Black Wings

by Christina Henry

  It was kind of weird, actually. Quite a few people had come to look at the place, gushed about the space, promised to bring back a deposit, but nobody returned. And after five rent-free months, I was pretty desperate for a tenant.

  I pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs and stepped into the small foyer. Gabriel Angeloscuro stood on the porch with his back to the main door, a large pane of glass with oak trim. He looked about a foot taller than me, and trim underneath his long black coat. His dark hair was slightly damp from the light October drizzle and curled a little at his neck and ears.

  The expensive shine of his shoes made the already shabby paint job of the porch look even worse. Flecks of red paint peeled up under his feet, and I worried that he might catch the fabric of his coat—which appeared to be wool, dry clean only, and sporting a designer label—on a jutting nail. The interior of the building looked pretty good, but it was hard for me to keep up with repairs on the outside—yet another compelling reason to get a tenant and some rent money ASAFP.

  For a brief moment I wondered why a man so well dressed would need to rent an apartment at all, much less rent one in my middle-class neighborhood. A guy like that should be in a condo in the south Loop, or somewhere else where trendy people with money bought trendy property. He turned around and met my eyes through the door, and for the second time in the last hour I felt like all the breath had left my body.

  Beezle was right. He was a handsome devil. Way beyond handsome, actually. More like the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. He looked like an Italian Renaissance painter’s ideal figure, from his broad forehead and carved cheekbones to the long, slightly arrogant Roman nose and the tiniest of clefts in his chin.

  As jaw-dropping as his face was, it was his eyes that were most compelling. At first glance I thought they were brown. But as I looked, and looked, I realized they were closer to black, black like the ocean under the moon, an endless expanse of glinting waves reflecting the sky. There were stars in his eyes, stars and a hint of fire, a sun going supernova a million light-years away.

  He didn’t move or say a word. I realized that he stood on one side of the door and I stood on the other, and that I held the apartment keys in my left hand and the doorknob in my right. For a second I wasn’t sure if I would turn the knob to let him in or hold it fast so that he could never enter. I felt like I was on the trembling edge of something, that if I allowed him to enter my home, my life would change irrevocably.

  Then he smiled, the slightest upturn of the corners of his mouth. “Are you going to allow me in to view the apartment, Ms. Black?”

  Blood rushed into my cheeks as he politely waited for me to turn the knob. I’d gaped at him like the class nerd panting after the quarterback. So what if he was good-looking? It didn’t excuse my rudeness. Off to a great start, I thought. At this rate I would never get a tenant.

  I opened the door quickly and stepped back to allow him to crowd into the small foyer. He smelled spicy-sweet, like apples and cloves.

  “Sorry about that; please come in,” I said. I held out my hand for him to shake. “Madeline Black. I’ve been a little distracted today.”

  His own hand was covered in buttery leather glove. He grasped my hand briefly, impersonally, and I wondered why I was disappointed. “Gabriel Angeloscuro.”

  “Well,” I said, trying to pull it together and remember why he was there. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”

  He nodded and I turned to open the apartment. The two apartment doors sat side by side with the mailbox and a small security light in between. The right-hand door was for the first floor.

  The door opened into a small nook before expanding into a long room divided by an archway. The layout was practically identical to my own apartment above.

  “As you can see,” I said, “this is the living room/ dining room area. The floors are the original hardwood and they’ve recently been refinished.”

  He walked to the large picture window that faced the street, seemingly not hearing a word I said. “How long have you owned this building, Ms. Black?”

  “Nineteen years.”

  “You seem awfully young to have owned this building for so long.”

  “I inherited the building from my mother.” After she was murdered.

  “I see.” He tapped one of his fingers idly against the glass. “I’m sorry for your loss. And your father?”

  “Not in the picture,” I said shortly. I had never met the man, never seen a photograph of him. His name wasn’t even on my birth certificate. Whoever he was, my mother hadn’t thought too much of him. She’d never spoken of him.

  “Again, I am sorry to hear that.”

  This was not a line of questioning that I wanted to continue. It seemed much too personal for a tenant-landlord relationship. “Those windows were just installed four months ago. They’re a lot more energy efficient and they help keep the house warmer in the winter.”

  He turned away from the window and touched the metal coils of the steam heater that sat directly below the window. He seemed to be refocusing himself, remembering why he was there. “This is an older heating system, yes?”

  “Yes, unfortunately, it’s much more expensive to replace. It’s also unnecessary, since the steam heat keeps the building very warm, even during a Chicago winter. But the kitchen and bathroom have been updated in the last year.”

  I waved him toward the back of the house. He walked slowly through the empty rooms, his heels ringing on the floor.

  “This is one of the bedrooms,” I said. A very small room opened off the living room. “There’s a large storage space in the closet.”

  He obligingly opened the closet door and looked inside. “Are those your apartment stairs above this space?”

  “Yes,” I said. “If you’ll come this way, I’ll show you the rest of the place.”

  “It must be difficult,” he said as he stood inside the closet and stared up at the diagonal ceiling.

  “What’s that?”

  “Living alone, with no family to help you.” He turned to face me and I again had the disquieting sense of falling into his eyes.

