Vampires like lofts. It’s a bat thing.
Roland de Courtenay lives on the third floor of the Wilcott Building, a crumbling faux-Tudor edifice shouldered on both sides by twin semi-detacheds. Vines tumble over its arched doorway and creep upwards to hem the second-floor windows. The windows are framed with thick brown beams and inset with stained glass mosaics as pretty as those in St. Paul’s. It’s the kind of building that would be right at home in some parochial country village, but sticks out like a sore thumb in Little Lickington, an urban locale that boasts two soulless, ultra-modern shopping centers, four cinemas, six factories and a gang-related murder rate that’s twice the national average. Lickington is the Britain we’re accustomed to seeing in the grittiest of cop dramas: a place where the Bill is too scared to tread.
As I walk up to the iron gates I see that someone—a group of someones—has been busy tying signs and pieces of paper to them. It’s religious paraphernalia, mainly, in the repent-the-end-is-nigh vein that I optimistically hoped would fall out of fashion after the mid-1600s. Amongst the brain-rot I notice an undercurrent of homophobic hysteria; the old love the sinner, hate the sin shtick. There’s a badge with “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” on it, because as every half-wit fundamentalist knows, that joke never gets old. A pennant with the unequivocal message GAYS OUT on it unfurls in the wind.
I head up the stone steps. The front door swings open before I reach the porch. Roland. It’s still too light for him to venture outside safely; so he stands in the shadow of the door, bloodshot eyes gleaming in the darkness like a slightly under-the-weather Nosferatu (think 1979, not 1921). He’s put on weight since I last saw him, and his face has grown puffy, especially around the eyes.
“Kazeem,” he says. “My peri. You came.”
“I think your new decorator is trying to send you a message, de Courtenay,” I tell him, jerking a thumb toward the papers proselytizing shrilly from his gates. “What’s this about?”
“My darling boy, please! Permit me some small talk. We can discuss business later.” He kisses me on the cheeks and forehead and nose—not quite a benediction. Vampires are prone to acts of minor heresy, subversions of religious gestures. The smell of alcohol—cheap bourbon barely diluted by lemonade—is thick on his breath. “What have you been doing with your time? Terribly interesting things, I suspect.”
“I live in a housing estate and work at Tescos. I was employee of the month four times. I chalk it up to my genial good nature and the fact that my backside looks great in cheap polyester. What about you?”
Roland’s origins are French. Although he lost his bourgeois accent a good while ago—rather conveniently during the French Revolution—he retains his over-developed radar for British sarcasm. “You’re so funny, Zeem,” he says. “Why, I haven’t done anything. A few parties here and there, meeting people, missing people, wasting the family fortune, you know, the de Courtenay usual.”
“Smashing,” I say.
He leads me upstairs to his loft. It’s pure rococo inside, florid and ornate and cluttered with uncomfortable, bandy-legged furniture. Ornamental flourishes spiral off the corners of the ceiling; stone cherubs with flat eyes and huge heads hug the walls like ugly imps. I sit on the edge of a velvet couch while Roland babbles through a checklist of supernatural gossip: there’s a Chinese dragon living in an abandoned tube station, a leprechaun married a faun and now their families aren’t talking, the vampire social scene was so much better in the old days, and so on, and so forth. Only after he’s exhausted his conversational repertoire is Roland ready to admit the real reason he’s called me. Which is of course the only reason anyone ever calls me: he has a problem.
“It’s the locals, mon cher,” he says, with a limp shrug. “No flaming torches this time round, thank goodness, but—well, it’s still disconcerting. They stage protests outside and call me all sorts of terrible names. They’ve even contacted a nearby school to warn parents not to let their children walk by my house.”
“You’re a vampire. That’s fairly sound advice.”
“You know that isn’t what this is about.” Roland examines his glass of bourbon as if it were possible to divine its ingredients through careful study. “I don’t like drawing attention,” he continues. “It’s not safe. I need some way to get rid of them, some outside help. Except I doubt anyone important—anyone supernaturally important—would listen to a mere vampire. Most fey folk see me as little better than a human, while you—why, Zeem, you’re a peri, a fallen angel; you’re ancient, powerful, legendary—”
I can see he’s trying hard to ignore the fact that I’m currently wearing an oversized hoodie with the words YO MOMMA stenciled across the front in faux-graffiti scrawl. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything more legendary than riding a shopping trolley down the access ramp in Tescos’ car park.
“I need you to talk to the archangel for me,” Roland bursts out. “He can stop it.”
