James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“Look, I’m sorry. I’ve had a rough few weeks. My mouth is working faster than my brain.” He lowered his hands, voice thick with contrition. “And I’m not used to Hounds being so… euun … chaste?”

“If they’re not chaste, then I’m not a Hound.” My eyes narrowed.

“Well… technically…” Angkor shuffled in place, biting his lip for a moment. “If you’ve ever eaten the flesh of a Gift Horse, you’re a Hound. It marks you for life. You maybe didn’t know it at the time, but when you ate that heart or drank that blood, your whole body dumped all of its old cells and regrew them on a slightly different genetic code. An improved code, in case you’re worried.”

“Are you serious?”

“There are all these ancient viruses written into our DNA. Gift Horse blood kind of… cleans them up a bit.” Angkor shifted his hips in a way that drew my eye and sent a fresh injection of imagery and confusion straight to the brainstem. “So, when I was healing you, I could see all the signatures of Horseflesh. I wasn’t like, trying to pry or anything. I had to make sure everything I did was in line with your body’s code, or ‘fast healing’ turns into ‘catastrophic cell die-off’ pretty quickly.”

“Noted.” Rescuing this man from The Deacon and his merry band of eyeless freaks was beginning to look like yet another poor decision on my part, but I couldn’t deny that he’d hooked me with something I’d been craving for weeks, maybe months. Knowledge. Deep, powerful knowledge of a subject that I’d only begun to skim.

I was reaching for the bedroom doorknob when a high-pitched female shriek of horror ripped through the air. I winced as dark blue and white flashed behind my eyes.

“Ah, there we go.” Angkor sighed, and held the pistol cupped as he drew up beside me and peered around the edge of the door. “The Lion King has left the building. And now the crying starts.”

We sidled out into the hall like a fire team, careful to look up as well as around on our way out. Talya’s sobbing racked the tattoo parlor, louder and louder as we reached the entry to the tiled room. She was nude, slumped on her knees, alternately flapping her hands and trying to bury her face in them. The floor looked like someone had been fingerpainting in blood. Her hands were covered in it, and she’d managed to smear it over her belly, thighs and hair in her desperation to get clean.

“Talya, Talya, come on, it’s going to be okay.” Angkor passed me the pistol and went to her empty-handed, crouching down in front of her and catching her wrists as she tried to claw at herself again. “It’s going to be okay, alright.”

“ Ya… s’yel… ya s’yeh-s’yeh—” She was hiccoughing so hard that she couldn’t get the words out. It was clear she was beyond English. I kept the guns at my sides and down low as I joined Angkor to the side of her.

“You did nothing wrong,” I said to her in Russian. “Talya, listen to me.”

“I ate them!” She shrieked at me in the same language. “This stupid thing… this… other me… it… I…!”

Her words cut as she retched, clasping at her stomach, and then vomited a bloody mess of torn fabric and metal onto the ground. I stepped back as she went to hands and knees, throwing up what looked like sections of zippers and D-ring buckles, pieces of half-digested nylon and plastic. Anything she’d eaten that was inorganic came up again. Angkor winced, and patted Talya on the back as she choked and hacked.

“Oh my god.” She caught the three words out in a strangled grunt before it kept on going.

“Listen to me.” I went to one knee on her other side, trying to avoid the blood and gristle on the floor. “Listen. These men were dead. They were already gone, Talya. You did what you needed to do to live.”

“No, no no no no.” Talya heaved and wept, her face a red mess of tears, blood and snot. She looked no older than twelve like this, her tenuous maturity stripped away by trauma. The violent retching was already beginning to subside. Weeder bodies were as efficient as they were alien.

“It’s alright,” I said. “You didn’t hurt anyone. Your Chiah , your Ka, it knew they were gone. It wanted you to live.”

She peered at me through swollen eyes, and then at Angkor. Wordlessly, she knelt back, and then folded against his chest and curled her fingers in against his skin, shoulders hunched, head bowed. He held her close, one hand around her back, the other over her hair, and murmured wordlessly as he rocked her. I stayed down, unsure of what to do, but suspecting that it required staying in place to provide support or comfort, or at least a translation.

Angkor seemed to know what he was doing, at least, and Talya gradually sagged into his arms. The hiccoughing and gulping slowed.

“I’m sorry,” she rasped. “I can’t control it. I don’t even remember wh-what happened.”

“You were hurt very badly,” I replied. “Duke freed Vanya and fought his way out to help him escape. He went the same way as Mason. It’s that knife he was stabbed with, I’m sure of it.”

“I can guarantee it is,” Angkor said grimly. “The Temple have StainedGlass weapons.”

“Somehow, I doubt you’re talking about artful church windows. Tell me everything in the car,” I said. “We need to get back to the clubhouse, and soon. Vanya has an army at his command. He’s the Organizatsiya’s recruitment specialist. If he’s got mental sway over Duke and Duke talks, he’ll lead them straight to the clubhouse.”

“Josie’s in there. Clubhouse. Clothes.” Talya croaked. She pushed herself back gently from Angkor, and I looked away as she stood and stumbled away into the house.

“Man… she’s so young,” Angkor said, once she had left.

“She’s not that young. Even someone hardened in the street would have a fit if they inadvertently committed cannibalism.” I picked myself up and started for the bedroom. I needed my holsters, my familiar, and the other small things I had left over from my trip to the warehouse.

“I don’t mean her HuMan self. I mean her entire Axon. Her soul, you know.” Angkor shook his head. “She’s a freshly minted shocktrooper. The latest in Anti-Morphorde technology.”

“But the American Lion is extinct,” I called back.

“Exactly,” he said. “When prehistoric super-predators start getting incarnated back on a world like this, it’s a really bad sign.”

The trip to the clubhouse was tense. I drove with Binah riding on my shoulder, her face to the wind as she meowed excitedly out of the car window. Talya was huddled in the front seat, a sheathed machete in her lap. Angkor took up the backseat. He had claimed Talya’s shotgun and the axe that Duke had tried to murder me with. Now that we were on the road, he was all business. When I checked in the rear-view mirror, he had his eyes closed, his face still and composed with the quiet concentration of a magus. He was surely communing with his Neshamah. It made me sick with envy to see it.

“You said something about stained glass weapons before, Angkor.” I called back to him, pushing the car as fast as I dared. We really, really did not need to be pulled over tonight.

“StainedGlass. Say it like a German noun. Like you’re capitalizing words together.” He didn’t open his eyes. “You seem pretty smart. How much do you know about the history of the Wars?”

“Some of it. Please feel free to rehash.”

Angkor sighed. “Short version of the history of Everything is that our reality is basically a huge beastie floating in a sea of hostile nothingness, right? It used to have a shell. That shell was Eden, also called the Ah-Za-Naur, or the Glass Land. The shell got broken when the NO-thing figured out how to mimic the behavior of living things. It broke the shell and the whole thing collapsed like a cell wall.”