Part 72 (1/2)

The male paused before her sat in a wheelchair, his hands folded across his lap. He was ugly even by human standards, bald and bristly and scalded-looking, with heavy jowls and watery eyes that squinted through thick thumbprint gla.s.ses. He pointed to the rack of cues over Gretchen's shoulder and said, ”There's only one table. Mind if I play the winner?”

His voice was everything his body wasn't. So rich and comforting, full of shadowy resonances like the echoes off of hard close planes. Tamara recognized him: he was the male who had been with the dark-haired female eating the chicken wings. Tamara glanced toward the door, but his companion seemed to have left. He smelled of salt water and beer, not grease and rotten meat the way most humans did. ”I'm Pinky Gilman,” he said, as if Tamara had answered, and extended his hand.

crippled, Gretchen murmured. weak. Tamara made sure to keep her teeth covered when she smiled. prey, she answered, and felt Gretchen laugh, tongue lolling, though her human cage remained impa.s.sive. ”Tamara,” Tamara said. She reached out and gingerly squeezed thick human fingers. ”Gretchen is my sister.”

”I see the resemblance,” he said. ”Am I interrupting?”

”No.” Gretchen turned to reach another stick down. ”I was going to take a break.”

Tamara disentangled her fingers from the meat-puppet's, and stepped back. Her tongue adhered to the roof of her weird blunt-toothed mouth. ”Can you? ...”

”Well enough,” he said, and accepted the cue stick Gretchen extended across the table at arm's length.

Gretchen patted Tamara on the arm as she went by. ”Do either of you want a beer?”

Tamara was learning so many new emotions in her cage, and so many nuances on the old ones. Worry, discontent, and now another: surprise.

Because she didn't have to try not to beat Pinky Gilman too easily. Rather, he was making her work.

The first game, she let him break, and never chalked her stick. In fact, Tamara handled Pinky's cue more than her own, because he pa.s.sed it to her to hold while he manipulated the wheelchair.

He sank three b.a.l.l.s on the break, chose solids, and proceeded to clear the table with efficiency and a series of small flourishes, mostly demonstrated when he spun his wheelchair into position. By the time he reached the eight ball, though, he looked up at her and winked.

Gretchen had just returned with the beer. She pushed her hair behind her shoulder with the back of her fingers and handed Tamara a drink. i don't believe it.

can meat puppets do that?

shoot pool?

win at pool. Gretchen leaned her shoulder on Tamara's so her bones bruised her sister's cage's flesh. Tamara sighed, comforted.

apparently, she answered, some can.

The male, leaning forward in his wheelchair to peer the length of the cue stick, did not glance at them. His eyes narrowed behind the gla.s.ses and the stick flicked through his fingers like a tongue. It struck the scuffed white ball, and the white ball spun forward, rebounding from the wall and striking the black at an angle. Click. Hiss. Clunk.

Eight ball in the corner pocket.

Pinky laid his stick across the table, spun the wheels of his chair back six inches, and turned to Tamara, holding up his hand. ”Shark,” she said, and put the beer into it instead of accepting the greasy clasp.

Pinky smiled at her and swallowed deeply as Gretchen pa.s.sed her a second bottle. She was thirsty. She was always thirsty. ”Go again?”

Beer was bitter in her mouth, cold and foaming where it crossed her tongue. She swallowed and rubbed her cage's tongue against its palate for the lingering texture, then gulped once more. The cold hurt the teeth of her cage. ”Gretchen,” she said, stepping backwards, ”you play.”

Gretchen beat him, but just only, and only because she broke. He laughed like a drain as she sunk the smooth, black eight ball, and raised his cue stick in his hands, holding it overhead as if it were a bar he meant to chin himself upon. He had blunt nails, thick enough that Tamara could see the file marks across them, and the tendons of his forearms ridged when he lifted them. ”So,” he said, ”how would you feel about playing for forfeits?”

Gretchen smiled, and Tamara could see the difference. ”What do you have in mind?”

The human lowered his cue stick and shrugged. ”If I win, you come back to my place and let me feed you dinner.” Tamara started, and he held up his hand. ”Never fear; I don't have improper designs. And there are two of you, and only one of me, after all.”

Tamara looked at Gretchen. Gretchen looked at Tamara, her luminous eyes huge, the pupils contracted to pinp.r.i.c.ks. ”Not to mention the wheelchair,” Tamara said.