“Luminael? Self-righteous, holier-than-thou, wouldn’t-save-his-grandmother-from-drowning-if-he-didn’t-get-the-order-from-above (signed in holy triplicate) Luminael? You must be out of your mind.”
Roland frowns, his lips pressed to the rim of his glass. He’s too drunk to be subtle; there’s no way any complex thoughts can filter through the haze of alcohol. Still, his self-preservation instincts remain strong enough for him to register that this is not a particularly safe suggestion. “I know you two don’t get on, darling,” he says gently. “What with him being such a bureaucrat, and you—”
“And me slashing the tires on his Citroen last month?” I suggest.
“Who else can help? What else can I do? Every day the damned protesters are out there with their placards. What if all this commotion draws the police? I have a collection of shrunken heads in my bedroom, a fridge full of A-positive plasma, and fangs—not to mention all that nice stuff I nicked from Versailles back in 1793. I’m not exactly the average miserable old queer, am I?” Roland throws up his bone-pale hands, sending his bourbon sloshing about. “I need you to talk to Luminael, Zeem. None of the other supernaturals in these parts are comfortable around you. The little Persian fairy who went native, it’s so bloody Apocalypse Now. No offence, darling, but you must admit you spend too much time with them.”
Them means humans. I’ve received a similar lecture from Luminael, many times, a lecture that starts with a rallying We are gods that walk amongst men and ends with a more practical And that’s why it’s perfectly okay to make them do things they probably wouldn’t want to do if we weren’t around. Which is why I hate the archangel—although I shouldn’t, I suppose, no more than I should hate a soldier conscripted to war. “You used to have a heartbeat, once upon a time,” I point out. “There’s nothing wrong with liking humans. If you want me to help you, it’s going to be on my terms.”
An expression of disgust flickers across Roland’s face. “Oh, bugger,” he says, reaching for the bourbon. “You’re going to talk to them, aren’t you?”
Because this is a witch-hunt, I consult a witch.
“They call themselves the Concerned Parents for Purity Association,” Trinket explains to me between gulps of Guinness. “Bunch of moralistic fundamentalist bastards, pardon my chav. Basically they target GBLTs—that’s gays, bisexuals, lesbians and transgendered people—in their area and try to shame them into leaving the neighbourhood. The only way to stop these people is through police intervention. They’re convinced that they’re doing the right thing, protecting children from the evils of the real world.”
She stubs out her cigarette in one of the pub’s ill-considered plastic floral arrangements and stretches, lean muscle in a leather jacket. Trinket—Patricia Goldman, according to her driver’s license—is a thirty-something Wiccan with a passion for causes and more tattoos than a Little Lickington thug. She’s pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-immigration and pro-more-ethnics-in-the-police-force, and it’s of no surprise to me that she’s also on top of the local gay rights movement. There’s a row of rainbow-themed badges (GAYS ARE OK!) in a line around her collar.
“Roland is a vampire,” I say. “Getting the police involved is out of the question. I was at his place the other night, and I’m pretty sure at least two of his paintings previously belonged to Marie Antoinette. Even if the police don’t have a degree in art history, the guy smells and looks like a corpse. Surely there’s another way? Can’t I appeal to their better natures?”
“You’re adorable when you’re being idealistic, fairy-boy,” says Trinket, chucking me under the chin. “I like you, Zeem. I believe in the cause, your cause, and I’ll help you all I can. But the vampire-thing makes it tricky. I honestly don’t think anything but a nice big dose of uniformed authority is going to shift them. Unless, of course, you know someone who could flush them out with ethereal hocus pocus.”
Together we look out the pub’s window. We’re currently in The Mason’s Wife, a dingy faux-Irish pub that overlooks the Wilcott building. There’s about twenty or so dedicated souls clogging up the pavement outside Roland’s gates, armed with garishly painted signs and a panoply of slogan-splashed t-shirts. I can’t hear them through the glass, but their mouths are moving as if they’re singing or chanting. Judging from the redness of their cheeks and the sharp, almost military jerking of their placards, I’m guessing it’s the latter.
“Sure, I could find someone to flush them out,” I say. “I could also find someone to turn you into a right wing conservative. Or a submissive housewife. Or anything I wanted, really. The problem with quick-and-easy supernatural solutions is that they’re an ethical nightmare. Where do you start? Where do you stop? I’m a fairy, a fallen angel, accent on the fallen. I’m not qualified to be the arbitrator of right and wrong.”
