by D K Girl
‘What do you know of me?’ Az spoke in a low, almost sultry whisper. He moved up close to Leona, and she raised her hands. At first Kira thought it was a defensive move. Nope. Kinda the opposite. Her hands fluttered over his chest, her breathing quickening. Kira took another sip.
‘Nothing personal but it’s best I keep a distance.’ If the room hadn’t been dead silent, Kira might not have heard Leona at all, she spoke so softly. ‘We’re going to need help to decipher you. You nearly blew my eyes out of their sockets last time we touched.’
‘Oh Christ.’ Kira took another longer, harder gulp. ‘Your lines need work, love. When you’re finished fan-girling, can we go to a room that doesn’t smell of rotten ass?’
Vail stifled a smile. Apparently seeing her about to puke was something he found funny.
But Leona and Az were locked in a stare-fest. ‘Do you recall nothing of your origin?’
‘I do not,’ Azrael said. ‘Do you know who I am?’
His hands were raised as though he was fighting to stop himself from touching her. Nothing nefarious. Just desperate. And the ache of it slammed a fist into Kira’s cold, hard, metal heart. Her own ache this time. Good old pain-in-the-ass empathy.
The woman’s expression softened, and Kira bit her lip, bracing for the reply she saw coming.
‘No. I don’t. I’m sorry.’ Leona winced. ‘But I do believe I know where you are from.’
Vail placed the laptop on the table and darted a glance at Leona before clearing his throat. ‘Azrael, you might want to take a look at this. See if it means anything to you.’
The lizard made a chirruping sound. Kira blinked, sure she’d just seen the thing nod its teeny, grotesque dragon head.
‘Az can’t eat soup or drink beer,’ Kira said. ‘He’s hardly going to be able to read.’
‘Still, it might be worth taking a look.’ Vail tapped at the keys, swiping his finger across the touchscreen, eyes so narrowed they looked closed. ‘Help him remember who he is.’
‘There’s internet here?’ Kira said. Internet meant Skype. Or, at the very least, email. Ready or not, Blake, here we come. But her question was ignored. Leona pulled out a chair and gestured for Az to sit. He did, and Leona and Vail gathered around him, forcing Kira onto tiptoes to get a look at the screen. The web page’s flowery text declared that this site knew everything there was to know about Sumerian mythology. The entire page was mostly writing in a tiny font that would have been a bitch to try to read. There were a couple of pictures, though. One caught Kira’s eye. Some naked chick with clawed feet and great boobs held a staff in one hand, a small cup in the other, and had wings the length of her body draped at her sides.
Big Boobs was called Ereshkigal, apparently.
‘Ereshkigal, what kind of friggin’ name is that? Okay, what are we looking at? Az was an ancient Playboy Bunny?’
Leona puffed out a breath. ‘Ereshkigal is the queen of the underworld. The Sumerians worshipped her –’
‘Sumerians? Like in Jesus’s time or something?’ Kira said, draining more wine.
‘No, much earlier,’ Vail said. ‘We’re talking beginning of civilisation and –’
‘So what the hell has she got to do with Az?’
Azrael stared at the screen, but nothing showed on his face to betray what he was thinking. Quite possibly nothing at all. The guy had learned to talk all of five minute ago.
‘Oh by the Maiden’s laces, will you shut up and listen, girl?’ Leona shoved the cask across the table. ‘Occupy yourself with this, but listen. When we exorcised those possession spirits at the hotel –’ She gave Vail a sideways glance and continued. ‘I obtained some information. A sense, if you like, of their identities, and their intentions.’
‘Aside from strangling me, and humping Az, that was what?’ Kira ran her finger round the rim of her glass.
Vail shifted in his seat, turning to look up at her. ‘There was a lot of confusion. They seemed as surprised as we were to find them there. Like they didn’t quite know what to do once they found some bodies to inhabit, didn’t know what to do with their own strength.’
‘They claimed they were utukku.’ Leona stirred the bubbling pot with slow circulations. ‘Not a title I was familiar with, but I had my suspicions. We wanted an opportunity to research before we told you anything. That Azrael is a bright one is evident –’
‘You keep saying that, and I keep having no clue.’ Kira refilled her pint glass.
