King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,73
man.
After a moment, the dealer subsided, the tension bleeding out of his large body. “What do you want?” he asked, resigned, temples gleaming with fear sweat.
“Castor has a new conduit.”
The dealer’s gaze flicked toward Rose, and then back to Beck. “Are you asking me about it? ‘Cause I don’t know shit.”
“You just sold heavensent to those kids.”
“Yeah, and it was the real shit. Which comes from conduits. You know that.”
Beck tightened his grip on the dealer’s hand until he hissed. “How much of it is he producing?”
“I dunno!” Desperate, now. “Look, I don’t ask those kinds of questions. I take what they give me, and I sell it.”
“How much heavensent are you selling?”
“It’s most of what I sell. Castor’s making it again, and all the low-level dealers are trying to get in on it, too.”
“Just the one conduit?”
“I don’t–” He choked against Beck’s boot again.
“Why would he risk working with another after what happened last time? He could make money selling anything.” A note of tension had crept into Beck’s voice; Rose knew if he wasn’t able to control it, then he was feeling even more frantic and unsettled than he let on.
“I don’t know,” the man choked out. “Ask him yourself!”
Beck stared at him a moment, chest heaving. Then he said, “Kill him.”
Rose did, quick and clean, and blood spilled out onto the grass.
They left him where he lie, a gift for the crows, and melted away into the dark.
~*~
“What do you think is happening?” Rose asked, later, when they lay on their backs, staring up at the dark green bed canopy overhead and catching their breath.
“I don’t know.” He rolled toward the nightstand, lit a cigarette, and rolled back, mouth curled down sourly as he took a drag. “There’s too many things I don’t know. How have conduits remained here after the Rift closed? How many are there? Are some abandoned? Do the angels choose other conduits? Or are they finding their way to earth even without the Rift being open?”
Rose shifted so she lay on her side, facing him, propped on a raised fist. “What do you think they’re trying to accomplish? The conduits, I mean.”
“I don’t know.” He made a helpless gesture with the hand holding the cigarette, smoke swirling like a ribbon. “That’s the problem: I just don’t know.” He rarely sounded so frustrated; it was unsettling, but comforting, too, in a way: Despite appearances to the contrary, Beck was only human after all. He wasn’t all-knowing, all-seeing, all-problem-solving. “When the Rift happened, the being who claimed to be Gabriel said that he was heralding a ‘purging of the evils of the earth.’”
“Killing humans,” she said, back of her neck prickling.
“And not just thugs and murderers,” he said. “Women, children. Innocents lost their lives. It made no matter to the conduits – to the beings inhabiting them.
“But this. Now. This isn’t a purging.”
“What could it be?”
He took another drag, and didn’t answer. He didn’t know.
NINETEEN
Christmas arrived quietly, and without fanfare. It hadn’t been a day worth celebrating in the Bends: maybe a bit of tinsel in a window, a snatched bit of an old song, crackly through the speakers of a cheap radio. Trees, and lights, and colorful cookies were for those with disposable incomes to burn on such frivolities.
People like Beck, she realized, when, twelve days before Christmas a massive fir with all the trimmings appeared in the comfy parlor. It was fake, of course, same as the smaller tree in the corner of the kitchen, but they were quality, and Kay produced a bevy of fir-scented candles that she kept lit all during the day.
“Come help me with this,” Kay ordered, scowling fiercely as she attempted to unknot yards and yards of convincingly-real-looking garland. “Pain in the ass.” But when they’d swagged it all down the bannister, threaded it with lights, and studded it with glimmering ornaments, she nodded in satisfaction. And, later, when Rose asked Beck if the garland had been his idea, he’d offered a bemused smile and a headshake.
“Don’t let her fool you: she loves Christmas.”
Packages appeared under the tree, more each morning, wrapped in shiny, seasonal paper that was such an extravagant indulgence in times such as these that Rose felt immensely guilty – too much so to even shake the boxes.
Beck didn’t want to go hunting, seemingly content to spend their evenings in front of the library fire, slowly sipping wine rather than whiskey. She would read aloud, and he would wind up on the floor, his head