“Is that the panic button again?” Ariel glanced around, looking for a missed gargoyle.
“More like your smoke alarm, missy.”
“Damn it!” Ariel yelled, as she ran for the kitchen and the column of smoke coming off the stove. “That was my dinner!”
- 35 -
Cages!
Mouser hated cages. Every time he saw some poor bird behind bars he wanted to let it out so it could fly away. Now he was the canary in the cage.
“Good afternoon, Theodore,” the grey man said.
“I’m not some dumb kid,” Mouser told him defiantly. “Let me out of this stupid cage.” He remembered the pet shop owner telling him the birds really didn’t mind being caged when he’d objected to the way all the birds in his shop were locked up. He didn’t believe that for a second.
“Not until we do a little experiment, Theodore. It shouldn’t take too long from my point of view, although some have told me it feels like an eternity.”
“What are you going to do to me you perv?”
“Just provide you with a little incentive, my boy.”
“Incentive to do what? Just ask me, I’ll do whatever you want except, you know, the bitch stuff. You’re not giving me a chance to cooperate.”
“Oh, but I am. Change for us, Theodore.”
“Change what?”
“Precisely. Change into what you actually are. Show us your true self.”
“This is my true self,” Mouser yelled. “I’m me! This is what I am.”
The grey man sighed. “You’re making this much harder on yourself than you need to. But we shall see what we shall see.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mouser yelled. He wasn’t going to change for them. His ability was his ace in the hole; it was his only chance to get away.
* * *
Mouser looked down. The cage swung from an overhead chain. It had bars on all sides. They’d taken his shoes and his feet felt greasy, like he’d stepped in slime.
He grabbed the bars. There was nothing to hang onto that wasn’t steel. His feet started to tingle. The sensation increased. Small shocks began to run up his fingers. He snatched his hands away. Soon he was shifting from foot to foot. The current was going higher.
“No!” he yelled.
The grey man picked up a heavy wooden rod and gave the cage a push. It turned on its chain and swung back and forth throwing Mouser into the side bars.
The first shock to his arm threw him in the opposite direction, slamming him into the other side of the cage for a second jolt. He screamed and sank to his knees trying to get cloth between his skin and the electrified floor. The shock of that brought him back to his feet.
He danced with the pain and the motion made the cage swing even more, knocking him from wall of bars to wall of bars, where current pulsed in alternating intensities. The shocks increased his momentum as he rebounded from one side of the cage to the other. Tears were streaming down his face and the shrill noise in his ears was coming from his own throat, from his gut, from the very depths of his soul.
Somewhere inside the pain Mouser could feel it coming. No! He thought. Then, Yes! Yes please, just stop this! Please.
Suddenly, he was in the air, wings beating frantically, as he tried to stay in the middle of the cage where no part of him would touch metal. His avian vocal cords let out an angry, predator scream of rage. He wanted to go for the grey man’s eyes, rip out his throat, open his belly and devour his entrails until he’d eaten his way into his heart.
A wooden dowel, attached to two pieces of rope fell through the bars from the top of the cage.
Mouser saw it and realized his captors knew he couldn’t maintain flying in place like this for long. He landed on the perch, hating himself for this humiliating act of defeat. His feathers were sticking out in all directions. He began to smooth them with his beak, ignoring his tormentor.
“See how much misery you could have saved yourself,” the grey man said. “If you’d just been honest with us in the first place.” He reached out a hand to steady the cage. It brought him close to the bars.
Mouser threw himself at his tormentor with a screech, his head darted through the gap trying to get to the grey man’s face, take out an eye, bite a piece out of his smug, self-satisfied flesh.
The grey man stepped out of reach, chuckling softly. “I like your spirit, Theodore. A mere human would be groveling on his knees after all that. Really, I’m not your enemy. In fact, as we spend more time together I think you’ll find we have a lot more in common than you ever thought possible.”
