The Everborn (17 page)

....a flicker, a radiant gleam and the razor sliced cleanly into her right cheek. Blood seeped outwards and trailed beneath the inside crevice of her earlobe, downward, beading across her flailed hair....

“....until then, you can call me
Scratch.”

Slowly, his free hand skimmed down the length of her side and found the base of her blouse.

As she felt the distant numbness of his fingers fumbling with the top button fly of her jeans, one and then the next and then the next, as her panties soon slid with the jeans to her ankles and his coldness pressed hard against the exposed skin of her inner thighs, she allowed the evening’s realities to slip into a detestable emptiness where, compared to reality, she found a better and brighter place in which to hide....

12.

A Departing Exchange

Andrew hadn’t been forced to pay as much attention to Ralston’s music nor the worshipping Ralston fans as he had first dreaded. Instead, he payed far more attention to the woman who asked him to dance and who offered him a seat at her table.

Who would ever
think
.

Melony hadn’t forced herself to pay as much attention to the investigative business of unknown truth-seeking as she had planned. Instead, she ended up clubbing and drinking and dancing with the investigation’s priority subject of the evening.

Who would ever think
that
, either.

They both ducked out from the show just beyond one a.m., allowing enough time for themselves to avoid the exiting onrush at the advent of the show’s climax and the last call for alcohol.

Squid Friction
had been well received and neither Andrew nor Melony could imagine the band’s debut as taking a turn for the worse this late in the evening, or any time before the gig ended. They both agreed, however, that the show’s success was largely due to the novelty and nothing that night could possibly herald a smashing debut album.

The two made their way across the car-littered parking lot, up and over an infestation of weeds and cracks of broken sidewalk. As they crossed the adjoining intersection, Andrew paused to gaze back at the mouth of the
Crow Job’
s
rear alley as the reminder of its hidden crime scene briefly struck his memory. Melony turned too, noting as her eyes caught sight of Andrew and then of his distraction that she should interject a regard for the evening’s professional mission while there was still time...

...before she found herself driving home without so much as a promise from Andrew that she will meet with him again.

For investigative reasons, of course.

I’m walking her to her car
, Andrew thought, and he could not believe where the evening had taken him thus far,
holy gee-zus
.

“You didn’t expect to, without me?” He meant to say,
you didn’t expect to, unless you met someone
, but the instant before he said it, he thought it too rude. Or too blunt.

Melony laughed a short laugh. Then, rather straightforward, she replied, “I didn’t expect to really meet
anyone
tonight, unless it was....” (
unless it was
you
in particular
) “...unless it was Ralston or someone in the band.”

“I was meaning to ask you about that,” Andrew said, “and now’s as gooda time as any. So,
Diverse Arcanum
covers entertainment as well, as, say, Noah’s Ark and vampires and Santa Claus? What’s a girl like you and a magazine about the unknown doing in a place like
The Crow Job?”

The two half-passed a lone and lowly motel before Melony began to cross the street to her vehicle with Andrew following. Approaching a sleek cherry-red custom-made convertible ‘68 Mustang, she withdrew from her purse a black box-shaped gadget and flicked its center button and the car responded with an abrupt
chirp chirp
! Already, she found herself relieved upon casual inspection that no rat-bastard hoodlum had attempted to tamper with it. She exchanged the black box with a set of keys.

Behind her, across the street at the motel, a door slam startled her, made her turn. She found Andrew before her, jotting something down with a pen to a jagged paper within his palm.

“This is my home phone,” he said, and coyly handed to her the jagged piece. “I...I was hoping tonight wasn’t just a really good night and nothing more....”

She took the paperand it disappeared into her purse after a quick glance at it. Her keys clinked and jiggled in her hand. She didn’t know what to do with them, for it seemed that to turn and open her car door was to call her encounter with Andrew quits for the night. And she didn’t want to do that. But yet, she had to. For herself, for Max, for business.

At the same time, she knew she had to meet Andrew Erlandson again.

If but only for business.

For one sweeping second, Melony found time to wonder whether the way she was achieving this task of getting to know Andrew was right or wrong. Was she coming on to him like some relentless diva willing to go as far as to sleep with a guy to get what she wanted from him? Was she a spy sent by Maxy to befriend Andrew, to be Andrew’s buddy-ol’-pal until she knew him good enough to exploit him? Was she genuinely attracted to him as she would be attracted to
any
intriguing young man, as though he actually
was
a man and
not
the secretive Being From Beyond she’d convinced herself of him to be?

Was she finding him to be more of a man than anything she expected?

Was she so incredibly turned off and tired of Max that any prospects of fooling around or falling in love again turned on and tempted her?

Surely she wouldn’t cheat on her husband.

Not under
these
circumstances, especially.

It was
okay
to be attracted to Andrew. It made her comfortable with him and she
had
to be comfortable with him, or the aspects of what he was would make him far too intimidating to tap for unseen wonders.

“Call me, I’d like to hear from you,” she said to him. “Soon. Like maybe tomorrow. You got my number. Let’s get together this weekend.”

“Or you call me, you now have my number, too,” said Andrew. “Or how about this, the first person to call the other wins.”

“Wins what?”

“Wins a full course Chinese dinner for two, courtesy of yours truly, on the house. Or should I say, at my place. It’s a cozy little apartment and I make great Chinese. We could do something afterwards, maybe, like go catch a movie....”

