“It smells new here,” Jody said. “Reno already smells old.”
Nick didn't comment.
“We ought to go fishing here some time,” Jody said.
“Maybe.” Nick pulled a stalk of grass and stuck the end into his mouth to chew. It tasted green.
“Or we ought to find a ride on up that way pretty soon.” Jody pointed up the highway and toward the forested mountains that rose up, seeming to block the sky.
Nick turned his head and stared at the mountains. “In the winter that has many feet of snow.”
“Glad we won't be here in the winter, then.”
“We'll be on the far coast by then,” Nick said.
“I'd like that.”
“And after that I may have to take a ship.”
Jody lifted his shoulders and stared at his friend. “I'm not so sure I like sailing the ocean so much.”
“No, you might want to stay in California.”
Jody knew that meant they'd be splitting up and the thought left him feeling empty. “We'll see. I guess I can find a way to adjust.”
He didn't know it, but Nick, his head still turned toward the mountain range, smiled into the dark.
#
They did not go fishing, but a week later the two friends had bus tickets for Sacramento, California. They bade good-bye to Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World, leaving it to rise up and throw its glitter without their help.
Josh Harper was glad to see them go, though no one else cared one way or the other. They hadn't been in town long enough to make friends. They were just two more transients passing through the town, coming and going without fanfare.
CHAPTER 32
THE THREATENING KIND
The man was a mortal threat. Angelique saw him parked near the bus station and knew right away he was a dark one. He watched as she neared the car and before she passed by he was out on the sidewalk blocking her way—just as she thought he might.
She was more intrigued than frightened, but she knew she needed to be careful.
“Are you lost, little girl?” he asked. His voice was soft and silky with no hint of menace. It was his eyes that betrayed his intentions. They belonged to a beast, a ravishing, violent beast used to getting his way.
“I'm going to the bus station.” Angelique tried to delve into the man's mind, but it was so dark it was like falling into an underground tunnel to the pit of the earth.
“Leaving town? By yourself?” he asked.
Her shoulders straightened. “I'm capable of riding a bus alone.”
“I could give you a lift. Where you headed?”
She had only seconds to decide. She knew he'd snatch her straight from the street no matter what she said.
“I just need to go north. Are you going north, Mister?” She must play the innocent child for now.
He stared at her a moment before the smile slipped into place on his face. He was thin, wore a suit that long ago needed a cleaning and pressing. It hung from his pointy shoulder bones like from a scarecrow. His hair was thin, brown, and combed over to the wrong side. His face was long and rectangular as a box, gaunt, the nose aquiline as a Roman senator on a gold coin. His eyes were a deep muddy green, like the bottom of a scummy pond. The rims of his eyes were red, his whites bloodshot, but she knew it was not from drinking.
“Come along with me, little one, I'm going north all right.”
She climbed into his car, noting the dust on the dash, the papers strewn across the floorboard. She was sealing her fate, of course, but she expected to overpower him and use his violent nature for her own ends. A man of this sort could come in handy on the open road.
The first thing he did was pull over at a gas station outside of town and rob the place. He came out, the gun still smoking in his hand, the other hand stuffing stolen bills into his front pants pocket. She couldn't see the attendant. She expected he was lying on the floor behind the counter in a pool of his own blood.
“Thanks for waiting,” he said. “Now we can mosey on up the road.” He stuck the gun into his front jacket pocket, got behind the wheel, and grinned over at her. She saw he had a chipped front tooth and his lips were chapped.
“You're an outlaw,” she said. She leaned her head back against the seat, closed her eyes, and tried again to enter his mind. Nothing. It was so dark in there it was another galaxy—a cold, empty one.
“Yeah, I'm an outlaw. I like the sound of that. Outlaw. Outside the law. Kind of a necessity these days what with jobs being short and money shorter.”
“Why did you want me?” Angelique asked.
He grinned again, then licked his swollen lips.
“I have to show you something,” she said.
“Yeah, what you want to show me?”
“I'm not what you think I am.” It is then that she forced the wing tips out of her body, growing them quickly, leaning forward to give them room to expand. The material of her dress ripped smoothly down the back and just as smoothly it would repair itself once she was done. The black wings rose until they touched the car roof, grew some more, bending over her head like blackened, feathered claws.
The man hit the brakes and skidded to a stop along the graveled roadside. He sat staring at her in awe.
She turned her head slowly to measure his response. What she saw reflected in his face and eyes was unexpected. He was not afraid. It was as if he were looking at something he had dreamed about, fantasized over, and here it sat next to him, come to magical life. He looked at her as if she were found treasure.
“Think that will stop me?” he asked. She blinked. She tried a third time to get inside his brain so she could control it. Now her heart was beating like a bandit on the run and she wondered if she had finally made a mistake after all these hundreds of years. Maybe she had grown complacent, maybe she believed her powers were so strong she could never be intimidated, never harmed, and that belief was mistaken. Was she mistaken? Could she fend off this monster as she had done so many others? Or had she met her match?
