Chapter 17

 

Peter Archer walked the streets of New York with his hands in his pockets and a supernova boiling in his chest. The gift he’d been given kept him warm, insulated him against the sheeting snow and the wind howling up the boulevards. As the sun dipped below the jagged skyscraper horizon he felt a heartbeat thrum inside him, not where his heart had once been but lower, just below his breastbone.

He knew where to go, not because he’d been given an address but because something in his chest tugged in that direction. Maybe the thing sewn inside him. Maybe instinct. Maybe the Queen guiding him from her nest below the earth, shoving him gently towards his purpose.

He missed the Queen, but the thing growing inside him kept him from loneliness. Soon there would be more, little ones all squirming and tickling as they filled him to bursting. Every part of him would belong to the true ruler of Rustwood.

The Queen’s guidance took him across Manhattan, beneath the long black shadows of the twin towers, to an apartment block lit from below by the honey-orange flare of sputtering streetlamps. Every window was a singular blaze of light, small as postage stamps. The tug in his chest told him which window was the right one - six floors up, with a potplant pressed against the glass.

An emergency staircase stitched up the side of the building. The ladder was within reach.

Peter climbed.

The staircase rattled as he ascended, old bolts creaking in the masonry. His shoes had hard rubber soles that thunked on the steel, and he peeled them off, preferring to go barefoot up the stairs. The cold was painful, but only for a moment. All pain was temporary when compared with the rewards of the Queen.

He found his lips moving, whispering words that weren’t his own. “Eternal. I love her. I love-”

His teeth clacked together as he snapped his jaw shut. No time to talk. Work to do, important work. One more flight took him up to the sixth floor. He didn’t wince when the skin on the soles of his feet stuck fast to the ice riming the stairs. The things inside the flesh of his arms - blades, he knew them now, blades of bone, such perfect gifts - sawed against the skin.

He’d been given a holy mission. He was ready. All he needed now was the victim.

The staircase groaned beneath his weight as he reached the window and peered through into a dining room small enough to stuff in his jacket pocket. Barely four paces per side, the carpet mouldering around the skirting boards, the formica dining table uncomfortably wide in such a small space, nearly bridging the room. Two wicker chairs with busted backs. On one wall, a yellowed poster of Debra Winger, brunette curls spilling from beneath her Stetson. On the other, a framed photograph of a stiff-backed man in uniform. His left breast was a constellation of medals and his right eye was pinched shut by a burn scar puckering his face from chin to crown.

Peter was already lifting the sash window when footsteps sent him skittering back, pressing against the brick. A man entered the dining room with a plate in each hand. Spaghetti with marinara, Peter figured, just from the smell. Once he would’ve salivated at the sight. Now, hunger was a thing other people experienced.

Tall, dark-haired, fair-eyed. The ghost of a moustache on his upper lip. No ring on his finger. Square jawed, like the military man in the photograph.

He knew already it was Aaron. The Queen put the knowledge in him, urged him on. All he needed was to bust through the window, ignore the jagged slash of broken glass, let the bones slide from his wrists and jam them into Aaron’s neck. His reward would be ready in Rustwood.

And yet, he waited.

Two plates. Aaron had a guest. A woman? Peter sneered. His wife, the girl he’d loved and held and cried with was pining away for this man? It’d be a pleasure to tear Aaron’s throat open, to feel his blood run over his palms.

Aaron adjusted the napkins, lay cutlery at perfect ninety degree angles to the edge of the table. His voice was faint through the glass: “Hey, it’s getting cold!”

Now. Now was the time. Peter inched forward, tugging the window up by degrees.

A woman stepped into the dining room.

Peter hadn’t drawn breath in days, not since the Queen’s servants had stolen his lungs and left him cold and rotten, but something inside him hitched at the sight of her. Her weary smile, pricking at one corner of her mouth like she was struggling not to laugh at a bad joke. Waves of golden hair you could bury your hands in up to the wrist. The way she gripped the back of the chair, that peculiar tilt of the hips.

The ring on her finger. The rock glittering in the dusty light of the 40 watt bulb.

A face from another life. The woman he’d loved. Yes, God yes, the woman he’d married and held and kissed and laughed with, the woman he’d comforted as she screamed in the hospital bed even as the nurses administered an epidural, the woman who’d held his son to her breast. The woman who’d betrayed him. Pretended to be insane. Spurned his name. Left him in the cold.

Kimberly Archer. His wife, his lover, the mother of his child. He could see Curtis in her, the curve of her brow and the bow of her lips so like her infant son’s.

She held the hand of the enemy. Leaned in to let him kiss her cheek.

He wanted to throw up but nothing came out. Instead, the heat inside him grew until he felt ready to ignite. Claws pricked his insides as the Queen’s gift writhed and clenched against the cage of his ribs.

