Sleeping Late On Judgement Day (32 page)

“I follow her,” she said. “Halyna.” I thought for a moment she meant she was going to die, too, but before I could say anything she spoke again. “I follow her because I love her. I know her when we are girls in school. To me, she is the bravest there is, like a kite.”

“Kite?” I said softly.

“No, not kite. Ka-night.”

“Knight. The ones in armor, who ride horses, yeah?”

“Yes, knight. To me, she is the bravest, the most beauty. When windy, her hair is like flag. I want to . . . to marry her.” For long moments she couldn't talk. I held her while the sobbing washed through. When she calmed again, she said, “Halyna tell me I am too young for her. That she is the bad news and that she likes boys, too. I don't care! And when she goes to join the Scythians, I promise that I will do, too.” Oxana put her head on my chest, as if she liked the sounds of her words better reverberating up from inside me. “And I do. Two years, then I leave from school and go. And I love it. All the fighting practice, I get strong, and Halyna still is the most beautiful—so strong compared to me! And so smart. She knows all about the world and the politics.”

I had never heard Oxana speak so long and had never heard her use English for more than a few sentences at a time. I tried to ignore the physical nearness of a warm, healthy young woman and just become a pair of ears and a brain, because that's what she needed, but it wasn't easy. I may be an angel, but I was lonely too, and my body is just mortal as hell.

“And then after while, my Halya, she loves me also. Still she has other love, other girls, but she loves me best, she tells me. That is best ever for me. She call me . . . she call me . . .” Oxana's voice hitched again. She had to ride this one out like a bad storm, gripping my chest with her arm and pushing her head against me, an animal trying to burrow down into the safety of earth. When it passed, she said in a tight, calm voice, “She call me
Hodulocnik.
That is bird with long legs that walks in water. She says that is me.
Hodulocnik
!” The storm took her once more, and this time it went on so long that I fell asleep, still holding her closely.

Later, probably in the first hours after sunrise, I woke again. Oxana was still in the bed with me, but she was wrapped around me in a much different kind of way, her groin pressed against my leg, her breasts against my arm, and she was pushing me, nudging me, making soft, muffled noises. Her nipples tented her thin shirt as she pressed them against my skin. She dragged them across my upper arm and groaned, but so quietly it was like something happening in another room.

Oxana was asleep, I'm sure she was, dreaming of her lost Halyna. I tried to move away from her, but she made a whimpering noise and held on. I had been dreaming of Caz and was already half hard, but the rhythmic pressure of Oxana's mons pushing against me, the little sounds of need and pleasure, had given me a painfully full erection. I didn't know what to do, except I knew that I had to get out of that bed. Oxana didn't want me, she wanted something she couldn't have, and I didn't want her, or at least my heart didn't, and I certainly didn't want to take advantage of her, whatever my crude and ignorant physical plumbing might have thought was a good idea.

I turned a bit more to the side to keep her out of contact with my throbbing self, and as I was preparing to clamber out of the warm bed and into a cold chair, for the good of everybody in the room and at least one person who wasn't, Oxana gave a strangled little gasp, then her thighs tightened on my leg so hard I thought she might break my femur. I mean, that woman had some muscles. She lay there breathing deeply for long moments, then said something I couldn't hear, in a voice completely muddled by sleep, before falling back into even deeper unconsciousness.

I just lay there for a long time, trying to get back to sleep and not having much luck. I was missing Caz in every way a man can miss his beloved, plus a few new ways I hadn't even thought about before. Eventually all my blood flowed back to where it was supposed to be, dispersing to various useful tasks, and I could slide into darkness again, this time to dream of endless white corridors with no way out.

I
DON'T KNOW
about you, but when I've spent weeks planning something and then it crashes and burns, bringing futility, horror, and death, I like to start planning something else right away. You know, so I don't lose that winning momentum.

Of course I was gutted, and would rather have been drinking and trying to forget the terrible mistakes I'd made, but I didn't have that option. I had to figure out what I was going to do next, because “next” was going to happen whether I wanted it or not.

The morning news, at least in the San Judas area, was full of the results of our expedition (
Attack At Stanford Museum—Vandalism Or Political Protest?
in the Courier was pretty typical) but to my immense relief, I saw no mention of bodies. Apparently the guard who'd been downed was going to survive, and the absence of other victims in the reports suggested the Black Sun had taken their wounded with them when they fled. I was pretty sure some of those wounded had been the kind we would label “dead, actually,” but I was relieved that their impulse toward tidiness meant it wasn't going to turn into a murder investigation. It's always about ten times harder to stay out of trouble when it's a capital crime, I tell you with the sad voice of experience. How I longed for the days when I was still in good with my bosses, and I could have just called the cleanup crew from Heaven Central like I did for the Black Sun mess in that upstairs apartment. Still, I suppose even the heavenly cleaners would have had trouble trying to cover up the fact of neo-Nazis breaking in and tying up all the museum employees.

