Failure? Me? Only in this space/time continuum, bub. There must be tons of alternative realities out there where Bobby D is still The Man.
I went out to the courtyard to make some calls, but was distracted by something thrashing around loudly in the bushes beside the path, like a cat trying to upchuck not just a hairball, but an entire other cat. After some investigation I found a nizzic—the nizzic, the new batwinged, read/write model—tangled deep in a juniper bush. I guessed it had gone looking for shade when the sun came up. Hell-creatures like it hot, but they also like it dark. I unhooked it from the clinging branches as carefully as I could, then took it inside, but it was still trembling and making little barfy noises, so I put it under a bowl on a cookie sheet and set the over for about 250 degrees.
After ten minutes or so I put on the potholders and brought it out. The little demon-creature looked happier now and was already reciting its message. I turned off the kitchen lights and listened to the rest of it, then let the winged messenger cycle through the whole thing again.
• • •
“I suppose this is one of the reasons I fell for you instead of just destroying you in the first place, like I should have—your psychotic inability to compromise or do the smart thing. I’m so used to people who only care what’s best for them that there was a certain charm in someone who couldn’t take the sensible way out even under threat of torture and death.
“You were right about the gypsy story I told you our first time together—you wouldn’t have done what Korkoro did. You would have charged up that mountain to attack the Fog King, and the whole thing would have been even worse for everyone, and all for a principle you’re not even sure of yourself.
“Oh, Bobby, I can’t tell you how much I want to fuck you right now. I want you all over me, pressing me down with your weight, holding me like I was trying to get away. But I wouldn’t be. Because I know about being held against my will, and I also know about being held because it’s exactly what I want, and I definitely know the difference between the two. What a ridiculous, nightmare world this is, my lover, where two people who just want to be together would have to turn the whole universe upside down to do it.
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk any more, at least for a while. I thought I could handle it, but I don’t think I can. All those years I lived in London, I should have learned from the English, because they have the right idea. The only way to deal with people, living or dead, is at arm’s length.
“Don’t tell me anything that will make me cry, Bobby. If you send a message back, just be funny. Be sweet. Otherwise I can’t do this.”
• • •
I wasn’t ready to answer her, not just that moment. Too much stuff boiling in my brain. You know when you’re a kid and you’re so sad and angry that you just start crying? Like that. Instead of crying, though, I tucked the nizzic back into the warm bowl, blanketed it with a couple of my dirty socks (which I thought should make a little demon feel right at home) and stashed it in the back of one of the pantry closets so it wouldn’t startle Oxana if she got up. Then I made a cup of coffee so strong it violated several workplace safety laws and took it back out to the courtyard to make some calls. The first was to Clarence.
“Bobby!” he said when he picked up. “Thank God, you’re alive.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So’s Sam and so’s Oxana. But Halyna, she didn’t make it.”
The kid was genuinely sad and outraged, which shows you that someone picked the right person to be an angel. In fact, he seemed to take it harder than I had, not that I didn’t feel sick about it. But in my case it seemed like it wasn’t the loss of Halyna herself that burned as badly as my failure to keep her safe. Clarence the Rookie Angel, like any decent person, reacted first to the loss of the woman herself and its effect on Oxana.
After I’d given him the full battlefield report, the kid told me that he and Wendell had gone back to work as though everything were normal and that, so far, they seemed to be pulling it off.
“But what are we going to do now, Bobby?”
“No ‘we’ this time. So far, you’re still clear, or you seem to be. Let’s keep it that way, especially since I don’t have the slightest idea of what I’m going to do next, short of complete surrender. You and Wendell just keep on keeping on. I’ll contact you if anything changes.”
“But, Bobby—!”
“No buts. I appreciate what you’ve done. You’re a good man, and I was wrong about you, but I don’t want to take anyone else down with me.”
I hung up then. I wasn’t being dramatic or selfless, it was just becoming clear to me that I was running out of options, that maybe this was not going to be a story that ended happily, no matter how much I’d hoped it would. After all the death and destruction, I couldn’t quite imagine a way it could end well. Even Caz was beginning to seem like a phantom. She had been my dream once, but now she was only a voice, farther from my reach than ever.
I had only one piece of good news for anyone, so I passed that along next via a message on Fatback’s voicemail, letting him know his days of being haunted and burgled were probably over, at least at the hands of the Black Sun Faction. Baldur von Reinmann was messily, monstrously dead, and Timon, Pumbaa, and any remainder of the local troop must be running for the hills by now. Or Argentina.
As I considered my next step, I nursed my coffee and tried to keep thoughts of Caz at arm’s length. The sun rose higher in the sky, turning the dank, gray December morning into something almost cheerful. Birds scuffled through the leaves that littered the concrete patio all around me, then leaped into the air whenever I set my cup down or re-crossed my legs.
Why had I been so certain that I’d find what I wanted in the museum? I’d thought I was going at the problem in a systematic way, but the more I looked at it now, the more I saw what I felt sure was the real Bobby Dollar—a creature of reflexes and reactions, following whatever the most recent stimulus had been, half the time getting it completely wrong, the other half getting things right mostly by accident. But when you were fighting out of your weight class—way out of my weight class, with Eligor and now Anaita—hoping for dumb luck was not a viable strategy.
The feather, the horn, everything in the whole grim mess came down to the bargain Anaita had made with Eligor to create a place outside of Heaven, Hell, and Earth, a home for Kainos, her pet project. But why had Anaita been so interested in creating a Third Way? And why had Eligor taken a huge risk just to help a powerful angel, one of his sworn enemies?
I had a sudden urge to talk to Gustibus again about Eligor’s possible motivations, but his phone only rang and rang—no answering machine this time, no semi-helpful nun. What could he have told me, anyway? Follow the money? There was no money, or at least the money was never the point with beings as powerful as Anaita and the Grand Duke. “Powerful”—yeah, that was the word, that was all that type cared about. I didn’t need to follow the money here, only the power.
Something clicked. It wasn’t a very loud click, but it was enough. That was what I’d been missing. Who gained from all this? And what did they gain?
I felt I had grasped something important, but I needed more coffee to shake the sense out of it. I went back inside and found the kettle still hot: Oxana was up and had made herself a cup of tea. She was wrapped so completely in a blanket she looked like a Bedouin tradesman, and she glanced up from the ghastly daytime show on the television only long enough to meet my gaze with a very dull, miserable one of her own. I gave her an awkward, one-armed hug, then took my coffee and went back outside. At the moment I felt pretty sure she didn’t want to do anything except stare like a zombie at people that she didn’t know on a screen.