Heartland

XIV

Below deck, the light was purple and crimson, splashing off metal surfaces so as to create a play of shadows and reflections that made the hallway seem wider, the ceiling higher, and the dance floor cavernous. The DJ booth looked like it was a half-mile away, and the intervening space was filled with a crush of gyrating bodies. Whatever gothic aloofness or mechanical inflexibility was adopted by the patrons of the club above ground was abandoned down here, laid aside for a feverish exultation of the music.

The bar, a long slab of shiny steel, was near the door, and Marielle dove into the surging crowd like a championship swimmer vying for a channel crossing. I stayed near the wall, feeling a little more grounded with a steel bulkhead at my back. Colorful flashes of light were bursting at the periphery of my vision, and I was pretty sure they weren't the club's light show. Sweat ran down my back, and the Chorus was moving uncontrollably in my head.

I was running out of time. My reserves were dwindling quickly. The energy I had acquired from taking Lafoutain was going too fast, eaten up in a losing battle with the poison in my system. I had lasted longer than the others, but that was a small comfort in the long run.

A woman bumped into me. Hooded and wrapped in translucent latex, she was anonymous but for the swirl of her tattoos visible through the sheer material. Flaming snakes crawled up her belly, and ravens with lightning clutched in their talons rode her shoulders. She groped me like an old friend, and laughed as I responded to her eager fingers. Her tongue was pierced with a star, and the light behind her eyes was entirely unworldly.

Her companion, a sleek dominatrix with bloodied lips and too-pale skin, pulled her away from me. The shining one, still laughing, waved to me as they dissolved in the sea of bodies, and for a second, it looked as if she were carrying the disembodied head of her stern friend on a platter.

Behind them, flickering in the crowd like a reflection caused by something in the corner of my eye that was catching the light from the DJ booth, was Antoine. My teeth chattered as a cold draft snaked down my collar, and my vision washed out with too many colors as I started blinking uncontrollably. He was suddenly everywhere, hiding behind every face, and the more I tried to find him in the crowd, the more I wasn't sure which face was truly his and not some illusion. I spotted the woman in latex again, still laughing with the star in her mouth, and when I tore my eyes away from her dancing light, Antoine's face was gone.

But the sensation that he was watching me was still there.

Tremors ran through my legs, vibrations that increased in amplitude as they moved to my chest. Pressing my back against the wall for support, I scanned the crowd near the bar for Marielle. The Chorus reached out, flicking from light to light, trying to find her psychic signature. I needed something familiar. Something I could trust. My anchor. Where had my anchor gone?

A centurion stood near the bar. I blinked, and he remained. Out of time and place. Glistening as if he had just stepped in from the rain. Over his head, a bronze fish was attached to the wall. The ostrich plumes of his headdress were crimson and black. He held a pole in his right hand, and the top was ragged as if several inches of the stick had been crudely snapped off. The shaft was stained black, as if it had been dipped in oil, and some of the blackness was on his hand too. He wore mirrored sunglasses, an incongruity that made him more like a costumed patron than a vision.

Something burned my side, and when I slapped at my coat, my hand hit the pack of tarot cards in one of the inner pockets. Like a detoxing alcoholic who finds a tiny bottle of vodka in the sofa cushions, I dug for the bag and fumbled with the strings. The cards spilled out, and I frantically grabbed at them, trying not to lose any.

Death. The Tower. Lots of swords. The Eight of Cups. The Moon. The High Priestess. Too many. Too many possibilities. I couldn't focus, and I felt like I was drowning. The beats were waves, battering me against an unyielding shore. Too. . many. . choices.

It was the Chorus, flush with a cacophony of voices. Too many willful souls so recently taken. I couldn't control them, not in my current state. Their histories and personalities were overwhelming me-still too vibrant-and I was vanishing. Struggling to block out the sensory tumult of the dance floor, I tried to relax. Don't force it, I thought. Don't try so hard. My hands knew what to do. They could master the deck, and I wouldn't drop any of the cards; and if I could hold the cards, I could hold my thread. I could find myself again.

Somewhere in the rush of noise in my head and the pounding waves of sounds, I found shelter. I imagined a tiny alcove, almost like a monk's cell, tucked away in the bowels of an unknown monastery. No light. No windows. Just a space large enough for a man to kneel and consider his own fate. His own choices, and the paths granted to him. A quiet place, where I could sift through the detritus and the dross of my being and ascertain what had been lost. Where I could remember who I was.

This tiny place was like the altar I had visited. Not in any profane church, not in any physical building. The one surrounded by wind and light, though when I realized the stone was there beside me, there was neither wind nor light. Just an empty void, a vacuum without life or spark.

The stone was bare, unmarked by Bernard's water. This place was untouched, unmarked by sacrifice. I hadn't come here yet. No one had. It didn't exist. Not yet. It was just an idea in my head.

There was something in my hands, and I thought it was the deck of cards, but it wasn't. The cards were gone, gone with the rest of the real. I was somewhere else, hidden away in this wilderness of the mind. The object in my hand was luminous, twitching and squirming in my grasp as if it were alive. My fingers were translucent from its light.

