciousness, memory moves in liquid ripples: something familiar that I can’t quite place, an old echo from another time or another life.

He’s quiet for a beat, just a half second, and the pause is enough to tell me that whatever’s inside isn’t trivial. “Take a look,” Corbin says, keeping the silk neckties from falling as he carefully lifts the box in his arms. He holds the flimsy cardboard thing—aged and falling apart—like bishops handle gilt reliquaries for petrified bones of long-dead saints. Steady but reverent.

He places this holy ark down at my feet, and tells me, “This place is too empty, Master March.” Corbin’s mellow drawl is quiet, discreet. “You need to fill it up with things again. Good things. Beautiful things.” Like he knows what’s best for me, even when I don’t. I’ve got a twitch across the corner of my mouth, and it’s either going to curl into a scowl or a laugh, but they both mean the same thing: Damn you, what is it?

He steps away. The vassal turns his back to give me privacy, and a few moments later I hear the sound of the water running in the kitchen as Corbin begins washing the dishes from the breakfast he cooked for me.

Ophélie’s things. Ophélie, Ophelia, my O, my Oh. Delicately packaged in faded newsprint, the paper crinkling under my fingertips. Headlines from five years ago, when I boxed them all away, when I couldn’t bear to look at anything that once belonged to her but that she wouldn’t touch again. I gingerly peel back the flaps of corrugated cardboard with trembling hands; and I could stop now, close the box again, send it back to storage. Scream at Corbin until my already-ruined throat chokes with rage and frustration and the welling tears I will not shed, because they mean that death is final, that I’m defeated, that Father has won.

But I can’t stop.

Here, through whispering layers of fragile paper, some fragile porcelain ballerina I’d given to her on her seventh birthday, and I remember the smell of her hair when she laughed and threw her arms around my neck, and how she’d kept it until she was an old woman dying here in New York City, miles and eons from old Paris and Fulcanelli and her father Canseliet.

There, a read and reread copy of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, one that she’d paged through until it was battered and dog-eared, desiccated now—and I remember how I’d loved to read it with her. I recognized myself in Dantès, in the way he burned with hate and revenge and love all at once. She with her wicked-sweet voice coyly asked to be my Haydée, and I, laughing, had asked which of us was the slave, and which the master.

Toward the bottom, sifting through substance and memory, my fingers brush a small leatherbound photo album we bought together in the Champs-Elysées. Beside it, steadfast companion, I can feel the hard geometric lines of her Super-Eljy Type 3, and I remember how pleased she’d been that the first photograph she ever took was of me—sitting with my thoughts distracted by Fulcanelli’s research, startled by the sudden flash, and the child crowed with laughter because I, the so-grand Marquis of Gehenna, had been surprised.

In the kitchen, the water shuts off.

But he was right. Corbin’s always right. Since O died on a pure-white hospital bed, I’ve been empty; and since the White girl swept all of my comforts away, there’s been nothing left to hide behind. It feels strange, imbecilic to unearth Ophélie’s old possessions and arrange them in my own space—as easily smashed as those things I’ve lost already.

But it’s the memories, the pieces of my history, that matter more than the physical objects I can caress in my hands. These are already on the verge of collapsing under time’s weight. Seeing them once, I’m almost, almost back in Paris—not younger or kinder, but happier.

It’s better that they be blown to dust than for me to keep them hidden away.

wait

“All human wisdom is contained in these two words—wait and hope.”

—Alexandre Dumas, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1864)

haunting ground

Dawn sunlight glances down 42nd Street, colliding into Time Square's steel-and-concrete monoliths with the reckless abandon of a suicide. Electric billboards, shining storefronts still dim, and the Chevrolet clock's towering height glows like a Big Ben for the digital age at ten minutes past six.

A dull sandy ache has lodged itself deep behind my eyes after a day without sleep. The peepshow's red-lantern darkness soothes them, New Amsterdam's answer to old Amsterdam's Rosse Buurt or Paris' Quartier Pigalle. As the viewing booth presses me close with its claustrophobic walls drenched in the lion reek of male frustration, I watch feminine flesh, these remote temple priestesses of Lilith gyrating their limbs and rangy svelte bare bodies in fatigued choreography. The softly-clinging crimson glow of low lamps hides more than it shows. Darkness visible.