Still, the blowback from the museum disaster was going to be quite enough to destroy me anyway. Not only had I made my beef against Anaita very clear to her, I'd slapped her in the face about as hard as it was possible to do, but I still hadn't found the horn. In other words, I'd made her angry without hurting her a bit.

When I finished with the newspapers, Oxana was still asleep and looked as though she might be for hours, which was fine with me. It's one of the only things the truly bereaved can do, and I didn't know how much support I could give her in my current situation. In fact, I was thinking pretty seriously about taking her out to the airport immediately and putting her on a plane to somewhere, just so I didn't have to protect her from the shit that was going to go down. Actually, considering how much of my budget I'd already blown on the disastrous museum venture, I'd probably have to take her down to the County Transit hub and put her on a bus. Budget-wise, I could probably get her to Salinas.

Failure? Me? Only in
this
space/time continuum, bub. There must be tons of alternative realities out there where Bobby D is still The Man.

I went out to the courtyard to make some calls, but was distracted by something thrashing around loudly in the bushes beside the path, like a cat trying to upchuck not just a hairball, but an entire other cat. After some investigation I found a nizzic—
the
nizzic, the new batwinged, read/write model—tangled deep in a juniper bush. I guessed it had gone looking for shade when the sun came up. Hell-creatures like it hot, but they also like it dark. I unhooked it from the clinging branches as carefully as I could, then took it inside, but it was still trembling and making little barfy noises, so I put it under a bowl on a cookie sheet and set the over for about 250 degrees.

After ten minutes or so I put on the potholders and brought it out. The little demon-creature looked happier now and was already reciting its message. I turned off the kitchen lights and listened to the rest of it, then let the winged messenger cycle through the whole thing again.

 • • • 

“
I suppose this is one of the reasons I fell for you instead of just destroying you in the first place, like I should have—your psychotic inability to compromise or do the smart thing. I'm so used to people who only care what's best for them that there was a certain charm in someone who couldn't take the sensible way out even under threat of torture and death.

“You were right about the gypsy story I told you our first time together—you wouldn't have done what Korkoro did. You would have charged up that mountain to attack the Fog King, and the whole thing would have been even worse for everyone, and all for a principle you're not even sure of yourself.

“Oh, Bobby, I can't tell you how much I want to fuck you right now. I want you all over me, pressing me down with your weight, holding me like I was trying to get away. But I wouldn't be. Because I know about being held against my will, and I also know about being held because it's exactly what I want, and I definitely know the difference between the two. What a ridiculous, nightmare world this is, my lover, where two people who just want to be together would have to turn the whole universe upside down to do it.

“Maybe we shouldn't
talk
any more, at least for a while. I thought I could handle it, but I don't think I can. All those years I lived in London, I should have learned from the English, because they have the right idea. The only way to deal with people, living or dead, is at arm's length.

“Don't tell me anything that will make me cry, Bobby. If you send a message back, just be funny. Be sweet. Otherwise I can't do this.”

 • • • 

I wasn't ready to answer her, not just that moment. Too much stuff boiling in my brain. You know when you're a kid and you're so sad and angry that you just start crying? Like that. Instead of crying, though, I tucked the nizzic back into the warm bowl, blanketed it with a couple of my dirty socks (which I thought should make a little demon feel right at home) and stashed it in the back of one of the pantry closets so it wouldn't startle Oxana if she got up. Then I made a cup of coffee so strong it violated several workplace safety laws and took it back out to the courtyard to make some calls. The first was to Clarence.

“Bobby!” he said when he picked up. “Thank God, you're alive.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So's Sam and so's Oxana. But Halyna, she didn't make it.”

The kid was genuinely sad and outraged, which shows you that someone picked the right person to be an angel. In fact, he seemed to take it harder than I had, not that I didn't feel sick about it. But in my case it seemed like it wasn't the loss of Halyna herself that burned as badly as my failure to keep her safe. Clarence the Rookie Angel, like any decent person, reacted first to the loss of the woman herself and its effect on Oxana.

After I'd given him the full battlefield report, the kid told me that he and Wendell had gone back to work as though everything were normal and that, so far, they seemed to be pulling it off.

“But what are we going to do now, Bobby?”

“No ‘we' this time. So far, you're still clear, or you seem to be. Let's keep it that way, especially since I don't have the slightest idea of what I'm going to do next, short of complete surrender. You and Wendell just keep on keeping on. I'll contact you if anything changes.”

“But, Bobby—!”

“No buts. I appreciate what you've done. You're a good man, and I was wrong about you, but I don't want to take anyone else down with me.”

I hung up then. I wasn't being dramatic or selfless, it was just becoming clear to me that I was running out of options, that maybe this was not going to be a story that ended happily, no matter how much I'd hoped it would. After all the death and destruction, I couldn't quite imagine a way it
could
end well. Even Caz was beginning to seem like a phantom. She had been my dream once, but now she was only a voice, farther from my reach than ever.

