From his comment earlier, that look of recognition that flashed in his eyes, he might even know what Dags was.
Dags leapt up as he thought it, coming down with a clenched fist, using gravity and muscle to clock the boxer directly in the face. The combination of his weight, gravity and momentum, not to mention his waist and hips as he put some muscle behind it, drove the guy down to the asphalt.
Finally.
The boxer still didn’t react enough.
He let out a grunt as his knees slammed into the alley floor, even though Dags heard something crack, something that sounded a lot like bone. The guy barely exhaled out a rough breath, although it must have hurt like hell.
He fought back instead, throwing out his arms and hands out in a futile attempt to catch his weight, even as he looked up to track Dags.
Dags didn’t wait.
Landing lightly on one foot, he pivoted, whipping around to angle a kick directly at the boxer’s jaw.
That one connected just right.
Dags felt that satisfying shiver of heat when he hit the sweet spot with a precision he still couldn’t explain. Guilt followed that thrill, even now, after all these years, coupled with the knowledge he shouldn’t be enjoying this so much. In the same way, he knew, even before he saw the results, that he’d dislocated the other man’s jaw.
Night-night, asshole.
Dags’ eyes never left the boxer as the beefier man collapsed in an inelegant heap. His face hit first, just like Dags knew it would, smacking into the alley floor. The rest of his body crumpled onto his muscular arms, twisting his torso and back into an unnatural position, his head lolling sideways as his body pushed it harder into the asphalt.
Wincing at the sound of the other’s skull making contact, Dags remained where he was after he landed, panting. He continued to stand there, every muscle tensed as he watched the boxer’s face.
For those few seconds, he didn’t move other than to breathe, deliberately taking the time to store up on oxygen, to catch his breath in case he needed it.
He’d learned his lesson with this guy.
He wasn’t assuming anything.
He watched the boxer lie there, making sure he wasn’t getting up.
Demon-boy should be down for the count.
Physically, they could only take about as much as their human hosts, even if they had a tendency to be stronger, and to heal faster.
Dags hung there, waiting, his eyes flickering over the other’s unmoving form. Noting the sprawl of the other man’s thick legs, the awkward twist in his freakishly muscular right arm, his bleeding head and ears, his closed eyes, Dags figured the chances were really damned good that the fight was over.
He waited a few beats more, just to be sure.
If the guy wasn’t out, that was some Academy-level performance, there.
Dags slowly lowered his fists, still watching the demon-possessed human. He went totally still, trying to determine if the guy was still breathing. Noting the broad chest was still moving up and down steadily, if more shallowly than before, Dags unclenched his jaw with an effort. A flicker of relief coursed through him at that, too.
He hated it when he killed them accidentally.
That had only happened a few times, but it was horrible.
It haunted him.
Dags was about to walk up to the guy, check his pulse, maybe lift up an eyelid to check his pupils, a final safety check to make sure he could start the cleansing ritual⏤
⏤when someone behind him let out an elongated, half-strangled shriek.
Dags froze, turning his head.
A face shone at him, orange in the streetlight’s glow. Her eyes stared at his, her chest heaving breaths.
She was breathing even harder than he was.
Dags’ eyes and mind slowly made sense of the rest of her.
Her hands splayed on the brick wall as she stared at him with wide brown eyes, like Dags had transformed into a green-skinned alien. He stared back at her, unblinking as she panted, her back pressed to that shadowed segment of wall.
“What,” she panted. “The fuck. Was that.”
She continued to pant, staring at him.
“No. Really.” Her chest hitched and struggled for air, fighting with her own adrenaline. “What. In the seven hells. Was that? What did I just see?”
Dags blinked, staring at her.
For those few seconds, he had absolutely no answer.
Chapter 2
Dreamwalking For Dummies
Dags was a normal guy, once.
It was a strange thing to think on a regular basis, especially about oneself.
He did think about it, though. Sometimes, somehow, it kept his mind on the straight and narrow, remembering that.
It reminded him to make an effort with people. It reminded him to try.
He’d been normal once.
He’d been able to do this. Talk to people. Interact with other human beings without second-guessing everything he did and said, every odd gesture, every non-standard mannerism, every quirk of speech or uncomfortable silence, every time he flexed in a way that might scare them. He used to be able to just live, to exist in the world without worrying some not-normal part of him might be showing.
He’d been normal once.
This new, non-factory setting… whatever the hell it was… wasn’t the default setting for the model known as Dags Jourdain.
It wasn’t how he came out of the box.
Dags still obsessed over the sequence of events that led him to his current state more than was probably healthy. It still kept him up at night, staring at the ceiling and wondering how his life would have turned out, if he hadn’t done that one, completely stupid thing.
A dreamwalk.
Hell.
A New Age bullshit dreamwalk.
How had his friends talked him into something so colossally stupid? He wasn’t into that kind of thing even back then. Dags was never the seeker type. He wasn’t remotely interested “expanding his consciousness” or whatever.
It’s not like he was clean as the driven snow.
