“Tell me more about yourself.” Angelique felt the time for secrets was at an end.
“What, like where I come from, who made me, that sort of thing?”
“Yes.” She stared off across the mountains they climbed, the forests a blue-green in the afternoon shadows. All along the road the Truckee River cascaded over rocks and around the curves of the mountain range. It was a big silver snake curling through the mountains, splashing white over big rocks, lying low and smooth and dark like velvet ribbon through the rockless passages.
“I must have been around fourteen before I knew what I was,” he said, reminiscing. “And how I could change. What my true nature was. I don't remember having a family. I grew up in an orphanage in a little Texas border town. They told me I was dropped off in a basket on the steps as a baby, but who can trust what people say? There were only twenty-three of us boys, half of them Mexican. I don't know where they kept the girls. When I was fourteen I was planning to run away. One of the boys, a diehard snitch—he told on everybody--found out about it and said he was going to tell Goldman. That's who ran the orphanage. Goldman was a scrawny old man who loved to use the rod on us for any small reason.
“So when Rachett, that was the boy's name, said he was going to tell Goldman, I lost it. I plain and simple lost it. I was so angry that I seemed to feel the top of my head steaming open, like my skull was cracking open under pressure and heat. What was really happening was I was changing. Rachett and I were alone out behind the school building and he was standing quite a ways from me because he was scared of me and what I'd do when he said he'd tell. He was sort of bobbing around on his toes, getting ready to run.
“But when he saw what I was becoming, he went flat-footed and his mouth fell open. My whole body changed, and the real me emerged. I was next to Rachett before he could move one inch. I reached up and caught him by the hair and dragged him down to my level, so I could look him in the eyes. I saw my own hand and arm—the leathery skin, the pustules, the scabs—and I knew my face must be just as ugly. I said to Rachett, 'You tell and I will kill you.'
“Even my voice was different. Deeper, more manly. Rachett almost fainted. He swayed on his feet. Then he whispered that he wouldn't tell, he wouldn't tell no one nothing.
“I let him go and took off across the grounds. I made it to the fence and clambered over. I couldn't run as well as I did as a boy-human, but I sure could climb like a long-armed monkey. Before long I was over and heading out, leaving the orphanage behind. When I was out of sight of it and of Rachett, who was probably still standing where I'd left him, I changed back. I didn't think about it, I didn't will it, it just happened. I was just a kid again. A skinny kid who had a secret. But now I was free. No more rod on my backside.
“So to the question of where I came from—I don't know. To the question how I can shape-change. I don't know. To what or who made me? I don't know. To how I can steal the souls of innocents? I don't know. I just know that's what I'm meant to do. That's my mission. That's all that matters.
“Now you tell me what you're doing here, girl. Or is it mysterious like my situation--where your Maker won't talk to you?”
Angelique weighed Henry's story in her mind. She wasn't sure if he was telling the truth. How does a boy just suddenly turn into a golem-thing one day when he gets mad? And if it was true, why hadn't she run into them before now? Or maybe he was one of a kind. That would be the most miraculous of all.
Though she'd met no one like him, it was true over the hundreds of years of her existence in this body she had felt strange feelings about some humans and those people she avoided. She had also seen apparitions from the corners of her eyes or in the shadows and wondered if there was really anything there. It was possible, she supposed, that beings like Henry had been there before but had never let themselves be known. Still...
“Well?” Henry asked. “Does your Maker talk to you? I haven't read the Bible or paid any attention to church services in the orphanage so I have no background in religious matters. Only thing I know about angels are they have wings. Like you.”
“My Maker doesn't speak either. I'm on my own, the same as you are. We're both outside the pale, outside the perimeter of what is thought of as good and clean and redemptive.”
“We're creatures,” he said. “Without masters.”
“Yes.”
“But this other angel, the one you want to catch up with, you're his master?”
“In a way. Where I come from, I reign. He's an inferior.”
