by Anton Strout
I allowed myself to relax, turning to my human friends. “This creature was not going to rip you apart,” I said, then turned back to the angel. “Neither my friends nor I are here to hurt you.”
“I don’t think you can hurt me,” he said. His words came out full of fury and confusion despite the angel being prone.
Emily cocked her head at him. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Look at me,” he snarled, a sadness in his words. He pulled one of his arms free from the ropes and slammed his stone fist against his chest.
“Don’t be too sure about not being able to die,” Aurora said, sounding both offended and a bit prideful. She tapped the bladed end of her pole arm against the angel’s chest. “We’re pretty resourceful.”
The grotesque’s face seemed uncertain, but he turned his attention to me instead, some of the fight going out of him. “What are you? What am I?”
“We will get to that,” I said, kneeling down close to his face and lowering my voice, “but for now why do not you tell me who you are and what you remember.”
“I do not understand,” he said. “This . . . this isn’t right. I saw my own gravestone. I should be dead. I should be in Heaven, not here as some cruel mockery of a Heavenly creature!”
I looked up at Alexandra, raising my voice once more. “Have you not done as we agreed?” I asked her.
She shook her head.
“You scold me for the lateness of our arrival,” I said, “yet you have not taken care of your end of dealing with those you find of my kind who are in need of Sanctuary . . .”
“He threw a gravestone at us,” she growled back at me. “With that kind of behavior I didn’t think he was a likely candidate, okay? I chalked him up as one of the bad ones.”
“So it would appear,” I said, standing. “Do feel free to do your part now.”
Alexandra sighed, but knelt down next to the angelic form.
“Easy,” she said, laying her hand on his chest. “What’s your name?”
“Jonathan,” he said, calming a bit.
“Listen, Jonathan, I can appreciate your frustration here . . .”
“I doubt you can,” he said with some bitterness to his words. “You’re human still.”
“I can,” she insisted, trying to keep her composure. “I’m just dealing with a whole city full of your kind right now. It’s a bit much.”
“I don’t care about those others,” he said. “What I care about is how I’ve been forsaken after pledging myself to His service.”
“What were you in life?” I asked him.
“He came here to grieve,” Alexandra said. “And he threw what I think was his tombstone at us, so I’m guessing there’s a connection to the Cloisters.”
“Stanis,” Emily said. “I thought you said they moved several abbeys here. They moved the graves as well?”
“I can answer,” Alexandra said after I had been silent for a moment too long. “New York architecture is kinda my thing. Some of the spiritual ties to the abbeys used for this project were strong. It was a sign of reverence and respect for the deceased who were chosen to rest here.” She turned back to the angel. “Go ahead. Who were you?”
Off in the distance the sounds of sirens cried out into the night, growing louder with each passing moment.
“I served the Lord,” Jonathan said. “I was a man of God. A monk. I remember dying long ago. What a joke it is that I am now stuck in this form which so viciously reminds me that while I may look like an angel, I am no closer to His Kingdom than I was in life.”
Alexandra fell silent beside him, her head lowering and her eyes slowly falling shut. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m to blame for that.”
The angel looked up at her, confused. “What?”
“I’m to blame,” she repeated, with conviction and hatred in her words this time.
“How is that possible?” he asked. “Who are you?”
Alexandra took a deep breath. “I am Alexandra Belarus,” she said. “And I am your maker. I’m responsible for this. Thanks to the magic practiced by older generations of my family—Spellmasonry—I accidentally drew you and others like you into these forms. Now Manhattan’s got so much grotesque activity, it’s made the news every night since my spell went awry. All of this running around is me trying to clean up a situation that’s already gone way too public.”
The angel’s face filled with horror. “So you drew me out of Heaven and trapped me here?” he asked in shock.
“I do not believe so,” I answered. “After talking with many of our stone kind, I believe we are inhabited by disquieted spirits that have been unable for reasons I do not know to pass on to the afterlife.”
Red and blue lights flashed through the forest all around the Cloisters from the roads leading up to it.
Alexandra stood back up and looked to me.
“That’s the CliffsNotes version,” she said. “Satisfied? Now, Stanis, if you’ll do your part. Rory and I have to go. Like, now.”
“You’re hurt,” Emily said, pointing to the large amount of blood I had failed to notice along Alexandra’s left arm.
“I’m fine,” Alexandra said. “Not your problem.”
“We really should be going,” Aurora said, grabbing Alexandra by her good arm and starting for the forest.
I watched the two of them run for the tree line through intermittent flashes of red and blue light.
“We can discuss the alarming rate at which you are handing over these newly captured grotesques to me at a later date,” I called out after her. “Unlike your . . . CliffsNotes version, you called it? The way of the grotesque takes time when we bring an initiate to our ways.”
“Your ways?” the angel asked, looking up at me from the ground where he still lay.
“You will learn soon enough,” I said, “but trust me now when I say the time it takes is both for your protection and that of those around you.”
The bright white of headlights lit up the three of us as a male and female officer jumped free of the car, running toward us.
