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.