I returned to the Lair in a foul mood. I was supposed to protect her from shit like that. Instead I got my ashes hauled and I stopped thinking. What the fuck? Women didn’t affect me like that. It had to be some throwback to my fucked-up rock’n’roll year, those twelve months that had tempted me out of retirement and pumped me full of all the evil old conqueror chemicals and crushed me like a bug and sent me crawling back under my rock.
Should have stayed there. Who was I kidding? I was starstruck, tickled to be banging a goddess in training, getting sucked into her lifestyle even while I was trying to convince her there was life after stardom. I was a fucking hypocrite. A lazy, hormone-driven hypocrite with shit for brains and a short circuit between his dick and his common sense.
She’d re-invited me to jam with them tomorrow. That was before her uncle got his teeth into her, plus who knew who else had been lurking in that suite, waiting with a hairbrush in their hand. For a grown woman. A goddess. Who was desperate to hang onto her family, no matter how big a pain in the ass they were.
I suddenly remembered attending my roommate Kamadeva’s wedding in New Delhi earlier this summer. He told me something his bride had said to him about her family. The bride was his long-lost goddess, she’d lived with him for nearly six thousand years, but she had reincarnated among mortals, and she told him she wanted to hang onto her mortal family as long as they lasted, no matter how much they got on her nerves. I have you forever, Rathi had said. I’ll only have them for another sixty years.
Yoni was so alone. These guys were all she had. And here I was, fucking that up for her. Putting her in a position where she had to choose. I couldn’t imagine she’d want to see me tomorrow after all that.
I decided that I would be too hung over by morning to play bass. I went about arranging it.
There was still a pile of uncut emeralds in the kitchen. I swept them up one-handed with beer therapy in the other hand and dumped the stones into a trash bag.
Veek showed up some time after I’d switched from beer to tequila. He actually looked more cheerful than when I saw him last.
“What happened to you?”
He started shaking his head, went to the fridge for beer, got it, opened it, threw the bottlecap out the open window to fall tinkling into the alley two stories down, and was still shaking his head as he dropped into the La-Z-Boy beside mine.
He definitely looked less gray around the edges than he had all summer.
“Well? You score tonight?”
That set him nodding. He nodded until he was giggling, and then chuckling, then he busted out laughing.
I found myself grinning because he was so fucking happy. “Spill it. I need some news to cheer me up.”
Veek wiped tears out of his eyes and sucked beer. “That girl.” He shook his head, then nodded, and might have gone off again if I hadn’t punched his arm.
“What girl?”
“You know her. Sophie. Your rock star’s stalker. You met her outside the botánica.”
I frowned. “The teenager who has your navel string.”
He nodded, giggling. “The one who rappelled down off the hotel roof and entered your rock star’s suite through the window.” He toasted me and broke into a belly laugh.
That made me go cold. “I don’t get it.”
“She’s, how you say, a piece of the work. I lost her at the concert, so I went over to that woman’s hotel. And there she was in a climbing harness, swinging in at the window. By the time I got to the roof myself, she was back on the roof, mightily pleased with herself.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Such a dance she led me.” Veek drained his beer, got up, fetched the rest of the six, and flopped in the La-Z-Boy again. “I brought her back here to the Lair. I apologize for that.” He sobered a bit, looking over at me. “I didn’t realize you were here with that woman until I felt the energy surges. As soon as I knew—pouf—I whisked my crazy mademoiselle out the back way. And do you know what she did?”
“No clue.”
“She broke into this man’s house. She told me it was her girlfriend’s place, the boyfriend was away, oh, so many lies. Par exemple, she said her key wasn’t working at first—she must possess burglar’s tools as well as climbing gear. I wouldn’t be surprised. We went upstairs to fuck.” Veek fell silent a moment, his face going soft. “And then the poor bastard who lived there came home and found us. Nearly found us. She jumped out the second-floor bedroom window while I tripped him up on the stairs.”
