The Edge of Ruin (7 page)

“Now that’s more what I’m talkin’ about. Some
serious
booty.” He grabbed Rhiana’s wrist and yanked her into the room. “Now get those clothes off, and get your ass in the bed.” Whiskey breath gusted into her face.

Rhiana reached out to her power, ready to freeze the breath in his chest, choke him on the offensive words, but she met an implacable wall.
Oh shit, he’s a paladin. Magic won’t work on him.
She felt a flash of all too human female fear.

Time for a human solution. She swung her purse and hit him in the temple while at the same time she drove the high heel of her shoe into his instep. He howled, clutched at his foot, and hopped. While he was off balance she shoved him hard in the chest. He crashed down on the unmade bed.

“First, I am Madoc’s daughter. Second, I’m in charge of you now. Third, I’m going to get you the sword.”

As she watched, the furious glare faded from the dark eyes, and calculation took its place. He wasn’t smart, but she bet he was cunning.

“Now get dressed. I’m taking you back to the compound.”

“No.” He folded his arms behind his head and stared up at her. “I like it here just fine. There’s shit to do in New Orleans.”

“Oh, really?” She looked ostentatiously around the room. “It’s pretty clear from the stink that you haven’t let a maid in here in days. I saw the room service tray outside the door. The women are coming here.” She forced herself to look at the crusted stains on the sheet. “And you don’t look like a music lover.”

For the briefest flash she saw Richard’s profile, eyes half closed, head thrown back as his hands swept across the keyboard of the piano. She pushed the memory aside.

“I’ll keep you supplied with whatever you want, but you need to be where I can find you fast.” Rhiana had a sudden inspiration. “And I need to keep you safe. You’re very important.”

R
ICHARD

T
he clink of silverware on china had me jerking upright, and the abrupt movement set my thigh to throbbing. The bedside lamp, a tall glass column, switched on, momentarily blinding me. I threw an arm across my eyes, but in that brief moment before spots exploded across my vision I had seen Cross.

“Oh, sorry,” the creature muttered. The light was dimmed, and I opened my eyes.

Cross dragged over a chair with one hand while with the other he tried to control the soup bowl. He wasn’t notably successful. Soup sloshed across his hand as he failed to keep the bowl balanced. Then the spoon shipped overboard and rang and clattered on the polished slate floor. Cross picked it up, blew across it, sat down, and began slurping. Noodles clung to his lower lip like a walrus’s bristles, then were quickly sucked in. Broth dribbled into his beard. Watching the homeless god eat was a stomach-turning experience. I swallowed hard a few times. My stomach sank back down.

I found myself staring at the Old One. In the weeks before Kenntnis’s capture our enemies had kept up a constant assault on Cross to keep him splintered. He had been reduced to a fragile stick figure barely able to muster up the strength to “see” magic, which was his primary use to the Lumina. But now that sickly creature was gone. Color shone in his cheeks. His eyes were clear. The envelope in which he wrapped his alien form looked strong and virile. I said as much, and got back Cross’s usual tactless response.

“Thanks. You look like shit.”

“I got shot. What’s your excuse for being so chipper? I thought you’d be almost permanently splintered with all the crap that’s going on in the world,” I countered.

“Yeah, things are getting rough out there, but when bad shit happens, good people, I mean truly good people, tend to get even better. They’re worshiping me
hard
, so I’ve got a little reserve built up against my asshole brethren. And, don’t forget, the chaos feeds me, too.”

Well, that was an alarming thought. “Help me up,” I ordered. I so didn’t want to face what that might portend while flat on my back.

Cross set aside his soup bowl, grabbed me by the forearm, and helped me sit up. He snatched up the pillow and revealed the Starfire and the sword hilt that had been hidden beneath it.

“Little paranoid?” Cross asked. He plumped up the pillow and leaned it against the curving steel and glass headboard. Thrusting his hands beneath my arms, he hoisted me back until I rested against the headboard. He was amazingly strong, and the pressure of his hands both tickled and hurt the muscles and tendons in my armpits. Moving also changed the throb in my thigh to a white-hot line of pain. I clamped my teeth together so hard that my jaw ached, and I still couldn’t hold back the strangled moan.