Trinket scratches a hand through her peroxide-blonde stubble. “Power makes bad people into tyrants and good people into pussies,” she says, tightening the laces on her combat boots. “But heck, it’s your bloody vampire, not mine. Got an anthem in mind? We’re queer, we’re here, we will not live in fear? Then let’s get down there.”
Outside the sun’s shining and the protestors are wailing their way through the concluding verses of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Up close they’re a decidedly un-fearsome lot. Most are older women, of the purple-rinse-and-twenty-quid-perm persuasion; a handful of young mothers and nervous husbands bring up the rear. Aside from their Leviticus-quote t-shirts, they’re dressed quaintly in long skirts and woolen cardigans. Squint just so, and you could mistake them for members of a Salvation Army choir. Maybe they are, when they’re not rabble-rousing in Lickington.
I know a little about witch-hunts and witch-hunters. I never visited Salem, but I did go to Dornoch, where I watched a mob of villagers burn a senile old woman in a barrel of tar. Janet Horne. Her crime was turning her daughter into—get this—a pony for the devil. I guess when the pair of them weren’t half-starving in a Scottish shithole, they were cantering about Sutherland turning old milk into rancid milk and whatever else witches did for kicks in the late 1700s. I wish I could say something trite here about how the witch-hunters were regular people, and that regular people can do terrible things for stupid reasons, but we’re in the twenty first century now. Human corruptibility? Mob mentality? Xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and all the rest? It’s old news. Only it’s not.
There’s a stone bollard just to the left of Roland’s front gate, and Trinket kindly hoists me up on top of it. Not quite a soap-box, but the principle is the same. The CPPA watch me with wary eyes, and their song warbles off into a low, discontented mumbling.
“Hi. I’m here to ask you to stop,” I say, raising my hands. “Please. It’s kind of not cool.”
The surprised silence that follows is broken by an old lady in a peach cardigan. “We’re performing a community service, alerting people to the creeps in town,” she snaps, brandishing a wedge of pamphlets like a fencer’s foil. PROTECT YOUR CHILDREN, reads one. THE GAY PLAGUE; PERVERSION AND SODOMY; WHO IS WATCHING YOUR KIDS? “That French pervert gets pornographic magazines sent to his house. Lickington will be a safer place without his sort.”
That’s a fair point, I’ll concede, but not for the reasons they think. “I’m pretty sure it’s against the law to go through other people’s mail,” I say. “Breach of privacy. And while we’re talking about legal issues, I expect you might have trouble trying to defend your right to run people you don’t like out of town. Anyway, the man’s a hermit. How is he going to get at your children if he won’t even leave his house?”
Peach Cardigan curls her lip in a way that’s unflatteringly equine. “He’s a threat to society,” she says stubbornly.
“Why? He’s not setting fire to Parliament or picking fights with the Middle East. Look, I know you probably mean well, or think you mean well, but surely there are other, more worthy causes than frightening an old immigrant? What about campaigning to improve the education system? Helping out at a homeless shelter? Recycling your rubbish—”
“You’re one of them!” interrupts a grey-haired man in a plastic anorak, glaring at me. “A sexual deviant. Am I right?”
“Um,” I say.
I’m a peri. I’m a creature of goodness and truth and purity. I can’t lie any more than Trinket can pass a McDonalds outlet without bursting into a meat-is-murder monologue. The short answer to Plastic Anorak’s question is yes, a resounding, did-the-earth-move-for-you-too yes. But allow me a moment to put this in perspective. There are couples out there in their thirties and forties who, after a decade of marriage, decide to buy expensive apparatus and fetishwear in order to ’spice up their sex life’. That’s a decade. I’m nine thousand years old. At that age you don’t call yourself heterosexual or bisexual or gay or kinky or vanilla or any other of those curiously limiting human terms. In nine thousand years, I haven’t just had sex, I’ve had all the sex. There isn’t a permutation, cast, or position I haven’t explored, and it’s not because I’m deeply perverted, it’s because it’s been nine thousand years, and—let me be blunt here—humans, mortals, have no idea what nine thousand years feels like.
“Yes,” I say. “But allow me a moment to put this in per—”
“I thought as much,” snaps Plastic Anorak before I can finish, and he shakes his REPENT sign at me with all the conviction of an exorcist. The rest of the CPPA take his cue and swarm in, buzzing with mob-malevolence, which is when Trinket decides to pull me out. Lifting me off the bollard by the back of my jacket, she drags me back to the safety of The Mason’s Wife. In our wake the CPPA folks growl and hiss and shake their placards. GAY, NO WAY. SEXUAL DEVIANTS GO TO HELL. PROTECT LICKINGTON’S LITTLE ONES. Better than flaming torches, as Roland said, but not much better.