“Did she hurt herself?” I blurted.
“I doubt it. She has the lives of a cat, the disposition of a puppy, the courage of a lion, and the bon sens of a butterfly.”
“Must be like screwing a menagerie.”
“Little bit,” he conceded, smiling around the beer bottle.
“You still need help getting your navel string off her?”
He swung his head around and narrowed his eyes. Just a little threat.
I put my hands up. “I withdraw the offer.” Shaken, I took a pull on El Patron.
His menacing look vanished. “And your evening? The lady?”
“She’s fine,” I said shortly. He didn’t say anything. I had another slug. I confessed, “We got caught by a paparazzo over on Irving. I should have been on guard. I fucked up.”
“Merde. One man? Young, white, badly shaved and ill-dressed?”
Only Veek would notice if a paparazzo was GQ or not.
“That’s him,” I growled.
He got very solemn. “I’m sorry. My most humble apologies. I’m terribly sorry. That was my fault.”
I looked skeptically at him. “You brought the paparazzo to Ravenswood?”
“He followed Sophie. It occurs to me now that he was waiting for your rock star at that hotel, and saw Sophie come out of it with me, and he must have thought, Voyons, wherever that mad little creature goes, there you find the star. So. We led him straight to you. I’m sorry.”
I slid back into my La-Z-Boy with some relief. I was marginally less of an asshole. The bastard hadn’t followed us to the Lair, so he didn’t know where I lived . . . yet. But I wouldn’t bet a nickel that he or someone at his rag would fail to recognize me.
Once they did, they’d be all over Yoni. What’s more, they’d find out where I was working now, and then I’d get no peace.
Not time to celebrate yet, in fact.
“So that’s the sorrow you’re drowning tonight?” Veek said.
“What?”
“Come. You have my story. I get yours.”
Drunk and cranky and sorry for myself as I was, I warmed to think that Veek was opening up to me at last. Must be this stalker chick, I thought. She’s got him by the balls.
“Lemme show you something.” With some effort, because the Patron was starting to hit me, I lurched out of my chair and pulled the garbage bag of emeralds out from under the sink. I dropped it, closed, into his lap. “Careful. I already swept these off the floor once.”
Veek opened the bag, took out an emerald, and turned it, peering through it at the fluorescent ceiling fixture. “Is it real?”
“Beats me. I imagine so. She sure didn’t have any pockets big enough to hide ’em in.” Standing up didn’t feel so good. I took another slug of tequila. “That’s not all. C’mere.” I staggered to the kitchen doorway, missed and clobbered myself in the face with the door frame, then turned left, toward the head, instead of right toward my room. “Shit.” I put my hand to my face, clonked it with the tequila bottle, dropped the bottle, touched my face, and found blood. “Well, goodness me.”
Veek came up behind me and guided me into the bathroom. “Tout droit, mon frere. Let’s not make a mess.”
“Oh, why not?” I shook my head, and then all that beer and tequila came up.
He had me on my knees at the toilet barely in time.
After I’d given up everything I had and a bit more, he stuck a bandage on my cut cheekbone and tried to make me drink water. “You’ll hurt tomorrow if you don’t.”
I rinsed my face and mouth, but I refused the water. “I want to hurt. I deserve to hurt.”
He smacked the back of my head with a towel. “Stupid fellow.”
“Wait.” I belched, held it, and decided it would stay down. “Something else.” I took the towel and wiped my face in a half-assed way, then led him to my room and showed him the coverlet made of thick, creamy, spotty lynx pelts.
His eyes widened. Like I said, Veek had a taste for luxury.
“Mon Dieu.” He ran his hands over it. “This is beautiful.” He flipped one edge over and examined the seams. Sometimes I wondered if that guy was gay. “What is this thread? And look, a monogram? Where did you get it?”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. My stomach was upside down, my mouth tasted like bilge, and my head was already splitting. “It appeared, like the emeralds, when I had Yoni up here. Under specific circumstances.”