‘A supermundane, a preternatural –’
‘Oh yeah, he’s super all right.’
Leona paused with her stirring. ‘You understand. I know you do. I saw your face when he touched you. He is a supernatural being, and those utukku believed he would be able to return them to their true realm. Azrael is ripe with a raw power, the like of which I’ve never witnessed. And that power does not come from the Maiden. She herself is a fledgling, her full strengths are still developing. A new god whose Dawning is yet to come. We worship at her altar, awaiting that day when she emerges from the Earth and graces us –’
Vail coughed, interrupting the sermon. ‘These utukku, if that’s what they are, are ancient. Thousands of years old, and there’s been no hint of them before now. There are a few supermundanes that pop up every now and then, but very basic stuff, wood sprites, weaker stuff like that. Nothing like this.’
‘Of course.’ Kira chugged wine.
‘These utukku were off the charts . . . Azrael is off the charts. And for whatever reason, they thought he was their ticket home. They are trapped here, we think, but have been dormant until now.’
Rubbing her eyes, Kira debated asking the question. Decided what the hell? Sanity had gone to hell in a handbasket anyway. ‘Ticket home?’
‘To Kur. The underworld.’ Vail nodded at the screen. ‘Where that goddess rules.’
‘Oh, right. That makes sense now.’ Kira slapped her thigh. ‘Az is some kind of demon lord of the underworld. That was my second guess after advanced AI. Guess those prayer-loving ali –’
She caught herself in time. About to mention the A word. One big reveal at a time, she decided. Things were complicated enough without mentioning the ETs.
Az, the man . . . being . . . android . . . whatever-the-fuck, sat staring at Big Boobs.
‘Recognise her, Az?’
Slow shake of the head, side to side, not lifting his eyes from the screen. Bradley the freaky lizard jumped off Vail’s shoulder, landing on the keyboard beside Azrael’s hand. Az didn’t flinch. Still as a statue.
Leona rapped the metal spoon against the side of the pot. ‘We don’t know who or what he is, but those possession spirits believed him to be a creature of Kur. Explains why our workings were magnified so dangerously.’ Vail’s enthusiasm slid off his face like a mask, but Leona kept going. ‘Azrael’s energy radiates, and these utukku will not be the last who are drawn to him. He’s a magnet for supermundanes of all sorts. We need to get you to the Rudiment in Jackson.’
‘Please god, tell me that’s a nightclub, somewhere there are lots of drugs.’ Kira refilled her pint glass.
‘The Disciples of the Maiden are all formed into Rudiments. Groups, really. You’d probably call them covens.’ Vail puppy-eyed her from beneath his bangs. ‘It’s usually based on geographical locations, but we kind of got booted out of the local one –’
‘I got expelled.’ Leona poured herself a glass of red into a giant coffee mug that declared, I believe in unicorns. ‘Vail suffered because they sought to be rid of me.’
Vail gave her an indulgent smile. ‘Leona’s right about the Rudiment, though. William runs it, and he’ll take us in. You’ll be safe there. William will be able to help us work out what’s going on.’
All the sweet, doe-eyed looks in the world weren’t going to see that happen. ‘Sounds like a barrel of laughs, and William sounds like a great guy. But I’m not moving another inch until I speak to my sister.’
The lizard barked, and the frill of his collar expanded
around his beady-eyed face.
‘What’s wrong with slimy?’ Kira glared at the reptile.
Leona sniffed. ‘Bradley is not slimy, he’s a Tylototriton anguliceps. Very rare. And I believe he thinks contacting your sister is a very bad idea. As do we all. She asked you to take Azrael from the Facility, didn’t she? What exactly did she tell you to do with him?’
Kira folded her arms across her belly and walked across the cracked vinyl floor to the window. A sliver of moon rose above a poorly lit street. In the silence, the laptop pinged with an incoming message.
‘She said . . .’ Kira spotted a rotary phone propped on a pile of magazines, half-hidden by a faded floral curtain. ‘She said . . . shit . . .’
She couldn’t call Blake. A super spy Kira was not, but a dumb-ass could work out that contacting her sister at a place that designed high-end surveillance and robotic tech for the military was probably a stupid idea. Blake knew when Kira fucked someone on a beach half a world away; tracing a phone call would be child’s play.