“You should talk to people more often, fairy-boy,” says Trinket, settling down at the bar. “You’re a regular little Churchill.”
“Shut up. That isn’t fair. They didn’t give me a chance. Let me go back out, I know what to say now. I’ll talk to them about how Roland is an okay guy, and how sexuality isn’t a choice, and maybe quote some scripture from the New Testament—not Paul, obviously, but—”
“Don’t fret. The real problem is never what you say; it’s how they hear it.” She signals the bartender for a fresh Guinness. Cool in the face of adversity, is Trinket; as a professional activist, I suppose she’s used to it. “Anyway, you’re talking to the wrong people. Didn’t your vampire want you to go to the top? Appeal to the highest authority?”
I narrow my eyes. “I’m not grovelling to Luminael.”
“Highest authority, not highest supernatural authority.” Trinket ruffles a hand through my hair. “Every cause, no matter how offensive, has its champion. You’ll just have to find theirs.”
It turns out he’s in politics.
His name is Harry Edwards; he’s a member of the BNP (”Typical,” Trinket snorts); he’s a fundamentalist of obscure denomination; he’s running for a place on the Little Lickington council next month; his campaign slogan is A Better World For Our Children; his photograph on the CPPA website is fair and handsome and lightly freckled, and he exudes a youthfulness that’s both pure and determined. I’ve seen him before—if not in the flesh, at least in spirit. Where there’s a witch-burning or a vampire-staking, there’s always a man like him, a guiltless arbitrator of righteousness, a moral bellwether. Harry Edwards. The CPPA’s founder. He is the sort of man, I feel, who is easy to follow.
He has an office in the larger of Lickington’s shopping centres. It’s close enough to walk to from Trinket’s apartment, so we do, the witch leaning protectively over me all the way. Outside Edwards’ office, she straightens my jacket in a motherly fashion, an uncharacteristic softness in the lines of her face. I feel like a soldier, ready for battle. Champion of a vampire? Well, I could do worse. Trinket squints under the neon shopping center lights, her quick fingers reaffirming the creases of my collar. “You’re not coming with me?” I ask.
“No. I’d be more of a hindrance than a help,” she says. “Dealing with those ridiculous cardigan-wearers, that’s one thing. It’s different with the men at the top. The controllers. The brainwashers. The Man. I’ll get too worked up about it. Remember when I was on the cover of The Sun for throwing eggs at Tony Blair? Got worked up about the war, went a bit mental, ended up with a fine and a good behavior bond. Didn’t help me, didn’t help the cause. Anyway, women like me don’t get on with men like Harry Edwards. I think it’s the tattoos.”
She flexes the one on her left bicep, which depicts a half-naked angel getting spanked by a demonic dominatrix. Both of them have tassels on their nipples.
“Probably for the best,” I agree.
Edwards’ office is bigger than I’d expect for an unelected politician. A small entrance hall opens into a waiting room with a queue of four comfortable chairs, two bookshelves worth of pamphlets and a wealth of flora (deceptively plastic). The slogans that decorate the walls aren’t as blatant as the ones carried by the CPPA, but they share a similar, underlying theme. REAL FAMILIES, REAL VALUES. BELIEVE IN A BETTER, SAFER WORLD. PROTECT INNOCENCE, PROTECT CHILDREN. There’s a reception booth, but it’s currently unmanned, so I put on my most charming smile and walk into the inner office to meet the man himself.
Harry Edwards is sitting behind a big desk that matches his big office and big career plans. In person he’s tanned and casual, his jacket unbuttoned, his tie carelessly loose. He’s handsome in a clean-cut way; those freckles give him a boy-next-door charm. Something about his mouth reminds me of the vampire and the long-ago days of pre-revolutionary France, when Roland was handsome, and I was, if not exactly interested, at least more easily entertained. A fan of light streams through a crack in the curtains and spreads itself across his papers like a single wing.
“My name’s Kazeem al-Djinn,” I say. “I’ve got a friend that your CPPA followers are harassing. Roland de Courtenay. I’ve come to ask you, respectfully, to stop them. If you’d like to discuss the matter further, I’m sure you’ll find five minutes to spare.”
