For once, someone else’s display of temper didn’t spark my own; I was too far into terror for that, so far beyond anything I’d felt before that it lent its own weird clarity. So I squeezed back, replying, “Simon, baby, yes—you are clear, absolutely, but you’re wrong. You still don’t really get what you’d be in for.”
“And you do?”
“Well, yeah. Like you say, stuff’s happened. You saw it happen, some of it.”
“I saw stuff happen to you, which is exactly why I don’t want you near it again; no more, Lo. No more.” He released my hands, rising, bag heaved over one shoulder. “I’m going to go settle up. When we get back, we’ll take a cab up to this place and Safie and I will shut this down while you wait outside.” To Safie: “Might be a good idea if you called Detective Correa, keep her in the loop. . . .”
She nodded and he turned away, rummaging for his wallet as he rounded the next corner, heading for the bar. Left alone together, we only had to glance at each other—a blurry twist of what I assumed was her head—before I stood, too, coat already half on.
“You in?” I asked her. “Tell me quick if you are.”
“Lois, c’mon. All you have to do is wait.”
“Yeah, sure—and then he runs in half-cocked, so Lady Midday can pick her teeth with him. Screw that noise. Plain truth is, if Clark has to lose one of his parents, it’s better if it’s me.” Saying it out loud sunk a phantom needle through my chest; she tried to protest, and I cut her off mid-word. “No, just shut up, okay? I may not be as shitty a wife and mother as I think I am, but if I’d only agreed to leave well enough alone, we’d be laughing; Simon’ll gladly kill himself getting me out of all this, and that’s not something I’m willing to live with. So help me, please.” I held out my hand shakily, barely able to see where it went. “Please, Safie.”
Safie let out a long, stuttering breath. “Going by every horror movie ever, there’s no possible way this can end well, for either of us,” she said at last. “But . . . my Dédé always told me it was important to stand up, fight evil wherever and however, whether human or something else. Not to mention I guess some of this is on me, too.”
“Hey, no fair,” I retorted. “I got funding, remember? Which makes your part of the proceedings a job, not an obsession.”
“Least I’m getting paid,” she agreed. “Hell with it, though—let’s just do it, and call it even.”
Up and out, through the back door and onto the patio, Safie steering me into the alley. We emerged northbound onto McCaul at a sort of loping run, pausing to hail a cab. We’d only been in it for a few minutes when my iPhone began to ring: Simon, who else? We headed up through tree-lined side streets toward the Kensington area. I hit the “ignore” button once, then again, and one more time. After that, he switched to a series of texts heralded by impatient chimes, text-to-talk’s vocal software growling at me in all-caps like a pissed-off Wookiee: LOIS DONT, LOIS STOP LOVE YOU, JUST FUCKNG WAIT GOD DAMN IT. I finally raised it to my lips and dictated three messages in quick succession: Sorry, I have to, Love. “Now send to Simon,” I told it, before I turned the whole thing off.
The Saturday-night traffic was heavier than expected. I swore under my breath. “What time now?” I asked Safie, barely visible against the window, what with Chinatown’s lit-up heart whipping by outside.
“Seven fifty-three.”
“We’re not going to make it.”
“We might. Hey, you know Wrob; he likes to waffle. If his introduction runs long enough, then maybe . . .” Safie sighed. “Then again, maybe it won’t even work for him. He wasn’t ‘touched,’ not like Mrs. Whitcomb, or Sidlo, or you; probably doesn’t know Lady Midday from her picture on the Vinegar House wall. If so, then for him, it’ll just be a film.”
For a moment, I wondered what the cab driver thought of all this, if he was even listening.
“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t want to bet on it. Shit, he stole the thing She wanted to use as Her bible, Her doorway, then claimed it for his own—that’s gotta piss her off. Hell, this world’s going to piss Her off, the level of disrespect She’s going to face on a daily basis.”
(Big “s,” big “h,” without thinking twice about it. Christ, I was starting to sound like I came from Dzèngast.)
“I don’t think it’s about disrespect,” Safie replied. “Not really. I mean, yeah, She doesn’t like it, but it’s more people who aren’t . . . doing what they’re supposed to, neglecting their responsibilities. People with no vocation.” She paused. “Then again, how many people in that room—any room—know exactly what they’re meant to be doing?” I heard her swallow. “I mean, I sure don’t, and Lady Midday, She’s not exactly Jesus; no Hail Mary rain cheques in Her church. She doesn’t forget, or forgive.”
I took a breath, felt it tremble in my chest, resonating: all fuzz, like some cordless speaker. Then whispered, the sound barely audible outside my own skull,
“Well, fine—can’t really blame Her, not all that much. I was never very good at any of that crap, either.”
By the time the cab let us out at the bottom of Augusta Avenue, into the unseasonably bitter November cold, it was already two minutes past eight. The streets were empty, and all I could see around me was a shifting black background pierced by blurred squares of yellow light. Safie paid, and the cab peeled away with unnerving speed; maybe the driver had decided he didn’t want anything further to do with the crazy-talking ladies . . . or maybe he could sense the same thing I could. Something in the freezing starless air felt strained, like a weak spot in a balloon where the rubber looked uneven, splotchy and thin.
“Come on,” said Safie, and I felt her grab me by my wrist, the same way I’d grabbed Clark a thousand times or more: Enough fucking around, let’s move. I ran as best I could, blindly, trusting Safie’s path and stumbling from time to time. Once I tripped and went down completely, banging the hell out of my knee, but the adrenaline stifled the pain and I was back on my feet before Safie could fully stop. “No, I’m fine, I’m okay,” I gasped, and we resumed our run. The noise of College Street came over the rooftops, nearing as we closed in on the Ursulines, but strangely distant. If we passed anyone else, I never saw them, or heard them; all I could hear was Safie’s ragged breathing, and my own. We might have been alone, the city as empty as every post-apocalyptic vista ever: The Walking Dead’s Atlanta, 28 Days Later’s London . . .
(Neither of which were really empty, of course. Which was the point.)
I recognized the Ursulines not by the shape or colour of its light but by the quality: the rattling flicker of a film in motion, leaking around black squares of drawn shades on the upper floor of the big square building. We staggered to a stop below those windows, staring up in dismay. “Shit,” I choked, trying to get my breath back, “they’ve already started. Come on!”
Safie let go of my hand, ran to the front of the building; I heard rattling, banging. “Doors are locked!”
“That’s the bike shop! You go up the fire escape, ’round the back—I think it’s to the left . . . no, right.” I raised my voice as footsteps scampered past, startling myself: “Safie, don’t leave me!”
“Shit—sorry!”
Her hand seized mine again and I clutched it hard, too scared for shame.