I want to tear out the heart of whoever spray-painted those words, but they’re long gone, so I concentrate on the guy instead. I can see perfectly in the dark and my hearing’s nothing to be ashamed of either. The wind changes and his scent comes to me. He’s wearing some kind of cologne, but it’s faint. Or maybe it’s aftershave. I don’t smell any fear.
“I just want to know how you do it,” he’s saying. “I’ve got a success rate of maybe one in thirty, but you… you’re just shutting them down, right, left and center. And it sticks. I can tell when it’s going bad. Can’t always do something about it, but I can tell. The ones you help stay helped.”
He’s talking about me. He’s talking to me. I don’t get the impression he knows what I am—or even who I am and what exactly it is that I can do—but he knows there’s something out in the city, taking back the night for those who aren’t strong or old enough to do it for themselves. I’ve been so careful—I didn’t think anybody had picked up on it yet.
“Let me in on the secret,” he goes on. “I want to help. I can bring you names and addresses.”
I let the silence hang for long moments. City silence. We can hear traffic from the street, the vague presences of TVs and stereos coming out of nearby windows, someone yelling at someone, a siren, but it’s blocks away.
“So who died and made you my manager?” I finally say.
I hear his pulse quicken. His sudden nervousness is a sharp sting in my nostrils, but he’s pretty quick at recovering. He looks above him, trying to spot me, but I’m just one more shadow in a dark alley, invisible.
“So you are real,” he says.
A point for him, I think. He didn’t know until I just confirmed it for him. How many nights has he been walking through these kinds of neighborhoods, talking to the night this way, wondering if he’ll make contact or if he’s just chasing a dream?
I make a deliberate noise coming down the fire escape and sit down near the bottom of it so that our heads are almost level. His heart rate quickens again, but settles fast.
“I wasn’t sure,” he says after I’ve sat there for a while not saying anything.
I’ve decided that I’ve already said enough. I’ll let him do the talking. I’m in no hurry. I’ve got all night. I’ve got the rest of my life.
“Do you, ah, have a name?” he asks.
I give him nothing back.
“I mean, what do people call you?”
This is getting ridiculous.
“What?” I say. “Like the Masked Avenger?”
He takes a step closer and I tense up, but whether I’ll fight back or flee if he comes at me, I’m not sure yet. The cat anima left me with a lot of curiosity.
“You’re a woman,” he says.
Shit. That’s another bit of freebie information I’ve given him. I feel like just taking off, but it’s too late now. I’m intrigued. I have to know what he wants from me.
“My name’s Chris,” he says. “Chris Dennison. I work with Social Services.”
“So?”
“I want to help you.”
“Why?”
He shakes his head. “Christ, you have to ask that? We’re in the middle of a war and the freaks are winning—isn’t that enough of a reason?”
I think of the child waiting in the dark for a boogieman that’s all too real to come into her bedroom. I think of the woman whose last bruises have yet to heal, thrown across the kitchen, kicked and beaten. I think of the boy, victimized since he was an infant, turning on those weaker than himself because that’s all he knows, because that’s the only way he can regain any kind of self-empowerment.
It’s not a war, it’s a slaughter. Fought not just physically, but in the soul as well. It’s about the loss of innocence. The loss of dignity and self-respect.
“What is it that you do to them?” he asks.
I don’t know how to explain it. Using the abilities with which the anima have gifted me, I could literally tear the monsters apart, doesn’t matter how big and strong they are—or think they are. But I don’t. Instead, I pay them back, tit for tat.
But how do I do it? I’m not sure myself. I just know that it works. I look at this Boy Scout standing there, waiting for an answer, but I don’t think he’s ready to hear what I have to say, how everyone has a dreaming place inside them, a secret, private place that defines them. It’s what I learned from Annie’s stories. I just put that knowledge to a different use than I think Annie ever would have imagined someone could.
“I turn them off,” I say finally. “I go into their heads and just turn them off.”
He looks confused and I don’t blame him.
“But how?” he asks.
I can tell it’s not just curiosity that’s driving him. What he wants is a weapon for his war—one that’s more efficient than any he’s had to work with so far.
“It’s too weird,” I tell him.
“I’m not a stranger to weird shit.”
I’m not sure I want to get into wherever that came from.
“How did yon figure out that I existed?” I asked to change the subject.
He takes the bait.
“I started to notice a drop of activity in some of our more habitual offenders,” he says. “You know, cases where we’re trying to prove that there’s good reason to make the child a ward of the court, but we’re still building up the evidence?”
I didn’t, but I gave him an encouraging nod.
“It was weird,” he goes on. “I mean we get more recants than we do testimony anyway, but when I investigated these particular cases I found that the offenders really had changed. Completely. I didn’t make any kind of a connection, though, until I was interviewing a six-year-old boy named Peter, His mother’s boyfriend had been molesting him on a regular basis, and we were working on getting a court order to deny the man access to the child and his mother as a forerunner to hopefully laying some charges.