“Sounds nice,” Melony replied, and smiled.

As Andrew watched Melony pull into the street and speed into the distant lamp-lit black, his thoughts sped also, thoughts about the weekend, thoughts about dinner and beyond.

...and thoughts about what Bari would think of all of this.

He was left in wonder and wondering these things when he proceeded back to the opposite side of the street to make his way to the apartment, casually observing the flow of nightclubbers exiting
The Crow Job
and swarming between the parking lot’s vehicles and it crossed his mind that Melony had never quite answered his question about why a magazine concerned with the unknown would concern itself with a horror writer’s rock n’ roll gig.

Then again, it didn’t matter.

He went home with these thoughts and with them he went home to Bari.

13.

A Few Fringe Benefits of the Gods

When Andrew returned to his third floor apartment, he expected Bari to be somewhere about and waiting for him to come home.

Bari herself was more than amused at this. She’d given up reminding her dear one years ago that she was
always
with him, always and in many ways. What was he thinking, that Bari slummed around the place like a bored housewife, that protecting him with her very soul meant macrame and
Days Of Our Lives
and hoping he’d return to her safely for chicken and dumplings and a piping pot pie?

Andrew knew better than that; he simply wasn’t as conscious of things as he could be. And whenever Bari would appear to him, she would appear mostly at home and very rarely elsewhere, almost
never
in the presence of others or under the potential of being
seen
by others, except in a few past cases of protecting Andrew from harm. Aside from any exceptions when Andrew was out and about, Bari remained undetectable and observant and totally nonexistent to the physical realm of Andrew’s world.

Oftentimes to Andrew, Bari’s absence grew so convincing and certain, stretching over the course of hours or even days or weeks that it became all but impossible to accept her claim of
always being there
.

But hell...people generally take God that way.

Whatever sort of creature or being Bari was or used to be, she was actively a Watchmaid, like it or not and she had been for quite a while now. Oftentimes, she dared to confront what few vague glimpses of memory she carried of her human self, of the mortal woman she once was, but in many ways it became a natural instinct not to dwell on these memories too much. Her duties were embedded within her from the single burst of moment it took for her to be transformed and the sudden enlightenment, which accompanied this transformation left her with no choice but to accept it and to remain true. It was like dying and embracing the inevitable afterlife, and then assuming the role of guardian angel to the very one responsible for her death.

The only thing was, Bari never truly died. She was too physical and material to be a literal angel; she was also too spiritual and intangible to be limited to the physical world. Bari possessed the power to materialize into the physical world, to touch and to feel and to be touched, but she could also upon her own will manipulate her state of mind and body to disappear and reappear, to see the unseen spectacles which surround us all in spirit and limitless dimension and to take part in them as well. For her, there was no place on Earth she could not travel and nothing on Earth to keep her from traveling there, from walls of iron to the Gates of Hell.

If the average Joe or Judy Human were to possess even a few of these fringe benefits of the gods, things would lead to nothing less than cataclysmic mayhem for the only species to ever walk the earth who could never quite seem to keep their feet on the ground.

There was one thing keeping Bari from her own potential brew of cataclysmic mayhem, from exploiting such powers as Man could...

...and this was her allegiance to her Everborn, upon which these abilities were built. Everything about her was dependent upon a solid guardianship of Andrew, for if any harm should come to him, the price for her would be banishment, banishment from the physical realm altogether, to forever walk the earth while merely viewing the physical realm but hopelessly unable to take part in it. Such is the realm of spirits, but she would not be spirit. She would no longer be a Watchmaid should Andrew die, die for reason.

She would become what came to be called a Magdalene, a term coined by the many Watchmaids who had suffered this fate over the ages and centuries past.

Andrew may not have been aware of Bari’s presence with him at
The Crow Job
that night, but she had nevertheless been with him, watching him, studying the wife of Maxwell Polito with amusement and intense interest and with increasing approval. She had been waiting for Andrew to make this sort of destined connection with another and it was seeming as if Melony would be the one. Of all women.

But there had been something else present at
The Crow Job
that night, something lurking about near the dark and deserted alleyway at the nightclub’s rear, something aware of Bari’s presence also, of the presences of all involved.

Something waiting and watching, pinpointing the movements and schemes of the man in shabby grey, savoring the lingering death smell of the black boy it had revived to keep tabs on the shabby grey man when he himself had been an infant; the boy whose second and final death had drawn the being to this alley so many years later.

This
something
was one of the Magdalene.

And Bari knew what it was waiting
for
.

14.

Max and Melony

Max had trampled through the front door of his Malibu estate late that Saturday morning, a briefcase in one hand and notebooks and piles of papers in the other. He trotted upstairs, clad in blue jeans and a grey Los Angeles Kings sweatshirt (which was all he cared to wear on his plane trip up) and went directly to his office.

Melony sat at her desk with a cup of coffee. His emergence startled her; she swiveled in her chair to face him as he sped past her to his own desk, dumped his armful of important this-and-thats before an array of keyboarded PC hardware.

“Phil Hubert of the...” Melony sighed, gazed at her notes. “...the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Susan called from Fairway. Mark Deltmore wants a lunch date, soon, and Ruben Whitfield’s agent called about a booking at the Fall convention. The Cleggs down the street want to know if we can attend their dinner party on the night of the eighth....”