The next thought hit me hard, although it was the reason I was sitting in a pretty apartment garden right then instead of being dragged through the streets of Heaven in disgrace. Not only was Anaita admitting she had something to hide, she was afraid of me. Me, the angelic equivalent of the guy who mopped her floors. She didn’t know what I knew or who I’d talked to, didn’t know what kind of allies I had, who might be backing my play. In fact, the boldness (yes, some might call it idiocy) of my walking right into her home had worried her badly. Because why would any sane angel dare to anger one of the Powers and Principalities right in her own house?
Just because me, was the real reason, of course. And Anaita knew me and my history at least well enough to guess that might be the case. But she couldn’t be certain, which was probably all that was keeping me alive and relatively comfortable in my fleshly shell.
Was there some way I could bring in bigger artillery on my side? I couldn’t believe all four of the other ephors were in on this with her, Karael and Terentia and the rest. But I didn’t know the territory well enough, didn’t know what was going on among my superiors—heck, I didn’t know if I could trust my own archangel, Temuel, even though he’d helped me several times. I wondered if another talk with Karl Gustibus might be useful.
As I sat and watched birds hopping across the cement paving stones looking for seeds, performing their due diligence before winter came for real and fucked everything up for them, I felt a surge of resolve. The only good alternatives for me required me to neutralize Anaita somehow, once and for all, so there was no point in letting the scary magnitude of what I’d gotten into affect me too badly. I had been heading in this direction for most of a year. Yes, I’d shut a door behind me today, but I had already been long past the point when I could have turned around and gone back.
• • •
One good thing that had come out of the trip to Donya Sepanta’s sprawling estate was that I’d seen the Amazons in action, at least the low-level kind, and they were good soldiers. No nonsense, no second-guessing, and they had both done what they were supposed to. That was important, because now that I had officially put Anaita on notice, I could feel trouble coming like a sailor feels a storm.
I had some errands to run, and Oxana was trying to get her new pictures downloaded onto Caz’s computer, so I invited Halyna to drive downtown with me.
“Where do we go?” she asked as we headed north on Middlefield, past shops and chic restaurants and a few crazy-expensive houses now subdivided into merely expensive apartments.
“To get some new phones.”
“But you have a really good phone!”
“Yes, and it’s been tapped by so many different people they have to take a number and wait in line to eavesdrop. I’m not going to war with compromised communications.” She looked at me, confused. “I don’t trust my phone anymore,” I explained. “My bosses gave it to me. I don’t trust them, either.”
“But is your boss not God?” Halyna asked, intrigued.
“Supposed to be, but there’s quite a few levels of middle management between me and the perfection that is the Highest.” I shrugged. “Who’s your boss? Back home, I mean. In Amazon Land.”
She scowled, but not too seriously. “It is not called that.”
“But seriously, who runs the place? You said it was some politician.”
“She once was a politician. Now, she is only the leader of Scythians. Valentyna Voitenko is her name. A very strong, smart woman.”
“I’ll bet. What about you, Halyna? How did you get involved with the Scythians?”
Now it was the redhead’s turn to shrug. “It’s not interesting, very much.”
“Tell me anyway, if you don’t mind. It’s still a ways to Cubby’s place.”
“What is Cubby’s Place?”
“It’s a who, not a what. Cubby Spinks is the lady I get my phones from—her and her husband. You’ll meet them. But I’d still like to hear how you wound up in a mountain camp training to kill Persian goddesses.”
She made a face. “Much more than that. Scythia—it is a way of life, you understand? Like a religion, but a religion of women. Not a God-religion. It is about living the right way, the way that women were once living in the old days.”
I nodded. “And how did you find out about it? Was your family involved?”
Halyna snorted. “Them? They are useless. I get nothing from them, just watching television, and they tell me not to make trouble.” She was struggling with her English a little, as if returned to a younger state. “New government comes in, everything is money, money, money. My family just wants some of the money.” She paused, choosing her words. “Me, I am just . . . ordinary girl. No politics, nothing like that. I have girlfriends, even one or two boyfriends. I drink, I fuck. I smoke hashish. But then I run away one day, and the Scythians, my sisters, take me in. They teach me. Valentyna shows me what life it really means. Valentyna gives me understanding, gives me reasons.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Where is my father now? I don’t know. Where is my mother? I don’t care. I have my family now. I have a family.”
“And Oxana?”
“She is family, too. She is like my favorite sister.”
It didn’t sound like that late at night, but I wasn’t going to quibble over definitions. We were skating around the edge of downtown, headed toward the apartment towers along the edge of the bay. Not every waterfront building in San Judas is a showpiece, and we were going to one of the non-showpiece type.
I hadn’t seen any sign we were being followed, so when we got there I parked in front of the building. We went up to the sixth floor on the world’s slowest elevator, then I knocked at number 68.
Cubby Spinks opened the door. She’s about sixty years old and absolutely round, with hair in a military crew cut and a tan like walnut furniture oil. The tan comes from sunning on the balcony all day during the summer, listening to baseball games, although by this time of year she had faded to a dull teak color. She was wearing her usual outfit, Bermuda shorts and a wife-beater T-shirt. “Bobby D!” she said. “Come on in!” She looked at Halyna and raised an eyebrow. “Wow,” she said in an extremely loud mock-whisper, “so you’re dating high-schoolers now. You told me that Parmenter kid was just business.”
Halyna looked at her, unsure of whether or not she was being made fun of. “Ignore Cubby,” I told her. “God ran out of senses of humor, so He gave her something else.”
Cubby’s husband Gershon appeared, dressed pretty much the same as his wife, except for the addition of an apron, and made his way gracefully through the piles of electronics boxes stacked all over the living room—no easy task, because he was even rounder than Cubby. “Hey, Bobby.” He extended a hand encased in a padded potholder. I shook it. “I’m just doing some satay under the grill. You and your friend want to stay?”
“Can’t, sorry, Gersh. This is Halyna. We need some new phones. Five or six, I’d say, just in case some get lost.”
We spent the next fifteen minutes or so waiting while Cubby and Gersh trolled through various crates. At last Cubby found what they’d been looking for. “Brand new,” she said, handing me the box. “Cheap, because all the instructions are in Serbo-Croatian. They fell off a truck in Belgrade, if you know what I mean. They’re totally clean, though.”