“You trying to piss me off, Ky?”
Kyra smiled a razor blade smile. Her eyes locked on Johnny’s, and she nodded slightly . . . just like she had back at the Spirit Song Trading Post, seconds before Johnny pulled the Magnum’s trigger and blew that Indian bitch right out of her moccasins.
Johnny knew what that nod meant.
It meant: Do what you
want
to do.
Do what you
have
to do.
License to do what the black muse demanded. That’s what Kyra called it.
License to take charge. That’s what Johnny called it.
Kyra’s new eyes burned through him. She lay back on the vault, parting her raised thighs, revealing her shaved sex—a glistening, pierced, hot pink flower. Staring, Johnny peeled off Dan Cody’s gore-splattered leather jacket, dropped it on the floor of the tomb. Slid out of his Blasphemers T-shirt, his leather pants.
He stood before her, naked, his muscles pumped with exertion and desire. Waiting.
“Come,” Kyra said.
‘‘Now.’’
And Johnny moved toward her like an animal freed from a cage. Soon she was beneath him, and he felt the wild beating of her heart as he pressed against her She wrapped her arms around him and raked his bare flesh with sharp black fingernails that might have been talons. Angry scarlet welts wept down his back.
Do what you want to do.
Do what you have to do.
It's for both of us,
Johnny assured himself.
It's what nature demands of a man, and a woman. Primal and undeniable. It's what Kyra wants, deep down there in her gut and her stained soul, what she really needs
—
Kyra’s hands drifted to Johnny’s neck. She unbuckled the
heavy, chrome-studded dog collar. The silver caught the moonlight. Black leather snapped in her hands.
“You ready for me, Johnny?”
Man, was he ever. His heart pounded like a jackhammer.
Kyra slapped the buckle hard across Johnny’s face. He drew in a hard breath as a divot of pain throbbed deep in his cheekbone.
“I just asked you a question, Johnny.”
“I’m ready.”
“Then do it.”
Johnny slapped her. “I don’t need your permission. I’m not asking for it. Not anymore.”
Johnny yanked the dog collar from Kyra’s hands and pressed it to her windpipe . . . right across the pale lavender scar she almost always concealed with a necklace or a scarf
The scar a hangman’s noose had left on Kyra’s very white neck.
Man, sometimes Johnny couldn’t believe that someone with Kyra’s confidence had tried to kill herself He still didn’t know why she’d done it. Not really. Oh, he knew the kind of hate she kept locked inside her heart. He knew the way that kind of hate could burn . . . just like sulfuric fucking acid.
But, hey, like someone said
—life is tough and then you die.
Johnny hadn’t had it easy either, but the idea of killing himself had never crossed his mind. For Johnny, life was about making up for disappointments, not giving in to them. He wanted to run the clock down, drive it hard and fast and get what he could while the getting was good—
“Harder,” came Kyra’s strangled whisper.
“Anything you want, babe.” Johnny grit his teeth, pressed the stiff leather band against Kyra’s scarred throat, the force of his weight behind it.
Hard, harder As hard as she wanted it.
Ten seconds ticked by. Twenty . . . then thirty.
Do what you have to do.
Do what you want to do.
Kyra’s eyes were different now. They were blue, and they had
once belonged to another woman. But the look that came into them was more than familiar to Johnny.
It was a look he’d never forget as long as he lived.
It was the same look Johnny had seen when he walked into his busted-up little apartment house in San Francisco’s Mission District one night and discovered a woman he didn’t even know hanging there in a nasty little piss-soaked stairwell, rope knotted around a banister, feet dangling inches above a threadbare carpet, green eyes bulging like she could suddenly see everything in this world and the one that lay beyond.
Everything there was to see.
In the mausoleum, Kyra opened her mouth, tried to breathe. Johnny didn’t let her. Her fingernails dug into his hips, made crescent moons of blood that glistened on his hot skin. She pulled him close, then inside. He slid in easily, came within seconds, an explosion of pure pleasure that seemed to shatter his skull as if it were made of sugar.
A couple seconds later, it was the same for Kyra.
Johnny released the collar, hands shaking.
Kyra gasped, filled her lungs with huge gulps of air.
Johnny stared at her, spent. She opened her mouth, and he knew exactly what she was going to say.
The same two words she’d said when he cut her down in that shitty little stairwell.
Those words weren’t
thank you.
All Kyra said was:
“The Crow
..."
Kyra closed Leticia Dreams The Truth Hardin’s eyes as the leather strap pressed down on her neck.
Inside her mind, everything was dark.
Dark and electric.
First, she saw the things she always saw, the bright flashes of memory that came as the air died inside her and her lungs began to burn like napalm.
A man. A classical musician. Her father, a violin tucked beneath his chin. Strong fingers, lean and beautiful, clasped around a bow as
she waits, breathless. The sound: Peter Warlock’s "Bransle.” The sensation: rapture, and love, and a reverence for hands that can make such exquisite music.
Later. The same hands turning angry. Striking Kyra (though Kyra is not yet her name), throwing his child across the room like a broken instrument.
And a woman comes. Kyra’s mother Hair swinging like severed catgut strings. Screaming at an artist whose favorite medium is human pain.
The girl who will be Kyra. Frightened, barefoot, running down a spiral staircase. Shouts and threats chasing after her.
Later A voice, strung-out soprano, on the telephone. A hand tight around Kyra’s small wrist. "It won’t be forever. Mom,” Kyra’s mother said. "Just until we get back from Europe. He can’t create with a child around. She irritates him. If you can just take her for a while.”