Blake wanted Az kept hidden. Kira was on her own. With an utukku-attracting, underworld-dwelling, million-dollar piece of tech, that might be a demon. Kira sighed.
‘She told me to keep him away from the Facility. No matter what I heard.’
The words lifted from her, heaving a great weight with them. Maybe she was just as nuts as the two witches behind her, but goddamn it felt good to share the load.
‘Oh no,’ Vail breathed.
‘Oh shit,’ Leona said.
‘Oh yes.’ Kira leaned on the windowsill watching the wind play with a brass chime hanging from the veranda. ‘You have no idea how much I wish I’d told Blake to fuck off –’
‘Kira, that’s not what we meant,’ Vail said.
The lizard barked again, little snaps of sound, like a chihuahua with a bad cold. Kira turned. Vail’s face had dropped a shade or two of pale. Leona glared at the laptop screen, hands on her hips.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘We keep tabs on the Facility, any newsfeeds about the place –’ Vail began.
Leona shoved past Kira as she raced back to the table.
‘And? What did you see?’
Vail spun the screen. The website was The Smoking Gun. Ironically, one of the same conspiracy-theory-loving sites that Blake had told her once the Facility kept tabs on, tracking how close to the truth anyone was getting about proving the existence of the Syranians. The nutters had been convinced for years the aliens were in the basement, luckily, no one paid much attention to a sad bunch of people who believed the moon landing was a fake.
But people might pay attention to an explosion at the Facility. One large enough to register low-level seismic activity at the nearest monitoring station.
‘Shit. Blake.’ Kira’s wine-laden stomach turned. ‘Fuck what she said, we have to go to the Facility.’
Glass clanged and cupboard doors thumped as Leona piled things into a wicker picnic basket that had seen better days. ‘I’m sure she’s fine. They say she’s a genius.’ Leona grunted, heaving a giant jar of pickles from an overhead cupboard. ‘You can’t go to the Facility. We have to go to the Rudiment. Now.’
‘Like hell –’
The laptop pinged again. Vail opened a new tab, and a headline blazed across the screen. Apparently Leona and Vail didn’t just keep an eye on the Facility.
‘You are fucking kidding me.’ Kira stared at her own face on the screen next to a headline that read ‘Kira Beckworth Linked to Casino Murder?’
The picture, one from a year ago on a beach in Greece, ran alongside a video of the two guys in the elevator, the drunk touchy-feely lovebirds, who were loving every second of their fifteen minutes of fame as a local news crew questioned them about the casino murders. Spouting off about how they’d chatted with Kira Beckworth in the elevator as she was headed to the penthouse floor. How certain they were that it was her, despite the wig and glasses, because they’d spotted her chest tattoo through her ludicrously expensive designer shirt. How concerned they were when they heard about the death, assuming one of her parties had gotten out of hand.
Miffed they hadn’t gotten an invite.
‘Oh, those two have very big mouths.’ Leona hustled in alongside her. There was no actual footage of Kira in the hotel. Whatever hoodoo-voodoo stuff Az had going on had buggered up every camera they’d gone near. The authorities were clutching at straws, but it was a big hotel, with an enormous wallet, and it wanted its reputation straightened out.
‘They want to question Kira about the . . . accident.’ Vail’s fingers shook over the keyboard.
‘Oh shit,’ Leona said.
Kira stared at her own smiling face. Tanned and high, and a lifetime away from all this. ‘All the shit, all the fans.’
‘What do we do?’ Vail said.
‘Plan A, we get wasted.’ Kira tapped her empty glass. ‘And pretend none of this is happening.’
Azrael pressed his hands against the table and rose to his feet. ‘We go to the Rudiment, where the Disciples of the Maiden can offer protection, and source my true identity.’
Kira reached for the cask of wine. 'I'm going to stick with Plan A. Anyone else with me?'
Without a word, Leona thrust out her half-empty coffee mug, and this time there was no doubt in Kira’s mind that the lizard nodded.
….CONTINUE - METAL ANGELS - PART TWO
Exclusive Sneak Peek!