  “The bathroom is this way,” I said, ignoring his comment. I would not be drawn into a personal conversation with a stranger. It would be impossible to explain how Beezle and I had managed to dodge child services for years until I came of age, and it wasn’t Gabriel Angeloscuro’s business in any case. I’d lived by myself since I was thirteen years old. Yes, it was lonely with no one around except an overweight gargoyle, but I’d gotten used to it. I wasn’t used to hot guys prying into my private life.

  Gabriel seemed to accept my change of subject and followed me through the rest of the apartment, nodding at the second bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen.

  “There’s a small yard out back and laundry downstairs,” I said. “You would share both with me. There’s also a storage space for this unit in the basement.”

  He said nothing, only stared out the row of kitchen windows at the small porch, the patch of grass, my scraggly little vegetable garden. I almost hoped he wouldn’t want the apartment. There was something about Gabriel Angeloscuro—the familiar way he spoke to me, his disconcerting gaze—that made me deeply uncomfortable.

  At the same time, could I afford to wait another five or six months for a better tenant? Probably not. Just because he was handsome and had some boundary issues wasn’t a good enough reason to turn him away. If he wanted the place, it would only make good business sense to give it to him—as long as his credit and references checked out, of course.

  “I believe I would like this apartment,” he said, and then he smiled, showing white, white teeth.

  Since an Agent’s work is never really done, I had to head downtown immediately after Gabriel Angeloscuro’s departure. Paperwork—the bane of my existence—had to be filed in a timely manner or else I would be forced to listen to J.B. rant from now until kingdom come.

  “Beezle, I’m headed to the office,”
I called.

  There was a faint grunt from the mantelpiece. The gargoyle was in brood mode and hadn’t said a word to me since Gabriel had left. He had, however, seen fit to throw several black looks my way and to mutter imprecations under his breath.

  “Whatever,” I said. I stepped to the side window and thought about going to the Main Office. As I pictured the building—an unassuming brick nine-story in the Loop—my wings sprouted from my back. I swept out the window and into the morning air.

  A handy side benefit of being an Agent is that no one other than the departed can see you when your wings are out. Well, almost no one. Many, many mentally ill people had caught sight of me over the years, as well as any number of folks using psychotropic drugs.

  And children. Not all of them, although my mother told me that it used to be that she couldn’t pass by a single child without being noticed. If she had to fly by a school playground during recess, she’d cause a riot.

  But not anymore. I think children today are desensitized to the possibility of magic and wonder. Most kids I see have their noses buried in a handheld video game or are whining for their parents to buy something for them. Those kids are already too emotionally detached to notice a woman with black wings flying by.

  But there are a few still—the ones who read on the playground instead of playing kickball with the other kids, the ones who stare dreamily out the classroom windows during science class, the ones who pretend their closet is a spaceship and their bedroom is the rocky surface of Mars—those kids see me. Really see me, and know that I’m not a figment of their imagination.

  It took me about ten minutes to get to the Main Office. My wings are a hell of a lot faster than the Brown Line. I landed on the roof of the building. It was one of Mayor Daley’s “green roofs,” so it was covered in late-season vegetation that was slowly dying off as winter crept in. There was a fire escape door at the back corner of the roof, just above the alley. I pulled out my key, opened the door and clattered down the stairs until I reached the ninth floor.

  I pushed into the hallway, a standard office-building, white-walled, gray-carpeted affair. It bustled with Agents and office staff. Most people talked rapidly into cell phones or carried sheaves of paper under their arms. Like I said, death is pretty much a bureaucracy, with all of the attendant paper and bullshit that goes with it. My cubicle was on the fourth floor, so I waited at the bank of elevators with a crowd of other people and crammed in when the doors opened to go down.

  When I reached the fourth floor, I stepped out of the elevator and then waited until a small crowd of people emerged so I could blend in. It was childish, but I was trying to sneak past J.B.’s office without him seeing me. He always knows when something is off, and if he saw me, he would ask about the ghost.

  J. B. Bennett was the area supervisor for Chicago. Each major city and every rural area has a supervisor, and then there are regional supervisors who oversee several areas. Above the regional supervisors are three managers, and then the president of the Main Office, who answers to the North American Branch Office in Ottawa.

  This building controlled the whole Midwest region, so J.B. was one of many smaller fish that longed for bigger things. He was convinced that he was destined for the president’s corner office. He was also convinced that if he micromanaged his Agents to death, then he would get where he wanted to be a lot faster.

  Every time a soul did not choose the Door, he took it as a personal insult. He treated soul-collecting like a sales job. An Agent had to maintain a minimum percentage of “successes,” souls who chose the Door, or else she was forced to write up a biweekly report explaining why she hadn’t met her percentage minimum until she brought things up to scratch.

  J.B. was also well-known for calling such Agents into his office for no apparent reason and wasting a lot of time haranguing them about their success rate. And he enjoyed assigning extra little tasks designed to irritate the crap out of them. J.B. couldn’t fire an Agent who didn’t meet his standards—being an Agent was a lifetime appointment—but he could certainly make your life miserable unless you gave him what he wanted.

