“But the American Lion is extinct,” I called back.
“Exactly,” he said. “When prehistoric super-predators start getting incarnated back on a world like this, it’s a really bad sign.”
The trip to the clubhouse was tense. I drove with Binah riding on my shoulder, her face to the wind as she meowed excitedly out of the car window. Talya was huddled in the front seat, a sheathed machete in her lap. Angkor took up the backseat. He had claimed Talya’s shotgun and the axe that Duke had tried to murder me with. Now that we were on the road, he was all business. When I checked in the rear-view mirror, he had his eyes closed, his face still and composed with the quiet concentration of a magus. He was surely communing with his Neshamah. It made me sick with envy to see it.
“You said something about stained glass weapons before, Angkor.” I called back to him, pushing the car as fast as I dared. We really, really did not need to be pulled over tonight.
“StainedGlass. Say it like a German noun. Like you’re capitalizing words together.” He didn’t open his eyes. “You seem pretty smart. How much do you know about the history of the Wars?”
“Some of it. Please feel free to rehash.”
Angkor sighed. “Short version of the history of Everything is that our reality is basically a huge beastie floating in a sea of hostile nothingness, right? It used to have a shell. That shell was Eden, also called the Ah-Za-Naur, or the Glass Land. The shell got broken when the NO-thing figured out how to mimic the behavior of living things. It broke the shell and the whole thing collapsed like a cell wall.”
“Something about him becoming thirty thousand miles tall. But the first virus, in essence,” I said.
“Right. So the pieces of Eden got scattered all around the Theosphere. Most of those shards were absorbed by GOD’s body as it began to stir up from the sudden pain and exposure. A lot of them embedded, still healthy and vital, but small. Some of them, especially the powder fragments, got infected and turned bad, and they’re in evidence in the world around us today. You know how viruses have those thirty-sided crystalline heads? In biology, we call those things nucleocapsids: they’re this bizarre crystal structure that carries the payload of RNA that a virus uses to change a cell.”
“Right.”
“That nucleocapsid head of a virus is like nothing else in nature, and that’s basically because they’re tiny fragments of a ruined Eden. The common name for this is StainedGlass, because, you know.”
Talya shuddered on the seat beside me, her hands tightening around the machete.
“StainedGlass is a kind of monster in its own right, once it gains enough mass. It carries a kind of Morphorde called a Yen.” Angkor’s eyes flickered open. “Yen is a virus that attacks your soul. It goes straight for your Phitonic mass, which is like… the energy that powers you to exist in concept and in reality. It corrupts you and turns you into a vector. It’s one of the few Morphorde that can infect Weeders. With enough Phi, it can replicate itself into shards big enough to be shaped into weapons.”
“Like the sacrificial knife The Deacon was using.” Fear lanced through my chest, and I gripped the steering wheel more tightly. “I was stabbed with glass like you describe. Mason vomited it on me.”
“Yeah,” Angkor said. “You were.”
I pressed my lips together. “Will I have this Yen?”
“HuMans have more resistance to Yen than Weeders do,” he said. “Because we’ve got a barrier between us and our soul. What the virus does is tempt you to break the wall down. They call it a Yen because it causes hungers of various kinds. Physical, sexual. You start wanting more and more stimulation, and depraved behavior scratches the itch. You rape, you wallow in filth, you crave money, power, fame. It eats at you until you break down and it can get into your soul. It’s like rabies in that way, but instead of needing to bite people to feel relief, you do nasty shit to yourself and other people.”
“Or children,” I said.
“Yeah.” Angkor shifted uncomfortably. “Or children. But I think you’re going to be okay until we get the HookWyrm out. If you have it, you’ll know once you’re back in contact with your Axon.”
Turn signals, change lanes, take the exit. The air was becoming hazy, and it smelled unpleasant. I focused on the moment, moving through the familiar activity of driving to clamp down on the nausea curdling in my gut. “Is there a cure for it?”
“Yeah. Gift Horse blood.”
Well, we were all out of that. I’d killed the only Gift Horse I knew of. I turned onto Marcy Street, and slowed as the haziness thickened to fog and smoke that pressed through the gaps in the windows and doors. It stank, sweet and rotten and pungent. It obliterated the sky in a brownish-violet miasma, but further down the road, we could see red and orange light struggling violently against the cloak of filthy magic.
Strange Kitty was burning.
Chapter 35
Small figures passed in and out of the fray on the road ahead, and then a large one as an insectoid creature stumbled down the gravel pathway. It was a skeletal black scorpion the size of a minivan, screeching through three severed heads that had been melded into one tri-lobed horror. Its back was on fire, and it was hacking at small figures swarming around its feet.
“Brace!” I gunned the engine and aimed the car.
Wide-eyed, Talya fumbled the machete out of its sheathe as we thundered down the road. The rats and possums that were attacking the scorpion scattered when they saw us thundering towards them, but the Morphorde only spun around, front legs raised like a tarantula’s. The car was big enough and the hood sturdy enough that we hit the DOG like a snowplough. It screamed with a high, tortured whistling sound as its legs crumpled and it collapsed. I backed up, tires screeching on the wet road, and drove at it again as it stumbled up to its knees and coughed a gout of slime onto the hood. The stuff melted the windscreen where it spattered, but it rolled off the paint and we hit it with a satisfying crunch. The Morphorde went under the wheels, limbs flailing.
“Whatever you do, don’t shoot them! Stab them! Put honey on your weapons!” Angkor cried out as he threw the back door open and rolled out. A spidery limb shot out from around the side of the car on my side, stabbing at anything within reach. Talya screamed, fumbling for the door, and I followed her with Binah tucked under one arm as it banged on the window and then broke it in with a shower of broken glass.
“You have to shift!” I yelled at her, pulling my knife. It felt too small for this fight.
“I can’t!” She yelled back. “I can’t, I’ll lose control again!”
The scorpion creature was bumping the car up and down as it struggled to free itself. Down the gravel driveway, a Morphorde like a giant bacteriophage – a virus that looked like a bizarre crystal moon lander – was being savaged by five raccoons. A dying fox was impaled on its stamping needle legs, but the DOG was stumbling with the jerkiness of the walking dead. Bursts of automatic gun fire rang out from behind the back of the club. Whoever was back there had assault rifles.
“Josie is in there,” I said. “They’ll take her back and they’ll kill her. Do what you were born to do.”
Talya’s eyes hardened, and she held the machete out to me without a word. I took it, and she undressed carelessly, throwing her clothing to the ground. Her skin was still bloody as she stepped out of her borrowed jeans, her eyes on the car as the huge Morphorde finally heaved it up and flipped it off. Her eyes focused, intent and predatory, and she took off at a run towards it with a high-pitched shout, tearing and distending into her Ka on her way across.