“Maron!” the female officer called out, her red hair pulled back and swaying wildly as she ran. “By the doors!”
“I see them, Rowland,” the man said, pulling a gun free from the jacket of his suit as he ran toward us.
“NYPD!” the woman shouted, pulling a gun of her own. “Freeze or we will open fire.”
The man slowed and raised his gun, waiting for the woman to join him. “Think guns will actually work?” he asked her, uncertain.
Emily and I did not want to be around to find out. I handed one of the ropes to Emily and secured the other in mine, leaping into the air. The added weight of the still-tied angel made it difficult to fly, but with Emily and I splitting the load, we still managed to shoot up past the tower and into the night sky before the two detectives could open fire.
“I do not understand,” I said to Emily once we were in full flight with our newly acquired grotesque in tow.
“What exactly?” she asked.
“That is not the Alexandra Belarus I know,” I said, troubled. “With my father and his men vanquished . . . with his threat eliminated, I would expect the Spellmason to be more at peace . . . yet to see her like this . . .”
“We all have our issues that lie beneath the surface of what others see,” Emily said. “I can only imagine hers run deep.”
Was it seeing me with Emily that had put Alexandra in such a mood? It was the only thing I could imagine, although Alexandra had no right to judge whom I chose as my companion. After all, the Spellmason had made her choice when she had chosen the alchemist Caleb Kennedy. Or rather, when I had stepped back to allow the like companionship that his human form offered her.
Tonight was full of questions, not all of them mine.
“Where are we going?” the angel
asked, confusion thick in his voice as he dangled between the two of us high above the Manhattan streets.
“Sanctuary,” I said, and fell silent as I flew on and tried to make sense in my head of the woman I had once been sworn to protect and had watched over my whole life.
Three
Alexandra
While Rory and I had been playing the Winchester sisters all evening skulking after the gargoyle population of Manhattan, her roommate and my friend Marshall Blackmoore had been working, too, but as we approached his store, Roll for Initiative, it became clear who had fared better.
In the reflection of the store’s display windows, the two of us looked worse than the zombie action figures posed just on the other side of the glass. With her blue hair plastered to her head despite the hood she had been wearing, Rory looked like a drowned Cookie Monster. My eyes were sunk far enough into my head from exhaustion that I almost wished someone would shoot me in the head after mistaking me for the first sign of the zombie apocalypse.
Marshall, comparatively, just looked busy behind the cash desk at the front of his store. The worst thing he probably endured tonight was a paper cut from flipping through the pile of books he had spread out before him. Still, he had his hands full there. For this late at night there were a considerable number of customers wandering the store.
Not surprisingly, when we entered the store as wet as two drowned rats, we turned a few heads among Marshall’s nerd herd.
Marshall looked up and did a double take when he saw us staggering in.
“You two look like hell,” he said, nervously running his fingers through his mop of black hair. “You okay?” His eyes darted to the back of the store, then back to us.
“We’re okay,” I said. “Ish. Are you?”
His kind brown eyes came quickly back to us, and he nodded.
“We could have used you,” Rory said, reaching into her pocket and fishing out the crumple of notes from the evening.
Marshall turned his eyes back to his books on the counter. “There’s only so much time in my day,” he said, tapping the books in front of him. “I can’t stay up all night chasing grotesques down. Someone’s got to catalog them, and I’m lucky I have the time to do that, on top of running my store . . .”
“Well, you really should have come with tonight,” Rory said. “You know how hard it was for me to take notes by moonlight, in the rain, in the middle of Fort Tryon Park?”
“I appreciate the effort,” he said, “but I just couldn’t get away.”
I looked back through the store’s racks and shelves, further examining the crowd I had only given a cursory glance to upon entering. Each of them looked a bit like the types of people I saw dressed up on their way over to the Javits Center for the annual Comic Con.
“I’m sorry; are we keeping you from something?” I asked.
Rory took note of the crowd. “Is this one of your live action role-playing thingies?”
Marshall blushed, holding his hand out to Rory.
“Something like that,” he said. “I’m sure you two did fine without me. I’ve just got a lot going on with the store.”
“Who knew gaming could be such work?” Rory asked. She stepped up to the counter and threw down the notes she had been taking at the Cloisters earlier. “This should make your night. Tagged another Griever. Released it to Sanctuary.”
“Thanks,” he said absently as he pulled the notes over, already looking down at his books again. Marshall pulled open a large binder, flipped to a tabbed section labeled “Grotesques,” and began transcribing Rory’s notes onto a blank page there. A few lines in, he pulled his hand up to find a wet smear of ink on his hand and the page.
“Sorry about the pages . . .” Rory said. “It was raining.”
“And the blood, too,” I added. “I was . . . well, bleeding.”
“You okay?” he asked, for the first time looking at us as if he was genuinely concerned.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, even though as I finally took the time to assess myself, I felt far less than it.
“She could have died tonight,” Rory said. “You weren’t there for us and she could have bled out.”
