Out of the Drowning Deep, page 6
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you wish to be unmade? Or remade? Do you wish to evolve?”
The questions were dangerous. All the years of prayers layered into these walls, the gods that had walked here, the angels that had fallen… Angel felt the weight of all that faith. It might not even require a specific prayer. Xe could do what xe had offered. Unmake Scribe IV. Remake him.
The realization should have been more startling. There were angels who never left the bounds of Heaven because the temptation to tap into this raw power, the very threads of creation, was too great. There were angels who chose to remake themselves for fear of what they might do.
Angel felt a stirring deep beneath the waves again. Possibility. Power. The knowledge that xe could change into something vast, if xe allowed xemself. The knowledge that perhaps, xe had already changed before.
It was an uncomfortable feeling. Xe’d seen glimpses in Quin St. John’s mind of what an angel could do, of what they might become. Angel shuddered, pulling back into xemself, pulling away from the ragged edges of history xe felt in the Bastion’s stones. Xe’d only wanted to help Scribe IV better understand himself, see that he could become more than his programming if he so desired.
A glimmer of something that might be alarm, or hope, or both, flashed in Scribe IV’s eyes. This was a thing Scribe IV might have considered privately, but never out loud, and Angel had plucked it from the air and offered it to him.
“You could…” Scribe IV did not finish the thought.
“I could,” Angel agreed – softly now, less certainty in xyr voice.
Xe’d been proud of xemself, rooting out something in Scribe IV that he’d never acknowledged aloud before. Xe’d been having fun. And xe’d been careless. But now that xe’d drawn Scribe IV’s attention to the possibility, xe couldn’t lie about its existence either.
“If you wished. If you truly believe yourself to be obsolete. If you are unhappy, you could become something other than you are. I could help.”
Xe watched contemplation slide like light over Scribe IV’s polished features. It wasn’t xyr place to impose any sort of decision, only present options. That was all xe’d done, wasn’t it? Xe hadn’t pushed Scribe IV to change his nature, only shown him that he could.
Angel understood how some gods could grow addicted to prayer, how they could gorge themselves on human desire, and how, in the great turning of existence, many had gone mad with it.
“I will think on it.” Scribe IV bowed his head in gratitude.
“Good.” Angel pushed the unease away, turning xyr mind back to the problem of the Pope. “I want to search the grounds,” xe said. “Starting with that structure.”
“The labyrinth ruins?” Scribe IV looked where xe’d indicated. “Why?”
“If I were human, I would call it a hunch.” Xe let mischief slide across xyr expression.
Angel pushed xemself off from the wall. Scribe IV gave a flinch and a half-step, as if he meant to catch xem before remembering himself. Angel landed neatly, xyr feet making no sound.
“Aren’t you curious about what we might find?” Angel asked.
“I suppose.” It was a grumbling admission, but Angel knew the truth – no mind-reading required.
Scribe IV valued mystery as much as xe did.
“Good. Then you can come with me. Satisfy my curiosity. I promise to keep you safe from the Sisters’ prying eyes.”
Angel held out xyr hand. Scribe IV barely hesitated before taking it. Quick as a thought, xe folded them inside out, stealing Scribe IV away from the Bastion and down into the ruined garden high above the crashing sea.
9
Quin moved deeper into the station’s leisure district. Back in his room, something crouched, lurking, waiting for him. It folded too-long legs against its chest, gnawing on the claws that had dragged against the floor as it slunk and stalked him.
Quin couldn’t go back there. Not alone.
Dante’s Inferno. Quin wedged himself into the already packed club, shouting above the pulse-bass-thump of music to get the bartender’s attention. Like its unsubtle name, the club screamed excess. Three levels of premium station space crammed with platforms and cages, catwalks and swings. Bodies gyrated and writhed on or in or dangled from every single one of them, slicked in glitter and sweat, spit and cum. All of it washed persistently in strobe lights that only made Quin’s headache worse.