When I could talk again I snapped, “Can you blame me?”

“Nah. Your dad told me what happened. Talk about a co-worker gone bad.” Cross paused and cocked his head, considering. The flippant expression faded. “You gotta make sure no one in this building gets similar ideas.”

“And just how do I do that?”

“Use the sword.”

“Snyder tried to kill me out of greed, not because of all the craziness.”

“Yeah, but as our dimensions push deeper into your universe, your reality is going to get really fucked up. People are going to believe crazy, crazy shit, and sometimes the crazy shit’s going to start happening. You’ve gotta at least protect the people around you.”

I reset the pillows supporting my injured leg while I chewed on that. “Great, I can just picture how well that’s going to go over. Oh, by the way, if you want to keep your job you’ve got to let me touch you with this
sword.
”

“Tell ’em to think of it as your version of a drug test.”

I wasn’t buying it. I shook my head and then asked, “Will the madness affect your worshipers?”

“Richard, hello.” He bopped me on the forehead with the palm of his hand in a send-up of the V8 commercial. “Remember, believing in me is crazy, too.” It was said with that patient gentleness you reserve for the old and senile, or the very young.

With an irritable wave of my hand, I brushed off the condescension. “But you appeal to the best of our natures. Even if the underlying belief is irrational, I’ll settle for the good result.”

“Problem is, once
my
worshipers get organized, and agree to power sharing,
their
worshipers are going to come and kill
my
worshipers, and they’ve got a lot more warm, crazy bodies than I have.”

The silken black duvet cover snagged on a hangnail as I began to pleat it between my fingers. “That’s sad.”

“Which part? The killing or the fact that charity, love, forgiveness, and mercy are way less fun than righteous vengeance and punishing the infidels and the sinners?”

“Both, and what does that say about us as a species?” I said.

“That you suck, but you sure are tasty.” Cross lifted the bowl to his lips and slurped down the last of the soup.

Cross’s flippant response hit me wrong. Maybe it was the pain making me testy, but I wasn’t finding Cross amusing at—I peered at the Bose clock radio—two seventeen in the
A.M.
“Kenntnis thought we were worth the trouble. He believed in our ability to grow and change.”

“Yeah, but do
you
?” And the creature’s brown eyes were suddenly swallowed by his expanding pupils until they were just stone black. I had seen it happen a couple of times, and it still had the nape hairs trying to climb up my scalp. A million years of evolution were screaming at me that this thing was evil, and it would kill me, and I needed to run like a … a … I tried to not use the profanity, but nothing else would serve.
A motherfucker.

Papa can’t read my mind. He can’t know that I’m cursing like a sailor.

But you’ll slip and say it out loud sometime.

Stop it! Focus. Answer the question.

What was the question?

Are humans perfectible?

I got control of the cosmic kibitzers in my head, and thought back on the violence I’d witnessed in four years of police work. There was the toddler killed when his angry father had thrust a hose up his rectum and turned on the water as punishment for a full diaper. A woman beaten by her boyfriend until her face was just pulp, knifings at a party, drivers shooting each other because they got cut off in traffic. And beyond my small and petty personal experiences, there was all of history rolling out dark, and violent, and terrifying. There was the destruction of the Cathars. Auschwitz. Pol Pot’s killing fields. The body-choked rivers of Rwanda. I lay there unable to muster a single argument for why mankind deserved to survive, and I hated Cross for making me face how evil humans really were.
Maybe we do deserve to be cattle for the Old Ones.

Then my eye was caught by the Impressionist paintings hanging on the walls to either side of the gigantic bed. Shimmering water, flowers in dreamlike colors, misty landscapes. Twining through my errant thoughts were the haunting strains of
Il mio tesoro intanto
from Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
, and then the music modulated in the final movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. I could almost feel the keys of the piano beneath my fingers.

Next I looked at the enormous LED television hanging on the far wall, and I thought about the scientists, inventors, engineers, and machinists who had created that wonder of technology. I remembered thunder shaking the ground and vibrating in my chest that time Papa had taken me to Cape Canaveral to witness a space shot. I had been nine. The ship lifting skyward on a pillar of fire had been blurry because of the tears that filled my eyes. All of these were testaments to mankind’s genius.