He drank, smoked a little weed⏤usually at the beach, right before he climbed on a surfboard or ate way too many tacos. He’d dropped acid a few times, tried X with a few girlfriends. But he wasn’t some guy on a vision quest. He had no interest in opening his doors of perception for some higher purpose.
Even worse, Dags knew.
Going into all that, he knew.
He had a crazy uncle who told him stories around one campfire or another, at one rez or another, back when Dags was a kid and visiting relatives with his mom. His uncle laughed, describing how he smoked the same stuff Uri wanted to take. According to his uncle, he smoked it, puked, then everything went dark. He woke up missing his pants, covered in vomit by the side of a dirt road, somewhere up in the mountains around Santa Fe.
Why any part of that would sound appealing to Dags was a mystery.
Maybe it was just being eighteen.
Maybe it was just feeling indestructible.
Maybe he’d already been too hammered when Uri suggested it.
The truth was, Dags didn’t know why he did it. He didn’t know why he did a lot of things, even before what he still thought of as “The Change.”
Then again, maybe everyone felt like that.
Maybe there was nothing special or unusual about Dags at all.
Maybe what happened to him was just damned bad luck.
His friend, Jade, had her own theory.
She called Dags the “Vortex of Chaos.”
She was drunk the first time she said it.
They’d been in their early twenties, so already a few years after the Change.
The two of them were looking out at the surf, leaning on the railing of a beat-up porch at some college house party, drinking beer and vibrating under the music thumping from inside the house. She laughed hysterically after she said it, blowing cheap whisky breath in his ear, right before she smacked him,
hard, on the ass.
Despite the random ass-grab, Dags was relatively sure she didn’t mean it as a compliment.
She wasn’t exactly wrong, though.
Ever since the Change, Dags had a tendency to encounter what most people would consider an unusually high number of “randomly problematic” events.
He remembered that night clearly.
He remembered it in part because he’d been nervous to go to the party in the first place. It was one of his few, random attempts to play normal before he gave that up totally. It was before he finally faced the fact that partying and the Change didn’t mix.
Back then, he’d still been trying to convince himself he could live a normal life, with maybe a few modifications⏤kind of like a diabetic, or someone with severe anxiety. He’d figured Uri and Jade were safe. They were his oldest friends. He’d known both of them since junior high. They were both there for the dreamwalk.
Later on that same night, at that same house party on Venice Beach⏤where Dags went to decompress from being dumped by his last real girlfriend, a five-foot-tall punk rock chick with blue hair and the unlikely name of Gonzo, who informed him he was “too strange” for her⏤someone set the dining room on fire.
It turned out, the guy was a demon.
The demon-possessed guy didn’t just walk too close to a candle, or knock over an oil lamp. He screamed obscenities at a girl in a neon green micro-dress for three full minutes, then threw a Molotov cocktail. Lit gasoline ignited the bungalow’s sheer white curtains, the threadbare carpet, an ancient set of wicker chairs, and, very nearly, the cat.
Dags managed to put out the fire.
Apart from some nasty scratches from the cat, who clearly held Dags personally responsible for the whole fiasco, Dags also managed to do it before anyone got hurt. One could even argue the arsonist did the guy a favor, putting that mangy carpet and his rotting wicker chairs out of their misery.
He dealt with the demon after, but he had to drag him down the beach to find a place with no witnesses, first.
So much for Dags and parties.
So much for his plans to go to college, too.
A few months later, he took the test to get his P.I. license.
After Gonzo kicked him out, after the Molotov beach party, after the reality check that this nightmare likely wasn’t going to end, Dags finally succumbed to the inevitable.
He wasn’t normal. It was highly unlikely he would ever be normal again.
If Dags was destined to be surrounded by shit, he might as well get paid for it. If he was going to spend his free time fighting demons, he needed a decent cover.
Whether it was fate that brought him to where he was now, or pure idiocy, the sad fact was, at a certain point, it didn’t matter.
Life didn’t care about his rationalizations.
The Change happened.
There was no going back.
Dags could tell himself any story he wanted about why it happened, what it meant, and it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference.
“Are you going to answer me?”
Dags blinked. He refocused on the boxer crumpled in that odd, twisted position on the alley floor, his thick muscular arms seeming to belong to another body.
He still hadn’t moved.
He was still breathing.
Dags turned his head, looking at the girl.
Woman. She had to be in her early twenties, at least.
Why the hell was she still here?
“Hey!” she snapped. “What is wrong with you?”
Dags’ eyes flickered, refocused on hers. He glanced down at the boxer warily, unable to help himself, but the guy still hadn’t moved. He was out. He had to be out. That, or he was doing the best imitation Dags had ever seen.
“Do you know him?” he said, his voice blunt.
When she didn’t answer right away, he looked at her.
Studying her face, he realized he, meaning Dags himself, was scaring her now. What was it? Something in his face? His tone of voice?
“Do you know him?” he said, subduing his voice with an effort. “He seemed to be targeting you specifically. Have you ever seen him before night?”
“No.”
