at him, he took a breath and said, “Fine.”
He laced his fingers together over his knee, rested his temple against the high back of the chair, and told her a story.
A story of a spoiled, wealthy boy at what remained of an all-boys school upstate post-Rift, rain lashing high, Gothic windows, professors tense, rumors always swirling and changing. Post-Rift was a time of hushed conversations in dark corners, furtive looks, and worry, always worry. A darkness lay over the world that had nothing to do with the charcoal cloud cover, and which infected all of them. Happiness – what was that?
At Beck’s school, when he was fifteen and stupid, happiness had come in pill form, small, and white, and oblong. They called it heavensent, and half a pill could leave you lying dreamily in the back stacks of the library for a few hours, fascinated by the slow movements of your own hands. A whole pill sent you flying through fields of color and sunlight, and you inevitably returned to yourself in a completely different room from which you’d started, sprawled sometimes across a stranger’s couch, being slapped and hissed out and called a junkie and told to get the fuck out.
“My parents found out I was using,” he said, “so they cut me off financially. They paid for tuition, and meals, and that was it. But I was addicted, so I found ways to get more of it. That was how I became indebted to the Dellucci family.”
Not as big or as powerful as the Castors, but big and powerful enough. Enough to ruin the life of a teenage boy hooked on their pills.
“They detoxed me,” he said, a wry twist to his lips. “That was – disgusting. When I could keep my food down, and walk a straight line, they set me up with a challenge – one that I met, and then some. In five years, I became their top enforcer. No more school, no more family. I was disowned.”
“Enforcer?”
He lifted a hand and made an eloquent gesture, one that left her imagining a knife handle spinning between his fingers, the blade winking. “The worst part, I suppose,” he mused, “is that I was never ashamed of the killing. I rather liked it.” He said it as casually as someone might reveal a favorite ice cream flavor. Shrugged. “It was a life. The Delluccis fenced heavensent for the Castors, and I cut throats for them. I had what I needed to live comfortably. The world was a shithole. What else was there?”
His gaze cut toward her, sudden and bright. “And then I was ordered to escort a group of our dealers when they went to Castor to restock.”
He described a night black with low clouds, rain pounding on the roofs of black imports, and the black nylon of umbrellas. An old warehouse belching steam and smoke; a slot in the doorway where eyes peeped through at them, and demanded a password. A factory setup: women and children bagging and bottling pills with monotonous focus, sweat sliding down their temples; the building was hot, monstrously so, and shirtless mean streaked with filth fed coals into a furnace – atop which perched a small, barefoot child with tangled hair, and burning white-blue eyes.
“Do you know how they make heavensent?” he asked, tone deceptively mild. “It’s opium, synthetic binders – and conduit blood.”
She felt her mouth fall open, and closed it, swallowed. She’d heard of heavensent. It was still in circulation; it had been offered to her, once, a boy extending a grubby palm, three long, white oblong pills cupped like something precious. She hadn’t been tempted: to be out of her own head and unconscious was to invite Tabitha’s violence.
“But…the Rift was still closed,” Rose said. Her mouth felt dry. “The conduits were gone.”
“Most of them. The Rift was closed, yes, and there sat a conduit, pricking his finger and dripping blood down into a vat. Tony Castor was using a conduit to control the vices of this city, and telling the conduit all of it was a means to a divine end: ridding the world of the unworthy.”
“Holy…shit.”
“Exactly. I asked Dellucci about it later. If he’d known, if he cared. He feigned ignorance.
“I wanted to kill it. I was curious. Could an angel be exorcised? What happened if you killed the conduit? Would the angel heal it? Would the angel be forced out? I had so many questions. Mostly I wanted to know if its presence would draw