There was a wound in my side, a long rip weeping slow tears. Dried on my naked skin, in a track running down to my waist and thigh, was a line of rose petals.

If I opened my hands, would the light go out? There was no answer to my question, not even from my own spirit, and so I kept my hands pressed together tightly. I was afraid to find out what happened next.

I do not Know the course of the future. I cannot See what comes next.

In the darkness before the world began, I hugged my warm hands to my bare chest and wept.

Drink, my lord. Drink from this vessel.

Marielle put the cup to my lips, and I coughed as the acidic vapors burned my nose. I recoiled and my head banged against the bulkhead. My lips refused to cooperate.

"Michael," she said. "Drink it. It smells worse than it is."

The fumes seared my nose and eyes badly enough that I gasped in pain, and Marielle forced the cup between my teeth and tipped it up. The fluid moved like half-frozen sludge and tasted like motor oil mixed with battery acid and putrid fruit. I choked on the first sip, nearly spit it out, but managed to keep my lips pressed together. It went down like you'd expect that combination to, burning all the way, and the explosion it caused in my stomach forced all the air out of my lungs. My vision went white, and I felt electricity spark from my fingers and toes.

The second sip went down more easily. By the third, I could feel my arms again, and after that, I held the cup myself. Drinking the potion greedily as if it were nectar squeezed from a half-dozen exotic fruit.

At least, that's what I told myself. It still tasted like rotten apples coated in axle grease and bile, but I knew it wasn't going to kill me. On the contrary, it was cleaning me out. Of a lot of things. The magickal purge. One potion washes away all manner of sin and poisons.

"God, that's toxic," I managed when my throat worked well enough for words.

"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger," she said.

"Fuck Nietzsche. He never had to drink that stuff."

She patted me on the chest and then left her hand there. "And look. Your mood has improved too."

I nodded at the battered cup. "Where did you get that? From the engine room? They didn't have something cleaner?"

"The cocktail would have melted anything else," she said.

I ran my tongue over my teeth. "I think it stripped off a layer of enamel." My stomach still boiled, but the prickling fire in my joints was gone, and the noise in my head had fallen to a dull roar. The normal sort of roar. The music, while still a pervasive pressure, wasn't as bowel-rattling as it had been a few minutes earlier.

She was right: I was stronger.

A man in black leather and a mask that blocked all his peripheral vision bumped into Marielle and she pressed more firmly against me. Her fingers started tapping on my chest. "You need to move around," she said, her mouth close to my ear. Her breath was hot on my neck, and I felt a welcome flush of blood move through my skin. "Get your blood circulating. Make sure all the toxins are burned out."

"What do you suggest?"

She nodded toward the crush of bodies on the dance floor, and her hair brushed the side of my face.

"Strictly for medical reasons?" I asked.

"Of course." She nipped my earlobe.

I looked toward the bar. Beneath the metal fish on the wall, a pair of young women dressed as goth Lolitas were busy texting on their mobile phones. Probably to each other. There was no sign of the centurion. Nor was there any sensation from the reinvigorated Chorus that Antoine was still in the crowd somewhere. If he ever had been.

"Come on." She dragged me into the mass of dancers, and I gave up looking for something that wasn't there. Her hand was hot and real, and the rest faded away. It was all a dream, and what I held was what mattered. It might be enough, I told myself.

The last time we had danced in public had been the New Year's party/millennium celebration at a place simply known by a Greek symbol. I had no idea if Omega was still there, though I doubted it; the party that night had had a vibrant fatalism about it, as if either we or the place itself wouldn't survive past dawn.

There had been Watchers there-Bento, the last one from our little coterie who was still speaking with me, and a number of others-and the mood, while celebratory, had been slightly tense. Ever since the game of Hunt the Werewolf had gone badly in Bechenaux, Antoine and I had been circling each other, waiting for an opportunity. In the months and years since that night, I had come to realize that it wasn't that Marielle had been blind to our antagonism, she had simply expected us to behave better. The question never satisfactorily answered was who had been the most naive that night: Antoine and I, or her.

In that moment, during those few hours before New Year's Day, I hadn't cared. The world shrank to her and me; everything else was hidden behind a barrier of rhythm and light. She and I moved against one another, breathing in time. Her hands against my chest. My mouth on hers. My hands in her hair. Our breath, moving back and forth. Her voice, Whispering in my head in a way that made the Chorus jealous.

We had been this intimate prior, but not like this in public. Not in front of Witnesses. Let the Record show that the Daughter of the Hierarch chose to end the last century in the arms of the Outcast-solute frater, veneficus. The one named Adversarius.

The Record also contained the death of the adversary at the hand and sword of her champion, a man who later became Protector-Witness-one of the chosen soldiers of the society. Such was the cost of sinning against the fraternity, of a brother transgressing against brother, and while Marielle would argue that she was not a possession-not something that could be bought or traded or kept-the simple fact was: I fucked Antoine's girlfriend-more than once-and then celebrated such intimate knowledge with her in public.