Henry laughed. “Inferior angels! Does that make you the queen?”
“It does.” He noted she was completely serious and he believed her.
He lost his gleeful expression and looked at her face. “Why are you a child if you are the queen of angels?”
Angelique frowned. “I made a dreadful mistake. I had to take a dead body and it had been so long since I'd been on Earth, I couldn't make it all out clearly. In the world between life and death, between the plane of angel existence and that of the Earth, I almost lost my way. I slipped into this girl the second she gave up the body...I was in a sort of panic. Once I'd done it, there was no leaving it without...the body dying again. I was here. I was in the flesh. I didn't want to try again. I didn't want to die.”
“I see. I think.”
“We're just creatures,” she said. “We're not gods. We're not perfect. Neither of us can do everything in a god-like way.”
“And is your God perfect then?”
“Not by a long measure.”
Henry guffawed and almost ran into the ditch. He straightened the wheel to get the car back on the road and tried to snuffle his laughter. Of course she would call her Maker imperfect. She had been thrown out and cut off from him. Was her Maker his Maker? Was he too some thrown out thing, some trash-canned being, some lost creature on an evil mission that was probably destined to fail?
He kept these questions to himself as he drove. Angelique fell asleep after a while, her head against the window. Sunlight flowed over her child's face like honey over a sculpture. She was as beautiful as he was grotesque. Her skin looked so soft it made him want to run his hands over it. Her long, dark lashes lay against her cheek;, her lips were red as pomegranate. And her hair, like long ribbons of night, shone with blue glints it was so black.
He thought he loved that awful, godforsaken creature. If only he knew what love was. Which he didn't.
A sudden, crippling voracious need filled him. He wanted to pull over to the side of the road and drink her soul, drink it to the dregs, make her part of him, part of his grand legion. His face twisted in an agony of hunger and his cells began to dance and circle readying to turn him into the reaper who would snatch the girl from where she dozed and clamp his mouth over hers to suck the golden grist from her human body.
Her eyes opened and she was staring at him hard. “No, Henry,” she said quietly. “No.”
He shook himself, clutched the wheel, and wiped the wide lustful grin from his lips.
No. He couldn't do that. He might never be able to do that.
Yet he thought he could almost taste her as she rolled over his tongue and teeth, as she slid down his throat, as she lodged in the center of him making him more, making him more than what he was.
Her eyes were closed again. Unafraid. Fearless.
An angel.
#
With Jody gone, a terrible silence descended on the room. The gnawing concern that had overcome him earlier deepened. He could almost picture Angelique hurrying towards him.
He reached for the soup and began to eat. The steam went up his nose. It tasted delicious, so good in fact he could hardly wait to get every spoonful to his mouth.
He felt he was already healing faster than expected. The pain he'd experienced earlier was off at a distance now and dwindling. In a day or so he should be able to remove the bandage and find himself whole again. Angelique had explained to him how their angelic beings inside the human body worked. The cells
were replaced by supernatural cells that regenerated at an accelerated pace. All the organs worked much better, growing younger and more vibrant. They might not come back from total death to the body, but anything less they had the ability to overcome, given a little time.
He still felt Jody near by and wondered why. He should have been all the way down to the wharves by now. He just couldn't be around when Angelique arrived. He had seen what she could do to people she didn't want in her way.
With the ridiculous, superstitious voodoo she had gotten into in Charlotte, he had seen her move from animal sacrifices to human. He hadn't participated, of course. He had spent all his time with Mary or handling the varied business enterprises. But he wasn't ignorant about what Angelique was doing. She said the Cubans and local mixed breeds were all into voodoo, so she used it to create a strong bond between her and them. Also, she kept looking for a body to use to bring down more of the Fallen, but so far nothing had worked for her. When she wondered why, Nick wanted to tell her that she was up against a force so great in their Creator that she might as well be a tumbleweed blown back by hurricane winds. That she'd been able to bring him down might only be because she'd done it before, and he'd lived on Earth before. But to bring more reinforcements something was blocking her powers, thwarting her. Now he felt grateful for that. She was entirely enough to contend with. What if she had a dozen fallen angels at her side, able to send them out to extract revenge on him? My God.
