Murder of Angels (19 page)

“Time for what, and who the hell’s the Weaver?” Niki moans, steadying herself as the tree becomes a flagpole. “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about, bird?”

“We have to hurry, Niki. We have to
fly
. Already, the jackals are hunting you. The worlds have grown thin here, and by now they’ll have found a way in.”

“You’re not even a real bird, are you?”

“The Weaver will be waiting at the bridge, but we have to go
now
.”

“Why can’t she come here?” Niki asks, and the flagpole becomes a tree again, but its bark is soft and black, and she pulls her hands away.

“The jackals are
coming,
” the bird squawks.

“Then answer my question. Why can’t the Weaver come here? I’m sick, and I don’t think I can walk all the way to the goddamn bridge.”

The white bird shrieks and dissolves into a spinning ball of gray-violet light. It throws sparks that twinkle and whirl madly about its equator.

“See, I knew you weren’t a real bird.”

And then there’s a thunderclap so loud that windows up and down Steuart Street shatter, and glass rains down to the blacktop and concrete. Niki screams and covers her ears as the sky turns a deep wine red and finally stops flickering.

“That’s it,” the ball of light murmurs, and it doesn’t sound anything at all like the white bird did. “They’ve found the frequency. They’re coming.”

From the east, the direction of the Embarcadero and the wharves lined up along the bay, there’s a sound like howling wolves, if wolves grew half as large as elephants, wolves so loud that Niki can hear them even through the ghost of the thunderclap still ringing in her ears.

“The jackals,” she says and then looks south, towards the interstate and the bridge.

“They run before the guard,” the light whispers and glows a little brighter. “Go now, Niki Ky. Go if you ever mean to, or you’ll die in this place, and two worlds will die with you.”

“What if I just go back inside? What if I go back inside and wake Marvin—”

“You are dead to this city,” the light replies. “You’d never find your way, and if you did, there would only be an empty room where you’d sit waiting alone for the jackals to sniff you out. It wouldn’t take them long.”

The light fades into a white bird, its feathers washed the color of funeral carnations by the bloody sky.

“Follow me, Hierophant. The Weaver is waiting.”

Niki looks at the hotel one last time, at the dark window where Marvin sits asleep, and then she turns and follows the bird down the deserted black ribbon of Steuart towards the Bay Bridge and whatever’s waiting for her there.

After the climb through the rubble of the Fremont off-ramp—over treacherous cement and asphalt boulders, broken roadway strata and rusted rebar teeth jutting crookedly from stone jaws—when she’s finally standing on the buckled, sagging remains of I-80, Niki stops and looks back the way they’ve come. She still can’t see the jackals, but she can hear them plainly enough, the terrible, frenzied noise of them searching for her through the ruins of San Francisco. Breathless and sore, she takes off the pack and sits down. Her heart is beating so hard, so fast, that it hurts, and she puts her good hand flat against her chest and tries to catch her breath.

“What happened?” Niki gasps. “What’s happened to the city?”

“Nothing has happened,” the white bird replies impatiently, lighting on the road beside her. “The city—
your
city—is still just the way you left it. But it has pushed you out.”

Niki swallows, tasting bile. She’s afraid she’s going to puke and knows there isn’t time for getting sick.

“Pushed me out
where
?”

“Where or when,” the bird chirps, “is of no consequence. There’s no time to rest here. They’re not far behind us.”

“If I don’t rest, I’m going to have a fucking heart attack. Then it won’t matter if they do catch me. I’ll be just as dead, either way.”

“They have your scent in their nostrils, your taste on their tongues,” the bird frets and hops from one foot to the other. “I would not want to be in your shoes, Hierophant.”

Niki gives the white bird the finger and then stares up at the red sky. There’s no way to tell whether it’s day or night, because there’s no sun or stars, just the flat crimson light that seems to come from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. She’s never even dreamt a sky like this, so entirely empty, not even a scrap of cloud to break the endless, ruddy monotony of it.

If I were wearing a watch,
she wonders,
would I know then? If I were wearing the watch Daria gave me…but maybe watches don’t work in this place. Maybe there’s not even time in this place.

