On the Verge (30 page)

“Right. So I think we should go,” Freya said, and she started off toward the spot a few blocks away where she’d parked the Caddy. She didn’t look back, but she knew they would follow.

F
reya looked in the rearview mirror as she drove along Northlake Way toward the U District and the Montlake Bridge that would take them across the water and back up the hill to her place. She couldn’t help but smile at the motley crew in her car. It had been a bit of a challenge getting them seated, given the logistics of loathing that existed among the passengers. Rusty claimed the front seat, ostensibly for his size, but mostly because he required as much of a barrier between him and Ophidia as was physically possible given the limitations of the Cadillac’s interior. He wouldn’t even let Ophidia sit behind him so Dakryma took that spot, lowering the wide armrest built into the middle of the backseat to mark a symbolic boundary between him and his former lover. Ophidia sat behind Freya and she could feel her shooting daggers into her back the whole way. It was uncomfortable to say the least, an awkward atmosphere punctuated by deadly silence.

“Well, you’re down to about twelve minutes so somebody better start talking,” Freya said as the car sped along the curves hugging the shoreline close to Lake Union.

“We need those colors,” Ophidia hissed. “You have no idea what would happen if you fools passed them on to some power-hungry mortal.”

“Enlighten us,” Freya replied.

“You don’t require enlightening,” Ophidia said. “You just need to give us the colors and get on with your pitiful, pointless life with Quasimodo over there.”

Rusty turned quickly and swung his arm over the seat in an attempt to wrap his thick fingers around Ophidia’s graceful neck. He might have accomplished his goal, too, had Dakryma not caught his arm in midflight, stopping its forward momentum effortlessly.

“Forgive my tactless counterpart, Rusty,” Dakryma said. “She might be beautiful, but, as you know, she’s a bit of a ruthless, narcissistic bitch to put it mildly.”

Rusty tore his arm away from Dakryma’s grip and glowered in his seat while Ophidia threw Dakryma an equally withering glance.

“There, now that we’re all friends again,” Dakryma continued, “let me elucidate the situation for everyone.

He cleared his throat and began.

“Once, a long, long time ago, Ophidia and I were lovers. It was exciting for a time. Incubi and succubi are notoriously passionate demons, but there is a strict code of conduct between the two groups that forbids them from carrying on affairs. At the time, as a young, roguish incubus, I thought it was just a useless bit of tradition and an entertaining rule to flout, as it seemed to come with few consequences and copious amounts of copulation. However, I soon realized the error of my ways when it became obvious that Ophidia had grown inordinately attached to me. Normally incubi and succubi are impervious to romantic feelings. Such useless emotional investment would stand in the way of our means of feeding ourselves and the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed.”

“You mean you might suddenly start to feel bad about fucking everything in sight,” Ophidia said with acrimony.

“To put it bluntly, yes,” said Dakryma. “So the rule hadn’t stood for nothing after all. Our kinds weren’t meant to mix because it made us behave strangely. It made us more human, and nothing is more dangerous. That’s what happened to Ophidia here. She fell in love with me. I didn’t think it was possible for a succubus to love, but there it was, and I knew I had to act quickly. I cut off all ties with her as soon as I found out, but it was no use. She had already dreamed up a way for us to be together. She got a hold of the colors you two have just collected and forced a talented artist to paint her and then got him to make my portrait as well. The act bound us to the objects, our paintings, forever. She thought Stuck would keep his masterworks, tying us together for eternity. The painter, however, was anxious to be rid of his demonic totems and shortly our portraits parted ways.”

Freya stopped at a red light and turned slightly in her seat so that she could see Dakryma.

“That’s all very interesting,” she said, “but what does it have to do with Beldame and the situation we’re in now.”

“It has everything to do with it because Beldame has figured out our curse,” Dakryma said. “She’s brought our portraits together for the first time in more than a century and she’s timed it for Halloween, the time when the boundary between this world and the Verge is at its most precarious. I don’t feel her pull on me yet, but I doubt it will be long before she finds a way to divest the Bulgarians of their art. And she already has Ophidia. She knows that we are powerful players in the world of the Verge. And if she also controls the colors she can use us to recruit other Verge to be painted into portraits. With those pictures in her possession she could start to form a collection, an army of subjugated Verge forced to do whatever deviant bidding she desired.”

The light changed and Freya started up the steep side of Capitol Hill. The Caddy’s powerful engine churned as they made their way, the pavement of 24
^th
Avenue gliding swiftly by under the black car’s white-rimmed tires.

“And to make matters worse,” Dakryma continued, “Ophidia has informed me that Beldame knows that she is Seattle’s Morrigan.”

“What does that mean?” Freya asked.

Ophidia sighed.

“It means I’m respected by the demons I outrank,” she said. “Something about which you seem to have very little understanding considering your subordinate position.”

“Oh, god,” Freya said, exasperated. “We know, we know. You are great and powerful and we are just puny mortals. Blah, blah, blah. Can you just finish your story, Dakryma. And make it quick. My patience is running out.”

“Of course,” he said. “There isn’t that much more to tell really. As I was saying, Ophidia is the Morrigan, a queen of sorts chosen from among the most powerful beings of the local Verge enclave. It’s a tradition that all large Verge communities follow and one of the Morrigan’s most important duties comes on Halloween when the Convocation happens.”