“Was that gun yours?”
She hesitated.
When his eyes refocused on hers, his gaze narrowing, she swallowed, then nodded quickly, as if he’d poked her with a finger.
“Y-yes. My roommate. My best friend. She’s been having problems. It was mostly for her.”
Dags frowned. He considered following up on that, but she spoke before he could.
“Who the hell are you?” she said. “Are you a cop?”
He shook his head. “No.”
She blinked, staring at him.
When he didn’t go on, she scowled.
“Are you going to play dumb now?” The fear in her voice shifted, sounding almost like anger, but Dags could still hear the tremble underneath. “Hey. I heard him. I heard him talk to you. Do you know that guy?”
“No.”
When he didn’t elaborate, she exhaled in obvious frustration.
“So you just happened to be here? Right when he grabbed me? I’m supposed to buy that?”
Dags gave her a flat look. “You can ‘buy’ whatever you want.”
Feeling a sharp prod in a part of him that didn’t use words, Dags tensed, feeling eyes on him. He glanced around the alley, frowning, feeling adrenaline shoot through his veins.
“I need to go.” He pulled his phone out of his back pocket, staring down at the lit face. He hesitated, briefly contemplating dialing 911.
He dismissed the thought an instant later.
He had to go. Now.
“You should go, too,” he added to her, lowering his phone. “Call the police once you’re a safe distance. Go to the pie shop first. Anywhere open. As long as there’s people. Don’t touch this guy. Let the police handle him.”
Dags was already turning, heading for the mouth of the alley.
He only made it two steps.
Sirens exploded on the street outside.
Lights flashed at the mouth of the alley, blinding him.
His body reacted.
The Change reacted.
Which is to say, Dags didn’t make the decision himself.
Dags didn’t decide jack-all.
Pure instinct kicked in. That instinct threw out every rule he’d made for himself, even the more useless rules he’d made for the parts of the Change he couldn’t control.
Dags’ legs bent.
They straightened with force, launching him up into a full leap.
He dove straight up.
He didn’t tell the wings to unfurl.
He didn’t want them to unfurl, not in the slightest, but Dags had no idea how to control that, despite years of supposed practice. He had no control over the wings at all, much less when they came and went.
Even if he’d jumped up like that deliberately for some stupid reason, even if he’d wanted his wings to burst out of his back, shred his favorite T-shirt and jacket, and unfurl in front of some woman he didn’t know and a bunch of cops shining spotlights on him, he couldn’t have done it on purpose.
Dags couldn’t control a lot of the things he could do since the Change.
For the same reason, he pretty much treated it all like a bizarre chronic disease⏤a really freaky, really dangerous chronic disease he couldn’t tell anyone about.
Like others Dags had known who suffered from chronic diseases, he did his best to avoid things that seemed to set it off, or cause any type of flare-up. Unlike most people with chronic diseases, however, most of what Dags tried didn’t work.
He kept doing those things anyway, knowing it might be closer to praying.
Unfortunately, it worked about as well as most of his prayers did.
Which is to say, not well at all.
Chapter 3
This Is Where You Live?
Dags opened his eyes, staring up at a
low, familiar-looking ceiling.
Someone was knocking at his door.
They were knocking really loud.
They were knocking in a way that made him think it was unlikely they were going to just go away.
“Dags!” a voice yelled, muffled through the thick door. “I know you’re in there! Open up!”
He lay there a second longer, still hoping they might go away. Every muscle in his body hurt. He felt like he’d run a marathon⏤then got hit by a garbage truck.
“Dags!” The voice got louder. “Answer the freaking door! Now!”
Exhaling in frustration, he sat up, and let out a heavy gasp.
Moving made everything a lot worse.
He was back in his human suit.
Meaning, when the Change stuff retreated, Dags was stuck dealing with the bruises, sore and pulled muscles left behind, not to mention the damned exhaustion. He did his best to stay in shape, and that helped, but it never erased the effects entirely.
Everything about the Change was hard on him.
He’d wondered, more than once, if it was aging him in dog years.
Like now. His back hurt, his shoulders, his arms, his knuckles, his fingers. Wincing, he stretched out his arms, gasping a second time in pain. Even his damned foot hurt, probably from dislocating that guy’s jaw.
He gripped the opening of the alcove where he slept, pulling himself out enough to hang his legs over the edge. Not bothering with the ladder built into the wall, he slid down to the floor, wincing as he landed on the soles of his bare feet.
Squinting and fighting to open his eyes despite the low light, he caught hold of the wall briefly, then began stumbling his way towards the front door. He grabbed things along the way to keep his balance⏤the back of a leather couch, a chair, another segment of wall, hitting his shin on the leg of a decorative table. He cursed without stopping, still making his way towards that deafening knocking, and the faint light coming from a beveled window above his front door.
The knocking only got louder, more insistent.
“Wake up!” she snapped. “Come on! I know you’re inside! I already talked to your landlord, and she saw you come back in last night. Your stupid car’s in the driveway.”
I, Angel Page 2