Harry Edwards considers this proposition for a moment. “I suppose I’ve got five minutes now,” he says, pretending to consult a slip of paper amongst the stacks on his desk. “Al-Djinn. That’s an Arabic name, if I’m not mistaken. Are you a Muslim Arab?”
I play this one free and easy. “My prophet predates Mohammed. You might have heard of him. Started a ministry at 30, got tempted by the devil, lots of mentions in the scriptures.” In the Avesta scripture, to be precise, but I trust that Harry won’t require a citation.
The politician seems satisfied. “I don’t usually let people through here without an appointment,” he says. “You’ve caught me at a good time.” A lie; I’m sure it’s the potential for a lawsuit or, worse, negative media attention that troubles him. “So you want to talk about de Courtenay. I assume you’re aware of his perversions?”
“I don’t believe his sex life or his magazines are any of my business. Or yours.”
“We live in a dangerous world. People are scared. They don’t need the added threat of perverts in their community. I campaign for the safety of children. I want the people of Little Lickington to be able to sleep soundly in their—” He breaks off, frowning. Our eyes have met over the piles of his neatly stacked paperwork, and he must recognize in mine the bored disinterest of a man who’s heard those same clichés (protect the children; perverts at large; the threat of an unspeakable and indefinable danger) used to champion so many different causes.
“You don’t care about my campaign,” he says.
“Just Roland.” I inch closer to his desk, until my knuckles touch the wood. “It can’t be long until the council elections, Mr Edwards. I bet a controversy like this would get you a lot of lines in the Lickington Weekly. But I reckon your involvement with the CPPA looks a great deal better when it’s confined to a photo on a website. It’s much less attractive when it’s stamping about the streets in a plastic anorak, shouting hymns and waving signs that say THE END IS NIGH.”
He laughs in my face. “You’re going to sic the newspapers on me, is that your clever plan? Have you even read the Lickington Weekly lately? The reporters love me. I’m going to clean up the town. Oh, you might think the CPPA look ridiculous out there, with their posterboards and t-shirts, but for every critic like you, there’s a dozen people who silently agree with what we do. We’re the future of Lickington. In fact, Mr. al-Djinn, we’re the future of London.”
He has power, Harry Edwards does. I sense it in him, I smell it in him, as my kind can. It’s not a supernatural power, not even in the loose, neo-Pagan sense that a witch like Trinket has power. It’s a power of personality, a power over people. And what’s worse is that he’s the kind of man who believes it’s perfectly okay to make people do things they probably wouldn’t want to do if he wasn’t around—a mentality I’m aware is not, in fact, only the province of arch-angelic supernaturals.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
I leave. Outside, I call Roland on Trinket’s mobile phone. Our conversation is short and final.
“Roland, I can’t do this.”
“Have you spoken to Luminael?”
“No. But I’ve tried, I even talked to—”
“Zeem,” says the vampire quietly. “This is my life.”
He hangs up. I feel, not for the first time, the true weight of centuries, the weight of my centuries, and the balance of his. The witch, sympathetic to the failures of a novice activist, wraps a tattooed arm around my shoulders and squeezes. I sense that she expects an outburst from me, a yell, a scream, something appropriately mental, but I don’t have it in me. Nine thousand years of human violence, hatred and general idiocy, and I can’t muster much more than a pout.
“We’re going to see Luminael, aren’t we?” she says.
At the end of a day that’s seen me stumble from one failure to another, I find myself in church. Which is fitting, in a way. Trinket claims that churches are a symptom in the patriarchy (in much the same fashion another person would claim that suppurating boils are a symptom of venereal disease), but I prefer to look at them as Luminael does: a place for last resorts. A place you go when you can go no further.
The archangel claims he trades in hope, not help, although today I aim to get a measure of both.
Our Lady of White Hands is a simple, Spartan church, a far cry from the excesses of the inner-London cathedrals. From the outside it looks like a run-down little cottage; only the neon image of a dove, glimmering in the window, marks it as a religious venue. Inside, the pews are plastic chairs, the walls seamed with rising damp, and only the arched window directly above the altar contains stained glass. A mix tape of Hallelujahs, Ave Marias, and Mozart’s greatest hits plays discreetly over the church’s audio system. Everywhere there is the smell of—well, it’s not mustiness, precisely, or even rust; the best way I can describe it is that it’s the smell of old, an oldness that’s at odds with the crude plastic furniture. Old stone and old people and old laws. And old archangels, too.
