Midian Unmade (5 page)

He did not watch as she began to move from him, but then he heard her coming back again. As he turned to look, she was already standing over him, bending down. Her lips touched his forehead, brushed against his skin, and then were gone again.

“Thanks. I just wanted to say thanks. And you don't need to be so sad. Read the book. Maybe it will bring a smile to whatever it is you're hiding behind that scarf.”

As she straightened up, he dropped the book and slowly pulled down the scarf. She looked at him, and did not scream. Did not wince. She just looked. And then whispered, “Thank you.”

She turned again and walked away. Iblis sat for a long time. He sat until he knew he had to leave in order to walk back to his home before the sun rose.

As he walked, he looked at the picture on the book. The man faced away. You couldn't see his face, but his body screamed power. His sinews were taut and tight and ready, yet at rest. You could almost see the small images on his body changing.

As the sky slowly began to change from black to blue, he knew that someone or something had left the world. It wasn't like Midian had fallen again. Just that it had gotten smaller. The Naturals had grown closer. That's when he realized. He didn't know her name. He knew nothing about her but her pain and her loss. But he was able to lessen those.

He walked past the temples of the beautiful, now silent. No more loud rhythms enticing the crowd. They stood empty and abandoned, like Midian. He saw the homeless sleeping in the doorways.

He felt changed. Was this what Cabal had gone through? He shifted in his skin, under the scarf and the hat and the jacket and the hood. Sometimes the walk back to what passed for a home simply reminded him of how alone he now was. Not tonight. Tonight something had been lost, so something must be gained.

Instead of turning on Coldheart, he kept walking, back to Hollywood Forever. That was what was missing. He had been putting on the costume and mask and drumming for the band so much recently he had not been here in a while. He needed, before the sun was fully up, to drum again. Not for crowds of people pretending to be monsters, not for the beautiful to dance and seduce and judge, not for crowds at all, but for the lost and the broken.

He moved past the familiar marble. The lawns and graves were well kept here, unlike Midian. He was still at home among the dead, even the beautiful dead of Los Angeles. Even the name, Hollywood Forever, seemed a lie, but a lie with a promise. Among the familiar stones, paths, and crypts the real rhythms of the Breed began to return to him. Not what he played in clubs and bars, but what had come through him in Midian.

He drummed for her. He drummed for her dead friend. He drummed for himself and all the Breed. Not for those pretending, but those who were. When he walked, he was never alone. He was Iblis, and he was born of fire.

 

ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE OF MY HEART

A Story of Midian

Nancy Holder

The air belowground in Coraz
ó
n was thick with the scents of incense, blood, and meat. Good scents, holy, but if they had a sound, it would be a closing door. A gate, shutting. A tomb collapsing in on itself. Separated, away.

From Cabal.

Other sounds clanged against Coeur's eardrums, but these were like slowing heartbeats. She had just received her three sacred words, her mantra. Her path, then, would be Dark. The chant had been chosen for her by the elders, and divulged to her by Jean-Marc, first elder, who was her father. This was her initiation into the holy work of the tribe: some rejoiced, others mourned, all sought to confuse.

Her words mourned.

They were not the three words she had longed to hear. They were words of the past. Of moving away from the Beloved:

Invasion.

Diaspora.

Exile.

Coeur's vocation required her to think the words until they were a part of her. To find her own darkness and increase it, to send her thoughts out to the night on behalf of the tribe. Coraz
ó
n must never forget that they had been and still were in mortal peril. Decker, the Antichrist who had led the human attack on Midian, was forever dead. Ashbery had been his disciple, and in the fighting had been made an imbecile who was somehow privileged to hear the plans and dreams of the Nightbreed, which he could relate to Eigerman. Eigerman, his minder, was Decker's other acolyte. And Eigerman had sworn not to die until he could put an end to the Breed, forever.

Because of the imbecile, each of the tribes silently chanted words to clog Ashbery's mystic channels—to confound and deceive their mortal enemy. All of the tribes, each with their own mantras, whispered such barriers into being. It was marking time, in a way. It was waiting. Stalling, some said. But it was a life.

Sange, who was exactly Coeur's age and so was initiated at the same time—they were both eighteen tonight—smiled when Jean-Marc whispered his three words into his ear. Coeur knew then that he had been given the words of the Light:

Rendezvous.

Rebuild.

Restart.

The words of hope, and also of defiance. If Ashbery heard them, he would translate them like this:
When Midian is rebuilt, we will dance on the graves of the human race. You will become dust, and you will be utterly forgotten.

Only the elders could utter the Prophet's name aloud:

Cabal.

His human name was Boone, and he had been chosen by the Divine Creator whose name no one but Cabal was worthy to speak:

Baphom-t.

Cabal was to lead the people while they were scattered over the Northern Hemisphere. Cabal had caused the fall of the Nightbreed, but Baphom-t had decreed that Cabal would also bring them together when the Moon and stars aligned, and Midian rose again in glory. When the crass and brutal sun burned the human race away, and the Moon regained her luminous dominion. Then the Nightbreed would caper and dance over the world made new.

And then she would see Cabal.

Until that time, the Nightbreed must hide below, as they had done in Midian. In simplest terms, they must outlast their enemies. As it had been written: “
Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with a human.
”

And on the night of her initiation into the tribe, and the receipt of her three sacred words, Coeur knew that she was in terrible trouble. Her sin was grievous. Because other words filled her head:

Let's

Run

Away.

The tears that she shed during the ritual weeping of every initiated Dark member were genuine. The pain that coursed through her body as she knelt in the dirt and her wings were sewn together was real. But as the elders cut her hair and burned it with the incense that clogged and choked the passageways of their village, she wasn't meditating on the suffering of their sundered god, Baphom-t. She wasn't mourning the flight of a dozen tribes hastily formed as Midian fell, each given a piece of the One to protect until He could be made whole again. She wasn't showering Cabal with filial love and obedience.

