Bone Dance

The red-haired woman pressed me against the van’s front fender and over the wet hood; then she hooked her foot between my ankles and forced my feet apart. She was going to pat me down. A long, uncontrollable shudder went through me. “Dusty,” she said, “take this and cover her.”

“Her?” said Dusty.

A loud voice, behind and above me, said, “Stand back from the truck. Sparrow, move away from ’em.”

It was Theo’s voice. I’d never heard him yell before. He was at the head of the fire stairs, with Sher beside him, and he, too, had a nice little gun, which he’d pointed at Myra and Dusty.

Oh, Theo, no. Didn’t he remember his own advice? Didn’t he know he was making the Underbridge look damned uncooperative? Didn’t he have the sense not to do this for someone who’d never done anything for him?

Dusty still had Myra’s gun. So he smiled and snapped it upward. I was lunging headfirst toward him, not sure how I’d gotten there or what I was going to do, when someone exploded the whole volume of air around us. At least, it sounded like it.

I was lying in the mud, deaf, looking at the toes of Dusty’s shoes. My nose was full of the smell of fired gun. I couldn’t get up, because my hands were behind me, so I rolled over.

Dusty still smiled, with the pistol in his hands pointed at the fire stairs. Theo stood where he’d been, wearing the archetype of expressions of surprise. Sher was flattened against the door at the top of the stairs, her eyes showing white all around, her face colorless. Everything was — I looked back at Theo. His attention was fixed on his right arm. It looked as if someone had spilled ink inside the sleeve of his white jacket, and the stain was spreading. I saw his lips move. Was it something profound? All I could think of that needed saying was, I’m sorry, and it wasn’t his line.

Then someone back by the van said, “If you try that with me, I’ll cut you in half, Peppermint,” and I thought, Have we had enough drama yet tonight?

I struggled to sit up, and found myself looking at Myra. She held an automatic rifle that I realized must have come from the van, was pointing it at Dusty, and seemed ungodly pleased with herself.

Card 5: Crowning

The Lovers

Waite: Trials overcome.

Crowley: Various twin deities. His weapon is the Tripod. His drugs are ergot and abortifacients. His powers are to be in two or more places at the same time, and prophecy. Analysis, then synthesis. Ope

5.0: One hundred stories without a punchline

“Myra?” said Dusty with a quaver.

Myra surveyed us all with the same smile. “God, I love tableaux. Les Enfants du Paradis meet The Untouchables. Peppermint, hold that toy of yours by the barrel and fling it toward the river just as hard as you can. Now.” He did, and after a moment, there was a splash. “There’s a good boy. Lie down.”

“What the hell is going on?” Dusty’s voice was like a skin of ice over deep water.

“Allah has sent the change wind, and the world’s turned arse over ears. Now do what you’re told.”

“I ain’t go

“Yes, you are. But you have a choice as to whether you do it alive or dead. I have no preference, myself.”

Dusty sank slowly to his knees in the mud, and finally lay on his stomach. Myra reached into the little van and started it, fiddled with some things in the cab, and stepped back. The van lurched forward into the darkness, toward the river. In a few moments, there was a crunch.

“Pity,” said Myra. “I was hoping it would sink. Now, as for you two,” she went on, turning her attention to Theo and Sher.

Theo had come to himself enough to clamp his hand over the wound in his arm, but he looked as if he would like to fall down. Sher was keeping him from doing it, and staring narrowly at Myra.

“Who are you?” Sherrea asked her.

Myra’s eyebrows went up. “Child, you frighten me. Bright young people always do. Take your leaking comrade back through that door, lock it, and don’t come out again. Will you do that for me?”

“What’re you going to do with Sparrow?”

“I am going to take Sparrow home, and you will damn well have to take my word for it. Get inside.”

“What home?”

I was, after all, a confirmed bird of passage, but I hadn’t thought that Sherrea knew that. Myra said, “If I wanted you to know, I’d invite you along.”

Sher was glowering from under her hair, a pixie with a bad attitude. “I’d rather she didn’t shoot you,” I croaked.

“You don’t belong to them,” Sherrea said savagely. “You never did. And you don’t now.” Then she turned and pulled Theo inside.

Myra walked over to me and hauled me up by one arm. “Your standards of personal grooming never cease to impress me,” she said, giving my mud the once-over. “Peppermint, stay there until I come back for you, and if I find you’ve twitched a finger, they’ll mistake your corpse for a screen door.”

He still had the silvertones on; their blankness gave his face extra malevolence. He said, “When I kill you, I’m go

She looked down at him, the rifle pointed at his jaw. “Probably,” she said, her words slowed by the weight of some personal meaning. “I have a damnably long memory.” She took my elbow and drew me stumbling toward the parking lot.

The dust was rinsed away, but the thing parked at the pavement’s edge was recognizably the tri-wheeler from two days before. We stopped next to it, and Myra dug in her raincoat and pulled out a little chromed key. She poked it into my jeans pocket. “The cuffs,” she explained. “I’d ditch them now, but you’re so much more manageable this way. Get in.”

She’d popped the weather shell open, and I stood staring, a sickly colored light dawning in my battered head. In the driver’s seat of the tri-wheeler was the black-haired woman who owned it, she of the many names. She sat slumped, her eyes half-closed, her mouth slack, her hands dead on her thighs. Inert. Gone.

“Oh. Oh, hell,” I whispered. I glanced at Myra, back again to the black-haired driver.

Myra sighed. “Never mind; I’ll do it.” Before I could struggle, she grabbed the back of my shirt and the waistband of my jeans and swung me in behind that uninhabited body. Then she turned the driver’s limp hands over. Twined in the fingers of the left one I saw a strip of braided leather thong and black beads: my hair tie. Myra laid the rifle across the black-haired woman’s palms. I must have made a little noise, because Myra turned her flat gray gaze on me. “Sorry,” she said. “When you booked your seat, you should have specified ‘no shooting.’ ”

Myra walked away from the tri-wheeler, about a dozen feet. Then she turned around. Her face was blank.

The hands that had been limp closed around the rifle and raised it, pointing it at Myra. And above the rifle, the black-haired woman’s face was alive with the pleased expression that Myra’s features had worn moments before. Myra looked like someone who had gone to sleep in the basement and woken up on the roof, which I suppose wasn’t far from true.

“Myra Kincaid, you make me wish there were disinfectant for the mind,” said the black-haired woman. “Are you confused? Of course you are. The short version is that I’m not on your side, I’ll shoot you if you take one more of those steps, and I’m stealing your friend here. For the long version, ask your brother. He’s around back.”

I saw Myra take a breath; then, as if that had broken a spell, her face contorted, and she screamed, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the thing you’re a pale shadow of,” said the black-haired woman, and started the tri-wheeler. “Come see me again when your permanent fangs grow in.”