I had only one piece of good news for anyone, so I passed that along next via a message on Fatback's voicemail, letting him know his days of being haunted and burgled were probably over, at least at the hands of the Black Sun Faction. Baldur von Reinmann was messily, monstrously dead, and Timon, Pumbaa, and any remainder of the local troop must be running for the hills by now. Or Argentina.

As I considered my next step, I nursed my coffee and tried to keep thoughts of Caz at arm's length. The sun rose higher in the sky, turning the dank, gray December morning into something almost cheerful. Birds scuffled through the leaves that littered the concrete patio all around me, then leaped into the air whenever I set my cup down or re-crossed my legs.

Why had I been so certain that I'd find what I wanted in the museum? I'd thought I was going at the problem in a systematic way, but the more I looked at it now, the more I saw what I felt sure was the real Bobby Dollar—a creature of reflexes and reactions, following whatever the most recent stimulus had been, half the time getting it completely wrong, the other half getting things right mostly by accident. But when you were fighting out of your weight class—
way
out of my weight class, with Eligor and now Anaita—hoping for dumb luck was not a viable strategy.

The feather, the horn, everything in the whole grim mess came down to the bargain Anaita had made with Eligor to create a place outside of Heaven, Hell, and Earth, a home for Kainos, her pet project. But why had Anaita been so interested in creating a Third Way? And why had Eligor taken a huge risk just to help a powerful angel, one of his sworn enemies?

I had a sudden urge to talk to Gustibus again about Eligor's possible motivations, but his phone only rang and rang—no answering machine this time, no semi-helpful nun. What could he have told me, anyway? Follow the money? There was no money, or at least the money was never the point with beings as powerful as Anaita and the Grand Duke. “Powerful”—yeah, that was the word, that was all that type cared about. I didn't need to follow the money here, only the power.

Something clicked. It wasn't a very loud click, but it was enough. That was what I'd been missing.
Who gained from all this? And what did they gain?

I felt I had grasped something important, but I needed more coffee to shake the sense out of it. I went back inside and found the kettle still hot: Oxana was up and had made herself a cup of tea. She was wrapped so completely in a blanket she looked like a Bedouin tradesman, and she glanced up from the ghastly daytime show on the television only long enough to meet my gaze with a very dull, miserable one of her own. I gave her an awkward, one-armed hug, then took my coffee and went back outside. At the moment I felt pretty sure she didn't want to do anything except stare like a zombie at people that she didn't know on a screen.

The thing was, although it had almost taken over my life in the last year, I had no idea what Kainos was
for
, why it even existed. The official version handed out by Kephas/Anaita had been that it was an alternative to the present either/or of Heaven and Hell, which could be true for all I knew. But why would the Angel of Moisture want to create such a thing, and why would Eligor help her? It was hard to imagine either one of them getting misty-eyed over the rights of souls, and from everything Sam had said, an incredible amount of work had gone into making the Third Way real. Could I square the idea of Anaita as a sincere reformer with the creature who had now tried several times over to destroy me and the people I cared about?

Actually, I thought it was entirely possible. Maybe she really did think of herself as a do-gooder. Nearly every revolution, even the necessary ones, spawns a great deal of pointless bloodshed, revenge killings, and show trials of the insufficiently committed. Most of what Anaita had done to me had been in order to cover her own tracks, so I could accept, at least for now, the possibility that she'd set out to do exactly what was claimed, then panicked when the feather went missing—the feather that proved her guilt in conspiring against Heaven's order.

But Eligor was another story, of course. Whatever Anaita's motives might have been at the beginning, I found it impossible to believe that the Horseman had any interest in reforming the system or changing anything that didn't benefit him personally. So why would he play along, and even take a huge risk, by giving his horn—which wasn't really a horn, but a token of his essence—to Anaita to keep as potential blackmail fodder?

Trying to figure out the motivations of Hellfolk was like going down Alice's rabbit-hole. I put it aside to concentrate on things that I had a better chance of answering.

Don't worry about anything else
, I told myself.
Follow the power.
I couldn't yet answer the questions about who benefited and why, but there were still plenty of other things to consider. I'd been fairly sure that the horn was hidden at the museum because Anaita had gone to a lot of trouble to conceal something there. If it hadn't been the horn, if it was only the entrance to Kainos, why? Why hadn't she just built the doorway into one of the many rooms in her giant, fuck-off mansion?

Because she needed to hide it
, had to be the answer. Anaita wanted ready access to it, but not in a place obviously associated with her. Heaven didn't like the Third Way. Not at all. And it probably took a great deal of power to get there and back, or at least enough to be noticed by Heaven's higher-ups. That might be why the doorway to Kainos was hidden far from Anaita's own house. Perhaps that was also why she hadn't followed Sam and I through it when we got away from her—she'd expended as much angelic might as she could manage to disguise.