“I thought it might have had something to do with the Voicers, but I suppose they were a strawman for the Voctus Sol.” I found my stained and torn pants, belt, tie and shirt in a plastic bag, and a set of clothes in the drawer next to the bag. There was a plain white envelope on top of the neatly folded trousers. “What’s this?”
“Eh?” Jenner looked around me. “No idea.”
“Probably an invoice I have no intention of paying.” I set it aside, and laid out my what I found: an undershirt, a sweater, trousers and gloves. The sweater was the one I’d worn while I was homeless, but it was no longer shapeless. The wool was a little crisp under my fingers, and it smelled of lavender. “If you would excuse me, then. We can check out.”
“They wanted you to stay in three days after you woke up. Head trauma, or something.”
“They’ll live, and so will I. Now please, excuse me.” I pulled my gown around myself, as modest as I could manage, and looked back at her. Pointedly.
“Right-o, tough guy.” She held up her hands. “I got your gun back, by the way. And Zane’s been feeding the cat.”
I said nothing, waiting until I heard the door click shut. Only then did I strip my gown and begin to dress.
“Did you know I’d do this?” I closed my eyes, looking inward as I pulled my trousers up and belted them. I saw Kutkha sitting there when I withdrew into the temple of my mind. The raven spirit was perched on an arching stand of silver that poured up from the floor, but there was something wrong. Something out of place.
“You made your decision.” Kutkha ruffled his wings, fluffing out. He was acting as if he were cold. “You are a Magus. Your Will is the deciding factor of our fates. We were fortunate enough to have allies with us. But now, we are ill.”
Frowning, I put my hands on the bed and immersed more deeply into the symbolic inner-space, the Astral chamber I’d constructed of my mind through years of meditation and discipline. It was a small temple, a black bell-shaped dome with a mirrored black floor as smooth as water under glass. There was a silver circle in the center, where Kutkha made his rest. Otherwise, it should have been largely featureless and austere.
On one side of the temple dome, roots had pushed themselves in through cracked patches of wall. I went across to them, moving like a ghost through the mental space, and bent to examine them. They were pink and white, brachiating like neurons. I recognized them. They looked like the roots of the trees on Eden.
The opposite wall had a patch of what looked like crackling frost from the floor to about waist-height. As I watched, the fissured pattern replicated fractionally at the edges, spreading like a bruise. The Yen.
I pressed my lips together. “I won’t let it take me, Kutkha. Not after what I’ve seen it do to others.”
“You say that now, my Ruach.” Kutkha shivered again. “Remember these words when it comes to tempt you. See to it you never underestimate the lesser Morphorde, Alexi. Greater men than you have fallen to a simple Yen, reveling in the temporary power and release it brings.”
Power? Like the explosion I’d generated, the fireball?
My gut twisted painfully enough that it shook me out of my impromptu meditation, gasping. I licked my lip, and focused on getting my belt through the loops of my trousers. The thought of it, the loss of control to something capable of infecting the HuMan mind and soul, was terrifying… but whatever was going to happen would happen, and there was little I could do except act to manage the symptoms until I found the cure: Zarya, the Gift Horse.
Chapter 42
About an hour later, we left the hospital and emerged into prismatic sunlight. It was a damp and cloudy day, and the city smelled like rain and dust. The texture of passing cars rasped on my tongue. For the first time in a very long time, I felt alive.
Zane gave me a ride on his bike back to the Strange Kitty clubhouse, and I spent the trip clinging to his back like a barnacle lest I sway too hard to one side and fall off. Strange Kitty was still zoned off with yellow and purple scene tape, evidence of the Vigiles Magicarum’s need to territorially piss on everything supernatural, but we were able to get into the Tigers clubhouse. When I opened the garage door, Binah leaped from the pool table, meowing and chirping, and jumped up onto my shoulder. She was beginning to fill out again. Her fur was growing back, cream-white and sleek. I caught her, scratching just above her tail as she tried to wrap her entire backside around my face.
More surprising were the children. Josie and another small boy, a face I vaguely recognized from the case file photographs, were playing Legos with two girls who had to be Ayashe’s children. Ayashe was ostensibly watching the four of them from the sofa, twitching her toe like a tail and glancing up from her copy of Cosmopolitan when we filtered inside.
“Well, look who the cats dragged in,” she drawled. “Weren’t sure you were ever going to be back with us, Rex.”
“I am notoriously resilient,” I said.
“Angbutt here probably helped,” Jenner added.
Ayashe’s mouth sloped across. “You mind your mouth around these kids here, Jennifer Tran.”
“It’s my freakin’ clubhouse.” Jenner sniffed, lifting her nose on her way to the bar. “I’ll friggin’ slag off in my clubhouse if I friggin’ want to.”
Talya broke away and made for the group of oblivious children and crouched down on her heels, her face alight with ready interest. “Oh my goodness! Are you building a house? Look at all these little horses. What are they doing, Mary?”
“Nooo, that’s not a house. That’s the pirate ship, and this is the island, and those are the cowboys that are res’king the princesses from the pirates,” one of the two dark-skinned girls said, lisping through her missing front teeth. “But they’re all girls.”
“No they’re not!” The boy whined, but it was clear that he knew he was outnumbered.
“Nuh-uh. Girls is what Josie wanted! You got the island!”
“There’s boys on the island!”
Josie looked up at Talya, but then gazed on past her to stare at me. She was dressed in fresh clothes, a pink t-shirt and jeans that hung a little loosely on her emaciated body. Her hair was clean, a shoulder-length red tumble of curls, and her cuts were healing into scars on her pale freckled skin. The haunted, gaunt lines were fading from her face, but as her eyes met mine, I felt a flash of something low in my gut. It was not an emotion. It was an instinct.
The little girl clambered to her feet under the watchful eye of Ayashe, who didn’t stop her as she crossed the room towards me. I bent to one knee, holding Binah to my shoulder so she didn’t fall. The cat jumped off anyway, and flopped onto the floor in front of me to present her belly for worship.
Josie drew up about a foot from Binah’s recumbent, purring form. She looked up at me, brow furrowed. “You look sick.”
Up close, I met Josie’s eyes a second time, and I saw it again: the glimpse of something numinous and golden and powerful. Her Neshamah. Josie had undergone Shevirah.
“So do you,” I replied. “But I hope we’ll both get better.”
Josie’s lips twitched nervously. “Tally said you were in the hostipal… umm… hos-pi-tal. But I don’t think that’s what you got sick with.”
“The doctors had to do some surgery.” Could she sense the Yen, now? This was a novel experience, one of the few times in my life that I had actually spoken to a child face to face. “I’m feeling better. What do you see?”
She glanced down, almost coyly, and then looked back up at me with her lip in her teeth. “It’s the lady with the rope around her neck.”