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  “Sorry,” he panted, “didn’t have the chance.”

  “That’s fine,” she lied. But she wasn’t going to tell him she liked how it felt. She’d done enough for his ego. Pretending he hurt her the first time, that he’d broken her hymen, that there’d been blood, which she’d known would be a safe lie because his disinterest in afterglow became immediately apparent as soon as he came.

  Cole pulled out a hanky from his colorless suit. The warm comfort she felt was replaced with disappointment. Weird scarring and creases flexed through the broad, toady face. Hard years of unloading Church supply trucks and scuffles with other acolytes had made those creases. The scarring, however, was anyone’s guess. He never spoke of it. Not to her at least. The impressions sunk into the flesh like third degree burns made by a red hot pickax. Around his temples, around his throat, around his ears, the scars always looked fresh; she easily imagined smoke rising off them and the spicy odor of gristle.

  Cole cleaned off. When he was finished he folded the soiled linen and returned it to his pocket, not offering it to her. Melissa frowned and wiped herself with the already damp bridge of her underwear. A moment later, they were dressed and the chair pushed back against the rock wall.

  “Traven should be back by now,” he said.

  “You know he’s passed out somewhere.”

  “Never again.” Cole shook his head. “Not trusting that lush ever again.”

  “How long do you think Quintana will be down there with the Archbishop?”

  Cole’s gray eyes glowed. “Interested in Paul now?”

  “Don’t start that, Bishop.”

  He pulled her close to his bank vault of a chest. “The thought of you and him—”

  Her regret in that drunken event with Paul was so deep that no acting was required. Her desire for it to be untrue was mightier. Cole gently released her; he’d never be satisfied with her performance, no matter how convincing.

  Cautiously, Melissa pressed on, “So, again—how long will the trials last? We’ve got a lot of work to do before Chaplain Cloth returns.”

  Cole folded his arms and his suit lifted, too small on him. He needed a new one, badly. “It took me a day before the effect of the seeds wore off. Then my garden grew. Balance of the blossoms could take most men their entire life—like with that poor dead son of a bitch Margrave, it may never happen.” Cole leaned his gigantic shoulder against the wall. His face was tragically tired, and clearly not from sex. “Justin Margrave was a waste—we won’t have to worry about that with Quintana. He can achieve balance in time for the Heralding.”

  “Will Chaplain Cloth accept someone so new?”

  “If Quintana fails then he’ll make me take his place. I can’t go through another Heralding and still put my plans into motion though. The act pulls too much vigor from my body—it almost killed me last October.”

  “I remember.” She hadn’t known Cole that well at the time, but she recalled him being in the infirmary for several weeks. The scars might have been forged on that occasion for all she knew. The Heralding was supposed to be a brutal ritual, and Cole had done it more than many bishops before him. “It makes me wonder if all this is necessary. We’re doing well enough, aren’t we?”

  “Sandeus Pager isn’t worthy,” Cole snapped and then caught the volume level of his voice. “He hasn’t been out on the Hunt in more than a decade, and I don’t think he’s ever been to a Heralding. He’s imbibing more marrow seeds every year when the Tomes prohibit overindulgence in more than twenty sections. Twenty, Melissa. Sandeus Pager’s an atrocity. I will be the Archbishop the Church needs.”

  She did have a Xerox of that inventory count for the marrow seeds. Now, Melissa wished she hadn’t given it to Cole. Even though it had pushed his plans forward, it also made her vulnerable. Besides which, she wouldn’t have been surprised if the Archbishop hadn’t really taken the seeds but merely misplaced them—the man was more absentminded than anyone she’d ever known.

  “But I’m not stupid though,” Cole said, “Chaplain Cloth isn’t a man. He has his own ideas about the world of human beings.”

  She froze inside his thunderhead eyes. “What then?”

  “I won’t take anything for granted, not with Cloth,” he replied. “I don’t have that luxury this 31st with the gateway so close to opening indefinitely. Last year I felt it was closer, and had that Heart been just slightly more potent the Old Domain would have spilled into our world. That could happen this year. When the time is right I will, of course, tell Chaplain Cloth my plan and ask for his blessing.”

