by Brian Fuller
“Nope—Daylia, Dollia, or however you say it. Bartender’s got me covered,” he answered in a low tone, trying to act nonchalant and low-key. “Thanks anyway.” He turned away, and she walked off. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he caught her looking over her shoulder at him, but he didn’t dare return the gaze.
He’d met Terissa in a place like this. The sudden memory slithered its way out of his subconscious. Brandon had been with him. His brother and Terissa had been like two peas in a pod all night, and he’d had to pry her off Brandon to get a moment alone with her. The ugly feelings of insecurity mounted with unusual force. Instinct alone kept him from turning around to face the Sheid he could feel had walked in the door behind him. He fought the urge to wallow in his pain and texted the code: “It’s warm in here.”
The reply came back, “Don’t drink too much.” He had to rifle through all the hastily given instructions in his brain to remember what that meant, recalling that it was to proceed with caution and leave if he needed to. The Sheid, morphed into a male computer technician, walked into Trace’s peripheral vision, led by the dark-haired man he and Cassandra had spied in the graveyard. The Sheid carried a large tool bag, the man striding in front of it with a cigarette burning in his left hand. Dahlia dropped her eyes as he entered and scooted off in another direction. A Dread grabbed her butt to the leering and laughter of Dread and normal alike. Trace clenched his hands. Pigs. But she was a Dread. She might be a stunningly beautiful Dread, but dealing with slime ball come-ons was probably just as easy for her as putting on socks and tormenting the good people of the earth.
The Sheid and his handler went through a locked door near the kitchens, and so powerful was the presence of the evil creature that Trace could feel him ascend to an upper level before the subtle torching effect on his emotions faded.
Breathe.
And then Dahlia was there again. “Still all right?”
A nervous chill snuck up Trace’s spine. “Yep,” he replied without looking at her.
“You waiting for a girlfriend? Wife? Husband?”
Trace crinkled his brow and turned toward her. What was she up to? “Nope. I’m trying to convince a couple of married buddies of mine to come on over. Hard to pry them out of the house, though.”
She watched him for several moments, searching eyes curious but devoid of any warmth. “Just let me know if you need anything.” She smiled the fake waitress smile at him again, teeth looking fresh out of a toothpaste ad. He turned away, slouched a little more, and shoved some peanuts into his mouth. The skinny man in the sweater vest sidled up to the stool next to him.
“She is hot,” he whispered, shooting a glance over his shoulder to get a good look at Dahlia’s backside as she sauntered away. “I don’t think I have ever seen such a beautiful woman. Everyone’s staring at her. Some are doing a bit more than staring.”
“Yep,” Trace replied.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t notice her. She’s not talking to anyone at the bar but you. Maybe she’s interested in you, man.”
The idea of a woman like that being interested in the scratch-and-dent loser of a drunk he had morphed himself into was so ludicrous Trace actually snorted a sincere laugh.
“Whatever, buddy.”
The geeky guy stood to move away again. “I’m just sayin’. Everybody’s checkin’ her out. Except you. Makes a man wonder what team you’re playing for, know what I mean?”
Trace shrugged off the odd conversation and tried to think. He was sure the Sheid and his handler were upstairs trying to remove the GPS unit and pry the drive loose from its housing so they could move it more easily. If they succeeded, he could sit there all night and not know where it was. It was a decent bet they would use the Sheid to move it, but if the man was clever, he might hire some normal to put it in a locker somewhere. Trace could find no rational excuse to head upstairs to reconnoiter, and doing so might get him killed anyway.
As the hour grew late, more of the normals left, while the Dread patronage increased. Dahlia checked on him twice more. Geeky guy was right. She wasn’t bothering with anyone else at the bar except him. Every friendly “Is there anything I can get you?” came with her penetrating glare, as if she were a psychologist reading something into every word and gesture. When she left for the outer dining area, the Dreads grabbed any part of her they could get their hands on. Trace gritted his teeth and tried not to care. She was a Dread. Just another Dread.
