PRAISE

“What if Bright Lights, Big City-era Jay McInerney wrote an Ira Levin occult thriller? You’d have this True Long Island story!”

—Nick Mamatas, author of I Am Providence

“Unrelenting and filled with relatable characters, Washed up on Dark Shoresis a deep dive into commercialism and corporate greed with a heavy dose of cosmic horror. Wood’s prose is addictive from the first sentence to the last. Make time to read when you pick it up, because you won’t want to put it down until you turn the last page.”

—T. Frohock, author of the Los Nefilim series.

“Jonathan Wood’s prose accelerates at the speed of a locomotive and you’re tied to the tracks up ahead with only a dull knife, a broken flashlight and a prayer as your hope to escape.”

—Elad Haber, author of The World Outside

“I felt like I’d lost a fight after reading, with all the gut punches.”

—Sarah R. New, author of Hypochondria

“Washed Up On Dark Shores is an intoxicating collision of corporate thriller, cosmic nightmare, and bitter truth; a furious howl into a ravenous and bottomless abyss.”

—Dale Lucas, author of First Watch

“This book will place a bomb in your heart.”

—Paul Jessup, author of Rustbelt Gothic

WASHED UP on DARK SHORES

•

JONATHAN
WOOD

Underland Press

For Tami, Charlie, and Emma

1

DANNY

Danny arriving. Danny announced by the crunch of gravel beneath the Uber’s tires. Danny unfolding from the car’s cramped back seat. In front of him: not gates, but Gates. Big enough that they demand capitalization. Big enough to imply the wealth they contain. Old money. Big money. More money than you’re thinking of money.

Danny presses a small button next to them.

“Yes?”

“Danny Spencer”

The slight hiss of well-oiled hinges. The Gates swing open. Behind him, the Uber drives away.

Two security guards watching Danny enter. Danny pulling an embossed card from his inside pocket. The guards flicking a black light over the invite then waving him on.

“It’s a bit of a walk,” one calls. An afterthought.

“I’ve got it.”

It’s not true.

☉

A phone call, a week and a half previous.

“Mr. Spencer? This is Beverly Dreary calling from OmniPharm head office. Mr. Phillips would like you to come in to discuss consulting on an issue.”

As in Oscar Phillips. As in Chairman and Chief Executive of OmniPharm. As in the head honcho. Calling in as a consultant on Fox News. Dropping truth bombs in the Financial Times editorial columns. Oscar Phillips wanted to meet with him. With Danny Spencer.

He’d said yes. Of course he had.

A day later, he’s outside Phillips’s office door. He looked up the stock price on the way over. Down twenty-five cents today. Down twenty-five dollars for the month. Down fifty over the past three months. A long, shuddering trail of red. Like blood in the water.

An anomaly for Oscar Phillips. The magic that empowers one of Wall Street’s preeminent figures abandoning him in a way that has financial wogs salivating and panicking in equal measure. “His money, which emerged from nowhere” Danny had read in one near-hysterical article, “is threatening to go back to the same place.”

Oscar Phillips stands as Danny enters. Danny is not a small man. Oscar Phillips makes him feel tiny.

“Mr. Spencer!” A voice like a buffalo charging. “Sit.”

Danny sits.

“You were surprised to receive my call.”

Not a question. But he’s right, so Danny doesn’t quibble.

“I needed someone . . . outside our organizational parameters. A fresh perspective. There are . . . security reasons. You’ll understand. Your name came up in the course of another matter. Your reputation impressed me.”

It sounds rehearsed and untrue to Danny, but he’s not sure why.

“How do you think we make money here at OmniPharm, Danny?”

Is this, Danny wonders, a test?

“Pharmaceuticals. That’s what you’re thinking, Danny.” Phillips laughs, loud and booming, although Danny isn’t sure what joke was told.

“Exclusivity,” Phillips says. “That is how OmniPharm makes its money. It’s what we all sell. It’s what you sell. It’s why you’re sitting in that seat instead of some other two-bit thug in a suit I wouldn’t bother to wipe my ass with. Because you have sold me, unwittingly or not, on the idea that you and you alone are exclusively positioned to solve my problems.”

Danny puts it together. An outside consultant. One with experience in white collar crime. And a stock price heading toward the shitter.

“You’ve got a problem with industrial espionage, Mr. Phillips.”

“My problem, Mr. Spencer,” Phillips says, “is someone is stealing my ideas and selling them to Daochu Pharmaceuticals.”

Daochu: Chinese; more money than some small countries.

“But I do not know who, Mr. Spencer. So I need you, and what you can exclusively provide: the hot brand of justice to emblazon upon their breast.”

“Well,” Danny says, “you have my rates.”

“We’ll double them.” Said without emotion. An afterthought. A dismissal. Because Phillips knows he will say yes. Because need compromises us all, and Danny is just another man come to bend his knee at the king’s high table.

☉

It’s a mile from the gates to Phillips’s front door. Other guests are driven past Danny, in limousines and convertibles. He trudges on. Still the house catches him off guard, appearing around a corner. Predatory architecture ambushing his eyeballs.

The Black House. A Gold Coast mansion reclad with black marble, basalt stone, and gray granite. Designed specifically to be ten square feet bigger than the Big House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Intended specifically to be a middle finger to the concept of government of the people, by the people, for the people. A reminder that when money makes the world go round, this is the axis it revolves around.

There are a lot of stories about the Black House. A lot of myths. Stories about limbs found on nearby beaches, a spike in missing persons, elevated levels of mental illness on this part of the North Shore—the sort of thing to drive the internet whack-jobs wild. But nothing to ever make it more than a conspiracy theory.

Now Danny goes up its portico steps to vast double doors cast wide. Painted black of course.

“Danny!”

His name like a gunshot fired at his head. He spins. Phillips right there, greeting his guests. The floor at his feet strewn with white petals crushed and bruised by the feet that have passed through them.

Phillips’s hand envelopes Danny’s own. “So glad you could make it.”

As if he’d had a choice. As if he hadn’t sent a list of the people he wanted to interview and been sent an invite to this party in return and told they’d all be here.

“Hello.” A second figure emerges from behind the bulk of Phillips.

“Jesus,” Danny says.

Not Jesus, though. Not the one Danny learned about. A naked woman. Mid-twenties. Not necessarily unattractive, although with a child-like demeanor that robs her of sensuality. She holds out a flower toward him.

He puts up a hand between him and her, as if trying to block the sight. Is that what you do? Danny doesn’t know if Emily Post covers this.

“My daughter,” Phillips rumbles.

Tidbits from Danny’s research: internet rumor and gossip rag supposition. No one seems certain on who the girl’s mother is. No photo from before the girl’s fourth birthday. Barely any after that. An adoption some wonder. The suggestion that there is something unspeakably wrong with her. Or him. Or their relationship.

“Polly, dear,” Phillips says. “You’re naked.”

“Yes,” Polly says. “I am.”

“I think,” Phillips says, “that Mr. Spencer is finding it off-putting.”

“I find it off-putting that he won’t take my flower.”

Danny realizing that somehow he has become the asshole. Realizing he’s not the only one. This place is awash in discarded flowers. Danny’s desire to be different from these people. He lowers his hand. He reaches out, takes the flower from her.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her. “I forgot my manners.”

“That’s okay, I forgot my clothes.”

Phillips laughs. “Why don’t you run along, Polly? Find something to wear.”

A smile for her father fresh as a field full of spring flowers. She has one for Danny too.

“Gladiolus,” she says pointing at the cutting in Danny’s hand. “It means generosity.” Then she bounces away.

“Generosity,” Phillips intones into his daughter’s absence. “An expensive form of manipulation, Mr. Spencer, but an effective one. Wouldn’t you agree?”

The man, who’s there because his rates were doubled, nods.

“Go.” Phillips's finger pointed past the discarded petals and towards a door at the summit of twin stairs. “Mingle. Investigate. Do what I pay you to do, Mr. Spencer.

☉

Danny’s office the day after he first met Oscar Phillips. Danny going through the files and clicking on Wikipedia articles. Danny unraveling stock portfolios.

A knock on his door. A sharp rap. The man comes in without waiting for an answer. Small. Tanned skin taut like a snare drum.

“I don’t really do walk-ins.” Not true, but there’s an entitlement to this man Danny doesn’t like.

“Yesterday,” the trim man says, “you met with Oscar Phillips. You are about to gain access to some very sensitive files.”

Not common knowledge. Something only a very interested party might know.

“Daochu.” Danny’s finger pointed like a gun, right between the small man’s eyes.

“There are people”—the man says—“who, if they were to receive those files, would make you a very rich man.”

“Hardly ethical,” Danny says. His throat is dry.

“I’m not talking ethics, Danny. Ethics can’t pay the rent. Ethics can’t buy the drugs your sister needs.”

Danny stands up fast.

The small man reaches slowly into his jacket pocket. A white card between manicured fingers. “There’s an email address and a number on this card. Send the files to email address, and the money equaling the number will be deposited in your bank account.”

☉

Danny through a second set of double doors. Danny finally in the Black House proper. Money is everywhere he looks. As paintings on the walls. As vases on antique tables. As oak paneling and arched ceilings. As well-tanned bodies. As bespoke suits and tailored dresses. As pearls. As cufflinks. As mistresses and liposuction scars. Money as an attitude. As a disposition. As a blindness for the milling wait staff.

Danny drifts through a room where everything is green. Then a corridor like an art gallery: Manet, Monet, Magritte, Matisse. From there, Danny finds himself in a ballroom that is so far removed from the catering hall where his sister got married that he might as well be on Mars. Then out onto a covered patio, black stonework softened by ivy. A space dotted by tight knots of black tuxedoes shot through with feminine flesh and color. Waiters navigate the corridors between the bodies like miners working their way through crevices in the coal face.

And then, spotted from the corner of an eye, a face Danny recognizes: Jasper McCormick, chief financial officer of OmniPharm.

He had talked about McCormick in an online chatroom with someone who called themselves TehTruth99.

>> TehTruth99: You know about the au pairs, right?

>> DS98469: I saw some articles

>> TehTruth99: Articles, shit, man. The press never followed up on jack.

>> DS98469: What did they miss?

>> TehTruth99: Everything. We’ve done the digging. There ain’t no record of them going home. No flights. Nothing. And no record of them here. So where did they go? Right?

>> DS98469: We? Who else is out there looking into this?

>> TehTruth99: Look, man. These people run the world. McCormick wants to make snuff films with au pairs, then he can do it. No investigation. Nada. So yeah, anyone who is interested in how the world really works, where the true power is, that’s who “we” is.

>> DS98469: OK so, I saw something else on another forum. Mind if I run it by you?

>> TehTruth99: You want the truth about something, man, you’ve come to the right guy.

>> DS98469: Mammon.

—TehTruth99 has left the chat—

Which was honestly as about as enlightening as Danny had any right to expect a conversation with an online conspiracy theorist to be.

Now: Danny contemplating McCormick. Danny thinking about a seven-figure sum written on a white piece of card. Danny thinking maybe he’ll get to McCormick later.

Danny looking for security guards, watching where they move. What they watch. Checking little velvet ropes draped across stairways. Phillips doesn’t want anyone up on the second floor.

He goes to a bar, gets a glass, leaves it teetering. Less than thirty seconds later, glass shatters. Claps, cheers, a guard’s head turns away.

Danny ascends, as quick and quiet as his bulk will allow.

Upstairs. Danny in a darkened hallway his feet on plush carpet. His fingers on a door. Well-oiled hinges emit no sound. A moment when he wonders, will the internet rumors be true? Will he see a room of blood sacrifice and savagery? But no. A child’s bedroom. Pink sheets and a creepy dollhouse complete the poorly lit ambiance.

Danny moving on. Danny pushing more doors open. A bathroom. A library. A room full of humidors. A home gym. Then finally, a study.

He hesitates on the doorstep, considers doing something he can’t take back.

☉

Danny the day after the Daochu man visited his office. Danny in the South Bronx visiting his sister. His nephew opening the door. An overly serious five-year-old wearing milk-bottle glasses.

“Hey, Unka Danny.”

“Hey, Sammy.”

Sammy marches back toward the world of primary colors and promise on the TV. His mother is curled on the couch behind him, wrapped in a blanket. Danny hands her a bag. “Got your insulin.”

Three hundred dollars a vial. Two vials a month. Seventy-two hundred dollars a year. Manufacturer: OmniPharm.

And that’s only half of what she needs. It’s not the diabetes that’s got her working half shifts and half weeks. It’s the Hep C that’s cut her income in half. That’s forced her to drop the insurance. Even though with the half shifts, she can’t qualify for Medicaid. Because if she dropped that much work after taxes and rent and food, Sammy would be going to school clothed in newspaper.

They don’t talk about that, though. Instead, they bitch about the news and the heat, and question why the super in Ash’s building would choose a blonde toupée when he’s got dark brown hair.

Later, Danny puts Sammy to bed. When he comes back, Ash’s eyes are closed. He tiptoes toward the door.

“You okay, Danny?” Ash’s eyes peek out from her blanket.

“Doing okay.”

“How’s work?”

“Doing a job. Keep me whole for a good while.” Will cover the Hep C medication for a while, he thinks. But only a while. Because the price of Placidol isn’t coming down any time soon.

She waits, knows he’s not done.

“Someone else,” he says slowly, “wants me to work another angle.”

“Will the first guy mind?”

“Yeah. But the pay is . . . tempting.” Because it could cover more than meds. Could cover actual insurance. Could cover co-pays.

Ash propping herself half upright. “You know who tempts people, Danny? The devil.”

☉

Danny giving into temptation. Danny stepping into Phillips’s office and flicking a pen light back and forth: a large desk; an unruly stack of papers; books on a dense shelf; the back of the office chair. He pulls the chair aside looking for a laptop.

Danny realizing his mistake immediately. Someone’s sitting in the chair. He sees it as it spins around: black, a shirt melding with the shadows, hair cropped close, nails well-trimmed.

All that eclipsed by the mouth . . . It’s stuffed with flowers. White blooms burst from between teeth. The jaw has been yanked down to make them fit.

And roots. Danny sees them protruding from the corner of the mouth, the left nostril, the tear duct of the right eye.

Danny realizing he knows what sort of flower this is.

Gladiolus. It means generosity.

Then, one last detail to complete the scene: the whisper of motion, the chest rising and falling.

The man is alive.

Danny staggering backward. Danny gagging. Danny unable to stifle his scream.

2

IRINA

Snapshots of a childhood.

Irina at five years old. Irina on a yacht. Irina standing in the prow. Silhouettes of a party behind her. Other children darting between the adults. Irina single and solitary.

Irina at eight years old. Irina in a Swiss chalet ignoring the Alps. Irina reading Heidi, irony still a mystery to her. No siblings or parents or adults of any kind are in sight.

Irina at nine years old standing on a balcony overlooking Paris. Behind her, two children playing. They regard her as one would a wild animal that has taken up residence in the attic.

Voices below. The children’s mother speaks shrill, rapid French.

“I don’t care what Oscar asks of us! He asks too much. She is not—”

Something sharp from the father.

“He doesn’t bug the place. He doesn’t need to. You ask his permission before you shit.”

Something else from the father. The wrong thing.

“Mammon requires? Mammon requires? I require you to grow some balls.”

Irina at eleven years old. Irina ice skating in Oslo. She is very good. A man watching. Later, she will ask him about her parents. He will tell her a familiar story about a car accident when she was four years old. She will scream that if her parents were as good as people always tell her then they wouldn’t have consigned her to this life, shuttled from one loveless home to another, from one disinterested semi-relative to another, always with enough money to buy everything except the one thing she wants, and he will simply shut down, and drive in silence along the long cold, Norwegian highway. But for now, she skates.

Irina at thirteen years old, smoking a black cigarette on an Albanian beach.

Irina at fifteen years old, with a scruffy older boy on her arm, examining their reflection in a department store window.

Irina at sixteen years old, sleeping rough on the streets of Odesa. A car pulls up, and two men in black suits unfold from it. She yells that she is not going back, and they drag her kicking and screaming into the car.

Irina at eighteen years old, stuffed in the corner of a library in Lisbon, cup of coffee in hand. The idea of university, and freedom, and a life spent away from watchful, dispassionate aunts and second-cousins floats before her—a vision so real she feels she can almost grasp it, the same way the terror of failure has grasped her.

Irina at nineteen years old. Irina in Paris. Irina dancing. Free. Happy.

Irina at twenty years old in the apartment she shares with four other Sorbonne students, pacing, smoking furiously, trying to explain to her Economics professor that, no, she does not want him to leave his wife. Irina wondering how she became this particular cliché.

Irina at twenty-one years old, still in her apartment, examining the hand that feeds. The young Economics student is surrounded by books, press releases, and articles, and she can see so many ways in which OmniPharm should have failed: the indictable offenses, the exposure of its moral vacuum, the simple poor decision-making. Except none of it has mattered.

Too lucky, she is thinking. This does not fit any of the models she has been taught. There must be fraud, epic and audacious. But she cannot see the scheme. No one can.

She only has one clue, a word only seen occasionally, glimpsed in hidden forums that shut down rapidly: Mammon.

Irina at twenty-two, months from graduation. An attractive young man approaches her at a café. He introduces himself as Max Steinmetz and asks to discuss her future.

“Do you work for the government?” she asks him.

“You’re smarter than that, Irina.”

She cannot stop her hand from shaking as she takes a long, long drag on her cigarette.

“Mr. Phillips,” Max says, “would appreciate it if you considered coming back to the fold upon your graduation.”

A sip of coffee. “It’s been three years,” she says, “since I’ve had to do a single fucking thing Mr. Phillips tells me.”

“Mr. Phillips is deeply regretful for the shape of your childhood. He did his best with what was available to him, but he would be the first to admit that he made many mistakes.”

No sip of coffee this time. “Mr. Phillips doesn’t have a clue what you’re saying. He gave you a number and told you to say whatever it took to convince me to agree to it. So, stop with whatever cheap insights you think you’ve gleaned from the file they gave you, and just tell me what he’s willing to offer, so I can tell you to go and screw yourself.”

He tells her. It is a staggering sum.

“Not enough,” she says. “Tell him it will never be enough.”

“Okay,” he says. “That’s fair. I read the file. I get it. And I’ve never met the man. But on a personal note, consider this: you could work some bullshit entry-level job for a sum of money that I will never even see in my life, then quit after two years, set for life. That seems like a better way to punish him to me.” He smiles at her. “They told me you had three days to decide.”

☉

Irina at twenty-five in the OmniPharm Munich office. It is 8:50 A.M. Things are still quiet. While unobserved, she opens a virtual network that would have a significant laxative effect on the IT chief, and fires up a ProtonMail account.

Nothing.

At 9:00 she is joined by Alex, the head of Human Resources. At 9:03, Hannah Becker from Sales Training arrives. She sees Alex beside Irina. She blanches.

“So,” Irina starts. “Back when I got here in February you and I—”

Hannah Becker’s cheeks flush. “You can’t treat people like machines. You have to work with them. You have to invest.”

“Please sit down, Hannah,” Alex says.

Hannah pays him no attention. “You think you have this all figured out,” she hisses at Irina “You’re a fucking child.”

Irina nods. “Yes, I am young. But unlike you, I am good at my job.”

When Irina gets back to her desk at 9:25, she checks her surroundings again. She opens the email account again.

One new email.

Palms sweaty, she clicks.

googled this shit right? mammon: wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object of worship and devotion. taken by medieval writers as the name of the devil of covetousness.

except that’s not what it means. or you mean. context = everything right? so, here, now, this is the deep dark. burn after reading.

mammon here now, is omnipharm, is phillips, is the unholy trinity. one and the same thing, all of them. nobody’s fully clear. but whenever the market goes south, whenever the scandal gets too big, whenever phillips and omnipharm look fucked . . . then they aren’t, and if you stare hard enough there’s that word. mammon. fixing stuff.

best guess, some sort of proprietary, illegal-as-shit black box sitting somewhere in phillips basement playing monopoly against the rest of the world.

but i didn’t tell you that. burn after reading.

Irina deletes the email, empties the trash, allows herself to admit she’s disappointed. Another guess. No proof.

A ping from her work email makes her jump. A glance at the sender makes her mouth go dry: Beverly Dreary.

Dear Irina, it reads. Mr. Phillips wishes me to convey his congratulations on your work in Germany. With everything now in hand, he has requested your presence at the head office, where you and he will discuss your future.

She’s at the airport an hour later. In the air an hour after that.

☉

And then he ghosts her. He’s spent the three years since she graduated jerking her chain around Europe. For three years, she’s been looking for an answer: to what he is, what he does, why he treats her like this. And then his assistant—his fucking assistant—sends out this tease for answers. And he ghosts her.

He’s booked in meetings. He’s out of the country. He’s on a flight. He’s meeting with senators.

And then one day—a day when she was assured Phillips was in Europe—she sees a man ushered into his office. A man who looks like he’s lost every fight he ever got into.

She watches the office door. When it reopens, and the man is led away, looking no more like a winner than he did when he arrived, she goes to Phillips’s assistant.

“Phillips is here.” It isn’t a question.

“Mr. Phillips will let you know as soon as a window opens up in his calendar.”

Another week passes. A window doesn’t open up.

☉

“Irina!”

Irina blinking. Oscar Phillips framed in her doorway. Larger than she imagined. Larger than she can handle

“I’m so sorry,” he booms. “I dragged you all the way over here and then my schedule.” His hands mime an explosion. “Terrible. Disastrous. Leave you here in this office. You don’t even have a beanbag. I’ll have Beverly make sure you have a beanbag. We had consultants come in. Lot of benefits to a beanbag, apparently. I probably don’t need to tell you that of course. One of our bright young things, aren’t you?”

It’s nonsense. The thought very clear and sharp in her mind. This man who has shaped her whole life is intentionally not saying anything to her despite all his words.

“Anyway,” Phillips says, “must dash. But we must talk. Can’t right now. But I’m having a little get-together at the Black House this weekend. Beverly will send you the details.”

Then he is gone. And Irina is just a girl, in the prow of a ship, standing all alone, while around her the surf rages.

☉

Irina at twenty-five. Irina on Long Island. Irina realizing Phillips is ignoring her again.

Irina as the pressure cooker pushed far too far beyond the factory-recommended settings. She feels rage at herself. That she has allowed this petty despot to control her for so long. That she let herself be bought, not by the money, but by the promise that his answers would be better than the ones she could find herself. By the idea that maybe benevolence lurked beneath her uprooted life.

Irina shedding her last thoughts of what Oscar Phillips wants. Irina finally committing fully to finding her own answers.

And then through the crowd, she glimpses the same beaten man she saw in the OmniPharm office. She sees his cheap suit. She sees the looks the other guests give him. She sees his eyes roving. She knows he does not belong here.

Why is he here? He is searching for something. What? She doesn’t know. But she sees the way he avoids the gaze of the security guards. She sees the way he distracts them and slips upstairs. She thinks she might see an agent of chaos in the midst of Phillips’s orderly arrangement of sycophants. She thinks she might see a way to enact her revenge.

She waits for her own opening then follows him up the stairs. Everything up here feels dark and soft, everything is wood and plush carpeting. She listens for something that gives the other man away.

Which is when she hears the screaming.

3

DANNY

Danny with a knee in his back. Danny with a security guard he didn’t even see coming pressing his face to the floor.

“Danny!” Phillips’s boom of a voice approaching. A muttered, “Shit,” from the guard above him. A woman’s voice?

Danny doesn’t say anything. Danny has a mouth too full of carpet, and a head too full of horror.

“Let him up,” Phillips says.