Kimberly sat opposite the stranger. She smoothed a napkin across her lap. Her fingers were pale, precise. An earring hung from one lobe, flashing in his eyes.

Peter pulled back, sliding down the brick wall, coming to rest on the cold steel lattice of the fire stairs. Jags rose and fell beneath his skin. He rested one hand on his stomach and whispered, “Not now. It’s okay. Not yet.”

Far above, the clouds had parted to reveal a black sweep of stars. It was the first time Peter could remember seeing them so clearly, without being blinded by a film of rain.

He wanted to reach up and pluck out every one, crush them beneath his heels, grind them between his back teeth. Drown the world in darkness.

If only he’d known. After so much struggle, after trying to find a better way, the stranger in the rainslicker had been right.

It was good to hate.

 

* * *

 

Commissioner Snow watched in silence from behind his desk as the emissary in the black raincoat took Officer Rhodes to the centre of the office, pushed him down to his knees, and skinned him alive.

Rhodes didn’t scream. All of them were long past screaming. His eyes had already been cored out and the New Queen’s little servants were laying eggs in the hollows. They wriggled from Officer Rhodes’ open wounds, black-backed and skittering, crunching on the floor beneath the emissary’s feet.

The shadow cast by the thing in the rainslicker was liquid across the police department linoleum. It flickered, lashing out to lick the dark corners. In those shadows Commissioner Snow saw open, gap-toothed mouths. Tiny, clenching baby-fists. A fan of black hair framing a woman’s crying eyes.

The shapes billowed, wailed, and were gone.

Officer Rhodes slumped in the middle of a puddle of spreading gore. He was meat from his crown to his shoulders, the tendons of his neck standing taut and proud and wet. The emissary ducked its head, acknowledging an unseen presence summoned by the ritual.

“My Queen,” it said.

Commissioner Snow wasn’t party to the conversation. Only an observer, stuck behind his desk as winds whipped through the cubicles and stirred the spreading blood into tie-dye swirls. More blood in the halls, and in the closets, and the basement. So many dead.

Not that being dead bothered Snow much these days. Much like being alive, except it was harder to think and you had to follow orders and you didn’t get laid half as much. Also, the itching. Always itching, deep in his bones.

The wind ripped through the open door of his office, slapped papers from his desk, rattled the venetian blinds. The emissary was down on its knees, black hands clenched into fists. Its rainslicker drank the light, leaving the third floor office darker, less forgiving.

“Yes,” it said. “The half-woman. She abandoned her post without your leave. Her captives escaped.”

The half-woman. Snow’s master and creator. He still couldn’t remember what’d happened that night, after they’d traded come-ons in the bar, but he knew he felt better with her around. The shimmer of her sunglasses was comforting. No anger, when she was near. Only orders, and contentment.

He missed her. He hoped she was safe.

“Yes. I will bring them back to you. The half-woman first. Then Archer.”

Snow had read - long ago, in a past life, a life only half-remembered - that sharks could smell blood from a quarter mile away. That a single drop in a swimming pool was enough... or was that a bucket? No matter. There were no sharks in Rustwood, if you didn’t count the pale monstrosities circling off the coast.

Only the emissary. Snow had seen it raise its face to the night air and drink deep. He figured it could smell Goodwell and Fitch clear across town. Trace the ripples left in their wake.

“I understand,” the emissary said, and the wind died away. The papers soaring madly around Snow’s head fell quiet. The blood-pool warping across the linoleum shivered and went cold.

Officer Rhodes fell on his face, kicked once, and went still.

The emissary straightened, unfolding by degrees, and it seemed to Snow that it could’ve kept unfolding forever, stretching out to touch the ceiling, to drape the entire police department in the folds of its rainslicker. To envelop the town in wings of black plastic and suffocate all the squealing citizens against its breast.

Dimly, Snow thought, I should be afraid. Not afraid any more. Why not? Then his hands rose to his hollowed eyes, and he remembered how he was long dead. Nothing frightened the dead.

“Snow.” The emissary’s voice was the squeal of steel tearing in a high-speed collision. “Did your mistress, the half-woman, tell you where she was going?”

Snow shook his head. “She only tells me what I need to know.”

“No matter. We can track her.” The thing in the rainslicker stepped across what was left of Officer Rhodes. “Bring your men. All of them. This must end.”

 

* * *

 

Goodwell, Chan and Fitch hit the outer suburbs of Rustwood and eased into the darkened streets, lights off, hoping to avoid attention. A man in a navy-blue suit stared from beneath his umbrella at the passing police cruiser, but said nothing.

Goodwell gave the man a friendly smile and mumbled out the corner of his mouth, “Where’re we going, Fitch? Gotta get this thing off the street.”