  If ever there were two people who epitomized the saying about oil and water, it was me and J.B. He wanted total submission, a line of orderly soldiers who did exactly as he asked. I wanted nothing more than to be free of him and this miserable job, but I was bound by fate and by magic to stay.

  When an Agent dies, the next person in that Agent’s bloodline is activated to duty. There is no choice, and there is no escape. The magic in the blood that gives Agents their powers also binds them to the job, and the only alternative is death.

  I’d never known an Agent who’d attempted to leave the service, but there were stories—legends, really—of those who had tried. They were hunted down by Retrievers, and when the Retrievers found the errant Agent, no choice was given to them. They were struck down where they were found. They did not enter the Door, nor did they become ghosts. Their names disappeared from the rolls in the Hall of Records. It was as if they had never been.

  I had never seen a Retriever. Rumor had it that they were planted among ordinary Agents, living double lives, or that they haunted the upper floors of the Ottawa office, seen only by the highest levels of management. Other Agents didn’t believe in them at all, and thought Retrievers were just imaginary bogeymen, stories told to keep Agents from leaving the service en masse.

  I was something of an agnostic on the Retriever question. I didn’t necessarily believe, but I wasn’t willing to take the chance. I wanted to see my mother again someday, and getting vaporized by a Retriever did not seem the best way to do that.

  I managed to get past J.B.’s office and into the main room. I had a cubicle tucked in a corner and I scurried past my fellow Agents, most of whom were laboring with their heads bent over forms that had to be filled out in triplicate by hand. Agents possessed some of the most powerful magic in the world, but our data-entry system still hadn’t entered the twenty-first century.

  I had just settled in comfortably and started to fill out the form for Mrs. Luccardi when the phone on my desk rang. I could see the extension number and I rolled my eyes.

  “How does he know?” I asked as soon as I picked up the phone.

  “And a very good morning to you, too.” J.B.’s secretary, Lizzie, always seemed unruffled. “He wants to see you in his office.”

  It was just turning out to be that kind of a day. I sighed. “Of course he does.”

  2

  I DIDN’T HATE J.B. HE IRRITATED ME LIKE NO OTHER human being on earth could, however, so I considered it my duty to repay the favor.

  J.B.’s office was a tiny two-room space crammed with file cabinets that overflowed with paper. Manila folders were stacked on every available surface, and any leftover space was filled with black three-ring binders. J.B.’s secretary, Lizzie, typed patiently away at some audio transcription as I entered the office. Her eyes were fixed on her computer screen and I could hear the clack of the foot pedal going up and down as she rewound the tape and then pressed down again to let it play. She finished typing her sentence and then looked up at me, pulling her headphones over her frizzy blond hair.

  “He’ll be out in a minute, Maddy. He’s having a quick meeting with Atwood.”

  “How long has Atwood been in there?”

  She glanced at the clock that hung on the wall above my hand. “Maybe five minutes.”

  I looked at the door that was a few feet behind Lizzie’s desk, then up at the clock, watching the second hand. “And three ... two ... one ...”

  Right on schedule, I heard J.B. shouting at Atwood. The door muffled his exact words but I didn’t need to hear the conversation to get the gist of it. Atwood must have fallen below percentage.

  Lizzie looked as if she wanted to say something to defend J.B., but decided discretion was the better part of valor and picked up her headphones instead, nodding at me as she went back to work. A couple of minutes later Atwood came out looking white
-faced. He passed me without a word and swept into the hallway. J.B. was right behind him.

  The worst thing about J.B. wasn’t that he had the world’s crappiest personality. No, the real tragedy was that that personality had been shoehorned inside the face and body of a god. Well over six feet with the leanly muscled body of a long-distance runner, he had silky black hair cut ruthlessly short and green eyes that glinted like cut glass. If he’d had even a sliver of sweetness in him, he’d have had women sticking to him like flypaper. As it was, I didn’t think he’d been on a date as long as I’d known him.

  But then again, neither had I, so I wouldn’t be throwing that in J.B.’s face anytime soon.

  He stopped as he caught sight of me and smiled with shark’s teeth. “Black. Perfect. I need to speak with you about that soul you collected this morning. Get your ass in here.”

  “Who talks like that?” I asked as I sauntered in behind him and closed the door. He sat down at his desk. “You sound like a police sergeant from a cop show.”

  “Sit,” he said, ignoring my comment and shuffling things around on his desk.

  The quantity of paperwork on his desk was unbelievable. It looked like there had been some kind of paperwork apocalypse. I think the only reason it wasn’t on the floor was that J.B. probably thought that paper on his desk made him look busy and paper on the floor made him look like a slob.

  “What is it you’re looking for? I haven’t filed the paperwork yet. I was just filling it out when you called.”

  I crossed my legs and caught a flash of blue. I noticed that I had never changed out of my fuzzy house slippers. That meant that I had shown the most beautiful human being I had ever seen in person around the apartment while wearing my crummy holes-in-the-soles slippers. And that I had come to work in them. And everyone I worked with must think I am either mentally ill or the world’s biggest ditz. I voted for ditz, myself.