His brow furrowed. “What does it mean?”
“It means she’s turning into a goddess. She knows it. I didn’t realize that until we really talked, but she does. And apparently hanging around with me makes it worse.” I told him about the gold plated hotel suite full of rose petals.
Veek said thoughtfully, “Clearly she’s doing it right.” He looked worried again. That would never do. I hadn’t seen Veek laugh like tonight in, well, in forever.
“And you’re doing it wrong?” I said.
He showed me a startled face.
Then he started to talk.
I’d always wondered what his real story was. Listening to him talk now about his isolated, rigid, luxurious, empty childhood, I wished I was sober. He got to the part where he ate the offering food at the vodou ceremony and I burst out, “Holy shit. Did they lynch you? Hell, I remember officiating at massive offerings to Ashur, to Bel and Erishkigal, to Tammus and Marduk and Ishtar. Piles of burning livestock. If anyone had tried to steal from that we’d probably have added his body to the pyre.”
He put his shoulders up. “What? I was brought up Catholic. We ate God every week.”
“So did this Samedi guy make you a god?” Veek stood suddenly, as if he was done with questions. I was too drunk to be sensitive. “Well, did he?”
Veek looked down at me. “To be a god, one must be worshipped. You know this.” I didn’t like the scorn in his narrowed eyes.
I conceded the point. “I was a god from the day I put on my first crown at seventeen.”
“To be a god, one must also serve.”
I opened my mouth to say something else thoughtless, maybe about the care he had lavished on that horse’s ass, Jake, or all the women he had serviced, if not served. I thought about how Yoni served, sweating bullets at every show, and my old roomie Kamadeva, certainly the most cheerful immortal I’d ever met, putting it out for the sake of duty.
For that matter, my killing or subjugating countless people in neighboring countries had been a kind of service. For somebody. And the libraries I’d built. Libraries were good, right?
“Did you ask?” I said, figuring that if I couldn’t be tactful, then I should at least get as many answers as possible, “I mean, did you want to be the god of anything? In particular? Anything, anybody, anywhere?”
Veek stood very straight. “No.”
Now I’d done it. My last roommate to comfort my old age, and I’d offended him.
My headache didn’t feel any better.
I gave up. I made feeble jazz hands. “Listen, I’d love to gas about this all night, but I have a hot date with a motherfucker hangover tomorrow and I want to get a head start.”
He put his palms up, echoing the gesture I’d made. Then he patted me on the shoulder and went out, closing the door gently behind him. In two minutes he was back. He set a pitcher of ice water beside the head of the bed on the floor, and left without saying a word.
I lay down gently on the lynx coverlet. The room swam. My stomach was very angry with me.
On the upside, Yoni and her troubles were far, far away.
I sat up again and drank some water, blessing Veek, who hardly ever gets a chance to mother-hen me, and then out of curiosity I flipped the edge of the coverlet over.
Why had he asked about the thread? Looked like hemp twine to me. Very stout. I forgot the name of the stitch that was used to attach the pelts together, but it was thorough, and it somehow knocked on my aching skull, familiar, but what? It’s just stitching, I thought.
Then I found what he called the “monogram.”
It was my seal. Ashurbanipal, King of Akkadia, King of Assyria, King of Mesopotamia, Ruler of the Known Universe. Me in the ribboned crown and the fringed robe, and the lion rampant trying to claw me while I stuck it in the gizzard with a sword.
It came back to me now.
This was my coverlet. I’d shot the lynxes myself when I was fifteen. The palace women had sewn it up and marked it with my seal. It had hung over the end of my bed, too small really for that vast royal platform, but pretty, and tons of fun to tumble on for the next forty years. Moths got at it eventually.
But not this version. This one looked brand new.
My brain was not up to this.
Maybe I should throw up again.
Instead, I drank some more water, crawled under the lynx-fur coverlet, and passed out.