“Fuck you, Harmon. I told him I’d marry him in a New York second.”
“Wow.” Annie looked at me with wide eyes. “Really? You said yes?”
“Of course I said yes! I’m in love with him, Annie.” I tried to keep my voice from sounding desperate. “He’s—he’s everything I never thought I’d find. He’s everything in the world to me,” I said softly. “Everything.”
I looked up, expecting to see Annie’s mocking gaze or worse, her anger. Instead she was staring at me as though she’d somehow walked into a stranger’s carriage house; which, I guess, she had.
“You said you’d marry him. Too much. And obviously he doesn’t know who his real father is,” she mused. “Which is probably for the best…
“Well. He sounds nice,” she said after a long silence had passed. “Really, he does. I guess it’s just that—well, some kind of intense stuff has happened to me in the last couple of months.”
“Like what?”
She shifted uncomfortably on the couch, finally curled up into the corner facing me. “Well, like—like I guess maybe I’ll have to wait a few minutes before getting into it. This is a lot to think about, after all this time. Right here—”
She gestured at me, then at the little room around us, with its ancient beams and slate floor and books and rose petals strewn everywhere.
“All this, and you, and him.” She was quiet, and stared thoughtfully out the front window; then she asked in a low voice, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Sweeney, but—well, are you sure it’s Dylan you’re in love with? I mean, you really used to bang your head against the wall over Oliver—”
“I’m sure,” I said curtly. “I haven’t thought about Oliver in years and years.”
Which was a lie, of course. Annie didn’t seem to believe it for an instant.
“Really? I have,” she said, almost dreamily. “I thought about him, and you, and Angie, all the time. All the time. Especially Angie.”
She pulled a pillow into her lap and kneaded it, and I was shocked to see her eyes were red. “I thought about Angie for years. Fucking years, girl. Did you know we slept together?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said awkwardly. “But—well, I’m not surprised. You probably weren’t the only one.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Annie’s face twisted, and she held the pillow so tightly her fingers were white.
“But I wanted to be the only one! I was so gone over her, I was insane for her. That time I found you in the room—I wanted to kill you, Sweeney, I mean, really kill you. It was like when I found out about what happened to my cousin Lisa—”
“But you know it didn’t mean anything, Annie! I was drunk, that was such a horrible night, and she—”
“I know what she did. She did the same thing to you that she did to me, that she did to everyone. She used you, Sweeney. She used us all.”
Annie’s expression was so vehement, her eyes so black with rage that I moved a little closer to my end of the couch.
“Annie,” I said gently, trying to be careful with my words, “I’m sure Angelica didn’t mean to hurt you. I don’t think she meant to hurt anyone. Things were different then, you remember what it was like—lots of people slept with their friends. We didn’t know.” It was like letting something go, that had been caged inside of me. “We were just kids, Annie. That was all. Besides—”
I pointed at the ring on her right hand. “You’re a big star now. You can’t be living alone.”
“I’m not.” Annie straightened, tilting her chin defiantly. “My lover, Helen—we’ve been together for almost eight years now. Shit,” she added under her breath, “I think our anniversary’s coming up, too, I got to remember that. But that’s not what I meant, anyway.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“I mean that she used us. Really used us—starting with me, and you, and Baby Joe, and Hasel, and then Oliver…”
My heart clenched, but I only nodded. “And Oliver.”
“And I don’t know who else, over the years.” She pulled the pillow to her chest. “Have you been following Angelica, Sweeney?”
“You mean, watching her career?” I shook my head. “No. I never heard from her, after—after what happened. Until this summer, as a matter a fact. I saw her on TV about five or six weeks ago, I guess it was right before I met Dylan. But he’s told me about her, so I know about her from him. Why?” I asked guardedly. “Have you been in touch with her?”
Annie let her breath out in a long low whoosh. “I have been doing everything on god’s green earth not to be in touch with her.”
She stood and crossed the room to stare at the sea urchin lamp. When she turned back to me she was pale but very calm.
“I don’t know exactly what she is, Sweeney, but Angelica is dangerous. I mean fatal. She killed Baby Joe, and she killed Hasel; she’s killed people we’ll never know about, hundreds of them—thousands, maybe. Homeless people, runaways, people nobody would ever miss—you ever seen statistics on how many people just disappear, like that?”
She snapped her fingers and I jumped. “You know, I’ve known people who’ve seen snuff movies—movies where people literally get fucked to death, and someone’s there behind the camera watching it all, and someone else is out there to market the stuff, and someone else is there to buy it… You like to think something that horrible could never happen, that it couldn’t be real; but it is, Sweeney. It is.”
Her eyes grew wide and unfocused. “It’s like we spend our whole lives walking on this little rind that covers the world, this little crust that’s got flowers on it, and dirt and houses and families and—and then one day, you break through, you just fall right through, and you see there’s something else there. The real world, the world that was there a million years ago, the world you see when you’re a kid alone in the dark; the world that fills your worst dreams until you can’t even wake up screaming from it, you can’t wake up at all…
“I’ve seen it, Sweeney,” she whispered. I swallowed, thinking back to Balthazar Warnick’s room at the Orphic Lodge, hobbled creatures whirling ecstatically around a single thin flame. “I’ve seen it, and you’ve seen it, Sweeney—that world is real. It’s real, and Angelica’s tapped into it. Whatever she is, whatever she’s made herself into—she’s found a way into that place. She’s found a way to bring it here—”
Her hand slashed through the shadows. “To make it here. And she’s doing it by feeding off all of us. It’s like she set out to be some kind of crazy goddess of love, Ishtar or Mary Magdalene or whatever the hell she thought she was—but somehow she’s really done it. She has turned into a goddess. She’s got her bible, and her cult, she’s got some kind of fucking black angels picking off kids from here to Seattle—”
“Annie!” I was shaking my head furiously. “No—”
“Listen to me, Sweeney!” She was kneeling in front of me, her hands on my knees. “She killed them! I know she killed them, because she tried to kill me—”
And then she told me about what she had seen: about the girls who would turn up at her shows, with their lunar tattoos and ominous chanting; about the sacrificial murder at Herring Cove, and the monstrously beautiful creature she had seen there; about the flowers left with Helen, and the strange woman who had saved her from becoming the next offering to Othiym. She told me that the same day he died, she had met Baby Joe alone at a strip club. But at that part of her story her voice faltered, and I knew she was keeping something from me.