Obie doesn’t answer. He takes me by the arm and pulls me away from the crowd, looking down into my face. His eyes are wide and hurt. Betrayed.
“This is the most important thing in my life,” he says in a low voice. “Do you understand that? I
need
this. How could you just run out and tell everybody?”
I gaze up at him, mute as he searches my face. I don’t tell him that it wasn’t everybody, that it was only Beelzebub.
“I had to tell someone,” I whisper, shaking my head. “I’m scared you’re going to die.”
Obie’s hand is resting on my arm and the way he looks at me is pleading. “Don’t—don’t make it harder. I
know
what could happen. Don’t you think I’d stay if I could?”
And I see in his eyes that he’s telling the truth. He can’t be happy here. He needs to leave, and needing that means nothing will stop him.
“I understand,” I say, with my hands clasped tight together. “Just please, be careful.”
Obie nods. His eyes are the interminable silver of our mother’s, but gentle and liquid. “I love you,” he says, so softly I think I’ve misheard it.
“You what?”
“Love you,” he says again, louder.
And I’ve only ever heard that word coming from the television. Not from someone’s actual mouth, not talking about me.
With an expression so tender it makes something spasm in my throat, he leans down and kisses me on the forehead. Then he lets me go. He picks up the suitcase and rests a hand on the boy’s shoulder, turning him toward the gates, and all at once, I know that he’s leaving—really, and for good. That in another instant, my brother will be gone and I’ll still be here.
He presses his hand against the pass panel beside the gate, leaning in to speak the word that will let them leave. There’s a stifled hiss as the gate unlocks and he pushes it open.
The boy stumbles once, lurching through the turnstile. As he does, something slips from his hand and lands with a clatter. Then they’re through the gate and gone, and I’m alone, standing in the spot where they stood. My hand feels numb, like it’s lost connection to my body.
I bend down, reaching for the thing the boy dropped. It is an onyx-handled straight razor. I hold it away from myself, my hand dripping with slick, pink water.
The red sky is already fading to gray again, leaving the terminal hazy with smoke. The razor feels light and graceful in my hand. I slip it into my pocket, then turn to face the crowd. Beelzebub might have been wrong when he said there was nothing here for them, but I can’t help thinking that just now, for me, it feels true. I know it’s not right or rational, but suddenly I’m overcome by loneliness, remembering all the endearing, baffling things about my brother. Everything I’m losing. Remembering how easy it was to wait for him when I always knew he’d come back.
For the first time in my life, it feels like there’s nothing keeping me anchored.
SISTERS
CHAPTER FIVE
T
wilight has settled in, leaving the city dark. I walk out of the terminal with my head high and my hands at my sides and it takes all my will to do it slowly.
Then I’m outside, away from the building, and in the next instant, I’m running—darting through the crowded streets, winding my way between open cooling vents. The smoke rises in columns around me, pouring out of the grates, making everything gray.
Obie is gone. He’s chosen to take his chances with Earth and Azrael, and I don’t know what to do now, so I run faster. Away from dropped razors, bloody water. Away from the dripping boy with his fierce, tragic eyes, the way it felt when I let him go. My feet are numb with the impact, pounding up the spiral stairs of the Spire building, up to my room, where I’ll sit alone on the couch and figure out a way to fix this.
But I open the door to find my sister Petra standing on the end table, hanging an assortment of rainbow-colored streamers. My collection of glass apothecary bottles has been set out in perfect order, each one positioned according to size.
Petra unfurls a streamer and holds it above her head, tying the end neatly to a ceiling hook. She’s dressed like the Pit girls, in a shift that hangs on her shoulders like a shroud, gray with soot. Her feet are bare and her hair is dense and stringy. She’s humming, lips pressed tight over gray teeth, arranging the streamers so they hang down like paper vines, green and blue and purple. In the riot of color, she looks strangely monochromatic.
“I thought you might like it if I did decorations,” she says, pivoting carefully on the tabletop.
For a moment, I just stand in the doorway with my mouth open and my hair a tangled nest around me. When I speak, it’s in a flat, dull voice. “It looks nice.”