“There is always time,” the bird says, “of one sort or another. Even the Dragon is a prisoner of time.”

“You can read my mind?” she asks, and the bird pecks at the asphalt, but doesn’t answer her.

“If you don’t get moving,” it says a moment later, “you’ll die here. I hope you don’t expect me to die with you. I’m loyal to the Weaver, but I won’t die for some silly girl too stupid to run when the jackals are on her ass.”

“Where are all the people?” she asks.

The bird sighs and glares up at her.

“What difference does it make?”

“Do you think they’re dead? Maybe there was an earthquake, or an asteroid, or—”

“Maybe there never
were
any people in this city,” the bird says.

“Then who the hell built it?”

The bird frowns at her and ruffles its feathers. “Maybe
no one
built it. Maybe it was always here. Maybe it’s only a dream or a fancy or a possibility. You have to stop thinking like someone who only lives in one world, Niki Ky, if you mean to ever come out the other side in one piece.”

The jackals begin to howl again, calling zealously back and forth to one another, their voices bouncing off the walls of empty buildings like sonar off the walls of submarine canyons, signals in the dark, guiding them closer.

“You’d think they’d be a little quieter,” Niki says, reaching for her backpack. “I wouldn’t be so hard to catch if I couldn’t hear them coming.”

“They would live for the chase,” the bird says grimly, “if they were alive. They don’t have to be silent. Nothing has ever escaped them.”

“You’re no end of cheer, you know that, bird?”

“There’s no point in lying about the jackals, Niki.”

She manages to get the backpack on again using only her left hand, and then she checks the bandages on her right. After the scramble up the collapsed off-ramp, they’re dirty and beginning to unravel a little, but there’s no sign of blood leaking through.

“I’m not asking you to lie,” she says. “But I’m also pretty sure there are things I don’t need to know.”

The jackals have stopped howling again, and once more there’s only the silence, the mute city pinned beneath that sprawling butcher sky, with not even an ocean breeze to spoil the desolate, unnatural calm.

“Bird, do you know how far it is to the other side?” she asks, and before it can answer, “Almost eight and a half
miles,
” she says. “That’s how far it is. I can’t walk that far, I don’t care what’s chasing me.”

“We don’t have to cross the whole bridge,” the bird replies. “We only have to go a little ways more. The Weaver will meet us above the water, at the last tower before the island.”

“And she can stop the jackals?”

“No. No one can stop the jackals. Not even the Dragon can stop them, once the hunt begins.”

“Then what good is she?”

“She’ll take you across and bear you safely to the Palisades. She’ll set you on the Serpent’s Road.”

The Serpent’s Road,
and now Niki remembers the things that Spyder said before sending her across the Dog’s Bridge.
You’ll follow the road that Orc took, and Esau. You’ll follow the road beneath the lake, the Serpent’s Road, because He’s watching all the other ways.

“The Weaver,” she says, and it’s so obvious, so obvious she should have seen it right from the start. “The Weaver is Spyder, isn’t she?”

For an answer, the bird squawks something incoherent and takes to the air, flaps its wings and soon it’s wheeling far above Niki, circling the interstate. She shades her eyes, force of habit even though there’s no sun to burn them, and watches the bird.

“I’m never going to see Daria again,” she whispers. “I’m lost now, truly lost, and I’m never going to see anyone ever again.”
Except Spyder,
she thinks, wishing that were the consolation it ought to be. Nearby, the jackals howl, and the bird stops circling and heads northeast towards the bay, its tiny shadow sweeping quickly along the wide, forsaken highway.

It takes Niki the better part of an hour to walk the two miles from the off-ramp to the last tower before the shaley cliffs of Yerba Buena Island. Almost an hour, and the only sounds are the steady tattoo of her footsteps against the pavement of the bridge’s westbound upper tier and the occasional bellow and barking of the jackals, her own labored breathing and, from time to time, the white bird cries out overhead. Perhaps it’s trying to warn her that the jackals are closing in, but when she stops and looks back there’s never anything but the empty expanse of I-80 West leading towards the city. The bay stretches away on either side, bloodred and smooth as glass, not a wave or a ripple to break its mirror surface.

