Strange Angels

by Lili St. Crow

  Just because he hunted things out of fairy tales didn’t mean I had any right to skip school. Oh no. Even if he was pretty blind without me, since only the maternal side of his family was the one gifted with what Gran always called “the touch.”

  Some touch. I haven’t figured out if it meant “crazy” or just “spooky.” The jury, you could say, is still out on that one.

  Dad never seemed sad or unhappy about missing out on the woo-woo train. Then again, Gran never did stand for much of what she called “moping,” and I couldn’t imagine her being any different when Dad was a kid. Weird as it is to think about him being gawky and adolescent—but I’ve seen the pictures.

  Gran was big on pictures.

  I hung up after fifteen rings and stood staring at the phone, chewing on a hangnail. It hurt like hell, and there was a healing scrape on my left-hand knuckles from the heavy bag. Other girls don’t have fathers who yell at them to work through the pain, to hit harder, to get in there and kill it kill it kill it! Other girls never filled thermoses with holy water or handed ammo through a window while their fathers held off skittering things like giant mutant cockroaches. That had been Baton Rouge, and that had been bad. I’d had to drive Dad to the hospital and lie about how he got the chunk taken out of his calf.

  Sometimes it was hard to tell where the lying to the normal world ended and the bullshit posturing necessary in the Real World began. There’s so much paramilitary hanging out under the edge of the Real World that the macho bull snorting reaches epic proportions.

  The phone just kept ringing.

  “Screw it,” I said under my breath, under the surf-roar of noise echoing from the cafeteria. I didn’t even get my fifty cents back; the machine ate it.

  For a second I stood there, just looking at the phone like it might suddenly give me a good idea. It smelled like damp wool and wet concrete in here, as well as formaldehyde carpet and the exhalation of two thousand kids. Not to mention sweaty stocking feet and food pried from underneath Ronald McDonald’s bumpers. School smell. It’s the same pretty much everywhere in the U.S., with only slight regional differences in the foot-sweat and served-roadkill departments.

  The crowd noise from the caf hurt my ears and made my head ache like one of Mom’s migraines. I was hungry, but the thought of going in there and elbowing through the line, then finding a place to sit where I wouldn’t be required to look at anyone or share a table with some jackass kids just seemed like too much hassle.

  If I went home and Dad was there, I’d get The Lecture. If I went home and he wasn’t there, I’d just wait and worry. If I went through geometry and art class this afternoon I’d go bazonko nuts, even though art class was generally the most enjoyable part of the day. And forget about the waste of time they called “civics class.” I’d seen more real-life civics on afternoon CNN. That is, if you define civics as “blowhards with expensive hair.”

  None of these classes taught you anything real. I’d rather be with Dad on stakeout or doing what he called “intel runs”—going to occult shops or bars, places where people who knew about the Real World, the dark world, got together and spoke in whispers between shots.

  Like the tea shop where Dad’s old buddy August hangs out in New York, where you step up to get into the bar’s dark gloom—and you step up again to get out. Or the bar in Seattle where the proprietor has tusks growing out of his lower jaw and a warty broad face that looks like something that lives under a bridge and eats goats. Or the nightclub in Pensacola where all the flashing strobes of light look like screaming faces when they hit the floor. And that country store out on a back road near Port Arthur, where the woman sitting in her rocker on the front porch will have what you need in a paper bag sitting right next to her, while the dust streaks and twinkles on the window, even at night. There are places like that all over—where you can buy things that shouldn’t or don’t strictly exist.

  If you’re willing to pay. Sometimes in money. Most times in information . And other times in something less tangible. Favors. Memories.

  Even souls.

  Maybe I could do some recon of my own, find Dad a good place to plug in. The watering holes for the Real World are hidden from the normal world, but they always stick out like a sore thumb to me. I think it’s because Gran always had me play “what’s on the table”— that game where you shut your eyes and try to remember everything she’d set out for lunch or dinner, canning or quilting.