”Not to mention the wheelchair,” he agreed. ”And if you win, you can make me dinner.” He let his cue stick fall forward so that it rested on the edge of the table.

Tamara smiled at him.

Tamara lingered in the bathroom, sc.r.a.ping her fingertips across pungent white soap to fill the gaps so her nails would stay clean. Through the wallboard, she could hear the clink of dishes and the rumble of the human's voice, the occasional answering chirp of Gretchen's. She turned the water on with the heel of her hands and cupped it to her mouth in br.i.m.m.i.n.g palm-fuls. It tasted faintly of Dial and made her blunt human teeth ache, her throat stretch and hurt when she gulped.

The smell of the alcohol the human was pouring reached her from the kitchen. She swallowed more tap water, filling the hollow s.p.a.ces inside her, squinching her eyes against the following, welcome pain.

She straightened and turned off the tap, then checked her nails to see if the white crescents of soap had gotten loose. They gave her hands the appearance of a careful manicure. She stuffed them into her pockets as she walked down the hall.

As Tamara came down the hall, she saw Gretchen bent over the breakfast bar in the kitchen, a strip of pale skin revealed between her s.h.i.+rt and the band of her jeans. The male stumped about the kitchen on elbow crutches, which he had produced when Gretchen and Tamara helped him into his car. The wheelchair was because he couldn't shoot pool with something in his hands, he said.

Tamara had been all for eating him in the parking lot, but Gretchen had thought it better to wait. For privacy, and leisure, in which to enjoy their first good meal in days.

Tamara cleared her throat. And Gretchen jumped a little-guiltily? Tamara flinched in silent sympathy. We cannot live like this. We just cannot.

It was an effort to think we, and that almost moved her to tears. It was an effort, too, to remember divinity. To remember certainty. To remember what it had been like to be clean.

hungry, she said, and felt Gretchen stretch inside her skin. Gretchen grinned and ran her tongue over her teeth, and together they moved forward. Soon there would be blood and sinew, bone and flesh-and if not an end to thirst and hunger, sweet surcease, for as long as the dining lasted.

The air was cool and full of rich smells. Tamara's feet were springy on the floor. One more step forward. One more.

Over the spit of bacon, without turning, the male said, ”I'd reconsider that if I were you.”

Gretchen checked, and Tamara hesitated a half-step later. She hissed between her teeth as the male lifted bacon from the grease with tongs, set it on a paper napkin, and turned off the heat under the pan. Only then did he turn, leaning heavily on his elbow crutches.

tamara? Gretchen said, and Tamara's breath almost sliced her; the name struck her like a cue ball. Sisters did not need names. Not between sisters. Names were a human-thing, part of the lie.

She bit blood from her cheek as Gretchen said, again, tamara?!

The human male said, ”He won't take you back, you know. You can starve yourself to the bone, starve yourself until you're blades, starve yourselves until your human hearts stop-and he will never forgive you. Time does not offer second chances. History does not give do-overs. It doesn't matter how hard you try to be entropy's angels again. The only kind of angel you can ever be from now on is fallen.”

That whine. That was her. Or was it Gretchen?

The male-not a human male, no, she'd been fooled by his disguise, but she knew from his words that he must be an angel too, of some one of the dark G.o.ds or another-continued. ”Or you can learn to live in the world.”

She should have stepped forward, rent him with her nails, shredded with her teeth. But she could taste it already, the grease of his flesh, the fat and the soil. She drove her nails into her own palms again. Gretchen crouched beside her. ”You're not the Master's. You are not a Hound.”

”No,” the male said, leaning on his crutches so they squeaked on the linoleum. ”I was born to the Father of Frogs. But I belong to myself now. Like you.”

”You failed. You fell.”

”I climbed, my angels.”

And that explained why he smelled of sea air and not sour maggoty meat. Unlike Tamara, who could feel her own flesh rotting on the bones when she breathed too deep.

Filthy. Greasy. Everything was dirt. Tamara sobbed and licked blood from her nails, tasting the soap, stronger than ever. Some of it was her own blood. She wished that some of it was the watery blood of this smiling monster.

”I won't be dirty. I won't be hungry,” Gretchen said, her hands bridged on the tile, one knee dropped. Her voice rose. ”I won't be dirty forever. I won't.”