Authors: J Bennett
“What’s on those screens?” I nod toward
the computer monitors.
Bear Mask rubs his shoulder. “They’re
uh…I’d rather not say.”
“You’d rather not say? I’ve got a gun on
you.”
He swallows. “I believe that’s a tranquilizer
gun.”
“Still good for bashing in your face.”
“I suppose if you must.” He drops his
arms to his sides and waits. His round face is flushed, and beads of sweat
skate down his neck. How in the hell is a guy like this even involved in
capturing and torturing angels? Why isn’t he handing out detention slips to the
stoners who fell asleep during his riveting discussion about finding the
hypotenuse of a triangle?
I sigh and lower the gun a little. “What
if I told you that we’re on the same side?”
“Then I’d say you shouldn’t be bashing
me in the face with a gun.”
We look at each other, and I feel my lips
tugging up into a thin smile. “Touché. You’re smart. Mind if I give you some
advice?”
He eyes the gun. “I suppose that’s
rhetorical.”
“In a minute here you’re going to take a
nice long trip to Candy Land.” I motion with the gun. “After you wake up, pack up
and go back to wherever you came from. Wearing stupid masks doesn’t make you professionals.”
I try to make my voice go all hard and cold the way Tarren’s does. This is for
his own good. “You have no idea about what you’re dealing with. The longer it
takes you to figure that out, the more teammates who will be hitching a ride
with Garret to wherever you go when your neck gets twisted like a corkscrew. Understand?”
“Indeed.” The man meets my eyes. Despite
his puffy, flushed face, his gaze is hard. I see it in his aura too, a strong
emotional surge. I get the feeling that whatever cushy life he came from isn’t
waiting for him anymore.
“They took someone from you,” I sigh.
“Yes.” His eyes don’t flinch.
“Then don’t go home. Go someplace new.
Start over. Volunteer at a food kitchen. Let us do our job.”
“Who’s us?” he asks, his voice all
innocent and soft.
I raise the gun. “Nice try.” This guy gets
my vote for group leader.
I bet he was the one who came up with that
clever
tightening net maneuver in the alleyway.
“Wait. Can I…” Bear Mask looks over at
the red futon. “Bad back.”
“Don’t try anything funny,” I say and keep
my face serious, so maybe he won’t notice how cheesy that sounded.
“Have I given any indication that I’m
the heroic type?” Bear Mask smiles as he backs up slowly to the futon. When he
gets there, he sits down, hands at his sides.
“Lie down,” I tell him.
Instead, he looks at me with those hard
eyes again. “There are other creatures still in the city. At least four more that
I’ve caught on the monitors. They must have a central location somewhere in
Peoria.”
“How do you find them?”
This time Bear Mask doesn’t hesitate. “Thermal
imaging. They’ll keep killing. Innocent people.” Strains of passion overlay his
calm manner.
I shoot a tranq. The man winces and
touches the nodule in his arm.
“I suppose I best get in
a…a…comfortable…” He pulls his legs up onto the futon and lies back. “Find them,”
he slurs. “Find them.”
I look back at the computer monitors. In
the black and white image, I can make out a street and cars inching through a
traffic light. They must have set up rotating cameras on the rooftops.
Clever
Bear.
The tiles on each screen switch to different scenes. I watch a jogger
plod carefully down the sidewalk, her frame a much brighter shade of gray than
the surrounding landscape.
Thermal imaging
. But do angels give off different heat
signatures than humans? Could it really be so simple to distinguish them?
The thought that these amateurs could
have discovered a better way of tracking angels is galling. I’ll have to ask
Tarren about it when….well, if I find him.
I’m struck again by the weight of my
current situation, and it’s like quicksand, pulling me down into panic,
confusion, hyperventilation.
Deep breath. Deep breath. One thing at a
time. First, finish the angel.
As I pass back through the living room,
I keep hearing Bear’s voice echoing in my head.
At least four more…must have
a central location somewhere in Peoria….they’ll keep killing.
I also think
about the angel with the blonde braid and the dead policeman she left behind.
A plan is forming in my head. A very
bad, very stupid plan. A plan that will most likely get me extra crispy dead.
