Dark Angel

by Bridget Essex

  “Yes?” she said, the word spoken in a low, velvet tone that seemed to drape over me like a sheath. I shivered.

  And I hated that I shivered.

  “Um…” I suddenly had no idea what to say. I had no idea why I was here. I had no idea why I’d come all this way, blocks and blocks away from my workplace. I had no idea how somehow, impossibly, in the city of Boston, I had found her again. It shouldn't have been possible.

  I shouldn't have ever seen her again.

  But somehow, here she was, in the flesh. She stood impassively, proudly, her right high-heeled foot tapping slowly, her shoulders thrown back, her arms crossed; her entire body radiated power as she gazed down at me with those intense eyes, one brow still raised, and her lips drawn out in a flat line, as if I were unworthy of her time. As if I were insignificant.

  I bristled.

  “Don’t you remember me?” I asked her incredulously.

  She raised that brow even higher and exhaled a slight sigh. “Should I?”

  But there was something behind the coldness in her eyes, something I’d just noticed, a glint of amusement.

  Did she find this…funny?

  “Look,” I said, taking a deep breath and stepping forward. I hissed, shivering. That single step forward had brought me into the cool aura of her body. Standing a few inches away from her, I felt so cold, pure chill emanating off of her skin in waves, as if she herself were a block of ice.

  “Look,” I managed to say again, my teeth chattering from nerves, from the fact that I felt as if I’d never be warm again. I stared up at her with narrowed eyes. “What’s… What’s happened to me? What did you do to me?”

  She smirked. The faux smile curled her lips upward but failed to reach her eyes. It was a cruel smile that turned up her ruby red mouth. She flicked her eyes back to the canvas behind me, leaned backward a little, her head to the side as she murmured: “What do you think of the painting?”

  I stared at her. I knew my mouth was open in shock, so I closed it, my teeth clacking together.

  Was she serious? What did I think of the painting? Was she just going to ignore all my questions?

  But she was serious. She’d gone back to staring at the painting, her dark eyes narrowed as she considered it.

  I turned and glanced at it again with a long sigh. “The woman in the painting looks terrified,” I finally managed. I really disliked that piece of art. I know all art is subjective, and it’s supposed to provoke strong reactions in people, but I thought this one in particular was just a stupid, meaningless painting. A terrified woman. What a terrible thing to paint. What did it add to the world? Nothing.

  The woman beside me considered that painting. “Well,” she said after a long moment. “That’s true. She is terrified. But there’s such a thin line between dread and longing, isn’t there?”

  My heart began to beat faster as I gazed back at her. “What are you talking about?” I whispered.

  Slowly, casually, like she’d known me forever, the woman put an arm around my waist and drew me close. She smelled of men’s cologne, expensive cologne, and the metallic coldness of snow.

  “Dread. And longing,” she answered me, pressing her mouth to the sloping curve behind my left ear. Her skin was so cold against mine, and the intimate gesture so unexpected—I gasped out, glancing around at the people gathered in the gallery. But no one seemed to be paying us even the slightest bit of attention. Every atom of my body stood to attention and concentrated on the connection of her mouth to my skin. It was all I could feel, all I could understand, in that moment, the cold softness of her mouth against me. I could feel her lips curl up into a smile over my skin as she whispered: “What’s the matter, Cassandra? Can’t you stop thinking about me?”

  I felt the floor fall away from me.

  Just like in the dream…she knew my name.

  That wasn’t possible. I knew I hadn’t told her my name last night. I turned, tried to look her in the eyes, but her firm grip around my waist had turned to one of iron, her fingers curling tightly into my belly. I couldn’t move, I was pinned so tightly against her.

  “How do you…how do you know my name?” I whispered, panting as I stared up at her.

  She moved me slowly, firmly, until my front was pressed against her front, pressed so tightly that I could feel her slow, insistent, pulsing heart against my chest, her breasts curving firmly into me with every slow breath. She gazed down at me with an expressionless face, her brown eyes glittering in the light as she ignored my question. I could feel the taut curves of her hard abdomen against mine, her muscles pressing insistently against me.

