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.