Is that enough?

Were art and music and technological prowess enough to offset the horror? Well, there was love and sacrifice and generosity that sometimes transcended the hatreds between people.

It wasn’t rational, but a certainty that all these things were enough to justify our existence filled me. The tension headache pounding in my temples eased.

“Yes. Yes, I do.” Cross must have heard that certainty in my voice, because he straightened in the chair and his eyes became human again. “Now get back out there. Walk on water. Turn water into wine. You may be a fraud, but at least you’re
my
fraud, and you’re a fraud that appeals to what’s best about people. Give them hope. Help them hang on. We need them and we need you.”

Cross stood and looked down at me. “You’re taking an awful risk. I’m one of the monsters. I just happen to be on your side … for now. If I feed and use magic, I get stronger. There’s a chance I’ll revert to my essential nature, and then you’re really fucked.”

“And I believe in your ability to grow and change, too.” We held a look for a long time. Then Cross nodded and walked from the room.

I
n the late afternoon the Round Robin Bar in the Willard Hotel was fairly subdued. The after-work rush of lobbyists, lawmakers, bureaucrats, lawyers, and hookers hadn’t yet arrived.

Rhiana paused just inside the door and surveyed the room. She knew it was a famous Washington, D.C., watering hole, and this was the place Jack Rendell had suggested after she’d called him and asked to meet, but she’d never been here before. It was pretty, with wide expanses of rich green watered-silk wallpaper bisected with narrow vertical wood panels. It smelled of aftershave and liquor and money.

Jack Rendell leaned on the circular mahogany bar, one foot resting on the brass rail. A wide-mouthed martini glass was held negligently between his fingers, and the light through the red glass stem stained his fingers like blood.

There were only a few patrons in the bar, all of them were male, and they all reacted to Rhiana’s entrance. The hem of her long black wool coat swung at her knees and brushed at the tops of the stiletto-heeled black boots worn over form-fitting pants. She finished off the ensemble with a cashmere sweater, and a scarf pinned on her shoulder with a large amethyst brooch. There was a rattle like dry leaves in a high wind as
Wall Street Journal
s and
Washington Post
s were hurriedly lowered, and Rendell, sensing the tide of male attention flowing toward a single point, turned. The attention ebbed when it became apparent where Rhiana was heading.

“Hey,” Rendell said, saluting her with his glass.

“Hi.”

The young bartender hustled their way. His eyes were alight with interest and pleasure as he looked at Rhiana.

“Get you a drink, miss?”

“A Dubonnet on the rocks.”

Jack drained his martini and waved the glass at the bartender. “And I’ll take another.”

“So, how did things go with the archbishop?” Rhiana asked.

“He’s conferring with Rome. I expect we’ll get some action in a day or two.”

“Good.”

The bartender deposited the drink in front of her. She took a sip and couldn’t control the corners of her mouth.

Jack laughed. “You really are a baby, aren’t you? Would you rather have a Coke?”

Rhiana nodded and swallowed past the lump in her throat. She was feeling too depressed and humbled to respond with haughty rage to Jack’s familiarity. And she had asked him to meet her. The Coke arrived, and Rhiana gratefully cleared her tongue of the sharp alcohol taste.

“Why did you order it?” Jack asked. “The Dubonnet, I mean? It’s not a very common drink anymore.”

“My grandmother … adopted grandmother. She just loved Jackie Kennedy … all the Kennedys really. She talked all the time about how beautiful and sophisticated Jackie was, and how she drank Dubonnet on the rocks.”

Jack looked down at her, and some of the sharp calculation faded, replaced by a gentler emotion. “That’s kind of sweet. But stick with me, kid, and I’ll teach you how to drink.” He threw back his head and laughed. “That’s a hell of a trade. You teach me magic and I teach you how to booze.”

“Shhh. Not so loud,” Rhiana said.

Jack looked around the historic old bar. “Why not? All of this … this bullshit”—he swept an arm around—“is going to be gone soon.”

“Yeah, but we don’t want them waking up and panicking.”

“Really? I thought the whole point was panic. Well, never mind that. You called me, and I assume it wasn’t just for an update, since I’ve been reporting to your dad.”