Vicious Circle

He took another tremulous breath. His voice was getting fainter, with a breathy hoarseness around the edges of it that I didn’t like at all. “Fanke used to talk about something called a sacrifice farm,” he said. “It was an idea he’d put together for himself by reading between the lines in the medieval grimoires. He’d read them all in translation, and then he’d gone back and read them all in the original languages—mostly Latin and high German—and if there was one thing he’d gotten hung up on, it was this idea of sacrifices. I know because I had to listen to it every time Mel had him and her other crazy friends over to play.

“If you’re going to make a sacrifice to a god, Fanke said—to any god—then the sacrifice has to be earmarked well in advance and treated differently. It has a special status, and it gets special treatment. It lives apart. Until the time comes.

“He went on and on about this stuff, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t fucking listen.”

Disconcertingly, Peace began to cry. I still couldn’t see his eyes: the single candle cast deep shadows, and most of his face was in one of them. But the plane of his cheek was in the light, and I saw the tears following a single, wavering track across his pitted skin.

“So one night,” he said, “Mel told me it was my turn to be on top again. And this one was going to be really special. Because this time we were going to make a baby, and we were going to do it in a brand-new way.

“She used the word ‘transgressive’ a lot. We were going to transgress: we were going to breach the laws of nature. That idea seemed to get her even more excited than having an audience, but when I asked her exactly what we’d be doing, she got all shy.

“There was a lot of crap: a lot of arcane paraphernalia, a lot of chanting. It built up and it built up and it built up, and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I lost my hard-on somewhere along the way, and I almost dozed off, but she slapped me awake again. That was part of regular foreplay as far as our sex life was concerned. But then she went off-script. She stabbed herself in the stomach, with a poncy little silver dagger that had runes all up the blade, and then she got me to use the wound instead of—going in by the normal route.

“I told her she couldn’t get pregnant that way. It wasn’t transgressive, it was just stupid and sick. And incredibly messy. She didn’t care. She wanted it. She wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything.

“And as soon as we were finished she staggered over to the door and opened it, and Fanke walked in along with a couple of guys in surgical whites. They hustled Mel away, and he told me I could leave. Just like that. Actually it was more like on your marks, get set, go. He said he’d removed his protection from me. The cops would be looking for me as a bail defaulter, and I’d better sod off out of the country or I’d be finishing out my sentence at the maison d’arręt, without remission.”

Peace held up his hand, on which the golden locket glinted dully. He checked the clasp: a nervous tic that I suddenly realized I’d seen a couple of times before while he spoke.

“So I went,” he said flatly. “How are we doing for time, Castor?”

“We’ve still got a while. Peace, are you telling me that that was how Abbie—?”

I let the question hang. Slowly, he nodded his head.

“I didn’t know anything about it then. They fired the starting pistol and I was off. I’m not kidding myself, though: I’d have run even if I’d known Mel was pregnant. I’m not the nurturing type.”

There was a hectic energy in his voice now, and his face was strained like canvas on a frame. It was alarming to watch, almost as though he were coming unraveled, using himself up in this cathartic information dump so that he’d reach his own ending at the same time as he ended his story. I tried to call a halt again—for the last time.

“Peace,” I said, “I can put the rest together for myself. Get some sleep now, and I’ll wake you up when it’s time to take your medicine.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Castor,” Peace muttered, with fierce heat. “You don’t know shit. You listen to me, and then you can talk, okay?”

I held up my hands in surrender. “Okay. But I haven’t been sitting on my hands, you know. Let me at least tell you what I’ve got already—you can save yourself some breath and use it elsewhere.”

He rolled his eyes impatiently, but I’d already started in. “You found out somewhere along the line that you had a kid,” I said. “And maybe you got curious. You tracked Melanie down to New York, and you went out there to visit her. Abbie would have been about eight years old then. You met her, got to know her, and”—I went out on a limb, but it felt like a safe one—“you gave her a gift. That locket.”

Peace grunted. “Fucking amazing, Holmes. What was I wearing?”

“I’m guessing that was the first gig you ever walked into that you found it harder to walk out of,” I said. “You ended up fighting for Abbie in the courts. You wanted to be her father, and not just on her birth certificate.”