Luminous Part 16

* No/I can save you/Get you home/Get you back. *

"STOP IT!" Consuela shrieked, flailing her arms. V grabbed her wrists and held on, restraining her pull, her push, her want to tear everything down. She yanked her shoulders and screamed through her teeth. Her hair stuck to her face in salty patches. V held her safely at a distance as frustration and fear somersaulted in her head.

Her anger finally slaked, she fell against him, sobbing-b.u.t.ting his chest with the top of her head, weak and weary and worn. His arms settled around her shoulders.

"I'm sorry," he said.

* Sorry/Sorry/Sorry/Too late!/I'm sorry. *

"Stop being sorry," she murmured.

They stood together in the burnt-rose room. The crisped teddy bear watched them with flat b.u.t.ton eyes.

"Tender showed me the way home," Consuela said. "He said I could go. But I didn't."

V stiffened. "Tender can't . . ." The words b.u.mped against each other, as if struggling to be first. "I'm sorry. I don't know what he said, but he can't take you home."

"I know," Consuela said sadly. Remembering her family portrait, she ran the topaz cross along its chain, feeling its tug at her neck. "But he wanted me to think that he could," she said; a part of her still wondered-hoped?-that someone would help her get home. That it could be as easy as walking through her bedroom door.

"He wants something," she added.

"He wants out," V answered. "Like you."

She shook her head. "That isn't it. When I asked why didn't he use the door himself, he said that he didn't ever want to go back. It might not have been a real way out, but I heard it in his voice." Tender didn't want his old life. He was after something else. "He said none of you wanted to go back to an ugly life."

V said nothing, hiding while holding her.

"For some of us, that's true," V said.

She shook her head against wondering what kind of life she'd find, what kind of body she might return to. It didn't matter-it would be real. It would be home. Mom. Dad. It would be better than here.

"Did Tender kill Yehudah?" she whispered urgently. "Did he kill Nikki, too?"

V's arms tightened around her, like a knot. * I don't know what I know . . . *

"I've suspected Tender was up to something, but I couldn't tell the Watcher," he said carefully. "I had no proof. I still don't. And we can't go around pointing fingers." A twitch cascaded down V's back; Consuela could feel it jumping and jerking under her palms. He cracked his neck. "It's no secret none of us like him much. He's tough to be around because of who he is and what he does. But it's not that." Consuela wasn't sure if she imagined V's arms growing tighter as he talked or how good it felt to be there. She closed her eyes and listened to his voice under her ear. "In here, we only have the things that cross over; we're all we've got. We can't afford to turn on one another."

Consuela pulled back, needing some distance from his intoxicating skin.

"What proof do you need?" she asked.

"Anything. Evidence. Whatever he's doing, he's been planning it for a while. * I feel it *," V said, raising his eyes. "Have you noticed that we all leave a trail, like a feeling or a smell? It's how we find one another. * How I found you/ How you found me. * It marks where we've gone, where we've been. His is everywhere when something's gone wrong." He wiped his hands on his jeans. "Like a warning you can feel." V ma.s.saged the place where she'd hit him, an echo of pain like the tears drying on her face.

* Tender *, the violins sang unheard in the room.

Consuela thought back to the last time she'd seen the Yad, and that feeling of forgetting something, left unfinished.

"What is it?" V asked.

"Nothing," she said. "I was just thinking . . . of the compulsion."

She was still raw inside as her mind whirred, the ripple effects of logic boosting her nerves. Consuela stepped up to V, nearly into his chest. "Do you think we can be called to help one another?" she confided. "Does that ever happen in the Flow?"

He stayed within a breath of her, gazing down into her eyes. "I don't know." He hesitated. "But I've felt it . . ."

"For me." She finished the sentence for him.

"For you," V said, and glanced away. He sighed. "I told you that I saw you see me in the mirror," he confessed. "But I never expected . . . * You would be you. * Here. * * Now. * Bones. *" The violins sang softly, and faded.

"I don't know what I can do for you here in the Flow," he confessed. His hand moved as if he meant to touch her hair, but he dropped it, rebuffed by an unasked question.

"I was your a.s.signment," Consuela said. "Maybe I'm still your a.s.signment. Maybe what you feel is . . ." She faltered, trying to speak around the tightness in her throat. She met his eyes."

