I SLEPT WITH ANGELICA that night. Lying in her bed with my arms tight around her, not saying anything, hardly even moving except when a bolt of fear would tear her from some feverish half dream. Then I would gently stroke her hair, and let my tongue linger upon the sweet-scented arch of her neck. Once I felt the curved amulet that lay there against her skin, its smooth curve icy beneath my lips, and cried out softly as its keen edge bit into me. At last I must have dozed off. Much later I woke to Angelica’s muttering in her sleep. Nonsense words, or perhaps not, perhaps only something I could not understand. I kissed her, my hands cradling her face. Her pale eyes opened, widening in fear, then grew soft as the mumbled words became my name.
Near dawn I woke again, to find that she had slipped from my arms. On the other side of the narrow bed she sat with her back to me, her tangled hair massed about her shoulders. Violet light from the room’s high arched window made her look like a woman made of amethyst. In the night sky hung the new moon, its crescent distorted by the window’s greenish panes so that it appeared to be a globe floating in deep water, one of those bubbles of rainbow-colored glass escaped from a fishing boat a thousand miles away and tossed about like a stray thought by the waves. Angelica had a globe like that on her desk, alongside an erubescent sea urchin twice the size of my fist and a small wooden garuda with a lizard’s crest and baleful onyx eyes. Her room’s guardians, she told me, to keep her safe from demons.
But in that room there was another moon, too, a slivered crescent nestled in Angelica’s throat, rising and falling as she breathed, lost on another sea. She sat and stared up at the sky, arms extended before her with her hands curled upward, the fingers opening as though to receive some benison. When the sky grew light she turned to me, not smiling, not saying anything at all, her hair falling across her shoulders in a dark stream, and drew me to her. Afterward I slept again, fitfully as before, and dreamed of angels with the wings of locusts, of hail and hammered silver blades clashing against stone in the night.
It was almost evening when I woke, really woke, with a hangover and raging headache and the ominous feeling of having slept with someone when I was too drunk to know better.
“Wait! Don’t move, I want to take a picture: you can be this year’s AA poster girl.”
I groaned and sat up, blinking, and saw Annie Harmon perched on a chair. She was barefoot, still wearing the same plaid flannel shirt and fatigues. She smiled at my rueful expression, but her brown eyes were humorless. She looked pale and tired, and when I glanced over at her bed I saw it was neatly made with a worn log cabin quilt and Snoopy pillow.
“I slept at the library,” she said in her husky voice. “I didn’t want to intrude—”
I groaned. “Oh, shit, Annie, it wasn’t like that—”
“Oh no?” Her eyes narrowed. “Well, then, please tell me what it was like.”
“Annie. Give me a break.” I ran my hands through my hair, grimacing. I was still wearing my rank T-shirt; my hands smelled faintly of sandalwood. “Where’s Angelica?”
“At class. You didn’t think she was going to wait for you, did you? She never misses a beat, our girl. You got to get up pretty early in the morning to fly with the angels. Pretty fucking early.” She glowered and slapped the edge of her chair.
I sighed. “Look, I didn’t mean to cause some kind of thing with your girlfriend. I didn’t even know she was your girlfriend—”
“And, speaking of early, it is now five o’clock, P.M. And Angelica, just in case you’re wondering, is meeting Oliver Wilde Crawford for dinner.”
“Oliver?” I felt as though I had been poisoned. Of course! The two of them had just taken off, leaving me here to deal with the murderously jealous lesbian roommate. I rubbed my throbbing forehead. “Ah, come on, Annie! It was a mistake, all right? Forget about it. Where’re my boots?”
It wasn’t until I stood, my bare feet smacking against the chilly floor, that everything else about the previous night rushed back to me.
“Oh, man.”
Annie tilted her head. “Feeling a wee bit foolish, are we—”
“Shut up, Annie, just shut up.” My voice was shaking; I thought I might throw up. I looked beneath the bed, saw my jeans and cowboy boots atop the torn remnants of Angelica’s dress. I grabbed my things and pulled them on hurriedly, hoping Annie couldn’t see how sick I felt, then headed for the door.
“Sweeney. Wait.”
I hesitated and looked back.
“Sit down,” she said in a softer voice, and patted the neat coverlet on her bed. “We have to talk.”
“Look, Annie—if this is about you and Angelica, I’m, uh, really not—”
“Will you just close the door and listen to me?”
I put down the urge to storm into the hall. Instead I shut the door and leaned sullenly against Angelica’s desk. “I’m sorry, okay? I was drunk, and there was all this—well, this crazy shit—”
Annie crossed to the door, drew the bolt, and pulled the chain tight. “I know,” she said. “I mean I know about the crazy shit. That’s what I want to talk to you about, Sweeney. Listen—
“Angelica told me about what happened last night—don’t look at me like that, I’m her roommate, okay? You were passed out—”
“I was exhausted—”
Annie rolled her eyes. “Well, when I came back this morning you were making like the living dead over there, and Angie had to talk to someone. So she told me.”
“What did she tell you?” I asked guardedly.
“About that necklace. And Magda Kurtz—”
Her face was so pale that her freckles stood out like soot. “Sweeney, you guys are in big trouble. I told Angelica, but she never listens to me. I told her she oughta ditch that thing and get the hell out of Dodge—”
“Did she? Did she give it back?”
“Give it back? To who? No, Angelica didn’t give it back. She’s never gonna take it off. She’s wearing it right now. Like a fucking sign around her neck—”
“Shut up, Annie.” I sank to the floor with my head in my hands. I felt sick and angry and embarrassed, and totally, totally screwed up. What was I doing, sleeping with someone I hardly knew, sleeping with a girl I hardly knew; and at the same time mooning over some guy I’d just met the day before? “Please, shut up.”
“No! Listen to me, Sweeney—I don’t know what you think is going on, but you’re way out of your league here. So’s Angelica, and your friend Oliver—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about all this—”
She stalked to the window and gestured furiously toward the Shrine, the neat white paths winding along the Strand. “And if you really don’t know what’s going on, you better start learning. Fast—”
She paced over to her desk and picked up a folded newspaper, stared broodingly at it before handing it to me. “Here.”
It was that afternoon’s Washington Star, opened to the Metro section. I glanced at it and frowned: the usual accounts of petty theft, local politics, urban renaissance, and decay. But then Annie jammed a finger at a small item on the bottom of the page.
“Check it out,” she said, and I began to read.
A chartered Beechcraft 640 bound for Philadelphia crashed in the West Virginia wilderness today, killing all on board. Two crew members and four passengers died when the aircraft plowed into a mountainside in dense fog. Bad weather hampered rescue efforts until early this morning. Among the dead was renowned archaeologist Magda Whitehead Kurtz, who had been returning from a summer appointment at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine. In an official statement, EAA officials said that…