The whisper was so quiet Rook half-thought he had only imagined it; Ixchel’s lips had barely parted. In answer, though, Clo . . .
or what had been Clo . . . moved, so fast she left a trail, stuttering from invisible to real and back again — a thousand poses, each scarring cornea and reality like a daguerreotype, acid-etched. First there, then here, slamming up nose-to-nose with complaint-happy Arkwright, who shrank from her eyeless leer, whimpering; head falling back, lips a-foam. Rook watched the hand he almost raised to fend her off wither, like wax in fire.
A frenzy of shell-bells tolling, ten thousand funerals strong — and then she started in on the poor sumbitch with all ten claws, finishing a fast half-second later. After which everyone got to watch the result fall back, to break apart at her feet: one dumb hex’s worth of bloody bones, barely held together with gristle.
Clo blinked, and was back by Ixchel’s side. “Your will be done, mother,” she said, licking her gore-stained lips.
Now it was Ixchel’s turn to smile. “Well,” she asked Rook. “Are you satisfied?”
“Not hardly,” Fennig replied.
The crowd swerved, almost as one, to scope out where they’d probably forgotten he stood. In the murderous interim, he’d regained his feet and much of his former style — stood tall, hands braced on his cane, like he was about to pick a swordfight.
“So that’s your deal, eh?” he asked. “A ‘guardian’ we can only trust to treat us all like her own personal coal-tender, somethin’ she can chew up by the cupful, whenever her boiler gets low.” Louder still, and as much to the crowd as to Ixchel: “’Cause that don’t strike me as fair-dealing, if so: what did any of us ever swear the damn Oath for, if it weren’t the promise of never gettin’ fed on such-a-ways again? By anyone?”
The thing Ixchel’d made from Clo seemed to find this amusing. But Rook’s Rainbow Lady puffed up with fresh menace, dragonfly cloak set a-buzz like an angry hive. “The Oath frees you from fear of each other, Henry Fennig,” she said. “Yet never for one moment think it protects you from me, your goddess.” She turned to the crowd, some of whom recoiled. “For you, whom I have folded in — given New Aztectlan as your home, your refuge — are all, to every last man, woman and child, mine. By your own words.”
“I’d beg to differ,” Fennig shot back. “Was Hex City they swore to, these ones — most of ’em don’t know what-all ‘New Aztectlan’ is.”
“This is sophistry.”
“Common sense, more like. A quality in short damn supply ’round here, as of late.”
“Have a care, mortal man.”
“Oh, I do, believe me. You should, too.”
Been quite the while since anybody’d called Ixchel’s guff to her face; Rook had to reckon that alone kept her frozen as Fennig crossed over, rolling up his sleeves. His cane he passed to Berta and Eulie, their tear-stained faces white with worry on his behalf, while those fine back-up specs of his he folded and gave the Rev himself, pressing them into the larger man’s hand.
“Keep these for me, will ya?” he asked, for all the world as though he expected to survive whatever happened next.
Bemused, Rook stowed them in his vest pocket while Fennig continued blithely along his path to ruin, pausing just short of Ixchel’s reach. Clo he ignored, or tried to — instead, he met the Lady of Traps and Snares’ empty gaze straight on, his naked eyes shedding light in a manner not unlike his dead wife’s, if cooler.
“You know I can see through you too, right, Missus?” he asked her. “Which is how I come to learn that savin’ the braggadocio, you ain’t nothin’ but a hex, same’s any other — well-fed, ghosted up, but that’s all. Talkin’ up how you own this whole world, how you can make and remake it at will. . . . So why is it you ain’t done that yet, exactly?”
“You dare to question me?”
“If I thought it’d do any good, sure. But since I know better, here’s what I will say. My g’hals and me come up here with eyes open, hopin’ that line you talked was only half a lie. And things went well, at first, but then I started seein’ cracks, like it’s given me to do — and lady, those cracks are big. Keep followin’ this path you’re on, all you’ll do is drag yourself back down into Hell, plus the rest of us along with you . . . not that you care.”
“Be silent, insect. If you would keep those two wives you still have, let alone your life, then — ”
Fennig laughed, bitterly. “Oh, yeah. Go ’head, threaten me louder, so’s everyone can hear. Do your worst, so’s they see what you really pay your wages out in.”
The cloak spasmed and eddied, a black rainbow waterspout, high as the wave she’d called to drown Bewelcome. “Silence, I said! You think to chide your betters, gutter-rat, bred and fed on garbage? You, who owe me everything — ”
“Yeah? Well, at least my gutter always stood behind me, whenever the bulls started in to crackin’ heads. I’m Five Points through and through, from cobbles t’curbs, and that’ll always beat bein’ a Mexican table-rapper’s mascot tricked out in half-naked stargazer-meat all to hell.” He folded his arms, bared his ill-set city dweller’s teeth, stiff with rage. “The long and the short of it is, Missus, you promised but you didn’t deliver, then made my son’s mother into that, and let my son die to do it. Way I see it, ain’t a single one of us owes you nothin’.”
Ixchel stood a moment, while Clo grinned beside her. “Perhap
s you think me weak enough to address with such disrespect,” she said, at last, “since this vessel nears the end of its use, as any fool can see. But her successor awaits, and when I am reborn in her — ”
Yet here she made yet another mistake, by looking directly at Marizol — at which point the girl’s already terrified expression went up like lucifer-touched flashpaper, as all her nameless dread became horrid comprehension. “Por amor de Dios, no!” she screamed, broke from Rook’s arms and flung herself on Berta and Eulie instead, rousing them from their grief-struck stupor. They grabbed her in a double hug, Eulie stroking Marizol’s hair and murmuring to her, while Berta exchanged a glance with Fennig so penetrating Rook could’ve sworn he saw words swimming back and forth inside it.
Distracted by the effort of beckoning Marizol back, her tomb-rank voice willed almost sweet, Ixchel remained completely oblivious. “Come here, my heart’s heart,” she cooed. “I am not angry; you are a child, and cannot always see where the best way lies. Your parents will explain this when we are alone together, in ways you can understand.”
“Que no! I will not do this thing! And if they seek to make me, to cast me off — then I cast them off!”
“Dear one, you know not what you say. Only wait, and I will — ”