Alabaster

"Good sirrah, I meant no offense," Selwith Tinker says, still smiling. "I assure you, I have not this day escaped the Weaver's noose only to lose my head for the sullied honor of a dead king's prized trollop."

And this time the laughter rises like a storm, like an ugly bit of flotsam buoyed on the crest of a wave, echoing off the high obsidian walls of Kearvan Weal. The Glaistig's minister repeatedly strikes his staff against the stones to no avail, and soon the laughter has been joined by hoarse shouts and catcalls and profanities shrieked and bellowed in a dozen black tongues. Selwith stands up straight and spreads her wings, welcoming any reprisals, any challenge after the frenzied retreat from the bridge. Better to end it here, she thinks, than endure another century with the memory of that defeat, the merciless red slaughter as the Weaver's shock troops finally broke the King's lines and surged over the ramparts. Better to die now and be finished and maybe take this preening bitch down with her, than wait for the Dragon to wake or for the Weaver to track them all back to the Weal. She draws a dagger from her belt, steel forged in ages of free night before the coming of the Weaver, before this war, but the Glaistig shakes her head and turns away. The minister steps between them, and Selwith flares her nostrils and looks down at the bright and shining face of the fallen Seraph. She spits, and her saliva sizzles on its armor, the cuirass forged from platinum and gold and the fossil bone of leviathans. She stops smiling and glances up at the Glaistig's minister.

"Then you tell me, Bartolemei, what we are to do with my trophy. Now that we have captured it, can the Weaver's magic be turned against her? Is there in all your vast and hallowed wisdom any antidote for this poison?"

"They've crossed the bridge?" the minister asks instead of answering her. "The Weaver's army is on the hub?"

"What the fuck do you think?" Selwith Tinker snaps back at him and tucks her ebony wings away. The Glaistig's minister nods once, his face gone almost as colorless as the flesh of this new evil the Weaver's conjured, and then he kneels to get a better look at the Seraph.

III. PensacolaBeach (December 1982)

Julia Flammarion sits alone in the dingy motel room across the street from the Gulf of Mexico, watching the brilliant winter sun outside the wide windows. There are seagulls like white Xs drawn on the sky. The room smells like disinfectant and the menthol cigarettes the man she slept with the night before was smoking. His name was Leet-Andrew Leet-unless he was lying and his name was really something else. He got angry when she asked him to use a rubber, and he called her a ski

The television's on, because she doesn't like the silence, doesn't want to be alone in the motel room with nothing but the sound of her own thoughts and the wind and squawking seagulls and the traffic out on Ariola Drive. Earlier, she turned the volume up loud and left it on a cha

Julia thinks that maybe she'll use some of the money to buy breakfast at the IHOP a little farther down the strip. She's always wanted to eat breakfast at an IHOP, blueberry pancakes and link sausages and black coffee and orange juice; besides, it isn't enough money for another night in the motel. Not that she needs another night. She's been in Pensacola Beach almost a whole week, a week since the bus ride from Milligan, and she's done almost everything that she came here to do. She's had sex with four men. She's seen two movies in a real theater, Sophie's Choice and Gandhi. She's gotten drunk on frozen strawberry daiquiris, learned to smoke, and she's watched the moon rise and the sun set over the ocean. She bought a yellow Mi

Behind her, the angel makes an angry sound like a forest fire, like she's back home and all Shrove Wood is going up in smoke, but Julia keeps her eyes on the pale blue sky and the hungry, wheeling gulls.

"It don't make no difference to me," she tells the angel. She knows it isn't real, that it's only something wrong with her head makes her hear and see angels and worse things than angels, but she also knows it's usually easier if she doesn't ignore them when they speak to her. "You do as you please. I've come this far. I'm not going to chicken out now."

The room fills with a smell like hot asphalt and fresh lemons, but she doesn't look away from the window.

"You're just go

There's a sudden crackling noise from the television, and Julia almost turns to see.

"You go and break that, I can't afford to pay for it," she says. "Leave me alone."

The angel clacks its teeth together, clack, clack, clack, and the hot asphalt and lemon smell gets worse.

"No," Julia says and reaches for the remote control to turn off the television so that maybe it'll stop making the staticky sound. She presses off, but nothing happens. "Fuck you," she says, and the angel hisses. She prayed that it wouldn't follow her, that maybe it would get lost or distracted somewhere between Milligan and Pensacola, but it didn't. Every single thing she's done the last six days, its been right there behind her. It watched her while she fucked Andrew Leet and those other men. It wandered the theater aisle during Gandhi and Sophie's Choice. It floated above the reptile house at the zoo.

"You ain't been listening to me, but you should. I said you can't have me, and soon enough you'll see that I mean what I'm saying."

The angel screams, and its wings are thunderclaps and St. Elmo's fire trapped there inside the motel room with Julia. But it knows she's not afraid of it anymore, and she knows that it knows. Before she took all the money her mother kept hidden in a Mason jar under the front porch and left the Wood for good, Julia went out to the sandy place where she'd seen the angel the very first time. That was seven years ago, when she was still just a little girl. A wide clearing in the slash pine and briars and Spanish bayonets, and sometimes rattlesnakes and copperheads su