V's face softened. "No," he said. * No. * His music held no doubt. "Consuela, I know the difference," he added quietly. "I know what's real." * I know myself. * Consuela. * Bones. *

Shyly, she nodded. One fear down. "Well, then maybe I'm here for a different reason," she murmured. "Because I think I felt something when I last saw Yehudah. When we were at Killian O'Shea's. I thought it was the ward, but maybe it was something else."

V looked intrigued, impressed . . . and maybe a little, what? Disappointed? Jealous? Then memory hit like a slap.

* The Yad is dead. *

"You think we should go there?" V asked under the sad lilting of electric strings. Consuela nodded. V took a deep breath. "Fine. When you get there-"

"When I get there?" she interrupted.

"I don't know the way," he said. "Crossing through mirrors isn't the same as going through the Flow. So when you get there, open this." He dug in his back pocket and handed her a s.h.i.+ny silver compact of blush. "It was Sissy's," he said with a tight grin. "She said she didn't need it as much as I did."

"I a.s.sume she meant the mirror." Consuela tried to laugh, but it stuck in her throat.

V watched as she opened the s.h.i.+ny bit of plastic and ran a finger along the pressed powder's edge. "When we cross over, the image stays," he said softly. "Like a photograph. Everything we last see there comes over here, too-down to the last speck of dust and lost ballpoint pen." He smoothed the mirror closed, pressing the backs of her fingers. It was a gentle gesture, but his eyes were intense.

"Everything here is precious because we can't go back and touch it again. What we bring over is all that we've got, all that we have, including each other," V said. "If we question it, it can undo everything." He squeezed their fingers together, like a promise or a pact. "Are you willing to do this?"

She kept her eyes on his as she clicked the silver case closed.

"Let's go."

WHAT happened here?" Consuela asked V as they entered the dim hallway; she knew the floorboards were cold without needing to feel them. The lights were off, the door was open, and all the photos in the hall were gone. It was as if they'd entered an abandoned building, a before-and-after shot of Casa O'Shea.

Consuela had flipped open the compact, expecting to see V's face staring back-like some sort of Star Trek gizmo trick-but a rush of color and matter hurricaned out and left V standing next to her, very much whole. It was both unsettling and cool.

"Is this the right place?" she asked aloud.

"It's the right place," V said as he pointed up. The line of blood still burned.

"The ward's still alive even when . . . ?" Consuela couldn't finish.

* The Yad is not. * V's heart spoke the seraphim echo that he, himself, couldn't hear. She knew for a fact that he was hurting. V knew the Yad. They had been friends.

Consuela didn't know the Yad well. She hadn't had the chance.

"He's not here," she said, thankful that there wasn't a body or chopped-up bits in the hall. She'd been half afraid of what they'd find, but the place was empty of everything but dust. "No one's here."

* But I can smell him. He was here. *

She heard V, but said nothing; the baby-powder scent was all but gone in the empty room. Cardboard boxes labeled with fat black letters littered the floor: WINTER CLOTHES, TOYS, SAFETY STUFF, LINENS/DRAPES. The walls were bare and the drawers were empty. Everything except the boxes, a roll of packing tape, and the large furniture was gone. The hardwood crib in the corner of the room still burned with flickering, dark fire. Neither of the Yad's wards had been broken, but the baby and his family were gone.

V walked around the room on the empty carpet. "So? Anything?" he asked.

She didn't feel anything, but she was piecing together what she could see.

"They're moving," Consuela said. "And it was unexpected."

V frowned. "How can you tell?"

"Ever had to move a whole house?" She pointed at the boxes, half of which had yet to be taped shut. "It takes forever. This is happening quickly and missing important bits." She pointed at the crib. "Where does Killian sleep?"

"In another crib, somewhere else," V concluded.

"Somewhere unprotected." Consuela said, examining the boxes. "This looks like it's a second load of stuff. The first went out already; clothes, diapers . . ." She glanced at the open box labeled TOYS and a thought slid into place. "It's not his mom."

V peered into the box full of bright-colored junk. "What?"