No luck tonight. No vassal to drag out of the mire, polish, no broken child to reform in my image and make shine like an angel. Easiest to play savior to those closest to Hell, Sons and Daughters of Man desperate for a mere shred of genuine hope. But I harrow this landscape for secret diamond veins—not mute stones and sterile salted earth. I am predator, parasite, subject to my own species of desperation.

With nothing to distract me, my mind wanders back to Vega's woman. Peripherally, the girls and their mechanical dance play like broken burlesque music boxes. But I'm seeing Jill Lockhart hit the concrete again and again, a shattered doll, and something about it is familiar, so familiar. I glutted myself watching their violence, Areille and Lockhart striking each other like clumsy she-beasts until blood flowed like water. Breathing it in, drinking the copper-iron Eau de Parfum until it leaves a rust taste across my tongue. I experience a brief moment of satiated pleasure.

Thanatos spoiled it. That Snow White should have broken, but she's been transmuted, something in the fragile body or the soul ascending from base lead to noble metal. Won't my dear demon-haunted alchemist be pleased?

As one faceless Babylonian harlot replaces another on the twilit stage with clicking knife-spike heels, I swallow this knowledge like the flesh of bitter fruit—that Jill Lockhart represents an uncontrolled element, one I couldn't predict with all the force of my oracular divining, my vision scattered to the horizons on ravenwing legions. My own lack of foresight maddens me, lashes me into a solitary ghost, and I wander the streets and avenues (empty except for dust and hollow-eyed vagrants) under electric lamps long after midnight. Too restless to stop, too listless to find relief.

She surprised me. And the threads of her life are closely tangled with those of Aden Brande, Marius Vega, the War-Rider. An error, further ignorance could waste all the effortless gains recent days have bestowed on me.

Perhaps I've underestimated the child. Time will prove whether there's diamond at her core, or just more coal for the fire.

you can help me

Say a prayer now
Don't be scared now
You don't want trouble
We might get some
We might get some
It's troublesome
But don't you worry
You can help me

—The Strokes, Killing Lies

say hello to the angels

The nerve, the nerve, the fucking nerve to enter my sphere and command me. Or try, with his holier-than-thou sermon when he’s as corrupt as I am. Raphael, God Heals, and he had better pray that his name’s worth a damn after I’m through with him; he’s going to need more healing than Lazarus and all the lepers in the Bible, Torah, and Koran combined.

dogs of war

There’s neither fate nor chance, but causality. You turn a gear, and outcomes change. I’m too far gone to perceive paths of actions, phases of engagement, but close enough to know coincidence didn’t lead Vega into my airspace.

I open my eyes wide, I turn my gearwheels, and I witness the king’s chariot rushing on from a million angles in Testarossa red. Zoom in, pan close: he’s smiling a conquistador’s self-smitten grin, and I want to take him and break him, see what the pieces look like after they’ve shattered.

He speaks the language of war, and I listen when he greets me with a gladiator’s knuckle and I answer with the harrowing threat of my revolver’s muzzle. And the woman, the Lockhart woman rages like a wild dog, because that’s what we are—blood-mad dogs of war.

They’re saturated in the alchemist’s smell: Vega, yes, but especially the woman, Aden Brande’s otherworld scent clinging to her flesh through and through, the sort of baptismal immersion that arrives only when faith overflows and drips from the vassal’s pores like love, like hate. It colors her China-pure skin in a brilliant masterwork of fading bruises.

Thanatos’ magnanimity stitches her back together like a glamorously broken ragdoll. Venom spits from her lipsticked adder mouth, not knowing what I see, not seeing what I know. Pang of mirror recognition at the raven darkness of her hair and the poisoned violet of her eyes, the lashing edge of her tongue.

We hate within others what we loathe most within ourselves.

By the end of the night, I’ve engaged in another pact with a man just enough like the alchemist to trigger rapidfire déjà vu. War, war, and further war, from one edge of the world to the other: that’s what I offer, and what Vega accepts, and we grip hands bent on breaking each other with our vanity. My filth-black heart stirs with resonance.

