Skyglass: Chapter 4

Rapture and Rictus

PHOENIX

I reached Moss’s toppled body just after Marko got to him. He had the drummer pulled up against his chest, and the sight of them all cozied up like that was almost enough to make me snicker in delight. I didn’t. Instead, I was furious at Moss’ impudence–how dare he disrupt my exquisite creation!

Marko choked when I crouched beside him, naked and smoking and freshly returned to my human form. But he said nothing and jerked his attention back to Moss–Moss’s slack face, his lean chest fluttering with shallow breath, his silk-thin throat skin blue-pale and just begging to be bitten.

Marko whimpered a half-hearted curse and put a hand against the back of Moss’s head. A tragic smile wobbled onto his face as his fingers brushed my housemate’s green hat. Then he reached for the drummer’s water bottle.

While Marko tried to get some water down Moss’s gullet, I pecked energetically at Zinn’s p-com, altering my Blowup to play along with the music; after glancing at Moss in Marko’s rather large and semi-capable hands, the rest of Skyglass had started playing again. Zinn and Sable were pulling something slow and muddy from their strings, like they’d dredged it up from a crack in the earth. I couldn’t see Zinn’s face–he had turned back to the audience–but he was a little tense in the shoulders, more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him before. Sable was relaxed, but in a vile sort of way–a poisonous viper utterly at ease in its deadly tranquility. Devin I couldn’t see, hidden as he was in my Blowup’s trees, but from the sound of his tortured, seething wails, he was pretty pissed.

Skyglass did a good job being creepy and atmospheric, and suspending time to trick their audience, but they felt fractured. Hearing them play was like looking at a broken bone distending–but not breaking–skin. Fascinating but wrong. They needed Moss.

“Give me that,” I muttered, snatching the water from Marko and interrupting his tender ministrations. I upended the bottle over Moss’s face.

The drummer’s chest heaved. He turned his head into Marko’s stomach, coughing. Marko looked shocked and pleased at this development, and put a hand on the small of his friend’s back.

Moss froze at the contact. He pulled himself away and cast the hood of his jacket over his head in record time. Even in the shadow of his hood, I could see the flare of his nostrils, the agony and disgust scrunching up his mouth. He slapped a hand against his drum throne and began to haul himself up.

Marko and I both reached for him at the same time–though undoubtedly with different intentions. I got to Moss first. I meant to help drag him back behind his instrument, but the moment I felt the shivers wracking his core, and the off-kilter tilt to his body, I stopped. I restrained myself.

This shattered and sick Moss felt familiar. He felt like me when I’d been spinning through space, moments after escaping my father. I’d floated, dead-limbed, in the wreckage of the escape hole I’d blown in the side of his satellite, a hollow vacuum around me and in me.

Absolute emptiness. That was all I’d felt. If I’d been human, I’d have been shaking then, too. I would have been dead.

So instead of shoving Moss back on his seat, I held him still. “No,” I said.

Beside me, Marko was motionless, hands still reaching for Moss, but without contact. “No, Moss,” I went on. “No more tonight. You need food, pisshead, and a couple years of snoozing in that repulsively fluffy bed of yours.”

Moss looked at me like I was a legless, tap-dancing octopus. I liked the taste of that look–it wasn’t undeserved.

Moss tightened his jaw and sat up, stiff and straight. His emptiness crystallized. “Let go,” he said. “Let me go.”

I mashed my mouth together, disapproving, but acquiescing. It wasn’t just the emptiness that felt familiar. I knew that resolve all too well–only mine wasn’t brittle.

I let him go.

***

Freshly shed of my catskin, I watched Skyglass revel in the afterglow of their show; I had a good view from my ground-level vantage point, tucked away in a fold in the cherry tree’s trunk, peeking through the rosy glass of an adjacent, elven meditation bubble. The band was packed up and ready to head out for a celebratory drink–which meant they were too preoccupied by the promise of booze to take note of me.

Moss was perched on an amp, hood on and a scarf wrapped up to his nose, probably to warm those delicate collarbones of his. Still, I could read the heat of his orange eyes. No matter how hard he was trying to hide it, I knew there was a wild grin aching on his face. He was exhausted, but happy.

“You’re Phoenix,” said a woman’s voice from behind me.

“Well, aren’t you sneaky?” I said, turning about to face my visitor.

She was big, full of grace and intensity, and loosely gripped a box full of Peeps in her dirty-nailed hands. For a moment, her eyes were the color of dried blood, then darkened to plum. I found their lack of passivity strange and sweet.

She laughed. “I am that–but my name is Yunayuna. What are you doing?”

“Being sneaky. And nosy,” I said truthfully.

“How lovely.” She leaned forward and licked my cheek, a greeting only poppers used–though she didn’t seem like a popper, not at all. Still, I leaned forward and licked her own soft cheek.