A hesitation before the knee is removed. Danny picks himself up gingerly, turns to see Phillips looming over him. “A body,” he says and points into the office. “I think . . . I don’t know . . .”

Danny becoming aware of the security guard staring at him. Glances at her. Stares back.

“Marta?”

“Oh yes,” Phillips smile is just a little too large. “You know each other. It’s like I said Danny, your name came up in another matter. Now let me go and see what all the fuss is about.”

Danny knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt he’s being fucked with. Marta glaring.

“What are you doing here?” she hisses.

“What are you doing here?”

“Working.”

“Same.”

“Who for?” There is no trust. No love lost. It’s been years, but they have not made the heart grow fonder.

A burst of laughter stops them. Phillips emerges, claps his massive hands.

“Just a misunderstanding.” He beams. “Just a bit of tomfoolery. A party guest come up here to sleep it off. His friends don’t think too much of that, grab a table decoration, shove it into his sleeping mouth. Seems to have caught Danny here off guard. Shadows and whisky, not the best combination, isn’t that right, Danny?”

Danny looking Phillips right in the eye. “No,” he says. He knows what he saw. He takes a step toward Phillips.

Marta has him back on the floor in an instant.

Phillips laughing again. “Well, Danny,” he says. “Goddamn. What do you think of her?”

“Why were you up here in the first place, Danny?” Marta hissing the words into his cheek. “Why were you sneaking around?”

Danny searching for an answer that doesn’t lead back to a man from Daochu. Danny still wrong-footed by Marta’s presence.

But then: “Because I asked him to.”

IRINA

Enter Irina stage left. Enter the agent of chaos. Watch the worm turn.

“I asked him to come up here,” she says. “I was cold, and I asked him to fetch my shawl.”

“Bullshit.” The security woman looks outraged.

Phillips looks at Irina. Heavy, creased lids over dark irises. He turns to the security woman. “That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me, Marta. Why else would Danny be up here?”

Even as she stores the man’s name, Irina is fully aware that Phillips doesn’t believe her. And so, clearly, is Marta. This is play-acting of the worst kind. And there is a moment when they are all waiting to see if the security guard will bite the hand that feeds. Maybe even the security guard is waiting to see it too.

But the moment passes.

“Well,” Phillips says into the moment. “I think that’s all wrapped up.”

The man still struggles beneath Marta’s knee. “But the guy . . .”

“Is cleaning out his mouth,” Phillips says. “Is embarrassed and wants to be left alone. Now, are you going to behave yourself, Mr. Spencer? Should I have Marta let you up? So, you can go and earn your pay downstairs?”

Marta’s grinding knee seems to decide it. Danny grunts, “Fine,” into the floor.

And that’s it. The scene is over. The tableau—and Irina is abruptly sure that is exactly what this was, that they have somehow all seen precisely what they were meant to see—is shut down and they are swept up in the tide of Oscar Phillips and sent hurtling back to the maelstrom of the party below.

MARTA

There was a time when Marta felt invincible. There was a time when she was in a U.S. Army recruitment office because she did not give a single flying fuck and she wanted the world to know.

Basic training had been tough. She’d watched other people wash out. But in the army, Marta discovered a point and a purpose to things that she’d never seen before. She understood her place in the pack. Understood that the anger that had complicated every day of her childhood finally had a purpose.

She’d been eager to go to Afghanistan. She’d wanted to go. And the first tour was good. She did good work. And sure, it was boring like people said it was, but no worse than sitting through seventh period history. And she got paid for this at least. She saw mountains.

Yeah, her first tour was all good.

Then there was the second one.

☉

She’d been back two years when she met Danny. Working personal security mostly. Occasionally doing events. She used to see him at a coffee cart when she was working a job down on Wall Street. He’d slide glances at her every morning, and eventually she put him out of his misery.

“Hey.”

He’d blinked like someone waking from a dream. “Me?”

She’d sighed, turned away. “Not anymore.”

But the next day, he was there early, coffee already in hand. “Caffeined up so I’d be ready for you.”

“You’re not ready for me.” But she’d been flattered despite herself.

And the next day he’d been waiting for her again. This time with two coffees. He held one out to her.

“You think you paying attention to my coffee order isn’t going to come across as creepy?” she asked.

“Oh, the second one isn’t for you,” he said. “It’s for me. You said one wouldn’t get me ready.”

And she’d laughed at that. Really laughed. And he’d looked so damn proud that he’d made her smile. She’d liked that too.

And then, that’s how it was every morning. The two of them talking, joking, making each other laugh. And still it had taken him two weeks before he said, “So, erm, yeah, well, see I was wondering . . .”

“Yes.”

“What?” Big eyes looking up at her from behind his coffee.

“What time do you want to pick me up?”

He took her to some Middle Eastern place with falafel to die for. And the company was better than the food. And when, on the third date she went back up to his place, it got even better.

Still, they took it slow. She made sure of that. So, it was a year before she moved in. And she made sure he knew what he was getting himself into by then. Made sure he’d met her brother, her mother. Made sure she’d met his sister and nephew. Made sure he’d seen her at her worst. Had held her and talked her back down. Had weathered the bruises to his ego and his chest. She wouldn’t have done it if she didn’t think he could take it.

Turned out, he wasn’t the one she should have worried about. He could take it just fine. But the more he took, the worse she got. Like he was just there for her anger, like he wasn’t taking it away, just storing it, so it was all there waiting for her when she came home each day.

They tried to make it better. She didn’t want to be that way with him. But it got so when she looked at him, she just wanted grab his throat. It got so she was angry all the time. Got so she couldn’t always keep it inside. And it wasn’t always Danny who saw the rage bleed out.

Then, one day she’d come home, and he’d asked: “You doing okay?”

She remembers that she hadn’t been, remembers that she’d spent most of the day in a dive bar because of that. Then . . . Then she just remembers the end of it: standing over Danny; his nose broken; her crying; shoving clothes into her gym bag; waking up in some Holiday Inn the next morning.

That was the last time she saw him. Lying on the floor covered in his blood and her tears. Now, he’s here. Now, he’s up to no good. Her shot at redemption, and the man who could screw it all up for her knows exactly how bad it gets.

☉

“How bad is it?”

Three months ago. The fourth floor of a crumbling brownstone in an unfashionable part of the East Village. Marta itching in a polyester suit.

She says: “I’m handling it.”

“If you were, you wouldn’t be here.”

A tightening of Marta’s jaw. But through an exertion of will, she keeps her mouth shut.

The man nods. “Your old C.O. told me your story.” A moment of grotesque sympathy. “That’s a hard thing.” Then he was back to businesslike. “Still, let us be honest with each other: you are here because you have screwed up. Not once but many times. Despite this, I am giving you a chance because I am sympathetic, and because I believe you have skills that can make me money.”

“Now,” he says, “I will bury your last few indiscretions in places where potential clients can’t find them. But my sympathy ends as soon as you fail to hold your shit together.”

☉

To Marta’s surprise, three months later they have both kept their promises. And after several good gigs, she is abruptly head of security for Oscar Phillips’s big night. This is her chance to prove she can keep the moments of weakness to her off hours. Her chance to get back to where she ought to be.

But now this. Now Danny Spencer. Danny who knows how weak she has become. Who with one word can ruin everything. Can send her spiraling back down.

They get to the bottom of the stairs, back to the party. She leans in, tries to put the same fear in him he’s put in her. “Remember,” she says, “I’ll break you before you break me.”

She taps one of her guys. “Eyes on him.” Points at Danny. “Always.”

DANNY

There was a time, Danny thinks, when they were beautiful together. When they would curl up on the couch, bodies like yin and yang.

He remembers seeing her for the first time. Stalking down a street. Windswept and tousled. Like a wolf, he’d thought. An image unbidden. And he had loved being part of her pack. The certainty that she would tear out the throat of any who threatened him.

But then, of course, the splintering. The separation. The disintegration of their unity. Like peeling part of his own body away. An amputation of the heart.

“No trouble,” he says to her now, but she’s already stalking away.

And then the other woman, the one who saved him for reasons he cannot yet fathom quirks a smile at him and says, “Well, maybe a little bit of trouble.”

He turns to her, tries to judge the moment, her motives, what he just saw, what he’s meant to be here doing. He moves toward a bar, and indicates she follow him.

Danny sipping whisky poured from a bottle worth more than his first car. Danny asking: “So, who are you?”

“A possession,” she says.

“Be less cute.”

“Irina.”

“And you work for Phillips?”

“I told you,” she says. “He owns me.”

This is more bullshit than Danny wanted. This whole night is more bullshit than he wanted.

“Why did you bail me out?”

“Because I want trouble, and you look like it.”

A flash of guilt in Danny’s soul. Does she know about the man from Daochu? But that seems unlikely.

“Why trouble?” he risks.

“Because I’m tired of being owned.”

There is, Danny senses, an ocean of hurt beneath the woman’s calm exterior. He could drown in it easily.

“I’m not here to cause trouble,” he says. Danny swimming toward the shoreline.

“Why were you upstairs?” she asks.

Danny doesn’t want to answer that question.

“Something is fucked up here,” he deflects. “There was a guy up there. In his mouth . . .” He imagines trying to explain it all. Feels nauseated. “He wasn’t dead,” he says instead, “but he ought to have been.” Shakes his head. “He must have been.”

“So, will you call the police?”

Danny calculating. Because he should. Except he has the overwhelming suspicion that there won’t be anything for them to police when they arrive. Assuming the commissioner isn’t already here sipping Phillips’s expensive whiskey.

“I didn’t have time to get proof.”

“Proof of Oscar Phillips’s misdeeds,” Irina says. “That sounds like trouble.”

“I don’t want—”

“You’re a snoop,” she said. “A detective. An agent of industrial espionage. I don’t give a shit. I want to help you. I want you to help me make Oscar Phillips hurt.”

Danny wishing that the fact this woman is pretty wasn’t affecting his decision.

“I work for Phillips,” he insists.

“Not up in that room you didn’t.” She’s very certain, Danny thinks. “And you saw something that makes you want to work for him even less.”

She’s also very right.

“You ever hear the word ‘mammon’ before?” she says.

A little shock through Danny like electricity. A moment of recognition. The word at the edges of OmniPharm’s darker secrets, always retreating as he approached.

“Word from the Bible.” He plays it safe. “New testament. Means wealth.”

She shrugs, looks away. “Not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant.”

A sharp look. His turn to shrug. They’re both testing the waters. Trying to find out where the trust lies.

“You know what it is?” he asks her.

She hesitates. “I’ve heard people talking about it. I’ve heard people saying it demands sacrifice. Is that what you saw in that room?”

Danny thinks about that. Thinks about internet rumors and Phillips’s meteoric success.

“What I saw here wasn’t some financial tool . . .”

“What was it?” she presses.

“I don’t know,” he concedes.

“Oscar Phillips isn’t going to hide his secrets in his estate agent’s office,” she says.

“What?”

“That’s where you were, just so you know.”

Danny feeling very stupid.

“We need to go to the basement,” she says.

“Why?”

“Because that’s what you do with secrets. You bury them.”

MARTA

Marta prowls through cocaine drifts and marijuana clouds. Around her, excess becomes excessive. Two men charge down a corridor, a vase raised above their heads like a stolen virgin. She puts her palm into the chest of one. Catches the vase with her other hand.

“No,” she growls. The man on the floor backs away on all fours.

Marta shakes her head, closes her eyes. For an instant, this scene disappears. Another is summoned: a glimpse of rock, and sand, and flat-roofed houses. A longing in her heart for rain. Smiling children hugging their mother’s legs.

She opens her eyes, returns to a room containing a man dry-humping a statue.

A crackle in her earpiece. “Alarm just got tripped in the basement.”

“Who has eyes on Danny Spencer?” It’s her first thought.

No one answers. A signal flare of rage is launched in her heart.

“Get on him!” People turn to stare. Her nails score crescents of red in her palms. Marta’s urge to commit violence is suddenly barking and slathering at the end of its leash. She is going to do something. She knows it now. The urge in her is too far gone. All she can hope now is to steer it.

Almost desperately, she shoves toward an exit and the isolation of the estate grounds.

☉

She still remembers the good times of course. She wonders if she would hate Danny less if she didn’t.

The first time they had breakfast together: the pair of them in her postage-stamp sized kitchen. The bulk of Danny awkward at the best of times, now impossible. She shooing him away. Him hovering, trying to be helpful, failing miserably. Her laughing at the disaster of it all.

And somehow that led them back to the bed, and to a memory of stubble and lips, and hands hot in the small of her back. Of his breath in her neck. Of her lying there with her head on his chest, feeling the rough surface of him through the thin fabric of his undershirt.

Mine, she’d thought, there in the nest of blankets and limbs. This is all mine. And in her mind, she had drawn a circle around them, and staked a claim she’d believed inviolable.

☉

Marta breathing hard among hedgerows. Marta punching tree trunks until her knuckles bleed. Marta wanting a mouth of fangs to tear with. Marta wanting eyes like lamps to search with. The desire to stop him.

From . . . ?

From what?

A moment. A breath. A clearing in the woods of her mind.

Why is she so angry? What has gotten into her?

Marta standing in the moonlight, trying to get a hold on herself, trying to understand her rage. She was annoyed to see Danny, yes. She was worried about what he might tell Phillips about her. She’d been angry about what he was doing, about the nuisance he was making of himself, making her look stupid in front of a client she couldn’t afford to look stupid in front of.

But this . . . this murderous desire in her . . . It feels almost foreign. Almost as if it came from outside . . .

Marta shaking her head. Trying to clear it. Taking breaths. Feeling the night air enter her. Realizing that Phillips’s gardens are undeniably beautiful. That she is surrounded by white flowers with a beautiful scent. The moon above her, full and wild.

She’s still pissed at Danny, but she’s in control. Her people will find him. She will black his eyes one last time, and then kick him out on his ear. It will be okay.

She turns to go back into the house, realizes she has wandered further away than she intended. The bulk of the Black House is hidden behind hedgerows and trees.

More irritation, but Marta tamps it down, begins to trudge.

And then, through a gateway in a wall, she sees a figure and hesitates, and sighs again, and changes her direction.

“Polly.” Marta says, entering a low-walled garden. “What are you doing out here?”

Phillips’s daughter. Wearing clothes now, thank God. Although . . . A tutu and a bikini top? Hair in braids almost to her waist. If ever privilege had a poster child, Marta thinks, this is it.

“We need to get you somewhere safe,” she says.

Polly turns, bestows a beatific smile on Marta. “We need to get you somewhere safe.”

Marta can’t tell if it’s just idiot parroting, or mockery, or if the girl’s just high, but she’s not in the mood.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s get you back to the house.” She crosses to her boss’s daughter, takes her by the arm. When she pulls, though, Polly doesn’t come. Marta pulls a little harder, maybe harder than is advisable. But Polly just stands there as solidly as if she has roots. As if she is a spire of obsidian piercing down to the earth’s heart. Marta could pull all day, but Polly isn’t moving.

“What?” Marta pulling almost experimentally at Polly now. And then . . .

Then . . . Polly turns eyes on Marta like stars. Like black holes. Like the event horizon of hope.

Fear in Marta now. Fear that she cannot resist or deny. Fear she cannot even run away from, because even as she tries to pull away, Polly takes her arm, and her grip is like the inevitability of death.

“You don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

But Marta is afraid. Is starting to buck. Because her rage is suddenly outmatched, negligible in the face of this unsuspected opponent.

Polly has something in her spare hand. Something as bright and mournful as a dying sun. Like a flashlight pressed against the fingers of reality. And all around it . . . all around Polly, all around Marta . . . all the stars are fading, the moon is going dim. Only that crimson, mournful light in Polly’s hand still shining.

Marta trying to scream. The vacuum of space all around her. She is suffocating. She is dying. She thrashes and feels her shoulder joint go as she pulls the arm from its socket in her desperation.

Polly’s hand comes down. Marta puts up a hand to stop it, and it’s like trying to hold back the tide. The sun descending. The only light in the world crashing into Marta’s chest.

Polly pressing that glowing hand against Marta’s chest. A sense of violation. Of penetration. Of pain and joy. Of something so large it eclipses everything. A white vacuum of thought and emotion.

And then all the lights go out. All of them. Except the one now glowing behind Marta’s sternum.

4

DANNY

Danny in the Black House twenty minutes before this. Danny and Irina traversing a tangle of corridors. Danny straightening his gladiolus buttonhole, while around them, debauchery escalates. Two men hold a woman out so a third can use her as a limbo pole. All four of them collapse in a giggling heap. Two women with swords taken down from the walls swing at each other. A man pisses into an ancient Chinese vase. It feels too soon for things to have gotten this out of hand.

And yet in Danny’s head . . . an urge to join in. Not his normal mode. Almost as if the desire was being pressed into him.

☉

Marta used to take him to parties. Left to his own devices, he’d stay at home surfing sitcoms, using actors’ facsimile of camaraderie as methadone for the real thing. But Marta was always happier with the pack, deep in the thrum and thrust of the dance floor, rejuvenated by the kinetic charge of people around.

Her brother Vasyl would text addresses of places he was DJ-ing—old factories, abandoned stores, run-down warehouses, once even a dried-up old water tower. And Danny would grumble, but they’d both know that he was secretly glad for the excuse to be dragged into contact with the rest of humanity.

He couldn’t really dance but had discovered early that enthusiasm could cover a multitude of sins. Dancing was one of the things he could do fearlessly. At least with a little liquid courage in him. Not the amount Marta seemed to need, but she always seemed most herself on the dance floor, all her appetites exposed, her lust for life unleashed and swinging. She was beautiful on the dance floor, sensuous, boisterous, belligerent, and wholly focused on him. The two of them making their own world as all around them people gave themselves over to the pagan preaching of the beat.

She was polyamorous in her love of music—as happy with hi-NRG nu-disco as she was with deathcore, with freestyle jazz as she was with dubstep. Anything that pulled people to the dance floor. “A socially acceptable form of fighting,” she called it.

“I’m not sure the way you dance is socially acceptable.”

Danny laughing as she pantomimed outrage and dragged him back out to gyrate and jump with the rest of the revelers.

She and Vasyl never acknowledged each other much on those long-lost nights. A nod here. A clinking of beer bottles. But there was something fractured and tenuous in their relationship, and it could not bear much weight. Danny had always thought there was something tragic in that.

Now he is on the same side of the divide as Vasyl, and now he knows he was always right.

☉

“This is the way down,” Irina calling him back to reality. Irina pointing to a door tucked in amongst the wooden paneling.

Danny considers. “How’d you know that?”

“For a long time,” she said, “I wanted to understand Oscar Phillips. So I did a lot of research on him. On the things that are precious to him.”

“And now?”

“Now I want payback for being made to want to understand.”

Maybe she believes that. Danny doesn’t. Danny thinks she’d kill for answers. Maybe kill him. But is that any better than him? He’s doing this for a seven-figure sum written on a piece of paper.

He opens the door. Stairs lead down. They descend. Danny worries he’s about to end up photographing Oscar Phillips’s sex dungeon. But at the bottom of the stairs is just a mundane unfinished space. Steel shelves stacked with cleaning supplies, tool boxes, A/C filters. The mundane detritus of life.

Irina crosses the space, goes to a second door in a shadowed corner, opens it to reveal another corridor with unfinished concrete walls and bare bulbs. She seems very confident in where they’re going.

Danny’s footsteps echo off walls. Irina’s are a lighter counterpoint. Their shadows are stark. There are more doors. They are all locked. They don’t even rattle in their frame when Danny tries them.

Irina leading Danny around twists and turns. The sense that they are descending. Some bulbs have gone dark, leaving patches of shadow. Another turn and twenty yards ahead the corridor ends not in a door but an archway. Like something from a medieval church in Europe, the detail of it eroded by the smudging finger of time, incongruous in this bare modern space.

“What the hell?” Danny not sure if this is an expected development or not. Danny turning to Irina. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“Not exactly.”

Which is not wholly reassuring.

“Why are you so confident there are secrets down here? What secrets? In fact—” A thumb jab over his shoulder. “—why did we turn left instead of right back there? Where are you trying to take me?”

She closes her eyes. Opens them. Jaw set. “I don’t know, Danny. I’ve never been here before in my life. That’s why I’m here right now. Because my whole life has been shaped by the decisions of a man I’ve only met twice, and one of those times was tonight with you. I am here because I think something is buried down here that Oscar Phillips wants hidden. And if he wants it hidden, I want to pull it screaming into the light.

“Phillips hides this basement. He’s tried to erase it from the blueprints. And I want you to bear in mind that you cannot just get the blueprints for the Black House. You have to dig. You have lie to people. That’s what I did. I was curious and resourceful. And when I found the plans, I found that most of what’s underground lies to the south. That’s why we turned left back there.”

She’s leaning forward, spots of color high on her cheeks. “What I want to know, if we’re being suspicious, is why are you here? Why are you willing to follow a stranger into basements? What’s your angle?”

Danny abruptly seeing his own actions from outside. Danny realizing he’s the asshole. “I’m sorry.” He says rather than coming clean. He nods at the archway. “Onward?”

Onward it is. A corridor follows the arch: stone now, and a smell like damp. Much less light.

They come to another punctuation in the passageway. Another archway carved into the side of the wall. Danny peers in.

“Jesus.”

Except very clearly not Jesus. Something far more esoteric. The space beyond the archway is like a temple. Like a set from Indiana Jones. There are pews. There is . . . an altar? Statues? Convoluted forms. The suggestion of limbs. Red velvet cloth hangings on the wall. Danny thinks he sees the suggestion of scenes on them. Age and shadow making the original meaning impenetrable from this distance. The place smells like a dried-up swamp: fecund but dusty.

“Is this real?” Danny entering the temple tentatively. Danny’s head full of internet rumors. “Were the chat room psychos right?”

Irina neither confirms nor denies.

Danny heads down the central aisle. Thick carpeting beneath his feet. He pauses, examines one of the statues. Can’t quite tell if it’s marble or wax. The forms unsettlingly fluid. Things that might be limbs running into each other

“Something’s . . . off.” Irina hesitant. Still in the archway. Then more definite: “We should leave.”

Danny not leaving. Danny pulling out his phone and snapping shots. Not caring if Daochu or the tabloids pay for them. “You wanted secrets. This seems like one.”

Danny advancing on the altar at the front of the room. Something on it. Another statue? Looming. Monolithic. He tries to focus on it. Can’t quite. Something’s bothering his eyes.

“Let’s go back.” Irina from the doorway.

Danny still not going back. His feet still carrying him toward the altar. He could buy a year’s worth of Placidol with each of these pictures.

“Danny!” A tone of desperation in Irina now.

Danny goes to stop. Goes to turn and explain he will be leaving in just a minute. To just be patient.

Except Danny doesn’t stop. Danny’s feet move against his will. He grabs at a pew. Dark wood slides beneath his fingertips. His feet still moving. His body out of control.

Danny yelling. Pinwheeling his arms. Not understanding what is happening. Casting desperate looks at Irina. Seeing her face, aghast.

Danny looking where she’s looking. Danny staring at the altar in abject horror.

Something coming off it like a heat shimmer. Something emerging . . . unfolding out of the statue. The idea of a creature that is only a mouth; only teeth and tongue and jaws.

Danny’s certainty: it wants him.

To consume him.

To devour him.

To have and to hold him.

His feet still skittering forward. And rising in Danny’s head now, a cocktail party of inappropriate emotions: a desire to drink, to dance, to seize Irina, anyone. His own desire to possess. And Danny somehow certain this feeling isn’t of him. It’s being forced into him.

Danny opening his mouth to yell to Irina for help. Danny finding he doesn’t have the breath. That has been taken from him. And the thing is coming down off the altar, coming toward him. And Danny is fighting to get away, but in the face of its all-consuming, undeniable need, he is powerless to resist.