Is this what I waited for? In perfect one-by-one succession, the elements fall into place to complete my mechanism, and piece by piece my siege engine begins to rise.

filius philosophorum

On the heels of one firebrand came another.

I met the alchemist Aden Brande last night. Wrapped in layers of demons like Legion, but his was possession reversed: devils compelled to lend their power, not man compelled to surrender his flesh. He struggles on a hairline balance, and the merest shift of chance could spell his ruin everlasting, and like me, his name might be erased forever from the Book of Life. Or worse.

I shook his hand, and he mended mine. Imagine, Fulcanelli, an alchemist who might have even surpassed you.

He is inscrutable. But my eyes see everything. Hide, hide, but I’ll see. Give it time.

And while we wait, while we dance, I have a brother in arms. I’ll watch, lest man become tyrant become God. And if he reaches too high, I’ll cut him down before I crush his corpse beneath my heel to climb another link and reach Father. But let him find what he seeks, what he burns for. In a just universe, he’ll possess bliss, and I’ll possess freedom.

While it’s unjust, let us smash it, let us break it, burn it down, and raise a new kingdom from its ashes.

vision

“And their whole body, and their backs, and their hands, and their wings, and the wheels, were full of eyes round about, even the wheels that they four had.”

—Ezekiel 10:12, The King James Bible

träumend

The sanctified poison worked its way through the substance of my vessel for roughly twenty-four hours: a day of sweltering madness tangled in the sheets of my bed, clutching and crushing them, snaring my own shaking limbs. I panted like a diseased dog, I raved, and memories and dreams blurred together in a single mass of old wounds and hopeless futures. I dreamt failure—defeat—the unending waste of my exile—the meaningless worse-than-nothing that is the Thousand Year Kingdom.

She emerged through my fever, drowsy-gentle Ophélie sitting in my bed. Perfectly beautiful, her wickedness softened by the adoration in her too-knowing verdigris eyes. Ophelos—helpmate. She placed her oasis-cool palm against my forehead to brush back hair streaked with sweat. And I understood that this was a mirage born from my temporary madness, but I longed to weep under her merciful fingers, had my eyes not been baked dry.

I remember her, I dream her as a child. That’s how she sat on my bed, a wild fragile pale-skinned girl, more faerie than mortal, infinitely sweet even at her most vicious. She was bare skin and babymouth, and when I desperately pressed my lips to her fingers, she smelled and tasted as she always did: like manna and ambrosia intermingled with the azoth in her blood.

“Stupid Margrave,” she murmured, a bell-sweet melody of shivering crystal, and my heart faltered, overflowed. To die, to really die, I wouldn’t mind like this. All that I see or seem is but a dream within a dream. “I thought you couldn’t be hurt.”

And I croaked: “Not forever.”

nachtmahr

Fever numbs and lights me from inside. My bonfire guts me from the core and leaves charcoal mixed with ash, brimstone, wailing and gnashing of teeth. I can’t keep that heat. It burns on its way out of my muscles, past my blackened bones, and my lungs, and then the cold seeps through the emptiness in its place. Chill sweat beads on my brow, I shudder, and the cycle repeats.

Toxic. I got careless. But Haborim’s just a little punk, a petty Duke who can’t claw his way up without seizing on some wretched soul like a black scavenger. I’m ashamed to call him family, a sniveling mongrel savoring scraps of refuse while he rides a dying sack of bones almost as useless as he is.

I drink Saint Magdalene to distract me, the way the alcohol tears my throat open every time. The fever will pass. Already I can feel it subsiding, but it’ll take time. Time or worship: a girlchild on her knees in yearning, or one of Danny’s brawl-scarred bruisers asking me again with holy awe in his voice: “Jesus Fucking Christ, March, how’d you do it?”

Because at that moment, I am Jesus Christ, and it doesn’t matter what name they use, or how they do it, as long as they pray to me.

And there’s glory—glory—hallelujah. But my glory would tear the world, so I must wait, I must wait, choose to burn and take my pleasure from the pain.