  That sounded better than putting up with the same bullshit everyone my age has to put up with. So I turned and went the other way, toward the doors that would lead out to the soccer fields and baseball diamond. I could cut across the fields and maybe slip out through the greenbelt—Foley was one of those schools with an open campus, a rarity anymore. I had that extra twenty, enough to sit in a café or coffee shop where nobody would bother me before I put on my serious face and started following the tickle of intuition.

  The cold outside was like a slap to already-stinging cheeks. It still smelled like iron, the way a penny tastes when you suck on it. I walked with my head down, my boots crunching frozen weeds, my nose immediately running.

  What a choice. Skip school and freeze your ass off, or go back inside the building where it’s warm and get bored literally to death.

  “Hey! Hey, you!”

  I ignored the voice, swiping at my nose with the sleeve of my sweatshirt jacket. Footsteps crunched behind me. I didn’t hunch my shoulders—that’s a dead giveaway that you’ve heard someone. If it was a teacher, I was going to have to come up with a reason why I was out here, and I began to think about exercising my creative lying muscle.

  They should have a class for that. Who would teach it? I wonder if it would grade on a curve.

  “Hey! Anderson!” The voice was too young to belong to a teacher. And it was male.

  Shit. Just my luck. The bullies don’t usually mess with me, but you never know. I set my heel down in the gravel and whirled, my head coming up and my hair falling in my eyes despite being mostly stuffed under my hood.

  It was the half-Asian goth kid from American History class.

  He was too tall, and the long black coat flapped as he skidded to a stop. He’d pushed his collar up again, and the cold made his cheeks and nose cherry red under his mop of dyed-black hair. He wheezed for a second, his narrow chest heaving under a Black Sabbath T-shirt, and peered at me through strings of hair. His eyes were an odd pale green, but his hair managed to keep them from doing more than peeping out every once in a while. In a few years he’d probably be a real looker, with those contrasting eyes and the thick wavy dark hair.

  Right now, though, he was in that funny in-between stage where every part of a guy’s body looks like it was pulled out of a different parts catalog. Poor kid.

  I waited. Finally, he got his breath back. “You want a cigarette?”

  “No.” Jesus, no. He had the type of baby face most guys would curse at in the mirror, at war with its own nose and cheekbones. The kind of face some half-breeds get stuck with if they don’t draw the pretty card. It made him look about twelve, except he was so tall. The hair was maybe an attempt to look like he really was “sixteen, honest.” He had nice boots, steel-toed combat numbers laced up to his knees. To top it all off, an inverted crucifix dangled from a silver chain, against his bony sternum.

  I backed up another step and took another look at him. Nope. Nothing of the Real World on this kid. I didn’t think so, but it’s better to check. Better to check twice and be relieved than only check once and get your ass blown off, Dad says.

  Dad. Is he gone already? It’s still daylight, he’s probably okay. I didn’t like the way my chest was getting tight.

  The kid dug in a pocket and fished out a crumpled pack of Winstons, the corners of his eyes crinkling. At least he hadn’t drawn the really slit-eyed card a lot of half-breeds have to play, where they look like they’re squinting to beat Clint Eastwood the whole time. “You want one?” he asked again.

  Wha
t the hell? I stared at the crucifix. Did he have any idea what that meant? Or how quickly it could get him in a lot of trouble, in some places?

  Probably not. That’s why the Real World is the Real World: because the normal world thinks it’s the only game going.

  “No thanks.” I want a cup of coffee and a club sandwich. I want to sit down someplace and draw. I want to find some place where the sunlight doesn’t get in and I don’t feel like a total alien. Leave me the hell alone. I should have told Dad about the owl. My conscience pricked me. “Sorry about Bletchley.”

  He shrugged, a quick birdlike movement. All of him was birdlike, from his beak of a nose at war with his caramel-skinned baby face to the restless way his fingers moved. He tapped a cigarette out of the pack and produced a silver Zippo, lit the cancer stick, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and promptly went into a coughing fit.

  Jesus. Here I was freezing my ass off with Cool Goth Boy. Some days were so much worse than others it wasn’t funny. “It’s okay,” he said when he could talk again. “She’s a bitch. She does that all the time.”

