Strange Angels

by Lili St. Crow

  I shrugged. “It means dead and reanimated. My mom’s dead, too. So is my grandmother.” Everyone’s gone. They all keep disappearing on me. The words were full of old bitterness. “I’m going to make lunch. You must be hungry.”

  “So you just live here by yourself? In this house?” He was a persistent one. He scrambled up off the steps, wrapped himself up in the red-and-white quilt like a mummy, and shuffled after me.

  “For a while. Until I can’t anymore.” I led him into the kitchen and flicked the light on, setting the gun on the counter within easy reach. “Pretty much all I feel like making is grilled cheese. You want some?”

  His eyes roved the surface of the counters like he was looking for contraband. “Why was that dog thing after you?”

  That was another question that bothered me. I shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you want some goddamn lunch or not?”

  “Sure, I’ll take some. If you promise not to hold a gun to my head.” By the time I rounded on him he was smiling, and had both his hands up in hey, man, I’m harmless mode. “Just kidding, Dru. Lighten up, okay?”

  Lighten up? I stared at him like he was crazy before getting the cheese and butter out of the fridge. I tied him down and nearly shot him, and he’s telling me to “lighten up”?

  The grin widened, his eyes very bright green now, no hazel tint left. He shook his hair down over his face and puckered his lips, making kissing noises. That strange heat crawled up my cheeks again. It got to me and I laughed, with the butter in one hand and the cheese in the other. We had bread in the freezer—it probably would have frozen on the counter too. That’s a good way to keep it fresh down South, especially if you eat a lot of toast. Or grilled cheese.

  “That’s better.” He leaned against the counter, wrapping himself more securely in the quilt. “We’re in the same boat, you know. I don’t have anyone either. Not anyone I can call or anything. I’ve been on my own since I was twelve.”

  Great. What am I supposed to say to that? I got the frying pan out. He didn’t mention the plywood and taped-down blankets over the back door. I didn’t mention the closing and healing flesh on his shoulder. We were mostly silent, and the wind moaned against the corners of the house.

  But I opened up a couple cans of tomato soup and dumped them in a pot, and I didn’t feel quite so lonely. Having someone in the house—someone who wasn’t going to leave just yet—helped. I even poured him a glass of milk.

  Call me domestic.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Holy shit .” Graves peered into the ammo crate. “Jesus. Was your dad a survivalist?”

  He was helping me clean up the living room. He didn’t ask about the bullet holes in the wall, or about the faint, horrible smell of rotting zombie. He also didn’t ask about the clothes he’d seen me scoop carefully up off the floor and set to soaking in the washing machine. Dad’s clothes were torn up and stinky, all his weapons and his billfold missing, along with Mom’s locket on its supple silver chain.

  I didn’t want to think about that.

  Snow whirled down thick and steady outside, each flake a muffled erasure of the world. The radio said some people had lost power, but not us. Not yet. I was glad about that—even with the duct-taped blankets the kitchen was chilly, the heater working overtime until I scrounged up more blankets and another two pieces of plywood to create a baffle. It worked pretty well, actually. Especially since I’d braced the door to the porch.

  I opened up the fire-safe box, sure I’d find what I was after. After a bit of digging through papers—birth certificates for both of us, my immunization records, a fat file of records from each school I’d attended—I found the ragged red address book, duct tape clinging to its vinyl cover. Dad’s kill book would be in the truck, but contacts were always kept separate.

  Okay, Dad. Let’s see who can get me out of this, since you’ve ended up a stain on the living-room rug. A stain I should vacuum up, by the way. In a fresh bag so I can keep it.

  A hot bolt of nausea scored through me. That was no way to think about my dead father, was it? But it was either find something snarky to say or start crying, and if I started sniveling now, I might never stop.

  Dad hated sniveling. “Bingo,” I muttered.

  “I mean, what do you use all this stuff for?” Graves continued. I’d given him a pair of Dad’s sweats, but he’d turned down my offer of a Peter Frampton T-shirt. So his narrow back was pale and goose pimpled despite the heater. I could have found him something else to wear, but he made such a big deal over the Frampton I decided he could go shirtless if he was going to be picky. I mean, it’s not like it was David Cassidy or something.