I descend the stairs, kicking Milo’s
chain out of the way. As my adrenaline begins to ebb, I feel the ache in my
twisted ankle, the throb of my battered face, and a heavy pounding in my left
wrist. I step over Milo’s supine form at the bottom of the stairs. On second
thought, I bend over him, rifle through his pockets, and find what I’m looking
for – a cell phone. I tap the screen to wake it up, swipe to unlock, and am
mildly surprised to find that it isn’t password protected.
“Thanks,” I mutter, shoving the phone
into my pocket.
Across the room, Rain is still sprawled
on the floor where I left him, but I can see little ripples of consciousness starting
to rise in his aura. Finch cradles Garret’s head in her lap. She’s pulled his
mask off, and his half-lidded green eyes stare up unseeing. The whole basement
smells of the bowels he released upon death.
“He’s dead,” Finch says in an empty
voice when she sees me pointing a gun at her.
“I know,” I say and pull the trigger.
Nothing happens. Out of darts. A shame. She could have used some sweet dreams.
I drop the tranq gun without wiping it down. What’s the point? I’ve probably
got my prints all over this place. I doubt even The Totem would be stupid
enough to call the police about this situation.
I make my way over to the angel and peer
at that ugly face. Moment of truth. The pitiless, almost gleeful way this angel
went at Garret and then Rain confirms that he is a killer. There isn’t any
moral conundrum holding me back. I could also snap his neck and get some points
for poetic justice. Just one quick twist, and I’d be on my way to getting him
buried in an anonymous grave and then starting my search for Tarren.
At least four more that I’ve caught on
the monitors,
Bear’s
voice echoes in my mind.
They’ll keep killing.
I sigh. Idiot plan it is.
Six houses to the left, I find a silver Cadillac
with a dented bumper and unlocked doors huddled beneath a thick blanket of
snow. I thrust the unconscious angel across the wide backseat and sweep off
mounds of snow from the windshield with my arms. The inside smells like old
lady and church. I mutter an apology as I rip apart the console and hotwire the
car. Or at least try to hotwire it. The engine is stubborn in the cold.
The church-smelling car fills with my
curses. The engine catches on the third try, and I drive the hell away. Not
anywhere in particular, just away from this middle-class neighborhood, from all
those collectors’ plates, and the weeping girl in the basement.
The handcuff still attached to my left
wrist clanks gently against the steering column as the car coughs, shakes, and handles
like a boat, its wheels sliding at every stop sign and red light. The console
tells me the time is 3:50 PM. Could my world have neatly imploded in only nine
hours?
My adrenaline is draining fast, leaving
me with sore muscles, body shakes, and an aching hunger that fills my brain
with a tantalizing music. I glance in the rearview mirror at the unconscious
angel in the backseat. He doesn’t have an aura, which makes it next to impossible
to guess when he might be coming around.
It won’t be long,
I think.
He was already reviving when
The Totem got back, and they were gone for less than three hours.
I pull over at a fast food joint a dozen
miles down the road. My mind spins with a growing list of “to-dos”, but first I
get out of the car, stagger to a fresh patch of snow, and shove handfuls of it
in my mouth. I must look like I’m tripping on acid, kneeling here in the snow
without a jacket, gobbling up fistfuls of my own handmade, tasteless snow
cones. But oh, oh, oh, so good. My entire body shivers as the cold liquid
soothes my swollen tongue and sandpaper throat.
Before my hands turn into ice cubes, I use
more snow to try and scrub away the blood on my face and neck. My nose is a
big, throbbing mass of pain that lashes out at me even when I try to be gentle
scrubbing dried blood from my nostrils with a wet fingertip. There’s nothing to
be done for the crimson stains splattered on my gray long-sleeve shirt.
Damn.
I return to the car, dig out Milo’s cellphone,
and call Tarren’s number. It’s the longest of longshots. When I said Styx
,
he
should have ditched everything, cut off all avenues of contact. Still, a part
of me hopes that he ignored my command, refusing to abandon me to my fate. My
heart quickens to a gallop as I press the last digit. Even now he might be
valiantly searching for me, clinging to his phone, hoping for contact…
An operator informs me that my call
cannot be completed. I sit back in the seat. Tarren discarded the phone,
probably snapping the SIM card in half for good measure. There’s no point in
even trying the motel. I hang up the call, and begin to press the digits of
Gabe’s main cell.
My fingers stop. If Tarren is following
Styx
protocol, then Gabe should also be completely out of reach. Even if
he were available, I can’t get Gabe involved. He’d insist on coming to help,
and he’d most definitely not allow me to follow through with my terrible plan.