  “What if he doesn’t give it? Cole, what if he tells the Archbishop?”

  “I don’t think he cares about Church politics, just as long as he obtains the Heart of the Harvest.”

  “Are you sure he doesn’t care though… about Sandeus, I mean?”

  Cole walked out of the archives and she followed him. She waited for an answer, but he never gave one.

  NINE

  The song of the marrow seeds still rang operatic through the colonnades of Paul’s mind, just a hint of pipe organ blitz and impish balladeers in both ears exchanging lyrics. The pinkest smells like cat heaven! Heaven, like pink, smells so pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Slippery hot pink kitty cats. Paulo, Paulo, Paulo, my Paulo. After some consideration he discovered these voices were not conjured from psychedelic influence—the imps had been performing in his mind for a long time and only now were they free to sing openly. The singing went from tinny to soft, and he understood. They sang the same song his mother sang him at bath time.

  Paul just let it be. So much time had passed watching the sentinels hook up the phonograph that he’d forgotten the context and let his mother’s voice rule the hour. Far, too far, back, cowering behind a survival instinct, was the notion Paul might be in some danger. However, hallucination did not remove the corpse sitting next to him. Ray Traven sat like a gruesome doll, his skin a delicate white, a brilliant explosion under his jaw. Twenty or more wires fed into that explosion. Their little brass clamps bit onto the meaty strands as though to jumpstart him.

  The setup of the phonograph might have taken five minutes or five hours. It felt like both. A great deal of time had been spent staring into Ray’s phlegmy scarlet eyes and pondering not a thing at all. Sandeus could have spoken sometime during this epic journey, but Paul wouldn’t have known.

  Paul wagered that Alexander the snake, after being venom-robbed, had been returned to the tank. This was a lost event though—he just knew positively that it wasn’t him who took the scaly motherfucker away. It couldn’t be. He wasn’t able; he could hardly sit; his body urged to reconsider his position and just slide out of his chair onto the stone floor, perhaps into the stone floor, and there he could sleep amongst the stars.

  Archbishop Pager took out several thin stone discs from a battered blue suitcase. He reviewed the grooves of each disc with a painted fingernail. His eyes flitted over to Paul once. Those eyes—the wrongness in them—made Paul imagine Sandeus would laugh out in sadness or rip off his own skin from his nearly bald head, just to prove his love.

  The stone disc dropped with less weight than its appearance suggested. The needle came down on the perimeter and a hollow note struck from an unseen alto ghost. Pink foam frothed up in Ray’s ragged tracheotomy.

  “Quintana! Must I ask again?”

  Paul’s eyebrows jacked to the limit. He’d pissed Pager off somehow but hadn’t a clue how or why.

  “Hand over Alexander!”

  The snake? But hadn’t it been put back in the tank? Where the fuck—?

  Then a cold swamp smell filled his nose. He brought his head down, carefully. The weight of the moist, fat thing around his neck became heavier and he knew that four black fangs would latch into his jaw if he made a sudden movement. Paul raised a hand and the snake’s arrowhead shaped skull turned. Its pitchy eyes glittered. He dropped his hand. “Who put this on me?”

  Sandeus adjusted several switchboxes on the side of the phonogr
aph. The process didn’t seem to be going as smoothly as he liked because he was scowling. “You put him there, Quintana.”

  “But I’m high as a kite—” The room faded to sky blue now and swabs of cottony clouds streaked past with a million lavender kites hanging in the horizon like purple paper spirits. Paul didn’t let this distract him; he hadn’t forgotten Alexander and when he looked down the hallucination sky disintegrated in moldy blue threads.

  Paul gasped as he felt the snake writhe around his neck. He couldn’t touch this damned thing. The thought of touching it again made his balls tighten to little fists. “What’s the point of terrifying the shit out of me?” he demanded.

  The Archbishop, solemn and sincere and overflowing with intolerance at the same time: “Do you actually think I enjoy watching you suffer?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Well you couldn’t be more wrong. In this case however, there happens to be a practical purpose also.”