“Close,” Fitch said. “Don’t worry about hiding the car. People look at my house and see what they want to see.”

“And if they want to see a big fuckin’ police cruiser?”

“Here!” Fitch pointed to a tumble-down clapboard house hidden behind rangy bushes. The windows were dark and shuttered and the front yard overgrown with weeds tall enough to lose a child in. From the street, it seemed a derelict block, not a safehouse.

Not like Goodwell had any other options but to trust the nutcase. Maybe they were working at cross-purposes, but Fitch didn’t seem the sort to lie. If he was trying to screw them, he’d come at them straight.

Chan wrinkled her nose as they parked in the slanted carport. “You’re a squatter?”

“No Ma’am. Bought it fair. Deceased estate, that is to say. Best deal I ever made.”

Something tingled in Goodwell’s back teeth as he stepped out. He hugged himself tight, but it didn’t help. “Like someone walked over my grave.”

“That’s the wards,” Fitch said, proudly. “Set them myself. Makes you feel ill, doesn’t it? Well, if the beast sends any servants down here to root us out...”

“What, they’ll explode?”

“Not so dramatic. Just sorta...” Fitch’s brow wrinkled. “Well, yeah. Explode.”

“Christ.” At least he had a carport over his head. Goodwell had spent so long in the rain he was starting to feel faded. “So we’re safe?”

“Not safe. Shielded.” Fitch shucked the collar of his coat up around his ears. The extra finger on his left hand flexed and clenched. “The beast might throw so many soldiers at us that they damp the wards with their bodies But we’ve got a day or two. Time enough for a cup of coffee. Follow close, you hear? Walk where I walk. The wards’ll burn your legs off if they don’t fry your brain first.”

The front door was unlocked not with a key but with a seried of complicated hand movements, like semaphore in miniature. If it was another ward, it was a type Goodwell had never seen before. He tried to remember all of Fitch’s little twitches and flicks, but he moved too fast.

The door creaked open on old hinges. Goodwell squinted into the dark. “Nice murder-hovel.”

“Like you’ve got anywhere better to be.” Fitch scowled as he waved the two detectives in. “Quick, before they see!”

Nobody was watching them from the street, but Goodwell was still glad when Fitch slammed the door behind them. Light flared overhead, a dim orange bulb swinging at the end of a chain. Rain pattered from the ends of Goodwell’s fingers as he took in Fitch’s safehouse.

It might’ve been rotten on the outside, but the vagrant... less and less of a vagrant, the more he learned of the man... liked to keep things neat. The entrance hall was polished boards, expanding into a living room with a faded but intact floral-print sofa and a TV with bunny-ear aerials. The walls were hung with off-the-shelf POMO art, splashes of primary colour cut through with hard black lines, the sort that went for millions in New York galleries or fifty cents a piece at primary school fundraisers.

The air was musty, unlived in, with a sour undernote of gasoline. No, not just gas. Something more chemical. Goodwell raised his nose and drank deep. “You got a lab in here?”

“Basement,” Fitch grunted, as he flicked light switches in the living room. Goodwell could hear cables fizzing in the walls as the house filled with a gentle, if not entirely comforting, glow. An electrical deathtrap. “Making moonshine.”

“Moonshine that’s liable to blow up in your face.” Goodwell knew, suddenly, where he’d smelled that before. Not just at the Pentacost Convent, but two months before that outside the mayor’s house, and a week before that in the smoking ruin of Joe’s Family Optometrist. “You’re the guy, aren’t you? The bomber. Jesus Christ, all this time-”

“Everything I did, I did to keep the beast at bay. You going to arrest me?”

For a moment, the three were silent. Chan and Goodwell shared a conspiratorial look.

Finally, Goodwell shrugged. “You really did the mayor’s place?”

“He’s been on the beast’s teat for years. It’s in his eyes.”

“I don’t see-”

“Exactly. When was the last time you saw his eyes? Always wears those glasses.”

“He has a condition,” Chan said. “Photophobia.”

“Like all your buddies back at the station had photophobia?”

Goodwell couldn’t help grinning. “And the optometrist? What’d old Joe ever do to you?”

“Joe’s a miser. Wouldn’t give me credit on a pair of Ray-Bans.” Fitch licked his lips. “Also, he was growing clickers in the basement.”

“Clickers?” said Chan.

“Goodwell knows. You saw that house, the place Mrs Archer was staying. I was there.” He gave Goodwell a sly elbow in the ribs. “Sent your cleanup team, didn’t you?”

“They’re not my team,” Goodwell muttered. “I’m just a detective.”

“So there’s others?”

“Don’t know their names. Don’t know who pays them. I made the call, they turned up.” He ducked away from Chan’s accusing stare. “You said something about coffee?”