He regretted not getting high, despite his promises to Lena. Even sober, everything fractured and stuttered in the light; bodies twisted and elongated and became improbable, almost inhuman.
Quin leaned as far over the blue-lit bar as he could and shouted to the bartender again – a very cute person with a shaved head and kohl-lined eyes.
“What can I get you?” Their words buzzed with the music; Quin read their lips as much as heard their voice.
“Have you seen…” The blood-beat bone-crunch of sound stole Quin’s attempt at an explanation. What name would Murmuration even be going by now?
“What?” The bartender scrubbed a glass which refused to look any cleaner.
“Birds?” It came out as a question, despite Quin’s best efforts. Pathetic. “Shadows?”
He tried to describe a shape in the air with his hands, and failed. He might as well be high for all the sense he wasn’t making. He took a deep breath and gathered himself.
“An angel. He might be here. He’s my…”
He let the words trail, throwing the bartender a pleading look. It was hard to explain, not that the bartender was entitled to an explanation of what Quin and Murmuration had been to each other, what they might be again if he continued down this path.
Ex was too simple a word for it. Confessor? Tormentor? Quin could barely explain it to himself. Murmuration had disassembled him, taken him down to his base elements, stripped him to his soul and scoured that for memories to devour. And Quin had let him, invited the angel to rummage in the deepest parts of him, not just once, but many times. He’d given himself the excuse that he did it in exchange for information, things only an angel might be able to find out that had helped him solve more than one case.
“Spooky-looking motherfucker? Over there.” The bartender hooked a thumb; Quin followed the gesture to a clustering of shadows on the far side of the club, skin crawling in a response more primal and more complex than simple desire or fear.
He authorized credit to the bartender’s tip jar without buying one of the overpriced drinks. Despite his longing, he knew he should be sober for this. Or as sober as possible, at least.
Crossing the floor felt like swimming upstream. Hands grasped at his shoulders, cupped and squeezed his ass and cock. Entering Dante’s Inferno was as good as consent to some. Glitter smeared Quin’s clothes by the time he emerged on the other side of the room.
There. Waiting, smug, knowing Quin would come looking for him eventually. Quin hated him, and his entire body sparked alight with desire.
Quin remembered – had forgotten, needed to be reminded every single time: looking at Murmuration could be like seeing overlapping layers of reality. Seeing more than one truth at one time, all equally weighted. A flock of birds. A swarm of shadows. A tall, pale man with long fingers, long black hair, eyes that devoured the light.
An illustration of an angel of old, surrounded by dozens and dozens of wings, a flock of birds in constant, restless motion, a creature with black talons tipping its fingers instead of nails, and needle-teeth.
Quin blinked, and the edges of Murmuration’s being stopped shivering, became something that approximated human – a terribly beautiful and beautifully terrible man seated at a small table with just enough room for Quin to join him, two drinks ready and waiting, and perhaps most incongruous of all in this place, a small tealight candle flickering between them.
Murmuration gestured, a fluid motion of his long-fingered hand, and Quin sat. Sitting, in fact, became a necessity, Quin’s legs boneless and incapable of supporting him. He tucked himself into place beside the angel and remained pinned there by Murmuration’s smile.
“It’s been too long.” Murmuration leaned in, lips brushing Quin’s jawline, a gesture familiar and frightening, one that didn’t await permission, but claimed it as a right.
It was over so swiftly, Murmuration folded back so neatly – almost primly – into his own space that Quin couldn’t be certain the angel had moved at all.
Had it been Dante’s Inferno where they’d first met? Quin had been drinking alone, he remembered that much, when he’d felt a presence just behind him, taking up far more space than it rightfully should. A voice at his ear that was somehow also a hand at the base of his spine, an electric jolt of desire straight to his cock and to somewhere else, more fundamental than any physical part of his being.
“Be not afraid. We are Legion. We would very much like to buy you a drink and then fuck you.”
