Jay Lake: Last Plane to Heaven

She snorted, then slumped.

“Momma, I’m taking some money from your purse to go buy food.” There was the lie, the one he’d get whipped for, and have to pray forgiveness at the altar later on. Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes was very clear on the penalties for a Practitioner’s lying to the Spirit Worlde.

But without the money, he could not move the rain. Besides, surely he’d buy food on the way to Seattle. So it wasn’t really a lie.

He reached into her purse, pushed aside the pill bottles and lipsticks and doctor’s shots to find her little ladybug money purse. Too scared to count it out, Danny took the whole thing and fled without kissing his mother good-bye or tucking her boobs back in her dress or even locking the front door.

Danny’s pass got him on the number 33 bus downtown. Even in the floods, Tri-Met kept running. The bus’s enormous wheels seemed to be able to splash through deep puddles where cars were stuck. The rain had soaked him on the way to the bus stop, and at the bus shelter, and even now its clear fingers were clawing at the window to drag him out. Danny clutched his Little Oscar cooler and his Transformers knapsack and stared out, daring the rain to do its worst.

If he made the rain mad enough, and Sky, who was both mother and father of the rain, maybe it would follow him to Seattle even without the Reversal of Indifference.

The Greyhound station downtown had a sign on the door that said NO SERVICE TODAY DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER. Danny wasn’t sure exactly what “inclement” meant, but he understood the sign.

He sat out front and stared at the train station down the street, crying. It was in the rain, no one would notice him in tears. The Little Oscar emitted scratching noises as the mice did whatever it was mice did in the dark. He knew he should draw out Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes and try to work out what to do next.

Then the girl on the bike showed up again. She came splashing through puddles with a big smile on her face, as though this flood were a sprinkler on a summer lawn. The bike skidded sideways in front of him, splashing Danny with grimy water. She leapt off like she was performing some great trick, and let her bicycle fall over into the flooded gutter.

“So how’s your edge, Danny?” she asked brightly.

He couldn’t remember that he’d ever told the girl his name. It wasn’t like he knew hers. “Th-this is all your fault!” he blurted.

Somewhere out in the rain a ship’s horn bellowed, long and slow. The bus station was near the waterfront, Danny knew.

The girl’s grin expanded. “Somebody’s going to hit the Broadway Bridge.”

“You s-set me up.”

“No, Danny.” She leaned close, her hands on her knees. “I just told you how to do what you wanted. You set you up. A Practitioner must know zir Practice.”

He was startled out of his growing pout. “You know everything about the Booke of Dayes, don’t you? Tell me, how do I fix this?”

Another laugh. “Think,” she said. “Smart kid like you doesn’t have to go to Seattle to stop the rain.”

“I been doing nothing but think for days!” The tears started up. “People been drowning, that p-puppy, Mom’s got no w-work, the tomatoes are rotting…” Danny screwed his eyes shut to shut the tears off, just like Mom always made him do.

When the girl’s voice spoke hot-breathed in his ear, he squeaked like a duct-taped mouse. “What’s the name of the ritual, Practitioner?”

“ R-reversal of Indifference. ”

“What does that mean ?”

He wasn’t stupid! Danny concentrated, like they’d always tried to make him do in school. Reversal… reversal… The meaning hit him suddenly. “You can turn something around from either direction,” he said with a gasp.

She clapped her hands with glee. “And so…?”

“And so…” Danny let his thoughts catch up with his words. He could see this thread, like a silver trail in the sky, tying a star back into place. “And so I can make Sky stop thinking about rain on Portland, make Sky take the rain back.”

“Bravo!” Her eyes sparkled with pure delight.

“Wh-what’s your n-name?” he asked, completely taken in by the girl’s expression.

“Geneva,” she said, serious but still amused. “Geneva Fairweather.”

He squatted on the bench in front of the Greyhound station and opened the Little Oscar. Five sets of beady eyes looked from a reek of piss and damp animal. Danny already had his duct tape out, but when he reached for the first mouse, he remembered that it was the edge that counted. Geneva Fairweather had said you could work most rituals with a sharpened paper clip and grass cuttings.

So maybe he didn’t need to kill three mice. Or even tape them into tiny mummies to bind them. His fist would hold the mouse. The athame was sharp enough to prick three drops of blood from the mouse’s back. The poor animal squirmed and squealed, but it was not dead. He folded the blood into a corner of paper torn from Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes, and followed the ritual from there.

Within moments, the rain slackened and Father Sun peeked down for the first time in three weeks. Danny turned to Geneva. “See? I could do it!”

A distant bicycle splashed through the puddles. She was gone.

Still, it didn’t matter. Danny knew he’d done something important. Real important. And Geneva Fairweather would be back, he was sure of it.

As for Danny, if he could do this, how much more could he do?

What effect would a Reversal of Indifference have on his mom?

Clutching his bus pass, Danny walked back toward the Tri-Met stop. He would study Mother Urban’s Booke of Dayes all the way home.

On the bus, he noticed for the first time the tiny illustration of a girl on a bicycle that appeared somewhere on every page of Booke of Dayes. Sometimes inside another illustration, sometimes tucked within the words, sometimes on the edge.

Had she been there before?

Did it matter?

The mice rustled in his jacket pocket. A pungent odor told Danny they were already making themselves at home there. That was fine with him. Smiling, he pricked his finger with the athame, right there on the bus, and watched the blood well like a fat-bellied ruby. Once he got home, some things would begin to change.

“Innocence always was a recipe for disaster.” Sesalem kept one hand on the issue .38 that protruded from the holster at his back like a warm, black egg stuck halfway out of the hen.

A nervous habit.

Corpses made him nervous.

Fork-Foot, his Infernal Liaison, walked around the body, kicking it with needled claws. Sesalem winced at this contamination of evidence. Eight feet tall, jeweled with glittering scales, and armored with Infernal Immunity, there was little the detective could do to influence the demon.

“Not innocent.” Fork-Foot growled like machine screws in a blender. “Stupid.”

The alley was narrow, three stories of age-blackened brick on each side lined with greasy Dumpsters. Portland had been a nice town, back before the Rapture. Now they were lucky just to keep the murder rate down.

It was no comfort that a good number of the victims got up off their tables at the morgue and walked out. Or sometimes clawed their way from the earth, much later.