Richard Kadrey: Blind Shrike

"This visit is not for you," said the banker in the middle.

"It is for us," said the one on the left.

"For accounts balance?" said the one on the right.

"I don't owe you nothing. My account is balanced," said Lulu.

"For now," said the banker in the middle, who appeared to be the leader. "Our concern lies with the future?"

"I saw what you did to that guy. Get the fuck out of here!" said Spyder, grabbing one of the chairs and starting at the men.

The banker with the ledger calmly pulled his knife and pointed the blade at Spyder. "This is not for you, young man. Please do not interfere."

"Look at her. She doesn't have anything left to give you."

The three pale men nodded and laughed. "She lives and breathes? Yes. There is always something. Her heart?"

Spyder looked at Lulu. "You said they didn't take hearts."

"We take hearts, when life is not honored or appreciated. But the oblation can not live without one, so we take them last."

Spyder weighed the chair in his hands, knowing the moment to hit someone had passed. When he set the chair down, the middle banker put the knife back in his belt.

"You can't have her," said Spyder. "But from what she told me, you don't care about that. You just want a payment, right?"

"Accounts must be balanced. This is our burden," said the one on the right.

"Any will do, if given freely?" said the one on the left.

Spyder nodded, still trying to parse their odd, sing-song speech. "Then take something from me."

"Shut up, Spyder!" shouted Lulu.

The middle banker said, "You owe us nothing. If we took from you, we would be in your debt?"

"No. You'd leave Lulu alone, so we'd be even."

"This is possible."

"And you said this was for the future, so you wouldn't need anything from me right now…?" Spyder asked.

"Correct."

"Okay then. It's a deal. I'll see you down the fucking road. The door is that way. Use it."

"There is no deal yet," said the middle banker. He stepped forward and grabbed Spyder's arm with shocking speed and strength. With his knife the banker cut a symbol into the underside of Spyder's left wrist. "Now we have a deal." He smiled at Spyder. The flesh the banker wore didn't quite synch with his muscles, so the smile came in stages. First the facial muscles worked, then the teeth appeared, then the outside flesh stretched into something a schizophrenic might call a smile. "So that you will not forget? And no one else can claim you."

Spyder had been tattooed, pierced and had a ritual scar on his chest, but nothing he'd ever done prepared him for the pain of the banker's knife. It managed to be freezing and branding-iron hot at the same time. And it didn't feel as if the blade was cutting, but raking away large sections of skin and muscle. However, when Spyder looked there was a small, neat incision that was already cauterized.

"Pardon us?" said the banker, and all three men started toward the back of the shop.

"Hey, Barry White, tell me something," said Spyder. "You knew she wasn't alone, didn't you? This whole scene was just a vaudeville act. You weren't here to collect from her, but to rope in someone new."

The middle banker nodded to his companions, then to Spyder. "You. The girl. This does not matter. The debt matters. The restoration of balance? This is our burden." One by one, the three men entered the little bathroom at the back of the studio. When Spyder opened the door a moment later, they were gone.

"What was that word he called you just now?" Spyder asked Lulu.

"Oblation," she said. "It's a kind of sacrifice. The kind you're supposed to give with thanks."

"It's not enough they zombifie you. You're supposed to send them a thank you card, too?"

"Pretty much. You wouldn't think it to look at them, but the Black Clerks are all about having a good time." Lulu put her hand lightly on Spyder's shoulder. "You have no idea what you just got yourself into."

Spyder kissed the top of her head. "It's all right. I think I know someone who can help."

After dropping Lulu at home, Spyder took at cab to the Bardo Lounge. He'd always -preferred the night, but now he was falling in love with it.

Spyder couldn't really deny the angels in the sky or the anacondas with the faces of crying children hiding in the palm trees along Dolores Street, but in the dark smaller oddities were swallowed and invisible. Besides, night had always seemed a time of madness and possibility. The visions just felt more natural at night.

The neighborhood around the Bardo Lounge had taken on a heavy, wet jungle feel, as if the cab had stumbled into the abandoned set of some expensive dinosaur movie. There were always a lot of film crews in town and for a moment, Spyder thought that they might have genuinely rolled onto a set. But sacrifice poles dotted the corners, animal heads and flowers dripping in the thick, humid air.

The Bardo Lounge was packed. Rubi was serving drinks. She gave Spyder a kiss on the cheek and bought him a tequila. He was relieved to see that she was entirely normal, with none of Lulu's mutilations.

The bar was alive with a happy, drunken weekend crowd. Leather-clad boys and girls with hair in cotton-candy colors and lips shining brighter than their vinyl skirts. Spyder wanted to wade out and dive into their beauty, and be baptized by their sweat and saliva. But for the first time since he was an awkward teenager, he couldn't think of anything to say to them. He felt as removed from the crowd as the monsters he'd been seeing in the streets all day. Spyder turned away and drank his tequila.

There was a demon sitting on the stool next to Spyder. It was a huge bare-chested olive-skinned man, his features lost beneath cascading rolls of glistening fat. White geometric designs covered his arms and chest, some kind of tribal markings. Considering everything, he didn't look too bad, Spyder thought. Pretty human, in fact. Not at all like the monsters in Jenny's mythology textbooks. The demon stole the beer of the girl sitting next to him and poured the whole thing into a wide, toothless mouth that split open in the middle of his chest.

Spyder sighed and the demon caught him looking. The demon leaned in close and said, "How do you get twelve humans to wear one hat?"

"How?" asked Spyder.

"You bite the heads off eleven."

Spyder turned back to his drink. "Sorry for not laughing, but I'm going to be over here ignoring you."

"I'm Bilal," said the demon, " You're the little prince, aren't you? The one Shrike killed for. What's your story?"

"There is no story. I'm just an inker who had to take a leak."

"That's beautiful. Maybe they'll carve that on your tombstone? You'll be an inspiration to future generations." A stoned couple stumbled by and Bilal delicately plucked the cigarette from the mouth of a cadaverous, lavender-lipped boy. The demon sniffed the cigarette once and dropped it into his chest-mouth. "Though I was really hoping you could justify your existence. Like maybe you were some minor deity on pilgrimage. Or a diplomat off to a secret rendezvous to stop a war."

Bilal blew out a long puff of smoke out through the mouth in his face.

"What's it like being a demon here in a place like this?" asked Spyder.

"I don't know. What's it like being a human?"

Spyder looked in the mirror behind the bar, taking in the crowd. There were other demons, mostly talking to each other. A couple of guys playing pool were cut up in a way that looked like the work of the Black Clerks. "Scary and Salvador Dali weird," Spyder said. "Wrath of god weird. The kind of weird where you think if you see one more shadow or hear one more bang, your heart's going to explode."

"Welcome to the world, boy. As for my personal complaints, you can add having to deal with idiot talking meat like you." Bilal pocketed a two dollar tip someone had left for Rubi. "See, that demon who died last night was Nebiros. He was a friend of mine. In fact, my best friend in this sorry Sphere." Bilal put his hand on Spyder's arm. Each of the demon's fingers was tipped with a scaly lizard mouth lined with tiny needle teeth. The lizards bit into Spyder as Bilal squeezed his arm. "You owe Nebiros a life and me, well, I miss my friend and that makes me mad. You know what I mean?"