night. But now he tells me secrets.”
“About the Madonna?”
“Among other things,” said B, and he managed a tired smile.
“What is it? Just fucking tell me, if you know. And if you don’t, say so.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the bundle, then back at me. He nodded once or twice.
“What is she? She’s the whore that tilts the world, kitten. Pretty much a hydrogen bomb you don’t even have to aim. Fission and splitting and a chain reaction that starts small until Her Magma Highness tears a hole in the world.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?” I asked.
He squinted, and the briefest flash of the old B drifted across his face. He reached out and pressed the tip of his index finger hard against my forehead. It made me think of Selwyn, tapping her nose.
“She’s the Anti-Mater, Quinn. She unbirths.”
All at once then, the day seemed too bright, too loud. All the edges seemed drawn too sharply, and every sound was just a little bit louder and shriller than my ears could bear. In another life, I might have thought it was exhaustion, of head, body, and spirit. In this afterlife, fuck only knows. I rubbed at my eyes. How long had it been since I’d last seen Selwyn? Less than thirteen or fourteen hours? It felt like days had passed.
B’s finger was no longer pressed against my skin.
My mouth was dry, and I wished I had a few sips of a peach Snapple of my very own.
“And the ghouls made a thing like that?” I asked him, my voice sounding distant and pinched and skeptical.
I looked back at the bench, and Charlee was gone. The Madonna was still there, though. He hadn’t taken the bundle with him.
“Perhaps they were the architects and perhaps not,” replied B, half thoughtfully, half wearily. “I’ve heard tales told, and I’ve read some others, but I’m right cream crackered on what’s de facto actual.”
“Fuck, last I heard, the hounds were still struggling with Tinkertoys.”
He coughed and cleared his throat, then spat in the brown grass.
“Quinn, the ghouls you know, they’re the surface dwellers, the outcasts, as it were. Degenerates.”
Now, the fact of the matter is I’d never yet seen a ghoul out and about beneath the sky, night or day, cloudy or clear, stars, moon, or sun, not even once, and I told him that.
B smiled, flashing uneven, tobacco-stained teeth. “Well, then, let’s just say, love, that your concept of subterranean is impoverished and insufficient to the task at hand, id est comprehending the true depth of the world and, more precisely, the complex strata of the cosmos, both waking and sleeping, conscious and unconscious, as it pertains to the history and social mores of the venerable race of the Ghul.”
I rubbed at my eyes again, wanting to go back to the bench and sit down. The day stubbornly remained excessively everything. I tasted new fillings, and a catbird in a nearby holly bush screamed like the sky was falling down.
“You’ve hardly even glimpsed beneath the flinty rind of the world,” said B. And then he reached into his jacket and took out a few yellowed typewritten pages and handed them to me. They were rolled up tight and tied together with green velvet ribbon.
“Read this,” he said. “When you two are out of the city and on the road, read this. It might help, if only a sconce.”
“What the hell is it?”
“A missive produced anonymia, incognito, so forth and what have you. People write things down and set them free, and that, pumpkin, is all I know. But it’s a damn interesting read.”
“And it explains this unbirthing business?”
“Not in the least.”
“But you were coming to that, right?”
“Was I?”
If patience is a virtue, which I doubt, patience isn’t a virtue of mine. And it was clear that, even now, B was fucking with me for no other reason than it pleased him to do so. I considered a hastily conceived Plan B: Snap the motherfucker’s neck and leave town. Leave the bundle on the park bench for some unlucky passerby to find. Forget Selwyn; forget the twins and the threat of total all-out ghoulpocalypse; get the fuck out of Dodge and don’t look back.
I’d never been to Mexico.
Or London.
Both seemed like a better idea than Boston.
But then B said, “It’s fairly self-explanatory. Unbirthing. Erasure. He . . . or she . . . who wields the Madonna, they hold the power to take something from this world, from our dimension, to subtract from