Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

Selwith wrinkles her nose, wondering how that blood might taste, how it might feel on her tongue, wondering if tasting it would kill her slowly or all at once. And then the world shudders again, and she sits down on the floor, a safe distance from the Seraph's blood.

"He's waking up," she says. "Is that what she wants, your White Lady, this Weaver? Has her year of butchery and devastation, and your nativity, has all this been merely some great fucking show to get his attention?"

Again, the Seraph doesn't deign to answer her, but it stares down at Selwith Tinker with those blazing yellow-orange eyes, eyes choked with enough pain and hate and contempt that she suspects actual words could never do its thoughts justice, anyway. She thinks they'd be mere anticlimax compared to the force of that stare.

"The cunt," Selwith says, speaking half to herself now. "Well, she's getting her wish, if all this has been only to wake the fucking Dragon. She's getting her heart's desire, and we'll all be getting it right alongside her."

Another purplish drop of the Seraph's blood falls to the floor, striking the pool with a sound like hot steel against anvils, like breaking glass. Selwith forces herself to smile and not turn away from those cruel eyes.

"Between them, beast, what do you think will be left?"

The Seraph grits its teeth and strains against its bonds with such sudden violence that, for a moment, Selwith Tinker beleives it might actually manage to tear itself free. She gets to her feet again, her own tattered wings unfurling, and braces herself against the bars of the cage in case the jailer's devices should prove inadequate after all. But they hold, the fetters and the spikes and chains, and the Seraph gasps loudly and shuts its eyes.

"Come on, you murdering bastard," Selwith growls at it. "I know you can do better than that. The Weaver put everything she's got into you, right? Yeah? So tear yourself down off that wall and let's find out what'll really happen when one of you fuckers finally dies."

The Seraph closes its eyes, and Selwith, unexpectedly freed from the blistering heat of its gaze, finds herself confused and shivering in the darkness. Somewhere beneath the floor, miles and miles below the brittle navel of the world, the Dragon stirs, fully half awake now, and the vampire sinks to her knees. It's almost over, all of it, she thinks, and none of us can change a single thing.

Dust and small shards of rock sift down on her from a fresh crack that's opened in the ceiling, and Selwith looks up at the Seraph. With its eyes shut like that, she might almost believe that it's despaired at last and nothing now remains but a beautiful, empty shell hanging from a wall.

"No," she says. "You're still in there, aren't you, beast? She made you, and the Weaver would never have found the simple mercy to give anything she'd made the capacity for surrender. She'll have seen to it that you'll still be fighting when all the world is nothing but a cinder for the stars to wonder at."

Blood leaks from the Seraph's parted lips, and in the gloom under Kearvan Weal, the silver designs worked into its ivory skin have begun to glow, whorls held within whorls, lunatic tattoo spirals forever looping back upon themselves.

"What's this?" Selwith asks it. "You gonna show me something pretty now?" And she reaches into a pocket of her vest and takes out the flintlock pistol she's carried all the way from the ruins of the city where she was born more than a thousand years ago. The city of scholars and libraries and the knowledge of the world revealed and kept safe for ages beyond memory. One of the dozen or so cities the Weaver razed on her march towards the hub. Selwith has loaded the pistol with a polished bit of melted nickel and iron that fell smoldering from the sky, and she whispers a faithless prayer to all the gods of the wheels, the holy retinue of night and day, twilight and dusk, that there might be some fearful scrap of cleansing magic in the thing. She raises the gun and aims it at the Seraph's head.

"And she would call us monsters," the vampire woman laughs, pulling the hammer back and tightening her grip on the trigger. "Look at me, beast! Look at what your White Lady has made of me!"

The Seraph opens it eyes, twin embers that have become bottomless magma pools, and when it speaks, its voice is a hurricane without wind, a devouring inferno without heat, rolling through Selwith's memories and hopes, her loss and sorrow, through all the dead spaces behind the vampire's eyes. Selwith squeezes the trigger and tries to turn away, but its words have already begun taking her apart, dissolving her like a handful of salt in water. The flintlock pistol explodes in her hand.

"She's coming," the Seraph says. "On the heels of the cockcrow of this last day of all, she is coming."

And hearing that, the Dragon opens its eyes.

When Julia Flammarion has finished her late breakfast-the stack of blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup and butter and a little dollop of whipped cream on top-she leaves a ten-dollar tip for her waitress and then pays the woman at the register. The cashier tells Julia to have a nice day and come again, and Julia smiles for her and thinks perhaps this is the very last person who will ever see her smile. She leaves the IHOP and walks west on Ariola, back towards the dingy motel room that is no longer hers. She has six dollars and some change remaining from the money that Andrew Leet left on the television. Her whore money. Julia leaves the sidewalk and wanders out between the sea oats and the low white dunes onto the beach. The sun is warm, even though the wind is colder than it was the day before. She pulls the lime-green cardigan tighter about her shoulders and buttons it. It's one of the few things she took with her from the cabin in Shrove Wood. Her mother gave it to her as a birthday present two years ago; there are small pink flowers around the cuffs and the collar, and she didn't want to leave it behind.

Past the motel, Julia comes upon a man sitting on a produce crate in the sand, picking a twelve-string guitar, playing some song she's never heard before, so maybe it's something he wrote himself. She stands there listening, watching his fingers pulling the music from the strings, and when the song's finished, she puts the rest of the money in his open guitar case. He grins and thanks her, this shabby, handsome, easy man, the sort of man that would have made her daddy scowl, the sort he'd have probably called a no-account hippie freak. She wishes that at least one of the men who'd been her lovers over the last six days could have had this man's eyes or his strong, callused fingers or the soft light that seems to hang about his face. Her men were all ogres, she thinks, cursing and pawing at her, slobbering and grunting like hogs when they came. This man would have been different. He asks her name, and she tells him the truth, then thanks him and walks away as he begins playing another song she's never heard. She would have liked to stay and listen to it all and any other songs that he wanted to play for her, but hearing more of that music, she might have changed her mind.

Julia follows the beach, the sand that is so white it makes her doubt the beaches in Heaven could possibly be any whiter, the water like peacock feathers lapping at the shore, vivid green blue going hyacinth out where the sea starts getting deep. And there are no clouds in the sky today, and she thanks Jesus for there being a sky like that. She figures that he's still listening to her prayers, even if she is a thief and a whore. Mary Magdalene was a whore, too.

Julia finds a cinnamon-colored starfish, wider than her hand and half-buried in the sand, and stoops to look at it. But she doesn't touch it. The starfish might still be alive. Leave it be, she thinks. Let me just look at it a moment more. And she's still looking at it when she hears the angel somewhere close behind her, its wings scorching the day. The starfish begins to steam and writhe in the sand, five arms curling in upon themselves, and the cold gulf water hisses against it. In a moment, it has shriveled and gone as black as the rattlesnake did that morning in the clearing when she first met the angel.