Alabaster

"I don't even know what you're talking about. Who's Sinethella?"

The mirror girl looks skeptical and furrows her brow. "It hasn't even told you about-"

"He tells me what I need to know, when I need to know it. He tells me-"

"Just enough to keep you moving, and not one word more, because it knows the big picture would shut you down, send you ru

"I don't have a tail," Dancy says, wishing the albino girl in the mirror, the girl who isn't her reflection after all, would shut up and go away.

"You might as well, as far as the Seraphim are concerned. To them, you're nothing but a trained monkey, an ugly little freak of evolution they can swindle into wiping their Heavenly asses for them."

"Is this another test?" Dancy asks the mirror, and she imagines balling up her fist and punching the glass as hard as she can, imagines the blood and pain, the glittering shards and the silvery sound they would make falling into the rust-stained sink.

"Christ, you can be a tiresome little cunt," the girl in the mirror sighs, and now her face is changing, years rolling through her rose-colored eyes like waves against a sandy shore, waves to diminish her grain by grain and draw deep lines in her pale skin. And, in only a moment more, the girl in the mirror is a grown woman-thirty, thirty-five, forty-looking backwards at the lost child she was, or Dancy's only looking ahead to the lost woman she'll become, if she lives that long. Or maybe it works both ways, Dancy thinks, and she reaches out, expecting their fingers to brush, but there's only the cold, impenetrable surface of the looking glass and her own sixteen-year-old face gazing back at her again.

"Just a trick," Dancy whispers, even though she doesn't really believe it. "The angel said there would be lots of tricks."

The girl in the mirror says nothing more or less than Dancy says, and does nothing that she doesn't do, and Dancy Flammarion turns her back on the sink, and whatever it might, or might not, mean. She makes sure her jeans are zipped, and tightens her belt again, and unlocks the restroom door.

Dancy's holding a red and white can of Campbell 's chicken and stars soup, the label enough to make her mouth water, and she thinks briefly about trying to steal it before she sets it back on the shelf. She glances towards the screen door leading out to the cloudy day and the old man and the front of the Texaco station. There's a shiny black pickup truck idling by the pumps, and the old man is talking to the driver. No one who's looking for her, just someone who's stopped to buy gas or a pack of cigarettes, someone the old man knows, or maybe he talks like that to everyone who stops. Maybe he offers everyone a wintergreen Certs and tells them to be sure and flush.

"He's a son of a bitch," she hears the old man say. "When the Good Lord was handin' out assholes, that cocksucker went back for seconds."

The driver of the black truck laughs, laughs the way that fat men and very small demons laugh, and Dancy looks at the can of soup again.

"Son of a whore wanted his money back," the old man says. "I told him sure thing, just as soon as ol' Gabriel starts playin' taps."

The man from the black truck laughs again, and Dancy's empty stomach rumbles.

And then she looks the other way, towards the rear of the store. There's another screen door back there that she didn't notice before she went into the restroom, a door with a wooden plaque hung above it, but she has to get closer to read all the words painted on it. Hyenas will howl in their fortified towers And jackals in their luxurious palaces, the plaque declares in fancy calligraphied letters like the ones on the cover of her grandmother's old Bible. Her fateful time also will soon come And her days will not be prolonged. Isaiah 13:19-22.

"I'm doing my part," she whispers, reaching for the brass door handle, smelling the musky wild animal smell getting in through the screen wire. "Now you better keep him busy long enough for me to finish this, you hear?"

The angel doesn't answer her, but then it rarely ever does, so she doesn't take the silence one way or another.

The door creaks very loudly, like the hinges have never once seen so much as a single drop of oil, the hinges and the long spring that's there to snap the door closed again. Dancy steps over the threshold, eases the noisy door shut behind her, and now she's standing on a small back porch cluttered with an assortment of crates and cardboard boxes and greasy, rusting pieces of machinery that she doesn't recognize.

And before she even sees the cage, before she sees what's waiting in the cage, Dancy Flammarion is out on the highway again, the air filled with that thunder that isn't thunder, and the Seraph shrieks and slices the storm-damp air with its sword of fire and molten steel.

The scorching light pouring from the angel's purple-blue eyes almost blinds her, and she turns her head away.

In His right hand he held seven stars, and out of His mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance-

On the porch behind the Texaco station, Dancy reaches for her knife, the big carving knife she used in Bainbridge, something else salvaged from the cabin in Shrove Wood. But her knife is still tucked safely inside the duffel bag, and her bag's out front with the old man.

And then she sees the cage, big enough to hold at least five panthers, a great confining box of thick steel bars and seam welds and black iron bolts. But the only thing inside is a naked woman huddled in the dirt and filthy hay covering the floor of the cage. Her long auburn hair hangs about her narrow face in knots and matted coils, and her skin is so streaked with shit and mud and grime that Dancy can't be sure if she's black or white or some other color altogether. The woman looks up, her eyes so deep and dark and filled with pain, and when she speaks Dancy thinks that it's surely the most broken and desperate voice she's ever heard from simple human lips.

"Help me," the woman pleads. "You have to help me. He's insane."

Dancy slowly descends the four steps to the weathered square of concrete laid between the porch and the cage and stands only five or six feet back from the bars. "That old man locked you up in there?" she asks, and there are tears streaming from the woman's brown eyes, eyes the same rich brown as chocolate. She nods her head and reaches through the bars for Dancy.

I don't have my knife, she thinks, half-praying to anything that's listening, and Dancy imagines the angel's fiery sword sweeping down to divide her careless soul from her flesh, to burn her so completely that there'll be nothing left to send to Hell.

"He's crazy," the woman says. "He's going to kill me. Whoever you are, you have to help me."

"He said there was a live panther back here," Dancy tells her and looks over her shoulder at the back door of the little store, wondering if the old man is still busy talking to the guy in the pickup truck about the cocksucker who went back for seconds.

"I just told you. He's insane. He'll say anything. Please-"

"He put you in that cage? Why'd he do that? Why didn't he just kill you?"

"You're not listening to me!" the woman hisses and bares her teeth; her voice has changed, has grown as angry and impatient as it was desperate and broken only a few seconds before. "We don't have much time. He'll figure out you're back here and come after you."

Dancy looks at the heavy Yale padlock holding the cage door shut, and then she looks back at the woman. "I don't have the key," she says. "How am I supposed to open that, if I don't have the key?"