MARTA

A heat like the desert burning in Marta’s heart. Her nose full of scents she cannot understand. A new power in her fists. So much so she doesn’t mind that they no longer resemble fists.

Something has happened to her body. When she moves, unfamiliar muscles stretch and pull. Her weight hangs strangely from her chest, her hips. And yet when she moves, she feels more whole and hale than she has in years.

Words are whispered. Polly Phillips’s lips brush her ear. “The big man. The woman. Seek. Destroy.” With them: a feeling in her chest as if a vice is removed from her heart. An urge rising in her and crying hallelujah. Because it is free. It has no reason to hide anymore.

She wants Danny. Wants to undo him. Wants to feel him in her new mouth full of fangs and hate. And she feels so capable of achieving her goals now. She can run forever. Can hunt forever. There is no place he can hide from her.

She enters Phillips’s house. People scream. People flee. She leans down and catches one of these paltry men in her jaws as easily as she might pluck a ball tossed through the air, as easily as she might strip down and clean an M4 carbine.

She closes her jaws, and the world tastes red and warm.

IRINA

When she was too young to know better, Irina agreed to a game of hide-and-seek with two sisters. She was new in the Venetian home and eagerly ran deep into the girls’ sprawling apartment. But as she explored its corridors and staircases, she found many doors were locked. Only a few turns were hers to make. Panic rose. And then she found one unlocked door and pushed it open to see a single green armchair near a window. She raced toward it and ducked down behind its plush folds.

A moment later footsteps approached. She held her breath. But the footsteps did not enter the room. They paused on the threshold. Irina heard the click of a lock.

“We don’t want you,” a voice hissed through the keyhole.
Now, facing a far more complex horror, Irina thinks again of locked doors, and being funneled towards a sickly fate. In the corridors beneath the Black House, why was one path easy to walk down and others impossible? Was she exploring or on a guided tour?

Before she can decide, the thing—

The mouth. The maw.

—descends from the altar. Pain spikes in her head. She puts a hand to her temple, drops to a knee.

She can feel the thing. The bottomless hollow of its avarice. An endless maw of desire that can never be satisfied or satiated. She feels Danny being sucked towards it, not by gravity or magnetism, but by the force of its desire.

Danny grabs a pew. His legs lift off the floor. Danny dangling perpendicular to reality as the thing approaches.

Pain spiking. Every inch the creatures advances splintering Irina’s head further. But pain: discovery. The creature’s proximity unfolding a new world in Irina’s head. Its desire doing something different to her than to Danny. Making her foreign to herself.

She reaches out a hand and she feels it—in her head, in her palm. Not quite like touching. Some other pressure. A new sense beyond the quotidian five. She closes her fingers. She can feel the thing, the creature, the not-there/there thing. It is in her palm. It is twenty yards away.

A moment of silent fascination. A moment of Danny screaming. His clothes whip in a wind that isn’t there.

She wrenches her hand sideways.

The creature lurches sideways. Crashes into pews like a ball of buzzsaws. Wood and stone disappear into its endless gullet. Danny’s feet find purchase on stone. He stumbles toward her.

Behind him, the creature reorients, comes on again like a logging truck through the rainforest. Irina has a sense for the shape of it in the absence it leaves behind. A circular path mowed through pews and pillars. Rock falls from above. The floor shakes.

The pressure in Irina’s head spiking. She screws her eyes shut. Screws up her will. She shoves her hand out. She focuses her own desire into a single burst of AWAY.

A crash. A clatter. Irina’s open eyes. The thing reeling back across the space. Danny doing anything he can to get to the archway. Snot and tears streaming down his face.

A migraine thundering behind Irina’s eyes. Pressing and pressing. Pushing this thing back. AWAY. She clears a path for Danny to scramble down and, past her, out through the archway.

Then, she follows. In her head, a door to a world she has barely seen slams shut. And then she flees from the secrets she has sought all her life in a wild headlong clatter of terrified limbs and thundering heartbeats.

5

DANNY

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuuuuuuuck.

Danny charging. Danny leaving tattered pieces of his conception of the world behind him. Danny not caring for answers, or explanations, or paychecks. Danny as terror. Danny as a single desire: to flee this scene. Sayonara. Farewell.

He hurtles down the corridor, past locked doors. No sense for whether this is the path he took before. No real sense for any directions. Only knowing that he must put distance between himself and . . . and . . . and . . .

Fuuuuuuuck.

“Danny!” Danny’s realization that Irina has been shouting his name for quite some time. Danny’s lack of giving a shit. He runs on.

“Danny! Please!”

Something in the tone. And Danny hasn’t entirely outpaced his sense of decency. He looks back.

Irina ragged and gasping in the corridor behind him.

Nothing behind her.

Danny not sure he dares to believe they’re safe. But in that moment of hesitation, all Danny’s horror and confusion catches up with him.

“What . . . What did we just . . . ?” He pushes his hands through his hair.

Irina all out of breath and answers.

“Was that real?” Danny knows the answer, but he wants a different one. “Were the internet kooks right? Does he worship a real demon?” He’s laughing but it sounds a lot like crying.

Irina manages to get a word out. “Mammon?”

“No,” Danny said. “No. No. It can’t be. No.” He doesn’t know. He paws at an eye with the heel of his palm. “I just . . . I just want to get out of here, okay?”

A thumbs up from Irina.

Danny straightening. Danny looking around. “We came this way before, right?”

“Only one way to go,” Irina manages.

“But . . .” Danny looking back and forth. “Is this the same way?” Did a different door open? Did he take a different turn? He can’t remember.

And then down the corridor, rumbling toward them . . . what is that? Thunder? A private subway train passing nearby? A growl?

“Oh, what the fuck?” Danny looking back at an empty corridor. Danny looking ahead at an empty corridor. Danny unable to imagine a horror ahead of him as awful as the one behind.

A hundred yards later: Danny confronting the limits of his imagination.

It is and it isn’t a wolf. It is massive, and shaggy, and has eyes like lamps. And yet also it is not a wolf. Because it is assembled from protoplasm and backyard junk. It is cobbled together from branches, and metal, and old car tires. Protrusions and additions muddle the form. Something mechanical juts from its jaw.

It is and it isn’t Marta. Danny can see her encased in it, just behind the eyes. Her body suspended in the protoplasmic throat of the creature. And her mouth is open. And her eyes are wide. And drool flecks her cheeks. She is wild, and feral, and lost in this thing.

She comes towards them. She and the thing around her. Above her. In her. Superimposed on the reality of her. The beast. The wolf. The monster come to blow all their houses down.

Danny freaking the hell out.

Danny turning. Danny running. Danny only vaguely aware of Irina being on exactly the same page as him.

And behind them: Marta howling.

MARTA

A sensation like flying. Like leaving the world behind.

Marta running through the desert now. Through the long dusty steppelands. The sun above and the earth below. The sky a liquid blue. The dirt beneath her feet an acid yellow. Everything bold, and bright, and blazing.

Marta with her rifle in her hand. The scent of its oil in her nose. The heat of it in her hands as it absorbs the sun’s rays.

Marta with a magazine of ammunition that never ends. Marta with her finger on the trigger. The whirring shudder of the recoil. The white-yellow flower of flame bursting from her barrel.

Marta with enemies on all sides. They pour out of the landscape. They crawl from behind rocks and out of holes in the earth. An endless, faceless stream of bodies. A zombie-flick horde.

All of them fall away under her endless assault. All of them beaten back by the endless stream of her savagery. Marta pouring all her rage and ammunition into the world.

A sensation like love.

She is not there. Part of her knows that. Afghanistan is half a world away. But part of her knows that she is always there. Except now she can fight, and fight, and fight, and bite through every problem that would hold her back. Now she is powerful as never before.

Part of her is here too. Part of her pursuing. The love of the hunt fresh and new and amazing to her. The inevitability of it. Her own implacability worn like a new dress, like a suit of armor.

And a thought in her head like a song. A rhapsody.

All I ever wanted.

IRINA

All I have ever wanted, Irina thinks as she hurtles down a concrete corridor and past barred doors sealed to her forever, is control.

Another barred passage. Another doorway swallowing her whole. The sense that she is taking a different route than before.

Behind her, the sound of Danny running flat out. The lowing howls of the Marta-wolf.

Then she sees the temple archway approaching. So, they have been this way before. But they know how this journey ends. They know what lay between where they were and where they are now, and they have not encountered that buzzing maw, so perhaps they took a different route. Perhaps with the revelation that such a thing is possible other rules—little things like causality—no longer apply.

And as they approach the temple archway, Irina recalls that it was a detour. That the passage continued past it. Now, that route offers a fresh path, one not dead-ending in chaos.

A glimpse into the temple as she hurtles past. A vision of a space half-collapsed, choked with rock and broken pews. As if the creature they had encountered there had sucked the ceiling down upon itself with its insatiable appetite.

She could feel it.

Control it.

How could she do that? How was that possible. It was an impossibility layered onto the impossibility of the creature’s existence. It was an impossibility within her, native to her skin. It was dream logic in the real world.

The memory putting a hitch in Irina’s step. Making her want to throw up. To excise that feeling of gripping the thing’s psyche—squirming and wriggling—with her own thoughts.

Who is she if she can control that creature?

What is she?

The floor beneath her feet slopes sharply downward, almost sending her crashing to the floor. Her hand cast out to steady herself against the wall. The feel of damp stone beneath her palm. Light fading. Darkness coming up to swallow her. The unbidden vision of a gullet swallowing.

Down she goes, stumbling and staggering. Danny still behind her, cursing as he comes, panting and sweating. The steady inevitable pad of the wolf’s paws audible beneath that.

A light before her. A glow in the dark. She moves toward it, faster than she should. Trips. Comes up barking in pain and grabbing her knee. Hobbles on.

Danny beside her, putting a hand beneath her shoulder. She leans on him. He half-drags her forward.

The light is small and electric, the bulb behind a small orange cage. Paint splattered. A workman’s tool. There are others further away.

There are turns now. Tunnels branching everywhere. A maze. As if Phillips is mocking her. As if suddenly all his restrictions are gone and she is paralyzed by choice, with no clue where to turn.

>

Danny barrels on. Picking turn after turn with no discernible plan or pattern, making it worse, always worse. The sound of Marta getting closer. Walls repeating. Patterns repeating.

All I have ever wanted is control.

“This way.” The own sharp bark of her voice taking Irina by surprise. Danny coming to an abrupt halt, staring at her wildly.

“This way,” she insists.

They go that way. “This way,” she says again. They go down tunnel after tunnel. Lights come and go. They stagger through darkness.

Eventually it feels to Irina as if she can run no more. Danny is a lumbering engine of breath and heat behind her, and she can hear his pistons misfiring. They are bent over. They are bumping off the walls.

They stumble to a stop. They cannot, but they must. They have to get away. But they must rest.

Don’t they have to get away?

Yes. Because of the wolf. Because of the sense of Oscar Phillips’s hand closing around her.

It must be his hand. Mustn’t it? Because he knew he’d raised a rebellious child. All the people she rebelled against growing up worked for him. Was that the design? All so he knew that when she saw what she saw tonight, when she met who she met, she would do exactly what she’s done. All so he could ensure she discovered exactly what he wanted her to discover.

But if that’s the case, doesn’t it imply a plan? A reason beyond cruelty?

Doesn’t it imply that the answers she’s rejected are closer at hand than she thought?

Although . . . if the things she has seen tonight are the answers, does she really want them?

Irina realizing she doesn’t know.

Irina realizing she can no longer hear the wolf pursuing them.

“I think,” she says, “we lost it.”

Nothing but panting from Danny until finally, in a plaintive voice, he asks, “What the hell is going on?”

A laugh on the edge of hysteria. “I don’t know. I don’t even know who you are. Why are you here?”

“Shit.” Danny squats. Danny closes his eyes. “I’m Danny. Phillips asked me to find out about some corporate espionage bullshit. Then Daochu asked me to commit corporate espionage. And none of it was worth this, except my sister is sick, and we can’t afford the meds.” A laugh or a sob. “God. I thought maybe I’d found a noble reason to screw everyone over. But none of it was worth this.”

“No more secrets?” she asks.

“What is the point of secrets anymore? I need your help.”

The idea surprises her. But maybe it shouldn’t.

“Down in that room, with that . . .” He swallows. “That thing. you stopped it.”

“Yes.” She knows she did, but admitting it to someone else is another Rubicon crossed.

“How?” he asks.

It’s a good question. She answers for herself as much as for him. “I could—” She touches the side of her head. “I didn’t know I could do that. I still don’t know what I did. Not exactly.”

She wonders if he believes her.

“Can you feel it now?”

She shakes her head. “Not since we left the temple.”

“That’s good, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about Marta?” he asks.

“Who?”

“The security guard. The wolf.”

Irina realizing why the figure in the monster looked familiar. Irina wondering how Danny knows her name. She asks.

“We dated,” Danny says.

Irina’s certainty that this isn’t coincidence. Irina sensing plans within plans. Plans implying answers.

What does she want?

And then before she can answer, a howl. A return of threat. The pause over. And was that calculated too? How much choice does she have?

Danny lumbers into a run again. Irina moves after him. Marta pursues. The hot breath of her, and the stink of her musk whistles down the corridor after them. A scent of meat and blood. Her growl like a dreamer’s murmur.

“What did you do to her?”

“Loved her.”

Deeper in. Down. The floor sloping again on this long impossible journey. The sensation that the hollow earth is about to open beneath their feet.

And then it does; not below but before them. Out of the tangled mire of half-hewn hollow space: a hall. A long low room with many columns.

Irina halts on its threshold. Danny hauls on her hand, desperate to continue. But she has found some certainty down here: danger lies ahead.

“I can feel them.” Grunted between grit teeth.

“What?”

“Like in the temple.” Like thumbs pressed against her forehead. Depressions in the gravity of her perception. “Just . . . more.” Many. They line this long room. They are a gauntlet.

Behind her, Marta’s snout appears.

The wolf is so large, it takes up the whole tunnel. Its legs are bent beneath it. Its lips are pulled back, canines, and saw blades, and a myriad of ersatz teeth exposed. Its snarl is a sound so large it becomes physical. Its hatred is a palpable force propelling them into the hall.

A sound like a sigh. The dust on the floor jumping. Irina feels as if she is walking along a precipice in a high wind: the desire to fall one way or the other. A spike of pain in her head like a migraine. It crescendos with the sound around them.

The room’s other occupants are awake now.

She stumbles sideways. The pain blossoms. She is almost blind with it. Just makes out a vast buzz-saw jaw only yards away. She thrusts out a hand at one.

A sensation like a tearing in her mind. The thing spins away. It passes through a column, rock and stone tearing free and disappearing down inside it.

She staggers back. Behind her, Marta’s mandibles yawn.

It is one death or another.

Danny seizes her hand. “Come on!”

She doesn’t want to. She must. She has been backed into a corner. Because, when it comes down to it, what does she want? To live.

She plunges into the room, heading down the hallway, arms held out ahead of her, spread wide, bracing herself against the storm of them. She pushes back. Heaves with newfound muscles that have no basis in her flesh. She braces her will as hard as she can. She makes her desire greater than those of the maws all around her. They want merely to consume, after all. Her desire has purpose.

Through. She drives the thought into the world like a wedge. She makes a tunnel of her own resolve and hauls herself hand by hand down the rope of her own desire.

The creatures are on all sides of her. Pressing in. Leech mouths jammed as close to her as they can get. The terrible, endless, suction of them.

Irina’s growing certainty that the pain in her head will make her black out. Knowing that if she does, she will die. But still her feet slow. Maybe she is no longer on her feet.

Then hands beneath her. Lifting her. Propelling her. Danny has her, is carrying her forward.

Then they are through, stumbling into another darkening, downward-sloping passage. She is barely capable of thought through the spiking headache. She pictures the old Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil tearing away at her frontal lobes.

Eventually Danny has to put her down, but even then she only moves forward because he propels her. The uncertainty of whether he is doing it because he has a plan or because there are no other options.

Irina’s growing awareness of an opening ahead of them. Light. The sense of a vast space. Then the pain blots out the whole world outside her head. Becomes vast itself. As endless as the desire of the creatures behind her. An epic, infinite universe of pain unfolding behind her eyes, and she cannot tell if she is screaming or not, but she wants to, she has to, she must let some of this out. It is too much, too much, and she will be torn apart by it, she is sure.

And then it is gone. As if she has finally broken through. She stands in the stark absence of pain, everything crisp and clear. The world become an undeniable truth.

A cavern. Irina cannot think of another word. An arching stone ceiling overhead. Rock beneath her feet. Everything ragged, as if this space was not worn smooth over centuries but forced into existence by some rupture in the earth.

Green light. She cannot make out its source. Bright enough after the darkness behind her to make the world seem high contrast.

All of this, though, a backdrop. Scenery draped unconvincingly around the focal point. Around the thing that has made Danny stop moving and start to shake.

In the center of the cavern: a god. A king. A giant. A vast figure. Thirty . . . forty feet tall. Just the upper half of Him. She applies the pronoun even though she cannot see its face. She isn’t sure why. Not yet. He seems to emerge from the floor at mid-thigh, and she cannot see if He is in a pit, or some swirling portal, or is just incomplete, an unfinished thought.

He has a moth-eaten grandeur. His robe was once rich but is ragged now. His crown is a circlet not of gold, but copper turned green. Its finery has been blunted by eons.

No flesh is visible beneath, just more layers of moldering cloth that sway as He moves. As He turns toward them. His massive attention coming to rest on Irina and Danny.

He lifts an arm. As He moves, she feels that pressure in her mind again. So much more than it was before when she was confronted by the whirling maws outside. As if all she has seen before are minnows and now the shark swirls toward her in the water.

They are related, she understands now, this thing and the things outside. They are parts of this whole.

Flittering in the back of her head a thought: can I control Him?

No. Of course not. That is an absurdity. He is a god, and she is insignificant before Him.

No.

His arm still rising. His hand emerges from fabric. Her first glimpse of the flesh beneath. White tinged with the same green as the room. On the fingers are rings of the same tarnished copper as the crown. Nails, yellowed and frayed.

Irina’s realization that the arm reaches out not with tenderness, but with mounting malice. The pressure in her head focusing, sharpening, lunging.

Irina flinches back as the hand lunges out. Too little. Too late. All this fleeing simply to end here. Sacrificed on an altar after all.

Except then the hand—as tall as Irina is—comes to an abrupt halt. His fingers strain but He cannot reach her.

Then: Irina’s realization that a massive manacle has been placed around the god’s wrist. Bronze chain links, each a foot thick, lead back to the rock at His base.

Irina’s realization: someone has chained a god.

6

DANNY

A word in Danny’s mind. Unwanted. Unbidden. Undeniable.

Mammon.

A sense of malevolence comes off the creature in waves. Danny cringes despite himself. Beside him, Irina has an expression which reminds Danny far too much of awe.

“Isn’t He magnificent?”

Not the god who speaks. Not Irina. A man. Danny tries to keep one eye on the massive, rancid hand while he scans the cavern walls. He finds it: an outcropping of rock on a wall above them, a royal box from which a divinely mandated king can make his utterances. Upon it: Oscar Phillips.

He still wears his tuxedo. Still has every hair in place. Looks like he just stepped out of the party, a martini glass in one of his massive hands. Beside him, his daughter, clad in a rainbow-striped bikini top and a fluffy pink tutu. The outfit somehow no more absurd than her father’s. Her hand is stretched out, almost mirroring the god’s.

“Mammon. The god of money.” Phillips’s voice bounces off the rock. “Of wealth. Of greed. Of desire. Of want.” Phillips’s smile splits his face wide open. “How do you think we make money at OmniPharm, Danny?”

Polly Phillips turns her palm upward. The god—Mammon—mirrors the movement. Something gold glitters between the massive fingers. Then coins and crowns, jewels and gems, trinkets and tiaras all pour from that sour hand in a glittering shower. Pearls patter against Danny’s shoes.

“Riches, Danny.” Phillips booms. “Wealth, wampum, cowry shells. It’s who we are. It’s what defines us. Our desire. Not just to have, but to have the most.

“Even before we built the first cities, Danny, He walked among us. That’s why we clambered down out of the trees. That avaricious drive He inspired in us. Because with Him there, the world-as-it-was wasn’t enough for us. It could never be enough. It still cannot ever be. We cannot be satisfied. And so, we reach. We dream. We achieve. Because of Him.

Danny’s desire: to climb the rock walls and beat Oscar Phillips to death.

The torrent of riches finishes falling. Polly lowers her arm and so does Mammon. He is a god not only chained, but a god broken.

“What if you saw a flaw in God’s plan, Danny?” Phillips boomed. “An inherent contradiction? Would you have the balls to act on that?” Another gunshot laugh. “We both know the answer, don’t we? We both see who sits above and who sits below.”

Phillips peering down from the ledge where he stands. “You’re a have-not, Danny. A never-could-have. And deep in your bones, you know it. You are inherently lesser. But I saw the flaw. I understood.

“He makes us want more—the most—and yet, He always has more than us. And He lets us perceive that. And that is the flaw because it means we can dream of being more than Him.”

“I dared to dream, Danny. I did what you, with all your blue-collar earnestness, are so utterly incapable of doing. I achieved. I made a god bow to me.”

Polly pantomimes a genuflection. As she does it, so does Mammon. The great mass of him folding up. There is a horror to it. Like watching a lion forced to curtsy. And Danny almost wants to weep for Him. Is almost overcome by desire, the sensation rising in him as strong as the desire to kill Phillips was a moment before.

“You feel it, don’t you?” Phillips said.

Danny isn’t capable of answering, is busy fighting off the influence of a god, but Phillips has moved on.

“Do you understand it yet, Irina? Does this tie together all those little fragments you gathered to yourself? Mammon, not an algorithm, nor cabal, nor machine, but rather the truth that exists beneath perceived reality. True reality. This is where I have brought you. This is where your answers begin.”

Danny’s realization that he is not truly the main character. Is in fact just a prop for the main focus of the story.

But Irina is perhaps less interested than Danny feared. “This isn’t for me,” she says. “It’s for you.”

Phillips laughs again. “Of course it is! Everything is for me. I can take anything I want. But you’ve always known that, Irina. You more than anyone. But just because it’s for me, doesn’t mean it can’t be for you, too.”

And there is something in the crass excess of God’s own pimp that inspires doubt to dare to creep into Danny’s mind. Because despite all this talk, Danny saw the numbers in the financial papers. Danny was hired for a reason. Not everything is going according to Phillips’s plan.

Even in the face of God, Danny finds he can still hope.

“Control, Irina,” Phillips says. “That’s what it’s all about. That’s what power is. What money is for. Control. And you have it. You are starting to learn that, aren’t you? I am introducing you to it.”

His smile is large, lascivious.

“There is a place for you at OmniPharm,” Phillips says. “I want you there, and you know there is no use in denying me.”

From what feels like a world away, the sound of a wolf howling. Something snuffling, and grunting, and clawing its way through rock.

Irina staring at Phillips. Danny watching the emotions working their way across her face.

“Don’t.” Danny unable to think of a reason why Irina would listen to him. Says it anyway.

She glances at him.

“What about him?” she says to Phillips.

“Ah,” Phillips sighs. “A bit player. Someone to set you on the path. A carrot, with his old flame cast as the stick. He was hired to find a corporate spy. And you found him, didn’t you Danny! In a room with a flower in his mouth. His excess of generosity spilling out of his mouth.”

Phillips’s smile is a shark’s. Danny’s fingers finding a flower still pinned to his chest. Stroking its petals in horror.

