Dark Angel

by Bridget Essex

  We were in the alleyway. We were at the end of the alleyway, at the dead end.

  And the guy let me go.

  They were fencing me in, the four men. I staggered forward and stood, shaky on my feet but able to breathe, in the center of the dead end, the old, crumbling brick behind me covered in scrawled graffiti in every color of the rainbow. No one was restraining me physically anymore, but that didn’t mean anything. I panted and pressed my hand to my jaw; it ached from how roughly the guy had been gripping me.

  I stared with wild eyes at the men in black trenchcoats.

  And I began to scream again, screaming at the top of my lungs, a haunted house scream, the kind of scream you make on a roller coaster, but more guttural and deeper and quite a bit more frantic.

  And, all at once, the four men smiled.

  I took a step backward, gulping for air, the scream stuck and silenced in my throat.

  It wasn’t possible, what I was seeing. The men in front of me, all of them, with their lips drawn back in sinister sneers... Their teeth were sharp. As sharp as a shark’s, all of their teeth needle sharp, as if each of the individual teeth had been filed down to cutting points.

  Were they a cult, a gang? A weird gang who sharpened their teeth and wore trenchcoats and murdered women wandering around at two in the morning? Oh, my God, I was about to become a bulletin on the morning edition of the news. I was going to die.

  I didn’t want this. I would do anything to avoid this.

  I wanted to live.

  I took another step backward, and my foot connected with a loose brick. It’d probably dropped from the top of the wall behind me. Not even thinking, I snatched it up, and I let it fly.

  Any other day, I probably wouldn’t have hit anything. But adrenaline works wonders, and I managed to smack the main guy, the guy with the black hair and the scariest of the smiles, square in the face.

  Hard.

  There was the sickening sound of something unyielding connecting with soft skin. His nose was instantly squashed sideways, the angle painful-looking and extreme; his nose was definitely broken.

  But, as I watched, his nose moved slowly, impossibly right back into its hawkish curl, as if his face were made of putty and could snap into its original configuration.

  I stared, open-mouthed. This wasn’t happening. Things like this didn't happen; broken noses didn't instantly heal themselves. I felt like I was in a horror movie, or—more believably—a really terrible and unforgettably awful bad dream.

  The leader stepped forward. He opened his mouth, his eyes narrowing and his teeth glinting in the gray, dirty light of the alleyway.

  This was it. They were going to kill me or rape me—or both. It was all over. My life was over. Anger and terror pumped through me in equal amounts, and I didn’t know what to do, but I gulped down air, curled my hands into fists. No matter what, I wasn’t going down without a fight.

  The guy stalking toward me, with his cruel, unnatural smile revealing sharp, sharp teeth, just…stopped. He paused in mid-step, his boot connecting to the pavement. He cocked his head a little, closing his mouth.

  He turned.

  His head was smashed in by a steel girder. Literally. A steel girder connected with his skull, and the bone caved inward like a rotten melon. He crumpled instantly to the broken pavement as if all of his bones had been turned to mush, and he lay, convulsing, his black trenchcoat fluttering around him like bat wings and the steel girder sticking out of half his head until the person who had put it there yanked it out.

  “That warning was painful, but not quite deadly, boys,” she said in a soft, rich growl. “Do you want me to get deadly?”

  The woman had long, straight, dirty blonde hair that spilled over her shoulders. That’s the first thing I noticed, how her blonde hair moved in the slight wind that found us there in the alleyway. The second thing I noticed: her long-fingered hands gripping the steel girder like it was made of Styrofoam as she hefted it upward.

  She had such dark eyes that, in the dimness, they looked more black than brown. And her face was flawless, model perfect, with full lips and a wide nose that made her large eyes look even larger. Even though her face suggested a soft, feminine beauty, her eyes betrayed that expectation: they were hard and dark and angry, and when she sneered at the men, tossing the steel girder a little into the air and arching a single eyebrow, I’d never seen a crueler, more heartless facial expression in my entire life.