Faith and glory won’t mend Haborim. I caught him last night like vermin in my talon clutch, and until then he was eager to the point of ecstasy: his firebrand smoldering and ready to catch the world like kindling. But not my part of it, not my vassals. Protectiveness or possessiveness? I wonder if they aren’t the same thing, the way love and greed, lust and envy can exchange faces.

In the end, I broke holy water over that brand and quenched the steel, ruined my hands with Father’s holy hate as the bottle shattered into candle-heated glass razors. Shredded like a snake’s molted skin, the gloves did nothing to keep the aquæ from my veins. Blessed tears of Lourdes. My blood festered—the black filth of sin rising from my damned soul and bubbling in ichor from my nerveless fingers.

But I could taste his terror, the bittersweet rush, and that’s the joy I savored as the muzzle of my Colt pressed between his eyes, and I squeezed the trigger like the root-deep shock of orgasm to blow out the back of his host’s skull. And his sin, the oil-black filth of gore and gray matter, bone and stolen time, geysered across Fifth Avenue.

Then Haborim’s host was meat, and Hell yawned for both of them.

But the White girl, my White girl, can sleep tonight, sleep in the quiet blue-blooded intimacy of her bedroom, with Chanel No. 9 on her wrists, and I think of her wrists and what it would be like to feel her pulse, put my fingertips on them again, around them, and I think of Choire, and I think of Ophélie. I have to laugh because the gun is hot and it throbs, or my hand does.

Bobbi’s had enough visitors for one night. I’ll let her only nightmares tonight be those living inside her head.

unclean

“And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea.”

—Mark 5:13, The King James Bible

die by the gun

aquæ

“Exorcizo te, creatura aquæ, in nomine Dei Patris omnipotentis, et in nomine Jesu Christi, Filii ejus Domini nostri, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti: ut fias aqua exorcizata ad effugandam omnem potestatem inimici, et ipsum inimicum eradicare et explantare valeas cum angelis suis apostaticis, per virtutem ejusdem Domini nostri Jesu Christ: qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos et sæculum per ignem.”

—Latin ritual for the preparation of holy water

live by the gun

They’re arranged across my table in military rank and file.

Black magic’s familiar reek mingles with the acrid gunpowder tang of cordite, all bound together in burnished brass shells. Behind them, cased in gleaming aluminum, the sanctified cartridges stand sealed with Solomon’s mark: the alchemical transmutation, fusion of opposites, vibrating with power between my fingers.

The latter I handle with particular care; but even so, I can feel numbness spreading through my fingertips and into my hand. Aching cold penetrates the thin snakeskin—I can feel how much they, how much Father hates me—but gloves any thicker, any clumsier, won’t do.

I’ve already disassembled the revolver, and I’m imaging (meticulous, exquisite daydream) Choire’s little virgin hands wrapped around the thickness of its engraved barrel, when Corbin calls.

I balance the receiver against my ear, let my eyes fall across the forty-five caliber cartridges and the antique Colt’s pieces scattered across the lamp-lit table like the skeleton of some dismembered organism bleached silver-white in the sun.

“The White girl?” I ask him, but I already know, and I’m smiling. Because I’ve been waiting. Because my tingling hand, my gunslinger fingers were waiting, and the joy of war threatens to spill from the core of me onto my tongue like the stinging-hot phantom memory of blood. My blood, or another’s, it hardly matters.

Two words from the vassal are enough: “Haborim. Tonight.”

just like heaven

White. The room was pure, clean white, and the sunlight through the window made it glow when the furious child made her way inside. She threw herself onto the bedside, and Margrave saw that she was on the verge of weeping or striking him—and thought for a moment that she might do both at once.

But she wrapped her thin pale arms around his neck and buried her golden head against his shoulder, and his face was pressed to the sweet-scented nest of her curls, and he thought for a moment that this is really Heaven. Then he ached as the child pulled herself away, drew her delicate hand swiftly back, and slapped him soundly across the cheek.

“Don’t you ever,” she said, tears glistening off her thick lashes, “hide from me again, you… you brute.”

“I—” His voice caught, crumbled in his throat. Margrave grinned tautly and tried again: “I wasn’t pretty to look at, my love.”