“It’s no big deal,” I assured him even though I felt blood dripping off my left hand onto the floor of his store. “Just crashing through a stained glass window, is all.”
“Jesus, let me look at that,” Marshall said, shutting his book and coming around the counter.
I shrugged my jacket off my shoulder, a wad of notebook paper pressed against the wound still sticking in place. What had once been your typical white-lined paper was now a crimson brown.
Rory’s eyes went wide upon seeing the papers. “We need to get you to a hospital,” she said.
The sight of my own blood did make me feel queasy, but I shook my head. “No time,” I said. “If I can get back out there and hunt, I can at least bag another gargoyle tonight.”
Marshall pulled away the clump of blood-soaked notepaper. “Not if you look like one of Dracula’s victims,” he said. “This looks pretty bad, Lexi.”
“Listen to the man,” Rory said, nodding in agreement with him. “You’re no good to your cause if you don’t take care of yourself first. Let’s just hit Beth Israel’s emergency room and call it a night.”
“No,” I insisted, harsher this time. “I need to be out there in the streets. I need to find more of these grotesques.”
“Lexi—” Rory started, but Marshall cut her off.
“I can fix this,” he said, which caused both of us to turn to him.
“Oh, really, Doctor Blackmoore?” Rory asked. “Funny, I failed to notice any medical degrees hanging on the walls of our apartment. Do you keep them here, covered over by that Settlers of Catan poster, perhaps?”
I wrinkled up my face in uncertainty. “No offense,” I said, “but won’t your ‘help’ just end up putting me in the hospital with something worse?”
Marshall ignored both of us and hurried back to his counter, disappearing for a second as he dropped behind it.
“Keep it up, ladies,” he said. “If you prefer, I can just let you stand there until you lose enough blood and collapse . . . ?”
Curiosity—or maybe it was light-headedness—got the better of me.
“All right,” I said. “How?”
Marshall stood, but continued searching beneath the counter as he spoke. “Just because I’ve been busy with the store doesn’t mean I’ve stopped experimenting with the alchemy your boy toy Caleb got me started on,” he said. His hand came out from under the counter with a dark plastic vial in it, the only marking being a piece of duct tape down its side with the letters CLW on it. “Ah, here we go.”
“CLW?” I asked.
“Cure Light Wounds,” he said, coming back around to me once more.
Rory eyed him with skepticism as she finally pulled off the hood of her coat and fluffed out her wet blue hair. “This is one of your gaming things, isn’t it?”
Marshall looked down his nose at her. “When isn’t it? It’s from Dungeons and—”
“That’s more than I need to know, Marsh,” she said with a grin.
Marshall rolled his eyes, shrugged, and fished in his pocket, pulling out one of those thick Sharpie markers.
“Here,” he said, handing it to me. “Bite down on this.”
With some reluctance I took it from his hand. “For real?” I asked, unable to hide the hesitation in my voice.
He nodded.
“For real,” he repeated. “It’s bad enough you’re dripping blood all over the entrance to my store. I don’t need you biting off your tongue while I’m applying this and have it flap all over my floor.”
The imagery left me feeling even more light-headed, but I was determined to stay standing and caught myself before it had me staggering. Without another word I lifted t
he Sharpie to my lips and slid it across my mouth the same way a dog would a bone.
Marshall pulled the vial’s stopper free and lifted it to the bloody slash on my arm. A black, tarlike substance oozed from the vial, and the second it touched the wound, there was instantaneous pain. Intense, burning-like-Hellfire pain.
My lips snapped shut involuntarily around the marker, my teeth biting down hard on the cold plastic. The sounds I heard coming from my own lips reminded me of a wounded animal. It drew looks from the people at the back of the game store, but I was so busy trying to pull away from Marshall that I didn’t care who heard. I wanted to wipe the liquid away, but Rory’s fighter reflexes were quicker than mine. Her hands flashed out and gripped tight around my wrist, holding me in place.
My skin crawling back together to close the wound sent a shiver down my spine. When it was over and the pain subsided, the only signs that there had ever been a wound were a few flakes of dried blood and a faint pink line where the cut had been.
“How’s that feel?” Marshall asked, stoppering his vial.
I pulled the pen from my mouth, my teeth having left deep impressions in the plastic.
“Good,” I said, flexing my arm, then smiled. “Great, actually.”
Marshall raised his eyebrows. “Nothing that feels like your flesh might be being eaten from the inside out, right . . . ?”
“No,” I said, drawing the word out. “Why are you even asking that?”
“No reason, no reason,” he said as quick as he could, then turned his eyes away from me, hurrying back behind the counter. He held up the now-empty vial. “Let’s just say there’s a good reason I’ve started making sure that I label these well.”
Despite the wound being gone, I blanched at the idea of being a test subject of some kind. “I don’t want to be your guinea pig, Marsh,” I said.
“You’re not!” he insisted.
“Me, either,” Rory added with warning in her voice.
“Don’t worry,” he said to her. “You don’t get hurt nearly as much as Lexi does.” His eyes turned to me and his face went serious. “You’re getting reckless, Alexandra.”