Black and Orange (9 page)

Thanksgiving to the black feast.

The food. The salt of old times.

Thanksgiving to the bleeding feast.

He tried to disregard the chorus. In the morning he would be alive and well, maybe resting among cadavers, but still breathing air and living and needing. This torment was no longer for the mother he’d fooled in the soft, wet darkness. This torment was a purer kind. He didn’t have to pretend he was someone else with the Priestess of Morning. She could change him. He knew she could.

Paul’s mind ripped him backwards, back to the meeting with the Archbishop. Both Archbishops…

Raymond Traven’s dead lips were syncing with a man’s from the Old Domain.

“We have a new Bishop, brother,” the Archbishop of Midnight said into the cone.

The Archbishop from the other world gasped with delight. “Another Bishop, already brother? Slippery business, so, so slippery there. I smell red.”

“His name is Paul Quintana.”

Raymond’s lips bubbled with each syllable and his dead eyes moved to Paul. “Welcome Bishop. The Church of Morning recognizes you.” The eyes went back to
Sandeus
Pager. “Have you dispersed the seeds amongst any others?”

Sandeus
took a moment and then said, “The other contingencies haven’t any members worthy of accepting their wisdom, brother.”

Raymond’s eyes went gray. A string of bloody snot coursed from his nose and swung into the crook of his mouth. “You must prepare, brother. Chaplain Cloth is already on his way.”

Sandeus’s
posture changed. “But... it’s not yet the 31
^st
.”

“The world has changed. The seasons have little power to hold him any longer. The gateway is ready to burst wide and the pillars are at ready. Give thanksgiving to the blood! Drink it from the brain carafe. Drink and drink, brother. The Tomes are read as such. This is our time. The Time of Opening. The Time of Arrival. The time of Tomes with wet script. Thanksgiving to it all.”

Paul shot up as the memory left him. The snorts and grizzly chuckles slid down his mind in oily black clots.

A door opened then and a shimmering red glow of torchlight wiggled into the grooves of the distant coffins, illuminating the runes scrolled into stone. Paul’s eyelashes fluttered. The symbols began to make sense, not that he ever learned their complexities, but there were thousands of other little brains growing in his lungs, and
they
understood the runes—they understood much about the Churches of Midnight and Morning—and the Church Eternal, the house of Chaplain Cloth.

The marrow seeds grew inside his lungs (slippery black blossoms sprung forth among others boiling orange in color). Paul became sidetracked with the horrible growth, which amplified in a frenzy. He remembered a door in the catacomb opening. Footsteps echoed off the cavernous planes. He thrashed like a snared rabbit and his bladder quivered uneasily.

Black feast: let us taste the night.

Orange feast: let us taste the dawn.

Everlasting: let us taste it all!

A real voice floated into him and he clenched the sides of the coffin. He wasn’t bound, and though he had full knowledge of this, his other brains would not allow him to slip off the side, gain his feet and run like hell. He was staying. The marrow blossoms said to remain and he would.

Paul, we’ll set your soul out to rot and slip apart. Paul, when it’s gone she will be the only thing.

“Who are you?” The bustling wind through the tomb stopped. Silence drove a spike of doubt through him. Was the damage from the seeds permanent? Would this never end? “This is bullshit!
Who are you?
”

A hand caught his sweaty, cold, ruined suit. Snaps of light danced across his vision. His head must have struck the stone.

“You know who I am.”

“Cole?” Paul sighed with relief. The ugly visage bobbed above him.

“How are things, Paul?”

Two thick fingers pressed down on Paul’s lips before he could yell something caustic. After a moment Cole slid his fingers off and leaned against an adjacent coffin.

“They killed Traven,” said Paul.

“Pricks, I’ll have someone call Val.” Cole sniffed, as though idle conversation had already worn on him.

“What the hell are those seeds?”

“The blossoms are now a part of you, like a thousand new organs. You’ve been blessed.”

“How long do they last?” Paul’s muscles were still confused by general numbness and the retardation of nerve impulses. “Do the blossoms make us... like the Nomads?”

The Bishop scratched his scarred jaw. “The Nomads have the blood of the Old Domain in their veins. Marrow seeds open doors for us the Nomads already had open at birth. Theirs is a power wasted and unappreciated—the Nomads cannot do what we do, nor can we possess their ability. We are converse to them. Only the Chaplain has full control of the Old Domain’s power. I thought you read the Tomes of Eternal Harvest, Quintana.”

“Don’t chastise me! I’ve got
voices
singing in my mind!”

Cole’s eyes ignited. It startled Paul because there was no light to make them well up with gold, and they managed not only to conjure the sparkling hue, but to hold it. “
The children have already called to you?
”

“Who?”

“You have a natural connection. This is better than I could have hoped for.” Cole tasted something in the air and savored it for several moments. The flavor almost put him into a trance. “Have you any idea what happens every 31
^st
?”

“The Heralding, the Hunt and the Harvest.”

“Yes, you know the simple version, the child’s story. You know that Chaplain Cloth comes to visit once a year with his children, to hunt and kill someone
special
, but you have no clue of the significance of the act itself. Every time the Nomads fail to protect the Heart, like last year, things move more quickly—that gateway to the Old Domain may be large enough now to open permanently. Finding this year’s Heart is essential to our future. And I’m not just talking about the Church of Midnight. I’m talking about you and me, Paul. Our futures. So you need to listen.”

“Whatever you say, Bishop.”

Paul’s throat constricted under Cole’s forearm and everything lapsed into pain and suffocation. “I have no time for flippancy.”

 
Paul gulped for air.

“Will you backtalk to the future Archbishop of Midnight. Will you?”

He couldn’t shake his head but Paul did so with his eyes. Cole released and he gagged as his Adam’s Apple righted itself.

