We Will All Go Down Together (34 page)

The last time I went there—a month or so before Mr. and Mrs. Mol rescued me from the depths of my own closet—I asked Carra: “So what should I do?”

“Why would you think I would know?”

“Well . . . you’re psychic.”

A razored smile. “So are you.” And then, after a beat: “You know, Janis, one of these days, you’re gonna have to learn how to make up your own mind.”

Adding, without speech—

Because letting something else make it up for you . . . was what got us both into trouble. Wasn’t it?

I looked down at my hands, silently; traced, in reflexive habit, the thin white worm-trails of scar tissue that ran along my palm, between my fingers.

“I keep getting that urge to draw,” I said, finally, not looking up. “Start drawing again, I mean. Keep drawing. Problem is . . . I don’t know what I’m going to see.”

Carra nodded, unsurprised (as ever).

“Door’s open,” she said. “You bust one down, or let it get busted, and it’ll never really close properly again.”

I closed my hand, so I couldn’t see the scars any more. Explaining: “But—I thought the mirror was the doorway. I thought, I really thought . . . if I just broke it, that’d all be that with that.”

Finally looking up at Carra: “Didn’t work, though. Did it?”

Carra blew out a breath and peered at the wall—for once not that scary, unfocused look of hers, but simply an ultra-ordinary human scowl of mingled fatigue/frustration. And: “I think,” she said, at length, “if you’re talking about the mirror, maybe it helped you a little too much.”

“Say again?”

“It . . . purified your control, like a static filter on a signal. Whatever was in you got stuck, halfway in, halfway out: couldn’t trick itself past your Mental Radio any more, couldn’t get far enough out to work on anybody else. All that power, building up, with nowhere to go. . . .” She shrugged. “Well.”

(
You
remember.)

I swallowed. “So when I broke the mirror—”

Carra swept her hand off to one side and up, a rising mime-jolt, like something squirting away under pressure. “It took the first channel out it could find. Straight into—”

—Henry.

(Wouldn’t’ve mattered, though: him, me, her. Whoever.)

“It didn’t have a choice,” she added with a shrug. “It had to move on. Somewhere. Through someone.”

“Because I couldn’t see it,” I whispered. “Because I didn’t want to see it. Or hear it, or even sense it.”

And shockingly, from Carra, came a dry, almost silent laugh.

“Nobody,” she pointed out, “ever does.”

Which stopped the conversation dead, right there; nothing more to say, let alone
worth
saying. Seeing how we both already knew just what she meant.

But I wonder, still, as I always must: what else might be moving through me, even now?

I pick up my pad at least once every day, sometimes even put my pencil to it. And every time, I put it down again, leaving the page unblemished; feel my hands hover motionless, caught forever between the abortive urge to do something and the fear of doing . . . anything.

Because: better by far that bleak, white blankness than to try drawing something, to rake up all my old pains and losses looking for something beautiful and find something unbidden crawling across my page, some unborn thing, some scuttling mouse with a ghost-foetus human face. To find only (once again) that awful light, which is so thick it clots like shadow.

Sub terranea. Sin nombre. Pen umbra.

I may never draw again. I may never even look, especially not at the paintings of Max Ernst. And in that way, I can only suppose, I guess it’s a little . . . 
just
a little . . . 

. . . like being dead.

No matter what he might have told himself later on, this was the God’s own truth: when Maccabee Roke chose to take that stupid job Le Prof offered him, it wasn’t
really
because he had nothing else left. He had his health, obviously; his certificate of release, signed by the Archbishop; fifty bucks and the clothes on his back, plus a voucher for one month’s free room and board at Saul of Tarsus’s Halfway House for guys (and some gals) who were . . . halfway. Halfway out, halfway back. Halfway between Church and State, between this world, the flesh, and the Devil.

Besides which, if he’d found himself in
real
trouble, there was always his blood kin to turn to—though he wasn’t exactly sure what sort of reception he could expect there, given the circumstances under which they’d all originally parted company.