  “Did you know,” she said slowly, casually, “that you were followed here?”

  I stared up at her, my heart beginning to beat even faster as I glanced over my shoulder, out the ceiling-to-floor length windows in the front of the gallery. There were people milling outside in small groups, smoking in the twilit day, stubbing brightly lit cigarettes out on the old brick of the building, throwing back their heads and laughing.

  There was no one watching me. No one menacing. There were just happy, inebriated people at an art gallery opening with their friends.

  I glanced up at her again, and she was staring down at me, her hard eyes tracing the curve of my nose, my cheeks. I felt scrutinized. I bristled at that.

  “Who the hell are you?” I asked her through gritted teeth, pressing my hands against her upper chest, trying to push myself off her. My lower arms pressed against her breasts at that gesture, but I tried not to pay attention to that. “What do you want from me?” I asked then, voice sharp and angry. “I can’t stop thinking about you…” I panted as I realized what that sounded like. I finally blurted out: “What did you do to me?”

  “Nothing,” she whispered, lowering her exquisite face down to me to press her lips to my cheek, brushing her full, soft mouth over my skin. She amended with a wicked grin: “Well. Nothing that you did not want done to yourself.”

  “So you admit it—you did something to me,” I managed to whisper, breathless as her lips made a coldly traced line down my cheek, to my chin, to my neck. I gasped as her mouth opened against my skin. There were people all around us, but no one seemed to be noticing us, or really even seeing us, as she chuckled against me, the reverberation of her dark laughter against my neck making me shiver.

  “You are going to leave this gallery,” she whispered into my ear. “And you’re going to walk around the block on your way to whatever you call your home. It won’t matter which direction you take. By the time they reach you, you’ll already know they’re hunting you. You won’t even have time to scream before they crush your windpipe.” I tried to pull back from her, look her in the eyes, but she held me too tightly, my heart racing in me. “They won’t kill you quickly, Cassandra,” she told me in a soft, sibilant hiss.

  And then she let me go.

  I stumbled away from her, turning to gaze at her with wide, wild eyes, my lungs heaving as I tried to find enough air, panic beginning to take hold of me. But she was no longer looking at me. She was staring up again at that damnable painting, eyes flint-hard and otherwise unreadable, her mouth a thin, hard line of a frown.

  I stared at her incredulously for a long moment, trying to make sense of what she’d said. Because I didn’t believe it—not for a second—that there were the same men out there from last night, trying to find me to “hunt” me. Two of them had been completely incapacitated, possibly even dead. And they couldn’t find me. Why would they even want to? None of this made sense. It didn’t fit in my world, none of this.

  She didn’t fit in my world. Not even after I’d found her, impossibly.

  “That’s it,” I said, then, resolve making my words cold as I told her the truth, gulping down air because it was suddenly very hard to breathe. I stared at her, my heart pounding itself out of my ribs. “I found you again,” I whispered, the hurt apparent in my words. “Elle, out of all the people in Boston, I found you again…and you’re
going to act like you don’t know me? And you’re going to tell me that there are people hunting me and that I’m going to die? Is this all a joke to you? Is what happened last night a joke? Why did you save me, then?” I asked her. I choked down a sob of anger, clenching my hands into fists. I wasn’t articulating things all that well, only spluttering, really, but I’d said what I needed to say, and she’d heard me.

  She flicked her gaze from the canvas, back to me. It was an indifferent sort of expression she wore now, cold and civil, the kind an attorney might put on before the defense, but for a moment—just a moment—there was a flicker of something else behind her eyes. It was instantaneous, and that cold indifference resurfaced almost immediately, the frozen mask sliding back over her face, but for half a heartbeat, I’d thought she’d looked…but no.