“I don't know what kind of devil thing you are, but whatever it is don't think you can wrestle a grown man. I won't touch you now, but when and if I want to, I will, and those wings won't stop me.” He turned back to the wheel and put the car into gear. As he drove back onto the road he said, “Settle down now. We might even be friends. You're one thing. And...I'm another. I got no problem with that and neither should you.”
Angelique withdrew her wings and slumped back into the seat. What kind of man was this? What had she gotten herself into?
He drove throughout the day without saying another word. She sat in deep thought, the desert air blowing in the window, ruffling her black hair back from her face. She could not get a handle on her predicament. He was a child molester, perhaps, a thief, a murderer, and it was possible he was worse, but she couldn't know because she couldn't read him. Without power over his mind, her wings were her only defense, but she was trapped in a car without room to maneuver. He knew that, had known it just by looking at her as she had raised the angel wings. She was cramped. She couldn't really overpower a full-grown man in this small space. She was his prisoner as long as she was inside the vehicle.
When the sun set and the night crept in across the empty landscape, he found a turn out and pulled off the road. He shut off the engine and it ticked as it cooled, the only sound in the long, barren night. Tick. Tick. Tick.
She reached for the door handle to let herself out, but he reached over and grabbed her wrist, restraining her.
“I've been thinking all this time,” he said.
“You don't want to hurt me,” she said. “You'll be sorry if you do.”
“I'm not gonna hurt you. Much.” Without hesitation he slapped her hard in the face with his free hand. Her head snapped against the window ledge and rebounded. She felt her consciousness fade in and out.
“But you're not getting out of his car until I say you can,” he said.
He reached under his car seat and w
ithdrew a coiled rope. He quickly tied her hands in front of her, then looped the rest of the rope through the steering wheel. “You're not going no where. Now get some sleep. I'm bushed.”
He rolled up his window on the cool night and leaned his head against it. He closed his eyes. He was sleeping within a minute, his hand twined around the rope that held her steadfast.
Angelique stared at him until her eyes watered. Her fury was like a train gaining momentum down a steep incline. How dare this mere human capture her like one of his victims! Surely he knew that when she got the chance, she would rip his head from his shoulders, she would tear his heart asunder, she would grind him beneath her heels like a bug.
Or...
She stared at him so hard she thought her brain was on fire. She had to calm down. She had to be practical.
Might she find a way to use this unusual nemesis? For the moment he had the upper hand, but even he knew jeopardy lay in releasing her from the confines of the car. Once she could raise her wings in full regalia, she could dwarf him. She could lift herself from his clutches. And she could do enough damage to make him wish he were dead.
But what if she could make him a partner, even without controlling his impenetrable mind? She could promise him...something. Maybe not what he wanted most, which might be her body and her death at his hands, but profit of another kind. Power to...
Power to indulge those urges with others, that's what she could offer him. Power to escape nearly any authority and any punishment for his dark deeds.
Now that she had a plan, she turned her gaze away from the sleeping man and looked out the dusty windshield at the night sky. Out there had been her home for millenniums, but she wanted none of it if she could help it. She wanted only to stare up at it like other humans. She couldn't let this person steal her body, not when she'd almost gotten used to it, and not when it meant she'd be banished back to the dark beyond where she would have to start all over again. It could take her decades; she wouldn't allow it. Now was her time. This was her world. She wouldn't let him make her leave it.
She finally closed her eyes and relaxed against the rim of the window. The night air bathed her with fingers that by morning would turn icy. She didn't care. She had been cold before on this journey. Cold, wet, hungry, and bedraggled.
She was all right. She would be fine. Nothing had ever stopped her and nothing ever would, especially not a scarecrow of a man in a wrinkled suit with a mind shut tight as a steel safe.
She slept peacefully, her tied hands lax in her lap. She did not dream.
#
She woke with a shard of sunlight in her eyes and they were moving. He had the car started and in gear, pulling onto the highway. There were a few cars, with drivers and passengers who didn't give them a second glance.
She saw her hands were still tied, but now the rope end was tucked under his right thigh, securing her to him.
“We'll get something to eat soon. Now tell me why we're going north.”
For the next hour Angelique told him almost everything. About her real identity, about Nisroc and how he had abandoned her. About her quest to find him and how she was tracking him with supernatural ability. Then she told him the deal she'd make with him—how they could help one another if only he would agree.
When she finished, they were entering a small town. He hadn't said anything. He pulled into the parking lot in front of a cafe and shut off the engine. He turned to her and began untying the rope.
“I can help you,” he said. “I'll pretend I'm your old dad and we'll find Nisroc together.”
Now she smiled and once again she was a charming picture of a happy child. “And I'll give you what you want when you want it—girl, boy, whatever. I can do that.”