He finished the bowl of soup and grabbed an apple. The juice of it ran down his chin as he bit into it. He chewed thoughtfully, relishing the sharp, tangy taste. The day was moving toward dusk and lights from the street glowed beyond the window. He could hear cars puttering by and exhaust backfires, the sound of people laughing, the tinkling of faint music in the distance—a ragtime piano drumming a bawdy tune.
He smelled the sweetness of the apple and it was separate from the taste. He smelled the room, a conduit for all the people who had stayed in it—their sweat, their sex, their cheap perfumes. He could catch the little lost echoes of their lowered voices—some desperate, some full of love, most of them anguished and in despair. The room was a repository of life lived inside it. The pink cabbage rose wallpaper was dingy and torn in places. There were water marks on the ceiling, yellowed with age. Dust motes floated in the air, twirling like stars in a dark system.
Even this—this rundown hotel and this shabby room were jewels of reality. There was not much on Earth that could disgust him because all of it was so real and full of reverberations from the living. To feel something was preferable to feeling nothing in any existence, even if it was in a room on a side-street hotel where the clerk never looked you in the eye. This was the world; it was the world he had come to love.
He couldn't let Angelique take it from him.
#
Jody was daydreaming, relaxing with his back against the wall, his legs dangling from the stacked boxes. It was dark in the closet, which put him in a mood for a nap.
Suddenly the door opened, light from the stairwell sluiced through the closet like a silver sword, and a small child stood in silhouette.
Jody's heart raced and he almost leaped from his perch. Had he locked the door or hadn't he? Was this the terrible girl angel from his nightmares? He was doomed!
“What'chu doin' in my place?” a boy asked.
Jody let out his held breath. It was a boy, probably around seven or eight years old. He was slightly built with brown hair cut so short there were white marks above his ears. Before Jody could respond the boy stepped into the closet and closed the door behind him. He turned on a small flashlight and spun it around in the dark indiscriminately. Light beams danced like stars flitting through a dark sky.
“Hello there, what's your name?” Jody asked. It seemed the boy was so nervous he couldn't keep the flashlight steady.
“Kurt. I'm Kurt.”
He didn't seem like other kids Jody had been around. This boy was reluctant to speak at all and what was he doing in this closet?
“What are you doing here?”
There was a little silence. Then the boy said, “It's quiet and dark here. Nobody yells.”
Ah, Jody thought, his parents argue and it disturbs him. He could understand a boy trying to hide away from that. He'd even done it himself, but he hid beneath his bed while his family argued, drank hard and argued, argued and drank.
“Well, Kurt, I have to stay in here a while and I don't want anyone to know. You won't tell, will you?”
The silence this time was longer. The light spear kept striking out in the dark, high, low, right, left, up, down.
Just as Jody was about to ask again, the boy said, “It's my place. My place! Are you a bad boy, too? Are you a dumb boy? Are you a bad, dumb boy?”
Jody's brow wrinkled. This child didn't speak like other children either. It appeared he was mentally handicapped. Now Jody sighed, wondering at all the ailments children were struck down by. He had been a little shrimp kid, a midget, and life never gets too much better for people like him and Kurt. He reached out in the dark and lay his hand on the boy's shoulder, but the boy leaped aside, the flashlight bobbing about like a firefly.
“Who're you hiding here from?” Kurt asked.
Jody realized the boy thought he was a child, too. He decided to be as open as possible without scaring Kurt. “I'll tell you who I'm afraid of first, then you tell. I'm afraid of a little girl. She's a bad girl and she's coming here.”
The boy moaned low. The flashlight finally stopped moving. Now it pointed to the floor at his feet. “Is she dumb bad or smart bad?”