“Well. You must be hungry. I’ll order you a couple of nice live rodents for your dinner. Food tastes so much better when you kill it yourself.”
- 36 -
Tony and Bishop had plenty of time to perfect their routine. The two of them alternated pacing the front hall of the shelter waiting for the reappearance of Sister Catherine. Bishop had tried her cell phone, but she must have turned it off at the hospital and forgotten to turn it back on again. He left messages -- four so far. He was tempted to try again. It was three a.m. and he was trying hard to stay focused but he couldn’t ingest one more cup of Shelter coffee without doing himself serious damage.
At the moment, Tony had the chair and Bishop was walking in a circle on the foyer’s well used rug. He’d decided to try leaning against the wall for a while when he heard the sound of a key in the lock.
An exhausted Sister Mary Catherine pushed open the door, only to jump about a foot when Tony leaped to his feet and Bishop appeared from nowhere to grab her in a tight hug that made her drop both her keys and shoulder bag on the floor.
“Thank God!” Bishop said.
Tony shifted from foot to foot behind them, not sure what to do. He and Sister Catherine weren’t on hugging terms. In fact, Sister Catherine wasn’t the sort of person you grabbed up in your arms no matter how happy you were. She struggled out of Bishop’s grip.
“What’s wrong?” She asked. “Did something happen? Have more kids arrived?”
“We’re just glad to see you’re okay,” Bishop explained. “You’ve been gone for hours. We were really worried.”
“I thought you were going to follow me.”
“By the time I found your car the ambulance was out of sight. I thought maybe you’d been kidnapped too.”
Sister Catherine dropped into Tony’s chair. “Not exactly,” she said, “although it’s been an interesting night. Tony, you look really tired. It’s okay if you go to bed now. I really appreciate you waiting up for me, but Frank and I have to talk.”
“Coffee?” Bishop asked as soon as Tony had gone off to his room.
“Thanks, but I’d like to be able to get to sleep sometime in the next two weeks. Tony’s coffee is the gateway drug to methamphetamine use. I usually dilute it by half even in the morning. Come into my office.”
Once they’d settled in chairs Sister Catherine said, “I don’t know where I went tonight, Frank. The ambulance windows were tinted so dark I couldn’t see out. By the time we stopped it was parked inside the engine bay of some old fire station. After that I just followed the gurney. There was an elevator and corridors and another elevator and suddenly we were in some kind of infirmary with bright lights and beds, machines and medical people who’d obviously been waiting for us.”
“So how’s he doing?”
“They took a bunch of blood, hooked him up to all kinds of monitors, gave him an IV with something I don’t remember the name of and then we waited. When I left the twitching had almost stopped and he was sleeping. They made me ride in the back of the ambulance on the way back so I couldn’t see where I’d been. Who the hell are these people, Frank? Why isn’t Jip in a regular hospital where they can find out what’s wrong with him?”
“They work for C.T. Kale, and a regular hospital can’t fix his problem.”
“And a dot com guy can? Anyway I thought C.T. Kale was dead.”
“C.T.’s a biotech gu
y. Apparently a few years ago Yamazaki Kiriyenko grabbed Kale’s patents for nanotechnology and took his company away from him. C.T. thinks these kids are full of experimental nanobots and Kiriyenko plans on using the bots to make demons into a super race. Problem is, the bots aren’t compatible with human physiology. They enhance these kids into serious fighting machines, but eventually the changes make them really crazy, or really sick.”
“Kiriyenko holds matches where he fights his lab rats for sport, or maybe he just wants to see if they can take the punishment and recover. I don’t know why he’s letting some of them go. Maybe to confuse the mayor’s task force about whether they were actually kidnapped, or maybe it’s because he’s so close to some major play that he doesn’t care.”
“Demons. You really think this is about demons? Even the church has moved away from believing in that kind of stuff.”
“You told me you saw a demon once. He marked you.”
“Maybe I was delusional. Religious hallucinations aren’t uncommon when you’re in an isolated, intensely faith-based environment.”