Here’s the funny thing: this run-down little cottage-of-a-church is full of parishioners. Even now, at half ten in the evening, they crowd the pews, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder like kids breathlessly awaiting a teen idol. Although Luminael never shows his true face here—in outer West London, what self-respecting supernatural would?—the faithful still come, drawn by some sort of sixth sense for divinity. Trinket and I are forced to stand near the back, just beside a crude papier-mâché piggy bank and a sign inviting the congregation to donate to the Church Roof Fund. Inhaling, I smell sweaty rosaries and cheap perfume and muddy Wellingtons; and, after a few minutes, my nostrils fill with the familiar dark odors of sulphur and blood. The smell of old faith and desert gods.
“The peri,” murmurs a voice behind us. “A little far from Baghdad, aren’t you?”
I turn. Technically the archangel Luminael has only one shape but many reflections; it is seen by some as a man on fire; by others as a bright pillar that rises to the sky; by yet others as a human, simple and guileless, a face easily lost in a crowd. But as a fellow supernatural, I see it as it really is. Its body—his body, although the pronoun is really just a convenience, a contrivance—is that of a Nubian giant with skin as black as the night sky, and across this dark canvas sparkle a thousand green eyes, on his hands, his face, his neck, his torso. In the old days (the really old days) the angels could witness in every direction. Witnessing is serious business; I guess having eyes just in the back of his head wouldn’t cut it.
Luminael is terrible, of course, in the way that all powerful things must be terrible. But the fact that he’s so terrible also makes him hilarious. I suspect that when Luminael was picking forms, no one thought to mention to him that he’d spend most of his elongated lifespan pushing a pen in refectory offices, day-dreaming of miles and miles of ecumenical red tape.
“I could feel you here. Your intrusion. Your—misplacement? Displacement?” The archangel’s wide mouth changes subtly; becomes something smile-shaped that is not a smile. “I know why you’re here. You want to talk about the vampire. Don’t look so surprised. Roland de Courtenay has been begging for me to intervene for months. I thought he’d end up turning to you eventually. You seem to be the last port of call for all London’s lost souls.”
“Roland and I have an understanding.”
“You mean you were lovers. You mean you feel guilty. Oh, I know you, Kazeem, I know how you think. I doubt you’re involved in this gay rights idiocy for humanist reasons. Too many times you’ve sat back, too many times you’ve looked the other way. This is just about you, you and your little world, and your little friends. Am I right?”
He knows I can’t lie. And when I search myself, really search myself, I realize he’s speaking the truth. Like I said to Harry Edwards, it’s just about Roland. There’s no moral aspect to this dilemma, not for me. I’m not and never will be an advocate for gay rights—not for political reasons but because human life, damnit, is so transient and human hatred is so predictable. In the middle ages it was witches and vampires, in the sixties it was Communists, and between the two it was everyone from the Jews to the blacks to the French bourgeoisie. If my nine thousand years of existence have taught me anything, it’s that people will always find new reasons to set fire to each other. Some of them I’d say were almost—almost—justifiable; but most were simply ignorant, and stupid, and unarguable as the will of gods.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s about my own little world.”
I don’t look at Trinket, but I can feel her expression, dagger-filled and betrayed.
“Of course it is,” the archangel purrs. “If you had any social conscience at all, I’m sure this world would be a different place. Considering your particular abilities. You peri-kind always had such pretty voices.” He reaches for my chin and automatically I flinch away, partly because the chill of his voice unnerves me, but mainly because the eyeball-hand thing is disgusting. “So why haven’t you fixed de Courtenay’s problem already, my little fairy?”
“I’m coming to tell you to fix it. They’re your responsibility. The CPPA is Christian, like you.”
“You flatter me. I’m strictly pre-Christian, although I like to think I look young for my age. But even if I was Christian, I wouldn’t be quick to claim responsibility. Harry Edwards could have just as easily co-opted Islam or Judaism or any other faith. The fact he chose mine, or a derivative of it, is indicative only of its popularity.”
“But you can stop this, can’t you?”
“So can you.”
“Luminael—”
“Luminael what? Luminael, solve my problems? Luminael, fix the things I’m too cowardly to do myself? You’re a peri, not a man. You were born in the silt and the shit of the desert gods. You have fought a hundred wars and killed a thousand men. You have breathed fire; you have swum oceans; you have tamed demons; you have dreamt forests into being. Of all the gods of London, only you are older than I. How dare you come to me and tell me you are weak?”