Another voice, a man’s, tenor A moaning Marat in the bulging claw-foot bathtub, percussion of hissing water drops against tiled floor, the shrill strains of an original violin suite echoing against a vaulted ceiling. "I have lost all, I have lost
all..
. ”
Years pass among relatives. One year after another, spent in the silent solitude of a closed room. Books about music, and an, and banished tribes. Books about death. Later, books about sorcery. The casting of spells. The performance of rituals. The transcendence of the soul. Secret verses and esoteric songs. Sunrise, sunset. . . through all the solstices and all the equinoxes. But nothing brings back what she has lost.
A voice remembered. Tenor "I have lost all, I have lost
all..
. ”
All but the pain. And the pain settles in her heart like a hard black seed until it takes root and bears fruit, and she eats of the fruit, and the fruit stains her lips black, for the fruit is poison. . . .
There is no way to escape this world of the living in which she walks, no way to find the world of the dead. No way to escape the taunts of children at the philistine school she attends, children who laugh and speak in whispers about the girl who dresses in black.
Later. Older children who laugh not at her but at death itself who dance like Dia de Los Muertos skeletons in empty warehouses. They smile their ecstasy smiles and listen to her deepest secrets. Then they use
her, and use her again, until they are finished and there is nothing left to use, and still the danse macabre continues, for there is always another empty warehouse, always another empty drug.
No sorcery. No spells. No transcendence of the soul.
Nothing at all, but the cool black surf of drugs in veins beneath her pale skin.
But still she survives ... on the streets now, reduced to walking bones amidst the stink of human sewage. Filth and degradation. Begging for money. Pound of flesh traded for anything that could make her feel, if only for a hot surging moment. And always someone else who wants to use her. But there is nothing left. Nothing left and she has no more to lose.
So she stops selling herself
Instead, she gives herself away.
To those in the cult.
Ritual sex majick. That's what these men claim to practice, and they take Kyra for an acolyte. There are thirteen men and Kyra, and they take the only thing she has that is still worth taking with words that lie, words that promise power
But the thirteen men in the cult have no power. Not really. They only have cocks, like all other men. And they have cameras, cameras with which they make videos, recording their ceremonies for a select clientele.
Smoke and mirrors is what it all amounts to. No majick at all. Only men in robes gang-banging a little strung-out goth girl. A power fantasy for the weak, set to the music of a supplicant’s eager whimpers, played out on a stage set with altar, rack, and other singular devices of the torturer's trade.
Kyra does not realize this at first, of course. She is afraid, and she is much too weak to discover the truth through all the lies. She only knows that it comes to her, unbidden.
This time, the truth finds her.
For it lives in a book used by the men, a book written in Latin from which their more learned members recite wicked prayers they cannot begin to comprehend. To them, the book is only window-dressing, a script to be recited in empty voices.
But the book itself is not empty. It is bound in the tattered hide of a sinner, and it is not like the men at all. Instinctively, Kyra knows this. She cannot read Latin, but she understands that the book has power, understands that it is calling to her and her alone
—
Kyra studies the book when the men have finished with her, when they need sleep as all men do. She flips its faded leaves one by one, studies strange symbols and drawings she cannot begin to understand. She is drawn to the book at every free moment, when the men drink their wine, and when they tell their lies, and when they turn to other women
—
Which, of course, they do. For they are not what they say they are, these men, and they do not even believe the words that slip from their mouths, and so they tire of Kyra.
They turn to other women. Once more, Kyra finds herself on the street. But she will not stay there. Not now. Not when the book’s secrets call her. So she waits for the right moment, and it is not hard; it is not hard to wait because the men in the cult don’t even know what they have, not really. To them, the hook is no more than a prop.
She waits for a moonless night, waits outside the cult house in the cold until the eager whimpers of her replacement fade within its dark walls.
The chanting ends soon afterward, and Kyra is sorry for that. The voices that carry the words are empty, but the words themselves are from the book, and they strengthen Kyra’s resolve.
Soon the lights dim, and Kyra steals into the house.
All is quiet, save for the quiet slosh of gasoline in the large plastic can she carries at her side. She finds the book, and it is as warm to her touch as an expectant lover. She holds it to her chest, and there is no sound at all now, but she can almost hear the words that live within, and she can feel the true power those words hold.
But there is power in silence, as well. Kyra knows this. And she is silent as she goes about the house with the gasoline, silent until she stands at the front door, silent until a single wooden match rasps against scarred wood.
She waits in the street as the flames speak their own quiet language. Waits until old wood crackles, then roars. Waits until she hears the
screams of the drunken and the drugged inside the burning walk, waits until thirteen men—and one unfortunate woman-—have been roasted alive.
She waits in silence, a smile on her lips.
For now the book belongs to Kyra.
But she is disturbed to find that the book will not surrender its secrets so easily, for she is not yet ready for it. The book demands much of her. It demands her passion, and it extracts a quality she never knew she had
—
discipline.
Latin does not come easily to Kyra, but it comes. First there are only words strung together, patterns and combinations she struggles to decipher. But Kyra is persistent, and one day meaning comes And on a day soon after, as Kyra turns the leaves of the dusty tome, the leaves flake away from her fingers like sheets of aged skin and shed their knowledge in lines penned in blood.
She learns of the uses of the flesh, and the limits of flesh, and how the flesh is transformed through death.
And she learns about the Crow.