It means generosity.

“So now, he has found his man. And he has brought you to me, Irina. His role is played, and shareholder value must be protected.”

Danny’s growing sense of dread.

The growing sound of Marta’s scuffling approach. Claws on stone.

Polly’s rising hand.

Mammon’s rising hand.

The sense of inevitability.

Danny turning to run.

There’s nowhere to run.

IRINA

Back a moment.

“Do you understand it yet, Irina?”

And here in the sharp definition of her own clear-headedness, she does.

Because of course the world is a senseless ruin. Of course she is a rootless vagabond. Because there is no firm ground. There is only inhuman whim enslaved to the ego of a man whittled down to little more than pure id. Because that truth—as horrifying as it is—it tracks with what she has seen.

“Control, Irina. That’s what it’s all about.”

As if her heart has always been open to him. Perhaps it has. Perhaps he has designed her life to bring her to this inevitable destination.

“There is a place for you at OmniPharm.”

And at least part of her, she finds, wants that place.

Because it may not be exactly the answer she was looking for, and the picture may still be incomplete, but it is so much fuller than it was before. And its existence means that all of the pain and all of the hurt was at least building to this. To something orchestrated for her benefit.

“Don’t.” Danny interrupting. Just a word. But it breaks the spell. And then the sheer absurdity of her thoughts catches her like a knife in the ribs.

“A place for me,” she says, testing the depths of Phillips’s self-serving cynicism. “What about him?”

And Phillips’s response comes in the form of Mammon’s raised fist.

It is all about control.

Irina aware that she can still feel the pressure behind her eyes. She can feel the presence of Mammon with her newly awakened sense. And the question persists: can I control him?

No. Of course not. He is a god.

But as Mammon’s massive, rotten hand swings down she throws her own up as if to deflect that massive blow anyway. She brings her own will to bear against it.

Mammon’s hand stopping in midair as if it has slammed against an invisible wall. Danny dropping to the floor. The sense of pressure ballooning behind Irina’s eyes. Eclipsing thought. As if the weight of that hand is crushing her. The growing sense that if she wants to save Danny, she must sacrifice herself, and the realization that she will not, because in the end he is just some guy she met at a party. But then . . . like a blessing or benediction the pressure releases. The hand rises. Irina screams in relief. She hears an echo above, looks up, sees Polly Phillips nursing her wrist, teeth bared.

“See!” Phillips with shine “Control, Irina! Already you are starting to gather it to yourself.” He claps his hands. “I can guide—”

But if this night is all about control, then Irina is done letting Phillips dictate this moment.

“Run!” she yells at Danny.

Danny, though, is too slow, is still picking himself up. He doesn’t have time to get his feet beneath him before Polly brings Mammon’s hand slashing forward.

And for all Phillips’s boasts, Irina realizes, the businessman has not enslaved a god. His daughter has, and then Phillips has enslaved her, a poor broken thing, her mind cracked, although whether by chance, or design, or by the very forces she wields, Irina cannot know.

Irina throws up her hands. Mammon’s hand stops and Irina’s feet grind back over rock, driven back by Polly Phillips’s will, as vast and implacable as the god before her.

Irina heaves back, unsure of her own capabilities, only sure of her horror and her rage, stretching out like two vast oceans behind her.

Mammon’s massive, filthy hand skidding sideways to escape the conflicting pressures. His hand skidding over her and Danny, the chain rattling past them. Irina bunches her will beneath the palm, pushing it up towards Phillips. She feels the god’s enmity towards His captor, His own hatred fueling the clawing swipe, as much as her own.

The chain arrests the god’s reach. Inhuman muscles strain. Vast links of copper creak.

“Polly, stop Him!” The sharp bark of command in Phillips’s voice.

Irina’s joy at the look of startled worry in his eyes is boundless.

Then Polly sends Mammon’s other arm darting towards her. Split nails slash at her chest. She spills backward, somersaulting head over ass to avoid the blow. Her control forgotten, Mammon’s second arm scrabbles towards her.

The sharp, hard crack of the chains pulled taught. The god’s great head looming toward her, His expression impenetrable through the reams of dirty fabric. The bronze circlet lies askew.

Irina lying in the dirt, breathing hard. Glaring up at Phillips and his daughter. Phillips with his teeth bared.

“The pair of you must stop this!” The first true emotion she’s heard in Phillips’s voice.

Something cruel twists Polly’s features.

Mammon darts away from Irina, twists toward where Danny is crouching. Irina is learning just fast enough, though. She marshals herself, heaves with her will. The god’s hand is deflected upward, goes again once more for Phillips and Polly.

Mammon caught between two battling wills. One hand reaching toward Irina, one toward Polly. The two vast chains binding him stretched taut. Metal creaks. Pain returns to Irina’s head. A nuclear bomb blast swelling behind her eyes. Colored spots burst in her vision like blood vessels in her iris.

Her knees trembling. Metal trembling. A god trembling.

“No!” Phillips howls. “Stop! You’ll—”

And then even he is drowned out. A crack like cannon fire. Like the globe falling off its axis.

Torn by forces it was not designed to withstand, metal breaks. Chains fail. Beneath the Black House, a god breaks free.

7

MARTA

She’d almost had him in her teeth. And then . . .

The concept of the past is harder to hold onto in this shape. So much of what is here and now is insistent to her.

She remembers a hall. Danny and the woman on its threshold. Preparing to lunge forward. And then . . . a vague impression of her prey disappearing ahead of her. The desire to pursue. Something holding her back. A hand on her collar. And then it slipped. And then . . .

☉

She remembers there were good times even toward the end. Even when they both knew where they were ultimately heading. Even as their friends behaved like desperate lighthouse keepers flashing ever-more-urgent warning signals at them while they plowed resolutely toward the rocks.

They’d gone to a restaurant. She can’t remember the occasion. Maybe there’d been an event, or maybe it had just been an attempt to rekindle the joy. But when they’d got there, she hadn’t been able to find anything good on the menu. At first, she’d expected him to get mad after all the anticipation, and then she’d expected to get mad at him for not getting mad. But there’d just been a sort of peace in wandering slowly down the streets, peering in the windows of places, scanning menus.

They’d ended up at some Italian place, and he was funny, she remembers, during the awkward wait for the food. Got onto some riff about a sitcom episode they’d both watched. And she could tell that he’d made an effort for her. Had pulled out a shirt she liked, ironed it badly. Had put on that weird Russian aftershave she’d bought him for Christmas.

Then, afterward, they’d caught a movie, and it had been so damned good. Something exciting, and beautiful, and bittersweet, and she’d held his hand, and he’d put his arm around her. Then afterward, heading home, they’d blown off the first three subway stops they’d been so engrossed in dissecting the story, the symbolism, the messages.

That night, she remembers, she slept calm and easy, sheltered from all the bad dreams in the circle of his arms.

☉

Out of the past. Into the now. Marta entering a cave. Green light blooming. Something in it terrifying. Something in it enticing.

Then Marta seeing it all: Danny, the woman, the chains, the god.

Marta small and insignificant in His eye. All her newfound might made pitiable and small. The understanding in her animal mind that this thing, this god, is the source of her strength. It is channeled into her. Stolen. Repurposed. Chained up within her with words of command.

She sees herself suddenly as if from the window of her bedroom in Brooklyn. Sees a warrior gone feral, a woman who only fights for other people’s agendas. Sees her body broken and distorted. Sees the full horror of it all.

Then the chains break. The god tears free. Power tears free. The chains inside her snapping. The words that gave her purpose, snapping.

And inside this new skin, Marta loses herself utterly.

IRINA

Chains whipping through the air. A god self-flagellating in the wild paroxysms of freedom. Stone dust filling the air. Chaos.

Irina staggering. Irina finding the thing she was pushing against suddenly unmoored. Mammon allowed to become nebulous. Above, Polly Phillips screams, half collapses. Oscar Phillips sparing her not a single glance. Turning. Running.

A chain scours the earth between Irina and Danny. She flings herself to safety, rolling over unrelenting rock. From behind: a mewling cry. Marta has arrived—the wolf rearing back, protoplasmic snout bent by the flying chain.

The god rages on. The wolf contorts in curious, unknowable agonies. Danny and Irina try to run for cover.

Even as she takes her first steps, though, Irina feels the first wrench of suction on her heels. The clawing, cloying need of Mammon’s desire. She stumbles, drives forward, gains precious yards, trips over herself. Her dress is flapping backwards, as if caught in a strong wind. She hauls herself on hands and knees.

Mammon is finding himself, she understands dully, without fully knowing how. He is expanding out from this tiny, compressed form that He has been forced to exist in. And now that He is free to expand and erupt, there will be—as there are with all detonations—casualties caught in the blast radius.

Irina understanding she has only seconds to escape the event horizon of Mammon’s desire. To not be forever trapped as His possession. Irina pushing with all she has to escape that expanding radius.

It is not enough.

Her fingers slide back over rock.

Then: Danny hauling her up; the greater weight and momentum of him fighting against the growing gravity of Mammon; the pair of them staggering away; Irina finding the strength to run.

A glance back, over her shoulder. Mammon dissolving. Becoming an It, a Thing, a swirling miasma in the air. The chains have disappeared, drawn down into the swirling center of the god. Loose rock and dust swirl through the air. The green light is dimming too, all of it going down, down, down into the center of the god.

Irina sees Marta too, just behind them, struggling to escape. The wolf racing desperately, obscene jaws open, panting wildly.

And then they are out of the cavern and into the hallway, running. Twisting and turning, and still the pull of Mammon is expanding out, hard on their heels, sapping their strength. Danny pants. Irina gasps. It is like running through the tide, the water rising ever higher.

Irina losing her sense of time, of place. Everything becoming focused on putting her feet down. On getting one more breath into her lungs.

Irina trips over something. Some shop vac’s tubing. Looks around, realizes she is back in the basement. The quotidian space of shelving and household junk. Looks back, sees an open door and a concrete corridor behind it. Sees the corridor collapsing. A rush of concrete dust billowing toward her.

Tumbling, crashing concrete and rock fill the doorway. And then, suddenly that is it. The basement roof holds firm. The collapse’s onslaught is ended, celebrated only by a rush of dust and dirt as nebulous as applause.

Irina’s exhausted absence of shock. Her discovery that she is too tired to react. Irina lying back on the cold, damp, unfinished floor, and simply closing her eyes.

DANNY

Danny waiting. Danny staring. Danny praying. Because Marta was behind them. Marta was down there. Danny waiting for her to emerge. To have survived.

Danny realizing she has not.

Danny’s knees give way. Something inside him gives way. A keening sound he didn’t know he could make emerging from him.

☉

He remembers meeting her mother for the first time. A woman with features as forgiving as a rock face. 

“Daniel,” she’d said the first time she’d met him. “A biblical name Are you a Christian, Daniel?”

“Mom!”

Danny delighted by this glimpse of the teenage Marta exposed by what was clearly a much-repeated moment.

“I was raised that way, sure.”

“God is my judge,” Marta’s mom had said. “That is what your name means.”

“I’ve been told.” A duck of the head. “Hopefully he won’t find me too wanting.”

Danny feels like he is generally good with moms. Sometimes better with them than he is with their daughters.

“It is not God’s judgement you shall need to worry about today, Daniel.”

A moment of icy staring, and then a smile had split her face like a cavern revealed in a cliff. Her laugh was a rusty croaking sound. And then Danny had laughed too, loud and uproarious, while Marta had said, “Shit, mom,” and squeezed Danny’s arm.

She’d ended up giving him her recipe for perogies. He’d made them with Marta and she’d seemed baffled by the instructions.

“What do you mean, you’ve never made cheese sauce before?” he finally asked her.

“It comes in the packet with the Mac and Cheese. Why do I need to make that shit?”

“This is your mother’s recipe!”

“You mistaking me for my mother?”

And then more laughter, and he’d grabbed her, and proven that he had not taken her for her mother with his mouth and his hands and his desperate need for her, and the perogies had burned and set off the smoke detector, and it had all felt just a little bit like magic.

☉

Danny seeing Irina lying on the floor. A rising irrational anger in him that he chose her. And yes, she was not trying to kill him, but also she has not fallen asleep leaning against him on the couch watching the fifth episode of Lost in a row. She has not ever discussed with him the fact that frozen spaghetti reheated in the microwave is somehow both inferior and superior to the freshly cooked stuff. He has not ever loved her, and she has not ever loved him.

Irina opens her eyes. “Are you okay?”

He is not. But what can she do about that? What can he? The universe moves inexorably forward. There is only one door out of here. So, he goes to it.

“We should . . .” He doesn’t say what. Neither of them capable of completing that thought.

“Yeah,” she says.

He opens the door. Stairs beyond. But stairs gone awry. A mishmash of styles and angles intersecting. A wooden riser leading to a carpeted step, leading to one of stone. The staircase taking abrupt thirty-degree turns left then right, then looping back on itself. A short, spiral section with an ornate wrought iron banister.

Danny and Irina ascending in confusion. Oil paintings of old white men peering down at them. Unframed abstract pieces hanging at odd angles. A statue of a naked cherub wrestling with a snake in the middle of the steps, placed so that they have to edge around it.

“Something’s . . .” Irina starts.

“Yeah,” Danny agrees. “Something very much is.”

The stairs expand above them, like the mouth of a river, spilling up and out onto a room Danny cannot recall. Something more ornate than anything else he has seen at Phillips’s estate. Like something he could imagine finding at Versailles. Gilding and white paneling. The band and the guests gone silent. Just their footsteps and breath.

Irina looking around. “I don’t know where we are.”

“Fuck.” Danny on his haunches hyperventilating again. Head down and woozy. “What’s happening?”

“I think . . . I think Oscar Phillips is trying to recruit me.”

Danny attempting to compute. Danny failing wildly.

“Mammon,” she says. “His daughter. She can . . .” She licks her lips. “It’s about control. She controls Mammon somehow. I think . . . Well, I did the same thing. Down there.”

Danny wishing she sounded horrified.

“But if his daughter can do it. Why you?” An attempt to divert her.

Irina shrugs.

“We’ve got to get out.” Danny saying it almost like a test.

“Yes.”

A little breath of relief. It’s not much in the face of everything he’s seen, but it’s something to know that she’s still with him.

A pair of large double doors is set into the wall opposite. Danny crosses to them. The handle is cut glass, cold and angular.

“The way out is through.” Danny not sure where he heard it before. Sure that it must be appropriate here, though.

“Was that meant to be reassuring?”

“Sounded cool in my head.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Moment’s gone.”

“Yeah.”

Both of them contemplating the door.

“Fuck it,” Danny says.

“That’s the spirit.”

MARTA

“This heat is gonna kill me.”

Marta shifts the weight of her rifle, grins at Private First Class Williams. “You get used to it.”

Around them, Afghan villagers bustle through their daily lives. Above them, the endless blue of the sky. Inside Marta, a sense of unease. Which of course, she always has out here, waiting for violence. But this is different. This feels . . . repetitive?

“Not sure that getting used to being sweaty all the time is something I’m looking forward to.”

“Nothing much else to look forward to for the next ten months.”

Marta hearing herself say the words. Her sense of déjà vu increasing.

A gaggle of boys passes them. They cut down a side street. The branches of pomegranate trees arch overhead. Melons used to grow there, and grapes in the surrounding farmland. Now, it’s all churned to mud, though.

She hears something then. A scream long and drawn-out. She jerks around. But . . . just a chicken underfoot, squawking and offended.

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

Marta closes her eyes, shakes her head. When she opens her eyes, there is a wolf in the road. It is large and sleek, heavily muscled, its fur almost black against the blazing brightness of the day. And her heart leaps at the sight of it. Almost like love. Almost like when she saw Danny at the coffee stand . . .

She shakes her head again. Who is Danny? What coffee stand?

When she looks back the wolf is gone.

Something is coming she thinks. Something bad. Next to her, Private First Class Williams is talking about the paradox of peacekeeping with a gun. And Marta tries to open her mouth, tries to articulate this great upswell of fear and foreknowledge, but—

A massive bang. Marta wheels round, gun raised.

A car has backfired. A man sits behind the wheel spitting curses. Marta slowly eases her finger off the trigger.

“Jesus,” Williams says. “You almost—”

And then her lower jaw comes off as the sniper’s bullet hits her.

Marta howls, dives for cover, holds her rifle in shaking white-knuckled hands, then risks a look at Williams’s body, and—

☉

—stares back over the long slope of her canine shoulder. Sees blood and meat smeared along a corridor. Tries to think how she got here. Tries to remember. Closes her eyes. Opens them and looks—

☉

—out through the windshield of the Humvee as it jounces down the road. Dust clouds from the vehicles ahead obscuring vision.

“—reconstruct the whole jaw from photos of her,” the driver says. His name is Jones. “Crazy what they can do these days.”

“Yeah.” Marta wishing Jones would shut up. Wanting to shut him up. Thinking about how it’s not great that she’s carrying a loaded weapon right now.

She lies to the therapist they make her talk to. Tells him she doesn’t need help. Tells herself that, too. Doesn’t convince either of them.

Sometimes she thinks she wants another attack. Wants to be able to take all this rage and pour it into these people who hurt her. Her. Fuck Private First Class Williams and her reconstructed jaw, and the medical bills that will cripple her far more than any sniper’s bullet ever could. They wronged Marta. The first action she saw here, and she spent it crouched behind a wall. She didn’t fire a single goddamn shot.

“It were me,” Jones says, “I think I’d have them narrow the point of my chin a bit.”

Around them, the sand is blowing up, forming an opaque mass. Grains ricochet off the car. Through the windshield, the whole world disappears into the swirling sands.

8

IRINA

Irina’s feet slapping against wooden floorboards. Then flagstones. She’s lost her Ferragamo pumps somewhere along the way. They cost her a week’s rent and were uncomfortable as hell. She thinks they are a stupid thing to miss when the world is going mad. She misses them all the same.

Is the world going mad, she wonders, or has it always been this way? Was this scene always playing out behind the curtain she was never allowed to pull back? Now Phillips is letting her see it.

The image of his outstretched hand. The memory of his smug self-satisfaction. His daughter beside him. A tool. An afterthought.

And she felt grateful.

Irina’s sense of self-loathing.

“Holy Christ.” Danny interrupting her thoughts as they round a corner. Danny trying to shield her from the sight of the body on the floor.

The hallway before them is broader than the corridor from which they are emerging. Checkerboard tiles are splayed across the floor. Staircases seem to have accumulated here, twisting off toward upper floors. The body lies near the center of the room. Splayed limbs in a thick smear of blood.

Someone has taken its eyes.

Irina covering her mouth, turning away. Next to her, Danny takes heavy breaths. “We keep pushing through.” Said with a sort of zealotry. He steps over the body toward one of the doors.

She follows. But as she does, she thinks about Mammon as a god of want. Who wanted this? And what does Danny want, she wonders? A way out. But how badly does he want it? How badly does Mammon make him want it? When he gets desperate, what will he sacrifice? Who?

And of course, if Mammon works on him then what is happening to her? Can she believe that the voice in the back of her head—telling her that these are the answers she was always looking for—is her own?

Except . . . what if she is immune? She was able to control Mammon for a moment. Was able to push back against his endless desires and shape his actions to her will. She was capable, in that moment, of something others were not. And as she did it, that eternal sense of not belonging to a place, of never being fully accepted, it had gone.

Had she enjoyed it?

They go through a door on the hallway’s far side, unsure if they are traveling away from the realm of the eye-thief or deeper in. She sees a thin-necked glass vase on a side table and grabs it. Danny sees this makeshift weapon and grabs a small marble figurine.

There are more doorways ahead of them. Some are ajar. They hear voices, scuffling footsteps. Irina draws closer to Danny.

Protection? Is that what she wants?

Three people emerge from one doorway: two men in dirty tuxedos, a woman in a torn dress. And . . .

Their eyes are gone.

This is not some clean, congenital condition. Careful surgery was not performed.

“We hear you.” The woman shuffles toward them, toeing forward, her hand swiping back and forth. “We know you’re there.”

Danny doesn’t lower the statue. “So what?” he says.

His voice strikes the trio like electricity. Their bodies jerking, spinning toward them.

“These are His lands,” the woman says.

“Whose?”

The trio shuffling closer. One of them is carrying a plastic carrier bag, as if they just returned from a grocery store. Something sways in it.

“His,” the woman says. “And he demands a toll.”

“What toll?” she asks.

Danny turning to her and putting a finger to his lips. Lifting a foot very carefully and taking a silent step. They slide left as the trio continue to talk to the space they just occupied.

“It’s not so much,” the woman says.

“It only hurts a moment,” says the first man.

The second pulls a screwdriver from a jacket pocket.

“Do you mean Phillips?” Irina asks. “Oscar Phillips?”

The trio whirl toward them. It’s hard to read their expressions. Eyebrows work above vacant pits.

“Oscar Phillips holds no sway here,” the woman says.

Further confirmation, if they needed it, that Phillips’s plan has gone awry. That he is not the infallible demiurge he pretends to be.

“Well,” Danny cracking his knuckles. “I don’t think you hold much sway here either. So how about you piss off and let me freak out in peace?”

The trio turns as if to confer on this proposition. Then, as one, they dart forward with a speed and confidence previously hidden. The woman’s hands extended like claws. The first man going low. The second with his screwdriver wielded aloft.

Danny yelling, half falling back, shock and surprise, and a sort of outrage. Irina lurching out of the way like a drunken toreador. The trio bursting past her. Danny’s big fists swinging. Sending the woman down into the ground while the two men crash into him.

Irina’s hesitations forgotten. She goes in hard. Wraps an arm around a man’s throat. Half remembered lessons from a self-defense class taught by an Israeli woman with knuckles the size of walnuts. She hauls the man off Danny’s chest. He writhes. Danny kicking at the second man. Blood everywhere. And the noise of it. The heat. The sweat. The pain. The first man driving his elbows into Irina’s sides. Kicking and screaming. She’s screaming. Danny on his feet, stomping down. The struggles of the man Irina’s holding getting weaker. Her arm getting weaker. Holding on. Holding on. Holding on.

The man goes limp. She drops him like a cockroach. Danny stomps one more time.

The woman picking herself up. Circling them, snarling.

Danny’s foot knocks against the plastic bag, dropped in the mess. The woman goes stiff at the rustle.

Irina making a decision, darting down in a single fluid motion, seizing up the bag in a cacophony of crinkling plastic, and flings it away. The bag sails. The bag spills. Eyeballs tumble from it in a wet splattering rain.

The woman screams, lunges toward Irina.

Danny punches her with all his weight. The woman hits the floor.

Danny and Irina panting. Irina shuddering. Danny rubbing his knuckles.

“Shit,” he says.

She looks over at him. He fingers a gash in his shirt. Red stains the white fabric around it.

He catches her expression. “It’s not deep.”

She nods. There’s not much she can do anyway. Not even “not much” really.

The way out is still through. They pick a door in the far wall at random and push on.

☉

A series of rooms more consistent in their tone. A gothic feel to the architecture. A lot of stone. Are they, she wonders, moving further away from Mammon’s influence or closer to the heart of the web?

There are signs of habitation. Chairs and tables pulled together into small circles. Bottles and glasses arranged. Plates with the remains of food. They hear voices. They pick quiet doorways when they can, wait for voices to fade when they can’t.

They still hold to the idea of a straight passage through the house. Danny still fixated on the idea that there is a limit to this. That an edge must eventually be reached.

They’re picking their way through one room, the floor covered by hundreds of discarded wine glasses, when a group enters at the far end. There’s five of them, all men. All of them have had their eyes removed. Or . . . have removed their own eyes. Irina realizing that she can’t be sure.