Making his way from St. Michael’s Cathedral for the very last time, Mac found Sister Blandina of the
Ordo Sororum Perpetualam
waiting for him next to the narthex, hand on hip, tracking his every move with coolly level eyes. Not exactly a surprise, though always a pleasure.

“Here to see me out?” he asked her, not stopping.

She turned and fell into step with him, replying: “Mother Eulalia sent me. She said to say she wants it back.”

“Wants what back?”

“Don’t even, F—. . . Roke.”

“Oh,
Sister
. Do I ever?”

A shrug, like she was throwing off flies. “Hadn’t thought so, up ’til now. But after this, I can only assume . . . all the time, apparently.”

“Gee. I’m cut.”

Sr. Blandina gave him another type of look entirely at that, so direct it virtually came with subtitles:
Not yet, you’re not.
Then leaned in, voice dropping, to murmur a hot lick of breath against his ear.

“Did you ever seriously think we don’t know what you really are, Maccabee?” she asked. “Because we do, be
very
sure of that. We always did.”

They were almost in the doorway now, flanked on either side by a glowing three-tier rack of wish-candles—two-dollar coin a pick, minimum donation adjusted for inflation—vs. a slightly overfull wall font, so handy for emergency entrance/exit genuflection. He put his palm on the door handle and turned again, without warning, so fast they practically slammed up against each other; saw her recoil a fraction, and felt a flicker of sick pleasure crossbred with vague insult—
just what do you take me for, Blandina? One of my in-laws?

“Listen up, Sister,” he told her, adopting the same uncompromising tone. “Even if I did know where it was, which I’m not saying I do, you of all people should know I’m not going to be posting it on some website and giving out the URL anytime soon. So tell Eulalia it’s a simple case of me needing insurance, or leverage, or what-have-you. Tell her it’s nothing personal. And tell her . . . tell her what I
think
is, if your whole Order’s sense of itself is so pathetically dependent on possessing one obscure mediaeval manuscript, then maybe there are better places both of you could be. Or all of you, for that matter.”

Meeting her gaze straight on now, unwavering, and finding . . . nothing there to hang on to, by any normal person’s standards. Just the same old same old: a killer’s stare, wrapped in a supplicant’s hide. That scarf concealing her hair might as well be some suicide bomber’s hijab, for all the mercy he could expect from calling it a wimple.

Good thing we’re neither of us normal,
he thought.

Behind them both, a recording of a bell rang Sext. Over her shoulder, he could see the routine ebb and flow of humanity gathering—parishioners with their spiritual hands out, tourists looky-looing, homeless people sidling in, in search of a quiet pew. And almost all of them with their shadows already attached, their various ghosts and parasites trailing spindrifts of fuzzy longing or polluting obsession. Soon, the place would be chock-a-block with crossed currents, knots and nets and snarls, etheric overlay so thick he’d barely feel able to move. . . .

And that was when
it
would come, as it always did. Come straight past everybody else and sit right next to him, grinning its dreadful, halo-lit grin.

But not tonight, not anymore. Not
ever
.

Blandina shook her head, very slightly, a Cylon resetting its personal hard-drive. “We need it
back
,” she repeated.

“Then come and get it,” Mac told her. And left the Church, lit. and fig., without a single backwards glance.

Seven days later, a mere week, and already the “normal” world was beginning to crush in on Mac like deep-sea pressure. The first thing he’d figured out was that, when you didn’t feel required to pray for five or ten minutes out of every hour, it freed up a lot of your time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t like he’d bothered developing many
other
reflexive habits over his almost twenty years in God’s “service.”

Which really did make him a pretty sad object, all told: holed up from noon to night with other faith-lost freaks on every side, scared to walk Toronto’s streets, no matter the hour, for fear of meeting someone he was related to (however distantly). His brave new life of physical freedom and spiritual ruin was quickly being reduced to a mishmash of half-remembered lines from songs:
Sin, sin, everything is sin, clap hands. Saturday night, and I ain’t got nobody. Thirty-eight years old, and never kissed a girl.

