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Fennig guffawed. “What, kiss it better? Looks like you forgot somethin’ you told us from the start, Lady — how for a sacrifice t’take, the one gettin’ done to’s gotta love you, or choose to let you, any road. Good luck ever gettin’ her to think of you that way, ever again.”

“This is your fault.”

“I should damn well hope so. But watch a minute — ’cause I ain’t done just yet.” He flung up an arm at the remaining Missus Fennigs — sent a gush of power into them so thick, it jolted ’em upright like puppets. And hollered, as the light in his eyes went out: “Berta, Eulie. Take the girl, and go!”

No time to think yea or nay; might be this’d been exactly what Fennig and Berta were “jawing” over, while Marizol handed Ixchel her hat. But the three simply vanished with a crack, air collapsing to fill the space they’d occupied.

Ixchel’s jade-chip parody of a face contorted; she turned on Fennig, hair wafting straight up, an inky nimbus. “Bring them back, dog!”

“Make me,” Fennig snapped. “But ya can’t, can ya? ’Cause that ain’t what it says, in the fine print: ‘Service to the Suicide Moon,’ — that’s what you get, all you get, and welcome to it. Long as it ain’t a direct rise against ya, or flat-out doin’ something you told us not to, you got naught to say ’bout anything we do, Lady R. — no matter how much it . . . inconveniences you. My g’hals and me — we kept to the terms. You can suck us dry. But you can’t make us do your will — or any other damn thing, neither.”

Rook rumbled, down in his chest. “That’s . . . very lawyerly of you, Henry. ‘Obedience to her High Priest,’ though, said priest being me — how ’bout that?”

The gangster shrugged. “Oh, that one holds,” he admitted. “You could’ve stopped ’em ’fore they went, I have no doubt — stopped me from givin’ the order, for that matter, if you’d known it was comin’. But . . .”

“. . . I didn’t. And now it’s too late.”

“Exactly.” With a nod, Three-Fingered Hank stood up tall as Rainbow Lady Ixchel turned her dreadful eyes his way once more, blank and pitiless as her emblem the moon, if infinitely darker: a glare beneath which harder men than he had shivered, Rook included.

Still, truth to tell, Fennig wasn’t even looking her way, keeping his own eyes trained instead square on the creature who’d once played triangle-point in his polyamorous affections — perhaps studying her for some recognition, however small, and getting none that Rook could perceive. Yet smiling slightly all the while, nonetheless.

“I put trust in you, Henry Fennig,” Ixchel told him, slowly, “on my own consort’s word; looked to you and your women as helpmeets, my strong right arm in battle just as one of them serves me yet. Tonight, however, you have gone against your queen, your goddess — risked not only the Machine, but the new world it brings on. Of all people but one, you should know best the penalty for such betrayal.”

“True enough. Think about it this way, though: killing me, right here and now, over an ‘offence’ don’t break none of your precious laws? That ain’t justice, so much as tyranny — same kind we fought a war over, back in old King George’s time. And that war, we won.”

A ripple went through the crowd, gone almost before Ixchel could perceive it, let alone trace its source.

You don’t even see what you’re about to do here, do you, darlin’? thought Rook. Teach ’em in one fell stroke what I’ve known all along — that you can’t be trusted, not to keep your word, and not otherwise.

“So get ready, Missus,” Fennig finished. “Now everyone knows — I may be the first, but I damn sure won’t be last.”

Good epitaph, son.

Fennig met his eyes, his reply echoing straight inside Rook’s skull. Honoured, Reverend; you’re a good man, even when you ain’t. Now, don’t forget those glazers of mine, will you? Believe it or not, it’s worth your while.

Ixchel didn’t even have to give the order. Between one heartbeat and the next, Clo was back in Fennig’s arms, like they’d never been separate. Except, of course, that this time her lips were peeled back to expose a shark’s double row of teeth, bottom and top. Though her right hand cupped the nape of his neck, deceptively loving, her thorn-clawed left had already plunged to split his breastbone like a sunk rail spike, fingers cupped cruel ’round his beating heart.

Fennig coughed blood, arterial-bright and steaming. Rasped: “Love you, honey. Always will. This . . . ain’t your fault.”

“Yes it is,” Clo replied, without a shred of remorse. And bit his face off first, a crunchy sweetmeat, before moving on to the rest.

After near everyone else had turned away but Ixchel, Rook (who’d forced himself to watch) and Clo (still intent on her pleasure, taking far longer with Fennig than she had with Arkwright, for reasons Rook didn’t want to contemplate), Ixchel put a hand on her “daughter’s” shoulder, pulling her gently free of what little was left.

“Enough,” she told her, wiping blood from Clo’s lower lip only to lick it off her finger, savouring the taste. “You are young yet, and though you do not tire, there is no reason not to pace yourself. Return to your chamber, to await my will.”

“Yes, mother.”

Taking Clo by the chin, Ixchel kissed her too-red mouth and stepped away, passing Rook by in the opposite direction. “I will expect you soon, my husband,” she threw back, cloak humming in her wake, as if over-stimulated by tonight’s amusements. “Do not keep me waiting.”

He made her a leg, bowing low, which seemed acceptable. And hung back one minute longer, stroking the bulge Fennig’s spectacles made through his vest cloth, feeling that residual pulse of energy under his fingertips as though the man was absent rather than excised: a patient, intimate resonance, like this fragile rig of wires and lenses carried just enough intelligence of its own to have stubborn faith he might one day return to reclaim them.

Fennig had to have known, or at least suspected, what Rook saw now: the specs were talisman as much as tool — mere contact conferred a stark fraction of Fennig’s gift. Enough to look at the horrid ruin Ixchel had made of Clo Killeen . . . and realize it yet contained a last seed of the original.

Something that might even bloom again, one day.

CHAPTER NINE

Night’s house, with its many chambers, its many occupants. Like the one located high on a hill overlooking Bewelcome where Chess Pargeter and “Reverend” Rook had once paused their horses, contemplating pre-emptive action ’gainst zealous young Sheriff Mesach Love, where two considerably less distinctive-looking men now stood in shadow, examining at a cautious distance the lamentable extent of Bewelcome’s current devastation.