It was the strangest pick-up line Quin had ever heard, and possibly the worst, but it had worked. He’d never met an angel before, had no idea what they could do, and he was at a low enough point that he didn’t care. He’d simply thrown himself at eyes dark as infinity, and let Murmuration take him outside of himself.
But only physically, that first night at least. Everything else – the memory-eating, the help with his cases, the thing very much like addiction that Lena had sweated out of him along with the actual drugs – all of that had come later.
And now he found himself falling right back into Murmuration, as if he’d never gotten out, wanting and needing to be taken apart, flensed and scraped to the bone to escape the terrible thing in his head. Murmuration watched him, predator-patient, leaning back, simultaneously taking up all the space at their table and none at all.
“I need…” Quin started, and words failed him. He felt like a junkie all over again, only sheer force of will keeping him from trembling, jaw clenched, a shake starting somewhere at the center of his being and threatening to overtake him.
“I need…” Help. The case. Murder. The crawling dark. But he couldn’t explain any of that aloud.
Murmuration leaned close again, cupped Quin’s jaw – tender and hungry, comforting and awful. He spoke his answer against Quin’s mouth, dissolving the world around them as he did and materializing them back in Quin’s room, straddling Quin and holding him down, mouth still on his and hand still on Quin’s jaw.
“I know.”
* * *
The memory is ragged, edges chewed, all the more painful for having been regrown countless times, stronger and more stubborn with each return, no matter how often it is devoured.
Quin’s knees ache, pressed to a hard wooden floor. His hands are bound, clasped palm to palm, rough fibers and the nodules of rosary beads digging into his flesh. Light seeps through the gaps between boards nailed over the window, sick and bright. His breathing is very loud, tear-wet and choked.
He is inside the moment.
He is outside the moment. It is only a memory.
He is inside his flesh, hundreds of thousands of miles and many years away.
He is inside his flesh, and he is not alone.
His angel is here.
The memory is a skein of thread the color of blood unwound from the core of him.
In the dark, something buzzes, it hums. It moves, though it no longer breathes.
Lena is with him. Too small, too fragile. She shouldn’t have to see this. No one should have to see this. He wants to tell her to cover her eyes. He wants to cover his own, but his hands are bound and so are hers, and there is nothing he can do to comfort her.
Tears drip from his nose, from the point of his chin.
“This is love,” their father tells them. “Perfect love. Perfect faith. This is how we will make a god.”
Quin hears the words in his room on the station as his angel digs nails made from the stuff of existence into his flesh, pulling the words out of him again. Words that step across his skin, along the curve of his ear, like the feet of a fly. Not one fly, but a dozen, a hundred, clustered in the corner of the room, where he doesn’t want to look, where he can’t help looking. Where the man—
Time slips, a thread unwound and re-wound again before being snapped.
“This is love,” his father says. “Faith alone is not enough. Gods require love, and you will love your god before the end. Your love will feed Him. When all else is stripped away, when fear has eaten everything else from you, you will worship Him, because you will know then that He is the only thing that can save you. He is the only way you can be free.”
“No!” Quin shouts the word, maybe then, maybe now, but it changes nothing.
Time slips again, runs backward. Before the chapel, in the barn, his father leads a starved man picked up from the side of the road by a rope tied to his waist.
“Watch,” he tells Quin and Lena, light burning in his eyes. “This is how gods are born.”
He anoints the man’s skin, washes his feet, sobbing prayers.
“My faith isn’t enough,” he tells Quin, tears unable to quench the fire burning and burning in him. “It has to be your sister. It has to be you. Don’t look away.”
He makes them watch as he plies the knife with loving kindness, each cut a prayer. He makes them watch as he twists the man’s head back and whispers in his ear.
“You will become so much more.”
Another stutter, another thread pulled, snapped. They are in the chapel. Their father binds their hands. He binds the man as well, like a spider’s prey, tucked up below the ceiling. He nails boards over the windows and the door. He leaves Quin and Lena in the stinking dark with the dead man, the smell growing worse every minute, every day. He tells them to love their god and to pray.