“I can’t—”
But the archangel looks bored now; his many-eyed gaze has drifted to his congregation, his ears pricked to the whispers of their wants, their needs, their silently offered desires. “Get out of here, al-Djinn,” he says. “Go slash my tires again if you think it will help.”
I’m about to snap out a witty comeback when Trinket, red-faced, turns on her heel and pushes her way out of the church.
“Your own fault,” says Luminael, as the door slams behind her. “If you insist on behaving like a human, they’re bound to treat you like one.”
“Oh, shut up.”
I find Trinket chainsmoking on the church’s steps, her shoulders hunched against the bitter winter wind. For a second I’m tempted (gods help me!) to follow Luminael’s authoritarian approach to human relations. It does seem easier, if not perfectly okay, to make Trinket do something she probably wouldn’t do normally.
Like forgive me my weaknesses.
“I’m sorry about—”
“I thought you cared. Well, I thought you cared about more than one stinking vampire.” Trinket drags hard on her cigarette. “Not that you even seem to care about him. All that arbitrator for right and wrong stuff. I thought we actually needed Luminael. I bet Roland did, too. Why the hell did you call me if you could just snap your fingers and—”
“I wanted to fix it the right way.”
It’s the wrong answer. People like her, like the witch, like the vampire, can never see the means for the end. Slippery slopes? Equivocal justice? The abuse of absolute power? All fine, so long as they serve her needs. In the street she turns on me, jabbing a blunt fingernail into my chest, and in her face I see that the thing I’d felt growing between us—a closeness? a complicity?—is gone. There’ll be no more collar-straightening and morale building from the witch. I have the power to change things; I have not done so; and that makes me the enemy just as surely as the CPPA.
“Tomorrow morning,” Trinket growls, “you will fix this the way you should have fixed it in the beginning.”
Morning, then. A cold grey sun shines down over cold, grey Little Lickington, with its cold grey streets and cold grey shopping malls. And it shines, too, on the solid Tudor facade of the Wilcott Building, outside which a group of cold, grey citizens have amassed. On the left side of the iron gates are the CPPA. A jolly good turnout today: a few dozen members are foot-stamping and sign waving on the pavement as energetically as the climate permits. Anoraks rub shoulders with Cardigans; Bible-verse t-shirts with Knitted Ponchos. They’re doing “Onward Christian Soldiers” again, presumably because it’s the one song that everyone knows the words to. And there’s a new face in their midst—why, it’s handsome Harry Edwards, who’s come out here just to prove, I suspect, that he’s not ashamed to march alongside his foot soldiers.
On the right side of the iron gates are Trinket Goldman and fifty men and women draped in Ché Guevara merchandise, rainbow scarves and bobble hats. Activists. Not to be outdone by the CPPA, they’ve also come bearing signs: GAYS ARE OK; GO HOME FUNDIES; PROUD TO BE OUT. Standing on the front lines, a rainbow bandana tied Rambo-style about her forehead, Trinket leads the group through the “we’re here, we’re queer” chant. In my absence the witch has clearly gone a bit mental. Mental enough, I assume, to send an open invitation to everyone on her gay-rights address list. The CPPA are lucky they aren’t covered with egg yolk by now.
I stand at the window of Roland de Courtenay’s loft and contemplate the drama that’s not unfolding so much as exploding messily across the street like a burst main line.
“You’re lucky the Wilcott Building has a back entrance,” the vampire mutters behind me, stirring the remains of an adulterated Bloody Mary. “Wouldn’t want you to inadvertently get caught up in your own mess. Really, cherie, was that the best you could do? My life’s on the line and you leave the grunt work to some dippy neo-Pagan with band tattoos and a bunch of university drop outs. I’m starting to think I should have just waited until the little fundy bastards died out.”
Three floors below, the CPPA snarl, the activists scream, Trinket yells and Harry Edwards preens. As I watch, a girl in a bobble-hat cranes out from the activists’ ranks and spits a mouthful of soy coffee at a middle-aged man in a knitted vest. Someone throws a water bottle; someone hits someone else’s banner; a woman in a plastic poncho tries to wrestle a sign from a skinny boy with dreadlocks.
“In retrospect,” I agree, “that would probably have been the wisest option.”
Roland pouts. “Don’t be coy, Zeem. You can still turn this around. Luminael called last night to tell me that you’re just as magically capable as he is. One little peri-touch and voila! Thirty nasty homophobes suddenly transform into nice, normal people.”
