Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods (24 page)

She smells of lily-of-the-valley, dusted heavy to hide the reek of fear. Someone very wealthy must have bought it for her. Scents like that are hard to come by.

Guilt spreads patterns of frost across the surface of my heart, but it doesn't touch the core. Pain flickers in Josie's eyes. I've forgotten; she hasn't.

I tip my head towards Lorence; it's the least I can do. Josie orders something as blood-red as her dress, but with far more kick.

"What are you doing here?" Josie asks.

A tendril of ink slips from beneath the strap of her dress, a questing tongue tasting the air. She shivers. The ink-shadow stains her eyes for a moment, too, turning them the color of lightning-struck wood.

"I was lonely," I say. It may be the most honest thing I've ever said; I don't know.

"Oh?" Her eyes are green again, mocking.

She lifts the long, black braid lying over my shoulder, running it through trembling hands.

"I wish I could do something for you." The words fall, a numb rush over my lips.

Josie is the most breathtaking woman I've ever known. Why can't I feel anything for her? I know what she meant to me, what she means to me, but I don't
feel
it. Not anymore.

"There's nothing you can do." She drops my braid, a soft slap against my leather.

Josie finishes her drink and orders another, her mouth set in a hard line that reminds me of Madam Senator and the case I should be on.

"There's nothing I can do for you, either." Josie steps back, eyes as hard as the line of her mouth.

She's right. There's nothing I can do except buy her drinks. And isn't there a selfish hope that her inhibitions will drop and we'll end up back in that decaying hotel room, listening to the remnants of humanity leave the Teatro while we fuck?

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Josie's next words send my pulse into the roof of my mouth. "Do you remember what you told me about your stepbrother and the night you got your scars?"

"No." The word emerges hoarse. I can't remember if it's a lie.

What did I tell her? What if I took her between, trying to make her forget?

Josie leans forward, her lips against my ear, her breath raising tiny hairs on my skin. Her voice is smoke and rough whiskey. "He called you his angel. They're shaped like wings, your scars."

When she draws back, I feel the absence of her breath.

"I don't think you're even human, anymore." Her hips sway as she walks back to the stage.

God help me, I'm wet and trembling. I want to throw her over the bar and nip the soft flesh of her thighs till she bleeds. Maybe she's right about me. Maybe I'm not human. Maybe I'm too much so.

Josie grips the microphone like she wants to throttle it. Her voice is steel wool; her eyes are fixed on me.

The blood-and-seawater light fills my mouth with salt. The world rolls, drowned in memory. Firelight flickers.

"The world is going to end." A voice speaks against my ear.

"It's already ending." I smell wet leather, tangle my fingers through wheat-gold hair, and pull wine-stained lips against mine. Rain drums. Hay prickles bare skin. "So, fuck me,"

I bite down hard, yank fabric roughly over hips; a body pushes into mine. A cry of pleasure and pain, and after, the world burns.

Josie's voice wails. Her smile is blade-edged. Her tattoos slither across her shoulders, chasing the ghost of my fingertips across her skin. Josie tips her head back, throat working. The song becomes a scream, her body shuddering, eyes rolling white between agony and ecstasy.

The bar squirms in murky half-light. Tentacles unfold. They undulate across the walls, wrap my arms, lift my hair. I drift in the green deep and they caress my bones.

I stagger for the door, retch on fire-scored pavement. Chill air slaps my face; I shift without meaning to. The threads binding past to present catch me, hurl me forward in time. My bones nearly shatter.

I brace myself against a wall, trembling. Damp, heavy breezes push air through the narrow, winding streets. My skin cold-sweats with borrowed dew. Where am I? When?

I walk, boots hushing over time-worn stone. I sympathize with Marco. I wonder why I'm hunting him. The Senator's envelope presses against my chest. I want to get this case over with and pretend there's a place I can go to that will feel like home.

Blonde hair, the smell of leather in the rain. I survived; he didn't. Fire scored my back with a thousand whips, tracing the shape of wings.

I walk along the waterfront, fighting memories that insist on surfacing, no matter how many times I try to give them away. I've begged the dark spaces teeming with star-ripe tentacles to take them, but they never do. There are no refunds on the price of survival.

I pass a nightclub. Tentacles — half-seen — lash the night. Shadows obscure the stars and they are just right. The club’s beat is a heart-sound, a pulse-thump. The building sways. It shivers. Pigeons weep and mourn in cages embedded in walls of slick, trembling flesh. Overhead, gulls still scream their laughter, but then they would, wouldn't they?

I know where I'm going now. Farther down the wharf is the man I need to see.

Vincenzo sits at the end of a pier jutting out into the water. The piles are ghosts against the lapping dark. Each weed-slicked piece of wood is topped with a creature with too many arms, suckers gripping rotten wood. They
sing.

The eerie-sweet sound licks my spine, too much like the timbre of Josie's voice. But instead of smoky-hot, the tentacles sing cold. How can things without mouths sing?

Their voices — if they can be called that — are vast, and reminiscent of cavern-glow and waving fronds. Their tears, should they ever cry, would taste of copper, iron, sulfur, and flame.

Vincenzo’s arm moves, his brush stroke jerky, involuntary.

"Ara." He doesn't turn.

The scant, pulsing light behind me illuminates the rotting pier. It shows Vincenzo's face and the gaping spaces where his eyes used to be.

I was the one who found him on bathroom tiles slick with blood. Vincenzo's head rested against the edge of a claw-footed tub. He wept.

Rather — his body shook with sobs and his eyes lay next to the drain in the otherwise-spotless tub, darker than the most cerulean sea and incapable of tears. Blood had spattered where they'd fallen, but otherwise, the porcelain remained white, white, white. His palms were stained rust-dark; so were his clothes. I nearly slipped in the blood covering the floor, but in the vast, arctic space of the tub, there were only a few drops, trailing from the drain back to the eyes.