She and Danny freeze. The group walks with the same shuffling gait as the trio, sweeping their toes back and forth. They knock against the wine glasses, topple some over, push others aside.

“—totally overpaid,” one of them is saying.

“Because you think of fashion as a commodity and not a luxury,” says another. He wears, Irina sees, a pair of women’s gloves that stretch to his elbows.

“Still,” says the first. “Two eyeballs for gloves.”

“I’d have paid three.”

“Barely worth a handful of lashes.”

Irina’s foot trembling beside a wine glass. Irina remembering the plastic bag full of eyeballs.

Danny starting to move, picking his way through the wine glasses, beckoning her to come on. Her breathing very loud in her own head.

“Idiots like Derek is why inflation happens,” one man says.

“You’ve got to expect fluctuations in a new market,” says another

“That’s where the profit is.” Derek grinning.

She wants Danny to go over there. Wants to see his fists go to work. Almost tries to reach out with her mind and see if she can make him do her bidding. Catches herself at the last moment. Is almost as horrified at herself as she is at these men. The man who exchanged his sight for a pair of fucking gloves.

She follows Danny through the room, moving silently. When they step into the next room, muscles work in Danny’s jaw.

“If I find the fucker who set this system up, who demands a toll . . .”

“I’ll help.” Said with feeling.

DANNY

They go through more rooms. Architecture and interior design become fractal again. They enter a room with a massive staircase, stretching from one wall to another, leading nowhere. A landing near the ceiling has been made into a dais. A throne has been placed upon it, gleaming gold.

Its occupant: not quite a king. A small man. Compact. Olive skin taut as a snare drum.

A terrible spasm of recognition in Danny: the man from Daochu. The man who offered him the seven figures that made him dumb enough to go into the Black House’s basement.

He is now absent a pair of eyes.

“You,” Danny hisses.

The man from Daochu cocks his head. A smile unfolds across his face. “Daniel.”

Danny’s uncertainty. The competing desire to gain answers, and to beat one shade of shit out of this man for every figure on that piece of paper.

“What are you doing here?”

“I was a guest, Daniel. An enemy kept closer than a friend. Now I am . . . something more perhaps. Something less? The context has changed.”

“Who is this?” Irina without any context at all.

“The fucker from Daochu who hired me.”

“And have you got what I want, Daniel?”

Danny’s incredulity almost a detonation in his mind. He mounts the first three steps. His hands itch for violence. “The hell did you just say?”

“I suggested a transaction, Daniel. The fundamental unit of society. I have something you want. In return you give me something I want.”

Danny going up more steps. Danny unwilling to listen to any more of this shit. “You can take your money and you can shove it up your—”

“What do you want?” the small, olive-skinned man says.

“Nothing from you.”

“A way out.” It’s Irina. Danny looks back at her. She meets his gaze. Because she’s not wrong.

Another smile on the face of the Daochu man. He stands from his throne, descends toward Danny. “I came here by helicopter,” he says. “It is a phone call away.”

Danny licking his lips. Danny contemplating one more journey into the underworld. “What do you want?” he asks. He feels hopeless. “What is there left to want when the world has gone mad.”

The Daochu man stands before Danny. “You know what I want, Danny.”

Danny genuinely failing to understand this man, his motives. “You still want—”

“I want your fucking eyes!” the Daochu man screams. A hand comes up, claws at Danny’s face. Danny recoils, totters at the top of the steps.

Instinct taking over. Danny reaching out. A flailing hand catching a lapel. Then they both fall. The pair of them crashing down the great slope of the stairs, one over the other, momentarily indistinguishable, just a single, eight-limbed beast.

They crash onto the floor. Spill apart. The smaller man flies free, lands with a sickening crunch. Danny’s breath whooshes in and out. Blood drips from the wound in his chest. He feels a fresh gash in his forehead.

The Daochu man lies very still.

Danny rolls onto all fours. Danny is aware of too many sources of pain. He spits onto the floor. Red in it.

“He’s dead.” Irina leaning over the Daochu man.

“What?” Danny’s rising horror. Did he . . . ? “I didn’t mean to.” Is he a killer now? Was this his fault? “He attacked me.” Danny defending himself, but Irina isn’t attacking. She starts going through the dead man’s pockets.

“What are you . . . ?” Danny horrified.

“He said there was a helicopter a phone call away. That’s what you want, right?”

Danny too overwhelmed by the body, but the implications of the jagged angle in its neck. “What?”

Irina produces a phone from one of the Daochu man’s pockets, holds it up to him. “We can call a helicopter,” she says. “We can get out.”

9

DANNY

Irina using a dead man’s face to unlock a phone. Irina going to the settings and deactivating security. Irina handing a phone to Danny. Danny holding it like a totem.

This is escape. This is freedom. Except:

“There’s no signal,” he says.

“Maybe up is easier than through.”

Danny’s hope like a pulse in his throat. The idea that he can get back to his old life almost palpable. Get back to his apartment in Washington Heights. His beat-up old futon, and his microwave that never gets above fifty percent power. Get back to his office, and the anxious little men who worry their wives are cheating on them, and the pissed-off women who are certain that their husbands are. Back to sitting in his car taking pictures of couples leaving hotels. To cold-calling the lawyers who’d thrown him work from time to time. Get back to Ash and Sammy, and evening visits. To watching kids TV, and heating microwave meals, and picking up Ash’s medicine from CVS. Get back to the grind. The familiar friction of the everyday. Get back to the way the world was. Not good perhaps, but predictable. The dangers known, survivable.

They find a door. They go through. And through. And through. Styles shift and swirl, and intersect, and assault each other. Marble, tile, wood, stone. Art Deco, Bauhaus, Victorian, Baroque.

And then: “Stairs!” Irina says.

They ascend. And ascend. And ascend. Steel, cement, bamboo, brick. Gothic, Brutalism, Colonial, Neoclassical. How many stories have they ascended? Fifteen? Fifty. Danny’s lungs burn.

And then abruptly the staircase ends. He is in a low dark corridor. The lights are out, and yet . . . light coming in. From outside. Through windows.

At the end of the hall, a door. Moonlight seeping below its base.

Danny as a dirigible borne aloft by elation. He walks toward the door, grabs the handle. His heart pounding so hard it feels like his whole chest is vibrating. A fear that the door will be locked.

“Careful . . .” Irina as the voice of reason. The voice of someone who’s seen what this house holds.

Danny not giving a shit about reason anymore. Danny too goddamn desperate.

He turns the handle, pushes, prays.

And the door swings wide, out onto the night.

MARTA

Marta’s nose full of the scent of Danny. Trailing it along corridors and through rooms. Following the scent upstairs. Heading through a door and into . . .

☉

. . . a Humvee that bumps along an Afghan road with potholes so deep Marta half expects her ears to pop as they head to the bottom of one. Behind them, a compound retreating.

“Finally awake?” Jones says, at the wheel beside her. “Wish I could fall asleep with all this shit coming down on us.”

Had she been asleep? Or . . . elsewhere?

Where else would she have been?

“You present and correct, Corporal?” Sergeant Brown in the back seat, examining a map. “Looked a bit green back there.”

A memory fluttering in Marta’s head. She’d been in a house . . . A great mansion. No. No she’d been in Ikram Qurban’s compound.

Qurban is an Afghan warlord. Is a piece of shit on humanity’s heel. But he is their piece of shit. Opposes the Taliban. When the U.S. government is unwilling to send people to die, Qurban has no problems as long as the price is right. And today . . . today . . .

Yes, she remembers now. Today they have to go make sure no-one is impinging on Qurban’s portion of the poppy market.

“Ready to do my job, sir,” she said.

“Just the thought of protecting that asshole Qurban making you sick to your stomach?”

She grins. “Sir, yes, sir.” Brown is a good guy to follow into the field.

“You and me both, Corporal,” Brown says. He looks up from the map, smiles at her. “But he’s a strategic asset. He saves soldiers’ lives.”

The vehicle rolls on. The countryside rolls by. Fields of poppies all around them. Red flowers lilting back and forth. Workers bending and straightening. And a shadow among the stalks.

For a moment, Marta thinks she sees a wolf running alongside them, somehow matching their speed. She blinks and it is gone.

“Just recon today?” she asks Brown.

“Yeah,” he nods. “Get a sense for the lay of the land. Figure out how to approach the problem.”

“Call in a fucking airstrike,” Jones says. “Simple.”

“Exactly how many times did your parents drop you?” Brown asks.

A pause. The pair both look at Marta. The sensation that this is a play and she just missed her cue.

“Yeah,” is all she can think to say.

A blink. A moment. A glitch. Jones and Brown laughing uproariously. The car swerving. A wolf howling.

Then gone. Just the three of them in the Humvee staring at each other in silence.

The landscape around them skipping. Brief glimpses of in-between places—a field, a town, a mountain road—then Jones is pulling the Humvee to a stop. The three of them exiting the vehicle with a slamming of car doors.

“Should have a vantage point from up here,” Brown says.

It’s a hundred yards to the ledge. They shuffle forward on their bellies. Brown holds a pair of binoculars up, protecting them from the dirt and rocks. They settle in a patch of scrappy grass, look down.

Another compound below them. The compound of Sayyid Rustam. Another wannabe mujahideen warlord. Another petty drug baron. The only difference between him and Ikram Qurban is who he makes deals with.

“I’d quite like to be a sniper, you know,” Marta says. Because she’s personable that way.

“You?” Jones looking at her like she just announced she wants to give this all up to become part of the cast of Sesame Street.

“Yeah, me.”

“But you’d be shit at it.”

“Fuck you.”

“You honestly think you’d be any good at it?”

“Fuck.” A pause. “You.”

Even though she knows he’s right. It doesn’t give him the right to point it out.

“Hey, I think we got something serious here.” Brown ignoring this witty banter. Brown passes the binoculars to Marta and points to a cluster of buildings. Smoke rises nearby them.

“Those look like fire pits to you?” Brown says.

“You think this is a refinery?”

“Could be.” Brown chewing his lip.

“They’re making heroin down there?” Jones catching up.

As Marta watches, a door opens in one of the buildings. A child exits. He wears a red T-shirt and khaki pants. He also has a rifle strapped across his back. Almost as tall as he is.

The kid pisses up against the side of the building, goes back inside.

“You should leave now, you know.”

Marta looks away from the building with a start. Brown is gone. Danny is lying in the grass next to her in a cheap rented tux, holding out his hand for the binoculars. He smiles at her. It’s more than a little sad. “It doesn’t get any better from here,” he tells her.

DANNY

Danny dazzled by the moonlight. Danny blinking, trying to take the world in in glimpses. Trying to make sense of it.

“Oh.” Irina’s voice little more than a breath. “Oh God.”

The roof of the Black House stretching out before them almost to the horizon. Miles of it. An ocean of sloping tiles. An endless plane of flat brick and arching shingles. A forest of towers and crenellations, dormers and gables, cupolas and skylights. A near-limitless landscape of architecture.

A thin rim of the gardens just visible at the dim edge of the horizon. A few ragged trees, a few open splashes of green. But even as Danny watches they are eroded. Bricks blur. Minarets rise, merge, blossom into buttresses and belfries. Walls spasm, grow, intersect, mount toward the heavens.

The house is growing. It is consuming the land around it. It is spreading like a disease.

“What?” Danny says. And then again, “What?”

A noise behind him. He looks back. Sees the distance travelled. Is appalled. Because behind them, hanging in the sky above the Black House . . .

It is a black hole. It is pure as pitch. It devours the center of the house as fast as it expands. Walls and spires and weathervanes and finials erupt from the house only to be seized and dragged upward. It is, he thinks getting larger.

It is, he realizes, not a collapsed star. It is a god. He is making out an event horizon of desire that must take possession of everything, even light.

“God,” Irina says again.

“We . . . We can . . . We can still . . .” Danny getting control of himself word by word. “The helicopter can still . . . It can travel faster than the house is expanding.” Danny with no clue if this is true or not. Danny thinking about Ash and Sammy. Wondering how long before the mansion swallows up all of New York City. Danny needing to hold onto something, even if it’s just the solace of fiction.

“Danny . . .” Irina speaking gently. The way you do to sick people and dangerous animals.

He holds the phone up, taps the screen, sees two bright and glorious bars.

“A signal!” he says. “I’ve got a signal!”

“Danny!” Irina’s voice sharper now.

But he cannot hear her insistence that he face reality. Not if this is reality.

“I can get through.” Said with the certainty of prophecy.

“Danny they’re coming.”

Danny hesitating. Turning to look. Seeing something like fear in Irina’s face. Something like awe.

“Who?”

And then he feels them. Recognizes that buzz-saw sense of desire. The gravity of it tugging at him. The splinters of the void that is Mammon. They are coming closer.

“Run.” Saying it even though he doesn’t want to. Wants so desperately to be in charge of his destiny. But what can he do? He grabs Irina’s arm.

“No,” she says. “Get behind me.”

“What?”

He can see them coming. Circular heat shimmers moving like ball lightning across the roof. Tiles, and chimney pots, and window panes are sucked into their maws.

There are only moments before it’s too late.

Irina doesn’t move.

It’s too late.

Irina reaching out with both hands.

The creatures roil against an unseen barrier of her will. They smash against it and are pushed away. She twists her hand and tears at empty air, and he can feel them shrieking as they fly away, crumbling brick and shattered tiles racing after them to plunge down those infinite maws.

They come again, a shimmering wave of black-hole hate. And Irina sets her feet. Sweat stands out on her brow. She grunts as they make impact with . . . nothing that Danny can see. They pile upon each other, a cresting wave that breaks and spills, and churns through roof ridges and gambreled slopes of corrugated steel. They burn and burrow, circling round, and Danny fears they will chew through the roof entirely, drop a great circle of the ceiling down into the bowels of the house below, but the house keeps churning out more and more roof in its desperate, inexorable desire to consume the world.

“Back,” Irina hisses through her molars. “I want you to get back.” She shoves with both hands and the creatures go spilling and tumbling, burrowing and burning. She rips her hands through the air, and Danny sees one torn apart, the whole shimming blur of it fraying, shattering into ragged chunks of disturbed air, evaporating into nothingness.

He almost feels the cry from them. Irina shrieks and drops to one knee. Danny’s certainty that they are abruptly exposed. Danny’s knowledge that there is nothing—absolutely nothing—that all his size and bulk can do. This is not something that can be understood with fists, and hands, and fingers that can change the spark plugs on an old beat-up Toyota, and can figure out how to fix the valve on the running cistern. This is nowhere he belongs.

Then, with a roar and grit teeth, Irina is up and advancing, forcing the creatures back. Her hands are ripping, and there is something close to the periphery of Danny’s hearing emerging. It is spike of pain between his eyes, and he wonders how Irina can take it, Blood vessels in her eyes are bursting. But the creatures are routed now. She breaks into a run, and he scrambles desperately after her, hauling himself up and down slopes of the roof, tripping and sliding, going almost on all fours as she lets out savage shouts of joy.

She is standing on the ridge of a roof when he catches up with her. Her breath comes in short sharp bursts. She pushes a hand through sweaty hair, puts a hand on his chest, leans her weight on him. He takes it. Gives her what little he can.

“Are you okay?”

She doesn’t seem to hear him. Stares up at the black hole that seems intent on devouring the world.

“I can feel him,” she whispers.

Danny uncertain if this is a confession or a boast. Danny trying to call her back to him from wherever she’s gone. “What does he feel like?”

Nothing for a moment. Just her heaving breath. Then, “Pure.”

Danny tries to give that context. “Like . . . Virgin Mary pure?”

“Elemental. He’s nothing but what He is. There’s no hidden agenda. No obfuscation.”

“He’s a giant black hole in the sky. I don’t think he’s exactly hiding.”

She takes her hand off him, steps away. She looks at Mammon, as if her attention is the latest thing to be drawn into his core.

“Was Phillips right? Can you control him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? But if I can . . .” She works it around her mouth. “I’m afraid.” She finally turns back to him. “Of what would happen. To me. To the world. To you.”

He steps toward her, closes the distance, puts an arm around her, feels her shoulder blades, slender, almost bird-like.

“What am I?” Her words whispered into his chest.

“No,” he says. “Don’t do that to yourself. The world’s gone mad, and we’re just holding on in the middle of it. They way out is through. And we’re so close to the edge.” He holds up the cell phone. “This is our way out.”

Irina steps back, stares at the horizon. At the world beyond, being eaten away.

“I don’t know if there is a way out anymore, Danny.”

“We can get away,” he says. Because he has to. Because he can’t allow himself to imagine not doing that. “We can find the people who matter. Get them to somewhere safe.”

She pushes away from him. Not roughly. Just gently disengages. She looks at her hands. And he feels for her. He can only imagine what it is like in this world of horrors to find that that horror lives within you.

He raises the phone to his ear.

“That isn’t the way out,” she says. “Not for me.”

He almost drops the phone.

“I’ll bring it with me, whatever it is.” Her hand gesturing at the house. “Like a haunting. So, I need to know what it is. What it can do. I need to understand.”

But Danny knows she doesn’t really mean need. “You want to understand.”

She looks at him. “I do.”

“That’s Him.” Danny gesticulating at Mammon. “That’s Him working on you.”

Irina chews her lip. “Maybe,” she says. “Maybe. But I don’t know. And I want to know.”

“No,” he says, knowing already that it’s a pointless thing to say, will in no way convince her. “We have to get out. We have to get to the people we love.”

“I’m sorry.” She’s shaking her head. “But if I don’t understand the past that got me to this moment, then the future will always be broken for me. Something will always be missing. From me. From it.”

“But that’s normal.” He tries to put all of his feeling into the words. “We’re all missing something. That’s human nature.” He can tell she’s not listening, and that makes him more desperate. He holds onto her shoulder hard. “We’ve got this far.”

She gives him a small sad smile. “Danny. You could come with me. Find a way to stop this place from swallowing the whole world. I think that’s how you really save the people you love. That’s where we can really change the way the world is.”

“This isn’t how the world is!” He can’t stop himself from shouting now. “This is all bullshit and hallucination, and fucking . . . I don’t know. Magic shit. Horror shit. This is a bad dream. If we can just get out, it’ll stop.”

She shakes her head, and she breaks his heart just by doing that. “You see, Danny, I think it is just like this. I think it always has been, and we just haven’t been looking right.”

“No . . .”

“I’m sorry, Danny.”

He wants to reach out to her, take hold of her, keep her with him. He is sure given time he can get through. If he just tries enough ways, he’ll get it right in the end.

He would have gotten it right with Marta in the end, if he’d just had enough time. Could have saved her if she hadn’t walked away. He’s sure. He’s sure there’s a way through . . .

But then the roof spews up a shelf of flat roofing, and there is a door in the wall supporting it, and she reaches out her hand and opens the door and steps through, and then before he can even take a step toward her, the door is a story above him, and then another, and he is standing there, all alone on the roof, and all around him the world is the way it is.

10

MARTA

The Afghan sun blazing overhead. A wolf approaching a scruffy compound, its body held low to the ground. Scent trails left by guards crisscrossing mud churned by feet and tires. Around it: scrubby grass and bushes yellowed by drought.

Brown is up on the outlook above the wolf, watching through his gun scope. Jones is circling round to the west. Jones and the wolf are plotting courses to the buildings and firepits set just outside of Sayyid Rustam’s compound.

“You can still turn back,” Danny says to the wolf. He sits on a nearby rock. He seems oblivious to the guards. He squints at the sun and wipes sweat from his forehead. He’s still wearing the tuxedo.

The wolf ignores him, stalks forward.

“I know,” Danny says, getting up and following the wolf, “that this feels like the only possible course of action. I want you to understand that I get that. That I get that—in so many ways—you’re the victim.”

The wolf lopes forward at a brisk trot, darting over a patch of exposed ground. Behind a boulder, the wolf hesitates, waits to see if a bullet ricochets off stone. It checks its peripherals, scans to see if it can spot Brown providing overwatch, makes out nothing.

The wolf is not sure where Jones is. It feels very much on its own.

“I wish there had been another path out of Brooklyn for you,” Danny says. He sits down on the boulder, rubs the back of his neck. “Or . . . that there’d been a way for you to stay in Brooklyn without it feeling like failure. I know you saw what happened to a lot of your friends. Working dead-end jobs they hated. Dropping out of school to raise kids, then not seeing the kids because they had to work twelve hours a day for minimum wage.

“Even in the army perhaps there might have been another path.” He shrugs. “I’m sorry. This probably isn’t helping. It’s all done really, isn’t it? Just picking at the same old wounds.”

The building is just a short sprint away. The wolf can see a guard over by the gates to Rustam’s compound. It waits until the guard looks away, and sprints forward.

Panting, it presses itself against a mud wall. Danny leans up against the other side. He’s taken off the tuxedo jacket, tied it around his waist. There’s a white flower peeking from its buttonhole. “Heat’s murder out here,” he says.

The wolf pulls its lips back from its teeth, growls.

Danny grimaces. “I know. I know. I’m circling the issue.” He bends down, gets on the wolf’s eye level. You don’t have to go in there, Mar. Not this time. You don’t have to do this to yourself.”

The wolf doesn’t listen. The wolf goes through a door.

It is dark after the blazing sun, and the smell is overwhelming. Sweet and giddy, cloying and bright, but beneath that . . . sweat and panic. There are two long rows of tables. Women are seated shoulder to shoulder on either side, bent over piles of poppies.

“You have to remember,” Danny says from the shadows, “that you were still messed up by Williams having her jaw blown off. That’s not something that you just shrug off.”

She stalks a single step forward into the barn. They have not seen her yet. Danny puts a hand on her front haunch, not rough, but heavy.

“I’m trying to save you, Mar.”

Her patience finally snapping. Turning on him. Biting out the words through sharp teeth. “Well, you don’t, Danny. You never could.”

And then she turns back to the room, but in that moment of distraction she has been undone. A boy has slipped out of the shadows. He is perhaps ten years old. Maybe eleven. She will never be sure.

He has a rifle pressed to his shoulder. It is aimed straight at her.

The women turn to look. More children emerge. More guns are pointed.

Marta puts out her hand. Her soft human hand. Just nails, no claws. When she opens her mouth, there are no fangs.

“Please,” she says to the boy. “I’m trying to save you.”

She is not sure she actually hears the gun go off. She thinks perhaps she sees the muzzle flash. Mostly, she is aware of the bullet striking her low in the chest. A little left of center. A massive echoing sensation. As if she is a bell, rung.

She is smashed back into the wall. Her head strikes the compacted mud and clay. She slumps to the floor. Her strings cut.

She cannot see Danny anywhere.

The boy is advancing on her. She is trying to catch her breath.

The bullet has hit her Kevlar vest. Not that that seems to make much difference to Marta right now. Everything has been knocked out of her, even her capacity to be enraged at the people that call this vest protection. She can only sit and watch the boy advance, his gun trained on her head.

Not this time, she thinks. I won’t fight back this time.

But she’s aware of her fingers scrabbling at her rifle. The impulse to survive existing without her conscious effort it seems. She realizes she is watching a moment play out that she has seen a million times before.

The boy presses the rifle stock to his shoulder.

She wishes Danny was here.

The gunfire, when it comes, is a roar; is a protracted howl of detonations and rattling machinery; is cacophony and chaos unfolding in fractal planes of destruction and panic across the poppy-strewn tables.

Jones in a doorway. Jones coming into the building from the opposite end. Jones switching his carbine to fully automatic and emptying a clip into the room without discretion or care.

Seedpods shatter. Tables jumping and flinch. The crack and whine of ricochets.

And the blood. Of course the blood. The contorting bodies. The women and children who die first.