Near midnight, only he and the geeky bow-tie guy remained at the bar, and only a handful of normals remained elsewhere, most taking their time with a drink. After delivering another round of beer to her Dread cohorts, Dahlia walked over. Trace exhaled roughly. What did she want now? She took the barstool next to him and leaned on her elbow, staring at him.
“So how many drinks have you put away this evening?” she finally asked as he pointedly ignored her in favor of a tall domestic beer.
The bathroom! He had completely neglected to fake going to the bathroom. If he were a normal, he would have been sitting in a swimming pool of urine.
“I don’t count ’em,” he said smoothly. “I just drink ’em.”
“Look at me,” she invited, voice teasing.
He screwed his face into a ‘whatever’ expression and took her in. The geek paid rapt attention from a couple seats away, looking a little unsteady after his marathon of alcohol ingestion.
“There’s something about you I haven’t puzzled out,” she said.
“There’s a lot about me that puzzles a lot of people,” he said in a depressed tone, turning away and slurping the head off his beer in a boorish way he hoped might send her off in disgust. “You’re just talking to me because you don’t want to go past those pigs anymore.”
“True,” she sighed. “So you have noticed.”
“Noticed?”
“Me getting manhandled by the local crew over there.”
“How could I not notice? You bug me like every fifteen minutes trying to get away from them.”
“And that’s what it is,” she said. “You look like a creep, but you don’t act like one. You don’t even act like a red-blooded male. I’ve been checked out and pawed and propositioned by every man from twenty-one to ninety-one tonight, wedding band or no, but not by you.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, lady,” Trace scoffed grumpily. “You’re not all that.”
She laughed, a bitter, almost sinister sound. Three Dreads in the dining area rose and walked in their direction, but they only had eyes for Dahlia.
“You know,” she leaned in close and whispered, “you are either the best Gabriel the Ash Angel Organization has ever had or the absolute worst. You’ve got a lot of guts coming in here. You know you’re not getting out, right?”
Busted.
Trace hoped he had kept the horror from his face. “What are you talking about? Gabriel? From the Bible?” It was about time to run, her smug face revealing that his feigned ignorance had no effect on her. The Dreads saved him from continuing the charade.
“Hey, Dahlia,” said an overweight, pasty-white Dread with a mocking leer. “It’s time to come back to the man side of the restaurant, honey.” His two companions grinned supportively.
Trace spun his beer glass in indecision as Dahlia continued to stare at him. He could just make out a green sweater vest disappearing into the bathroom. Someone knew trouble brewing when they saw it. Behind him, the door to the street beckoned, though a couple Dreads still loitered on guard duty. When would Dahlia expose him? Something in her smile, something concealed behind its perfection, told him she had a bit of a mischievous streak.
Seeing she wouldn’t engage them, the corpulent Dread reached out and grabbed the underside of Dahlia’s stool and dragged it away across the slippery tile floor. Her face turned angry.
“Leave her alone, you bastards,” Trace warned.
Dahlia turned toward him, eyes wide. The three Dreads turned their vulgar glares on him. What had he done? He wou
ld have to evaluate his sanity later. The Dreads had just found a new plaything. This would be a good excuse to bail. He stood to go, but the Dreads blocked his way to the exit.
“We’ll do whatever we want with her, you little prick!” the lead Dread menaced. He reached out to grab her arm, and Trace pushed her behind him, putting his hands up.
“Hands off her. Go back to your drinks and—”
The Dread’s meaty fist came so quickly and with such force Trace had no chance to even think about moving his face to an alternate location. The desecration all around him meant he felt every snap and crunch as his nose collapsed like an egg hit with a sledgehammer. Searing pain flooded his brain as he crashed noisily to the hard floor to a chorus of Dread laughter. When he rolled over, the laughing stopped.
“Well, look what we have here,” the Dread said. “It’s someone whose nose doesn’t bleed when it’s smashed halfway into his face. We got ourselves a little Trash Angel.”
“You’re just barely figuring that out?” Dahlia mocked, but she sounded anxious.