“Just keep listening to the children’s call and we will be fine at the Heralding. Take this obligation seriously and you’ll get your Priestess.”

Paul’s voice was burning and hoarse. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Cole drifted back and the darkness ate his hulking form. “After the Heralding, everything will make sense. Just keep listening to Cloth’s children.”

Paul waited in the dark, with the cold and with the ghosts, hoped for morning. Everything drained from his old life and filled into his new life. When things had finally been righted he opened himself up again. Listened for the call.

Sunshine and morning, two of Martin’s favorites. All he needed was some fair-trade coffee and he’d despair through this big mistake just fine. After Teresa went to sleep the previous night, he tossed and turned a little. She went right to sleep, probably since her demons had poured out and the burden of containing them had left. Martin, on the other hand, had to fight the urge to wake her up every minute and throttle some sense into her about this
Flagstaff
visit.

This morning he woke and felt no better. He pulled out a medical book to delve into the mysteries of the lungs’ pleural cavity. He’d been reading these same two books for a few months now, but Teresa couldn’t have named them if you asked her. She rarely gave notice of his books; she read magazines and romance novels and he read an occasional DC comic book chased by surgical manuals and acupressure guides.
The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy
and
Cancer Treatment: Complimentary and Alternative Medicine
, a nice mingling of Western and Eastern. If he actually got Teresa to a hospital, no glassy-eyed doctor was letting his Teresa die, not out of indifference. Not on Martin’s watch.

After they haggled with the tire shop to take a bad check, they got back on the road. His stomach was past the point of needy, angry, snarling, twisting ache. Now the organ was cold-silent like an ocean mine ready to detonate. He released his eyes from the road for a minute. Teresa sat beside him with little indication of the same painful hunger, even if the truth surfaced in her fading skin and crabby circles around her eyes.

“We could try that credit card again.”

Her women’s magazine had her fixated. She swept a page to the side and smoothed it down. “The canceled one?”

“I thought that identity was still clean.”

“The card-holder is in collections. We broke our ties with that one back in Duluth, remember?”

“Are you positive the card no longer works?” he asked.

“You’d have to swipe all four pieces.”

“You cut it up? Do you still have the pieces?”

“Hold down your desperation, kid. Do you really want the law on us again?”

“Do you really want me to answer a rhetorical question?” asked Martin, almost to himself.

Teresa took out a fresh box of cloves from her shirt pocket.

He persisted. “We don’t even have money for another tank of gas—this is cutting it close.”

She shook free a black stick and regarded it with dreary impatience. The expression made her look well beyond fifty.

Martin laughed in dismissal. “We’re losing our touch. We should have talked
Señor
Swindle into a better deal—no way was that tire eighty bucks. It hardly looks better than the one that blew out.”

“He took the check, you could give him that. We’re lucky they had a tire for this hunk of crap.”

“This hunk of burning nostalgia, is what you mean.”

“You’re going to miss the exit.”

She was right. Martin cranked the steering wheel right and cut off a fluorescent-lime jeep, which promptly barked with its horn. The van hitched at the sudden redirection and Martin prayed the new tire would prove worthy, just like this detour.

~ * ~

A few years ago they’d gotten adventurous and drove through Teresa’s parents’ neighborhood in
Flagstaff
. It wasn’t the first time they had made a drive-by visit and Martin figured it was enough for Teresa to see whether her father’s Cadillac was still parked sideways in the driveway or that her mother’s rose bushes remained trimmed. He’d spent enough time with Teresa to realize that visits here were never easy for her; even though she could stare something daunting directly in the eye on Halloween, Martin often sensed the silent aftershocks of her missed youth after their trips to their neighborhood. She’d wanted to knock on their door for some time now.

This time, as Martin wheeled the van around every suburban turn, the weight of that last visit must have stymied her courage. Teresa looked absolutely pale with the prospect of meeting her parents again. Martin couldn’t imagine their roles reversed. He was scared to death for her. If you told him his family was just ten feet away, he’d have probably run in the opposite direction and kept running until his legs gave out. Not that he hated them or anything, just that he wasn’t
supposed
to see them ever again.

And that must have been the feeling in the air this morning. Something heavy pushed down on the Santa Fe tiled roofs and crisp greens lawns. The homes slowly resembled terracotta monsters with wide-hinged jaws. Maybe the rosebushes would be dead. Or the Cadillac would be under a greasy tarp. How would Teresa react to seeing something like that? They were breaking the Messenger’s fundamental ground rules:
No permanent contacts. No family. No friends. You must keep moving. Always moving.

He noticed Teresa sat straighter. Her fulsome almond hair had become slightly oily without showering, but for the most part she scrubbed up nicely in the auto shop bathroom. She saw him looking and said, “My mother was always anal about appearances. How do I look?”

“No makeup?”

She poked his shoulder sharply with two fingers. “Ass.”

“You look awesome,” he said.

“You should think about seeing your parents too, while we’re on this coast,” she said.

“They’ll be the same, which means they won’t appreciate the visit.”

He could tell Teresa prepared to argue, but they pulled alongside the humble mission-styled home, which was older than the others on the block. The house had finer tiling and stucco, and the lawn looked freshly-mown. Sunrays bent off the blue shell of a Cadillac sitting in the driveway and the rosebushes had reached full bloom. Martin glanced over. His partner’s face had become stricken at the sight of them.

~ * ~

Teresa waited before the old cedar door, a step from a straw welcome mat with pumpkins and ghosts. With Martin standing close behind, she glanced to a sun-faded cardboard witch peering through the leaded-glass window. These tired decorations were things for other people, for acquaintances, for trick o’
treaters
, not for the people who lived in this house. Her parents would have skipped this holiday completely if they had the choice, and Teresa could scarcely blame them.