  Her black combat boots shifted on the pavement, and she began to slowly tap her right foot. “I’m waiting for an answer, gentlemen,” she murmured softly, the low tones of her voice making every hair on my body stand up to attention as I shivered.

  “This is our territory,” said the guy who had restrained me and covered my mouth. He sounded almost whiny as he added, crouching backward like a kicked dog, “You have no right.”

  But the woman didn’t even consider his objection. She took a single step forward, and faster than I thought anyone could move, she swung the steel girder again.

  It connected with the man’s face with a sickening thud and a slurpy crunch.

  I made a little sound in the back of my throat as the man fell down, crumpled next to the first guy, blood leaking out onto the pavement in a gush. I had to be sick, I realized, as my stomach began to boil all of its boozey contents, fierce nausea making my middle cramp as I stared at the horrors before me.

  The two men still standing glanced at each other then shook their heads. “Magdalena will hear about this. You can’t do this kind of shit and get away with it anymore. There are rules,” said one of them, almost petulantly.

  Then they began to pick up their fallen friends, hefting them upward like lumpy sacks of flour. As I watched, one of the beaten men's hands twitched.

  But...wasn't he dead? Weren't both of those men dead? How could anyone survive a steel girder to the face? How could anyone have a caved-in skull and still live? But, no, their whole bodies were twitching as they lay draped over the two men’s shoulders, and one of the guys even uttered a bubbly moan out of his smashed-in face.

  “Magdalena—” he started to say again. But he was cut off.

  “Tell Magdalena that she can go fuck herself,” said the woman in a low, almost conversational, tone. “And, knowing Magdalena, she’s probably done exactly that ten times today. Tell her I’m sick of the bullshit, of the rules she put in place. Tell her,” said the woman stepping forward slowly—the two men who actually towered over her scurrying backward as if she were the most dangerous predator they’d ever encountered. “Tell her,” the woman repeated, dark eyes flashing, “that I’m no longer in exile. Tell her that Elle has returned.”

  The trenchcoated men made whimpering noises in the backs of their throats, and then they ran down the alleyway—fast, faster than I could track with my eyes. I tried to watch their blurred forms as my hand rose to cover my own mouth, as I tried to swallow down the rising bile.

  There were two wet spots on the pavement where the guy's smashed heads had been. Sticky, wet spots. Blood... So much blood. Outside of movies, I had never seen so much blood before. And yet, it had seemed somehow, impossibly, that my assailants, being carried off on the shoulders of their companions, were still…alive?

  The woman in front of me lifted her chin and let the steel girder drop to the pavement at her feet. It made such a loud, metallic series of clangs that I jumped, my breath coming in quick pants until I let out a long sigh. The girder came to a rest in front of my toes.

  The stranger wiped the hand that had been holding the girder along the long, muscular thighs of her pant leg. I thought her pants, tight and slightly shiny, were leather, but it was impossible to tell in the dark. Her black coat had fallen open, and it seemed that she was wearing black underneath, as well. But it was hard to make out any details for certain.

  All I knew was two things:

  This woman had saved my life.

  And she was really gorgeous.

  Adrenaline
and deep, soul-shaking fear makes you notice the strangest, most inconsequential things.

  “Thank you,” I said haltingly, then cleared my throat, realizing that my teeth were chattering because I was trembling so hard. “Thank you for saving me,” I told her then, drawing in a deep breath to try and stop the shaking. The gulp of air didn’t help much, though, and I wiped the sweaty palms of my hands together, trying to warm myself.

  “Why are you thanking me?” she asked, her voice so soft in the now still and quiet alleyway that it seemed to echo eerily in the quiet off the Dumpsters to my right, and off the brickwork around us, coming back like a slow, soft hiss. I furrowed my forehead, opened my mouth, not understanding her words for a long moment.

  What she’d asked…it was a genuine question. She was staring at me with narrowed, dark eyes and didn’t seem to have a clue as to why I would be thanking her.

  “You…you saved my life,” I explained haltingly. My teeth clattered together in my skull, and my jaw was aching as severely as if I’d been punched.