“Smart bad.”
He moaned again, louder. “I don't like smart bad girls. They pull my hair and stick their tongues out. They trip me. They call me names.”
Jody didn't know what to say to that. He was the one silenced now.
“You live here, in the hotel?” Jody finally asked.
“Upstairs. We haven't been here long, I don't think. I can't tell time. Time won't listen to me.”
“Do you go to school?”
“No, I hate school. I don't know what the books say. I can't hear them.”
“I see. So when you get scared, you hide here.”
“It's my place! No one finds me here!”
“Keep your voice down. I know this is your hideyhole, but is it okay if I share it with you for a little while? The bad smart girl—she's coming.”
“Will she eat you?”
“She might. She's got wings and she's really powerful and scary.”
“Wings,” the boy whispered in awe.
“And she's bad. She has long black hair and she's got dark skin. If you see her, get out of the way.”
“You can stay here,” Kurt said. “We can both stay here.”
Jody hoped that wouldn't happen. He hoped the boy would go back to his room soon. He felt an urge from his bladder and asked, “Where can I go to the bathroom?”
“In your room.”
“I don't have a room like you do. I stay here in the closet.”
“Oh.” The flashlight swung up and pinned Jody's face. He thought he felt the child flinch. The light wavered slightly.
“You're not a boy like me,” he said, his voice hesitant and shaky.
“No, I'm a midget, a little man. It's how I was born. I won't hurt you.”
“I won't hurt you neither, cause my momma says I'm too dumb to hurt a fly.”
Jody winced at the cruelty of some mothers. “About the bathroom, is there one on the floor above?”
Jody saw the child point up. “It's that way,” he said. “Go up then go...” He lost all words and simply kept pointing.
“Okay, thanks, I'll find it.” Now his bladder was burning and he felt like an over-inflated balloon. “I'll be back, okay?”
He slipped from the closet and rushed up the stairs. He found the bathroom and used it, hurried back down the stairs and to the closet door, but when he let himself in he saw it was empty. Kurt was
gone, but he didn't know where to as he'd not passed him on the stairway.
Jody climbed back onto the stacked boxes and sighed in relief. He decided not to drink too many liquids. He didn't want to have to run up the stairs often and be so exposed. Nick could come out of his room and see him and know he hadn't left as he'd been admonished to do. Or the girl could appear at any moment and catch him out of the closet, vulnerable. He shivered uncontrollably. Wasn't fate and fortune supposed to watch over little children and little men? He had not found that to be the truth. If anything, fate worked just the opposite, making life for him harder than it had any call to be.
The door opened abruptly and Jody stiffened. He needed some way to bar that door. It was Kurt back again, sweeping in with his fidgeting flashlight. He closed the door quietly and this time he sat down on the floor, the flashlight in his lap, his light aimed on the ceiling. It highlighted his face from below his chin, giving him a ghoulish, gray look. He didn't have the heavy, slack look of a retarded child, but everything about his face seemed out of sync as if it was made of malleable clay that had been massaged into odd angles. One eyebrow was higher than the other, his nose was overlarge with a dimple in the end of it. His eyes were big and set wide apart, lash-less and stark. His lips were skinned back from boxy teeth and he hardly had any chin at all.
“Where did you go?” Jody asked. He wondered how often the boy hid here and how long he stayed.
“I watched for the monsters while you went pee,” he said. “If they came for you I was gonna hit them with my light. I your friend.”
Jody sat with his mouth open. Why was it that of all innocent children, the broken ones like Kurt were the most innocent of all? With a soul as unblemished as a newborn, with faith as strong as a mighty tree deeply rooted in the earth, this child knew there were monsters and pain and suffering waiting for them around every corner, but went out to do battle anyway.
“I...I appreciate that, Kurt, but next time you just stay here, okay? Remember the bad girl? I told you she might be here any minute. I don't want you out there when she comes.”
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