  Glad to know I didn’t interrupt anything. I stood there with no real idea of what to say. I settled for a shrug of my own. “See you.”

  “Are you skipping?” He fell into step beside me, ignoring the fact that I was walking away. “Off to a good start.”

  Leave me alone. “I don’t want to deal with it today.”

  “Okay. I know a place to go. You shoot pool?” He managed not to choke himself on another drag of cigarette smoke. “I’m Graves.”

  When did I invite you along? “I know.” I looked back down at my boots, marking off time. “Dru.” And don’t you dare ask what it’s short for.

  “Dru.” He repeated it. “You’re new. Couple of weeks, right? Welcome to Foley.”

  State the goddamn obvious and bring out your suburban Welcome Wagon. I couldn’t see any way to ditch him just yet, so I just made a noise of assent. We crossed the soccer field in weird tandem, him shortening his stride out of respect for my lack of grasshopper legs. I sized him up as we walked. I’d give myself better odds in a fight, I decided. He didn’t look very tough.

  Still, I was walking into the woods with a kid I didn’t know. I stole quick little glances at his hands and decided he might be okay. At least I could kick his ass if he tried anything, and the greenbelt wasn’t very big.

  He tried again. “Where you from?”

  A planet far, far away. Where nightmares are real. “Florida.” The question always came up, sooner or later. Sometimes, mostly when I was younger, I lied. Most of the time I just pretended like I’d always lived in the last place we’d come from.

  People don’t really want to know anything about you. They just want you to fit into their little predetermined slots. They decide what you are in the first two seconds, and they only get nervous or upset if you don’t live up to their snap judgments. That’s one way the normal world’s like the Real—it all depends on what people think you are. Figure that out, play to what they expect, and it’s clear sailing.

  “Yeah, you sounded a bit down-South. Big change for you, huh? It’s going to snow.” He announced it like I should be grateful to him for telling me. The strap of my bag dug into my shoulder.

  I tried not to bristle. I do not sound Southern. I sound like Gran a little bit, but that’s all. “Thanks for the warning.” I didn’t bother disguising the sarcasm.

  “Hey, no problem. First one’s free.”

  When I glanced up at him, he was smiling under his hair. It almost threatened to eat his nose, that hair. The proud, bony nose was putting up a good fight, though, and he looked miserably cold. He didn’t even have any gloves.

  For a second I toyed with the idea of telling him something. Hi. I’m Dru Anderson. My father went way-out wack after my mom died and now he travels around hunting things that go bump in the night, killing things you only find in fairy tales and ghost stories. I help him out when I can, but most of the time I’m deadweight, even though I can tell you where anything inhuman in this town is likely to hang out. I’m skipping school because I won’t be here in another three months. None of it goddamn well matters.

  Instead, I found myself almost smiling back. “You should wear some gloves.”

  He peered at me, shaking his hair away. His eyes turned out to be green with threads of brown and gold, thickly fringed with dark lashes, change-color eyes. Boys always get the best eyelashes; it’s like some kind of cosmic law. And half-breed kids get some kind of extra help there from genetics, too. Once he grew into that nose and his face thinned out a bit, the girls would like him a lot. Maybe it would even go to his head.

  “Ruins the image,” he said. Silver glittered in his left ear, an earring I couldn’t quite make out.

  “You’ll goddamn well freeze to death.” We reached the end of the soccer field and he took the lead, going to the right along a dusty footpath. Bare branches interlaced above us, and the dry smell of fallen leaves tickled my nose with dust. The brick pile of the school behind us would soon be out of sight, and that made me happier than I’d been all day.

  Graves snorted, tossed his hair back as he took another drag. The smoke hung in a feathered shape for a moment as he exhaled, but I blinked to clear my eyes. “Hey, we’ve got to suffer for beauty. Chicks don’t go for guys with gloves.”

  I’ll bet chicks don’t go for you at all, out here in Stepford Podunk. “How would you know?” I stepped over a tree root, my bag bumping my hip.

