Murder of Angels Read Online Free

She shuts her eyes again, trying to remember the things her psychologist has taught her, all the telltale differences between dreams and reality, but all she can hear is Spyder and the sound of drywall straining beneath the weight of the pale, dangling thing, the thing that Spyder became .
    To save you, she said. To save you all.
    The chrysalis, its shining skin like a clot of iridescent cream, a whiteness washed with shifting, indecisive colors. The shape beneath its skin, familiar and entirely alien, breathing in and out, in and out, and Spyder mumbles something in her ear that Niki doesn’t understand.
    “What?” she asks. “What did you say?” but the chrysalis only swings and creaks and breathes.
    Niki opens her eyes again and not enough time has passed that the room is any lighter, still hours until dawn, sunrise that really makes no difference because her demons have never been shy about the sun. The clock is ticking again, and this time she doesn’t argue with it. There’s another sound, too, like thunder far off, or waves against a rocky beach, and she sits up and listens.
    “Schizophrenia can be managed,” her psychologist says, whispering from some secret nook or shadow. “You can live a normal life, Niki, if you’ll let me help you.”
    “You don’t know,” Spyder says, way back then, and the ticking clock, the thunder and the waves; Niki tries to hear her memories of Dr. Dalby’s voice instead, but he’s the least substantial phantom in the room.
    “I know now, ” she whispers. “I do, Spyder. I know now.”
    Niki pushes back the blanket, the sheets, exposing her bare legs, and ten years earlier, she does the same thing, in that other bed, that other room. The chrysalis swings almost imperceptibly from its fleshy vinculum, making the ceiling sag with its weight. She knows that Daria’s somewhere in the house looking for her, not this house now, but that house then, the tumbledown house at the dead end of Cullom Street. Not San Francisco, but Birmingham, and in another moment the bedroom door will open and Daria will try to save her again.
    “You can’t help me,” Spyder mumbles in her ear. “Not here. Not now.”
    “That these…these events you’ve described left such a deep and horrifying impression upon you is completely understandable, Niki. You were only a kid, weren’t you? All those things you thought you saw—”
    “The whole world,” Spyder says, “the entire fucking universe, is held together with strings. I read that in a physics book. Strings in space and time, Niki, strings of energy and matter, light and darkness. And what I need to know, what I have to learn, is who the hell’s pulling those strings.”
    In a moment, the chrysalis, ripe and swollen, will begin to split and spill its wriggling contents across the floor.
    “Let me go,” Niki says, her voice sounding very loud in the empty bedroom in the big house that Daria Parker bought for her. “Let me forget and just be me again.”
    “You will not believe the things that you will see,” Spyder murmurs. “The things I will show you.”
    “I believe it already,” she replies, not taking her eyes off the chrysalis, Spyder wrapped up tight in that impossible, transforming second skin, and Daria’s calling Niki’s name now.
    Spyder kisses her cheek, and then she smiles her lost and secret smile, that smile that Niki fell in love with once upon a time. “The things that pull the strings,” she says. “You’ll see.”
    “I don’t want to see any more,” Niki replies. “I’ve seen enough already.”
    “We’ve barely scratched the surface,” Dr. Dalby assures her from the chair behind his wide desk.
    “I’ve seen all I ever want to see.”
    And then the bedroom door opens, here, not there, so it isn’t Daria, her hands and face streaked with burns from the air clogged with acid threads. Just Marvin in his purple paisley bathrobe, Marvin Gale who watches over her because Daria can’t afford real