The boy in front of her, whipping his gun around, dropping to a crouch, lining up a shot on Jones.

Her fingers still moving without her permission. She watches them, how her fingers wrap around the grip, flick the safety off, how she braces the stock against her stomach. That’s a terrible idea she thinks dully, but she also knows it is the best she can manage.

She is rushing back into herself in this final moment. She is regaining control of the wheel. And she fights against it. She howls like a wolf desperate to tear free, but her flesh has her. The gravity of her limbs pulling her down. As inescapable as a black hole. The event horizon of history.

She sits in the seat behind her own eyes, and watches as she chooses to point the gun at the boy. And then she’s there, and she’s not watching at all. She’s doing it. It is her.

“Look away.” She hears Danny whispering in her ear. “You don’t have to watch.”

But she keeps her eyes wide open as she pulls the trigger.

DANNY

Danny alone on a roof except for the end of the world.

Fuck it.

He dials, prays, puts the phone to his ear. Silence stretching out toward infinity. Like a body sucked into the heart of a black hole.

And then a single ring. A sound barely audible above the grinding of the expanding roof. Above the white noise roar of Mammon devouring the sky. But loud enough to jangle all of Danny’s hopes.

“Hello?”

There’s a Brooklyn edge to the word. A little abrasion on the surface. Someone who doesn’t have time for this crap.

“Hello!” Danny barking the word so loud and fast it becomes something other than itself. Something unintelligible. “Hello! Hello! Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, I can hear you, buddy. Who’s this?”

“Are you the helicopter pilot?”

A noise like the sucking of teeth. “I charter them, sure.”

“I need one.”

“Who is this?”

“Danny. Danny Spencer.”

“Okay, Danny, Danny Spencer, and where are you?”

Danny could almost weep. His whole body shaking. Something hard and immovable in his throat.

“The Black House,” he chokes out. “Out on Long Island. The—”

“Yeah, buddy. I know where The Black House is.”

“I’m up on the roof.”

A pause. “Okay.” Another pause. “Okay, we’ll make that work, I guess.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.” Danny babbling his gratitude.

“Let me just ask you one thing Danny, Danny Spencer.”

“What?” He’ll answer anything.

“Do you have it?”

“What?” Danny doesn’t understand.

“Have you got it yet, Danny?”

“Got what?”

“You know what we want, Danny. What we asked you to get. Information. Leverage. Something to give us a little competitive advantage. That’s the established price of passage. So, Danny, can you pay it?”

Danny actually winded by his bewilderment. And then: disappointment like a fuse; anger like a bomb.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Screaming into the phone. Neck muscles bulging. “Do you understand what is happening here? People are dying. The whole world has gone to shit. This house is . . . is . . .” He doesn’t have words. Doesn’t have much more than a primal scream of frustration and rage. Wrestling words around the urge to howl. “There is no OmniPharm after this. You don’t need their fucking files! You need to get me the hell out of here. Now!” The last word dissolving into the scream he can’t restrain. His body folding around the sound.

“Call us back when you’re ready. We’ll be here.” And then a click as the line goes dead.

Danny staring at the phone. Danny dumbfounded. Danny shaking with adrenaline and aftershocks. But what choice does he have. Can he survive up here on this rooftop without Irina?

An image of himself trapped here forever. Drinking puddle water and trapping birds. Hiding from the wandering maws of Mammon. His mind utterly gone. Never seeing Ash and Sammy again.

No. A complete rejection of the thought. Instead: It doesn’t have to be much. A laptop. A file folder. A receipt.

A dormer window has emerged nearby. He puts his elbow through it in a single sharp motion. Then he takes off his tuxedo jacket, and is about to wrap it around his hand, when he notices the gladiolus flower still in the buttonhole. He removes it, uses the tuxedo to clear the frame, then dons it once more, and puts the flower back in. His emblem of difference. Of defiance. Generosity separates him from the beasts.

Thus attired: he goes back in.

IRINA

A moment ago.

Irina enters the house, stepping into a study. She glances back, but Danny has already been swept away by the motion of the roof.

The house seems emptier now. There is a logic to that, she supposes. The house is expanding, the people inside it are finite. These empty spaces will become more common over time.

She wonders about the future. Will the house stop expanding or will it grow eternally like some economist’s wet dream? Will it stabilize, with the black hole of Mammon consuming it at the same pace that it is produced? Will the partygoers’ descendants roam these hallways, hosting parties of their own, sipping scavenged drinks from scavenged cocktail glasses, and checking over their shoulders for eyeless hordes?

Irina’s footsteps echoing in empty halls and abandoned rooms. Libraries and gymnasiums, bathrooms and kitchens, small apartments and sprawling ballrooms.

Irina looking for Oscar Phillips. He is the one with the answers, she thinks. He is somewhere in this massive, sprawling tumor of a house. And he is of course less than a needle in a haystack, and yet he is also Oscar Phillips. And so, when she opens a door and sees him hunched in the corner of a room still wearing an impeccable suit, she doesn’t really feel much surprise.

The room is old-fashioned, its walls are lined with shelves of ancient, leather-bound volumes. There are large wingback chairs everywhere, a fireplace that roars and crackles. A massive desk is set near one wall, a small bar cart loaded down with bottles and glasses next to it. And Oscar Phillips hugging his knees to his chest.

Oscar Phillips’s wild eyes locking on hers. His head tilting up and the firelight flickering on his broad cheeks. Irina thinking, for a moment, that he is going to lunge either toward her or the fire. But then he hesitates, and smiles, and straightens. He brushes off his suit. His big hands flicking at dust and ash. His lips pulling back into a smile.

“Ah, Irina.” He walks toward the desk. “I’ve been expecting you.” He pauses at the drinks cart, unstoppers something. “Can I offer you anything?”

Red fluid glugging. The decanter clinking against other glasses. Phillips’s inability to mask his shaking hand.

“An explanation,” she says. “A justification.” Her voice shakes as much as his hands. “You can tell me what the fuck is going on.”

“Very good,” he says, a little of the old bombast back in his voice. He puts the glassware back, smooths his hair. “Very good.”

She watches as he sits behind his desk, as he steeples his fingers. Her own knuckles are white. “We were interrupted before,” he says. A hesitation and then he takes a heavy swig. “But we can finish our discussion now.”

“Mammon,” Irina says. “Is out of control.”

Phillips brushes that away with a meaty hand. “A temporary inconvenience.” His smile looks poorly applied. “One soon resolved.”

“Resolved?” Marta’s incredulity as a frothing kettle. “There is a black hole in the sky eating the world!”

Phllips’s hands make placating gestures. “A temporary market fluctuation, Irina. And if we don’t lose our heads, we shall emerge on the far side victorious.”

“Victory?” Irina chewing on her anger. “Is this a game to you?”

“Yes.” His hands are still now. “The world has gone mad, but we have not. And that’s where the opportunity is, Irina. That’s where you come in. It all comes down to you.”

And he really sounds like he means it. So, she stops. She thinks. And he smiles.

“Sit down,” he says. “Let me explain.”

She doesn’t sit. She’s still thinking. She’s trying to figure out what she’s thinking. “You said—” She picks her words carefully. “—that there’s a place for me at OmniPharm.”

“Yes.” Phillips’s smile spreads like melting butter. “That’s it exactly.”

“But I have a place at OmniPharm.”

“Yes.” Phillips leans back. The chair creaks. “One of our up-and-comers. We’re all very proud of you at head office, Irina. We all expect great things.” He doesn’t bother to hide the gently mocking tone.

Irina waits until her rage settles into a dull background thump. “You’ve kept me close,” she says. “On hand if you needed me.”

Phillips’s smile is stretching his whole face. “Warmer.”

She hesitates. Because she thinks she knows now what he wants her to say. But there is knowing and there is acknowledging. And of course, by making her say the thing she doesn’t want to say, he stays in control.

But in the end, she wants answers. She chose them over Danny.

“I can control Mammon,” she says.

“Bingo.” Phillips cocks a finger gun and snaps his finger down at her.

“You need to control Mammon.” She’s feeling her way through it now. “That’s everything. That’s the source of your success.”

He’s nodding.

“But you didn’t need me.”

Oscar Phillips still hamming up the role of Cheshire Cat.

“Polly.”

A sharp nod from Phillips, now.

“You need me now, though,” she says.

Phillips glances at the door. His knuckles tighten on his drink. “There have been some . . . unforeseen market fluctuations.”

For a moment she thinks he’s still talking about tonight. But then in a flash she realizes he’s talking about the months before. The stock price that everyone has been talking about. Because one of the biggest companies in the world was starting to shit the bed.

That’s what this is about. She’s suddenly sure of it. And it feels like electricity going through her. Her first answer. The first glimpse of what has really been going on.

Because no-one has been able to explain how Phillips has lost his Midas touch. But now she follows the logic.

“You’re losing control of Polly.”

Phillips takes another heavy slug from his glass, wipes his mouth with the back of an expensive sleeve. “She is becoming dangerous.”

DANNY

Inside again. A corridor. A thick carpet beneath his feet. The sort of wallpaper that feels almost like cloth. Large oak doors at regular intervals.

All I need is a laptop. A folder. A sheet of paper.

The first door is locked.

So is the second.

So is the third.

At the fourth, he braces himself, raises his foot, kicks the lock hard. And again. The door rocks in its frame. The lock makes ugly splintering sounds. Danny’s smile is just as ugly. He kicks a third time.

A growl so low it takes a moment for Danny to register it as a sound. Thinks at first it is something in the room. Then he looks back the way he has come.

There is, of course, no way for anything to have entered the corridor. Three locked doors and a window onto an empty roof. Except logic has fallen by the wayside of desire, and apparently something wants Danny to be very fucked indeed.

The Marta-wolf fills the corridor. She is, perhaps, even larger than before. She is crammed against the sides of the corridor. Her muzzle is seven or eight feet long. Rivers of saliva pour from the corners of her mouth. Her legs are bent below her, shuffling her toward him.

An empty void opening in Danny’s guts. His heart roaring into it. He holds out his hands, placating. “Please, Mar. Please calm down. There’s no need.”

She does not seem to agree. She comes on. Teeth exposed and things that are not quite teeth, that may be blades, or saws, or drill bits. The stuff of her still not solid or settled.

Danny backing up, maintaining the distance, still desperate to placate.

“I only ever wanted to help you.”

Marta opens her jaws and howls. An aching, echoing sound–something between animal and human. Something that might be a scream for a life gone awry, a dream derailed, a wound inflicted that cannot heal.

Then she unfurls, wood and plaster and wallpaper exploding around her, architecture annihilated by the force of her will and the strength of her body as she leaps forward, jaws widening, teeth slavering, tongue lashing coming to end Danny once and for all.

Danny fleeing. Danny in an all-out scramble to survive. Danny so sick of running. Danny knowing how pointless this all is. Knowing that he cannot escape her.

He still tries, though. He jukes around corners. He dives through doorways too small for her. He darts up and down stairs.

And still she comes on, obliterating any obstacle between them with a flex of inorganic muscles.

Danny’s despair mounting. The tsunami of it towering over his gasping, desperate body.

He sees a set of stairs, dives for them. Doesn’t so much descend as fall. Crashes to a stop, tries to get enough breath in his lungs to get back to his feet.

Marta descends. Too big for the stairwell. Not caring. The walls buckling as she comes

Danny wonders if there is still something of the woman he once loved and who once loved him left in the fury that approaches. Can he calm her down like he used to do? Talk her back to herself? Show her that her fierceness has purpose? Remind her that the world needs its guardians? Make her a cup of chamomile tea, put on a rerun of The King of Queens, and just be quiet until she remembers that he loves her, and if someone else can love her then maybe she can love herself?

Danny crawling forward on his belly like a soldier in basic training. Like he supposed Marta had to do herself once. Finds himself praying that she’ll recognize something in the motion, some echo of who she was before . . . God, before what? What has happened here? It is all so violently, so aggressively impossible.

What a stupid way to die, he thinks.

Danny just giving up. Danny rolling onto his back and waiting. He can’t see Marta. Can just hear each of her heavy paws approaching. Can see instead the ceiling, the delicate plaster work, the carefully constructed flowers and cherubs. Where do you find someone to do that these days, he wonders?

Stupid thoughts at the end of a stupid life. No successes by any conventional measures. No money. No wife. No kids. No house in the suburbs. Just hours spent trying to scrape enough cash together to cover the rent, the food, the utilities, taking Sammy to doctor’s appointments when Ash wasn’t feeling up to it, hanging out with the two of them watching TV shows he wouldn’t remember in the morning. A whole life of marking time.

Who beside Ash and Sammy will even miss him?

Something in him rebelling at that thought. Because who besides Ash and Sammy matters? Who the fuck else is he meant to care about? If they will miss him, then that should be enough. If they will miss him, his whole world will miss him.

Marta looming into sight. Danny gritting his teeth. Her mouth opening.

He rolls again. A sprawling pratfall of a backward somersault, but he comes out of it on his knees. She snarls, snaps at him, and he lunges sideways. Can see another set of stairs. He goes for them on all fours, ass waving preposterously, grace not much of a concern.

Headfirst down the stairs. Marta darting after him. The gust of her breath on his heels. The bottoms of the stairs splintering his world into fragments: blood on his cheek; pain in his legs; lactic acid in his chest; laughter in his ears.

One of these is not like the others.

Danny lifting his head. The room reels like a drunkard.

He is in something like a courtyard or conservatory. There are plants everywhere. Walls of glass obscured by steam.

And a woman. There’s something familiar about what she’s wearing. He’s seen it before.

A rainbow-striped bikini top and a ballerina’s tutu.

MARTA

It doesn’t stop. The thunder of her rifle goes on forever. And it must stop eventually. Her magazine is finite. And yet, she just keeps firing and firing and firing.

She can’t see anything beyond the muzzle flare. Later, in one of the only times she is honest with her therapist, she will admit that this makes it worse. That she must imagine the consequences of her actions. That there is no clearly defined limit to her horror.

She glimpses things now in the gun’s yellow blaze. Afterimages of a life yet to be lived:

Danny on the floor, bruised and bloody.

The hospital tent where they’ll give her a muscle relaxant so she’ll let go of her gun.

The church basement where Alcoholics Anonymous meets on Wednesdays.

Punching a man in the face, and not really being sure why anymore. Doing it again anyway.

The tribunal telling her she will be dishonorably discharged.

It has to end soon, doesn’t it? It must. There must be limits.

Lying in her bed in Brooklyn for three days. Not speaking. Not eating.

Herself and Danny in a café. She’s laughing. What the fuck did she have to laugh about?

Sergeant Brown leaning over her and screaming at her to put down the gun, to put down the fucking gun.

In the medical tent and hearing the gunshot Jones used to end his life.

When does it end? How can it just keep going on and on forever?

Filing for unemployment; looking at the VA job board; lying about seeing her therapist; throwing up outside a bar; standing in the middle of an intersection shaking; sitting in her apartment thinking the anger will literally tear her apart; and waiting, and waiting, and waiting for Danny to save her, and he never fucking did.

And it doesn’t end. It never does.

Images on repeat. Of Danny. Of herself. Of rage. Of regret. Of Jones lying dead on the floor. Again.

And in the mix, one more: a woman in a tutu and a bikini top. A woman pouring shit into Marta’s head. A woman tearing down all the walls Marta had put up to keep the beasts at bay. A woman collaring her and dragging her to this spot. This instant.

The wolf bares its teeth and leaps straight at that woman’s throat.

DANNY

Danny lying on his back. Danny no longer capable of wonder. Danny watching as Marta leaps over his head and sprints toward Polly Phillips.

Danny realizing he’s still got the flower Polly Phillips gave him in his buttonhole. She’d seemed sweet. Then she tried to make Mammon kill him.

He doesn’t want Marta to kill Polly Phillips, he thinks. Not for Polly’s sake. For Marta’s. She’s gone through enough. She’s carrying too much. Someone turned her into a wolf recently.

Marta stands before Polly, all slavering jaws and rage. But Polly Phillips doesn’t look afraid. Danny worries he’s going to hear her say, “Here, doggy,” and watch her lose an arm.

And she does indeed stretch out an arm.

Marta’s jaws and Danny’s go wide together.

Polly’s arm swipes sideways with sudden savage energy.

Marta sailing through the air. Marta crashing through plants. Marta bending and bouncing against trunks.

Danny’s moan of fear.

Marta picks herself up, blood drooling from her massive muzzle. She growls uncertainly.

Polly reaches out, twists.

Marta’s body contorts. A cracking sound that reverberates throughout the room. She spirals through the air, lands hard, doesn’t get up again.

Danny watching as Polly Phillips turns and advances on him.

IRINA

Phillips stands, crosses to the drink cart. “I love Polly very much.” He twists the cap off a bottle. “She’s always been a part of my considerations.” He pours heavily into his glass. “And I know that what she’s doing now . . . it’s not out of cruelty.”

He goes back to the desk.

“I’m not a good father,” he says. “Although perhaps you will understand that more than most.”

His phrasing catching Irina short.

“You both have the gift,” he says. “From your mother’s side. It’s why I . . . sought her out.”

Irina’s sense of disbelief. Her anger.

“You’re the older.” Phillips staring at his drink. “Two years. We could tell you had it early on. By the time Polly was born you were demonstrating . . . talents. We had a whole system planned. A way to groom you.” A wry smile as he looks from the glass to the fire.

“Polly was just supposed to be . . . insurance. But then it became clear that Polly was . . .”

Irina trembling. Irina not sure she trusts her own voice. “Easier to control?”

He looks directly at her. Nods once. “We couldn’t have rivals, Irina. We couldn’t have Mammon split between two wills. And we could have cut your throat then and there. But we chose to be kind. Remember that.”

Irina too dumbstruck to laugh. Too disbelieving. Too unable to convince herself she doesn’t believe him.

“But . . . my parents,” is all she manages.

“It’s easy to convince a child of a lie.” He shrugs. “A false memory is easy enough to implant if you just repeat it enough.”

“So, I . . .” Her voice wavers. “. . . was a spare part?”

“Apologies are for lesser men, Irina. I was building something. I was changing the shape of the world. That demands vision. Vision demands sacrifice.”

“I’m your daughter?” Circling back to that. Unable to escape it. For obvious reasons.

“I can have paperwork sent to you. It should prove it to your satisfaction.”

“Paperwork?” Pushing down a hysterical laugh.

Phillips’s fingers tapping against his glass. “I am not here for a tearful reunion, Irina.”

No. She remembers knowing exactly what this was. “A recruitment,” she says.

“Polly is . . .” Something resembling sorrow crosses Phillips’s face. “. . . growing willful.”

“And so, you want a more easily malleable tool.” Unable to keep the spite out of her voice.

“No!” Phillips looking shocked. Almost disappointed. “No, Polly is not capable of grasping my vision. The short-term benefits of her simplicity have led to our current difficulties. So now, I realize a partner is required. Someone who shares my dream.” He smiles. “An heir.”

The whiplash of emotion and information. Part of her grateful. This is more than she ever dreamed: answers accompanied with the keys to Phillips’s kingdom. Part of her horrified. This dispassionate description of her abandonment and brainwashing is so much darker than the worst places her imagination took her.

“It’s a lot,” Phillips says. “I know. But I must insist you decide quickly. If we are to regain control of this night, then we must move fast.”

Irina with a monster and a father. With a dream and a nightmare. With the future and the past. Irina with everything she ever wanted. Every answer provided and accounted for.

Irina with a decision to make.

“I think,” she says, “that I’ll have that drink now.”

DANNY

Polly Phillips bending over Danny. Danny not daring to look directly at her. Her finger extending to tap his chest. His heart almost stopping.

“You kept it,” she says.

Danny’s wishing he knew what she meant.

“Gladiolus,” she says. “It means generosity.”

A dart of Danny’s eyes in her direction. She sits cross-legged, one of her pigtails in the corner of her mouth.

“Most people threw them away.” A small sigh. “Everyone except you. Father said they would, but I insisted.”

She leans closer, conspiratorial.

“I insist on things now.”

Danny debates. Risks a smile of his own.

“It is so nice,” she says with glee, “to find someone who thinks like me.”

Danny trying to nod while lying down. Danny trying to not make sudden moves. Danny bumping his head against the floor.

Polly giggles. “You’re jumpy,” she says. “I had a pony that was jumpy.” Her face clouds. “He threw me on the ground once, and Daddy had him shot”

Danny licks his lips. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” she says. “And thank you for keeping your flower. I’m glad that we can be friends.”

Danny hoping she don’t use psychic powers on her friends and fling them across the room.

A glance toward Marta. She lies massively among the ruined plants. Her flanks heave. She is broken, but perhaps not irreparably. Hope still flickers.

“I’m sorry I tried to kill you earlier,” Polly says.

Danny opens his mouth. What does one say to that?

“It was Daddy’s idea.” Polly shakes her head.

“No worries,” Danny manages.

“Thank you.”

“Do you,” he asks, “happen to know a way out of this house?”

She cocks her head. “Why do you want to leave?”

“I need to get back to my family. I need to take care of them.”

Polly’s smile is a little sad. Her finger taps his flower again. “Generous,” she repeats.

Danny shakes his head. “I just care about my family. Most people do.”

“Not everyone.”

Danny is suddenly aware he’s on the precipice of a great well of pain for her.

“Do you want to come with me?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “This is where I make my stories.”

This conversation, Danny thinks, has as many blind alleys as the Black House itself.

“What stories?” he tries.

“My stories about the world.”

“Could you tell one where I get to go home?”

She looks at him. Something sly in her eyes. “No. I only tell my own stories now. That’s what I told Daddy. No more of his stories. Just mine. Just what I want.”

Danny realizing he is being told something important. “What,” he asks, “sort of stories does your Daddy ask you to tell?”

She tugs on a clump of hair. “They’re boring,” she says. “They’re about money, and companies, and people. About stocks. Nothing ever interesting happens in them except he gets more money.”

“So . . . Mammon . . .” he says. “He gives you the power to . . .”

“No!” Polly looks offended. “I tell Mammon what to do.” She leans in close. “He’s my little bitch,” she whispers. Then her eyes go big as saucers and she leans back fast, staring at him.

Danny forces out a chuckle.

Polly cackles with glee. “My little bitch,” she says out loud. “My little bitch!”

Danny’s rising sense of anxiety.

“It’s okay, Polly,” he says.

Polly leaping to her feet, dancing on her tiptoes. “My little bitch!” She points her finger at Marta and the wolf’s head bounces off the tiles with a heavy crunch.

“No!” Danny shouting. Danny not thinking.

Polly wheeling on him with eyes of fire. Danny abruptly thinking he’s a fucking idiot.

But then outrage is replaced by the sly look once more.

“You like her, don’t you?”

Danny pausing. “Yes,” he says. “I do.”

Polly leans in. “Do you want me to tell a story about you two?”

Danny not quite sure what he’s messing with here.

“A kissy story,” Polly says.

So close to Danny he can feel her breath.

“Ewwwwww!” Polly dances away, squealing with delight. “You can’t kiss doggies!”

“You could always change her back.” Danny figuring he’s out here on this limb anyway.

“No.” Polly scrunches up her face. “I don’t want to. And I only tell the stories I want to tell now. That’s what I told Daddy.”

“Right,” he says. “You told me that.”

“Duh,” she says.

“Duh,” he repeats.

She smiles at him. And in that smile Danny finds inspiration.

“I’m glad,” he says, picking his words like he’s picking where to step in a minefield, “that we’re friends.”

She tiptoes toward him again, touches his flower. “I am too.”

“Sometimes,” he says, “friends do favors for each other. Do things that the other person wants to do.”

“Do you want to do me a favor?” Eyes round and full of anticipation.

