by Amy Vansant
Anne heard Puff barking. As if awakening from a dream, she looked at the dog. He’d pushed his head through the bars of the fence and stared at her with large brown eyes. He seemed…disturbed.
She followed Puff’s gaze to her own upraised fist.
Why was her hand above her head?
Why was it covered in blood?
She looked down at the young man.
She’d pounded his features into a bloody mess.
Anne rolled away, both horrified and furious. Breath jagged, she fought to regain control. Something about the creature’s power had filled her with an uncontrollable rage. She absorbed her left sword, its orange glow dissipating. Her foe remained motionless. Anne stood, panting, taking another step back to ensure no contact remained between them.
Puff stopped barking. Anne reached into the pocket of her sweatpants with blood-soaked hands to retrieve her phone, nearly dropping it as she hit the speed dial listed as “A.”
She’d once told Michael the A stood for Angelus. Usually, it did. It depended on how annoyed she was with her on-again, off-again boyfriend. There were other words that began with A. Words that rhymed with ShmassShmole.
“Hello?”
“Michael, where are you?”
“Toronto. Why? What’s wrong? Why are you out of breath?”
“I need you here,” she said, staring at the broken knuckles on her right hand. She wiggled them and watched them heal.
How long have I been punching that boy?
“Where are you? New York? I can be there by mid-morning.”
“No, now. You’ll come here now. As in now now. As in, five minutes ago. Fly little birdie.”
Michael huffed. His voice sounded muffled now, as if he’d covered his mouth to ensure his privacy.
“I’d rather not do that.”
“Then, is there something in particular you’d like me to do with the young man lying at my feet, moments from death, who is neither Angelus, Perfidian, Sentinel, human or whatever the hell Seth is?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You heard me. Gramercy Park. The actual park. Now.”
Anne hung up. She squatted beside the boy, her fist raised, ready to push an energy blade through his skull at the slightest movement.
Puffer whined and sat on the opposite side of the bars.
“Sorry baby,” she said as soothingly as possible. “Mommy might have to kill someone.”
Chapter Two
Michael appeared beside Anne with a rush of wind and a flash of blue light. His dark hair flopped to his forehead and he swept it back into place with the flick of a perfectly manicured hand.
“Twenty minutes. You’re getting slow in your old age,” said Anne.
Puff barked.
“Shush,” said Michael. He looked down at the dog. “Both of you.”
Anne eyed his suit.
“Armani?”
“Please. Brioni Vanquish II.”
“I thought maybe you were slumming.”
Michael studied the man on the ground, sitting on his heel beside the body. He used a pen from his breast pocket to push back the young man’s hood, exposing more of his bloodied face to the moonlight.
“What happened to him?” he asked, his lip curled in disgust. “Did he used to have a nose?”
“I was a little angry. Something about his energy filled me with rage.”
“You’re sure it was his energy? You do have a temper…”
“Not like that,” she said, pointing at the boy’s face. “I was out of my mind, pounding on him, for I don’t know how long. It took all my strength to calm down. I had to get away from him.”
“I don’t think inspiring rage in your opponents is an effective defense mechanism. We could just let natural selection rid us of him.”
“Oh you’re a hoot. You know I can’t resist Darwinian humor.”
Michael touched the only remaining patch of clean skin on the boy’s forehead with his fingertips.
“I can’t drain him.”
“So he has to be some variation of an Angelus, right?”
“Presumably.”
Anne squinted, peering at the boy’s face.
“You know…he looks like he’s healing. He looks better than he did. You can almost make out an eye socket… You think I should hit him again?”
Michael stood, scowling. He inspected the pen for blood and slipped it back into his pocket.
“Anything else?”
“He had black eyes, no white, with a red iris. Glowing. Oh, and when I first spotted him he said you are exactly the person I’ve been looking for.”
“So he ended the sentence with a preposition?” Michael unbuttoned his jacket, pulled a handkerchief from an inner pocket and wiped his hands.
“Yes, so we can rule out the possibility that he’s an English professor. Excellent job, case solved.”
The young man groaned and his finger twitched. She shot forth her blade, plunged it into his head and then retracted. The creature fell silent.
“You just lobotomized him with all the emotion of pushing a card key into a hotel room door,” said Michael.
“I didn’t lobotomize him. And I’ve had to do that twice since I called you. He’s as powerful as an Arch. He’s drained to almost nothing, but he’s healing as we speak.”
Michael looked around.
“We have to move him. We can’t stand here in public stabbing him in the head with light sabers all night. As much fun as that might be.”
“Take him to my apartment. I’ll meet you there.”
“I’m a little afraid to fly him. If we don’t know what he is, we don’t know how teleporting him might affect his situation. It could heal him or kill him.”
“Okay, then throw him over your shoulder. We’ll walk him there the old-fashioned way.”
Michael ran his tongue across his teeth and stared back at her.
“I don’t know. Maybe you should carry him.”
Anne glared at him.