“You're sure?”
“Positive.”
“Then we have a deal.” He pushed the coil of rope beneath the seat and stepped out of the car. “Let's go grab some grub. I'm starving.”
She followed him into the cafe and sat across from him in a booth. Together they ate a hearty breakfast. He ate with his mouth open and slurped his coffee, but Angelique hadn't thought he'd have perfect manners, not a man such as he. He paid with the stolen money while she stood docile at his side. Back in the car she asked him why he wasn't more surprised when he saw her wings. And why hadn't they frightened him.
“I've seen...things...before.”
“What kind of things?”
“Spirits—of a sort--for one.”
She nodded. “Go on.”
“People who weren't exactly people.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“People like you, well, not like you, they weren't fallen angels with huge wings, but they weren't altogether human either.”
“Tell me about them.”
For the rest of the day on the road he told her about people who could shape shift, turning from human to wolf or human to eagle. He told her about people who could disappear or at least it seemed they did since they vanished before his eyes. People who ate glass and nails without doing any harm to themselves and people who climbed walls like cats or slithered through pipes like snakes. Heartless humans, conscienceless humans, humans who could feel no pain, humans who believed in nothing.
The more he told her, the more excited she became. She could hardly hold still while her mind raced with possibilities. “Why haven't I ever run into people like that? I've been around more lifetimes than you can count and never found anyone like that at all. Are you telling me the truth?”
He glanced over at her with his pond green eyes. “I'm telling you straight up. You haven't looked in the right places, that's all. You've probably traveled in society, polite society. I've moved through the underbelly of the world, through the gutters and alleyways, in the abandoned and the dark places.”
“Will you show me those places?”
“Sure I will.”
Then I'll believe you, she thought. When I see it for myself.
It was as if fate had led her to this man. He called himself Henry, but did not give her a surname. He admitted he had done unspeakable things, but he didn't give any details or specifics. She imagined she knew why. His crimes involved the victimizing of children like herself and he didn't want to spook her.
She sat concentrating on Nisroc and trying to pick up his vibration. He was west of them now so she'd have to instruct Henry to change direction. After holding up a small grocery in Utah, they stopped for the night in Salt Lake City where they took a motel room. Henry made her a pallet on the floor and kept his distance.
He was keeping his side of the deal.
Angelique kept her wings hidden and thereby kept her word to him. She lay in the dark listening to him snore in the bed and thought of Nisroc and how she'd hurt him once she caught up to him. Although it appeared she had a new partner who could help her as other humans had done, nothing mortal could really replace an angel.
And then she noticed the room was silent, no more snoring sounds, and she stiffened with alarm. Alert to every little noise, every nuance of movement, she felt rather than saw movement in the room from the direction of the bed.
When Henry leaned over her in the dark, he was no longer a thin scarecrow of a man, but a hump-backed, lesion-covered creature from a nightmare.
“Just thought I'd let you know you're not the only unusual creature in the whole world, little one” he said. His face in the dark was a black lump of deeper darkness, his breath fetid. He reached out and pulled the lamp string on the table lamp so that light flooded down over them.
Angelique was staring into the muddy green eyes of a true beast, a thing that was no more human than was she. It was hunched and naked, its skin like tough, mottled leather—mottled and warty with weeping, crusty lesions. Great patches of that tough skin was mounded with scaly mountains of such layered, multicolored skin that it made Angelique actually cringe, drawing her shoulders in and pulling into herself. The head was larger than what the body supported so that it h
ung from the neck like a heavy pendulous bag of rocks. The being had sunken cheeks, and a mouthful of discolored square teeth bristling from between full dark, lesion-covered lips. The thing had no hair or eyebrows or lashes. The legs were short, muscular and misshaped. The shoulders were wide with bunched muscles and the arms were like tree trunks. The hands had clubbed fingers and knotted knuckles. It had no genitals and smooth flesh joined the torso to the legs.
Henry was not human, definitely not human. What he really was Angelique could not say for she'd never seen anything like him.
She sat up and instinctively brought forth her wings. They rose into the air with a breathy rush. Her pulse heightened and her breathing increased. She balled her hands into fists while adrenalin coursed through her body like scalding water.
“Don't worry, I'm not interested in a fight with you. We have a deal, remember? I can't get into people's heads the way you can. I can't always make them do what I want so I have to force them. But we make a good pair, now, don't we?”
“Henry, I don't know where you've come from, but I have a feeling you're going to tell me, aren't you?”
“What if I said I don't know? It's true, and I don't even know if I was born of woman. I think, though, that I have a mission and it's not what you've been thinking. I don't want children for what you think, little one. I want to corrupt them. You might say that Corruption is my real name. I breathe it into them and steal their innocence. I've made a league of them, these soulless humans, who grow up to wreak havoc and mayhem against the world they live in.”
She was as confused as if he'd told her he'd dropped down from the moon.
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