She was thinking of the human boy aboveground who was waiting for her. Because it was summer, and she had fallen in love.

After she had put on her black robe and the music started, she stared at the chunks of meat and told herself over and over that they weren't Bobby. They couldn't be Bobby. Sange, in a white robe and feasting hungrily after the long fast, sidled over to her and smiled.

“Coeur, are you all right?” Sange asked. His dark eyes were set deep in a face of hollows and valleys, and fleshy lips that would now mouth three happy words nearly every waking hour.

Sange towered over Coeur. He was so muscular that when his wings had been sewn together (like hers: symbolic of their hobbling until Midian was restored), cords of muscle bunched along his shoulder blades. When they were younger, she had thought him the most beautiful of the Breed she had ever seen. And that was still true.

But then she had learned that beauty truly was only skin deep.

Yes, she had gone aboveground. She blamed it on the Internet, which of course she couldn't access deep in the earth. But the elders went upside to communicate with Cabal and the other tribes. They discussed the possible sightings of Eigerman. They debated whether or not it was safe yet. They traded news about their tribes: births, illnesses, abundance of meat, lack thereof.

It wasn't hard to go up. She dug herself a little tunnel—it had taken only a month—and stumbled out into the night. Sweet, fresh air. Stars. The moon, which was the eye of the Creator. She whirled in a circle, laughing, and took off all her clothes. Her hobbled wings strained to flap in the breeze. She raised her arms, dreaming of flying.

No one caught her; there were no consequences. And she began to think that maybe the elders looked the other way as a matter of course, and others did what she was doing. She tried to hint to Sange, test him, see if he had gone up.

It was pretty clear to her that he hadn't. He had never even thought about it, as far as she could tell. And from now on, he would think only of
Rendezvous, Rebuild, Restart.
He wouldn't think about cacti and coyotes, as she did. Or about a boy who rode a horse and who sometimes rode with other humans. And who talked about
Albuquerque
and
the Balloon Fiesta
and other clues to their whereabouts—details that the imbecile could use to locate her tribe, and destroy it.

She shouldn't go. She couldn't.

Or … she could go forever.

That was Bobby's mantra:
Let's run away.

He had seen her one night; he'd been walking his horse because the animal had thrown a shoe. When she had spun naked in the moonlight, arms raised, laughing, he had shouted so loudly that the coyotes had yipped and the wolves had howled. She had rushed at him like a hunter, ready to make meat of him. There had been no hesitation; she was Nightbreed, and he was not. He was game.

But then she saw his eyes. Deep brown, enormous, and somehow familiar. She stood rooted as he found the courage to approach her, and then he spoke,
and she understood him
. She didn't know if his language was the same as hers, or if it was a mystical connection such as the one between the imbecile Ashbery and the Breed.

He spoke triplet words:

Who

Are

You?

Not
What are you?
For her, always, there had been no thought of “who” when it came to humans. The named humans were evil: Decker, Ashbery, Eigerman. The once-humans had been renamed: Cabal and his woman, known only as She. Breed names.

Except that when Coeur didn't answer, he said, “My name is Bobby.”

Why, oh why had she fallen in love with him? Why did his name ring in her ears during her initiation? Why was it so hard to hear
Invasion Diaspora Exile
?

Bobby had seen, and she had told him only a little. Only that she wasn't from outer space (not really), or a strange Native American angel, or a goddess. And that there were others, and she was bound to them. That by meeting him, and stealing away to be with him, she was endangering her family.

“Then run away with me,” he said.

Maybe he didn't know that if she left her tribe she would be in worse danger. There was safety in numbers. A Breed alone was a walking target. Unless Eigerman wouldn't bother with just one.

Maybe Eigerman would hunt her down and torture her for information. Cabal had told them that the human devil had followers now, who sat at the feet of Ashbery and listened, rapt, as Eigerman translated what Ashbery was saying. They had pledged to rid the world of the abominations. To them, Decker was a saint, not a serial killer who had driven Cabal nearly mad. But who, in his way, had contributed to Cabal's transformation.

Would Bobby contribute to her transformation? Was her transformation important?

Cabal. She wanted to see him, hear him. She wanted to know the path she must take. Cabal would tell her her fortune. He would give her the answer. How else to explain her obsession with Cabal?

Unless all were so obsessed.

Bobby believed that he would be delivering her from horrible monsters who were torturing her—sewing her wings together!—and forcing her to live in servitude. She couldn't tell him otherwise. She didn't want him to know anything about the Breed. He already knew too much.

She didn't know if she could change him with a bite. No one in the tribe had ever changed anybody. She couldn't ask because she couldn't confess.

It was insanity even to think it. And a terrible betrayal. She was putting the tribe in danger every time she so much as thought of him. He was aboveground, waiting.

Once the initiation and feasting were done, it was custom to spend the night alone. It was the last night alone; ever after, one was joined in resolve to protect the tribe.

And of course, to protect the piece of Baphom-t that the tribe guarded: in the case of Coraz
ó
n, it was a fragment of His beloved heart.

Coeur had never seen it. She didn't know where it was kept. Only the elders saw it, and only on special occasions. Sometimes she wondered if it really existed. Or if Baphom-t was just a happy dream the elders had created to give the people hope.

If only she could ask Cabal.

She loved Bobby.

She hated her words.

But maybe they were the correct ones, because they would remind her that love could bring the downfall of the Nightbreed. Look at Cabal. His love for his woman had led to the destruction of their home.

But Cabal was going to make a miracle.

Cabal, not Coeur, was Baphom-t's chosen prophet.

But she
was
His child.

Bobby was not.