  Paul tried at Alexander again and the black and orange head snapped and he drew his fingers away.

  “If you’re going to be seated as Bishop, there are things you cannot sidestep. The marrow seeds blossom with an individual’s own personal blossoming. We cannot afford flinching. We need strength. You have the talent for balance, but not the will yet.”

  “Yes but—”

  “You need to understand the challenge before us, Quintana. Their names are Martin and Teresa. The same two nomads have done the Interloper’s work for nearly twenty years—keeping alive that long is unheard of. Yes, the Church of Midnight has had its successes, harvested many Hearts, and weakened the gateway. But with handling the nomads, we’ve failed. I have failed. Therefore, you must be tested beyond a single snake if you’re to survive through the holiday. If you cannot, you will not be seated. And without my counseling or Bishop Szerszen’s, the marrow seeds will drive you mad.”

  Paul was not far from that now. But the Priestess was everything to him. She was worth this torment. Thoughts of her drove his mother’s lavender scent away—he slid his hand across his chest, carefully, toward the snake.

  Paul saw the Priestess of Morning last October at the celebration.

  He edged his fingers down and touched the snake’s back.

  Justin Margrave had said through sips of his blackberry wine, “She came through the gateway, my man. Belongs to the Church of Morning. The sacrifice opened the gateway wide enough for her to slip through from the Old Domain. Lucky for us.”

  Paul’s fingers glided to the head—the tail rattled, the snake moved.

  Gazing at the Priestess’s soft body under her semi-transparent gown, he’d understood why a woman that perfect had to be from another world.

  He caught the neck and Alexander sunk into a ropy mass. Sandeus took the snake and pinched its jaws over the foaming blood. The foam receded with little carbonated pops. A sentinel with a burlap sack stuck Alexander inside. Good riddance, thought Paul.

  Sandeus poised his lips over the amplifier cone. “Archbishop of Morning, do you hear me? Kennen, are you there, brother?”

  The needle treaded a few minutes. Paul shifted in his seat. His mouth tasted ashy, he was hungry, he was horny, and he was soaked to the bone with fatigue. Waiting made him nervous. He didn’t want to see this man go crazy, frilled at the neck and perfumed to the gills. Most of all because Paul’s mind hungered to see something exactly like that happen. But the needle treaded against the tablet. Static. Nothing.

  Then Raymond Traven’s mouth contorted around a string of unhealthy sounds. Ray’s words did not belong to a person from this world.

  TEN

  Martin stretched his eyes to the sand shadows flowing over the town, a crumbling relic on old, broken Route 66. Crawling over the cactus, dominating the mounds of thirsty grasses, thrusting out from behind the foothills, something approached... what? He wanted to get out of the van and soak up the ambience to better understand it. Too bad they didn’t have some trout or chicken fillets. He could take out the Coleman and grill outside, listen, wait, understand, pretend it was summer and clean blue waves were crashing at his heels.

  He and Teresa had spent an involved hour practicing mantles. The game was an old one for the nomads. She’d taught it to Martin twenty years ago. He still remembered her then, a much younger and frightened Teresa, still morose from losing her last partner, David Wessing. The game’s concept was a simple distraction for them both. Mental push-ups. Each person formed a mantle and set it against the other, pushing it toward the opposition until someone grew too weary. They had quite a rally going, but Martin’s mind wandered and he took apart his ghost-matter, reshaped it. He imagined the form of a rubber ducky. Even though mantles were invisible, Teresa sensed the reshaping and frowned as her rigid block pressed into his duckbill.

  Her eyes were shut with complete seriousness. “You’re going to tire yourself out. That isn’t part—”

  “Just because you can’t shape them—” He immediately corrected his tone, knowing she’d take it as a challenge. “Look, I’m just getting bored is all.”

  “You haven’t pushed my mantle out yet,” she reminded. It was a prod at his competitive side, something she knew he did not possess, but always felt determined to unearth.

  “Can I wave the white flag now?”

  “No.”

  He let go anyway. “You need your rest.”