“The mother was working with us—she was scared to death, if you want the truth, and was grasping at straws. She claimed she’d do anything to get out of this relationship. And then she suddenly retracted her offer to testify. The boyfriend had changed. He was good as gold now. Peter confirmed it when I interviewed him. He was the one who told me that he’d quote, ‘seen a ninja angel who’d stolen away all of the boyfriend’s badness.’ “
I remembered Peter. He’d come into the room and caught me as I was getting up from his mother’s bed, putting on my gloves. I almost bolted, but I didn’t want to leave a different kind of night fear in the little tyke’s head, so I told him what I’d done, couching the information in words I thought he’d understand. He’d been really brave and hadn’t cried at all.
“He said he’d keep the secret,” I say.
“Give the kid a break. He’s only six.”
I nod.
“Anyway,” Chris says, “something clicked for me then. It seemed … well, impossible, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What if there really was someone out there that could do what Peter had said his angel had done? I’ve been fighting the freaks for years with hardly anything to show for it. It’s heartbreaking work.”
I nod again. I’ve got a hundred percent success rate myself, but there’s only so many places I can be at one time. I know all about heartbreak.
“I felt like a fool walking around out here, trying to get your attention, but I just had to know. And if it was real, I wanted a part of it.”
I think of the anima that came to me all those long months ago.
“It’s not something that can be shared,” I tell him.
“But I can help, can’t I?” “I don’t think that’s such a good—”
“Look,” he breaks in. “How do you figure out who to hit? I’ll bet you just skulk around outside windows, hoping to get lucky. Am I right?”
Too right, but I don’t answer.
“I can provide you with names and addresses,” he says.
I remember him saying that earlier. It�
��s part of what drew me down from the rooftops to hear him out.
“You won’t have to waste your time guessing anymore,” he goes on, voice so damn eager. “With what I give you, you can go right to the known offenders. Just think of how much more effective you can be.”
It’s tempting. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s another gift, as unexpected, but as welcome, as those the anima gave me.
“Okay,” I tell him. “We’ll give it a try.”
I barely get the words out of my mouth, then he’s dragging a folded sheet of paper out of the pocket of his jacket.
“These are just some of the worst, ongoing situations that we’ve got on file,” he begins.
My heart sinks. There must be fifty names and addresses on that one piece of paper.
So many monsters.
5
The relationship works better than I think it might. I was working blind before, hanging around on fire escapes and ledges outside windows, crawling down from rooftops, listening, watching, until I got a fix on one of the monsters. And even then I had to be careful. Not every domestic argument leads to spousal abuse. Not every child, crying in the lonely dark, has been molested.
I’m also careful with the tips I get from Chris. I may have taken on the roles of judge and jury, but I always make sure that I’m really dealing with a monster before I step into his head and turn him off. But Chris’s information is usually good. We don’t just use what he’s collected on his own, either. He takes what we need from all the files in his office, his and the other caseworkers’, as well as from Children’s Aid and the like, to avoid suspicion falling on him the way it might if all the monsters I dealt with came from his caseload.
If Chris could make the connection, then so could someone else—someone perhaps not as sympathetic to my particular working methods. I’ve no idea how I’d deal with prison. I think the gifts of the anima would make it a thousand times worse for me. I think I’d rather die first.
A few weeks into our partnership, Chris asks me what got me started with all of this. I don’t know what to say at first, but then I just tell him that I lost a good friend which leaves him with the impression that it’s revenge motivating me. I let him believe that, even if it’s not exactly true. What killed Annie isn’t something anyone can fight against.
It’s funny. I never think of Annie looking as she did when she died. It’s like my mind’s closed off the image of how frail she became toward the end. She was just skin and bones, a pale, pale ghost of herself lying there in the hospital ward. Chemotherapy had stolen that gorgeous head of hair, but she refused to wear a wig.
“This is who I am now,” is all she’d say.
When I think of her, I see instead the woman I fell in love with. She could have been a model for one of those nineteenth-century painters whose work she so admired: Rosetti, Burne-Jones, Dixon—that crew. She was beautiful, but more importantly to me, she completed me. Until I was with Annie, I never felt whole. I was just an observer going through life, never a participant, which might be the reason I became a journalist.
I remember telling her that once and she just laughed.
“I don’t think so, Jaime,” she said. “If you really just wanted to report on life, you wouldn’t have worked for The Examiner. I think, secretly, there’s a novelist living inside you, just dying to get out. Why else would you be drawn to a job that has you making up such outlandish stories, day after day?”
Who knows what we secretly want—I mean, really, seriously want? I knew that with Annie I had everything I could ask for, so I had no more need for secrets. When I came out, it didn’t raise an eyebrow among my coworkers. The only people who changed toward me were my family. Ex-family. Can you get a divorce from your flesh and blood? To all intents and purposes, I certainly have.
But that’s okay. I was never close to them anyway. See, that’s the real revenge motive that let me take the anima’s gift: lost innocence.
Both my parents were alcoholics. I’m surprised I even survived some of the beatings I got as a kid. It was different for Annie. Instead of being beaten, her father started molesting her when she was in the cradle. The nightmare lasted until she was in her teens.
