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shoulder. The airliner stabilized with a thump and Allie crashed into his lap. He had a drink in his hand, but he was graceful,
lifted his plastic cup away without letting it spill. Not alcohol, Allie noticed, but milk.
“Make yourself at home,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
She quickly slid out of his lap and into the empty seat between him and the window.
The plane found a patch of smooth air and settled into it. Allie found it hard to look at the killer beside her. She glanced
past him, checking how many people had noticed her sudden appearance. The answer was: no one. Directly across the aisle, a
slender, silver-haired woman in a tracksuit was asleep—or trying to sleep, anyway—with her head against one of those little
white pads they euphemistically referred to as “pillows.” Just beyond her, in the window seat, was an equally slender silver-haired
man, watching the movie with a pair of headphones clapped to his ears.
“Allie,” she said.
“I’m Randy.”
“Are you?” she said. “I’d think the turbulence would’ve killed the mood.”
He stared at her from beneath those drowsy, half-lowered eyelids, studying her like a virologist looking at a sample on a
slide.
“Do you mind if I sit with you? I don’t think I can sit alone. Too scared.”
“Take a load off. I don’t mind. You got to think that if we were bouncing over a backroad like this, no one would give it
a second thought.”
“I’m not worried about the turbulence.”
He looked at her again, rotating his head on the thick stump of his neck. His barely there smile, his whole air of sleepy
calm, offended her. The arrogance—the stupid certainty of it—was an affront to her sense of decency.
“Did you know,” she said, “when you got on this plane, that you were putting all these people at risk, Horation? The King
is coming for you.”
She turned her face away from him, so she wouldn’t have to face his inexplicably offensive, self-satisfied smile. She didn’t
see his right hand flash out, didn’t know he was reaching for her until his hand clamped on her neck.
“What did you say?” he asked.
He squeezed so hard, so unexpectedly, she couldn’t reply for a moment. She shoved herself back in her seat, kicking her heels,
gasping. One shoe almost came off. Across the aisle, the older woman slept on. Her husband, in the window seat, stared raptly
at the in-flight movie.
The plane rattled over rough air. The film flickered. Or maybe the flickering was in her head.
He relaxed his grip. Then his face was close to hers, and there was a frightening blandness to his expression, a look bordering
on disinterest.
“Who are you?”
“He’s after me too. The King,” she said. It came to her all at once, just the right lie to tell. “You want to choke me out?
Go ahead. You’ll be doing me a favor. Better than being on this plane when he blasts it out of the sky.”
He studied her mildly. He was so calm, it was hard to remember he had been strangling her a moment before.
“You’re safe with me. He won’t touch this plane.
He’d like to. But he won’t. Can’t.” After a moment he nodded to the window.
“He’s out there, you know. I can feel him.
I feel him the way a rabbit feels the shadow of the owl.
I feel him in my blood. Do you feel that too? ”
“I guess I do,” she said . . . and maybe she did. There was the mark they all wore, that tattoo they could only see in reflections—and
even then, only sometimes—the wyvern that wound up her torso. She felt it on her skin, like the boning in a corset. She supposed
she had been feeling it since she began to approach the airport, although in the rush and the panic she had not tuned into
her own body, not paused to collect her breath and see what she was feeling.
He nodded to himself, looking her over. “You know my devotional name.” It wasn’t exactly a question.
“I had no idea you went by any other.”
“How do you know about me at all? What are you doing on this plane?”
“I’m looking for you. What do you think I’m doing? I riddled with King Sorrow. I wanted to know if there was anyone else in . . .
in my situation.”
“Your situation?”
“Marked.”
“For death.”
She nodded. “I riddled with him and won and he told me about you. He said if I found you on this flight I might survive the
night.”
“He wasn’t lying,” Horation said, with some satisfaction. “What did you have to offer him if you lost?”
“My grandmother,” she said. “He wanted my permission—I don’t know why he even needs it—to tear her apart with his claws.”
“Wickedness always requires an invitation: to one’s house, to one’s heart. And you were willing to gamble your grandmother’s
life?”
“Sure. She used to pull her false teeth out and snap them at me to scare me when I was little. Nasty yellow teeth. They smelled like she was already a corpse.” This was all true enough, although her grandmother and her false teeth had gone into the grave almost a decade ago.
Horation laughed, a deep, low rumble. “And you were just as willing to risk the lives of these other passengers as I am, or
you wouldn’t be here.”