“Catie, you are the sanest person I know. And I’m telling you that in the last two weeks I have seen things that I never thought existed except in an Ozzy Osbourne acid flashback. Some of the people I’ve met are on our side, and some are hoping to make people like you and me their permanent bitch. All I know is that when it comes down to it, the good guys have got to win.”
“What do I do if more kids show up?”
“Call me. I’ll get them picked up. C.T. Kale and his guys are working 24/7 to come up with a solution.”
“This is all really crazy but I trust you and I know you’re working in the best interest of my kids.”
Sister Mary Catherine walked Bishop to the door. He’d already stepped out on the porch when she said, “Frank, that girl who killed her family, do you think the demons took her soul?”
“I don’t think there’s any lab test for that, Sister. I sincerely hope not.”
“Be safe, Frank. I’ll pray for you.”
- 37 -
“If you’re going to breath down my neck while I’m working, at least make yourself useful. Hold this retractor so I can get this piece of metal out of him. Dingo, keep that light aimed where I’m working or I’m going to take you back to the pound.”
Tomas had been stripped of clothing and weapons and laid out on Ariel’s kitchen table. Because of his height, his lower legs dangled over one end. His wings had gotten in the way until Ariel smoothed and straightened the feathers allowing them to fold properly without more damage. Then she’d persuaded a minimally conscious Tomas to let go of his defenses so he would change. Ariel had thrown a towel over him for modesty sake.
“You found Dingo in the pound?” Ariel grabbed the handle of the instrument holding Tomas’ torn flesh open so that Ham could get to whatever was still in the wound.
“Yeah. He was just a pup. Some hunter had killed his family, but missed him because he was out running around like young pups do. Juke and I followed his trail. Animal control had taken him in as a stray. We claimed him and he’s been a pain in the ass ever since. Aim it to the right, boy! There it is.”
Ham pulled the forceps out of Tomas’ side. The serrated tips held a large shard of broken metal covered in a layer of flaky green scale. The shard glowed with a sickly blue green fluorescence.
“Verdigris. It’s a poison that oxidizes bronze. This is the tip of a demon-forged blade. They’re deliberately coated with an enhanced form of the poison. Even a small wound can causes debilitation and death. I’m amazed he was able to get here with this in him.”
“He has a really strong will. Does removing the piece reverse the effects?”
Ham held the fragment up to the light. “I can’t tell you the exact kind of weapon this came from, but it’s probably something called an Angel Slayer.”
“Angel Slayer? But we’re not angels, we’re Raptors. Shape shifters just like you guys.”
“Whatever. It’s an old weapon from an old war that neither side has ever won. It obviously works on Raptors just like it did on angels. Do you have some baking soda?”
“In the back of my refrigerator,” Ariel said. “I think it’s been there since I moved in. I’m not much for baking.”
“Dingo? I’ll need some more water too.”
Ham carefully poured the contents of the crumpled yellow box into the wound. “Baking soda will neutralize the acid in the poison. Pour the water in slowly, boy. Somebody better hold him down.”
As soon as the water hit the wound the white powder turned to pink foam that frothed and bubbled out of the hole in Tomas’ side onto the old linoleum floor, causing its brittle surface to dissolve in a few spots. Tomas gave a convulsive twitch. Ham caught his wrists just before the Raptor’s hands could reach the wound. “It’s okay, son. It’ll be over in a second, then I’ll stitch you up. We’re going to pull those arrows out of you too.”
Ham had clipped off the pointed end of the shaft protruding out of Tomas’ arm with wire cutters before he’d started on the bigger wound. The feathered piece was still stuck in his bicep. Ham reached over and yanked it out. Simultaneously, Juke clipped and pulled the quarrel out of Tomas’ leg.
“Ow!” Tomas’ yelled. The pain had brought him back to consciousness.
“Quick is better,” Ham said as he filled a syringe with local anesthesia to prepare for stitching. “Turn the radio on would you, missy? This is the tedious part.”