My hands feel weightless. I have to lace my fingers together and squeeze, just to prove they’re still connected to me.
Petra steps down from the table. “Is everything okay? You seem upset.”
I nod. The floor seems to shift under me and I can’t catch my balance.
“Here, sit down. I know something to cheer you up.”
Taking me by the hand, she leads me over to the vanity where she situates me on the little stool and opens the makeup box. She sorts through my collection of cosmetics and selects a tube of dark lipstick. I tell myself that this is right. It’s familiar, and now my life will go back to normal. It doesn’t work. I’m already considering the next step, the next possible move.
Petra applies the lipstick deftly, careful to follow the precise shape of my mouth. My reflection stares back at me with blank features and hard, blazing eyes. Petra just tucks her hair behind her ears and keeps her own face turned away from the mirror.
Her father is one of Lilith’s Pit demons and it shows in the shape of her thin lips, the grayness of her complexion. If she were vain like some of the others, she might lie. She might at least say she was the daughter of Belial, who built the foundry and the forges back when the city was nothing but a few crooked shacks above a pit of molten rock. He’s gray-faced, but angelic under his layer of soot. People might even believe the story if she told it often enough.
She doesn’t lie though. Instead, she shuffles and looks at the floor and everyone knows that she belongs to some gaunt, shambling artisan. She doesn’t belong in the Spire, but she’s here anyway, because she’s Lilith’s daughter.
Our other sisters mock her sometimes, call her Ash-Girl or Maid of the Metal-Workers, but I don’t mind her iron fingernails or her huge, heavy-lidded eyes. Better to be ugly and sure of what you are than to spend your time like I do, staring into the mirror, wondering if I’ll turn out to be just another one of the Lilim.
Petra begins to line my eyes with a burgundy eye pencil and I let her, fighting the urge to stand up, to pace between the window and the door because if I’m moving, then I can at least pretend I’m doing something, instead of just thinking about how to proceed.
“This is to make you seem flushed,” she says, steadying my chin and sweeping pink shimmer over my cheeks. “So you look warm and friendly. Like a regular girl.”
I fold my hands in my lap and don’t say anything. She likes to make me up in fresh, soft colors my sisters would never wear and usually, I like to let her do it. Now though, all I can think is that Obie is gone, and even with my face powdered pink, accented with burgundy and taupe, I feel colorless.
Petra reaches for the eye pencil again. Holding it like a calligraphy pen, she studies my face and then begins to draw lightly on the top of the vanity, smearing the makeup with the tip of her finger. The chin and mouth of a girl materialize, followed by dark eyes, the suggestion of a nose, a scribble of shadow to mean ear, jaw, neck. The drawings are always temporary. They burn off as soon as the furnace is open.
Suddenly, from out in the hall comes the sound of heels on the stairs.
Footsteps echo around us like the crisp tinkling of bells and Petra drops the pencil. “Your sisters are coming.”
“It’s all right,” I say. “They can’t do anything to you.” I don’t point out that they’re her sisters too.
She doesn’t answer, only crosses the room and slips into the closet as Myra and Deirdre sweep in together, arms linked. They stop in front of me, looking eerily similar—two dolls in elaborate outfits.
The Lilim deal in seduction. When one of them holds a man, he feels the heat of her body like it’s flooding him. She soothes him with the warmth of her breath, but really she’s robbing him of his dreams and his memories, everything that makes him who he is.
There’s a story that says my mother has a magic kiss, and that’s why my sisters turned out how they did. When Lilith met my father, he was broken, and when she kissed him, she drew his grief from him like poison from a wound. She took away his hopelessness, gave him back his valor and his strength. The common version is that she did it because she loved him, but there’s nothing loving about what the Lilim do.
They call it the fix, like something in them is actually broken, but feeding on misery and desire doesn’t cure them. Every time they do it, they just crave more. It’s all they talk about.
“You awful little hypocrite.” Deirdre’s voice is like mercury, thick and quick and silver. She has on a black strapless dress, fine as smoke, held together by thin chains and pulsing with embers. She’s smiling like she’s never enjoyed anything more than the idea of my being a hypocrite.