“Stupid,” she said. “You’re beautiful.” Possessive, miserable, she clutched him again, lowered her head, and half-sprawled across the bed heedless of her dress as she placed her ear against his heartbeat. In the sunlight, as she listened, she calmed. He stroked her head, felt the reassuring inconsequential weight of it on his chest.

“I thought you couldn’t be hurt,” she muttered. Sullen. He saw that the photographer had painted her pouting lips with rouge. Pretty on her, startling. She came directly here without washing her face, he thought.

“Not forever,” he murmured.

“But why?” she asked. And then: “Your heart’s beating faster.”

“I needed to show your dear papa something,” he explained softly, he soothed. “Some people can only fully understand a thing when they see it.”

“Like angels?” Ophélie asked as she shifted and made herself more comfortable across his body, mercifully whole.

“Yes, darling,” he said, smiling, half-lidded eyes watching how the sunlight in her hair transformed it into a corona. “Like angels.”

fury

She’s broken me. Beautiful, beautiful Danny, Diana, and I’ve broken her worse.

There are too many damned women in my life. My Erinyes, my Eumenides. That’s what goes through my bleeding head as I track it into the apartment—on the switch when I fumbled for the light and smear crimson across the faceplate, the new velvet pile carpet, the stiff sheets that I’ve started to hate so much as I collapse into the cool, empty bed.

I’m laughing because it’s all so useless, and each breath lances, pries my sides with pain from cracked ribs. There’ll be an ugly bruise soon, a royal splash of angry violet and yellow up and down my abdomen when it starts to heal, only a little worse than the marks across my jaw. A half-empty bottle of Scotch waits for me on the nightstand by the bed—took it from the lounge this morning; must have known I would need it now, twelve hours later, though the thought hadn’t occurred to me at the time.

I bring the mouth of the bottle to my lips, upend it, cough on the burn as it courses down, alcohol over the raw wound of my throat. Swallow, choke, swallow again, and finally I have to stop, gagging and gasping as a lurch seizes my guts and I wonder if I’ll have to vomit.

Here I am again. Some things never change.

Easy enough to fix the pain, the bruises, the abused hairline fractures running down my marred bones. But where’s the point? I’m finite, I hurt, and there’s grand pleasure in self restriction. Seeing if you can play a game with one hand tied behind your back. Because to Danny and I, this is just game, even if we play in deadly earnest. The stakes haven’t risen yet, not a live-or-die ante.

When they do, the rules change. Either way, I win. And my Furies will help me do it.

my sum

“I lov'd Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.”

—Hamlet: Act V, Scene I (1594)

white opium

Yesterday, I spoke with the ghost.

The border between where Bobbi Pascal ended and it began smudged with the light-spectrum blur of blue into indigo into violet. I wonder if I’ve met it before—in eras I’ve forgotten, memory and my old name sublimated and gone like wind. Maybe the comfort I take from the ghost’s presence is the ease of a drug, Marx’s Opium des Volkes. Bad habits are hard to break, and I used to be the worst kind of junkie: wallowing in filth, slavering like a lobotomy.

The Old Ones are involved; Wolf knew that in an instant, and I’ve felt it too, in my bones and my blood. Father’s handiwork. In those minutes of recognition between the three of us—Bobbi, the ghost, and me—I felt content, like the world is sublimely beautiful. And that’s the snare, because you hesitate to burn down what you adore. I’m drawn by Bobbi’s lovely fragility, attracted to what I can destroy as much as what destroys me.

But Father should know better by now. He thinks I’ve let myself become so sensually debauched, so viscerally wanton, that I’ll stay my hand for a few years—for the sake of a pretty doll-sweet child’s face? Like Ophélie, my Ophélie, she of the wicked blond curls tangled between my blood-damned fingers, she of the biting little whore-rouged mouth.

Father doesn’t understand; never did. That’s how narcissism works. Other people are shit under your boots. I’m shit. An irritant to scrape off at the earliest convenience.