  She stared at me for a long moment; then she breathed out with a sigh herself. “No,” she told me simply, taking a step forward. Her boots clacked against the pavement as she lowered her head, staring at me with intense, black eyes. “I didn’t.”

  I blinked, and she disappeared. No, she didn't disappear... She was now right in front of me, and her strong fingers were gripping my wrists. In one smooth, fluid motion, she’d flipped me, and my back was against her front, my hands held tightly and expertly behind me and sandwiched between us, as if she’d just performed a martial arts movement to incapacitate me.

  When she whispered into my ear, her breath was as cold as the grave, drifting over my skin and eliciting a violent shiver.

  “No,” she repeated, growling. “I saved you from them,” she explained softly, her cold breath washing over my skin, even as her firm body pressed against the length of me, her stomach tight against my hands. “But I did not save you from myself.”

  What? I blinked again, taking another ragged breath; my adrenaline—only momentarily quelled—began to surge through me once more.

  “What are you talking about?” I said, but she shook her head, and while her left hand still effortlessly—and tightly—gripped my arms behind my back, her right hand drifted up to caress my throat.

  Her fingers were so strong as she held my neck—gently but firmly. I had the sudden, cold realization that she could snap my neck if she wanted to. Someone who hefts around steel girders like they’re pool noodles could probably snap about twenty necks before dinner without breaking a sweat. But her fingers stayed confident and strong around my throat, her pointer finger gently drifting up and down my throbbing jugular as if she were trying to soothe me.

  The moment was as clear as crystal to me, as my blood pounded in a panic through my body, as my heart struggled with about a million conflicting emotions. I was aware of so many different things: how muscular her body was against my back. How my arms, crossed painfully behind me and held tightly by her, were pressing into her firm, taut abs. She was cold against me, like she’d just walked out of a deep freezer, and she smelled sweet, and a little metallic and a little deep and dark, like a blood-red flower that’s been left out in the winter wind for too long.

  Her finger paused against my jugular, and then I was aware of a sharp sensation pressing into my skin, a point against my throbbing vein. Was it her fingernail? It was impossibly sharp if it was. Impossibly sharp...

  “What are you doing?” I whispered, trying—and failing—to keep my voice calm.

  She nuzzled the back of my neck, pressing her open mouth against my skin, eliciting a bone-deep shiver that raced through my body like a fever. Her mouth, her tongue against my skin, was bitterly cold and so soft.

  “Tasting you,” she whispered.

  Every sense I had was heightened, every beat of my blood through my body could be felt, it seemed, in every single one of my atoms.

  It was so unexpected, this moment of steely tenderness, after the terror and the running and the screaming.

  My breath hitched in my throat as she kissed my neck again, as her tongue laved against my skin in one soft, sweet arc along the curve of my neck.

  The spell was broken when the woman stepped away from me, still holding tightly to my arms. But her body was no longer against mine, holding it up, and I staggered under that loss, turning with wide eyes to take her in. She wasn’t looking at me, though. She was looking back down the alleyway, the way the men had gone.

  “We have to go,” she said, one brow up as she glanced back at me. “They’re going to bring reinforcements. Magdalena doesn’t like it when I don’t play by her rules.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, frustration sharpening the words. I stared back at her, and such a strange thought came into my head: I didn’t know her name.

  Wait. Yes. I did. She’d told the men something…

  Tell her that Elle has returned.

  Her eyes narrowed as she glanced at me, and then she let go of me, taking a step back.

  Her name was Elle.

  “I could leave you to them,” said Elle, lowering her gaze. She was a few inches taller than me, and she was staring down at me now as if I were an inconvenience, not a woman whose skin she’d just traced with her tongue. I shivered at that open, blank indifference. “Or,” she said, and she took a step forward. Her hands grabbed my hips with one possessive yank, and then my body was pressed against hers again, and her fingers were digging into the skin along my hipbones with such familiarity, as if she’d touched me a million times. A billion.

  I gasped as she pressed her mouth to mine.