The last tower before the island, and in the light from this alien sky, the steel beams seem to have been painted the color of pomegranates. Niki drops her backpack and sits down in the road, facing the entrance of the Yerba Beuna Tunnel. It might as well be the gates of Hell, “abandon all hope” spelled out by that black hole bored seventeen hundred feet through ancient metamorphic rocks. Maybe, she thinks, the jackals have circled round somehow, and now they’re watching her from the conspiring darkness of the tunnel. When they’ve finally had their fill, when they’ve glutted themselves on her fear and dread and confusion, they’ll come for her. She thinks about her meds, the prescription bottles tucked safely into her backpack, and wonders if a handful of Xanax would kill her quicker than the jackals.

“I’m sorry this has to be so hard,” Spyder Baxter says, and when Niki looks over her left shoulder, Spyder’s standing right behind her. “I thought we’d have a little more time before they figured out what’s going on and came after you. I thought it would take them longer to break through.”

“What is going on?” Niki asks her and gets up, turning to face the ghost of the girl with white dreadlocks and a cross carved into the flesh between her eyes. The mark her father gave her when she was only six years old, the mark so the angels he saw might forgive him and spare him the apocalypse of blood and fire that haunted his nightmares and waking dreams.

“A war,” Spyder replies. “A war that was old a hundred billion years before there were men to fight on either side. A war that has scorched worlds beyond counting and stained the walls of Heaven.”

“And what does
this
mean?” and Niki raises her aching, bandaged hand. “There’s something inside me, Spyder.”

“I tried to keep you out of this. If there had been any other way, you wouldn’t be standing here now.”

“But what
is
it? What the fuck’s it doing to me? And why does everyone keep calling me the Hierophant?”

“A hierophant presides over certain ceremonies, and is a keeper of sacred mysteries.”

“Yeah, I know what the word means. I don’t know why people—why talking birds and fucking bridge trolls—keep calling me one. I’m not a hierophant, Spyder. I’m just crazy Niki. I’m just a goddamned schizophrenic.”

“No, Niki. You aren’t insane. You’ve never been insane. That’s the very first thing that you have to understand. I tried to tell you that before.”

“Why am I so angry, Spyder?” Niki asks, and she bites her lower lip because she doesn’t want to start crying now. “I should be happy to see you, shouldn’t I? I wanted to see you for so long. After you died, I thought that was the end of the fucking world. So why can’t I believe that any of this shit is real?”

“I can’t answer that question for you, Niki. Nobody can answer that question for you. That’s something you have to figure out for yourself.”

“Fuck you,” Niki whispers, and wipes at her nose. “I don’t want to hear any more of this. I don’t want to
see
any more. I want to go home. I want to see Daria.”

“I’m sorry. You can’t do that,” Spyder says and holds out a hand to Niki.

“Why the hell not?”

“You’ve been exiled by your world. It can’t take you back. The Dragon—”

“Jesus, Spyder, there is no fucking dragon!”

And then the jackals howl again, so loud they must be very near, their voices to set all the suspender cables humming, and the bridge trembles slightly beneath her feet.

“Take my hand,” Spyder says. “They’re getting close. We’re almost out of time.”

Niki looks past Spyder, and she can see something impossibly vast rushing towards them across the bridge, something without shape or the faintest trace of color, only a single-minded purpose to define it. The jackals howl, and the Bay Bridge shudders and sways like a thing of string and twigs.

“The bird was telling you the truth, Niki. I can’t stand against them. Now take my hand.”

“What do they
want
with me?” Niki asks and takes a small step backwards, glancing from the formless, rolling mass of the jackals to Spyder’s outstretched hand, then back to the jackals again. “I can’t hurt them. I can’t hurt anyone but myself.”

“You can destroy them utterly,” Spyder replies, “and they know it.”

“But the bird said
nothing
can stop them.”

“I can’t force you to do this, Niki, and I can’t do it for you.”

“I want to go home, Spyder. I want to wake up.”