Danny pausing. Trying to judge how thin the ice is. “I was wondering if you would turn Marta back as a favor for your friend.”

Polly’s face souring. “I said I don’t want to do that.”

“But for a friend . . .?”

Her finger circles his buttonhole. Danny half-expecting her to bore a hole through his chest.

“You’re generous,” she says again. “You care about other people.” Then she shrugs and says happily. “I’m not. I don’t.”

Danny’s tongue caught flat-footed. “But . . .”

“Daddy made me tell a story about you. I didn’t want to, but he made me. When I tell stories about people, it makes them . . .” She struggles with the words. “Messy. In their heads. Makes them mean.”

The smile she gives him is a sad one. “You’re not mean,” she says. “You’re still nice. You’re trying to not be part of the story. Because of who you are. In your heart.” She presses her chest. Just where his buttonhole is. “That’s how I know.”

She moves toward him. Close as a lover. “You kept it when no-one else did. So, I want it to be part of you forever. I want it to keep you safe from all the stories people tell about how the world is.” She leans in, presses her lips to his cheek.

Then she pulls back and looks him in the eye sharply. “This isn’t a kissy story.”

And before he can open his mouth, and long before he can decide what will come out of it: Irina’s hand slams into his chest, smashes down on top of the buttonhole, mashes petals against his chest. Danny wide-eyed. Danny with a pain in his chest like a railroad spike.

The feeling of something tearing through his chest. Something wrapping tendrils of pain around his viscera, constricting.

The image of a man, half-dead in a chair, flowers in his mouth and roots bursting from his eyes and nose.

Danny spasming on the floor, feeling the roots of a gladiolus flower slowly tighten their grip around his heart.

IRINA

Phillips offering Irina a glass of sixty-year-old scotch. A very slight pause. She takes it.

Phillips refills his own glass, raises it. “A toast. To homecomings. To partnership.”

Irina doesn’t know enough about Scotch to pick out tones and hints. Mostly, she thinks, it smells of power. When she takes a sip, it tastes very good.

Phillips takes a deep breath, seems steadier in himself. He nods a few times. Goes to his desk, sits. A large man in a large chair.

“So,” he begins.

Irina holds up a hand, interrupts. “I just want to be clear,” she says. “I bring Mammon to heel. I make him put the world back. And then I get him to put you and OmniPharm back on top.”

A burble of merriment from Phillips. He rubs his hands. “Yes,” he says. “And then we proceed from there. Your talent, and my vision. Father and daughter. CEO and president.”

Irina lets a little of her own smile show as she walks toward the desk. “You know,” she says, “when I was little, I always thought of you as all-knowing. I really did think about you like you would a god.” She pauses, considers. “Or a devil I suppose.”

“I’ve told you. I make no excuses.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t expect them. But I did expect you to be . . . smarter, I suppose.”

Perplexity written broad on a broad face.

“Because if I can control Mammon, what is it that makes you think, that in all of this, I need you at all?”

A moment. As he digests. Calculates. And she can see it happen. The little lizard bullshit building in his mind. The poisonous thoughts preparing to infect.

As he opens his mouth: Irina bringing her glass down hard on the edge of the desk. Shattering the edge.

Irina lunging across the table and smashing the smashed glass into his throat. Stabbing again, and again. And he’s big and he’s heavy, but that's just another way of saying he’s slow. And the strength is already jetting out of his neck. She’s screaming. Howling. Spitting. All those years of hurt propelling her arm back and forth.

She doesn’t stop as Phillips gurgles and flails. She doesn’t stop as he slumps out of his chair. She follows him down snarling, twenty-five years of neglect and abandonment released. She crouches over him, in front of the fire. Her arm aches. She is out of breath. And still she stabs, and stabs. She’s almost down to his spine now. His neck is more meat than anatomy. One more punch. One more.

Irina straightening. Irina pushing blood-soaked hair out of her eyes. Irina taking a shaking breath.

Irina bending back down, just to make sure she’s finished the job properly. She won’t take any chances with this one. Not anymore.

And finally, when the head is almost clean off, finally Irina is satisfied that Oscar Phillips—Chairman and Chief Executive of OmniPharm, the head honcho, the Big Cheese, the one who calls in as a consultant of Fox News, and who drops truth bombs in the Financial Times editorial columns—is lying dead at her feet.

11

DANNY

He and Marta had once taken a road trip out west in a rented car that rattled every time they hit eighty. It had been his idea. The idea of heading out into the wilderness without a map or plan had felt inherently romantic to him. Just camping gear, a little stove, and enough clothes for a week.

“Ready for anything,” he’d said as they left the GW bridge behind.

“Yeah,” Marta said, flipping off the Welcome to New Jersey sign, “but is anything ready for us?”

Except it wasn’t that romantic really. A lot of staring at passing strip malls and realizing how much filler was on the albums they’d loved as kids.

“Mixtapes when we get back home,” Marta had said eventually. “I don’t care how cliché that is.”

“Or that cassettes are a dead medium that can’t be played in any vehicle?”

Marta’s raised eyebrow. “I will sing along to the choruses if you’re going to be like this.”

He raised his hands. “I surrender.”

But then, after another day, civilization started to fall away little by little. The road opened up onto longer and longer stretches of nothing.

“Beautiful,” he’d said on the fifth day, looking out over acres of woodland and crops.

“Serial killer country,” Marta said.

“Picture perfect heartland homicide.”

“Now that’s an audiobook I’d listen to.”

They’d meandered into Nebraska by the middle of the second week. The car was rattling every time they hit sixty. They’d stopped at a campsite and stayed up late drinking a six-pack. The sky was massive above them. Every star visible. It was like a brand-new sky. Danny hadn’t known it could look like this.

“Looks like the sky I used to see out in Afghanistan,” Marta said into the comfortable silence.

“Yeah?” he said carefully. She didn’t talk about Afghanistan often. Danny didn’t bring it up often. Didn’t want to be the reason she went back to a bad place.

“Yeah.” And the silence had gone on so long he’d thought that was going to be it. “It could be beautiful when it wanted to be. When people stopped fucking with it.”

“Bit like you.”

“Now you’re fucking with me.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s cool.” And it was. There was some peace there, then, with the beers, and stars, and cool night air.

“I saw mountains out there.” There’d been wonder in her voice. Like she’d touched magic once, and still couldn’t believe it.

They’d made love then, out in the tall grass around the campsite, biting their tongues so no-one heard. She’d sat astride him and rocked him back and forth all the way to ecstasy and back, and he’d looked up, and watched the way her face worked, and her hair moved, her whole body looking to him like it was framed by the moon.

☉

Danny’s slow, trembling realization that he is not dead. He clutches at his chest, feels petals beneath his fingers. The buttonhole . . . Something about the gladiolus is different. It feels . . . more robust? Can you say that about a flower?

He tries to pull it up to see it better.

Danny bucking. Danny screaming.

When he recovers, Danny’s trembling fingers part the tear in his shirt, explore carefully.

The stem of the gladiolus emerges from his chest, stem flush with skin. Roots . . .

“No. No. No.” Danny desperately pinching green fibers, pulling tentatively. Even as he does, the spike of pain starts to blossom.

“What . . .” A breath. “. . . the fuck?”

“It’ll keep you safe.”

Danny realizing he is still in a conservatory. That Marta is still collapsed nearby. That Polly Phillips is still standing beside him.

“What did you do to me?”

“Kept you safe.” Polly losing her patience.

“And who,” Danny’s pain erasing good sense, “the hell is keeping me safe from you?”

Polly’s face hardening. “That’s not a nice thing to say to a friend. I didn’t have to do that.”

Danny still not paying attention. “What makes you think anyone would want this?”

“You shouldn’t talk to me that way.” Polly leaning in. Eyes bright. “I could make that doggy kiss you. I could make it kiss your head right off your shoulders.”

She is a monster. They are all monsters. Danny in a world of monsters. Not because that is the way the world is, he thinks, but because nobody is stopping it from being that way.

He picks himself up. Slowly. Painfully. When his shirt catches on the sepals of the gladiolus, he barks in pain.

“Fuck you,” he tells Polly from atop his two planted feet. “Fuck your father. You two deserve each other.”

Polly staring at him in wide-eyed shock. Danny wondering if anyone has ever spoken to her that way before. Danny finding he doesn’t care.

“Doggy!” Polly’s voice both tremulous and imperious. “I want you to—”

“NO!” Danny wheeling. “You leave her a-goddamned-lone! You have done enough! She is better than all of you.” His whole body shaking. “You hear me?”

Polly staring at him wide-eyed. As if this is something she has never seen before: the consequences of her own actions.

Danny hobbles toward Marta. He puts his hand against her muzzle, feels the fur of her, and the fibrous other part that is amalgamated from random junk and god-stuff. He would still save her if he could.

“You! Cannot! Speak! To me! Like! That!” Polly’s shuddering shriek of rage. Cracks in the glass walls run up and up.

He turns, uncertain of what he’ll say, only sure it’ll make things worse. He doesn’t care. But there isn’t time for him to damn himself further. Polly is already stretching out her hand. The world is already heaving. A ravine is already cracking the floor wide open, racing toward him. There is not even enough time for Danny to feel fear.

And then the split in the earth abruptly bifurcates around him. He is left standing on a craggy promontory as if the line of destruction has hit a shield and bounced away.

Polly Phillips stamps her foot in frustration.

Danny’s fingers reach the petals of the gladiolus flower rooted in his heart. “Keep me safe,” he repeats.

Polly snarls. “Only you, though.” Her eyes finding Marta. “Be a shame if something happened to your doggy.”

Above Marta, massive panes of glass crack.

“No!”

Danny flings himself at Marta’s head as the first pane shatters against fractured tiles just inches away. Shrapnel stings his calf.

“Close!” Polly chirps. Another pane of glass shatters next to Marta’s flank. “Closer!”

And then, as Danny glances back, searching for a way to stop this, Polly is abruptly jerked off her feet and sent flying across the room with a screech and a flail of limbs.

Danny staring. Danny utterly bewildered.

“Get away from him, you absolute and utter bitch.”

Danny recognizing the voice. Danny wide-eyed as Irina comes marching into the room.

IRINA

Irina walking into a room of shattering glass and lush greenery. Irina with war on her heels.

In her: The memory of Oscar Phillips on the floor. Looking down on him with a blood-slick tumbler in her hand. Staring at the bloody response to all her questions and realizing that she finally knows the one answer that matters.

What she wants.

Everything.

And knowing just as clearly that with Phillips dead, only one person can stand between her and the world.

It wasn’t hard to find Polly. With Phillips’s demise, clarity came; the logic of the Black House laid bare; the paths obvious. And so, she followed her feet, and she found the conservatory, and Polly flinging panes of glass at Danny.

But she wants Danny alive. She wants Danny. She wants everything.

So, she stretches out her hand, and thinks about how she wants the world to be, and the world does its best to please her.

In the aftermath: Polly Phillips finds her feet. She has been caught off guard but she is not defenseless. She makes a slashing motion of her arm. Her fingers crooked like claws. Irina fends off the worst of it, but she is knocked sprawling. Polly advances like a locomotive.

Irina wants to be back on her feet and makes the world bend around her until it is so. Polly Phillips screams. Smashes into her. Irina feels her defenses under assault, her desire negated by this opposing will. A desire as great as Irina’s own sends her sailing back. But Irina doesn’t want to smash against the glass and steel framework of this room. Wants to come to a cushioned landing. So she floats gently to the floor.

Now, she reshapes her intent. Sharpens it. She drives a simple request at Polly Phillips’s heart: please, fuck off and die.

Polly shrieking. Her feet skidding across the floor. The floor cracking. A fresh crevasse yawning below her.

Polly just catches herself before her fall. She reaches out with two closing fists.

On either side of Irina, balls of mashed leaves, sticks, trunks, bark and thorns are ripped, dripping from the soil. She dives to the floor as they smash together above her head. She snarls. She lunges forward on a wave of her own will, fired like a bullet by her own desire for victory. To win at all costs.

DANNY

Danny as flotsam on stormy seas. Danny as innocent bystander. Danny as utterly boned unless he gets out of the way.

The scramble of his hands and feet over tiles. Leaping a fresh-made ravine. Darting around shrubbery become shrapnel. Knocked sideways by the backwash of a psychic blast.

Danny still concerned for Marta. Despite the hunting and the hatred. Danny still somewhere deep down unable to shake the good times, the guilt, the sense that if he had just been able to do more when they were together then they wouldn’t be in this mess. Danny still believing that buried beneath protoplasm and other people’s desires there is a good woman.

“Marta!” He slaps a hand against her muzzle. He’s not sure what is wise anymore. He’s still fairly certain it isn’t this.

Elsewhere: Irina is eight feet off the floor. Is flinging panes of glass at Polly with her mind. Shards rain down around Danny and Marta.

He tries to push the wolf. She is the size of a small truck. He cannot even move her head. He grabs ahold of one of her eyelids, peels it back. The yellow eye beneath rolls, then comes to rest on him.

A snarl.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Danny screaming to be heard. Irina wheeling through the air above, smashing into the conservatory’s iron struts.

Marta’s lips pulling back from savage teeth.

A sound like a detonation. Shrapnel scoring him. He shouts in pain. Blood wells on Marta’s muzzle. She will die if she stays here. So will he.

“Come on!” Shoving at her head. Fear becoming desperation, becoming anger. “Come on, you dumb—”

She snaps her jaws. She tries to stand. Puts her weight on one back leg and mewls.

Steel is shorn free of its moorings overhead. Rivets fly like bullets.

Danny runs to Marta’s flank, puts his weight beneath the heavy thigh, heaves.

Glass rises from the floor, starts to swirl.

“Come on!”

Marta gets to her front paws. Hefts up her working back leg. Danny almost screams as the weight hits him.

Flying glass slices his cheek, his calf, his chest. Danny wonders what use this damn gladiolus is meant to be anyway.

Marta taking a hobbling step. Danny trying to stay on his feet underneath her.

The blur of a body hurtling past them. It lands with a spray of dirt and rubble. Dust swirls above the crater.

Danny keeps his head down, keeps focused on keeping Marta on her feet. On the stairs leading away. Keeps focused on the idea that, just this one time, perhaps he can save her.

IRINA

Irina floating to earth. Dirt and broken glass are blown back with every step she takes.

Irina standing over her fallen foe.

Polly Phillips in a crater of soil and broken tiles. Polly Phillips bloody and bruised. One leg clearly broken. She is panting, eyes fluttering.

Irina standing above the woman she has been told is her sister and searching for pity. She finds none. Only desire.

For revenge. For an outlet for her rage. For a purpose.

For everything.

She descends into the crater. She kneels down over Polly. She puts her hands on the younger woman’s throat.

Irina wringing the last of the life from Polly Phillips's broken body.

12

MARTA

Yeah, so she liked to drink after Afghanistan. Who wouldn’t? And, yeah, sometimes it got bad, and she would be at work and want to scream in the client’s face, or grab the guy with the backfiring car and smash his face into a wall until he understood the importance of basic engine maintenance, or to take the pneumatic drill and shove it right up the construction worker’s asshole, but she didn’t. She’d keep a lid on it. She was a professional. And then, when her shift was done, she’d head to the nearest bar and enjoy a goddamn drink.

When she’d first got back, her old friends were excited to hang out, and laugh, and make terrible decisions about men. But they’d lost a step since high school. They weren’t up for multiple nights out in a row. Weren’t as amused by trips to emergency rooms and explaining to tired policemen exactly what had happened and who had started it.

It got a bit lonely after that. But you got used to it. Got so that it wasn’t really loneliness anymore. Got to be just the way the world was. The way you were in the world.

And then she met Danny. And she had a bad day at work, and she went to the bar, and sat there with her shaking hands, and thought about how much better things might be if Danny was there. And he’d replied to her text right away, and willingly drowned the world in alcohol with her, and was washed up on the shores of her hangover beside her the next morning.

And he’d always been willing to meet her. And he’d always been patient with the ER doctors, and the tired policemen. He’d always been there, quiet, not judging.

Except then she’d realized he was always judging. He was always counting the number of empties beside her when he got to the bar. He was always probing her with questions when they shot the shit. And he was always biting his lip as the ER doctor approached, and he always had a sad little smile on his face when he explained things to the tired cop. He was always judging. He just wasn’t saying it out loud.

That made it worse, though. That’s what he didn’t seem to understand. And when she tried to explain it to him, it was just denials and bullshit. Because he was patient, kind Danny. Couldn’t acknowledge that what he really wanted was for her to stop, to just stop. Couldn’t grab hold of her and scream into her face that this shit was not good, not A-OK, that it had to stop now before she did herself some harm. And so, it just hung there in the air between them, him ignoring it, and her increasingly unable to do so.

Even when she hit him, he never fought back. Just took it. He never said that if she kept this up, she was going to kill him. Until she wanted to kill him.

☉

Marta blinking awake in a large room lined with bookcases. She can smell leather and smoke. Danny is slumped in an armchair near a fire, staring into the black void of the grate.

She cannot remember how she got here. Has only a memory of rage. That is more familiar.

Was she thinking about Afghanistan?

Marta looking at Danny again and feeling like she has been so angry at him for so long. But now, exhaustion soaking into her bones, she cannot think clearly why. It seems like a lot to put on a man who did his best to live up to an impossible dream.

She tries to say his name. And of course, a wolf is not meant to speak. But she is not quite fully a wolf.

“Danny,” she growls.

He jerks around. She can smell the fear on him. And he is so small to her now. Such a little thing to have invested so much anger in.

“Sorry,” she says as best she can. “I think I lost myself for a while there.”

It’s how they used to say it. When she woke up—sometimes in their bed, sometimes on the couch, even once out on the steps leading up to their apartment building—she would look back on the night before, on those shattered pieces that surely someone else had made, and go to find him in the kitchen, standing bleary-eyed over the kettle, pouring spoonfuls of the instant mixture into two mugs. She would put a hand on his shoulder and feel the tension in him, and she would tell him, “Sorry, I lost myself for a while.” And then his shoulders would soften, and he’d turn around, and say to her:

“Well, I’ll always help you find your way back.” He leans back into the chair as he says it now. The tension ebbing slightly.

It’s a lie. They both know that now. But there’s peace in that knowledge too.

She isn’t quite sure what has brought this sanguine mood. She feels, though, as if she has passed through something, and now finds herself on the other side of it. Many things shed and left behind.

“What’s happened?” she manages. “What’s happening?”

A hollow, bitter laugh from Danny. “I don’t know, Mar. The world’s gone mad. Or . . . maybe it was always mad but now we’re allowed to see it. I don’t know. I just . . .” He paws at one eye with the heel of a hand. “I just want to go home,” he says. “But what I think I’m learning, Mar, is that I’m too small. Too irrelevant. And it doesn’t matter two shits what I want.”

How much of this, she wonders, is her fault? Not that she feels truly guilty. Things were done to her just as much to him. Maybe more so. After all, which one of them is a wolf?

“I’ll help you,” she says though. Because: “I want out too.”

What departure means she isn’t sure. Is she trapped in this body? Does the spell break as she walks out through the doors?

She goes to stand, yelps as pain shoots up her back leg.

“Shit.” Danny stands like someone waking, “Let me help.”

He makes a splint for her from a table leg and binds it to her leg using the covers of couch cushions twisted into ropes. It isn’t fun to walk, but she can do it, and fun isn’t a luxury that either of them have been able to afford for a very long time.

IRINA

When she’s done, Irina stands and takes a breath. The conservatory is a ruin. Plants uprooted. Metal struts rent and twisted. Fissures split the floor.

This will not do.

A moment of focus, and when she opens her eyes, the room is whole. Polly Phillips lies not in a crater, but on unbroken tiles, a sheet hiding the broken bones and the tears in her skin.

This is a start. This is what she wants.

Part of what she wants. A single iota.

She feels Mammon above her head. He is out of control—unbound and raw. Is this, she wonders, what an oyster feels like when the grit gets in?

She reaches out to Him, tentative at first, still exploring where the edges of her newfound abilities lie, unsure of what will happen as she reaches out further and further toward them. Will she hold onto herself, or will she dissolve into the sheer volume of the world?

Yet reach she must. She must, in fact, leash the god if he is not to consume everything. She must chain him as was done before.

Better me, she tells herself, than Oscar Phillips.

She refuses to call him her father.

The god fights her, as obstinate as a child. The migraine spike of pain erupts in her head once more. She pictures blood vessels bursting, massive intracranial hemorrhaging, her body limp on the floor. She can feel how Mammon wants that. She can feel his divine craving overwhelming her.

But even as her knees buckle, she pushes deeper.

Irina learning that Mammon does not just want her death. He wants everything. So, he wants her to live too. To succeed. He wants to be bound and unbound all at once. All things are within him.

Irina as a weaver. As a woman plucking the strands of desire she wants from within the roiling mass of Mammon. Dipping her hand beyond the event horizon again, and again, and pulling it away clean. Weaving together a tale of enslavement that Mammon cannot help but produce for her. And even as the migraine spike threatens to expand into a full railroad spike of trauma, she buries Him beneath the ground.

A moment on the precipice. On the liminal point that is both defeat and victory. And all that can hold her steady on the course is her own will. Her own desire to control everything.

Irina thinking that she is still what Oscar Phillips made her. Despairing. But then thinking that perhaps what Phillips made her was not what he intended. Because what he made her killed him. Perhaps he was a fallible man whose plans went awry, and who has made her into something far better, far stronger, far more powerful than he ever intended.

A sensation like the world breaking.

And then she puts it all back together. Just the way she wants it.

DANNY

Danny and Marta are in a corridor when it happens. A ripple. A break. A jump cut in the editing of the world. All of those things. None of them. Danny’s mind trying to apply familiar constructs to an impossible thing.

Around him: one corridor becomes another. Black and white tiles and oak paneling become white paint and pine floorboards. Through newborn skylights overhead, the light looks just a little like dawn.

Danny turning. Danny certain that when he sees Marta she will once more be the woman he fell in and out of love with.

But the wolf just stares at him with eyes like lighthouse lanterns.

So, they go on. What else can they do? The world has changed but their choices haven’t.

The consistency of the space ahead seems remarkable after the chaos of intermingling styles that has surrounded them for so long. A clean modern aesthetic. Everything in shades of cream. The art on the walls off-kilter but not challenging. The suggestion of warmth. Of personality. Of—heaven forbid—a unifying vision.

Somewhere ahead, music starts up. A bright drizzle of piano notes among trumpet trills. A drummer tapping syncopated time on a snare. The clink of glasses. The burble of polite conversation.

They approach. They take tentative steps.

A party. People swilling cocktails and making polite conversation. A jazz quartet in one corner being ignored by everyone in the room.

Marta growls. Someone tugs at Danny’s elbow.

Danny wheeling round, already balling his fists, already his faith in this scene failing. Danny staring into a waiter’s startled face.

“I’m . . .” The waiter swallowing. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just the mistress of the house has asked for you to see her.”

IRINA

She sits in her office, and they bring her things. Bracelets. Necklaces. Shoes. Car keys. Love letters. Stock options. Invitations to summer homes. Tickets to shows and games. Deeds to artwork. Bags of drugs. Wads of hundred-dollar bills.

There is no limit, it seems, to her reach. Nothing exceeds her grasp. She can have it all.

And all because when she stands, the markets rise, and when she sits, the markets fall. All because the people here are so desperate to ride the coattails of her desire.

She wants them to fear her disinterest. To fear being treated the way they treated her. To be terrified that they will be punished for the way they prioritized their portfolios over a child’s suffering.

She wants to be a benevolent god, but she wants to be a vengeful one too.

She wants to be everything. Loved and feared. Worshipped and desired. Adored and hated.