“What’s scariest,” she told me once, “is that I didn’t even know it was wrong. It didn’t feel right, but I never knew any different. I thought that was how it was in every family.”
What are the statistics? I think it’s something like two out of every three women have been sexually assaulted by the time they’re in their twenties. Everything from being abused as children to being raped when they’re older.
Lost innocence.
Somehow, Annie regained hers, but most people aren’t that lucky. I know I never have.
But that’s why I think of what I’m doing as something I’m doing for her. So many monsters, and I’ve barely made a dent in their numbers. I wish there was a way to get rid of them all in one fell swoop. I wish I could deal with them before the damage is done. It kills me that it’s all ending for me before I’ve really gotten started with my work.
See, by the beginning of July my savings finally run out and I begin to lose the amenities because I can’t pay my bills anymore. The phone goes first, then the power. By the time I meet Chris, I’ve lost my apartment.
So I become a baglady superhero—do they ever deal with that in those comics? I know I’m obsessed, but I don’t have anything else to do with my life. It was bad enough when I was on my own, tracking the monsters down by trial and error. I’d deal with one, maybe two in a week—three tops. But now, with Chris’s help, I can hit that same number on a good night.
I’m proud of what I’m doing, but it’s starting to take its toll. That little piece of myself I was losing every time I dealt with one of the monsters has escalated to where now it feels as though what I’m losing is falling off the way clumps of dirt can be shaken from a piece of sod. The empty patches inside me just keep getting bigger. It’s as though my spirit is dissolving, bit by bit. I stare down at the anima residue I leave on their beds and want to pick it up and somehow stick it back onto me. I’m so wasted come morning now that I don’t care where I sleep—on a park bench, in an alleyway, in some deserted building.
Chris offers to put me up, but I don’t want to get that close to him. I let him buy me meals, though. Left on my own, I forget to eat half the time. When I do remember, I’m usually scrounging something from one of the monsters’ kitchens—now there’s something that really helps your appetite. God.
The cramps start in September, and I begin to get these sudden spells of weakness so often that even Chris notices the change. I mean, he can’t see much of me, all clothed in black and hiding in the shadows most of the time, but what he can see tells him I’m not well.
“Maybe we should ease off a bit,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“You look like shit.”
I know. I caught a reflection of myself in a window on my way to meet him tonight. All the meat was gone, leaving just corded animal muscles over the bones. The real emptiness is inside.
“I tell you I’m fine,” I repeat, trying to convince myself as much as him. “What’ve you got for me tonight?”
“Nothing.”
I don’t even realize that the growl’s rumbling in my chest until I smell the sudden sting of his fear. I force myself to calm down, but he still backs away from me.
“I’m sorry,” I say and I mean it.
He nods slowly, but he keeps his distance.
“Okay,” I tell him. “We’ll take a break tonight. Just give me one name.”
I don’t know why I’m pressing him like this. I could do it on my own. Skulk around until I found a monster. I might get lucky, you never know. But I think later that I want his complicity in this. I want someone to know what I’m doing—not to feed my ego. Just to remember me when I’m gone.
“One name,” he says.
“That’s all.”
Chris sighs. He tries to t
alk me out of it for a little while longer, but finally gives in. One name and address.
“This one’s a little weird,” he says as he hands it over. “It came in from the guidance counselor at Redding High. Something about it being a sensitive case, but I couldn’t find anything in the file to say why.”
“That’s okay. I can handle it.”
Mistake—but I don’t blame him.
6
Grant Newman is awake, only I don’t realize it. I pull myself in through his window, third story, nice part of town, and creep soundlessly across the hardwood floor to where he’s lying. He’s alone in his bed. I scouted around earlier and discovered that he and his wife have separate bedrooms. Makes it easier for when he wants to pay little Susan a night visit, I guess.
I slip up onto the bed and he grabs me. It happens so suddenly that I just freeze up in surprise. Then when I try to fight him, I can’t find the strength to break free. It’s not that the anima’s gifts have worn off; it’s that I’m worn out. I’ve left too many pieces of myself behind in too many monsters’ lairs. The shock of my sudden helplessness makes me feel dizzy.
“What the hell’ve we got here?” Newman says as I struggle to break his grip.
My heightened sense of smell makes his bad breath seem worse than it must really be. I know that smell. It’s the way my old man used to stink before he took the belt to me.
I try to get my legs up between us so that I can kick him, but he rolls me over and pins me to the bed with his knees.
“Some kind of little ninja fuck,” he says. “So what’s the deal? Yukio getting tired of paying me off?”
He reaches for my mask until his gaze locks onto my chest.
“Jesus,” he says. “Your boss must be really getting hard up if he’s running woman assassins now.”
I’m gaunt these days, just muscle and bone and the muscles aren’t working tonight. But the bodysuit still shows I’m a woman. For some men, that’s excuse enough for anything. Maybe Newman thinks he’s in his, private place and anything goes. For all I know we are in his private place, and I’ve just lost control of the situation.
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