began to cry. I still couldn?t see his eyes: the single candle cast deep shadows, and most of his face was in one of them. But the plane of his cheek was in the light, and I saw the tears following a single, wavering track across his pitted skin.
?So one night,? he said, ?Mel told me it was my turn to be on top again. And this one was going to be really special. Because this time we were going to make a baby, and we were going to do it in a brand-new way.
?She used the word ?transgressive? a lot. We were going to transgress: we were going to breach the laws of nature. That idea seemed to get her even more excited than having an audience, but when I asked her exactly what we?d be doing, she got all shy.
?There was a lot of crap: a lot of arcane paraphernalia, a lot of chanting. It built up and it built up and it built up, and it didn?t seem to be going anywhere. I lost my hard-on somewhere along the way, and I almost dozed off, but she slapped me awake again. That was part of regular foreplay as far as our sex life was concerned. But then she went off-script. She stabbed herself in the stomach, with a poncy little silver dagger that had runes all up the blade, and then she got me to use the wound instead of?going in by the normal route.
?I told her she couldn?t get pregnant that way. It wasn?t transgressive, it was just stupid and sick. And incredibly messy. She didn?t care. She wanted it. She wanted it more than she?d ever wanted anything.
?And as soon as we were finished she staggered over to the door and opened it, and Fanke walked in along with a couple of guys in surgical whites. They hustled Mel away, and he told me I could leave. Just like that. Actually it was more like on your marks, get set, go. He said he?d removed his protection from me. The cops would be looking for me as a bail defaulter, and I?d better sod off out of the country or I?d be finishing out my sentence at the
Peace held up his hand, on which the golden locket glinted dully. He checked the clasp: a nervous tic that I suddenly realized I?d seen a couple of times before while he spoke.
?So I went,? he said flatly. ?How are we doing for time, Castor??
?We?ve still got a while. Peace, are you telling me that that was how Abbie???
I let the question hang. Slowly, he nodded his head.
?I didn?t know anything about it then. They fired the starting pistol and I was off. I?m not kidding myself, though: I?d have run even if I?d known Mel was pregnant. I?m not the nurturing type.?
There was a hectic energy in his voice now, and his face was strained like canvas on a frame. It was alarming to watch, almost as though he were coming unraveled, using himself up in this cathartic information dump so that he?d reach his own ending at the same time as he ended his story. I tried to call a halt again?for the last time.
?Peace,? I said, ?I can put the rest together for myself. Get some sleep now, and I?ll wake you up when it?s time to take your medicine.?
?Don?t flatter yourself, Castor,? Peace muttered, with fierce heat. ?You don?t know shit. You listen to me, and then you can talk, okay??
I held up my hands in surrender. ?Okay. But I haven?t been sitting on my hands, you know. Let me at least tell you what I?ve got already?you can save yourself some breath and use it elsewhere.?
He rolled his eyes impatiently, but I?d already started in. ?You found out somewhere along the line that you had a kid,? I said. ?And maybe you got curious. You tracked Melanie down to New York, and you went out there to visit her. Abbie would have been about eight years old then. You met her, got to know her, and??I went out on a limb, but it felt like a safe one??you gave her a gift. That locket.?
Peace grunted. ?Fucking amazing, Holmes. What was I wearing??
?I?m guessing that was the first gig you ever walked into that you found it harder to walk out of,? I said. ?You ended up fighting for Abbie in the courts. You wanted to be her father, and not just on her birth certificate.?
I stopped because he was waving his hand backward and forward in an impatient ?stop right there? gesture. ?I told you you didn?t know shit,? he said, thickly. ?The court case, that was another scam. Mel was still with Fanke, and Fanke was a big wheel by this time. Fucking multimillionaire. He?d set up the First Satanist Church of the Americas?become a guru, like the Maharishi, with tax breaks and limos and all that garbage. And there?s him and Mel living together like husband and wife, and bringing up Abbie like she?s theirs. I bumped into an old crony somewhere in Rio and got the whole story, and I thought it had to be worth trying to shake them down for some hard cash. That?s all she was to me, Castor: a fucking lottery ticket.?
?Until you met her.?