Sins of the flesh. Though, while I harbored a few regrets from the last decade of learning magick, Marielle was not one of them. She was a ruinous complication; the sort of entanglement which everyone involved knew was going to end badly, but which no one shied away from. We were hedonistic children of an age which had no use for the morality of our forefathers. We believed we were stronger than the desires rooted in the flesh, that we were more emotionally evolved. We were domesticated creatures, no longer obsessed with the basal elements in the hierarchy of needs. We could-and did-concern ourselves with the eternal riddles of philosophy and consciousness. We knew the flesh was mutable, fallible, and would ultimately betray us without reservation. Why would we not enjoy the sensory opportunities it afforded us while it was healthy and strong? Why not?

The ecstatic ceremonies of ancient cults involved rituals of the body. Whether it was physical contact with another or the ingestion of pharmaceuticals or narcotics or the deprivation of sensation, the secret rites took advantage of the body's limitations. Overload the body, a machine that operates via a systematic structure of patterned responses, and it doesn't stop functioning, it stops following those preset patterns. It loses control, and turns to the mind for help. Freedom is the drunkard's waltz, the doper's irrepressible stream of consciousness, and the hedonist's climactic shiver. In these moments, the body is gone, and the mind is free to venture beyond the shell of meat that holds it.

I know what it is like to occupy the life of another, to experience their sense of taste, touch, and smell. To see and feel what they do. To know their fear and desire. While the Chorus is the fractured history of a dozen or more lives, it is not the chaos of schizophrenia. I never switch places with them; my identity is always the strongest, for it is in contrast to them that I am defined.

I am not the man I was ten years ago, but then who of us is?

And yet, validating that nexus of our cosmology, I gravitated toward Marielle once more, drawn to her in this enclosed space. She was a spark without shadows, and her pure light pulsed with the rhythm of the world around us. A moth flings itself at a light, Icarus flung himself at the sun, and I clutched Marielle tight, more desirous of that heat and light than any prior seeker of illumination. The crowd moved with us, a whirlpool cycle that ebbed and strained against the walls of the boat. Sensing the change in the crowd, the DJ flipped on a record with a lock groove, an endless loop disguised as a piece of vinyl, and no one cared. We were a primordial sea of flesh, electrified cells circling a central star.

This is how life began, a hundred million years ago. Tiny lights swirling tighter and tighter until all the gross materials caught in the whirlpool of energy fused into the primal gases and fluids of existence. The soup kept spinning, following the rhythmic cycle of God's heartbeat, and each rotation compressed everything a little more.

With each cycle-life, death, life again-we got a little closer, and eventually I kissed her. Her lips were hot and real, and they, too, might have been enough.

In an alcove that barely qualified to be called such, on a shelf that wasn't much more than a steel bump on the bulkhead, wreathed in shadows of our making, Marielle braced herself with one foot on the floor. Our pants were already undone; mine bunched around my ankles like a pair of short-chain manacles. With one hand supporting her raised leg, I fumbled with the edge of her panties.

The beat shook the boat, a subsonic rumble that shivered the rivets. My fillings vibrated, making my mouth tingle with electricity, and her tongue carried the same current. She opened her mouth wide against my lips as I pushed her back against the wall, and her lips curled into a smile as I slid into her. Arms wrapped around me as if I were saving her from drowning, Marielle held on tight as our rhythm became a counterpoint to the pulse beating through the bulkhead.

The song became stronger, the beat more insistent and violent as if the river was being bombarded. A knot of white-hot heat flooded my groin, a pressure that wouldn't release, no matter how hard I thrust. No matter how hard the walls shook against us. Marielle strained and pulled at me, her fingers raking through the fabric of my jacket. At some point, she bit me and blood smeared across her lower lip. Her teeth were shining blades of ivory, eagerly poised to bite me again.

The knot of our bodies tightened, cinching into an impossible tangle of desire and restraint. I thought my body was going to rupture, an explosion of bone and blood, before I could climax. She pulled harder, the tendons in her neck and shoulders standing out. When she cried out in frustration, I couldn't hear her voice, so loud was the feedback of my pulse jackhammering in time with the staccato climax of the drum and bass track.

I must have blacked out for a few seconds because, when I became aware that the knot was gone, I had no recollection of when or how it vanished. The song had changed too, and the walls only shivered quietly now, a distant buzz that was like a vibrating cell phone in a coat pocket. My face lay against the cold wall, and Marielle lay nestled against me, her face buried next to my throat.

Reluctant to let go, to let this moment of stolen intimacy end, I stroked her hair gently as I tried to burn all the tiny details into memory.

The trembling pulse beneath her skin. The tender brush of her fingers against my lips. The hint of her breath against my neck. A tear, sliding down my throat and melting into the braid of the Chorus. Ephemeral relics of her presence. All so fragile that, were I to move, they would vanish. All tiny fragments that would be lost in a moment.

I would keep them; when everything else became confused and tangled in my head, when my memories became twisted with the dreams and recollections of others, I would still have these tiny treasures. They would last, unlike the dreams.

They would be enough.