  I kept trying not to look at his bare skin, though. It made me feel weird. “Hunting.” I closed the top of the safe box, made sure it was shut and locked down. “Get out of there, that’s live ammo.”

  He was still poking around. “This isn’t really a grenade, is it?”

  “Of course it’s real. You won’t clean out a roach-spirit nest with a fake grenade. Get out of there, you’re not trained.”

  “Did your dad teach you how to use this stuff?”

  “Most of it. He told me to leave the AK-47 alone, though.” I paged through the address book, deciphering Dad’s scrawl. Most of the numbers were down South, with a smattering in California and up around Maine. Nothing near the freaking Dakotas. I even recognized some of them—the hunter in Carmel who surfed almost every day unless he was too injured from clearing out sucker holes with a team of hard-faced mercenaries; the women who lived out on the back bayou miles away from anywhere and kept the gator spirits pacified and cleared out; August in New York who swore in gutter Polish when he drank with Dad and could make a thin shining yellow flame spring from the tip of his index finger if he was in the right mood.

  Graves almost choked. “You have an AK-47?”

  And a flamethrower, but that’s in the truck. “Only for emergencies.” I found a scrap of paper tucked three-quarters of the way back with a number in our new area code. Nothing else. No name, no inked cross that meant it was a safe number for me to dial, no ident info.

  Great. Who would take a plane ride out here just to make me feel better? I’d have to explain what happened to Dad, too. Or as much as I knew about what happened to him. Which wasn’t much. But still.

  The way my stomach turned over at the thought threatened to push out every bit of grilled cheese I’d eaten. It was my fault; I hadn’t told him about the owl. “Jesus,” I whispered, staring down at the number. It was on the back of a receipt from an occult shop in Miami, the one where Dad had found a glassy shard of obsidian good for taking down chupacabras. He’d FedExed it out to Tijuana for Juan-Raoul de la Hoya-Smith.

  The goatsuckers were really bad around Tijuana. Juan-Raoul said it was the heat and the tamales.

  Dad had stayed closeted with the dreadlocked, scary-looking owner of that shop for a good two hours after it closed, while I wandered around looking at things and getting hungrier and hungrier. When he’d reappeared, his face had been stony-set and white, and he’d stayed up drinking in our hotel room all that night. I’d ordered room service and watched old cartoons until I fell asleep.

  Now I wondered if Dad had gotten this phone number there. I wondered if it was safe—the inked cross meant “safe”; the slashed circle meant “unsafe except in an emergency”; and no sign could mean anything.

  It was Dad’s handwriting, no doubt about it. Nobody else had access to the book, and there was his way of making a 9 from the bottom with a single line. I wondered whose number it was.

  I was going to have to go to a pay phone and find out. It was the only number in this area, but it didn’t have a mark next to it. It wasn’t like Dad to forget a thing like marking a safe contact.

  It wasn’t like him at all. But he hadn’t been himself since that shop with the cottonmouths hitting the glass with hard, padded sounds, making that horrible ratcheting noise. I looked up at the living-room window. The blizzard wind made a low
chuckling sound, mocking me.

  “Dru? You okay?” Graves was suddenly there. I hadn’t seen him moving as I stared at the window, lost in thought.

  Woolgathering, Gran would have called it. As in, Don’t woolgather when they’s work to be done, Dru. Go milk the goats and look’n fer eggs, and when you come back I’ll teach’n you how to use a pendulum. Won’t that be fun?

  Only with her thick Appalachian accent, it sounded slow as molasses inside my head. I could get out the pendulum now, but it wouldn’t be any good when I was wishing and hoping too hard. Sometimes things like pendulums or tarot cards will just tell you what you want to hear, not the truth. Gran always said you should see it for yourself instead of using “crutches,” but the crutches were good when you didn’t have time to put yourself in a trance or wait for a dream or omen.

