On the Verge (26 page)

Dakryma knew Channary’s tree. Given his immortal nature he’d had plenty of time to delve deeply into not only the theoretical and practical aspects of art and its history but also the technical side of its production. Perhaps because he spent so much time in the dark traversing dreams and visions, he found himself gravitating toward light and color. In particular he had become a bit of an expert in the field of natural pigments and their use by artists from the Paleolithic era to the present day. Channary’s tree was a garcinia and its sap could be harvested and used as paint. Gamboge yellow as it was called was a brilliant saffron hue and had been used by artists for centuries.

That was all fine and good, but the thing that gave Dakryma pause was the fact that the garcinia was a tropical plant native to Southeast Asia, growing in all its verdant glory in the temperate Northwest on a night that was only a few degrees above freezing. Suddenly that silent warning that had sounded deep in Dakryma’s brain when he had first met Channary began again, urging him to beat a hasty retreat from her almond eyes and amazing breasts and out into the safety of the night. This time, without his more base longings getting in the way, he actually decided to heed the warning.

He turned to step down from the ledge and there she was, her face a mere foot away from his own. He stared at her blankly for a moment until he realized with growing dread that instead of her supple, bronze body there was nothing below her beautiful face but the pearlescent white tube of her trachea and a mass of oozing viscera. Her disembodied head smiled at him, that same sweetly sinister smile from their walk back to her house.

“I’ve always wanted to have an incubus,” Channary said, her voice flat and distant. “Everyone said your kind were better than vampires in bed.”

“We are,” Dakryma said, “and you weren’t half bad yourself, you know. What are you exactly? I’d like to start spreading rumors about your kind’s sexual prowess. The Verge deserves to know.”

“I am called an ahp,” Channary said, her voice somewhere between a moan and a growl. “We are Cambodian folk spirits, cursed to be ever hungry, stalking the night for blood to quench our undying ravenousness.”

“The whole business sounds rather unpleasant,” Dakryma said.

“It is,” replied Channary, “and lately I’ve grown tired of all of Fremont’s horny college kids and drunk hippies. I wanted to try something new. Then you showed up and I just couldn’t help myself.”

Her head bobbed in midair, the bloodied organs hanging below her jiggling obscenely.

“Kiss me,” she said. “I want to taste you again.”

Dakryma regarded her with revulsion.

“You can’t be serious,” he scoffed. “You want me for your next meal? A fellow creature of the Verge? You must know that immortal flesh is tainted, spoiled from living too long past its expiration date.”

“That’s what you say,” breathed Channary moving closer to him, her livid red lips swimming before Dakryma’s eyes. “But I’ve heard you might be the key to my salvation. You, creature of the Verge, might be able to satisfy my incessant need for sustenance, for something to make me whole. You have no idea what it’s like to spend eternity this way, always starving, always searching for the next kill, hoping that the next bag of blood and guts will save me from my torment. I’ve heard that the flesh of an incubus is sustained by misery and longing. Perhaps if I consume what I know to be a reflection of my true self, it will complete me after all these years of suffering.”

“And if it doesn’t?” asked Dakryma.

“Then, hopefully, it will poison me,” Channary said with her lifeless voice. “Perhaps your corrupt flesh will give me the true death I’ve been denied for so long.”

Dakryma pressed himself up against the wall. He wasn’t used to feeling trapped. He was usually the one that did the hunting and ambushing. Channary opened her mouth and moved so close to Dakryma that the offal that hung from her neck brushed up against his chest.

“Just let me feast upon you,” she said and her disembodied head reared back like a snake’s before coming towards Dakryma’s face with the speed and intensity of a viper.

Dakryma’s reflexes fired and he grabbed the ahp’s pendulous organs tightly in his fist and yanked his hand upwards with a mighty jerk that caused Channary’s head to whip down quickly so that she now hung upside down. There was a noise like a flag billowing in the window and Dakryma unfurled his night dark wings, crouched down and then leapt up and out of the window. The ominous pair hung in the air for a moment as though suspended in time before Dakryma beat his wings hard several times, propelling them high into the midnight sky while Channary’s head flailed about, twisting this way and that, attempting to sink its teeth into whatever part of the fallen angel it could manage to reach.

“I have an easier way to put you out of your misery,” Dakryma said.

He saw his shadow writ large across Channary’s roof, his silhouette blotting out the light from the moon, and he spoke to it.

“Go get us some friends,” Dakryma barked and his shadow raced off over the rooftops, slipping from one to another like a velvet ghost. The moment it disappeared from view a hundred crows, nearly impossible to see against the background of the night sky, flew rapidly toward Dakryma and the ahp.

Dakryma waited until the murder of crows was within throwing distance, dancing this way and that in midair to avoid the ahp’s incessant attempts to tear away at his flesh. Then, when he could see the beady eyes of his ebony brethren, he flung the ahp’s head back up and over his shoulder as though brandishing a whip and then fired his forearm forward, propelling the ahp’s haunted visage and glistening entrails through the air and directly into the middle of the flocking crows. One of them caught it and immediately began to tear at the coils of intestines that hung gruesomely from Channary’s horrorstruck face. Another ripped away a hunk of spleen, while still another pecked at the demon’s eye. The ahp didn’t scream even as the rest of the crows began pulling the remains of her body apart piece by piece, fighting over the more generous chunks of lung and liver. She only stared back at Dakryma until both eyes had been consumed, that same insidious smile on her face.

