Read Online Murder of Angels by Caitlin R. Kiernan - Free Book Online

dirty mirror. “You’re dead, ” she said. “You got out . You ran the fuck away and left me alone.”
    “You think it’s some kind of party over here?” he asked her and smiled or sneered, black teeth and his eyes almost twinkled the way they did when he was still alive. “Well it ain’t, sugardoll. It isn’t even Hell. It isn’t anything you can begin to imagine.”
    “You left me,” she said again, and he shook his head, the ruined ghost of his pretty, drag queen’s face twisting into an angry snarl.
    “No, Niki. You left me. You ran out on me. I told you the truth because I loved you, and you fucking ran .”
    “Oh,” she whispered, “oh, God,” gasped, consciousness thin and brittle as onionskin now, black at the narrowing edges of her vision, and the thing beneath her flesh wriggled, worming its way in deeper.
    “You wanted her,” Danny Boudreaux said. “You wanted her and now she has you, forever and fucking ever.”
    He laughed at her, empty, soulless laugh like the end of time making fun of the beginning, and Niki screamed again and squeezed the welt between her left thumb and index finger. For a moment the shiny surface of the blister held, a second that might have lasted for hours, days, while she screamed and the dead boy with the crooked neck laughed his apocalypse laugh for her. And then it burst, popped loud, and Niki grabbed at one end of the squirming thing trying to burrow quickly away from her and the dim restroom light.
    “No,” she said. “No, you don’t . I won’t let you in,” and Niki held on to it tightly, her wet fingers slippery with pus and blood, its transparent body like a strand of water, living tissue that insubstantial, jellyfish siphonophore tendril or some deep-sea worm. It grew taut, then went limp, shimmered like a pearl before slipping effortlessly from her grasp and vanishing into the seeping red hole in the palm of her hand.
    “Sorry,” the dead boy said, sounding almost as though he might have meant it. “I thought for a minute there you might win after all.”
    Niki’s legs folded, and she fell to the floor, landed in a heap on the filthy, piss-damp tile and sat there sobbing and cradling her aching hand. Her treacherous right hand become the ragged passage into her body, her heart, her soul if that’s where the thing meant to go. Bright, clean blood flowed freely from the hole, and she let it bleed. Danny was gone, and someone was banging on the restroom door. She wasn’t sure if the lock worked or not, so she leaned on the door and braced one of her boots against the toilet bowl.
    “What’s going on in there?” a man with a Middle Eastern accent shouted at her from the other side. “Don’t make me call the police.”
    “I’m sick,” she shouted back at him. “I’m just sick.”
    “But you were screaming,” the man said. “I heard you,” and she could tell that he didn’t believe her.
    “So I’m very sick, okay? But I’m getting better. I’ll be out in a minute. I’m sorry.”
    “I will call the police if you scream again,” he said, and then she listened as his angry footsteps retreated down the hallway. Niki shut her eyes, wondering if there was anything in the restroom she could use for a bandage, and waited hopelessly for whatever was going to happen next.

     

    Another taxi ride down Fulton to the evergreen sanctuary of Golden Gate Park, and this time a driver who didn’t try to talk her ear off. He dropped Niki in front of the California Academy of Sciences, and she stood on the museum steps for a while, watched as noisy groups of schoolchildren were herded about by their teachers. She’d torn away a strip of the sweatshirt she was wearing under the blue fur coat and wrapped it tightly around her hand, not so tight that she’d cut off the circulation, but tight enough that it would stop the bleeding and stay put.
    She was there because this was where the thing that had crawled inside her said to come. This drab