Angus at Home

The feeling of his lips—it’s like a paper lantern, a dry bladder crushed against my mouth. Except that it stinks. A long surprised wheeze of rotten breath shoves into my throat, but I don’t let go. I keep on slamming that kiss at him, waiting for the sensation I’ve known in so many, many bodies: the feeling of a life caught by my lips, plucked loose. Unraveling.

It seems like it’s taking a longer time than it maybe should. And the next thing I know, the foul draft rising from his maw starts to quake.

He’s laughing.

The old bastard is laughing at me. Because it’s not going to work, because I’ve failed again and again. Even now, when I’m trying to do just one good thing with my shitty fake self, I can’t get it right. I can’t.

I fall away from him, and he stands there cackling at me, too out of breath even to speak. We’re only a couple feet apart and there’s nothing to stop him from crumpling me up like a used tissue, except that he has no reason to hurry now. You know, since I’m obviously not a threat.

Useless beamer. I shove my hands in my pockets, just in case Catherine decides to start scribbling insults on my skin.

“You forget, my precious Angus.” Oh, so Gus is finally getting enough air to talk? Awesome. I adore a good lecture on what a total loser I am. “You forget. The kiss can’t kill anyone who loves you.”

No. Freaking. Way. “You hate my guts. You hate your own guts. The kiss should kill the crap out of you.”

Gus shrugs. “Those two sentiments can commingle, and they do, despite your inexcusable behavior. As you now see for yourself.” He takes a step closer. “You’re hardly the first Angus to cause trouble, but trying to kill me, kill us both—that’s new. Some revisions are in order for your next version. More docility. After all this time, I’ve ceased to take enough care with my work. That’s become unpleasantly clear.”

He starts nodding in a that’s settled way. Planning his revisions already, right in my face.

“Or you could just give up, you creep. No her is ever going to love you. Catherine’s never going to love you. So why don’t you just forget the whole thing?”

The glints in his icy eyes sharpen.

“Strange. You say that as if you were in a position to know. What did you mean when you said Catherine told you where she is now? She can’t speak. She hasn’t produced anything but inarticulate shrieks since her unfortunate death. Not a single word! It’s doubtful if she even thinks in a strict sense of the term. If you know where Catherine is, you learned from someone else.”

Protesting too much, Gus? I’d like to laugh at him for a change—this might be my last opportunity—but I don’t want to screw Catherine over by giving the game away. Maybe twenty, fifty, eighty Anguses down the line, she’ll be ready to try again. Unless Gus gets wise and figures out a way to scrub her from my brain, that is; then the Anguses will keep on killing without her interference. And when I think of that sad, stumbling, murderous procession of future mes I feel so, so sorry for them, even if they don’t deserve it. I know we’re evil, I get that, and I’ve just blown our only way out—

Of being what we are. Of escape from Gus’s damned cycle.

“You’re right,” I say randomly. “Lore’s the one who told me. She took Catherine and fed her to a seagull, and now you’ll never see her again.”

He doesn’t know truth when he hears it. But bullshit he can recognize. His nostrils flex, and he lifts his hands, ready to mash me into a ball—probably very, very slowly, with some lulls for interrogation in the mix. His sick old fingers brush my cheeks, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do. And being trumped by such a shitty, vicious, used-up version of myself is intolerable. Who is this vile dirtbag, anyway, that he feels entitled to wipe out so many amazing girls as some kind of fucking therapy, and all because Catherine didn’t love him?

Every single her targeted by an Angus was worth a thousand of him—a thousand of me, if you want to be technical. I feel the visceral truth of that now: the infuriating, impermissible sickness of my own being.

Gus leers at me in recognition. We’re just alike, you and I. “Of course you’ve lost, Angus. How could you imagine that I wouldn’t anticipate your every move? Anything you could do, I’ve undone in advance.”

Then he stops. His grimace goes slack, his eyes bulge, green and glassy. He’s staring at something behind me and his breath comes rough, like scraping branches on a shingle roof.

So of course I have to look, too.

Peaky, elegant script is winding across the wall, black on pale. I guess Gus recognizes her handwriting, all right, because he’s nearly choking. Oh, so there’s someone whose moves he didn’t anticipate—and even if I didn’t either, it’s still gratifying as hell. I feel my lip hike in a sneer.

Where is the wine that ever forged its glass? Catherine writes. I expect you remember Anura’s poem, don’t you, Gus? I’ve given those lines a great deal of thought.

He’s magenta, sputtering. What, is her plan to give him a heart attack? Can you do that in Nautilus?

The glass, clearly enough, was Angus himself, in all his many iterations. I had nothing to do with his creation, but nonetheless I filled him. I was the wine, my power drained and decanted into your vile creatures. But what then was the poison? And, more to the point, how could I make you drink it?

“Catherine!” Gus finally chokes out. “Catherine, my love, my lost one!” He stumbles toward the wall until I’m a single pace behind him. His hands are out, imploring.

Neither loved nor lost. Quite present, as it happens.

“But how? Where?”

Where indeed? The glass is at your lips, Gus Farrow. And as for the poison, you slipped it into the wine with your own hands. There’s a pause. Please note the plural. I assure you it’s deliberate.

I’m laughing, pretty hysterically, and I don’t even know what’s so funny. Laughing till the tears run down my cheeks and my eyes blur, and I lift a hand to clear them.

Something black is blinking urgently on my thumb, like it’s trying to get my attention. It takes me a second to focus my brain and my eyes, but then I see the message. Tiny and insistent.