I cancel the call and watch for a moment as snowflakes settle onto the
windshield of the car. Soft, peaceful.
“I can’t do this,” I say out loud. Not without
Tarren or Gabe. I turn to look at the angel in the backseat and remember how
easily Garret’s neck snapped beneath his strong hands. “I definitely can’t do
this.”
I wait a while for my panic to subside.
One minute. Two. Three. I realize my panic isn’t so much subsiding as measuring
the windows for drapes. I’ve got to do this anyway, despite the fact that I’m….well,
me.
I do a quick Google search on Milo’s
phone and memorize the address I find. It’d be convenient to keep the phone,
but I can’t risk being tracked. Even if The Totem are amateurs, Bear Mask was
no dummy, and there’s that whole logic of never underestimating people who are
intent on killing you.
I slide out the phone’s SIM card, turn
it into plastic confetti and brave the snow drifts to throw it all away in an
icicle-laced trash bin outside the fast food place. Then, I scramble back to
the warm car, clutch the wheel hard, and steer the boat back into Peoria
proper. The monster part of me knows what I’m planning, and she purrs with
pleasure.
***
The worst of the storm has passed. The
streets are plowed and salted, and my Cadillac makes steady progress into town.
Heaps of exhaust-tinted snow line each side of the road. Halfway to my
destination, traffic halts for an excruciating fifteen minutes as we carefully
move around a minor crash.
I drum my hands on the wheel,
thump,
thump, thump,
and
try not to think about what I’m going to do,
thump,
thump, thump,
or how stupid this plan is,
thump, thump, thump,
or
that I have no idea where Tarren is and am thus completely and most utterly
alone,
thump, thump, thump,
and that, just as a kicker, I’ve got a
highly volatile and murderous angel in the backseat who could wake up at any
moment,
thump, thump, THUMP!
The line of cars finally moves past the
accident, and a few minutes later, I pull into a bland strip mall. There’s no
telling where the parking spaces are beneath all the snow, so I give it my best
guess and plow the Cadillac onto the nearest mound. The pet store is tucked
near the end between a closed beauty parlor and a pizza joint doing brisk
business.
A hand-painted sign hangs above the pet
store door depicting a little girl in a pink dress embracing a dog while a
smiling cat stands by her leg. I immediately hate the sign. The cat is too big
in comparison to the girl, and the perspective is off so that the dog looks
like it’s floating above the ground. The girl’s left arm is so short it looks
like she has some kind of congenital birth defect. Even I could paint a better
sign than that. Okay, I couldn’t, but someone in fucking Peoria could.
This is so dangerous and so stupid. And
just bad, a deep down soul-pitting bad that will make me feel ugly no matter
what I see in the mirror.
I look back at the angel.
“Don’t wake up for another fifteen
minutes,” I command. Then I sit in the car for another minute, completely
wasting valuable time. It isn’t because I’m scared. It’s because I want this
too much, and because I know what it’ll do to me.
“But he has to believe,” I say softly to
myself, and this, at last, propels me from the car and into the Arctic
temperatures outside. I immediately miss my parka and knit cap with the border
of happy snowmen as I hunch over and wrap my arms around my chest. I untuck my
hair from behind my ears, letting it fan over my face as I pass the large front
windows of the pizza parlor and tug open the door to the pet store.
Animals have a way of sensing my
predator vibe, and as soon as I pass the threshold, they start going bat shit crazy.
The gerbils rush to their cubbies, the rabbits thump their powerful back legs,
and the birds screech and flap.
I wince at the noise, but keep my steps
true to their course. Toward the back of the store, an overweight teenage girl
with bad skin was tapping fish flakes into a line of tanks before all hell
broke loose. Now, her head swivels around, and her aura crackles with confusion.
She sees me and automatically says, “Hi,
welcome to Pet Palace,” even though her words are soft and nearly drowned by
the cacophony. I don’t say anything, don’t acknowledge the greeting. I just
keep walking toward her.
Her eyes widen as she takes in my
bruised, swollen face. “Are you…do you need an ambulance?” she asks, her aura
spiking with fear. At the last moment, she notices the handcuff dangling on my
left wrist. The skin peels back from my palms.
Aura. Beautiful aura.
She
tries to step back, but bumps up against the fish tanks instead.
Now.