  He felt her mantle slip into divisions and extinguish from this world. Teresa opened her eyes and went right to her pocket for a clove. All Martin could do was sit there, back sweating against the driver’s seat, stomach gurgling for anything solid, just watching her, listening to the crackling fiberglass, smelling the cinnamon-sweet burn. How could he hate her so much and love her so much at the same time? He’d treated her so poorly these last few months. There’d been no other way to deal with her self-immolation. But come on, he thought, pushing someone away because it’s easier than losing them? Martin had to admit it was childish distancing, at best. He had no delusions about his tactics. Clove after clove though, Teresa didn’t care about breaking his heart, so why should he tend to hers? The thought was sour in his mind: Because she’s dying, you asshole.

  But should he apologize for her mistake?

  Not like this and not now; Teresa understood his thinking probably better than he did himself and it would do him no good. He always got snippy closer to the Day of Opening. Morale had definitely slipped since meeting that buxom girl and the lumberjack bartender. Even though he couldn’t explain it, Martin got the impression they weren’t supposed to meet those two, at least not on that day. Their flat tire might not have even been part of destiny. It wouldn’t have surprised him. On the unpredictable nomadic path, Martin had learned that anything and everything went. But if in the bar there’d been some kind of interference, who was responsible? Around the 31st, things could go wonky, and time and space could be jimmied—not changed, just toyed with. Spotting trouble had become a sixth sense for Martin, and those two in the bar got the sirens blaring for sure.

  There was another thing wrong though. Something, or some person, had perished somewhere close. Not like death wasn’t constantly happening everywhere anyway but what Martin sensed wasn’t flesh and bone and wasn’t literally dying. This death, unraveling over the hills and afar, was not earthbound; he got this feeling every October. His kidneys twisted like a doorknob that would open the way to the answer.

  Never had though.

  “The Messenger’s close,” Teresa told him quietly, bands of sweet smoke lifting around her face.

  Until now.

  Sam Cooke’s voice was joyful through the sketchy speakers. Another Saturday night, and Sam ain’t got nobody. It was actually Friday night, but the song still had forlorn poignancy. Even in the company of another, loneliness happened on the road sometimes, a sucker punch to the aorta. He and Teresa had never really had any private space of their own and so they learned to tune out each other’s existence.

  Then there w
ere times when each other’s presence was too well-known. Like today. That whole day Martin spent sitting in the van with Teresa, eating chip shrapnel from a greasy bag, taking walks out in a desert as empty as his mind, or listening to the radio until it got too annoying. Road-weary madness seeped into his brain and suddenly his voice became hers and hers his. His loathing of her sickness turned into self-loathing, which spawned new resentment when he thought about their last trip to the doctor.

  Teresa brushed her nails clean and went to filing the other hand. Martin didn’t think it had hit her until the hospital. She probably wouldn’t be around this time next year. She might die in a motel room, surrounded by bloody paper tissues, maybe some wilted get-well flowers from Martin. He could already envision himself softly crying over her, and feel the hot tears burn hot in his eyes. The lump in her lung would be a melon-sized bomb by then. Maybe a lung rupture would kill her or maybe something messier and less dignified would. How would Martin deal? Would the Messenger give him another partner, like what happened with Teresa when David was killed?

  The silent scratching of the nail file pissed him off and she sensed his anxiety right away. “We haven’t organized the weapon cache for a while,” she suggested.

  “You go right ahead. It’s already an anal-compulsive’s wet dream.”

  She glanced over. “Some of the labels are peeling off.”

  “I’ll just read the name on the box of ammo, thank you very much. And I know the difference between an M-1000 and a smoke grenade.”

  “You’re just going to get hemorrhoids sitting there. Get up and do something, Martin.”

  “Don’t order me around.”

  Teresa slapped her file on the dash and burst out laughing. “I’m sorry,” she managed. He glared. “I don’t mean to laugh. You’re just hypersensitive.”

  It was a puzzle for him sometimes what was more difficult: having only one partner to protect the Heart of the Harvest, or to be bound to that one person rather than taking the Church on his own. It was completely a no-win deal.