  “I’m fine.” I shook the idea away and copied the number on a plain piece of anonymous scrap paper, then shoved it in my pocket. The receipt was Evidence, and we Minimized Evidence, so it went back in the book. The contacts went back into the fireproof box, and I looked around the living room. There was nothing to do for the time being while we were snowed in, so I searched for something to say to get the conversation off me. “You can’t go anywhere in this kind of weather, you know.”

  “I thought I’d just stay with you anyway. Seeing as how you’re so interesting.” He waggled his eyebrows, but the effect was lost under his mop of hair. He rubbed at his shoulder gently, the pink traces of werwulf bite already fading. The scars would be white and star-shaped before long, little puckers where the teeth had punctured the skin. “Besides, I can’t get back into the mall just yet. Or anywhere else.”

  The quick healing was eerie, and the wounds just looked wrong, the way all wounds from the Real World do.

  I’m sorry. I didn’t say it. Instead I pushed myself to my sock feet and shivered, staring out the front window. The snowflakes were amazing, thick and cottony. “How often does it snow like this?”

  “About four or five times every winter. School will be back open tomorrow; they’ll have the snowplows going all night. You should think about going.”

  Yeah. I’ll get right on that. I rubbed at my temple, where the zit was gone. It still hurt a little, though, deep under the skin. I hate those zits that burrow underground. You think they’ve vanished, but no, they just barricade themselves right next to the bone and hurt.

  And my back twinged as I stretched carefully. “I don’t have any big dreams to keep me in school. What are you, a guidance counselor?”

  “You have to think about the rest of your life.” He sounded serious, just like an ABC After School Special, pushing his dead-black hair away from his forehead. “Seriously. High school isn’t forever. If it was, I’d kill myself.”

  That makes two of us. “High school doesn’t even matter. When I turn eighteen I’ll be able to smoke and vote, not to mention get a decent job.”

  “Not if you keep skipping. The way to get a decent job is to play the game well enough in high school, so you can get into college on a good GPA. That way you don’t end up poor and sucking on forties out in the Circle K parking lot, like my stupid stepdad.” Graves stretched. His eyes had turned a sleepy moss green. “Can I have another sandwich?”

  “You know where the kitchen is.” I need to find the truck. Then I need to find out who did that to Dad. And who this number belongs to. My left hand curled into a fist, shoved inside my pocket to touch the paper. It was the only lead I had for now.

  I thought Graves would keep bugging me, but apparently he was really smart. He left me alone in the silent living room with its faint horrible smell that lasted even after I got the ancient vacuum cleaner out and sucked every last trace of ash into a fresh bag.

  It was the only way I had to keep some piece of Dad. He deserved a funeral. He deserved to be buried with Mom.

  That was the wrong thought, and it made everything even worse. Something inside my chest was tearing open, and it was hard work to try to keep it closed over. That’s the funny thing about old hurts—they just wait for a new heartache to come along and then show up, just as sharp and horrible as the first day you woke up with the world changed all around you.

  I taped the bag shut and tucked it in the fireproof box; then I had to lean over the top of the box for a while, shaking and keeping the sobs muffled in my throat while Graves clinked around in the kitchen, listening to the weather report on the radio and occasionally bursting into snatches of song.

  I was glad he was in a good mood.

  CHAPTER 16

  The bad part of the storm lasted not a week but three days, and Graves turned out to be a halfway decent cook. I’m no slouch in the kitchen—Gran took care of that—but Goth Boy was better. He made me omelets and was a fair hand with coffee, even though he did it too weak like most civilians. He slept in Dad’s cot, dragged into my room and neatly made each morning.

  I got the idea he was on his best behavior. It was kind of nice to half-wake in the middle of the night and hear someone breathing, though. Like I was in a hotel room with Dad. I would half-smile and roll over, and I slept pretty okay.

  By the third day I was sick of the house and in a state of nervous tension that had me working the heavy bag in the garage, shivering as sweat steamed on my skin and I popped punches like a boxer, shuffling, and did my katas. It hurt, but I was used to that, working through the flinches as my muscles reminded me I’d mistreated them.