But I won’t stop. I won’t slow. I’ll glut myself on the world, choke on its pleasure and its pain. And I’ll burn it down all the same—like chaff in a fire, Father. It’s not the world they deserve: Ophélie, Bobbi, Choire, even Danny or Sunika. That limp-wristed bastard Canseliet, or Master Fulcanelli, wherever he’s wandered among the quick and the dead.

And I'm not what they deserve. But I can clear the way.

Wait. Just wait. It’s coming. I’m coming, the gears are turning. And nothing—not angel, devil, ghost, or man—is stopping me this time.

camera obscura

40 miles from the sun

In the center of the net, a heartbeat pulsing at its core, the infant star blossomed. It grew with a crackling roar, drawing hurried gouts of oxygen toward itself through the latticework of the net, and expanded to the size of a human skull—until it strained the boundaries of its cage and licked beyond them with fragile tongues of nuclear fire.

Margrave gazed into the light, felt it blast his irises, the windows of his pupils, in a wash of transcendent illumination and heat, and he remembered. Familiar, the way it had ruined him then, and ruined him now. He felt tightness drawing across his cheekbones, forehead, jaw as the radiance charred the surface of his skin, flooding the small laboratory with the cloying, acrid reek of smoldering flesh and hair.

Layers peeled away, and Canseliet screamed, but gam zeh yaavor: this too shall pass, King Solomon. He watched, even after vision had left him, struggling to differentiate chemical from alchemical, science from the secret place where Fulcanelli’s miracle began.

The net was copper alloyed with antimony—it should have shuddered, melted, vaporized like sighed breath under the sheer magnitude of force Fulcanelli controlled. But the infusion of azoth, the conduit that the old man effortlessly had joined with it, gave the net sovereignty unto itself, rendered it inviolate. Anchor for the lapis philosophorum, for the golden chrysopoeia—then why not a fledgling sun, he thought, as agony flayed him and he smiled to endure it.

Still he stood, and Canseliet was shouting for Fulcanelli to break the conduit, stop the experiment, but the old man waited, as Margrave guessed he would. Canseliet’s shriek from the other side of the laboratory's leaded enclosure: “Come back, you fool, come back!”

But he rode the annihilating glow in molten ocean waves, felt the human delineations of his body weaken, the organism collapsing. The salty-sweet taste of blood frothed Hebrew and Latin and Greek past his lips, and Margrave could not be certain whether the liquid stinging down his ravaged cheeks was tears or vitreous.

“This is the light of God, Eugène,” Margrave crowed, his grinning mouth splitting to reveal rows of irradiated white teeth in a cadaver’s rictus. “This is your burning bush.”

And finally the galvanized hum of electricity was dying, the machines calming, the old man’s sorcery fading as the sun in miniature fluxed, flared in its containment, suffered the ignoble death of a snuffed candle flame. Margrave breathed, rasped, and collapsed—laughing, laughing, because this too shall pass, this too shall pass.

i am that i am

“Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.”

—Exodus 3:6, The King James Bible

hate me

And today I heard those words—“I hate you”—from little Miss White's mouth too. You'll all drive me mad with want.

snare

It’s the same ceiling as yesterday, but I might as well be somewhere else. I lie face up in an unfamiliar bed; the sheets are new and stiff, Egyptian cotton, disheveled as she'd been after stumbling out of them. With everything gone, replaced and impersonal, the space doesn’t feel mine anymore. When the girl leaves, so may I.

I found her browsing at Saks Fifth Avenue, snared her like a white-skinned docile little rabbit, smiled at her and overwhelmed her until she didn’t have a choice but to follow anywhere I led. She’d liked my suit—and she should, my flesh and bones wrapped in glamour that she can see and some that she can’t. She’d fixed her eyes on my face, predictably caught. I’d crooked my finger, and she’d rushed—breathlessly eager—after me.

Vanity and lust. Two birds with one stone, though I never liked the expression.

The shower’s running in the bathroom, and I picture her spindly young legs still trembling beneath the water from the way I took her, clenching bruises around her wrists, pressing marks into the delicate hollow of her throat with my mouth. But I feel empty, hollow, unfulfilled, even with the girl's worship saturating me like heroine straight into the blood. Between the Shewolf and Choire, something like this was bound to happen. At least the edge is dulled now.

