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.