“The Convocation?” Freya said.

“Halloween is an important time for the Verge,” the professor continued. “It’s when the boundary between our realm and the real world is at its most tenuous, when the creatures of the Verge are at their most powerful. Bad things can happen. So the Convocation is a safeguard, a gathering in a secure place where the demons of the Verge can be free to be themselves without consequences.”

“As the Morrigan,” Ophidia interjected, “I am responsible for protecting those of the Verge from themselves. Think of me as a guardian, or perhaps more cynically, as a warden. My sisters and brothers, those lesser demons, consider Convocation to be merely a party, a giant bacchanal, but the truth is without their chosen Morrigan to reign them in, the demons and monsters of the Verge, on the night when they are most powerful, would explode upon this world. Seattle wouldn’t understand what hit it. With my portrait in her possession Beldame could keep me from my Morrigan duties. Far worse, however, and a distinct possibility, would be if Beldame used her power over me to attempt to control the Verge. Through me she would command the stuff of nightmares. There is no telling what she would do.”

Ophidia paused and Dakryma caught Freya’s gaze in the rearview mirror, holding it with an intensity that made her wholly uncomfortable. But she couldn’t look away. She had to see him. His eyes held an ocean of lies, but under that tumult in their silent depths there was a truth, the hard realities of the dark side of life. That is what she concentrated on, why she looked so hard.

“If Beldame has the colors, there won’t be anything we can do to stop her,” Dakryma began again. “But with them, we can. We can keep the barrier between this world and ours intact.”

“How?” Freya asked.

“I will paint her,” he said. “I will paint Beldame’s portrait.”

Suddenly the words of the old woman outside of the House of Kour came rushing back to her. “The devil is a maker too,” she had said. “He paints with a somber brush, but he is an artist, make no mistake.”

“But how will a picture of Beldame keep all this madness from happening?” she asked.

“You have to trust me,” Dakryma said. “Remember, I, just like all Verge creatures, am only a figment of the human imagination. I live only because I was dreamed into existence, first as an incubus hundreds of years past and then as Lucifer by a nineteenth-century painter. I am only what you make me. We, all of us from the Verge, are only as good or bad as the humans who created us.”

Freya hesitated. The road slipped quickly beneath the tires of the old Cadillac as it roared up the hill. They were only minutes away from the Briar Rose. She gripped the steering wheel tightly and let out her breath.

“The colors are yours,” she said, and then slammed on the accelerator, rocketing the four unlikely accomplices toward her apartment.

F
reya picked at her nails nervously and wished she hadn’t forgotten her phone back at her place; that way she could at least pretend to be deeply absorbed in whatever distraction was currently occupying the social networks. As it was she was stuck next to Rusty’s equally awkward presence trying to look like the gallery might not become a battlefield in the next few moments.

The big white box they occupied was one of the Frye’s main galleries and it was filled with all the key players in the Seattle art world, and what Freya liked to call art groupies, those people who had very little to do with the making, displaying, or promotion of art, but who just liked the secondhand sophistication that the gathering bestowed upon them. Freya had been to several of these opening night receptions for big shows around town and they were usually standing room only, but always filled with a kind of quiet hauteur exuded by lots of people trying too hard to be intellectuals. This one had many of the same attendees, but the atmosphere was unlike any other that Freya had yet experienced. There was an electricity in the air, an excited nervousness that seemed to animate the words and motions of even the most jaded art mavens in attendance.

Those without Freya’s inside knowledge probably assumed it was because it was Halloween, an energy held over from the days when the night had meant breaking bedtimes, dress codes and the embargo on candy. They might have attributed it to the exoticness of the paintings surrounding them. The combined effect of Franz Stuck’s great Symbolist works that lined the walls made the gallery twinkle like a sinister jewel box of the dark, the mysterious, and the sensual. But Freya knew the jolts of voltaic energy sizzling through the room originated from Ophidia and Dakryma in such close proximity to their binding objects on a night when their power here was at its zenith.

The two demons stood at either end of the long rectangular space each near their own respective portrait. Seeing them there, so close to Stuck’s handiwork, it was obvious that the works could never have resulted from copying mere mortal models or fabricating likenesses from the imagination. Paintings with that kind of palpable charisma could only be based on the reality of a fantasy come to life.

On the far left side of the room hung
Sin
. The raven-haired temptress embraced by the lascivious curves of the tumescent snake smiled Mona Lisa-like from her flat canvas plane while the three-dimensional Ophidia stood a few paces in front of it looking even more dangerously beautiful than usual in a red lace column dress. Her lips were a dark burgundy and her dusky eyes shone out of artfully applied black kohl. Her presence was captivating and people noticed. They tried to concentrate on their companions or on the amazing paintings surrounding them, but their eyes kept finding their way back to her.

That is, if they weren’t drawn to the right side of the room and the equally enthralling presence of Professor Dakryma elegantly attired in a sharply cut suit, a thin, silk tie dissecting his pure white shirtfront. He too had established himself directly in front of his portrait. The dark angel with his likeness was monumental not only in its size but in its threatening allure and strange vulnerability.