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The dog kneels for the shepherd, the shepherd kneels for the lamb. When the shepherd beckons the dog, the dog comes running out of love; when the lamb beckons the dog, the dog comes running out of instinct.
Gallagher sees himself in the dogs.
He sees himself in the ones left behind in concrete pounds, or on the edges of busy streets. Just like them, he’s lost his original collar— and the one who first put it on him is nowhere to be found, vanished into the maws of dreamland.
When he touched his new collar, the one The Family fashioned around his throat— fresh black leather and rustless metal ring— he felt no dedication.
Ownership without devotion made the purpose given to him echo hollow and opened his eyes to the faults in that purpose; what flock was he there to protect? Was he to protect them from themselves?
What preacher were the disciples like him there to follow?
He imagines Mikhail; Watchmaker; Shepherd; Preacher, and then the phantom press of silver— thirty in count— against the meat of his hand.
Thirty pieces, the price of sitting, staying, and doing nothing.
Rechristened and recollared, Gallagher; lost dog; apostate still on the altar, goes prowling through the concrete gardens as soon as he’s able, blinded by the artificial light and the choir of footsteps belonging to unknowing passersby. He hears their feet beat against factory tile, and pavement, and water-slick piers.
He is a witness to every moment of every hour: In the Gilded Hour, a body in a business suit drops from the edge of a great height. He watches it fall like a fleck of ash off the tip of his cigarette. All he can do is outline it in chalk.
In the Blue Hour, a cold footed groom stands knee-deep in water and reels his arm back. Gallagher watches the ring, a dream, sink like a ship without a captain. There was a brotherhood between him and that ring. Made for devotion but left with no owner.
In the Moment of Daybreak, a stuffed toy— a comfort of a long-forsaken childhood— is ripped by its seams to gut out a fuzzy cocktail of drugs. He remembers looking at the toy’s owner, a teenager, Misha’s age, a factory worker, and he remembers the kid telling him with a painful, genuine smile: what’s the harm sir? We can get high here because we can’t die here.
He lives in those moments, and learns through those moments. Those unimpressed with reality, who ache with living, will worship anything. Intoxication, ecstasy, religion, dreams. One way or another, they'll escape through belief.
Harrowing as it is, Gallagher pays witness to them all. Twelve moments of Penacony. Twelve apostles at the table.
Twelve reasons to prove to him this is not the paradise, or the freedom, his shepherd— the Watchmaker— dreamt of fathering into this world.
But it is the paradise the disciples forged, and it is the paradise the disciples ask him to soldier for with his teeth they removed and his muzzle they caged themselves. In the end, Gallagher is left at the dead-end of the Dreamscape, burning through his cigarettes until he burns through his bridges too.
(With himself as witness, Gallagher marks down another moment— the thirteenth.)
“What would you make of this, Mikhail?”
A lighter case; firelight blesses chiaroscuro across its metallic surface, the kind of orange reflection that warps and dances. The hound sees himself coming together: jagged, cross shaped scars, whiskey eyes, borrowed traits of the various masters he’s served.
The disheveled, stained glass amalgamation of Penacony.
“Betrayal is all I’ve done,” in doing nothing— as worse as collaborating. “So don’t let surprise take you, Mikhail, when I bite their hand again.”
Since Mikhail, it’s been easy to say Gallagher’s learned to love a little blood in his wine.
This dog; Gallagher’s old, and there’s only one trick the fake man underneath the fake name knows how to do.
The next time he takes out his lighter case, it’s in front of an angel.
Gallagher sees Sunday in the lambs; those born with their heads already bowed, knees already bent in supplication. Hair wool-soft, speech feather-light. A seraphim born in a holy herd with a holy name after a holy day, with a face so incredibly beautiful all his words become true. Nobody would ever think a face like his could birth lies.
Gallagher sees Sunday in the other lambs too; those carried up the mountains to sweat their dirtless blood on the stone altars. Unconditionally faithful, but not enough to live; sufficient only in the eyes of executioners. He and his sister dance between the wolves aching to eat and the butchers waiting to buy, but there is a difference between the lamb Sunday is and the lamb his sister could be— between the two, there can only be one martyr. The other will be a murder. Nothing more.
Gallagher thinks Sunday, ethereal, his perfection immortal, wouldn’t mind being that martyr. He thinks maybe the angel was raised for it. But the part of Gallagher that still heeds the call of his first master doesn’t want to give the lamb the satisfaction.
