“It is true…” Kutkha sighed. “That I bear a scar.”
“So no wonder I was on the magical short bus. What caused this injury, wiseass?”
“You did,” Kutkha said.
The answer caught me flat-footed. “Me? How?”
Kutkha did not reply. His withdrawal from me was as palpable as his contact.
Uncomfortably, I turned my attention instead to the notes Jana had left on the table. I knew I had to go: it was dangerous to be down here. Jana had gone from journaling properly in her books to keeping her thoughts on scraps, the newest left on the top.
“Frank Nacari no knowledge after retrieval. Brother, Robert Nacari, in charge of storage. Rob protected by ward: scry to find out WWHWW.” Beneath it, she had noted in a far more rushed notation: “Puslickers confirm. L says Fruit is local/nearby, secure V.M. to find. V.M. knows/knows who knows.”
L? Lev? I rifled through the stack of loose paper, my pulse trapped under my tongue. Other than vague references to L, an acronym turned up, over and over again. TVS. I could find no explanation.
Frowning, I turned my attention to Jana’s desk drawers. I pushed aside bones and trinkets and dug out a small silver box emblazoned with a unicorn skull. Curiously, I opened it, and when I saw what lay inside, my lips parted in confusion.
Set into a velvet depression was the necklace Jana had worn on our first meeting, the silver teardrop pendant. Beside it was a small glass vial bound in copper wire. It was half-full of silver fluid that seethed and swirled. I touched it and jumped, startled, as it pulsed against my fingertip. Hesitantly, I picked it up.
“Oh…” Kutkha breathed in a hushed, reverent voice. “Oh, my Ruach. This… is Phi.”
Kutkha’s mirror analogy finally made more sense. I could see my reflection in the tiny vial, a miniature, undistorted rendering of my face that split and reformed like an unearthly mirror maze, reflecting many small Alexis under the light. It looked like mercury, but when I held the flask to the light, I saw the fluid crawling and evaporating, dripping upwards to the pool and reforming back into the mass. “It’s stunning.”
“Few men, few magi know the source of Phi. Fewer ever see it.” My Neshamah was wary. Not of the Phi, I realized… but of me. “We must go.”
“How do I use this?” I pocketed the bottle and the pendant and rose. My knee was throbbing and hot, my skin crawling with sweat. “I mean… can it be used?”
“Yes. You can consume it, if you wish to take the risk. But not here.”
The impulse to uncap it and take the plunge then and there was strong, but common sense was telling me that I needed to collect my drug dealer and that we had to leave before we both ended up in the slammer. I pulled myself up, and collected Vincent, still unconscious, before I picked my way out of the basement, back up the stairs. I went to Jana’s room, intending to look for anything that would help me learn more about this Fruit of hers, and froze in the doorway.
She was gone. The carpet was still dark with blood… but her body was gone. The room was thick with a sweet putrefaction smell… and as I searched for footprints, claw prints, anything, I noticed that the bloody carpet was moving, squirming with small purple-black larvae.
The skin of my neck and scalp prickled as I looked up, around, and backed away from the door. Fear drove me down the hall, out into the living room, and then outside into the muggy heat. The air outside was fresh and sylvan in comparison to the smell in Jana’s house. The smell of corruption… the smell I was coming to associate with Violet and Black, with demons, and the Gun.
Chapter 19
A storm had broken over the Atlantic by the time I got Vincent home, drenching the city in warm summer rain. Vincent was semiconscious, slurring in his sleep. I carried him inside the house, dressed him, tucked him up in a duvet on the sofa, and turned the air conditioner down to let the house warm up a little bit. Once he was seen to, I went to the bathroom and slammed the door hard enough that the hinges rattled.
In the ringing, whining silence, I stared at my reflection in the mirror. Trembling broke out through my body, spreading through my hands, my limbs, and my chest. My eyes were a mirror of my father’s. I hardly recognized them as a part of my own reflection, trapped in the ringing silence of dissociation.
Jana had barely touched me, but she had some kind of power Carmine and his thugs did not. She had cut me into pieces, objects for her scrutiny… and I had an awful feeling that she was out there somewhere, looking for me. I thought of Crina up on stage, in a booth, in a hotel room, performing under the gazes of men who did exactly the same thing. I had no idea how she endured it, night after night.
Shaking, I took the vial out of my pocket, and considered it for a moment.
“You don’t like that I found this, Kutkha.”
“I think it is too soon for you to become a Hound.” My Neshamah’s throaty voice held a bitter note.
Maybe if someone had explained what that was, I wouldn’t have drunk it. With the naivety of the curious, I cracked the beeswax seal on the tiny bottle with jittery hands, and pulled the stopper.
The scent of Phi billowed out. It cleared the room. My bathroom turned into a fragrant temple, holy and sweet with the odor of night-blooming flowers, as if someone had taken the perfumes of honeysuckle, jasmine, and rose and dialed the saturation up until they transcended color and scent. It purified the air and cleared my head, even as it seared the inside of my nostrils with heat. It was the best thing I had ever smelled in my life, but it caused my chest to pang. Waves of wordless emotion gnawed at me… the sensation of loss and yearning was the strongest of all.
The mercurial fluid was pulling up in slender strands, disappearing into the air. It looked like chordae tendineae, heart strings. Before it vanished, I put the vial to my lips, and drank.
My body sucked up through my chest. Mind inverted.
I was a million miles above the ground and a million miles underneath as every vein, every organ, every cell filled with heat and sound. The sound penetrated everything, moved everything with its mass, moved between every atom and every moment in time.
…EverythingEverythingEverythingEverythingEverything…
I looked into sleepy eyes so blue they burned the heart out of me, and through them, a memory unfurled:
We were running, the White Woman moving ahead. Everything was frozen, the buildings cracking and crumbling, the ground itself churning to dust. The Earth, dipped in liquid nitrogen. The sky was orange, blazing orange, but there was no sun. I was myself, but not. My legs were missing from the knees down: I wore prostheses, recurved sprinter’s legs, as something chased us like boiling, ghostly clouds of lightning.
…EverythingEverythingEverythingEverythingEverything…
The freeze was right behind us. Where it crept, color and light disappeared. I caught up to her, and as she turned to face me and offer her hand, I killed her. I watched my fist plunge a rainbow-hued knife right into her chest. She gaped, wide-eyed with shock as I pulled it free and pushed her, still alive, into the roiling gray sea.
…EverythingEverythingEverythingEverythingEverything…
I licked her silver blood from the knife, as sweet and floral as GOD’s own perfume, and then I turned into the frigid wind preceding the wave of ruin. Everything cracked dry and fell apart, a ripping cold so intense that it pulverized. It bathed me in fiery agony, a global necrosis that swept to the water’s edge and took me as the sea froze and I opened my mouth and—