“Pick him up. You didn’t even buy that brioche suit of yours. You manifested it. If you get blood on it, you can re-manifest it. It will look a little suspicious if I carry a man into the hotel. I need to be free to explain to prying eyes why you are carrying a man into the hotel.”
“The suit is Brioni. A brioche is a French pastry.”
“Just pick him up,” said Anne through gritted teeth. She was trying to be scary, but now, all she could think about was a warm brioche and a cup of coffee.
She opened the gate and picked up Puff. The dog covered her face with kisses.
“Did you miss Mommy?”
The intensity of Puffer’s kisses increased and she realized love had nothing to do with his attention.
“Blood spatter. Little sicko.”
Michael lifted the young man, holding the body in front of him like a serving tray.
“Won’t the people in the hotel say something? His face looks like the chopped toro appetizer at Nobu.”
“The Gramercy gets a lot of famous people. A lot of arty people. They’ve seen everything. The kid at the desk thinks I’m a vampire anyway.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Anne turned and looked at Michael. The head of the man in his arm hung down, blood dripping from his mangled face.
“Michael, You can’t carry him draped over your arms like a bolt of fabric. First, a normal person couldn’t hold the weight of a man away from his body that way. Second, the kid’s face is in clear view. They train the staff to deal with quirky personalities, but basic humanitarian instincts might inspire them to call the police if we drag an unconscious, bleeding boy to my apartment. We need to make it look like he’s just drunk.”
“Like he’s drunk and fell face first into a wood chipper.”
“Oh, come on! It’s not that bad. Look, his eye socket’s perfectly round again.”
“Fine.” He tossed the man head first over his shoulder like a bag of rice.
>
“Better?”
Anne shook her head. “Walk with him. Make it look like he’s trying to walk.”
Michael huffed. He dropped the man’s legs and held him to his right side with one arm tucked under the young man’s right armpit. The head lolled against Michael’s shoulder, smearing it with blood.
He pursed his lips and took a deep breath through his nose.
Anne adjusted the boy’s hood to cover as much of his face as possible.
“Close enough. Let’s go.”
Anne opened the door and stepped into the lobby. Both the Jade and Rose bars to the right were closed for the night. The restaurant to the left was dark. The lobby was empty, except for Pete standing at his station behind the front desk.
“Okay. The coast is clear.”
Michael dragged in the body, shaking his arm to make the unconscious boy’s feet dance on the ground like a marionette’s. If Pete looked closely, he would notice the hooded stranger’s toes dragging loosely beside the Angelus. Hopefully, he wasn’t so obsessed with proving her a vampire that he’d look for oddities.
Michael scanned the lobby.
“Lovely. It feels very Julian Schnabel, am I right?”
“It looks like Beetlejuice’s vacation home. I know.”
“Beetle what?”
Anne waved a dismissive hand and walked in front of Michael to obscure Pete’s view. Pete looked up as they hurried towards the elevator area.
“Hey Ms. B,” he said, his brow knitting as he strained to see Michael and his friend. “Do you need some help?”
“We’re good.”
“Are you sure?”
“Back off, Pete.”
He blanched. “Sorry.”
Anne and Michael ducked into the elevator bay.
“Still angry?” the Angelus asked as they waited for a car.
“You’d rather Pete come and investigate?”
He shrugged and the boy in his arm danced accordingly.
“Fine. I am still angry. I didn’t mean to snap at Pete. I’m telling you, something about this creature’s energy affected me.”
“At least you were able to drain him.”
The elevator to the private residences opened and they stepped inside. Turning to face forward, Anne spotted a small pool of blood on the marble floor where they’d been standing. A spotty trail of it led back to the front door. Her shoulders slumped.
“Dammit. Blood. I can’t leave the lobby covered with blood.”
“It will affect your apartment prices?”
She rolled her eyes. “And maybe draw a little unwanted attention.”
He shrugged. “If he’s as much like an Angelus as we think, as soon as he switches to his energy form all the physical evidence will return to him.”
“Well we’re not planning on letting him heal like that any time soon, remember?”
“Good point.”
“Go on up,” she said, placing the dog on the floor. “Take Puff. I’ll be there in a second. Don’t get blood—”
She cut her comment short. Blood was already dripping from the boy’s nose. She winced as Puffer began to lap it from the floor of the elevator.
Helpless to control every detail, she jumped out and jogged to the front desk. Pete seemed both surprised and frightened to see her.
“I’m sorry for snapping at you,” she said.
As she spoke she trained her eyes on the security camera above Pete’s head. She moved to the far end of the front desk and hopped over it as if it were a foot high instead of four. Pete watched slack-jawed. Positioning herself beneath the camera, she jumped and touched it. The red light blinked out.
Pete took a step away from her. “Um, it’s okay, you didn’t snap. I—”
Anne lunged forward and touched Pete’s neck. As her fingertips made contact with his skin, he collapsed. Anne caught him and lowered him gently to the floor.
A burst of energy shorted out humans as easily as it did cameras.