And it’s another “Fuck you” to Father.

Funny. I think of Bobbi, and I have trouble picturing her like this. Maybe because she’s so pure it makes me ache: the way a child is pure, malicious and petty, defenseless and honest even when she lies. But purity's never made a difference before. Vastly more likely—the seal organically branded against the back of her neck, as much a native part of the girl as her heart and lungs. A connection between us, my name in abstract.

Irritation spikes mildly on my tongue. If not for her, for the ghost that haunts us both, I wouldn’t feel this sense of displacement. Brittle manuscripts edged in gilt leaf, hand-stitched clothing, centuries-old artwork—all gone, reduced to less than rubble, fine sand grain dust blowing on cold netherworld wind as the poltergeist came and went, destroying decades in an instant.

I’m getting sentimental. Complacent. Attached. But no—there’s Bahrain, or Turkey, or wherever the Hell the Garden hides from me. Soon, very soon: another rung on the Ladder, another link in the Golden Chain. I’ll ask Choire if she knows how to fly commercial aircraft; and thinking of Choire, the swollen juvenile smear of her mouth and the way she hates me, I consider the sound of the shower, and whether the girl will break if I have her again.

to suffer no evil

foreign exchange

Champagne had spoken all through the afternoon, and Margrave listened. In a little room on the Rue Rochechouart, he mutely smoked cigarettes and watched out the open window, never missing a word. When the old man arrived at a natural silence, he sat with the placid air of a priest behind a confessional screen, willing to wait forever as the late summer heat dwindled with the sun.

“For how long?” Margrave finally asked, facing the glass pane rather than his host. His words scraped barely above a whisper, quiet but raucous, the sound of a man whose seared throat is accustomed to swallowing fire.

“Three score and ten,” the old man answered softly, but businesslike and without hesitation or pause to deliberate. “Nothing—” he added “—to someone like you.” His inflection was Parisian, while Margrave spoke without accent: perfect, graceful-tongued French ruined by his voice.

Margrave watched the sun’s descent, slanting light across the floorboards at a shallow angle. He had tracked its progress through the window for several hours. When he’d begun, his mouth had been grinning, teeth clamped with mockery and a mad dog’s spite. As the sunlight sank westward, his expression also fell, until his eyes shone hollow, submerged in the distance of old memory. The smile had flown long before.

“But you leave me my liberty,” Margrave suddenly pressed, urgent, turning away from the window as he crushed the latest cigarette against its sill, in a row next to the others. “I can come and go as I please?”

“Unless I need you,” the other answered. Reminded: “And you’re to observe my restrictions.”

“I’m aware of the terms, Old Man,” Margrave said, electric agitation coursing through him like wire, held immovably taut by his own current and the quartering strain of ambivalence. His restlessness brimmed, he overflowed white-hot kinesis; but the claustrophobic attic room was too small to pace, and he closed his eyes, willing the impulse to subside.

Champagne's voice reached out in the quiet that followed with the careful, insistent delicacy of a physician probing a wound: “We both know a contract isn’t undertaken lightly. If you need time to decide—”

“No,” he answered harshly, halting Champagne’s voice, cutting it down at the first breath of empathy, understanding, mercy. The old man regarded him in silence as a savage witching heat lit in Margrave’s eyes. He watched the late commuters return home along Rochechouart’s narrow, winding course, stories below.

“No,” Margrave repeated. Calmer now, restrained. Beast at the end of its tether, quelling itself to patience, knowing that a lifetime spans only a moment.

“Just remember,” he said, because nothing was ever free, “what you've offered in exchange.”

black crane

“The Twenty-fourth Spirit is Naberius. He is a most valiant Marquis, and showeth in the form of a Black Crane, fluttering about the Circle, and when he speaketh it is with a hoarse voice. He maketh men cunning in all Arts and Sciences, but especially in the Art of Rhetoric. He restoreth lost Dignities and Honours. He governeth 19 Legions of Spirits. His Seal is this, which is to be worn, etc.”

—S. L. MacGregor Mathers, Trans., Goetia: the Lesser Key of Solomon the King (1904)