The next night, while venturing out for a copy of
Vanity Fair
and a pack of DuMaurier Lights, he accidentally ran into his youngest cousin, Saracen Druir, right outside Saul of Tarsus’s front door. Saracen had his arm wound around some chippie’s waist while he chatted up her best friend, sunk deep in a haze of personal glamer that masked everything about him but his poisonous, carrion-fly-blue eyes. When he saw Mac coming he slid, midline, into a double-take so note-perfect it actually succeeded in making him look even less human than he already did; the girls didn’t seem to notice, simply trancing out in tandem, as if he’d put them on pause.

“Coz!” Saracen greeted him. “We’d heard tell of yuir . . . reconversion? Such news does travel fast, even through Dourvale. Yet I’m main glad to prove it no’ just rumour.”

“Oh yeah?” Mac replied, for lack of any better comeback.

“Certes. Yuir grandmere asks after ye often, even now.”

“That’s nice of her.”

“Aye, that it is, and ye little deserving of such respect. Still, she says ye may come by the
brugh
when it suits you, by high way or low, if ye’ve no’ forgot how tae walk the latter. Only bring some small gift with ye, for entry-price, and be welcome.”

“Go up with a guest or two . . . like
these
gals, say . . . then come back alone, with a four-star hangover and a wallet full of twigs,” Mac agreed, going out of his way to make the analogy as insulting as possible. “That
is
about the size of it, right? ’Cause you know, it’s been a while.”

Saracen dipped his head slightly, parodying a bow—
la, coz, how ye do prick me!
—and favoured Mac with a slow, deliberate wink at the same time: his right lid closing bottom to top in a luxuriant sweep of lash, upside-down and backwards, like every other thing the (almost-)full Fae had to offer. Sweat stung the small of Mac’s back at the sight, and the tiny hairs on his neck went up. But there was no way in Hell he wanted Saracen to have the pleasure of knowing it, so he kept right on projecting aggressive boredom.

It seemed to work. “Oh, coz,” Saracen purred, all regretful, “ye do me wrong. And ye’ve surely no great call tae visit if ye’ve no mind tae—would be awkward, mayhap. As it might have before were I tae’ve visited
you
, given yuir past lodgings.” A pause. “But not so now, aye?”

Not so much, no.

Mac got a sudden whiff of that last visit “home” to the
brugh
itself—down into Dourvale Hill’s deeps, its apple-reeking darkness—when Saracen had shown him a single skeleton hand jutting up out of the close-packed earthen floor, bones splayed in decay like some pale flower. He’d told Mac, then a postulant, that it belonged to a local girl he’d liked enough to try to pull inside, not realizing—or caring—what an unexpected trip through solid rock might do to her; Saracen’s capacity to make non-Fae-style jokes had always been fairly limited, as Mac recalled, but stuff like this was just the kind of politically incorrect, human-unfriendly jest that really set the whole Druir family’s toes tapping. And truth be told, Mac had giggled a bit about it himself before throwing up, once he was safely back on hallowed ground.

Because:
They’re no’ like us, coz,
as Saracen was quick to point out,
and yuir no’ like them, for all ye may try. Ye never will be.

So why chase a dream of salvation, especially when you weren’t sure—not even after all this time, not
really
—if the offer applied to you? If you even had a soul
to
save, let alone one worth the effort of saving?

We live long, and then we’re gone. We dry up and blow away, with nothing left behind. Yet may we be merry, coz, ye and I and all our blood . . . in our season.

Saracen sighed, finally. “I’ve missed ye, cousin,” he said, and snapped his nail-less fingers—the girls immediately began to chatter once more, ignoring Mac’s presence entirely. And they drifted away down the street together, like leaves.

By the time he got back to his room, Mac’s heart was still hammering, so he spent some time turning all his clothes inside-out, just in case. He found them uniformly wet through with sweat, especially the ones closest to the skin. The only good part was that, because everything he wore was (by simple force of habit) black, no one would ever be able to tell, unless they were already looking for exposed seams.