It was just as I’d thought: she was no popper. Her skin tasted like skin–salty, with a hint of wood smoke, which made me a little sad. I missed the days when I’d concoct a wild mixer of cheek-flavor with my p-com. My favorite alchemy had been cinnamon, ghost chilies, and pickled oranges.

“Are you a popper?” I asked her anyway.

“No.” She shrugged. “I’m just the guitarist’s goat-herding girlfriend. As for the licking, well, I’ve always liked that kind of greeting. I think distance is unhealthy.”

I mused on that a second. “Sure,” I offered. “Getting cozy with the enemy, and all that.”

“Quite true,” she agreed with a gentle smile, then lifted the box of Peeps. “Anyway, good to meet you. I won’t tell them where you’re hiding, but I’ve got to deliver these to Devin before things get dangerous. See you later.”

She proceeded around the tree and crouched beside Devin, who’d spread himself belly- and face-down on the earth the moment the show ended and had refused to move since. Yunayuna broke open the Peep box and placed one on the back of his hand. He turned over groggily and stuffed it in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Ten seconds passed, then he jumped up and demolished the box in a ravenous thrall. I shifted my gaze to Zinn. He stared over at Moss, still sitting on the amp.

“Your eyes look bright,” the bassist said.

Devin let out a Peep-muffled yell and attacked Moss from the side, ripping off his hood and stealing his scarf. As the singer danced around with his prize, Moss’s teeth gleamed for a brief, sweet moment before he clamped his mouth into a frown.

“His teeth are bright, too,” Sable intoned, as she attempted to dodge Yunayuna’s efforts at untangling her hair, disheveled as it was from all the headbanging during the show.

“You coming with us to the drinkup?” Zinn asked Moss, as the drummer tugged his hood back up. “You know I can’t get drunk without my vomiting partner.” Zinn tilted back his head, sighing in reverie, and for a moment I could swear his eyes snagged on my (now vacant) hiding place in the tree’s pink, unseasonal blossoms.

But his gaze slid on, settling back on Moss’s huddled form. “Remember how we used to go target shooting after too much brandy in too little time? Whoever had the most vomit in the toilet won. I have to play with Sable these days, which is no fun at all. She always loses. At least you and I are both equally unable to hold our liquor.”

I suppressed the urge to leap out from behind the tree, all naked and sparkling, and tell him I’d play his blissful, alcoholic game. But I didn’t–too many reasons not to, the main one being that my belly was an incinerator, which meant I couldn’t vomit. We’d have to find a different game to play.

“I’ll buy you a buzzlefly belly-guzzler,” Devin pleaded, as if bribery involving bugs would somehow work on Moss.

At long last, Moss lifted his head. “No,” he said. “I’m gonna stay here awhile, absorb our triumph. You know.” His smile was obvious now, even through his hood-shadow–a little too motionless to be totally convincing, and more awkward than a zombie’s rot-jawed grin, but it was still a smile.

It was enough to satisfy his bandmates. Devin shrugged and waltzed away. Sable and Yunayuna followed, but Zinn hung back.

“Where’s our benefactress?” he asked. I sank back against the tree trunk before his ambery pickle-eyes could study the empty venue. “She still has my com,” he explained.

“Dunno,” Moss replied.

“Hm. I’m sure it’ll wander back to me eventually.” I listened to Zinn summon a deep breath, let it out. “We should have helped you,” he said, voice soft. “I should have. When you fell. We should have stopped playing.”

“No,” Moss said. “You did what you had to. I made a promise, and I broke it. I know I’m rotten, but I think maybe I’m starting to understand. The shows. This stupid, sickening urge you all have. I think maybe…I’ve been infected.”

“Good.”

I hissed quietly to myself as I peeked around the tree just in time to watch Zinn drop off the stage and amble toward the exit.

As soon as he was out of sight, engulfed in the darkness of the windy stairwell that led out of the venue, Moss glanced around. Only Marko remained, and he was a ways off behind the tree, busy loading drums into the van.

Maybe thinking no one could see him, Moss slipped from the amp and onto his knees. His fingers gripped at the dirt.

A string of yellow drool swung from his gagging mouth. The bend in his spine went hard and breakable, and he held back a fit of coughing until more watery vomit spattered on the ground. When his arms began to tremble, he collapsed onto his back. Threads of saliva glistened against his hollow cheeks and I could see the rapid rise-fall of his narrow belly beneath the bulk of his jacket.

I finally rounded the tree and walked over. When I sat cross-legged by Moss’s side, his eyes slid open briefly. Focused on me. Slid shut.

“Did the show lick your fancy?” I asked.

“It sucked,” he said. A slight smirk tweaked his mouth. “So much that I came.” He coughed again, turned onto his side–toward me, so considerate of him!–as he hacked out more drippy fluid.

He flopped onto his back again. His eyes were half-open and glassy, unfocused.

“Are you dying, Moss?”

He squeezed his eyes shut and said, very quietly, “Maybe.”

Proceed to Chapter 4, page 4–>