And she has so much now, and yet, somehow, it is not enough. There is something missing. And the more she asks for, the more it irks her.

But then: a servant enters with a dusty bottle of wine recovered from Oscar Phillips’s cellars, and he says to her: “We have located the guest you asked after, madam. They should be bringing him to you now.”

A great peace descending. A ray of light bursting over the horizon and coming through the window at her back, sending a golden spill over the room.

Irina with everything she wants.

DANNY

Danny standing before a door. Danny unsure what is waiting on the other side. Danny wishing he had the nerve to ask.

The waiter knocks, then: open sesame.

The room beyond is familiar, Danny realizes. He’s seen it before when it contained a man whose mouth was full of flowers.

In the far wall, something he missed in the dark the first time around, something long yearned for: a window, a sign of the world he has spent this whole long night trying to reach. Long lawns framed by old beeches and oaks. A few moss-dotted statues.

And then the office chair spins round and reveals Irina.

A smile splitting her face wide open. Leaping up from her chair. Wrapping her arms around Danny.

“You’re safe!” Pressing her face into the crook of his shoulder. “Thank God.”

Marta growls. She can’t fit through the doorway. Her muzzle pokes through and her eyes glow with hatred.

The waiter clears his throat. Irina doesn’t look at him. “You can leave us. Danny won’t hurt me.”

Marta retreats just enough to let him out. Irina stares at Danny. Danny isn’t sure he’s quite ready for tearful reunions. “Why did you ask for me, Irina?”

Irina looks hurt. “This is because I left you on the roof, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Where you would have died if it wasn’t for me. And there’d be no way out if it wasn’t for me. So maybe the wounded victim isn’t the right play.”

Danny has become the asshole again. But he’s not sure he’s the only one in here. Marta growls again, and Irina’s eyes flash. She shifts them from Danny to Marta. A staring contest. Marta mewls and looks away.

Something in Danny’s head telling him to run.

“You said ‘Thank God’ a moment ago,” he says. “Which god did you mean?”

A small smile. She looks away.

“After my parents . . . After I thought they died, I thought I’d stopped believing in God. The idea of believing in a great benevolent power that could save you seemed stupid. Except, of course, there was a great power in my life. There was someone who dictated my world. There was someone whose whims—”

“Oscar Phillips,” Danny says. He’s looking out the window and wanting to leave, not listen to confessionals.

Irina smiles. “Yes. Exactly. He’s dead now, though.”

Danny realizing that explains a lot. Danny realizing who must have killed him.

He searches Irina for confirmation, doesn’t have to look far.

“What I’m trying to tell you,” she says, “is that there’s a new god in town.”

Danny torn between sadness and fear.

She smiles at him, though. Bright as the sun coming in through the window. “I’m still me, Danny. All I ever was. Good and bad and all the messy shit in between.”

Danny wishing he could believe that. Danny wishing he didn’t think absolute power corrupts absolutely. But in the end, Danny wonders, maybe it doesn’t matter. Because that’s just the way the world is. There has always been someone like Irina. There always will be. He just happened to get close enough to the sun to be burned this time.

“I want to go home,” he says. “I want to go back to my family.”

She nods. “I know,” she says. “I can take you to the gates, right now.”

Something giving way inside him. The breaking of tension like tectonic plates shifting. His hope and fears grinding against each other.

“Really?”

Another smile. “You’re not a prisoner, Danny. Oscar Phillips is dead. I just wanted to see you again. Make sure you’re okay.”

☉

Gravel crunching. Danny and Irina walking side by side. Marta padding beside them. Small talk. Their destination and origin both hidden by bends in the driveway and the lines of trees. Danny wondering how much further it can be.

“You said your sister has diabetes, didn’t you?” Irina says. “That she was having trouble paying for insulin?”

Danny nods, finds that even now, with the relief of departure sluicing through him, he can still feel bitter.

“What insulin is she on?” Irina asks.

“Placidol.” Said like an invocation for the devil.

“Ah.” Danny can’t tell if she was expecting it or not. “That’s why you were working with Daochu then.”

Danny chuffs a laugh. “No. I can’t afford principles.”

“Just cash then?”

Danny’s mirthless smile. “Just the way the world is.”

Danny’s gone three more paces before he realizes Irina’s stopped walking.

“What?” Danny asks her.

Irina bites at her bottom lip. Marta hulks over her. “I want to say something,” she says, “but I don’t think you’ll take it well.”

“So don’t say it.”

“What if you didn’t leave?”

Danny blinking. Understanding the words, but also incapable of understanding the words.

“I could take care of her, Danny.” Said like it’s nothing. “They just need money, right? I have so much money, it’s ridiculous. I could make them millionaires and not even blink. So . . . then they wouldn’t need you, would they?”

“What . . . are you . . . ?” Danny not quite capable of putting his confusion into words, because she is being so very clearly right.

Danny sitting in cars on cold winter nights, not wanting to run the engine because gas is up over $4 a gallon again. Ash sitting rotting in her apartment because she can’t afford her meds. Sammy embarrassed to go to school in his thrift store sneakers.

Money is the problem.

And Irina can fix it. Just . . . give Ash the money. So, she can afford the meds, can afford a better place, a better school. So, they don’t have to be scared every time a bill arrives.

It could all be so simple.

So, why doesn’t it feel that way?

“And if they’re taken care of,” Irina says, “you could stay here with me.”

Danny’s blinking surprise. “That’s erm . . . I mean . . . Tonight was . . .” Horrific? Terrifying? Traumatizing?

Irina laughs. “I’m not hitting on you, Danny.”

“But you want me to stay?” Danny very aware of his ex-lover with slathering jaws.

Irina shrugs. “Is that so strange? The whole world changed last night. I changed. Everything is . . .” She looks around, and for a fraction of a second Danny sees how fragile her joy is. “It’s amazing, Danny, but God . . . it’s intimidating. I have . . .” She looks down at her hands. “I can do so much. And it would be so easy to get lost in that.” She blinks. Looks up at him. The mask back in place. The happy, serious businesswoman.

“You were there with me,” she says. “We went through it together. We both saw things we want to forget. Wouldn’t it be easier to do that together?”

And yes. Yes, it would.

“So, I just . . .” He looks back in the direction of the house.

Irina shrugs. “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out. There are plenty of rooms.”

“And you just send, like, a suitcase of cash to Ash?”

Irina’s smile as bright as the sun. “We figure it out. The point is, she doesn’t have to be a victim of the system anymore.”

She reaches out to him. A small, thin hand. And Marta shifts her weight, and paces around her. And Marta’s teeth are exposed. But it’s the obvious solution. It’s the prize.

But he can’t quite take her hand. Even though it’s holding everything he ever wanted.

Everything?

No, he thinks. Not quite. Because that’s not what he’s wanted tonight. Not what he’s fought for.

He’s wanted to go home. He’s wanted to protect his family. From people like Oscar Phillips. From people like the woman Irina is already more than halfway to becoming.

Her hand is not extended in welcome, he thinks. It’s there to take possession.

Irina lets her hand fall. He has left it too long. Something sour in her expression that he thinks she’s trying to mask. He’s the asshole again. Always the asshole.

“Why do you really want me to stay?” he asks.

“I told you—”

“Sorry.” He cuts her off. “Let me ask it different way: why haven’t you offered to turn Marta back?”

Irina staring at him. Marta staring at Irina. Marta’s teeth yellow and red. The wind in the trees. The sunlight thin above them. The birds whistling shrilly.

“He’s not the god of wealth, is he, Irina?” Danny says as gently as he can. “He puts it on that way, but that’s not it. He’s the god of greed.”

Irina licking her lips. Danny knowing he should have kept his big mouth shut and just kept walking.

Except, of course, she never meant to let him leave.

“I could make you want to stay,” she says, so soft he can barely hear it. “I could make you beg to stay. But I’m trying to be kind. I want to be a good god, Danny, if I can. But gods do need their worshippers. It’s just how we are.”

“Let me go, Irina. Please.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t.” Her turn to close her eyes. A look now of something like pain. “It’s not enough, Danny. None of it is enough. I need more.”

Eyes opening. Eyelids revealing large brown irises, large black pupils. Lashes with the last of last night’s mascara still clinging to them.

“Stay,” she says.

A word that is more than a word. A word that is a rewriting of the base code of the universe. An imperative. A command from a god launched direct at Danny’s heart.

And then the gladiolus in Danny’s chest twitches. A spasm runs through its roots down to his heart. There is pain with it, but also clarity.

It’ll keep you safe.

The power of Irina’s command passes over and around him, but not through him.

All so he can shake his head and say, “No. No, you can’t make me.”

Her face curdling.

“Stay.” A word beyond a word. A word the bends the world to its will. Trees bow toward her. Birds overhead change course. Every chipmunk, squirrel, and fox angles to obey. The whole world strains to belong to Irina.

The gladiolus bucks. His knees quake.

“No.” Danny defiant. Danny defended by Polly Phillips’s gladiolus.

All the layers falling away from Irina’s face. The thing she is becoming exposed beneath. “There are other ways I can make you stay.”

Before Danny can ask what they are, she points at him. “Fetch,” she says to Marta.

MARTA

Back just a few seconds.

Marta between the pair of them. The animal part of her wanting to do something savage to this little upstart woman trying to take possession of Danny. In opposition to that: the part of her that has come back to being human.

“He’s like this,” that part wants to say. “He confuses love and stubbornness. Long after it’s obvious that quitting is the only tenable solution, he doesn’t. It is his flaw and his beauty. If you change it, you will break him.”

But then Marta points to her and says, “Fetch.”

A war then in Marta. And she has seen too much war already. She has been ordered. Commanded.

Proceed to these coordinates and investigate the compound of Sayyid Rustam.

The big man. The woman. Seek. Destroy.

The animal part of her obeys. She feels her feet move. Gravel beneath heavy paws.

Marta remembering standing in front of the recruitment office and taking a breath. Marta remembering how excited she felt in that moment. On the precipice of everything. Feeling like she was getting out of Brooklyn before its clawing hands of poverty and shitty options closed over her eyes forever.

Danny backing away from her. His hands up.

Marta remembering coming home. Seeing the recruitment office boarded up. Posters of smiling uniformed men and women obscured by graffiti.

Danny backing into a tree. The scent of him in her nostrils.

Scent and memory. Time is so much harder to make sense of in this form. But she remembers now that there was a life after she came home. Remembers the broken pieces, yes, but remembers tidying the ruins of yesterday and pushing on. Remembers that she did it because it had to be done. Because there were tomorrows left to see. Because there were people there to help her, even if they weren’t good at it. Because one of them was Danny.

The part of Marta that has come back putting its hand on the wolf’s collar. The part of Marta that has come back remembering that coming back is possible. That there are still tomorrows left to see.

The command losing focus. Marta as a disobedient wolf.

She turns on Irina. Growls.

Irina’s answering growl as loud as Marta’s own. The world growls with her. Grass bristles. Houses hulk. Skies roil. The frustration of a world that belongs to Irina. All of it except this pair. These defiant two.

DANNY

“No!” Danny wanting to protect Irina as much as Marta, and unsure why. He’s already certain she’s a lost cause, but that doesn’t seem to matter.

Irina’s hand going up. Marta’s head snapping back as if struck. Her jaws slamming closed on empty air. But her paw knocks Irina skidding back.

“Please! Stop!”

Danny standing between the two of them, heart pounding, chest quivering, uncertain of how far his protection extends. Irina and Marta staring hate at each other.

“Please, Irina,” Danny says. “Let us go.”

“I can’t.” But he hears the fight go out of Irina between those two short words. Around him, the earth slumps into petulant defeat.

“You can’t keep me here.” He keeps pushing.

“I could save you so much pain.”

Danny shrugs. “It’s not enough.”

She kicks gravel. “You’re mocking me.”

“I’m not.”

“It’s not really an escape going out there.” Irina says. “The house is still expanding. Just not physically anymore.” She taps her chest. “Here.” Her head. “Here. You’ll come back some day. But it would be easier if you just stayed.”

She doesn’t sound triumphant.

Danny thinking about Ash and Sammy. Danny’s desire to protect them. To keep them free from the influence of this place. Danny suddenly seeing his own naivety.

He imagines Sammy succumbing, bent out of true by the force of Mammon, by the radiation of desire soaking into him without notice, metastasizing beneath his skin, transforming him into an avatar of eternal consumption, a hungry ghost.

Danny thinking about that happening to everyone in the world.

Except maybe not to him. Because he has a flower.

It’ll keep you safe.

It must, Danny thinks, mean something.

It means generosity.

If only Irina could learn that lesson. If only Polly had put the flower in her heart. Maybe that would save the world.

He taps the flower now, still protruding from his buttonhole. “Polly gave me this when I first arrived,” he tells her. “And told me it means generosity.”

He smiles, reaches out, pats Marta’s heavy flank. “I don’t know why I kept it, to be honest. Everyone else threw theirs away. Maybe that’s why I kept mine. Because I’m an ornery bastard. Or a reverse snob. Or . . . just because it seemed like a nice thing to do for a poor, lost girl.” He shrugs. “Maybe all of those reasons.”

He steps out toward Irina. Puts his hands out to her. “Please,” he says, “find a reason to be generous. Let us go.”

Irina shakes her head. “I don’t have one.”

Danny getting desperate. “If there’s something else you want. Something I can give you.” If he can just be generous enough . . .

Irina’s lip twisting, a refusal building. But then she hesitates. Her hand drifts up, almost as if she isn’t in control of it. Her eyes leave his face, working their way down to rest on the flower in his lapel, it’s white petals lush against his tattered rented tux.

Her fingertips brush the flower.

The flower’s roots bucking around Danny’s heart.

It means generosity.

“Perhaps—” Her voice little more than a whisper. “—if you left me something to remember you by.”

Oh.

Oh no.

Because, now, suddenly, finally Danny understands. He wishes he didn’t. But he sees now that he must always be the bit player. He is cast in the role of the lesson to be learned. He is Polly Phillips’s gift. Or revenge. Or nihilistic scream.

It means generosity. But now “it” is not the flower. Or he is the flower. Or they are one and the same now.

He is the opposition. The inversion. The annihilation.

Mammon is greed. He is generosity.

It’ll keep you safe.

It wasn’t exactly a lie. Polly didn’t care about people. She cared about desire. She cared about what he wanted. The flower, he thinks, is there to keep his desire safe.

All night, he’s thought he wants to get out, but he was wrong.

He wants to keep his family safe.

These revelations lost on Irina. Her obsession elsewhere. She wraps her fingers around the flower. She is not asking permission.

She is greed and she must take. He is generosity and he must give.

She pulls.

And pain.

He bucks. His whole body spasms. It is so much worse than he expected it to be.

Irina pulls again, harder now.

He screams. The pain reaches deep into him in a long tremulous spike that wends between ribs and lobes of lung.

There is a strange, fixed look on Irina’s face. A compulsion has come over her. And Danny understands that this is Polly anticipating his desire. She is giving Irina the flower. She is giving her generosity. And he is giving that lesson meaning.

He tries to find comfort in that as she pulls again, the hardest yet. He thinks of Sammy. Of Ash. Of keeping them safe.

A tearing feeling in Danny’s chest. A ripping deep inside.

Marta howls.

Irina pulls.

Danny screams.

Something gives way, gives in to the pressure of Irina’s relentless desire. Blood flows down his chest, a herald of the much greater damage being done inside. His heart bucks and spasms, a stallion kicking at the stable doors, fighting, fighting, fighting to run free.

☉

Danny in Ash’s apartment, the day after Marta left him.

“I should call her, right?”

“She punched you, Danny.”

“She has issues she’s working through.” Danny as a low-budget defense attorney. “She went through a lot in Afghanistan.”

“You’re the one with issues if you want to stay with someone who punches you.”

Danny explores the split in his swollen lip with his tongue. “Okay, so maybe I have issues too.”

Ash’s exasperated sigh. “You can’t save everyone, Danny.”

“But I want to.”

“Well, that’s not the way the world works.”

“Well, it ought to.”

Ash rolling her eyes. “Well, if you ever meet the person who runs the world, you let them know that, okay?”

“I will.”

“I swear, Sammy is easier to deal with than with you.”

IRINA

Irina pulling. Irina insistent. Irina implacable. Irina taking her pound of fucking flesh.

It comes free with a wrench, and a slurp, and a sigh of air. It comes free with a victorious howl, and a dog’s weeping whine.

It comes free, and suddenly she doesn’t understand. What is she holding? What has she done?

She holds a white flower turned red with blood. Blood that pours down Danny’s chest. He’s on the ground gasping. The flower’s stem is a trailing vine clotted with gore. There is a hole in Danny’s chest.

There is something nestled in the final tangle of the vine.

She can see Danny’s broken ribs.

Irina looking at Danny’s heart tangled in the root of a gladiolus flower.

What has she done?

MARTA

Marta staring at Danny’s body. Marta howling. Not even knowing what she’s mourning. Not understanding why this hurts after all their time apart, after the way she ended things. Only knowing that it does. Only dully aware something once possible no longer is.

IRINA

Irina staring at a bloody, broken flower in her hand. She had wanted it. Needed it. She had been certain that if she possessed it then she would finally feel satisfied. Satiated.

Why would she think that?

Except she knows why.

She felt resistance. She remembers it clearly. At first, she had thought he was defying her again, pulling some trick on her to make a fool of her. But then she’d kept on pulling. Too long afterward.

Had he been screaming?

How can she not remember?

Except she knows how.

Mammon is the god of greed. Danny was right. And now Danny is dead.

She doesn’t want him to be dead. She wants everything, but she doesn’t want that.

And holding the bloody flower, Irina realizes there will be no end to it. She will also want more. She will never be satisfied. She will always long for the next thing she cannot have. It is limitless. It will consume her even as she consumes the world.

Can she stop that?

Does she want to?

She looks inside and finds she does not. She wants everything but to stop.

But wasn’t that what Danny was asking her?

She thinks back on that last moment. Him looking at her. Him telling her, “Please find a reason to be generous.”

Irina looking at the flower. Looking at Danny’s heart. It meant generosity. It meant doing something even if it wasn’t for you. Even if it wasn’t what she wanted. Sometimes it just meant doing the right thing.

She has her answers. Shouldn’t that be enough?

No, says Mammon.

Yes, says Danny’s final gift.

Irina deciding who she’ll listen to.

She reaches out. She reaches into the world behind the world. She pushes into the place where the world is exactly how it really is. Into the space where Mammon lives. She reaches into him.

She knows how to do this, she thinks. She has done it before to enslave him. How much harder will this be? Because Mammon wants everything.

Even His own destruction.

Irina reaching out with her will. Her mind touching the squirming, writhing surface of the god’s. Irina blanching. Irina tearing deeper in.

—own it, want it, have it, get it, need it, buy it, deserve it, possess it, crave it, consume it, devour it, control it, take it, just fucking need it, need it, needit, needneedneedneednee—

Irina pushing through. Irina done with this bullshit. Irina holding onto the one desire left burning inside her.

Irina finding what she wants. Irina taking hold. Irina irrevocably directing the flow of Mammon’s desires.

I want you to destroy yourself.

A god screaming and Irina tearing everything down.

MARTA

Growing up in Brooklyn, Marta had always wanted to see a mountain. It was the most foreign thing she could imagine. Nature dwarfing the greatest skyscraper she’d ever seen. Making it insignificant. Invading the sky.

She’d traveled half the world to see them, and she’d seen too much.

And then she’d come back home and discovered something so much stranger.

Danny was her pack once. He was her mountain. Improbable. Never dreamed of. Stranger beyond all reckoning to her eyes. But hers. Her kin. Her love, if only for a while. Her failed savior.

And now he is dead.

She howls. She weeps lupine tears. She stands over him as Irina raises a bloody flower to the sky, and quakes.

Danny’s body quakes.

Marta wants to reach out a paw to stop it. To hold him still. That, she feels, he must be owed. Some rest here at the end of things. After striving so hard.

The ground quakes. Gravel rumbles. Trees shudder. A sound like thunder emerges from the earth. Skies darken. Birds wheel. Ozone crackles in the air.

Something is going wrong with the world.

Something primal in her—something animal—urges her to run.

But she stays. She won’t leave Danny. Not yet.

She looks for Irina. The woman is still holding the flower aloft. Is walking away from Marta, back toward the Black House.

Something like a black hole has manifested above it. Something like the god she glimpsed before.

Beneath it, the Black House is falling down. No. Is falling up. Is being consumed. Everything is being consumed. A tree is uprooted, whirls skyward. It brushes past Irina, and she doesn’t flinch.

A great wind tugs at Marta, pulling at her. Gravity gone horizontal.

Gravel coming down the driveway in a tidal wave. It slams and smashes over her, abrades her makeshift body.

She has felt this before. Has stood in a cavern with a god unleashed, trying to devour the world.

This feels different though. What pulls at her now has no hunger. No want. It feels like despair. It feels like an end. It feels like giving up.

Another glance back. The black hole is folding in on itself. Is devouring its own edges.

She starts to run then. Away. Home. Out. She has to get away. She wants to get away. She wants to go home.

Above her, clouds spiral down. Even the sky above the Black House is falling. The whole horror of it folding away. And she will not be caught here. She will not be wrapped up in this.

It’s what Danny would have wanted.

Marta running now. Marta leaving Danny behind. But it is not abandonment she thinks. Not this time. It’s strength. And she is strong enough, she’s sure. Her legs eating up the ground in long, loping strides. Her broken back leg burning against the splint Danny bound there.

She runs, and she knows that she is transformed, ruined, recovering. That things have been done to her that are irrevocable, immutable. But she knows too, that if they hadn’t happened, she would not be able to escape now, would not be able to resist the terrible howling, endless wind that is dragging turf, and bricks, and branches, and gravel back down into endless ruin.

It is an end of things.

An end of how things have been.

It is a god screaming.

It is, in its own way, a victory.

Marta seeing the outer wall. Marta seeing the gates. Marta seeing them torn off their hinges by the howling, desolate ending of this place. Marta seeing an exit.

Marta running, and behind her, the Black House falling down. All of it falling down.

And Marta puts her head down, and her feet pound against the ground, and she sprints for home.

.:.

Acknowledgments

Every book is its own journey. This one was longer than most, and it took the support of a lot of people along the way to help it achieve its final form. First off, thank you to my agent Howard Morhaim who had the wisdom and grace to explain to me that the book in its original form wasn’t working and who pushed me to write an ending that was actually comprehensible. Also, as always, thank you to my usual partners in crime, Paul Jessup and Natania Barron—their friendship, support, and genuinely inspiring talent is always a huge part of the forward momentum of any project. And, on that topic, thank you in general to the whole Underland Discord channel community. You couldn’t ask for a lovelier group of writers to discuss craft, cocktails, and an oddly large volume of goose trivia with. Speaking of Underland, a truly massive thank you should be aimed at Mark Teppo and Darin Bradley who were willing to take a risk on this odd little novella and who shepherded it into the book you now hold in your hands. And finally, thank you to my wife, whose love, support, and encouragement are the bedrock not just of this book, nor just of all my creative endeavors, but— essentially—of my entire life.

Also, thank you to you, for reading this. Even the acknowledgments. Look at you, going the distance. Cheers!

Washed Up on Dark Shoes is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the individual author’s imagination or are used in an absolutely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2026 by Jonathan Wood

All rights reserved, which means that no portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This book is published by Underland Press, which is part of Firebird Creative, LLC (Clackamas, OR).

He hesitates on the doorstep, considers doing something he can’t take back.

Edited by Darin Bradley

Book Design and Layout by Firebird Creative

Underland Press

www.underlandpress.com