Murder of Angels by Caitlin R. Kiernan Page B

probably going to insist she see a doctor again before they leave town. Niki stares at her hand, trying to remember exactly what did and didn’t happen in the restroom at Cafe Alhazred: the swelling and whatever grew inside it, the thing that had burrowed into her flesh, Danny, and then someone shouting and pounding angrily on the door.
    Niki reaches for a coral pink washcloth hanging on a rack near the tub and wraps it around her hand, squeezes it and grits her teeth against the pain.
    Was any of it real, the squirming, transparent child of her infection, something she saw or only something that she thought she saw?
    Do you really think there’s any difference? and she hopes that voice is only hers, her own voice from her own sick head, because she honestly isn’t in the mood for Danny Boudreaux right now. No time for anything that might slow her down, no hope but movement, and she stands up and goes to the sink, twists one of the brass knobs, and in a moment hot water is gurgling into the porcelain basin.
    “You wanted her, and now she has you, forever,” exactly what Danny said at Alhazred, and that’s what the face in the mirror says when she looks up from the sink. But it isn’t her face in the glass, and it isn’t Danny’s either, this haggard young man with eyes like stolen fire, eyes like the last breath rattling out of a dying man’s chest, but then he’s gone, and she’s staring into her own dark and frightened eyes.
    Niki raises her left hand and cautiously places her fingertips against the mirror, half expecting her hand to pass straight through, nothing solid there to stop her. But it’s just a mirror, and the silvered glass is smooth and cold and reflects nothing but the lost girl she’s become, the lost woman, and she looks back down at the water filling the sink.
    “All I have do is make it to the airport,” she says, wishing she were already in Boulder, and so many opportunities to back out had come and passed her by; over the Rocky Mountains and safe for a while with Mort and Theo before she has to see this shit through to the end. Niki shuts off the tap and lowers her right hand slowly into the clear, steaming water; it doesn’t hurt half so much as she expected, and she wonders whether that’s good or bad, watches with more curiosity than concern as her blood starts to turn the water red. Just like Moses, she thinks, and it annoys her that she can’t remember which number plague that was.
    “How are you doing in here?” Marvin asks, and she turns her head towards the bathroom door, making sure he’s really there and really him before she answers.
    “I think I’ll live,” and he comes closer, then, scowls down at her hand, and by now the water looks more like cherry Kool-Aid.
    “Damn. You realize we’re going to have to get that stitched closed again before we leave.”
    “That’s what I thought you’d say,” and she lifts her hand out of the water so he can look at it more closely.
    “Yeah, well, bleeding to death would probably be a lot more inconvenient. God, Niki, how did you even do this?”
    “I already told you that,” and she did, but Marvin shakes his head anyway.
    “Well, at least it doesn’t look as if there’s any infection setting in,” and he opens the medicine cabinet, his own little ER stashed away in there, and takes out a sterile gauze pad and a roll of surgical tape, a plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “This will probably do until we can get you to a doctor, if you’ll go easy on this hand.”
    “The flight’s at nine,” she reminds him.
    “We’re not going to miss the flight, and if we do, we’ll get another one.”
    “I want to ask you something,” but then he pours the peroxide over her hand and it stings, foams the ugly color of funeral-parlor carnations. “Shit, Marvin,” she hisses and tries to pull her hand away.
    “Don’t be a pussy. What do you want to ask me?”
    Niki waits until the stinging starts to fade, until he’s