"I can still
see
." Vincenzo's sobs turned to laughter while I held him.

"Hello, Vincenzo." I can't tell if he flinches or not when I lay my hand on his shoulder.

"You smell like her," he says. Did I tell him about Josie? I can’t remember.

"I need information." My soles should be hard after years of running; my soul should be hard after years of leaving myself behind. Some things R'lyeh will never cure. Not in any place — not in any time.

"Watch the painting." Vincenzo's voice holds the same quavering tone as Josie's song.

Pain flickers through the space where his eyes should be, stars shifting through black, bloody caverns. I see blue, crimson-tinged spheres against porcelain-white; I feel him shaking in my arms. It's too late for apologies.

Vincenzo places a fresh canvas on the easel. His arm jerks, spastic. I watch over his shoulder as he paints. Flames. Venice burns.

"Thank you," I say.

Vincenzo's body hitches; he might be bleeding the paint, crimson, saffron, umber. He doesn't stop. I leave him to his colors and his pain.

I shift. Sideways, cross-wise, moving through a cold space as crushing as the deepest parts of the sea. My lungs compress. Tendrils wrap me. They lap my heart, sucker-hold it; they caress every part of my spine. They take a bitter-sweet song sung in a smoky voice like burnt almonds. I shiver as it fades; salt lingers on my tongue. It leaks from my eyes and I don't bother to brush it away.

Venice burns.

Heat batters me. I throw an arm up to shield my face. Inhuman tongues hiss unknown words, shiver laughter, babbling inside the flames. The stars spin. The canal heaves. Angles and rounded nubs of stone-not-stone — worn by untold eons — rise, dripping. The city would shudder in revulsion if it could; instead, it screams as it burns.

Against all reason, I turn toward the city's fire-wrapped heart. Sweat pools beneath my leather. My scars itch, pulling tight.

Marco is here. I was wrong. He wasn't seeking the end of the world, just the end of
his
world.

I find him in the little restaurant off Calle Mandola - Josie's restaurant. The walls are black, curling with smoke-wrought shadows. They don't shift and unfold yet, but they will. Everyone else has either fled or burnt to death. Only Marco remains, belly-up to the bar.

He turns a pock-marked face towards me, unsurprised. Flame makes his already-dark skin ruddy. His eyes shine, and not only with the glow of alcohol. He mimes a toast, lifting his glass, and throws the liquor back, grimacing.

"I knew my mother would send someone."

I don't bother to answer. How long until the flames reach us? I pour myself a drink, and refill Marco's glass. Nothing unfolds against my tongue as I drink. My eyes don't water. It's only alcohol.

"She wants you to come home." I pour again.

Marco slugs the drink in his glass. His eyes shine empty, staring into a middle distance only he can see. When he ran, how far did he go? Has he seen the end of all things? Did he watch his mother die screaming? His eyes are unsettling.

"What are
you
running from?" he asks.

My stomach lurches. I try to pour another shot, but most of it spills on the bar. All this alcohol - we're a Molotov cocktail, waiting to happen. "What do you mean?"

"You wouldn't have chased me this far if you weren't running from something." Marco's eyes fix me.

I shudder. The sensation goes all through me. I don't taste what's in my glass; I taste cheap wine stolen from a funeral table the day we buried our parents — my father, his mother.

My stepbrother.

I saved his life once, pulled him out of the river. He was nine; I was ten. Lying on his back, rocks darkening with the water running from his skin, squinting into the sun, he called me his guardian angel.

I breathe deep, and draw in a lungful of wet leather and hay. Firelight flickers from the old trashcan we dragged into the barn. Rain drums the roof. Our feet hang over the edge of the loft, heels kicking dust-pale wood. A horse whickers softly.

"I hate them," my stepbrother says.

"Who?" I drink straight from the bottle, bitter tannins clinging to my skin, staining cracked lips red.

"All those people at Mom and Dad's funeral. They're all a bunch of fucking phonies."

He takes the bottle from me. A storm hangs over us that has nothing to do with the rain. A weight presses between my shoulder blades; my skin itches. There is something waiting to rise.

Then, there, I am pulled out of myself. I am in Venice, looking at Marco across the bar, watching the world burn. I am floating above the vastness of a star-filled eye. Time means nothing.

I know what I will do to survive.

My stepbrother finishes the wine, tosses the bottle against the far wall where it shatters, spraying glass. A few droplets fall into the fire, making it snap and sizzle. I retrieve another bottle, pen-knife out the cork. We stole a whole armful as we left the funeral.

My stepbrother says, "They're lucky they aren't alive to see what happens next."

I don't have to ask what he means. He feels what's coming, but has he seen the end of the world? Does he know what I'll do to make sure I will?

"What's the worst sin you can think of?" I squint into the dark on the far side of the barn. "Not that Bible shit. Something real."

Shadows shift, fold and unfold. Jason looks down, heels drumming the wood, dust spinning up every time they hit.

"Hurting someone you love and meaning it."

I nod. The stars shift. They've always been right. I know what I have to do to survive. Tendrils reach for me, the color of starlight and as cold as the moon. I have to wrap myself in a sin I can never forgive, the worst thing I can think of, a pain I can never forget or give away. It's the only way to stay human.

I reach for Jason's hand, squeeze fingers as chill as ice.

"The world is ending." Jason's breath is rapid, wine-hot.

I lean close. Our faces almost touch. He understands what's coming and he wants me to save myself because I once saved him. I could refuse his gift, but I don't. My heart beats, cracks, and salty water rushes in.

"It's already ended," Jason says.

"So, fuck me." I pull him close, bite down hard on a kiss. I taste cheap wine and blood.