There’s a practiced smile, limned with annoyance.
“Gallagher. You’re late.”
A barked laugh, with a disrespectful amount of teeth.
“Am I?”
Sunday stands before his sandcastle— his miniature city, skyscraper windows shoulder to shoulder, window to window. His arms are folded behind his back, as if restrained. When Gallagher commands a flame to the tip of the cigarette dangling out of his canines, he pictures, clearly, the hands Sunday’s hiding behind his back tightening into fists.
“Not for the first time,” Sunday states, fixated on the white paper as it starts to smolder and blacken. “Tell me: at what point did I give you permission to smoke?”
The question stretches across the sandpit between them, as great of a length as a miniature city. On one end there is Sunday, a beacon of pure control, radiant light glinting poetically off the sharpened points of his halo; opposite is Gallagher, nothing but man-made flames and the stale scent of alcohol clinging onto his clothes.
Neither are willing to close their eyes first. It would be as bad as waking up.
“Your shirt’s buttons are in the wrong holes.” Sunday says suddenly, eyes cutting into Gallagher.
The lamb gestures to his own neck, where the golden studs around his collar are perfectly even and aligned. “You see, your first button is in the second hole, which makes the cut of your shirt appear lower.”
His pale wings twitch. “I do not think the other hounds will appreciate your disregard for the dress code.”
“Nobody’s had a problem with it so far.” Gallagher comments, tendrils of nicotine curling freely from his mouth. “Unless we’re counting you.”
The hound removes the cigarette lazily hanging from his fangs, tapping the end of it to release a shower of ash.
The other thing about the lamb: it does not always have the eyes of a lamb. Gallagher gets a good look at them now as they watch the shower of embers descend upon the city of sand, landing on boundaries and guard rails. Not only are Sunday’s eyes gold and lapis, thin and bright instead of round and dark, but in some ways they show Gallagher an inkling of himself.
In them, there is a flash of vitriol, an old friend.
Gallagher receives it as if it was, smirk finding its home on his face as the angel’s sheep skin momentarily slips off.
“Anything else that upsets you so?” he provokes.
“As a matter of fact,” the lamb places a gloved hand on the corner of the sandpit’s rim. Crooks his fingers along its edge thrice, as if trying to beckon an animal that would not come. “Your face. It screams of neglect; shaving is not a hard morning routine to keep, officer. It is as simple as ironing your vest, or straightening your tie.”
For just a moment, Sunday’s smile was no longer beatific. However briefly, there was a snarl, a gleam of clenched teeth, and his gold-lapis eyes turned cavernous. And when Gallagher goes as far as to tilt his head— doglike in every mannerism— the angel’s wings flap sharply against his temples, gray hair curling around the feathers like claws.
“What more,” Sunday seethes, “Your self-conduct. The stench of your insolence. Have you no shame?”
“C’mon then. Preach to me. Remind me why I should have some.”
Gallagher’s stick of death, half-withered, remains firmly clamped between two calloused fingers, and from the decaying end smoke pours out like a language. A threat; a piece of pre-existing evidence proving how little those preachings actually serve.
Sunday is the first to move away from their opposing positions, the first to shift from the head of the sandpit to the sidelong corner of it, hands lacing together behind his back. In turn, Gallagher matches him, also moving sidelong, but his steps are notably slower in comparison; certain and leisurely. After all, a dog has nothing to run from.
“Must I?” Sunday asks, irritation stretching the pleasantry.
The dog says nothing. He just returns the cigarette to its rightful place between his lips and takes another pull, inflating his lungs with particles of ash.
“Fine.” That’s enough of an answer for Sunday. “You are an officer of the Bloodhounds, an arm of justice for The Family—”
Gallagher chuckles.
“Does something amuse you, hound?”
“Hah, no, no. Carry on.”
Despite the encouragement on Gallagher’s part, Sunday does not, not right away. With the gloves covering the skin of his clasped hands, Gallagher can’t see the state of the angel’s knuckles— but he does imagine them to be snow white, the same as Sunday’s coat and cape.
“... The Family endeavors tirelessly to uphold the respect given to them throughout generations; as an officer and representative, the two of us have a certain image we must not only cultivate, but uphold,” Sunday emphasizes the word, circling around the miniature model of Penacony with Gallagher on the other side— step for step.