  There couldn’t have been regret in her gaze. Not even for that half a heartbeat. Because her expression now, her flashing eyes, her sneer of contempt, were cold and utterly devoid of anything else but apathy.

  I believed, in that moment, that this was a woman completely incapable of regret.

  “Go, Cassandra,” she said, slowly and clearly, her words a low growl. “Go, and they will find you. And then, this will all be over.” There was emotion in her words as she choked them out, but she replaced it all quickly with a quick shake of her head as her frown deepened and her body turned away from me with finality.

  She stalked across the room toward the table laden with different bottles of wine spread out over a stark black tablecloth, her equally black high heels clicking on the cold concrete floor like she owned the place.

  There was a large part of me—really, most of me—that hadn’t believed a word of what she’d said. After all, I’d seen with my own eyes how terribly beaten up those men had been. She’d used a steel girder against their heads and faces, for Christ’s sake. That’s not a series of injuries that you could overcome overnight, if they’d even survived them.

  And it wasn’t even nightfall yet. Though the sun had just set, the sky was still obviously well lit, and I was in a very occupied and artistic section of the city. There were so many people on the sidewalk or milling about around the art galleries (this street seemed to have quite a few art galleries, actually), that for my would-be assailants to try anything like they had last night would be a recipe for disaster. People were everywhere—it’d be noticed if you tried to drag a screaming woman into a dark alley, if there were even any dark alleys around. And with so many people on the streets, there would be cops around, too.

  So, really, there was no way that if I stepped out of this art gallery that I would be hunted and attacked. It was impossible.

  But if it was impossible, then why did my skin crawl as I glanced at that front door over my shoulder? Because she was simply messing with me, that’s why. It was almost broad daylight. There were hundreds of people around.

  I was safe.

  So I turned on my heel and walked toward the door to the art gallery without another backward glance. I didn’t care if I ever saw that unfeeling, indifferent woman, with her sneering mouth and dark eyes ever again. I didn’t. She could rot in hell for all I cared. She didn’t care about me, and there was not a single reason in the world that I should have cared about her.

  But the minute that I crossed that door’s threshold, the solid glass swinging silently closed behind me, I felt the ache in me again, an intense pain that seemed to almost instantly replace my anger and confusion.

  I felt a tug in my stomach. Or my heart. Or in every cell of my body. I was being tugged backward…back toward her. Elle.

  But I gritted my teeth and squared my shoulders. She was obviously playing mind games with me, and yes, I didn’t understand the connection between us, but it could probably be chalked up to the fact that my girlfriend had broken up with me yesterday and I’d taken it really hard. Yeah, maybe I thought I hadn’t gotten drunk last night, but the strange events…how could I explain them? Maybe I had been drunk.

  When strange, terrible things have happened to you that there’s no way for your rational mind to explain…you really do try to start finding rational, though in their own way, completely unbelievable, explanations.

  All I knew at that moment was that I’d been rejected (well, not even really rejected—more like utterly dismissed) by a stunning, bewitching woman that I’d wanted to see more than anything else in the world. It had been hit after hit to my ego these past few days, and I didn’t know if I could take much more of this. So I squared my shoulders, and completely ignoring the pulling sensation in my heart toward the woman I’d left behind me in the art gallery, I began to walk quickly down the sidewalk, in the eventual direction of my apartment. Which happened to be about thirty blocks away.

  It would take far too long to walk the distance, and anyway, whether what Elle had told me was true or not held no importance to me, but if I was being completely honest with myself, I was spooked at her statement that there were men out here looking for me for God knew what purpose. So I needed to find a bus, or at the worst-case scenario, I could catch a cab.

  I began to glance toward the bus stop markers, feeling the cool breeze tug at strands of my hair, drifting over the back of my exposed neck. I was spooked, and feeling much more vulnerable than I’ve ever felt in my city. It was only because of what had happened last night, I reasoned with myself. That would be upsetting to anyone, and I’d survived it, yeah, but it was bound to leave some lasting psychological scars.

