“Let’s not, for now,” Reverend Rook replied, “seein’ how it ain’t yet light out, and I’m thirty-eight years old.” He closed his eyes on Chess’s disappointment, stretching. “Go get yourself cleaned up, give me a minute or two to collect my faculties. After that, I’ll fuck you ’til you can’t ride, if you’re still so all-fired up for it.”
“That wouldn’t be too smart.”
“You make me a lot of things, Chess. I’ve never noticed smart to be one of ’em.”
Me either, Morrow thought, as he watched Chess sigh, rise and pad away — the splash of a wash-basin, light flap of soaked cloth. Then saw the Rev jump a bit to feel that same cloth applied deep between his own thighs, with surprising skill and delicacy — gentle, almost reverent.
“That good?”
“Yeah, darlin’. That’s damn good.”
The intimacy of it all made Morrow blush, in turn, at the unlikely thought of ever taking his own turn under those pretty killer’s hands. To distract himself, he eked a little further toward the door, sidelong, as Chess climbed back in to fit himself up against Rook’s side.
“Yeah, well . . . you ever want to receive that sort of service again, Reverend, then you better get it through your head how San Francisco ain’t no fit locale to do business, in future. Christ on a cross, I’ll burn that damn place down myself, if I have to. An earthquake needs to swallow that shit-pit whole.”
Rook laughed. “Poor angry little boy,” he mocked, in fair approximation of Songbird’s voice. “Aw, don’t sulk, Chess — it don’t become you. Let’s talk ’bout something else.”
“Like?”
The Rev’s rumble dipped. “Hear your Ma’s in ‘hospital’; means she’s on her way out, from what I gather. That a prospect bothers you much?”
Chess drew a long breath, and seemed to give the idea some fair amount of thought, before answering: “I don’t rightly know. Best she go quick and quiet, I guess, considering.”
“I could make sure of it. If you wanted me to.”
That same cat-sneeze laugh. “’Course you could. Hell, I know that. . . .”
The Rev propped himself up on one arm, staring down at him — cupped Chess’s face in one huge hand, and said, with perfect seriousness: “But do you want me to, Chess? End her now, easy and pleasant, or let her go rough and slow, for all she done to you — all she let be done, ’fore you finally broke yourself free of that place? You just have to say the word, is all. Just say . . .”
You ain’t no God, Ash Rook, Morrow thought, abruptly gone weirdly cold around the pounding heart, not vengeful or benign . . . no matter how Chess Pargeter might set you up as a false idol, and do you worship on bended knee. ’Cause often as you might read that Bible of yours, it ain’t exactly like you wrote the damn thing, is it?
Morrow watched Chess stare back up at Rook, his green eyes gone somehow wistful. Saw the pistoleer’s gold-shaded brows knit a moment, snarled in what almost seemed like genuine distress — then smooth out once more, signifying he’d come to a conclusion.
“Okay,” was all he said.
Which was more than enough for Rook to work his magic with, or so his cold but gentle smile appeared to indicate. That, and the Bible on his nightstand.
“So be it,” he told Chess, like it’d been Chess’s idea, all along. And flipped the book’s black-bound cover open.
Back in the lime-walled depths of Selina Ah Toy’s, that pit of whoresome darkness, English Oona Pargeter stirred in fitful, over-drugged sleep — turned in on herself, shivering, and assumed the same position her son once had while he still floated inside her womb. Listening as Asher Rook’s voice seeped through one wall and out the next, near fifty miles away, the close-packed silver Scripture typeface spiralling quick and deep as smoke inside her, some unanswered prayer made flesh.
Genesis, 15:16 to 15:18 —
But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.
And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces . . .
Above her, the gals sharing her hospital rack began to twist and moan, sniffing the air like dogs who dreamt of meat. Because that familiarly enticing smell rising up toward them was nothing less than opium boiling off, issuing from Oona’s pores as she cooked from the inside; eyes gone soft and gleeful under their heavy lids, glazing over, unaware even in death how much they resembled Chess’s own.
Oh God, Morrow thought, that primal fear suddenly set back do
wn bone-deep in every part of him. How can I know this? Any of this?
The Manifold burned and chattered against his sweaty palm while he leaned against the wall, bracing himself against the wave of nausea that swarmed from fever-froze head on down, roiling stomach on up. As though the Manifold had seized onto Rook’s spell and conducted it into Morrow as a counter-natural lightning-charge, imprinting it onto him the way a daguerreotype’s acid-etching made a plate. This ill beat in his blood, telegraph messages hammering silently, from one world to the next . . .
“So,” Chess said, finally. “That’d be it, then.”
“It would.”