  The tai chi helped a little bit. The breathing and the quiet movements—full moon rising over the water, single whip, play the guitar—cleared out the inside of my head. It was the only time I wasn’t chewing myself into little mental bits. The problem was, as soon as I stopped, listening to the broken garage door bend and flex as the wind plucked at it, all the problems started crowding back inside my skull again.

  At least while I worked out I could sometimes hear Dad’s voice in my head. Better than nothing. But I didn’t touch the weight bench in the corner. Dad was always picking up cheap barbells at garage sales, since it didn’t make sense to tote them around the entire continent with us. The bench itself was a remnant from two cities ago, and one of the first things I’d pitch if I was packing to leave.

  Except I kept thinking Dad would stamp out into the garage, growl a greeting, and expect me to spot him for a set or two.

  I worried about the truck outside in this kind of weather, I worried about finding the damn truck so I could get out of town, and I most especially worried about whatever had turned Dad into a zombie.

  The snow had blown itself out, and the weather report said it would be clear and chilly the next few days. School was set to open up, and Graves had a bad case of cabin fever as well. He was getting tired of wearing Dad’s clothes, since they were all pretty much too baggy for him. I washed his jeans and he even condescended to compliment my long-sleeve Disco Duck T-shirt. We watched cable until I could hum along with all the advertising jingles again. We could agree on old sci-fi B movies, but he didn’t want to watch the horror flicks.

  I didn’t blame him. So we stuck mostly to cartoons.

  The fourth day turned over into the quiet cold before dawn, and I woke up in my bed with Graves leaning over me in only his tighty-whities, shaking me with a clammy-cold hand. “Someone’s at the door,” he whispered, and I bolted out of bed so fast we almost cracked skulls.

  “Who is it?” I grabbed a sweater and struggled into it, hearing the knocking—dull thuds muffled by the acoustics of snow—that hadn’t managed to dent my dreamless sleep.

  Or had I dreamed? I couldn’t be sure.

  I made it halfway downstairs just as the thudding stopped. Graves bumbled along behind me until I turned around and gave him a glare, putting a finger to my lips. He froze in the act of opening his mouth, scratching at the lower curve of his ribs on the right.

  Three more thuds, each very distinct. I froze, my skin going cold and prickling, every hair on my body standing straight up and doing i
ts best to escape my skin.

  I knew that feeling. Gran had called it the singing willies. Dad called it the tingles.

  I called it something nasty on the other side of that door.

  And me without a gun or anything.

  It tasted like old sludge and rust, the tang of iron against the back of my palate in that special place ordinary people don’t have. Dad said he always knew when I was getting the tingles by the look on my face, and it must have been true, because Graves went white as milk under his coloring, his nostrils flaring and his messy hair quivering as he shook like a dog caught between cowardice and outright peeing itself with fear.

  I caught something shifting over the surface of the door, a ripple like blue lines, just caught out of peripheral vision. The bolt of pain searing through my head caught me unaware, and I let out a hard, whistling breath.

  I snapped a quick glance at the entrance to the living room. Stopped myself—the blinds were up, I hadn’t pulled them before bed. No cover. There were weapons up in my room. I’d have grabbed one on the way out, but if a cop was at the door—or another adult authority figure—I would have gotten myself in trouble.

  This is getting ridiculous.

  One last knock on the door, a playful tap. Little pig, little pig, let me in.

  I let out a soft, shallow breath, just a sip of air. Pointed at Graves, pointed upstairs, and made a gun with my forefinger and thumb. Raised my eyebrows meaningfully.

  He nodded, the pink scars on his shoulder standing out vividly against pale skin. His undies had ridden up into the crack of his narrow ass, of which I was treated to a full view as he turned and tried to go as quietly as possible up the stairs.

  I settled down into a crouch, watching the door, my entire skin alive and alert to every sound I could possibly pick up. Whoever it was, they were on the front porch, waiting. I knew it as surely as I knew my own name. It’s like being able to see the heat shimmer off pavement on a summer day, the disturbance created by something weird standing in the normal world. The blue lines trembled on the edge of being visible, the house’s space rejecting something inimical.