“He said it was my only chance,” she told him. “He said if I wanted to live, I needed to find you. Why is he after you?” Wanting
to wipe the irritating half smile off his face, wanting him to remember the woman he had burned to death, the girl-child he
had run off the road.
“For the same reason dragons rose up against knights in the Dark Ages. To stop the crusade. To stop me from sticking a knife
in the heart of an evil power.”
“What evil power?” Allie asked.
“The IRS. The FBI. The ATF. The Elders of Zion. Different heads on the same beast. We’re moving against them now in our boldest
stroke ever. That’s what this is about.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s it then. It must be the goddamn Elders of Zion. That should’ve been my first guess.” Thinking to herself
that truly evil people were always too stupid, too lost in their own paranoid daydreams, to know they were evil.
He shot an appraising look at her, cold and speculative, and she wondered if she had put him on his guard again.
“You’re talking Jews, right?” Allie said, feeling good now about being a little drunk. White wine was basically inspiration
juice. “I was on a jury last year. Jewish judge. Jewish lawyers for the prosecution. They had some teenage boy on trial for
burning down a synagogue. I was the lone vote to acquit. They had to declare a mistrial.” Every word was a lie. She had read
about the synagogue trial in the Hartford Courant on a weekend in Bristol with Van.
“Was the boy guilty?”
“Yes.”
“So why didn’t you convict?”
“Because I thought the kid was cute. He looked just like the actor in Blue Lagoon. Chris Atkins. He was too sexy to send to jail. Boy, those prosecutors were mad, though. It was worth it just to see how mad they got. They were just about tearing their Jew beards out. The judge too—I thought he was going to eat his yarmulke.” Her father had heard exactly this kind of nasty stuff from his own supporters in his last couple years of office, at town hall meetings.
Her father had one donor, a strapping fortysomething who owned a chain of twenty gyms in Ohio, who told him in complete seriousness that the Federal Reserve Board had engineered the recession of the 1980s on behalf of the Jewish Illuminati.
Then there was a middle-aged woman in smart middle-aged clothes who braced him after a town hall to ask why he had voted to financially support a Holocaust museum when the Holocaust was a hoax.
He had got out not long after that, didn’t want to run anymore.
There was more money in lobbying, and he didn’t have to stand there with a big shit-eating grin on his face and nod while one of his voters told him fluoridated water was making people gay.
The plane rumbled continuously, like a big truck moving over grooved road.
“The Jews are a vindictive race,” he said. “No doubt they put the dragon on you much as they put him on me.”
“Why are you going to England?” she asked and waited for him to say he had found out about Arthur. Why Arthur, she wondered,
and not the rest of them?
Only Arthur never came into it. Horation said, “There’s some kind of stain on me—an invisible taint.”
“A taint?” Allie asked, thinking of the dusky highway between nuts and asshole, and all at once she was fighting to hold down
the giggles. She knew that was hysteria as much as hilarity working upon her. She knew too how dangerous it would be to laugh
at this man, had not forgotten how efficiently he had closed her windpipe with one hand.
But he didn’t clock her reaction. “I have been advised by the pastor of our church that there’s a pool on the coast of England,
in a place called Hastings. It’s called St. Helen’s Well. If I can find it, I can cleanse my evil taint.”
Allie bent over, biting a knuckle to keep from screaming with laughter.
He began to stroke her back. “Are you all right?”
She nodded without looking up at him and took the knuckle out of her mouth long enough to gasp. “It’s all the shaking around.
It’s giving me an upset stomach.”
“And you’ve been drinking. I can smell it on you. How much have you had?”
“Too much.” She took a deep breath, tried to exhale that wild, suicidal urge to howl with laughter. “St. Helen’s Well?”
“A sacred font. A virgin child—a novice nun—was killed there by a troll when she wouldn’t surrender her honor to him. I take
‘troll’ to mean a Black or a Jew. Though maybe there really are trolls. The existence of dragons would imply the possibility,
wouldn’t it? At any rate, some of her blood was preserved in a bottle, as a holy relic, and it is said a touch of it may heal
the most desperate wounds. And the tears she shed, as she was dying, splashed to the ground and became a torrent of clear,
blessed waters that have bubbled forth ever since. A man can wash off all evil marks there. A woman too.” Looking at her meaningfully.