A Lower Deep

When I woke in the morning I was already weeping.

It was the day before Easter. Bethany lay on the bed. Her belly was red and her knees had been torn. She was unlike the woman who had bedded me last night because she did not rouse or smile or chew.

Self sat in her viscera and screeched, Don't look at me!

I tried not to.

Instead, I stared at what was left of Bethany, lying unwrapped on the sheets and splayed across the floor.

My name had been carved into her chest, and I was covered in blood.

Chapter Seventeen

The raging clashes continued to escalate. Israeli troops battled several gunmen and thousands of rock-throwing Palestinians. They opened fire on the rioters, killing twelve and wounding hundreds. The bloody confrontations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would only grow worse as activists and followers marched on Israeli army positions. Thousands of protesters chanted the Muslim battle cry 'Allahu Akbar.'

God is great.

Streets became littered with rocks and overturned garbage bins while plumes of smoke from blazing tires rose into the sky.

Police were forced to evacuate tourists off the streets of the OldCity. Palestinian youths hurled stones, some twirling slingshots for a longer aim. They set fire to the Israeli police station at the Lion's Gate entrance during an attempt to take it over. Many carried black flags of mourning for those killed. Others stuffed gas-soaked rags into bottles and threw them at Israeli soldiers, who fired rubber-coated steel pellets and live rounds from behind walls. Gunmen, their faces covered by checkered head scarves and ski masks, shot at troops crouching behind jeeps in protracted fire-fights.

In the heart of the desert, it began to hail.

Fragments of ice had flecks of frozen blood in them. The air had started to spasm, as if the lack of motion and its very staleness were causing it to somehow convulse. The day grew dark, but not with clouds-frigid sunlight still shined but the world simply became blacker.

What did you do to me?

What?

You healed my body but you changed me. What did you let loose?

Self stared at me sadly. You've changed me, he said.

Did you do it?

Do what?

The girl . . .

Do what!

I drew him to me until our noses touched. Did you kill the girl?

He yanked on my shirt until his claws dug into my neck and blood welled. Did you? Tell me! Did you?

Which side are you on?

On your side, like always. Then he frowned so hard that the ridge appeared between his eyes, as it did between mine, both of us looking genuinely confused. But which side are you on? Do you even know?

The land itself had grown hostile with resentment. I sat in front of a church for hours, and then moved off to a mosque and a Muslim shrine and I watched the different flags droop in the unmoving air and couldn't tell them apart. I vomited in alleyways until the bile tore up my guts. Gunshots and the sound of breaking glass echoed in all directions.

Self sniffed, held his nose, and said, You really stink.

I lay under garbage as the hail stormed down. Even with the sunlight igniting the jewels of blood in the slivers of ice, I enjoyed the cold on my blistered and bitten skin. Helicopters passed overhead, hovering, silhouetted in the sky, hanging against the sun until it became as black as a sackcloth of hair or ashes.

Joseph and Bethany Shiya's corpses might not be found for days. The lust and illness had been purged from me in a sacrifice I did not make. The great whore that had possessed Bethany had fed well on all of us.

Why hadn't my throat been cut?

Bethany's body had been carved open in the exact same manner as Theresa Verfenstein thirty-five years ago on a New Jersey campus. Even my name had been sliced into the flesh with the same decisive, steady strokes. A right-hand curve, sloping low and dragging with a slight flourishing curl. The killer must have had some real strength in order to leave chips in the rib cage and sternum.

I'd fulfilled another prophecy out of Revelation, lying with the mother of whores. I was being used, step by step, but couldn't figure out a way to stop it.

What happened to us in there? What did you see?

I didn't see anything.

You don't sleep. You must've allowed this to happen.

I don't sleep but I'm not always awake. He scratched his cheek and peered around. Damn, I could use a latte and some more sugar cookies. I think I'm hypoglycemic.

A footstep sounded and a bird screeched loudly behind me.

I waited. The footsteps came closer. I could feel the anticipation pulsating all around, but it wasn't mine. Somebody else wanted a piece of me and expected this moment to be important and memorable. He twined between the shadows and finally appeared at the mouth of the alley, where he found me huddled under the strewn rubbish face down in the street.

That was all right. Situations like this could no longer shame me.

His bird tilted its head and whispered in his ear. He nodded and took a step closer, unafraid and indiscreet.

I stared at him for a minute and still couldn't really distinguish him from the rest of the coven. He stood tall, six-three, and had an oily smile that kept his lips sliding. A loosely curled shock of hair hung off his forehead, the kind that girls would love to catch in their fingers and play with for hours. He looked as though he should be in some college English lit program, leaning back in his seat, intense but casual, that greasy grin oozing as he argued with his professor about the subtext metaphor and vagaries of Voltaire's Candide.

Twenty-one or twenty-two, maybe, and he'd been killing them for years.

He was another necromancer, somebody in love with the dead. I didn't need to deal with any more trouble today. His eyes gleamed with a heady brew of humor and maleficia. He had beauty and charm and had used them in vile ways. Ghosts clung to him by the dozens-middle-aged women he'd drawn to him with his smile.

'What's your name?' I asked.

The jackdaw Hotfoot Johnson whispered to the kid again, like some lawyer clearing all his answers. 'Marcus,' he said.

'What do you want, Marcus?'

'To learn from you.'

It didn't seem incongruous to either of us that we spoke amongst trash, with the bloody hail coming down. 'No,' I told him. 'Now leave.'

'I can't do that.'

'Why? Are you under orders to stick close in case I don't plan on showing tomorrow?'

'No, nothing like that. We all know you'll help Jebediah.'

'Really.'

'Yes, or else why would you be here? You rely too much upon each other. You're the Lord Summoner.'

It was true, but that didn't have to mean anything to me. I held my fist open and stared at my variant lifeline again. I wanted it moved back to where it belonged. In which one of my lives had I been safer, and saner?

'I turn the title over to you, kid.'