“Daphne, Daphne,” Myra croons, wagging her finger at me. “You
bad
girl. Why didn’t you tell us you had a yearning for broken boys?” Her lips are the wet, red color of blood and candy. Her dress is silver, showing devastating curves, the body I do not have. Fastened to her back are a pair of wings, fashioned out of wire. They dance and jitter as she comes closer, flashing wildly.
“I don’t,” I say, not knowing how to explain the fragile line of the boy’s bowed shoulders. Not wanting to share the feeling of his fingers tangled with mine.
Deirdre picks up a framed photograph of Marilyn Monroe, smiling down at it contemptuously.
I snatch the picture back and set it on the table. “Don’t touch that.”
Marilyn looks kind behind the glass, hopelessly soft. Surrounded by tangles of streamers and silk ribbons, Deirdre looks like a molten-lipped monster.
Myra slides her arms around my neck. “You can’t lie to us, Daphne.” Her voice is a trembling band of silver, her mouth soft against my ear. “I know you want the fix as much as we do. It’s only a matter of time.”
She lets me go, twirling away to poke through drawers and cupboards, running her fingers over my collection of padlocks. Her enameled nails hiss and ping against the steel. The sound fills my room like steam escaping.
Deirdre sighs and smiles, backing me into the corner by the vanity. She touches my face, smoothing her thumb against my cheek. “You’re so lucky your father was an angel. Your teeth are almost perfect.”
When she brushes my lips with the tip of her finger, I shrug her off and retreat behind the sofa. “Leave me alone.”
She grimaces at the red smear on her hand, then wipes her fingers on her dress. “Are you wearing lipstick? Honestly, Daphne. We have to get you some
real
makeup.”
Her own face is expertly made up in the colors of the Lilim, red embers and white ashes. Her mouth is hot with melted brimstone and soot is smeared black in the hollows of her eyes. I shake my head, staring off over her head. I know that if I don’t respond—if I just wait—they’ll get bored and leave.
“Oh, come on, don’t you want to play with the boys? Don’t you want to know what it’s like? They go crazy for us on Earth.” Creeping around the sofa, she leans in like she’s about to kiss my cheek. “They
worship
us.”
I stand with my palms pressed flat against the wall, but she only snaps her teeth beside my ear and dances back, eyes glittering wickedly. For a moment, I consider it—consider the possibility that I could go to Earth with them and instead of looking for someone to prey on, I could look for Obie. But it’s too impractical going with the Lilim. They won’t be any help.
Deirdre gives me one last sly smile and turns away. Then she and Myra link arms again, smooth, practiced, like there’s never been a time when they weren’t holding onto each other. When they slink out the door, it’s with a laugh and a wave, without looking back.
“You can come out now,” I say, watching the shape of Petra sway in the shadows.
She creeps from the closet to stand next to me. With the palm of my hand, I scrub the lipstick off my mouth.
Petra hunches her shoulders and turns toward the window. Outside, the sky is gray like ash. “Will you go hunting for the fix like your sisters do?”
I think of the boy in the terminal, even though it’s not my right to want him. His arms were wet and I want to believe that the flutter in my chest is only astonishment at how the water ran down his skin in perfect drops, wonder at the miracle of surface tension. My hands feel numb and sticky, and his blood will burn off soon enough, nothing left to prove he ever existed.
“No,” I say, trying not to let my face change. “No, that’s low. It’s common.”
I sound utterly certain, like it’s the truth. But really, I don’t know the answer. There is only the memory of myself, standing over the boy. The feeling of being unable to move or look away, and I know my sisters’ hunger is in me, too. It’s sleeping deep somewhere, murmuring in my blood, and that knowledge scares me more than I can say.
ABSENCE
CHAPTER SIX
T
he strange fluttering I felt in the terminal is gone, and in its place, there’s another feeling that’s just as hard to name. It beats in my chest like a war drum. With no way to reckon time, it feels like only a moment since Obie left, and also like forever.
I’m lying on the floor of my room, picking apart the fuses on a string of Black Cat firecrackers and lighting them off one by one. Every explosion makes a sharp popping sound and I lie on my back, tossing the lit crackers into the air. They burst above me in a shower of noise and blackened paper.