“Luminael’s a liar. It doesn’t work like that.” Sighing, I join Roland on a bendy-legged couch. “A few centuries ago I saw them burn a witch in Scotland. I could have intervened; I could have saved her life; I could have forced my supreme will on them, Luminael-style. And I wanted to, believe me. But messing with free will isn’t as simple as flicking a switch; all you do is divert the hatred, channel it, revise it. If I’d forced the mob to stop burning witches, they’d have found a new pastime—civil war, or genocide, or ritual sacrifice—”
“I suspect the witch would have been happy enough, though.”
“Roland, the point is that I can’t be the one to choose who lives and who dies and which house they choose to protest outside next. I don’t have a direct line to an ultimate moral authority, and even if I did, I’ve noticed that pretty much everything touted as an ultimate moral authority just winds up following the human zeitgeist. And that’s why I talk. Or try to talk. Because talk changes things the way the blundering hand of an interventionist god can’t. Because talking makes people think and sometimes, sometimes, that’s all it takes. And—and damnit, Roland, get off my thigh. What happened in the sixteenth century should probably stay there.”
“Shame, that. You look quite sweet when you get worked up,” says the vampire, dabbing at his mouth with a lace cuff. He scowls briefly. “Well, I suppose that’s it, then. But before you crawl back behind your Tescos’ till, peri, I trust you’ll do me the small courtesy of cleaning some of those idiots off the pavement. I know you didn’t start it—I’ll blame the indiscretion of my mailman for that—but your presence has certainly upped the level of insanity.”
“Of course I will. I told you I’m going to fix this.”
“By exerting your supernatural will?” Roland asks hopefully.
I hold up a finger. “Just this once,” I tell him. “If you want help again, you should probably make some new friends. Ones with heartbeats and limited life spans and band tattoos.”
By the time I get outside, the fighting has devolved into a shouting match. Two competing yet rhythmically complimentary chants—GAY NO WAY and GAY’S OKAY—echo off the street’s unbroken chain of semi-detacheds. My old friend Plastic Anorak is tangling with a group of acne-speckled students; a handful of CPPA banners are being ripped to shreds by a girl with a buzz-cut and a single, suggestive ear-ring. The activists have numbers on their side, but an unwillingness to attack purple-haired old ladies means they’ve been forced to surrender several of their signs to the enemy.
At the center of the melee, Trinket and Harry are facing off. I can see, though not hear, the two of them yelling insults and, possibly, pertinent ethical concerns. Beneath the bandana, the witch’s face is bright red. Unprepared for such an encounter (and perhaps a little scared, too—leather-wearing Trinket does cut an intimidating figure), Harry looks far from his usual photographic self. His hair’s awry; his eyes are wide; his media-friendly smile has become a grim rictus.
With all the noise, I’m surprised the police haven’t shown up yet, but I suppose that this is Lickington, and the cops probably have more important things to do. Which leaves me, and me alone, to mediate this suburban war.
I huff into my cupped hands; I straighten my own collar; I open the Wilcott Building’s old iron-worked gates and lean out.
“Stop,” I say.
They do. All of them. They freeze in place, mid-chant, mid-song, mid-yell, mid-sign-fight. Even Trinket and Harry quit snarling at each other and turn their faces toward mine. Luminael’s right about one thing: as a peri, I do have a pretty voice. A beautiful voice, a charming voice, a powerful voice. Get the pitch just right, and my voice can make humans do anything I want them to. Too simple, you think? Too easy? Well, it’s an act of a god, a Deus ex machina—so that’s the whole bloody point, isn’t it?
I say: “You kids are all going to talk this out yourselves.”
“Oh,” says Trinket.
“Ah,” says Harry Edwards.
I close the gates behind me. “No signs. No slogans. No yelling and no throwing things. Just talking and listening. And no more of this nonsense until you all come to a solution that everyone agrees on.”
The CPPA and the activists nod dumbly, in unison—which is good enough for me. As they start mumbling amongst themselves, I slip out between their ranks, pausing only to give Trinket’s hand a quick, encouraging squeeze. Talking. It’s a middle ground; the only middle ground I can see. I may be forcing them all to do things they probably wouldn’t want to do if I wasn’t around, but it’s a far cry from melting their frontal lobes into zombie-like obedience with my ineffable will, the archangel Luminael’s preferred MO. My way, Trinket and Harry can make their own choices. Hate or love, at least I can say it’s in the hands of the human conscience now.
At the end of the day, I think that’s what separates me from the angels.