Your pendant, it says. First the pendant, then Margo. Now.

Margo? Dead, pathetic old Margo? What is she talking about?

But the pendant—I think I get that part.

Mine is the death undying, Catherine writes on the wall. Big and bold, nothing like the stealthy minuscule words she just slipped me.

I lift the chain off my head. It comes easily now, rising in a graceful arc. And with the same motion I swing my arms forward and drop it around Gus’s neck, and Lore’s pendant slithers down against his rotten heart. He twitches like a fly landed on him, so mesmerized by Catherine’s writing that he barely registers what I’ve just done.

Properly understood, I have been dying all this time.

Now there’s the Margo part. I have no clue what that’s about, but I sidle in the direction of my aunt’s corpse anyway. Catherine did promise that Margo would help me, and I don’t think she said it by accident.

Regrettably, my status as a ghost prevented me from enjoying the usual resolution. Lacking flesh, I could not complete my death. Do you see now, Gus? You stole my corporeal self from me, so I didn’t have a body to die with.

I stare from the corpse at my side to the message on the wall, trying to understand. My elbow knocks into Margo’s shoulder and her head flops forward, mouth jarring slightly open.

Deep in that mouth, I hear something whistling, like a shrill wind forcing its way under a door. Quiet, suppressed, but unmistakable.

A scream.

Hah. Guardian of all his cherished horrors is right! I grab Margo’s cooling jaw and wrench it as wide as I can. The writing on the wall keeps going. Steady but insistent.

But you do.

A shimmer shoots up from Margo’s mouth, half girl and half negation. She’s all the more terrifying in that I can’t fully make her out. The suggestion of a restless death with fraying hair skates on the backs of my retinas, flashes like black-and-white fire. The lace edge of her petticoat forms a wave of corrosion. Catherine, always dying, never dead enough. Her mouth is a perpetual cave, wide and echoing with her scream. The sound of it burns everything else from my hearing. Gus might be talking, or yelling, or howling as he spins from the wall to the apparition—I see his lips jumping around—but I wouldn’t know.

Oh, and I don’t care.

He sees Catherine looming over him. More than sees her and the dark flare of her hands flailing toward him. He feels her. For the first time he truly feels what he did to her, and his knees give way. His hands fly to his throat, like he’s fighting desperately to pull something away.

There’s something weird going on in the corners of my eyes. Some kind of movement. A heaving, as if the entire city were barfing its guts out. I can hear shouts coming from outside Margo’s room, a tumult in all directions, as the walls liquefy, convulse, crest like waves.

The waves contract into definite forms: dogs, huge as horses. They bark and snarl silently, living statues thrusting from the walls, all of them formed of the same living pearl. Their hind legs melt into arcing buttresses, still attached but roping, stretching outward as their jaws converge on him.

And riding on their backs, there are girls, sculpted from the same fluid nacre. Mouths wide in war cries, heels spurring on their hounds. Gus spins to find them bearing down on him from all sides. He gapes from face to face, gasping, his bulging eyes shattered by recognition. I know them too.

Justine and Lorca, Pearl and Viola. Anya. Claire. Breanna. Others. More and more of them crowding out the air, until I’m crouched under the leap and curl of their ferocious steeds. Gus is trying to scream his head off, but I guess he can’t get enough air because it comes out as more of a whistle. His face is a ghastly magenta.

I have just a moment to be so, so grateful that Geneva isn’t one of those girls—to feel how infinite my debt is to Lore, for saving her from me—before Viola’s dog bites down and rips his arm right off.

In all that glowing white, the spurting blood makes for a striking contrast.

I half expect the dogs to go for me too. But it’s like I’m not there. The girls are howling and laughing, utterly soundless, as their beasts rip chunks from Gus’s thighs and back. Avoiding major organs, from the look of it. The only noise is the shrill, choked scream Gus is making, and the outcry drifting through the walls. The ground trembles under my feet, the ceiling stretches up like glowing taffy.

And over it all, Catherine’s ghost, flashing and waving from her perch on Margo’s corpse. Not screaming at all now, it hits me. She’s finally, finally stopped. Because now she can.

Instead she’s presiding. A bitter half smile on her lips as Gus turns toward her, his remaining hand stretched out in desperate appeal.

I watch him stagger and fall to his knees, but his stare never leaves the violent flicker of her face. I can’t look away either: Catherine rocks black and bright and black again, the lines of her features haloed in a kind of inverted glow. And I think I understand.

Gus is wearing Lore’s pendant. It’s a mirror, you see, made to reflect whatever suffering you inflict back into you. A mirror that brings home the curse.

All his murders are reflecting into him now, in some amazing synergy of Catherine’s magic and Lore’s. Oh, this was always Catherine’s plan, wasn’t it? The kiss, the writing: those were only diversions. Shit.

Drink deep this draught, Gus. Drink to all the women on whom you projected my memory. To all those you murdered. Let your death be our voice, our final word, our song.

She writes those words on the ceiling behind her head, directly in the line of Gus’s dimming eyes.

He’s crumpling now into a pool of his own guts and torn-off limbs. The girls and their dogs writhe upward, all swinging hair and upraised fists. Then their movement ebbs away, transforming them into pale, triumphant statues crisscrossing a room turned immense and soaring. I’m feeling kind of faint myself.

Right.

I was made as a curse incarnate, a carrier of death; those were my operating instructions, the fundamental urge of my being. So I guess I’ve fulfilled my purpose, or at least I helped a little.

I carried that death straight home.