Consuela felt the chill like a sudden drop in temperature. "Killian's mom didn't pack this," she said. "The stuffed animals and blankets are all tossed in. A mom . . ." She remembered when her family moved to Illinois how her mother had packed every one of her toys with blankets so they wouldn't break, how each of her gla.s.s figurines had to be excavated carefully from bubble wrap and towels. Her room had taken the longest to pack because her mom kept telling her stories about every little thing. Consuela's fingers stroked the satiny edge of a yellow blanket.

"Moms like to linger over sentimental stuff," she said softly. "They pack those things with extra care. Baby things, especially."

"You sound as if you know something about it," V observed.

She shrugged and said, "I've got a mom." Her voice cracked.

V coughed uncomfortably. "So the O'Sheas are moving, Mom isn't doing the packing, and the Yad is dead." He waved an open palm at the undone room. "If there's something else here, I don't see it."

"Me either," Consuela admitted. She had no other ideas. She felt for the stale traces of any of them being here, but it wasn't something she could sense. The black lines of blood shone like a command: Protect them.

She was an Angel of G.o.d, after all.

"Maybe we should ask Sissy where the O'Sheas are going," Consuela said. "It might be good to give her something to do."

"Good idea," V said quietly as he stared at the crib.

* His body's somewhere. * Yad. * It's not fair! * I should have been there/done something . . . *

Consuela self-consciously waved a cardboard flap closed. She could feel the pain spilling off V in waves, rippling through the air. V trembled with a sadness he couldn't express. Not with her here.

"Okay," she said, and walked quickly past him, her pa.s.sage brus.h.i.+ng the black curls from his eyes like a blown kiss.

"I'm sorry," she said.

V nodded and rubbed a hand over his face, ma.s.saging the deep s.h.i.+ne in his eyes.

He turned away. She turned away. She thought that maybe this was why guys needed someone like Nikki, someone to cry for them when they could not.

Consuela left to find her next grieving friend.

chapter eleven.

"Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason."

-OCTAVIO PAZ.

It was like stepping into an old movie or a bad museum trick. Animatronics, Tender thought, with hidden wiring and lights. He didn't like things that tried to look alive when they weren't.

Joseph Crow looked like the Ken doll of the Indians. No way he really looks like that, Tender figured. Then again, none of them did. Except Wish. Abe's too stupid to take anything for himself.

The large man stood bared to the waist, hairless and tan, wearing body piercings and well-worn Levi's jeans. The jeans looked like they'd gone through the desert, been run over by a pickup truck, and dried while worn after the rain. They were the jeans every other male trouser wanted to be. Those were Joseph Crow's only clothes.

It was hot. How can he have a fire going in here? Tender wiped sweat from his eyes and stared at the small hole around the rough, center post. Air. Fresh air. Hot. I can't breathe! The b.a.s.t.a.r.d did this on purpose, dammit.

"I came to talk," Tender said to Joseph Crow, watching the smoke curl up and out, thinking, If anyone's escaping, it's going to be me.

Joseph Crow didn't turn around, which irked him. The giant Native American stared into a corner at a six-pack of cheap beer. The cans had the untouched look of having always been there. Joseph Crow kept staring. Tender thought if this was a contest, the beer might be winning.

"Going to offer me a drink?" he asked.

The big man finally said something: "No."

Tender shrugged and took a step closer. "I have something to ask you."

"No one's keeping you from asking." Joseph said it like a challenge. The silver barbell pierced above his Adam's apple bobbed as he talked. Joseph Crow threw a bundle of gray twigs into the fire and the place grew smoky-sweet.

"Someone's killing in the Flow," Tender said. "Folks are dying."

Joseph said, "I've heard," not making it clear whether he had heard about it secondhand or that he'd overheard it done. The ambiguity made Tender nervous, despite his c.o.c.ksure grin.

"Do you care?" Tender asked.

Joseph glared at him. "Do you?" From under the wink of two hoops through his left eyebrow, Joseph's eyes were darker than brown.

Tender, annoyed and surprised, said, "Of course I care." He wiped his limp bangs angrily from his face. "I wouldn't be here in your G.o.dd.a.m.n wigwam if I didn't. How about you?" he accused. "You give a d.a.m.n?"

Joseph c.o.c.ked his head sideways as he scratched absently at his chest. There were rough patches of discolored scarring, an inch above each pierced nipple, which Tender thought was pretty h.o.m.o if he stared at them too long. He kept his eyes up.