  But underneath all of it, my crawling skin and my worry and dread, there was something else. What was it that Elle had said? But there’s such a thin line between dread and longing, isn’t there? I wasn’t certain if I agreed with that, but I was still feeling a tug from my gut all the way back to the art gallery.

  Which was, of course, ridiculous. It was obvious that Elle wanted nothing to do with me.

  But my mind kept circling back to the most out-of-place puzzle piece: why had she even saved me, then?

  I was flustered and upset, and because of this, I wasn’t paying nearly as close attention to my surroundings as I usually do in the city. It becomes a habit after years of living here—you know where you are and where you are in relation to others. Boston isn’t a dangerous place, mostly, but it’s good to know your surroundings. Even the kids here know that.

  But I was surrounded by people. I was on edge, but I honestly didn’t believe that there could be any danger for me here in the crowd.

  I glanced up at the bus stop marker, and somehow, my gaze kept going past the marker. There was someone standing at the bus stop, hands deep in his coat pockets, and he was staring directly at me.

  Cold, frozen fear pooled through every one of my limbs as my breath caught.

  It was the guy from last night. The one with the greasy black hair and the hawk nose and trench coat. The leader.

  He was standing right there, right there in front of me. And his head, the head that had been crumpled inward like a rotten melon because of the steel girder connecting to his face…was fine.

  Perfect.

  Like it had never happened. Like no solid metal girder had ever hit him.

  He was about ten feet away from me.

  And he was staring straight at me.

  As I watched, as every hair on my body stood upward, and a shiver moved through me quicker than I could imagine, he began to smile. It was a slow smile that took awhile to happen, his lips curling slowly upward. As they curled upwards, the tips of his teeth came glinting into view, as sharp as they’d been yesterday, or sharper.

  Here was this monstrous man, standing ten feet away from me, watching me, staring at me, smiling at me like I was in the first five minutes of a horror movie, right before they roll the credits.

  I couldn’t breathe, only took in great, wracking breaths that didn’t seem to make a bit of difference to my lungs—I didn’t feel like I was getting air at all. I was suddenly too light headed to think up a plan, to think of anything more than
the basest instinct of a human being:

  There’s a predator after me.

  Run.

  I turned and bolted, my legs propelling me quickly down the sidewalk. There were still people all around me, but it seemed as if they were moving in a completely different place from me. They couldn’t exist in the nightmare world I now found myself in, where a man with sharp teeth was chasing me. I believed, in that moment, that no one would help me, or perhaps they couldn’t even see the danger I was in. I wasn’t thinking in that moment, and I didn’t ask anyone for help. I only ran.

  And I knew that more than one of these men were chasing me.

  I did what I’d always yelled at the victims in the horror movies to never, ever do. I ducked down an alleyway. I wasn’t thinking about any of this, only acting on the purest of instincts, and I knew that in a wide-open space they might catch me easier, but if I could dart down an alleyway and make it between the buildings, perhaps I could lose them.

  It obviously wasn’t very good logic.

  And of course it was a dead end. The alleyway ended at a twenty-foot high chain-link fence that was bolted shut with chain and a padlock. As I turned, panting, white spots poking at the corners of my vision as I placed one hand on the brick building next to me, trying to stay upright, I knew that they’d been hoping for exactly this, had, in fact, chased me to this dead end to make things the slightest bit easier for them.

  I felt like I was reliving the worst nightmare of my life. But I knew this wasn’t a nightmare as I stared at the mouth of the alleyway, at the four massive figures that were making their slow, methodical way toward me, their boots crunching against the broken bits of glass and pavement beneath our feet as they took slow, calculating strides, exactly as I imagine a big cat would hunt its prey.

  They won’t kill you quickly, Cassandra, Elle had told me.

  I stood as straight as I could, still panting, the blood rushing through me as I stood, breathless, watching them descend down the alleyway toward me. I was afraid, so afraid, the most afraid I’d ever been. But I stood as tall as I could, staring the men down.