- 38 -
“El?”
“What?” Ariel sat up. She cursed herself for having dozed off. Tomas had begun to spike a fever shortly after his injuries were bandaged. He was soon unconscious, his skin blazing with heat. The Dogs had put him in Ariel’s old fashioned claw foot tub and sent Dingo out for bags of ice.
“It’s the poison,” Ham said. He clipped open a couple of stitches and inserted a piece of rubber tubing into the wound causing it to drain a greenish-black fluid into the melting ice water. “As soon as it starts running clear he’ll be over the hump.” “Ariel?” Ariel had rolled her sleeping bag out on the tile so she could sit on the floor next to the tub and hold Tomas’ hand. Ham checked the drain every ten minutes. At the sound of her name, Ariel rolled to her knees.
“Can I get out of this tub?” Tomas asked in a weak voice. “I’m freezing.”
“You’re awake. Ham!”
Ham came into the bathroom and leaned over the tub. “It’s running clear,” he said. “Fever’s gone. Let’s get him up, dry him off and put him under some blankets.”
In a few minutes Tomas was asleep in Ariel’s bed. While she’d been in the bathroom with Tomas, the Dogs had disappeared the dead gargoyles and put plywood over the broken windows.
“Ez set this up, right?” Ariel asked them. “He arranged for you guys to keep an eye on me.”
“We’re guard dogs, not spies.” Juke told her. “We kept an eye on you, but we had no intention of getting in your way unless you needed us.”
“I guess this qualifies. Thank you.”
“If your friend takes another bad turn, push the button. It’s almost dawn, I don’t think there’ll be another attack this morning.”
Ariel dragged her sleeping bag into the bedroom. When Tomas woke up for real they were going to have a talk.
- 39 -
Bishop slept late, drank a pot of coffee and went to pick up his car from the mechanic. It was ready, and amazingly enough the orange Falcon was back in the garage.
“Sorry about the dead body and the police confiscation,” Bishop said.
The mechanic shrugged.” You have no idea what people leave in their cars. The wife and I ended up with a kid for two weeks because his parents forgot to drop him at grandma’s while they went off on a cruise. It’s insured. With your track record I was hoping you’d total it.”
While Bishop was writing a check, his steel cell phone rang. It was C.T. Kale. “Any chance you could get me a demon blood sample?” he asked.
“Well there might be some dried stuff in the back of a car I have access to.”
“A fresh tube of it would be better, but I’ll take what you can get.”
Bishop had a flash of the demon bar Ariel had taken him to. “I might be able to get you both. No promises.”
“Sooner is better.” C.T. hung up.
“Can I check the trunk of the Falcon?” Bishop asked. “I might have left something inside.”
- 40 -
Ariel’s living room was completely trashed: glass everywhere, blood on the mats. She couldn’t face cleaning up. Her kitchen smelled like scorched noodles and melted linoleum. Somebody had cleaned up the blood and foam, scrubbed her table and put the noodle pot to soak in the sink. Probably Dingo.
She had just poured her first cup of coffee when Tomas’ limped into the kitchen, her comforter wrapped around him, toga style.
“I smelled the coffee,” he said.
“How are you feeling?”
“I think I have frost bite in unmentionable places, but other than that I’m good.” He pulled the blanket aside and showed her his ribcage. He’d removed the bandages. The wound was still red and angry looking but the skin had healed shut and the scar had the shiny look of a two-week-old incision. Acid burns and claw marks on his face, torso and arms showed bright pink against his dark skin.
Ariel pulled a chair up to the table so he could sit down, and poured him a cup of black coffee. She topped up her own. “What are you doing here Tomas?”
“The Guardian sent me orders. He wanted me to take out Tesslovich.”
“Really? And you didn’t call me to ask why he asked you to do something like that in my territory?”
“I got the impression it was urgent and you weren’t available to handle it.”
Raptor: Urban Fantasy Noir Page 25