Okay, fine. Maybe he had some affection for the old guy. But like any sociopath wouldn’t catch a case of the fuzzies when faced with all that earnest?
Not that V was a sociopath. Not really, at any rate.
Fine, he was mostly not sociopathic. Especially when he wasn’t around fallen angels—
“Sire?”
“Hey, my man.” V cleared his throat and focused. “Have you seen Lassiter anywhere around?”
“No, Sire.” The doggen bowed low. “Neither inside nor on the grounds. May I summon him for you?”
By like, what, hanging that remote off the second story balcony and humming a few bars of “Thank You for Being a Friend”?
“Nah, I’ll find him. Thanks.”
“May I get you anything?”
Talk about your loaded questions. “I’m good. I appreciate it, though.”
The butler bowed again, so deeply, his jowls nearly Swiffer’d the floor. “Please let me know if there is aught I may do for you, Sire.”
After the doggen left, V considered whether to make himself a Goose, but he passed on that idea. He was off rotation, but you never knew, and the night was young in a way that inevitably would mean good news was not coming. So instead of sucking back some liquid sanity, he smoked the hand-rolled down. Then he flicked the stub into the cold fireplace, closed his eyes, cursed three times…
And just like Dorothy with her ruby fucking shoes, he was up, up, and away, traveling in a scatter of molecules to the Other Side, to the Scribe Virgin’s Sanctuary, to the place from which his mahmen had run her little cult of personality for eons.
As he re-formed up on the perpetually green lawn, he wanted to avoid thoughts of the one who had given birth to him, so he got his walk on and tried to view all the white marble, Greco-Roman architecture as a disinterested third party might: From the bathing temple to the treasury to the library, the last time there had been so many columns in one place had been Seti I’s hypostyle hall at Karnak.
Yes, it was true, he’d been watching ancient Egyptian documentaries lately.
Anyway, all the buildings he passed by were empty, and it was with no small amount of satisfaction that he took note of the persistent vacancy. Ever since Phury had become the Primale and freed the Chosen from their servitude, the Sanctuary had been a ghost town—and good for those females. They were out living now, not tied to the black robes of his mahmen.
They had left even before the Scribe Virgin had. So maybe this ghost town thing was part of the reason she had quit her job and given the reins of the race’s existential shit over to the David Lee Roth of fallen angels.
Thanks, Mom.
On that note, there was one place up here that was inhabited—or rather, that had better fucking be. The Scribe Virgin’s private quarters had a new tenant, and that must be where Lassiter was.
Vishous stopped as he came up to the wall around his mahmen’s courtyard, and it took him a couple of deep breaths before he could enter. When he finally stepped inside, the twinkling sounds of the fountain should have been a peaceful concert of water droplets falling into a marble basin. Instead, it was like fingernails on a blackboard. A human two-year-old screaming after they were denied a cookie. A wounded badger.
Who knew that the only thing harder than having the Scribe Virgin around… was not having her around—
Jesus, that was Lassiter, too. That was exactly how he felt about Lassiter.
No wonder his mahmen had picked the guy to be her replacement. The pair of them were lockstep right from the jump of the new era.
Yay, he thought as he stared at the magical fountain.
Like everything in the Sanctuary, the damn thing ran itself, no electricity or cleaning required, the specially charged H2O originating from no discernible source, every gallon forever sparkling fresh. The whole of the refuge was like that, self-perpetuating in its perfection: The illusion of all these temples, like the Augusta-fairway-worthy grass and the stupid Easter-ish tulips and the milky-white illumination that made everything seem to have an Instagram filter on it was an eternal kind of thing.
And no doubt exactly how it had been the moment the Scribe Virgin had I-Dream-of-Jeannie’d it all.
Well, not exactly. Phury had added the color. Before him, it had been shades of white.
And Lassiter? He’d made his own special contribution to the place.
“Where are you, angel,” V said as he pointedly ignored the tree he had once packed with songbirds.
When there was no answer, he crossed into the colonnade. The doors to the inner space were closed and he had a thought that, all of his black-wax, BDSM extremism aside… he might not want to know what was going on behind any of this Privacy-please.
“Lassiter,” he snapped. “You know I’m here. Stop playing hard to get.”