Trace scrambled to his feet, shoved the nearest Dread, and bolted, running headlong into one of the outer guards coming in. The Dread wrapped him in a viselike grip. Trace tried to call on his Bestowal of Strength, but just as Magdelene had warned him, it availed him nothing in the desecrated building. Inside the restaurant, the normals and Dreads alike had gone silent and gawked as the brutes dragged him toward the door the Sheid and its handler had entered hours before.
“He’s had a few too many,” Dahlia placated the curious patrons. “We’ll let him sleep it off for a bit.”
In vain, Trace struggled, his meager kicks at his captors only amusing them as they pulled him up a flight of stairs and into a small, sparsely furnished apartment. This floor was desecrated too.
“Time to sober up, Trash Angel.”
One of the Dread’s companions pulled Trace’s right arm until it was fully extended. With a quick upward thrust of his palm, he shattered the elbow with a crack. Trace screamed in pain, the other Dread muffling his agony by shoving a sock in his mouth. Desecration sucked.
“One down,” the Dread holding him mocked while the process was repeated on his left arm.
“That’s two! Only two more to go, Trashy!”
The blinding pain blurred his vision. One of the Dreads clamped his foot to the floor under a boot heel while another kicked his right knee until it snapped backward. Such was the pain that the sundering of his left knee barely registered.
“There you go,” the Dread said, now completely supporting his weight. “That’ll clear that beer buzz, won’t it? No? Still a little fuzzy?”
Trace’s watery eyes couldn’t see the fists that pounded his face and ribs like a prizefighter working a punching bag. Trace wished he could black out. He wished he had never come. By the end he wished for death. Once they tired of beating him, the gloating Dreads dragged him into a bathroom and dumped him unceremoniously into an empty tile bathtub, the back of his head smashing against the edge with a dull crunch. He could only sob, his body trapped in a searing pain that would not stop. This was how he ended. All for nothing.
The Dreads left, and he reached deep inside to control the pain and to focus. Movement was impossible with his broken, grinding joints. His phone still waited in his pocket, but he couldn’t command his arms to reach for it. Even if he could, he knew he was in the mother of all 44-2 situations. It would take a Michael army to rescue him, and the attempt would destroy half a city block. Alone and broken, he wondered when the evil creatures would come for him. Would they torture him? Would they ever let him die?
How long he waited he couldn’t guess, every painful minute an invitation to panic. A door closing outside the bathroom sent a surge of terror through him. He steeled himself. He would die with whatever dignity he could muster.
The dark-haired, auraless man who had come in with the Sheid walked into the bathroom carrying a boom box and set it next to the sink. He wore a dull gray suit and blue power tie, looking like he’d just stepped out of the boardroom. His face, while plain, carried an ambivalent kind of confidence made powerful by deep-set, dark eyes. He regarded Trace, hovering over his broken body with an intimidating stature. After sizing his captive up for several seconds, he shook his head and pulled the sock out of Trace’s mouth. He tossed it in the garbage and fished around in his jacket pocket until he found a pack of cigarettes. Like a man with time to spare, he lit up and took a few leisurely drags.
“You know,” he said, “the Dreads tell me smoking is liberating for them because the smoke only kills other people. Apparently, getting cancer yourself just takes all the fun out of it, not that I would know. These were invented long after my time.” His accent, foreign and unrecognizable, was the same as Dahlia’s, lending his speech an exotic, intelligent air. He regarded the cigarette as if he were studying it, before inhaling and breathing out a cloud of smoke.
Trace wondered where this was going. “How can a normal control a Sheid?” he asked, voice strained.
The man grinned mirthlessly. “Normal? I haven’t been ‘normal’ for millennia. Your face is a mess. You know, the brutes always go for the face no matter how many times I remind them not to before we get pictures. No matter. The software’s good enough to fix your nose, I think. When I came in this evening, I figured it was either you or the smart-looking one that was the operative. So how much experience do you have? Not much, I think. Anyway, we’ve got, what, about five hours until dawn now, so we’ll need to be quick. Tell me your real name. You leave behind a wife? Some kids maybe?”