METAL ANGELS - PART TWO
The thin silver needle guided thread in and out of Blake’s torn skin. Blood stained the tips of the nurse’s gloved fingers as he sutured the wound on her palm.
‘Are you all right?’ The man, Jeremy according to his high-security pass, did not lift his gaze from his work.
‘I’m fine.’ Dirty and exhausted. Body shaking as though she were still in the middle of the tremendous earth tremor that had wracked the level eleven chamber just on an hour ago. When the gallu had arrived during the Final Meld, her body had ignited, the toxins in her blood becoming a raging heat beneath her skin. But now, with the Waters settled once again, the hollow ache at her core began to spread, clawing up out of her diaphragm and reaching for her ribs. Distant whispers played in her ears. Jeremy could not help her with those injuries. ‘Are they taking Tamas somewhere?’
She nodded past the two armed guards – her escort Captain Nex’s mandatory condition if she were to be allowed from his sight – who waited outside her compartment. In another compartment on the far side of the level three medical ward, Cym leaned over an unconscious Tamas. Another nurse and a doctor were with him. Their nodding heads indicated they had all come to an agreement of some kind.
‘The director is going to be prepped for surgery up in the Zahra Centre,’ Jeremy said. ‘They need to reset his wrist.’
The Zahra Centre was a state-of-the-art on-site medical centre, built at the end of Tamas’s mother’s cancer battle and given her name. A staff perk that also removed the necessity for Tamas to leave the Facility when he was ill. Blake struggled to recall when she or Tamas had last left the high fences of their desert-bound workplace.
‘And the head wound?’ she said.
‘Sutured, should be fine. He’s been sedated for now, till surgery is done.’ Jeremy paused, needle hovering above the last section of torn skin at the base of her thumb. ‘That was quite a bang down there.’
Blake may not, according to Kira, have any social skills whatsoever, but that did not mean she was oblivious to a tremor in a voice, sweat beading on an upper lip. Jeremy wanted some reassurance that the Facility wasn’t going to collapse on itself. That they weren’t going to be buried alive or snuffed out by toxic smoke rising through the ventilation system.
‘You’re not going to die, if that is what’s concerning you,’ she said. Her gaze drifted to Perry in the compartment alongside hers. He lay still, surrounded by an array of machines that kept him alive. Beyond him lay Gren. The Syranian’s compartment held only one piece of equipment: a narrow tube
of translucent piping that haloed the crown of his head. A rainbow of colours filtered through the tube. Gren’s injuries were covered by a foil blanket tucked up high around his neck. His body, no doubt, had already begun to heal at an accelerated rate.
‘No, Miss Beckworth,’ Jeremy sat back, needle and thread dangling, ‘That’s not what . . .’
‘Of course it’s what you wanted to know. Can you please finish up? I have things to do.’
Speaking so harshly to someone with a needle poised over your skin was perhaps not wise, but Blake was too distracted to curb her tongue. The damage to the carapaces was to her advantage. The list of repairs they required would ensure she was not thrown into a holding cell anytime soon, despite the captain’s reassurances that would happen if she so much as blinked oddly. Bottom line was, he needed her. The Meld had played havoc with the inhibitor system, torn ceramic eyes from sockets, ripped faux skin from limbs, and made the gallu far from ready for their public close-up. Cosmetic enhancement was required. And she was the senior make-up artist.
Jeremy returned to the job at hand. Though Blake’s hand had been numbed, the last few digs of the needle seemed to penetrate deeper than before. She looked away, gritting her teeth against the odd sensation.
Just as the captain was gambling on allowing her some freedom, Blake was taking chances too. She could have fled in the chaos, but she remained and assisted with bringing the inhibitors back online. Keeping herself visible, so that Rossiter would have a chance to get out. And find Kira.
The serum Captain Nex had ordered Cym to inject her with had been far more powerful than anything human made. It had ripped truths from her—some terrible and personal— but the invasion only went so deep. She had ordered Kira to go to Melgrove, that much was true. Blake had ordered her sister to a place that held memories rich with pain, and hedged everything on the notion that Kira would not take one step in the place. That was the one truth the captain had not stolen from her.