I
take her down, swift and clean, pressing my forearm against her carotid artery
until all the manic fear releases from her aura, and she slumps against me. Her
hair smells of citrus.
The song, the song.
Her aura
calls to me. I could just take her instead. Human energy.
Velvet power,
filling me.
I drag her behind the counter, turn off
the lights, and flip the Closed sign hanging on the door.
I close my eyes.
This is what I have
to do.
I don’t know who I’m trying to justify this too. Maybe Gabe, maybe
Tarren, maybe the decent person I used to be. Either way, it’s only a partial
truth.
This is what you are,
the monster part of me answers back.
You
try to hide it. You try to fight it, but this is what you will always be.
I walk to the first bird cage, open the
door and start a mini-killing spree. The birds go first, just so I can shut
them up. One by one, I reach into their cages with my glowing hand and take
hold of their bodies. Their energy pours into me, warming my cold skin,
knitting my broken wrist back together. My mind slows its frantic spinning, and
all the fears and uncertainties melt away like those snowflakes on the
windshield.
More, More, MORE!
The monster’s voice is louder, driving
back my weak protests. I keep going – hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits, mice. They
bite me and scratch me, and I drain their lives away. At some point I’m so
giddy I laugh. Why haven’t I done this before? Why have I been so afraid of this
power when it feels so right?
I drink in more energy than I’ve ever
had before, except for the night I almost killed Gabe.
Except for that.
I gorge, and the monster grows strong.
She needs to be.
***
By the time the angel in the backseat
starts to rouse, I’ve parked the Cadillac in a corner of a quiet business
complex far away from the pet shop massacre. A few other cars sit in the long,
snowy parking lot – the diehards – but, for the most part, the place is
abandoned. I sit on the hood of the car and concentrate on breaking the
handcuff. The metal presses deep into the flesh of my palm as I pull and twist.
Harder. Power flowing through me.
With a defeated cry, the metal arm
swings open, and I massage my freed wrist.
Awesome. Everything is awesome.
I listen with fascination at the clarity
of the sounds all around me. I breathe in a symphony of scents that even the
mounds of snow cannot dampen. The colors of everything are so sharp I could
almost cut my finger on them.
My body hums in harmony. The cold can’t
touch me.
Why have I been holding back all this
time?
The thought
whispers through my mind, and there’s no one to argue against it.
I get tired of waiting, so I slide off
the hood, pull open the back door of the car, and unceremoniously drop the
angel into the snow. This brings him around, though slowly. He groans and
presses his hands through the white wetness. The threads pull against the
shoulders of his tailored sports coat.
“Wha, in hell?” he slurs, pulling himself
to his knees. He looks up and blinks at me. His heavy, Cro-Magnon brow shelters
beady brown eyes set too wide on his face.
“Better,” he says, his tongue gaining
traction. “This is better. What was that before?” He frowns, pulls his hands up
from the snow, and checks out the fading bruises around his wrists.
“Not a dream then,” he says.
“Nope.”
“That would have been a pretty fucked up
dream.” He doesn’t seem to be bothered by the cold.
“Vigils.” The angel stands up and brushes
the snow off his clothing, taking extra care to check his watch. His
caterpillar eyebrows fold together in concentration. “Let’s see, I got out of
them cuffs, rained down some of my signature hellfire, and then….” He frowns
and touches his head, probing the area I introduced quite brutally to the steel
chair.
“Then they put a tranq in your ass, and you
hit the chair on the way down,” I finish for him. I can’t take my eyes off his
round, squashed nose. It must have been a hard thing to grow up with that nose.
“An impressive showing.”
The angel’s head snaps up from his watch,
and the expression on his face reminds me of the wolverines I’d watch on the
Discovery Channel as a kid.
“Damn Ascension’s made me weak as fuck,”
he snarls, “otherwise, I would have torn all their heads off.”
I keep my face carefully set in an
expression of nonchalance, even though the word
Ascension
rings all
kinds of alarm bells in my head.
So they didn’t just come to Peoria to
snack.
“Well?” the angel demands, “what the
fuck happened and where the fuck are we?” His small eyes gleam with the threat
of violence. I should be scared. I know this the way I know the sky is blue and
that Gabe loves Francesca, but I can’t find any fear inside me.
“You’re not the only one who can break a
pair of cuffs,” I say, and dangle my broken cuff from my index finger. “I was
just waiting for a distraction, and you gave it to me.”