Anne dipped below the desk and grabbed paper towels and a bottle of spray cleaner. She ran to the lobby, cleaned the drips of blood leading to the larger pool in front of the elevator, sopped up that mess and recalled the car. She ran the bottle back to its place behind the desk and propped Pete in a chair. She returned to the elevator just as the doors opened, one last clump of paper towels in her hand for cleaning any mess Puffer might have missed.
Anne entered her apartment to find her assailant lying on the hardwood floor behind the sofa, surrounded by curious dogs. Now the pug was happily licking blood from his face.
“Don’t let them near him!” she said. She shooed the dogs into her bedroom and closed the door.
“Sorry,” said Michael. “It’s like herding sheep.”
He perched on a bar stool and stared at the man.
“Do you recognize him?” she asked.
“While a face tenderized by your loving fists is difficult for anyone to identify, I can definitively say no. He’s not an Angelus.”
“Has he moved? What do you want to do? I can’t keep him here.”
“We’ll keep him penned like Seth until we figure out who and what he is.”
“Is Con still watching Seth?”
Michael nodded. “He is. Seth retains the amorphous state he assumed the moment we trapped him. Con sits outside the cage, day and night, waiting for a chance to steal back his energy. I’d never let him interact with Seth, of course, but it makes me feel better having a Sentinel nearby.”
“And you can’t stop him from being there.”
Michael scowled. “No. Con is worse than trying to herd sheep.”
“He’s like trying to herd cats.”
“Why would someone herd cats?”
Anne sighed. She missed her fellow Sentinel, Con. A century earlier, he’d lost his corporeal body in a battle with Seth while trying to save her. He’d lived like a ghost until a month ago, when he again confronted Seth on the streets of Annapolis, Maryland. Through this second interaction, Con regained ninety percent of his physical body. He was convinced Seth retained the final ten percent of his form, but couldn’t siphon any energy from the Perfidian as long as he remained a nebulous ball of light locked in an energy cage. He couldn’t tear himself away from the possibility that Seth would reform and he could be whole once more.
“Hopefully your Perfidian cage will hold whatever this creature is as well as it holds Seth.”
The boy’s face remained covered in blood, but his nose seemed more prominent than she remembered. She manifested a sword.
“I better—”
Before she could finish her sentence, the body collapsed into a swirling pool of dark red light. The man’s human features dissipated, until only a man-shaped glow remained. The light phased through the floor as Anne yelped and thrust her sword through the floorboards, hoping to make contact before he dropped out of reach. She felt no transfer of energy.
Michael transformed into his own energy form, crackling with his angelic blue light. He slipped through the floorboards in pursuit.
Anne bolted into the hallway. She stared at the elevator call buttons, unsure what to do. She couldn’t phase through the floor like an Angelus and using the elevator to guess their location in a building this size was a hopeless endeavor. The creature could be on any floor of the hotel or miles away by now. Michael didn’t think to phase her with him, of course. Even Angeli were idiots sometimes. If he caught the creature, he wouldn’t have the power to hold him without a Sentinel in tow.
Anne stamped her foot.
“Dammit!”
She ran back to her apartment hoping Michael might return for her. She stared at the floorboards.
“What’s going on? It sounds like you’re having a rave out here.”
Anne turned to find Jeffrey, standing at the edge of the kitchen, bare-chested and wearing pajama bottoms covered with little penguins. She recognized them as her own.
“I was attacked in the park by a Perfidian-like creature. A
nd those are my pajamas. I’ve been looking all over for them.”
He rubbed his head. “Look, I’ve only been home a little while and I think I already have a hangover. Could you keep it down?”
“Did you hear the part where I was attacked? We brought him up here, but he escaped. Went right through the floor.”
She stomped.
Nothing.
“Who’s we?”
“Michael. He came to help.”
Anne squinted. There was something dark on Jeffrey’s shoulder.
“What’s on your arm? Did you get a tattoo?”
He looked at one arm and then the other. When he found the swollen flesh, he sighed.
“Not again.”
“You don’t remember?”
He shook his head and strained to get a better view. “What is it?”
“I don’t know, come here.”
Jeffrey shuffled forward a few feet and turned so she could better view his new art as she peered at it.
“It looks like…well it’s pretty raw, but it looks like two tiny ribbons with eyes holding hands…”
He put his hand over his face. “Does it say anything?”
“It says everything is better with you. Like one ribbon is saying that to the other.”
“Bacon.”
“What?”
“Not ribbons. Bacon. It’s two pieces of bacon.”
“Oh! Yes! You’re right. Ha! What made you do that?”
“Clearly, I lost a bet. With a chef.”
“Well, on the upside, everything is better with bacon.”
He sighed again.
“So you said this thing went through the floor?” he said, desperately trying to change the subject.
She laughed. “Yes.”
“And Michael followed him?”
“Yes.”
“So in the grand scheme of things, I borrowed your pajamas and you brought a monster into our apartment. I think I win.”
Anne grimaced. “Fine. Hindsight is twenty-twenty but I still want those washed and back in my drawer a.s.a.p.”
“You want me to make coffee or something?”