  “I know.” He shot me a look over his shoulder, his hair almost swallowing his grin, too. “You never said if you liked shooting pool.”

  “I don’t.” I felt a little guilty again. He was trying to be nice.

  There was one in every school—some guy who thought his chances were better with new girls. “But I’ll beat your ass at it, okay?”

  I decided I could wait to find the local paranormal hangout. Dad would probably give me another version of The Lecture if I went looking for it alone. There was that one time in Dallas when he found me trading shots of Coke with a pointy-eared goggle-eyed gremlin and about had a cow—

  “Fine.” He didn’t even sound insulted. “If you can, Dru.”

  I thought about telling him Dad had taught me to shoot pool when we were low on cash, and decided not to. Maybe if I embarrassed the kid he’d leave me alone.

  CHAPTER 2

  I got home a little after five, riding the jolting, bumping bus all the way from downtown. Graves had wanted me to hang around and shoot a few more games, but the place—an all-ages pool club with a jukebox and indoor basketball and tennis courts—was loud and full of funky smells, as well as being jammed with kids who should have been in school themselves. So I bailed and had to figure out the bus. I’m used to figuring out the public transportation in just about any part of America, and this place actually had a good system.

  Dad’s truck was gone, but he’d left the light on in the kitchen and a fifty-dollar bill next to a note. Don’t wait up. Order pizza. Homework before TV, kiddo, and do your katas. Love you. Dad.

  Other dads actually sat at the dinner table. Mine left me a fifty and a reminder to do my goddamn katas.

  I was cold anyway, so I dropped my bag in the kitchen and bashed my way out into the garage, the big broken-spring door rattling as the wind teased at it. The heavy bag creaked, swaying a little, but I shucked my coat and shivered in the middle of the concrete floor instead.

  Dad liked karate, and he was big enough that it was a good choice for him. But I’m built rangy, like my mom, except she had nice chestworks and a pretty curve to her hips. I’m just angles except for the breasticles, which are more trouble than they’re worth, especially when it comes to boys. I don’t have the kind of muscle mass you need to meet a punch with direct force.

  So for me, it’s tai chi and what Dad called “The Basic Dirty-Fightin’” when he was sober and “Six Great Ways to Bounce an Asshole” when he’d had a few Beams. I like tai chi—I like the
slow way each movement flows into the next and the breathing smooths everything out. It’s still hard work, because your knees always have to be a little unlocked, and after a while it really murders your quads and hamstrings, but it’s nice.

  Push-pull. Part the horse’s mane. Catch the swallow’s tail. Warmed up and loosened, and feeling a little better, I finally inhaled and exhaled, as close to at peace as I guess you can ever get. The outside world rushed in as soon as I opened my eyes, and I began worrying about Dad again before I even opened the door to the kitchen and stamped through, making a lot of noise I really didn’t have to.

  It’s the only way to fill up an empty house.

  I dug through the fridge and eventually settled on a bowl of Cheerios. I’d scarfed a greasy slice of pizza at the pool hall, and the thought of more half-cardboard cheese didn’t appeal to me, even with pepperoni. So I wolfed the cereal, spiked a glass of Coke with some of Dad’s Jim Beam, and wandered up to my room to lie on the bed and look at the light on the ceiling. Every room is different, and the way outside light reflects up onto the spackle stuff smeared on most ceilings is unique. I could probably describe pretty much every place we’ve ever lived in terms of ceiling light.

  The worst part about Dad being out on hunting runs was the way whatever house we were in got really creepy around dusk. Night is when most of the stuff in the Real World comes out to play—and by play you can mean “have a little fun,” “go grocery shopping because sunlight burns like acid,” or “make unwary people disappear, yum yum.” Take your pick.

  I pulled Mom’s red-and-white quilt around me, snug as a bug in a rug, and sipped at the Coke until my taste buds burned off a little—I’d made it about half and half, and began to get a warm glow after a while. My clock blinked its little red eyes, and darkness gathered deeper and deeper in the corners. The wind made the glassed-in screen door on the enclosed back porch rattle.