When night fell, he lay awake, trying his best not to think about what other relatives he might run into, given time, if he insisted on sticking around in the Greater Toronto Area. Semi-human wreckage set and left adrift by five hundred years of supernatural intermarriage, Rokes and Druirs with a side-order of Sidderstanes, Devizes and Glouwers and Rusks, all seeping back and forth into each other’s bloodlines since 1650 or so, barring the occasional outcross—their version of the Auld Alliance, like Scotland and France, albeit with far more collateral damage.

Reverse changelings like Saracen’s milk-brother Ganconer Sidderstane, tithed to seal a deal; throwbacks like his great-grandniece Ygerna, dripping in the dark somewhere, mere de-evolutionary minutes away from eating kids and taking names. Or quarterlings like Mac himself, living insults to a balanced universe—always equally uncomfortable in any of the worlds which laid tentative claim to him, no matter where he might momentarily choose to make his stand. . . .

But worst of all, the looming spectre of Saracen’s wayward mother, Enzemblance Druir Sidderstane: big sister to Mac’s mother Miliner Druir Roke, intangible diver through solid objects, who’d followed after Mac for most of his childhood harassing him with her creepy affection, just to see how high his warlock’s senses might make him jump. Enzemblance, once given to leaning out of the bedroom wall over Mac while he slept, waiting for the strange weight of her lank red hair to wake him, a scream half-caught in his throat. So she could smile down at him, too-sharp teeth the only light-source in a nightmare-shadowed face, and ask:
What is’t ye dream of, nephew?

(
Me
, perhaps?)

Eighteen years earlier, when he’d first finagled his way inside the Church’s embrace, it had been Enzemblance’s six-fingered hand at his back, pushing hard. Yet if he lived as long as both his genetic payloads suggested he might, barring any cold iron-related catastrophes, he’d do whatever it took to never feel that touch again.

Above, he felt the thing that absolutely was
not
an angel swoop to and fro on hook-feathered black wings, searching him out. But so long as he kept his window shut and his curtains pulled, he was safe, or close as made no never-mind.

I need to get away from this damn city,
Mac thought. And began to consider how he might be able to lay his hands on a large quantity of ready cash.

Thinking back, Mac found all his earliest memories took place while in transit, as part of a twilight world in constant motion, never truly “at home” anywhere. Days spent indoors, behind drawn curtains, cocooned in comfortable darkness; nights of scudding beneath a grey sky just before dawn or under a low-hung moon, always driving, touring an endless series of Maritime motel rooms, campsites and cabins, strip-malls and trailer parks. That they never really seemed to
get
anywhere, for all this aimless travelling, was something Mac wouldn’t notice until far later, when his parents were already dead.

As a kid, though . . . as a
kid
, life seemed genuinely golden. His mother—who called herself “Millie,” now she was out amongst the mundanes—got by on looking like some pretty slip of a Renaissance Faire girl with a greenish cast to her hair and a silvery tint to her poison-blue eyes. His jack-of-no-trades Dad, on the other hand—Armstrong, known as “Army”—took firmly after the roguish border-lord side of his Roke heritage. An itinerant fixer-upper guy with a bare touch of the sight, plus just enough hedge-magic to let him talk himself through the Dourvale
brugh
’s back “door,” which was where he’d met Miliner, naturally. And that, as they said, had been that.

It was a genuine romance, with Mac the much-loved by-product. And you really would think that would count for—something, with someone, wouldn’t you? But apparently, going on eventual denouement alone . . . not so much.

Once, on a drive-by through Toronto, they’d stopped at the Connaught Trust so Army could show Mac the official portrait of Juleyan Roke, the infamous Black Wizard. While Millie waited outside, they’d stood there in silence, overwhelmed by their mutual three-way resemblance ’til one of the nun-librarians had come by, gently asking if she could help Army find anything. Army just shook his head instead, turning on his Nova Scotia bullshit charm full-force, and a mere blush and stammer later, they were back out on the pavement once more, no harm done—no fault, no foul. Slipping away, hand in hand in six-fingered hand, back into the perpetual half-darkness that made up their oddly happy, fugitive lives.