Time lurches forward, then crawls. How long have they been in the chapel? An eternity.
Quin is dizzy with hunger, hollow and fever-hot. Lena slumps on the dusty floor beside him, her breath shallow. Unconscious – a mercy – but still alive. He will follow her soon. If he falls, will he have enough strength to catch himself with his bound hands, or will he smash his face into the floor? He tastes blood at the back of his throat. It has already happened. He is already—
Falling. Fighting not to fall.
This isn’t love, a voice insists. Quin’s voice? Someone else’s?
His father is sick. He needs help.
No.
Quin needs help.
He will not love his father’s god. He will not look. He does not believe.
The man is dead. He is a corpse, not a god. Buzzing, terrible darkness crawls across the man’s body until that crawling dark is all Quin can see.
The flies walk across his skin instead of the man’s. Is he hallucinating? Each step is a word, the voice in his head commanding him – Turn your gaze upon me.
Quin fights it, but he cannot fight for long. He is hungry, he is tired. It hurts so much, and he just wants it to stop. He looks where he does not want to look. He does not want to believe, but—
Above him, the dark buzzes and crawls. The air is hot and thick. Dust. Rot. A hundred thousand wings beat and trembling bodies feast. And—
The memory stutters, teeth-torn, shredded, by long-fingered hands on his chest, then sinking between his ribs, inside his skin. The most intimate touch of all – his angel rummaging around inside him, picking the memories clean, leaving him hollow.
The smell of the chapel. The taste of death, thick and clotted in the air. Wanting to die. Wanting it to end.
The promise in his mind that if he prays, it will. If he believes, if he loves his father’s god, he will be free.
“I—” Quin says.
And the god, the crawling dark mass beneath the ceiling, shifts, opens its eyes, opens its mouth and speaks a holy word.
Quin screams. The word sears through him, through every layer of his flesh and bone, leaving a dark, ragged hole in his chest. He is still screaming now. He has always been screaming.
The sound pours from him with the thread of memory. Unwound from his heart and gathered in the angel’s hands.
Murmuration arches above him, glutted and full. The memory is a shadow between his teeth, swallowed down like slick oil.
Murmuration is inside him, is him. And then his angel is a thousand, thousand beaks and claws and wings. A swarm, a legion. A murmuration filling every inch of space in Quin’s room, swallowing and suffocating every bit of light.
A shuddering gasp. Quin falls into blissful unknowing, spent. The last thing he hears, does not hear, as every terrible thing spools away from him, is an echoing cry that could be pleasure or pain, both or neither, nothing at all.
* * *
Quin woke with the covers stripped off his naked body, not shivering, but on the cusp of it. The not-quite-tangible sensation of sweat dried to something tiny and crystalline coated his skin. Post-fuck sore. Stretched thin, headachy like a hangover, regret seeping in to fill all the empty spaces the moment he opened his eyes.
He’d made a terrible mistake. He’d been sober, clean, quit of the angel, but last night, he’d gone back. Why?
Feathers stuck to his pillow, tucking themselves into the folds of his sheets. The quill of one poked him in the back, and he imagined the veins of it imprinting themselves on his skin. Murmuration crouched on the chair next to the tiny desk that was the only other real piece of furniture in Quin’s room.
The angel had a way of moving like liquid that was at once erotic and unsettling. It always left Quin feeling seasick.
Murmuration crossed to the bed and perched beside him. He trailed a hand over Quin’s chest, over his belly, but no lower, only making the queasy feeling worse and leaving gooseflesh in his wake.
“Delicious, as always.” A smile with too many teeth; a predator’s smile.
Quin pushed himself to a sitting position, but he didn’t quite have the strength to push Murmuration’s hand away. The angel looked entirely too self-satisfied. The motion of his fingers gave the impression not just of touching Quin, but of sinking into him, seeking within him and pulling the choicest bits out to eat.