The crows didn’t stop until there was no evidence left of Channary or her fiendish alter ego. Their bellies full, they flew off back into the night, their caws slowly receding into the dark corners of a Seattle midnight. Dakryma waited a few beats of his magnificent ebony wings, his eyes on the horizon of rooftops, until he saw the feathery shade of his silhouette gliding back to him. It came once again to rest below him at an obtuse angle to his hovering form. With his shadow and his flesh intact he was about to take off into the dark night when he caught sight of the garcinia tree below him.

It was withering, the vivid foliage rapidly disintegrating into dry, curled leaves that rained down on the ground like dun-colored pages from a dusty old tome. That only confirmed what was already obvious—Channary’s tree was connected to the Verge. Without her presence the tree would perish, but there might still be time. Dakryma floated down to the ground and folded his wings. They immediately disappeared into his body and he could once again pass for human. He stalked quickly around the trunk as the silvery bark rapidly split and cracked into a desiccated husk. About three-quarters of the way around he saw it, a single tube of bamboo and a short incision in the bark. He wrenched the tube off the tree before the creeping drought ruined whatever sap might be inside. He peered at the bamboo vial and was surprised to see that it was nearly full. Channary must have started the collection years ago, so slowly did the precious sap ooze from the tree’s veins.

It was his lucky day. Ordinary garcinia resin was costly enough, but the gamboge from a tree infused by the power of the Verge was priceless. He carefully stowed it in his shirt pocket as the rest of the tree shriveled and died before his eyes. He walked back to the front of the house, and traversed the ahp’s steep stairs with a slight bounce in his step, whistling a Satie nocturne as he went. This was an omen, whether good or bad, he couldn’t be sure. You could never be sure of anything when the Verge was involved, but there was magic in the air. Halloween was only a few moonrises away and he was closer than ever to exacting his revenge on that harridan Ophidia. Seattle was quickly becoming one of his favorite cities.

F
reya sat in her living room, her ratty bathrobe wrapped around her sore and tired body, nursing a cup of lukewarm coffee and listening to the water run in her shower down the hall. Rusty was in there. He’d been a gentleman and let her clean up first after they had made the long trek back to her place after their adventure underground. They’d raised quite a few eyebrows along the way and nobody wanted to sit next to them on the bus back up to Capitol Hill, although the driver didn’t even bat an eye when they boarded bruised and bloodied and caked in foul-smelling mud from the bog.

Freya was anxious to get Rusty to some place where he could rest. The relatively fresh air above ground seemed to do wonders for his constitution, but his odd countenance was still peaked and his eyes, usually so full of the fire of determination, looked glassy and distant. She’d urged him to go first to the shower so that he could lie down and rest but he insisted she go ahead of him. Freya wasn’t surprised when she emerged after a thorough scrub to find him still standing near the door, ensuring that he wouldn’t soil her tidy apartment.

Now as she sat there at her kitchen table staring down her short hallway, she imagined herself slipping out of her robe and stepping into the shower with him. She pictured her body pressed up against his as the warm water trickled down his irregular features. It sent a little thrill of desire through her and she felt her long suppressed sexuality stir. She never thought much about sex. She told herself she was too busy with other more important things. But it was nice to know that she was still a woman with desires, that she still was capable of craving the sensual touch of another person, of wanting, needing sex. And she wanted Rusty. Badly.

Maybe it was all that they had been through together in the last couple of days. Or, perhaps, it was how acutely human she had felt in comparison to those creatures from the Verge that had crossed her path. For whatever reason though, the passion she’d forced into dormancy all this time was finally awakening and it was stronger than ever.

She put her cup of coffee down and instead of just imagining that she walked down the hall to join her strange companion in the shower, she did it and he didn’t protest. They were in there for a long time; the water was cold by the time they got out and toweled off, collapsing exhausted into her bed.

Freya woke up the next morning just before eleven. She shifted slightly in bed and was instantly reminded of just how much punishment she had put her body through the day before. Next to her was Rusty’s broad back, his mane of wavy hair standing out starkly against her white sheets. She wondered if she should wake him, but instead she slipped out of bed and into the kitchen to grab something to eat. Settling on a piece of toast with peanut butter, she had just finished off the last bite when Rusty came down the hall. When he saw her he stopped and for a moment didn’t say a word. Freya was just beginning to feel very awkward when suddenly he spoke.

“Last night was perfect,” he said quietly.

“I thought so too,” Freya said.

“Do we really have to go out and get that other color?”

Freya stared down at her empty plate. She wanted to say no, to stay in bed with Rusty all day long, to forget about the ridiculous quest set upon them by some power-hungry madwoman, but she was afraid of what the consequences might be if they gave up now. Beldame had made her intentions perfectly clear: deliver the color or die.

“I think we do,” she told him in a quiet voice. “Let’s get this over with and then we can move on with our lives. How do you feel?”

“I’ll live,” he said. “At least, I think I will.”

Freya laughed hollowly, but the last color had nearly killed them multiple times. She didn’t hold out much hope for this next one.