Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

"And you, you think you're any better? You're so goddamn high and mighty, standing there on the side of the goddamn angels, and we're nothing but shit, is that it?"

"Please, Aramat," Biancabella begs. "We'll find something else for Porcelina's feast, something truly special. We'll take the car and drive down to St. Augustine -"

"Look at her, Biancabella. She's the monster. She has the marks," and Miss Aramat pulls the revolver's trigger again, and again there's only the impotent taunt of the hammer falling on an empty chamber.

"Let her go, Aramat," and now Biancabella's moving towards the stairs. She shoves Isolde aside and almost trips over Porcelina's corpse. "She's nothing to us. She's just someone's fucking puppet."

"I didn't come for you," Dancy says again.

"'I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan,'" Miss Aramat whispers, and the third time she squeezes the trigger the revolver explodes in a deafening flash of fire and thunder, tearing itself apart, and the shrapnel takes her hands and face with it, buries a chunk of steel the size of a grape between her eyes. One of the fragments grazes Biancabella's left cheek, digging a bloody furrow from the corner of her mouth to her ear, and she stands, helpless, at the bottom of the stairs as Aramat crumples and falls.

And Dancy Flammarion doesn't wait to see whatever does or doesn't come next. She drops the sword and runs, out the front door of the big house on East Hall Street, across the wide yard, and the new day wraps her safe in redeeming charcoal wings and hides her steps.

Not yet noon and already a hundred degrees in the shade, and the Bailiff is sitting alone on the rusted rear bumper of the Monte Carlo drinking a Coke. The sun a proper demon overhead, and he holds the cool bottle pressed to his forehead for a moment and squints into the mirage shimmer writhing off the blacktop. Dancy Flammarion is walking towards him up the entrance ramp to the interstate, a small girlshape beneath a huge black umbrella, coming slowly, stubbornly through the heatbent summer day. A semi rushes past, roars past, and there's wind for a moment, though it isn't a cool wind. The truck rattles away, and once again the only sound is the droning rise and fall of cicadas. The Bailiff finishes his Coke and tosses the empty bottle into the marsh at the side of the road; he takes a blue paisley bandanna from his back pocket and wipes the sweat from his face and bald head.

"A man needs a hat in a place like this," he says, and Dancy stops a few feet from the car and watches him. She's wearing a pair of sunglasses that look like she must have found them lying by the side of the road, the left lens cracked and the bridge held together with a knotted bit of nylon fishing twine.

"You set me up, old man," she says to him. "You set us all up, didn't you?"

"Maybe a nice straw Panama hat, something to keep the sun from cooking his brains. Didn't Clark Gable wear one of those in Gone With The Wind?"

"Was it the bottle, or the boy?"

The Bailiff stuffs the blue bandanna back into his trouser pocket and winks at Dancy. "It was the bottle," he says. "And the boy, and some other people you best hope you never have to meet face to face."

"And the women?"

"No. It didn't really ever have anything much to do with the Ladies."

"Aramat's dead," she says, and then another truck roars by, whipping the trash and grit at the side of the interstate into a whirlwind. When it's gone, Dancy wipes the dust off her clothes, and "It was an accident," she says.

"Well now, that's a shame, I guess. I'd honestly hoped it wouldn't come to that," and the Bailiff shades his eyes and glances up at the sun. "But it was always only a matter of time. Some people are just too damn mean and crazy for their own good. Anyway, I imagine Biancabella can take care of things now."

"I don't understand."

"What don't you understand, Dancy Flammarion?"

"The boy. I mean, whose side are you on?"

And the Bailiff laughs softly to himself, then, and reaches for the bandanna again.

"You've got a lot to learn, child. You're a goddamn holy terror, all right, but you've got a lot to learn."

She stares at him silently, her eyes hidden behind the broken sunglasses, while the Bailiff blows his nose and the cicadas scream at each other.

"Can I have my duffel bag back," she says. "I left it in your car."

"Wouldn't you rather have a ride? This sun isn't good for regular folks. I hate to think what it'll do to an albino. You're starting to turn pink already."

Dancy looks at her forearm, frowns, and then looks back at the Bailiff.

"What about the others?" she asks.

The Bailiff raps his knuckles twice on the trunk. "Dead to the world," he says. "At least until sunset. And I owe you one after-"

"You don't owe me nothing," Dancy says.

"Then think of it as a temporary cease-fire. It'll be a nice change, having someone to talk to who still breathes."

Dancy stares at the Monte Carlo, at the Bailiff, and then at the endless, broiling ribbon of I-16 stretching away north and west towards Atlanta and the mountains.

"But I'm not even sure where I'm going."

"I thought that's why you have angels, to tell you these things?"

"They will, eventually."

"Well, it's only a couple of hours to Macon. How's that for a start?"

In the marsh, a bird calls out, long-legged swamp bird, and Dancy turns her head and watches as the egret spreads its wide alabaster wings and flaps away across the cordgrass, something black and squirming clutched in its long beak.

"It's a start," she says, but waits until the egret is only a smudge against the bluewhite sky before she closes the umbrella and follows the Bailiff into the shade of the car.

For Dame Darcy

Through the deepening slash-pine shadows, the dim and fading shafts of twilight falling pale through the high branches of Shrove Wood, and Dancy Flammarion follows the familiar twists and turns of Wampee Creek. The cinnamon ferns and saw palmetto grown waist high to an eight year old, understory carpet of rust fronds and emerald-sharp leaves, and she watches the uneven ground, mindful where she puts her feet, watching for snakes and steel-jawed traps laid among the pine straw. Traps set for raccoon and bobcats, but they're just as happy to snap shut on little girl ankles, even this strange albino child who can only go out to play when the sun turns fat and red and sinks slow into the swamp.

"You watch yourself now. Don't go getting lost or hurt," her mother or her grandmother always says, and "I won't. I'm very, very careful," Dancy always reassures them. "I know my way," and she does, the long mile and a half between their cabin and the place where Wampee Creek spills out into the wide, peatdark lake that no one has ever bothered to name. But they worry for her anyway, this girl all they have left in the world, and sometimes, hazy grey evenings when the cicadas are a little quieter than they should be or her mother doesn't like the look of the stars rising over the trees, Dancy carries her grandmother's crucifix in the bib pocket of her overalls, near her heart, and maybe a sprig of pennyroyal or dried angelica root wrapped in a white cotton handkerchief, as well.

"Never hurt nobody yet to be too cautious," her grandmother might say, and "Better safe than sorry," her mother might nod. So Dancy carries their charms, and wears her own tarnished St. Christopher's medal, and watches where she puts her feet.

A sudden splash, and she stops, focuses her pink eyes on the crystal waters gurgling between low yellow-white limestone banks. Just an ol' bullfrog, she thinks, scared off by the sound of her boots, the dry crunch of pine needles underfoot, the brittle snap of twigs. "I ain't after you today, Mr. Frog," she says, her voice big in the still and the half light of the Wood. "If I was, you never would'a heard me coming."