“If we did not, then what significance would our titles have in the eyes of the people? Not just that, but also the significance of our family,” The Family.
At some point, Gallagher’s feet ceased to whisper against the tile, no longer step for step. But just because he stops moving doesn’t mean Sunday stops— no, the lamb seizes the opportunity to cross the gap, closing the distance between them.
Up close, the light on Sunday’s halo is even more striking. White and pure, compared to the hazy red ignited through a lighter’s butane and flint.
The exhausting heat at the tip of Gallagher’s cigarette offers no warmth to Sunday’s floating crown of thorns.
But it’s then and there that Gallagher remembers a line from a holy book he read, long ago: Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
He examines Sunday, white coat on the outside, pitch-blue, almost black, vestments on the inside, and finds the caution warranted; again, Gallagher asks himself— is he just a dog here to protect the flock from themselves?
The lamb looks carnivorous. But his voice is still feather-light. “Do you have anything to say for yourself, bloodhound?”
Gallagher’s reassured by the fact that he is a false prophet too. When he opens his mouth, the immediate thing that comes out isn’t words— rather, it’s a lavender cloud, and a cigarette brought to nothing but a nub is ashed not a moment after.
“Titles, titles. Without them, aren’t we just two men?” He unpockets a carton of cigarettes while Sunday unclasps his hands, bringing them out in front of him.
And while the dog; the apostate smiles lazily around his brand new nicotine stick, the lamb; the apostle strips one of his hands of a stainless glove, finger-by-finger.
“No, no, no. I am a shepherd,” Sunday’s voice sounds like a feather, a quill reinforced with steel and tiny teeth of hooklets. The methodical angel folds his glove, once, twice, then lays it flat against the sandpit’s rim. “Sent to guide men like you on a righteous path to Their forgiveness.”
“A shepherd!” Gallagher laughs, unrevoked.
He’s seen true shepherds. He followed one until thirty pieces of silence led him astray. “You are just another sheep. Whatever I have to say can be told by my own mouth— or not at all.”
And in just a breath, lightning fast, a bare hand— Sunday's— white-knuckled, like he thought, wrenches Gallagher’s tie into a vice.
The bloodhound feels the way the maroon fabric, close to the knot, cinches around the column of his throat like a noose, or a collar equipped with a leash to be pulled on. And pull is exactly what that ungloved hand does; yanking the bloodhound down until he sees Sunday’s contracting pupils up close and personal.
“I suggest you learn to bite your tongue, hound.”
Gallagher; the disheveled, stained glass amalgamation of Penacony, rechristened, recollared, with his leash in another’s hand— tugged once more, twice more— does not sit or kneel the way he would have done for Mikhail. There is no price anyone could pay to buy his silence anymore.
His whiskey eyes narrow on the arrowhead of Sunday’s cheekbone. His next action borders on blasphemy, but it’s a shot Gallagher doesn’t think twice about before taking:
Slowly, he shifts the cigarette to the corner of his mouth. Slowly, he inhales. Slowly, then suddenly, Gallagher blows a smoke ring— a halo of smog and nicotine— and it unfurls across Sunday’s flinching cheeks and snarling teeth. A silver kiss of defiance.
Sunday gives his own kiss: the infernal heat of his palm, striking the side of Gallagher's face.
Gallagher thought it would bite, but it barely even stings.
Stepping back, the angel wordlessly retrieves his glove and tries putting it back on his now-reddening hand— but the damnable rage trembling at the tips of his fingers prolongs the action for longer than Sunday seems to like. The angel turns away. The angel keeps still.
“I’ve had enough. Good night,” The angel grits, “Gallagher.”
That’s a dismissal if Gallagher’s ever heard one. He’s not always known to follow orders, but he’s had enough tonight too— enough to be satisfied with the outcome of Sunday’s tense back.
The hound unleashes his tie from his neck, noose and knot coming undone to hang off his thumb.
“Good night, whatever that is.”
(When the dog hears his shepherd calling him, he breaks off into a run; out of love. When the shepherd hears his lamb calling him, he listens; out of love. But what becomes of the shepherd when the sheep are cannibals? What becomes of the dog? Is it the nature of betrayal, or the betrayal of nature?)
(Gallagher doesn’t have a clear answer, but he does know his teeth itch for vengeance; and Sunday’s will be the same.)