  I wasn’t expecting a kiss, not even after her mouth had been on my neck, not even after she’d held me tightly, pressing so hard against me. I wasn’t expecting the kiss or the chillness of her mouth, or how much she tasted like mint and metal, so cold, so overpoweringly cold. I wasn’t expecting how my mouth immediately conformed to hers, even as the small-but-still rational part of my brain as yet unaffected by the booze told me that what I was doing was absolutely, positively crazy.

  She was gripping my hips like she knew my body intimately already. The sensation sent flutters through me, through my heart, between my legs, flutters that shouldn’t have been possible after the ordeal I’d just experienced.

  She drew her head back, searching my eyes, her mouth curling up at the corners cruelly.

  “I could leave you to them,” she repeated. “Or I could save you from them again,” she whispered, leaning down and mouthing the words against my bare clavicle. I shivered against her.

  “Who are you?” I asked her, practically panting against her. Elle. She was Elle. But the name didn’t tell me anything about her. Why were the men afraid of her? Why…

  She took a step back, shaking her head of long blonde hair, her smile deepening. “You ask too many questions. And you’re not very good at taking orders.” She peered at me thoughtfully. “Whatever will I do with you?”

  “The hell?” was my articulate response to that. I balled my hands into fists as this impossibly intoxicating woman took another step away from me, tilting her head to the side and chuckling lowly, like she’d just heard the funniest joke.

  “They’re coming for you,” she whispered, her words like velvet dragging over my skin. “Do you want me to save you?”

  There was too much moving through me, too much confusion, too much adrenaline—and I rebelled at her suggestion. I rebelled at the way she said the words, as if I needed her. She thought that, if she didn’t save me, I would be lost.

  I didn’t know who she was, but I already knew this truth, the truth that I was telling her so impetuously, even before it was out of my mouth: “No, thanks,” I said, taking a ragged breath in and curling my hands into fists. “I can save myself.”

  I blinked, and again, when I opened my eyes, she’d moved impossibly fast in stolen half second. She was right before me, gripping my
hips again with sharp-nailed, strong fingers, and she was searching my eyes as she stared down so deeply into me that every part of me, every secret part of me, seemed utterly open to her scrutiny.

  I’d never felt so exposed in my life. She stared into the very heart of me.

  “You know what?” she said, her voice a low, shaky growl that caused me to shiver in her grasp. “They were right,” she said, drawing out the last word into a low, breathy hiss. “You are feisty. But empty bravado is meaningless when faced with the reality that you are in over your head. Do you understand me? Do you know what those men were going to do to you? What they were?” She narrowed her black eyes further, her smirk increasing. “Better yet…do you know what I am?”

  “No,” I told her, keeping my voice steady. I’d been faced with everything but explosives tonight. I wasn’t exactly certain where I was getting all this courage from, but as long as I had it, I might as well use it.

  And if there was something I’d known but couldn’t put into words from the first moment I’d seen that woman…I’d finally found the words for it now.

  The men were dangerous, yes.

  But this woman? She was more dangerous than all of them combined. It was something I knew in my gut as surely as I knew that the sun would come up tomorrow, and that I’d wasted my time with Josie.

  I knew it as surely as I knew that no moment in my life had ever been more fraught with risk.

  And that I’d, somehow, never felt more alive.

  She took a step back from me, her hands—regrettably, I realized—leaving my hips. Her nostrils flared as she sighed out for a long moment, shaking her head and rubbing the back of her neck as she rolled her shoulders. “Right. Well, realize that, now that they weren’t successful…they’re not going to forget this. You’re in danger. And, like I said, you’re in over your head.”

  As if I didn't know that. As if I hadn’t been thinking that nonstop over the course of the extremely violent past twenty minutes. I glowered at her; I didn’t like her superior attitude, how she was acting like she was my one and only salvation. Yes, she’d saved me. But what was all this nonsense? I’d go home, call the cops, and I’d probably never see those men again—if the two severely injured ones had even survived the steel girders to the head.