Free Murder of Angels by Caitlin R. Kiernan Page A

themselves.” Marvin’s speaking more softly now, as if he’s afraid Niki might hear them, as if she might be listening. “That’s a hell of a thing to have to carry around for ten years.”
    “Yeah,” and Daria shuts off the tap, dries her face on an orange dish towel and wipes rough terry cloth across her tingling skin, wrinkles her nose at the perfume smell of fabric softener. “She was just a kid. I don’t think she was even eighteen yet. Hell, we were all just kids.”
    “Do you guys ever talk about it?” he asks, and when Daria turns around Marvin’s chewing a mouthful of the sandwich and watching her intently, his dark eyes so curious and concerned, and she wishes she could send him home, get through the next few hours on her own somehow.
    “Not really.”
    Marvin nods his head slowly and takes a sip from his coffee cup, swallows and sets the sandwich back down on the blue saucer.
    “Not ever?”
    “I spent the last decade trying to forget all about Birmingham. Most times it seems like all that crazy shit happened to somebody else.”
    “And I suppose you’ve just been hoping it seems that way to Niki, too?”
    “You know, Marvin, you’re starting to get me pissed. Maybe you better back off a little.”
    So neither of them says anything for a few minutes. Daria sits back down at the kitchen table and lights another cigarette, smokes it silently while she stares at the cover of an old issue of Bassics magazine, Benny Rietveld glowering back at her from the glossy paper. Marvin finishes the sandwich, misses nothing but a few crumbs, one stray sprout like a huge white-green sperm; he carries the saucer to the sink and washes it, then sets it in the rack on the counter to dry.
    “We’re going to be fine, ” Daria says, to herself or Marvin or no one at all. “We’re going to make it,” and she closes her eyes and watches the indistinct blobs of not-quite-orange and not-quite-purple light floating about behind her eyelids. As long as I don’t start crying, she thinks and chews hard at her lower lip. Reminding herself it could have gone so much worse, the terrible thoughts that haunted her on the long flight home from Arkansas to San Francisco—finding Niki dead or a comatose vegetable for the rest of her life—and she wants to feel grateful. Wants to feel relieved, but there’s nothing left inside her but lingering shreds of fear and the familiar and smothering dread that has dogged her almost as long as Niki Ky has had to live with the memory of her dead lovers.
    “Anytime you need someone to listen, all you got to do is ask,” Marvin says. “You know that you and Niki are more than just another job to me,” and she can feel his hands resting heavy as stone on her shoulders, the unwelcome, unconditional weight of his sympathy. Something she can neither accept nor return, and she squeezes her eyes shut even tighter, wants to slap his hands away, wants to tell him to take his compassion and fuck the hell off.
    “There’s nothing you could say that would change that,” he says.
    Daria sighs and takes a deep breath, another drag off her cigarette, and she opens her eyes as the smoke leaks from her nostrils and hangs suspended like a spent ghost disintegrating above the table.
    “No, Marvin, you are definitely wrong about that,” she says. “There are things I could tell that you can’t even imagine …but, if I did, you’d never want to see me or Niki again—” and then Daria shakes her head, interrupting herself, because she knows that if she ever got started she wouldn’t be able to stop, and the ice is thin enough already. Her silence as much the key to sanity as her strength; not denial, not lies, but the right to keep impossible things to herself and she’s never lied to herself, or anyone else about the things she saw and heard the night that Spyder Baxter died. That terrible December night in the old house on Cullom Street, and that should have been the end of it, the moment