?Until I met her. Yeah. I didn?t realize, but taking out the lawsuit let me in for all kinds of stuff that I couldn?t get out of. Depositions, procedural submissions, Christ knows. If I?d seen how much time it was going to eat up I?d never have started it.
?But anyway, as part of all that there had to be meetings. Documented meetings, because you?ve got to go through the conciliation shit before you can go to court. And there she was, you know? Mel did all the talking, just like always, and Abbie was just sitting there, looking so sad and lost. Looking like she was waiting for a bus on a dark street, and that was where she?d been all her fucking life.?
He was staring at me with haunted eyes. No wonder he?d been so flip about the sins of his youth: this was what he really had on his conscience, and it must have almost eaten him alive.
?I started talking to her. Partly because I wanted to see if I could cheer her up, partly because it seemed to piss Mel off. I bought her the locket, and a couple of other things, and I told her some bullshit stories about what I did for a living.
?And I started to wonder?if Mel was so fucking cold to her, and if she wasn?t even Fanke?s kid, then why did they keep her around? Was it just that whole transgression thing? That Mel had managed to turn making a baby into something obscene and sick? Was Abbie a?a trophy? It didn?t make any sense.
?And there I was in a strange city, stuck there because of this stupid court case that I didn?t even want to win?that I?d only sworn out in the first place so that Fanke would pay me to make me go away. And I had all the time in the world, and fuck all to do with it. So I started to do some digging.
?The Satanist Church is huge over there. They?ve got their own Web site, their own bookshops, sodding T-shirts, car stickers, the works. HONK IF YOU?VE SEEN THE LIGHTBRINGER. Fucking morons. There was a lot there, but none of it was hard to find.
?The Web site had links to articles that Fanke had written. Speeches he?d made. It was all in public domain?he wasn?t hiding it. He was still going on about sacrifice farms, and the grimoire tradition, and why the medieval alchemists got it all wrong. Oh sure, he said, they?d managed to open up some lines of communication with demons, and the demons were giving them everything they needed to turn that first contact into serious, regular trade. Only they kept getting all the details wrong. It was a communication breakdown, according to Fanke. Demons can speak all the languages that human beings ever spoke, or ever will speak, but not?you know?fluently. So they were giving out all this sales talk: you can bring the big boys up from hell, you can be top dogs in a new world order, and all the rest of it. They were giving fucking dictation, for God?s sake. But these medieval badasses?these Fausts?they were mostly managing to miss the point.
?They got it all wrong, Fanke said. All the stuff that really mattered, anyway. And the thing they fucked up worst of all?the most important thing, the engine that the whole thing ran on?was the sacrifice. Albertus Magnus raved on about rams being without blemish, and Bruno?s got a whole goddamn chapter on whether you carry the beast in or lead it on a rope, and what color its fleece should be, and what it should have eaten and what you do with its shit if it shits during the ceremony, and on and on like some kind of instruction manual translated from Japanese into Latin by a fucking Dutchman. And all the sense of it?all the meat?that just got lost in translation.
?So this is the gospel according to Fanke, which he posted on the Internet because Mt. Ararat?s a fucking long way away. To raise a major demon, you need a sacrifice that?s been dedicated from birth to the powers of darkness. From
?Abbie.?
?What do you fucking think?? His voice rose in a snarl, but then it turned into a cough and he folded in on himself, trying to ride out the spasms in his throat without moving his diaphragm. ?Yes, Abbie,? he said when he could speak again, glaring at me with unfocused hatred. ?The bastards brought her into the world just so they could kill her?at the right time, in the right place, with the right fucking weapon that Fanke and his mates had said a fucking blessing over and anointed with holy water and horse piss.? He coughed again, and this time he had to shove his hand against his mouth to keep whatever it was from coming up.
?Okay,? I said, gently?although the anger seeping out of him like tar from a smoker?s sweat was making my skin prickle. ?And then there?s another part I can fill in for myself. You lost the case.? He nodded, his face still buried in his hands. ?And you lost a shedload of money, because Fanke countersued.?
?Only to make me back off,? Peace wheezed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. A trail of spittle hung down from his chin but he seemed not to have noticed it. His voice was a little slurred now. ?He was telling me to go away. Behind the scenes his lawyers