“Go to hell.”
The man chuckled. “So original.”
Trace’s phone buzzed in his pocket. “Well, well!” the man said. “Time for an operational update! How exciting.” He fished the phone out of Trace’s pocket, taking the wallet with it. “Not even a regular Ash Angel phone. Looks like you’re in no condition to report on your status, so I’ll do it for you. Let’s see here. They say, ‘Hey, what’s up, dude?’ So clever. Is there some special code you have for ‘trapped in a bathtub with legs and arms bent at weird angles’? No? I’ll have to make something up, then. Will the cavalry come charging in for you, do you think? I hope so. Wouldn’t it be fantastic? The Ash Angels with their big guns blasting away. Heads popping like campfire popcorn. Dead normals. Police cars. News helicopters. It all sounds so delightfully messy!
“Well, here I am yammering on when there is an update to be posted to the anxious crew back at headquarters. I text about as much as I do yoga, so I’ll keep it short. You sure you won’t tell me your name? I always like updates to have that personal touch. No? Okay.”
He texted slowly, all the time whistling something that sounded like Beethoven’s Fifth. “There!” he said when finished. “I typed ‘Going down the drain before dawn.’ Let’s see what they—” The phone buzzed again. “Wow! They really must think this little mission of yours is important! They say, ‘What’s that, bro?’ Sheesh. ‘Bro’? So hip. So with it. Let’s see if I can make it clearer. ‘Your man is going to die.’ Aaaaand send! Now wait for it. Wait for it . . . Aaaand yes! The phone is dead! You’re on your own.”
He lobbed the phone into the tub, and it shattered against the tile.
“Let’s check the wallet, shall we?” He flipped it open, pocketing the seventy dollars inside and removing the driver’s license. “Nathan Pederson. Your name-generation software certainly has a knack for the pedestrian. Picture looks a bit rushed. Losing Trevex hurt, I see.”
“Just get it over with,” Trace begged. Anything was better than the agony of waiting for his snarky captor to get around to his doom.
“First we’ve got to see if you can be useful,” the man said, and Trace detected a small glow of red beneath his white shirt.
“It’s that thing you wear around your neck,” Trace speculated. “That’s how you control them, isn’t it? Even the Sheid.”
The mocking, carefree demeanor of the man disappeared,
replaced by a barely controlled expression of savage anger. He reached under his suit coat and pulled a pistol out, screwing on a silencer he retrieved from his pocket. The door cracked open, Dahlia sticking her head in. Trace caught her eye for a moment, but she turned to the man.
“Here’s the camera,” she said, holding out a small digital model.
“Forget it,” he said. “This one’s of no use. Go check on our friend working on our little electronics problem. He was close before I came over here.”
She nodded and left. Trace looked up as the man approached and hunched over him. “Well, I was hoping for a less unfortunate outcome, but it appears I’ll have to make good on that little threat I sent to headquarters.” He aimed and fired three bullets in a nice, tight group. Trace winced as each one entered his chest and tore into his heart, one bullet exiting out his back. The man replaced the gun and then leaned over to plug the tub and turn on the water.
“I really hate yelling and cowardly begging, so I brought a little music to drown you out in case you’re a screamer.” He turned toward the boom box. “You know, back in my day when it was just hide-covered drums and the sound of your own voice, you had to bring your anger to the music. These days, the music brings the anger to you.”
He pushed play. The discordant sounds of heavy metal echoed through the bathroom almost loud enough to drown out the splashing of the water.
Once the water got deep enough to cover Trace’s heart, the wounds would become fatal and he would burst into ashes and be done. The tub would only need to be half full to get the job done. The water poured out cold and strong. It wouldn’t take long. Trace closed his eyes and steeled himself to face the inevitable.
The door burst open and Dahlia reappeared. “He’s got it,” she reported, throwing Trace a look he couldn’t decipher. “We’re not even going to check him out?”