Black

by Angelina J. Steffort

  “Believe me,” I snorted without any appreciation for his enthusiasm, “it’s everything but exciting to be in the middle of the story.” I instantly bit my tongue, hoping to chew the words back. I wanted to fill him in on parts of the story; but it had to be done carefully and slowly; Mr. Baker was an old man and I couldn’t be sure how he would take the news that the ominous war between good and bad was going on right under his nose.

  “Please, tell me about it,” he asked, his face reflecting his fascination.

  The coffee machine sizzled loudly while the waitress worked on fresh coffee for some new customers. I hadn’t noticed them come in.

  To avoid the wrong ears overhearing our conversation, I stood up and walked around the table to sit down in the armchair right next to Mr. Baker. He looked at me expectantly. For a moment I hesitated, unsure whether I really wanted to draw this kind, old man into the depths of my misery.

  “I haven’t had a single day of peace since I found out they exist,” I finally brought myself to speak openly, my words heavy with the weight of my knowledge. “Remember the girl who died in your library last year?” I asked in a hushed voice, afraid to bring up the topic.

  Mr. Baker nodded earnestly.

  I had known the girl, Colina, from school. She had walked into the library one day and, a few minutes later, she had dropped dead behind the shelves.

  “It was no accident—They killed her.” My voice was so low that it was almost swallowed by the background noise.

  It had been demons—Jaden had told me so and I had seen the shadows.

  The old man’s eyes widened as I spoke. And then he nodded like he had been expecting exactly what he had just learned from me.

  “Knowledge can be a burden, girl,” he said, his eyes full of wisdom. An expression I had never before appreciated. “... but you’re not alone. There are so many people who believe that they,” he emphasized the word and then coughed, “...exist. The good as well as the bad. They just don’t call them angels or demons because they don’t know for sure what it is that they feel around them.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you at all that it was no accident?” I said a bit too loud and the heads of a tea-sipping couple at a table near the counter turned in our direction. I shrank into my armchair self-consciously and grabbed the cup in front of me to hide my face behind it while I watched the couple staring at me. Mr. Baker blew his nose. Frank Sinatra continued singing happy tunes that didn’t nearly fit the topic of our conversation.

  The woman looked away when she noticed me stare back. I wondered if she had overheard us.

  I lowered my eyes into my chocolate and waited.

  For a while neither of us dared to mention topics more serious than the weather, my progress at school, or today’s TV-program. It was only when the couple finally paid and left, that our conversation became a little more relaxed.

  Mr. Baker cleared his throat beside me and I took a deep breath and glanced sideways at him. He looked right back at me, his eyes mirroring my relief.

  We watched them leave the coffee shop and vanish around the corner before we returned to the core of our meeting.

  “Mr. Baker...,” I half-whispered, too afraid to attract attention with what I was about to say.

  “Please, call me Lucas,” he interrupted, “we’ve known each other for quite a while now and we share secrets that are beyond calling somebody by their last name.” He looked like a kind grandpa to me when he smiled at me like that.

  “Lucas,” I said, feeling weird as I addressed my boss by his first name for the first time, “demons killed the girl at the library, they killed my cat, and they murdered my boyfriend. And I think I’m going to be next.” I watched his horrified expression. He wanted to know and I had to tell him. It was fair—my knowledge for his. “I promised I would share my knowledge, but I need your help first. I need to know what I can do to help an angel get back its powers—it’s crucial.”

  Lucas Baker looked at me with frightened eyes. “I never knew he was murdered, too...” His voice was hoarse, even more than it had already been from his cold. “I thought it was...”

  “Suicide,” I stole the word from his mouth. “Adam would have never—” I forced myself to stay calm, “... never.”

  Embarrassed silence spread between us for a minute.

  Lucas took my hand into his wrinkled fingers and squeezed. “I’m sorry. I know you loved him.”

  My facade had grown strong over the last weeks but not that strong. I felt it disintegrate and reveal the mess I was behind it. It took all of my effort to hold back my tears.

  “He was one,” I breathed.

  Lucas sucked in a breath which led into another cough. “Angel.”

  I nodded reflexively at his whisper and pulled my hand out of his grip to lean back into my armchair.

  “So you’ve known one—” Lucas mused, his eyes looking into the distance as if he was seeing something there.

  I nodded again, unable to speak, incapacitated by my own bleeding heart.

  Lucas’ eyes were like two stars of excitement. “I’ve got so many questions...”

  I had to calm down. It was essential to find out how to help Chris. If Lucas knew anything, I had to find out.

  “Lucas, please, I need your help,” I tried once more, “I know it’s fascinating to you, but I really need to know what I can do to help an angel get its abilities back.” My voice sounded desperate and that was how I felt.

  “Sorry, Claire,” he apologized, “I’m... I just can’t believe...” And then he scrutinized my face, comprehension gleaming in his eyes. “You need to know what you can do to help an angel get its powers back—does that mean you know there is an angel who needs your help...a real one?”

  My chin sank against my chest in a single, unintended nod. It was like I had set off a firework with this one, simple gesture. Lucas Baker looked at me like a little boy at Christmas, his eyes all expectant and his hands clawing into each other with elation.

  You have to be more careful, the voice in my head warned me and I knew it was right. I couldn’t give away the Gallagers’ secret. I had to be way more cautious with what I did, and especially what I didn’t, tell Lucas.

  “Could you introduce us?” Lucas asked in a childlike voice. All the grayness was gone from his skin. He looked almost healthy, the way he shifted in his green armchair, exuberant with joy.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, unsure whether I could promise him anything right now. All I wanted was his help, but I had the feeling that now that he had sniffed out how real the angel-world around him was, he wouldn’t settle for less. “Lucas, please... do you know anything how to help him—” I bit my tongue. Now he knew that the angel was male. Very nice. In my mind I extracted a club and let it crash onto my head virtually for my own stupidity.

  “Of course—I’m sorry,” he apologized again.

  “Please, what can I do? What do your stories say?”

  “I’m sorry, girl, there isn’t a thing you can do,” Lucas said with concern in his eyes. “Either he finds a way to regain control over his broken soul or he...” His voice was suddenly dark and sad. It made a surge of unease run through my body.

  “Or what?”

  Silence.

  “Lucas, what?” I urged, panic surfacing in my voice.

  “You know that angels usually have the power of age-shifting?” he began his explanation, and I had the subtle idea that I knew where this was leading.

  Lucas stared at me, obviously waiting for a sign of comprehension.

  “I do,” I whispered, my voice shaky.

  “When an angel loses its mark, it can lose its powers. This includes the power of age-shifting.

  “Whatever assumed age the angel has when its mark dies, the angel will return to its factual age, and if this is above a plausible human span of life...”

  “... it dies, too...” I finished his sentence, my head full of pictures of Jaden, decayed to the bones. If his mark died, would he lo
se his powers, too? He had never told me anything about his marked person and what had happened to them. But they had to be dead. I couldn’t imagine otherwise. Jaden was almost a thousand years old.

  “Yes,” Lucas nodded and took a sip of his tea. “Your angel is obviously still alive or you wouldn’t be sitting here with me, asking questions. So I guess he can’t be that old.”

  “Uhm—” He was right. Chris was still alive. Chris had spread his wings for the first time with Adam. He couldn’t have shifted his age too much. He looked exactly around forty-five—the age he should be with a child at the age of twenty-one.

  Lucas gave me some time to process the new information. His eyes lingered on my face and he started humming to the music which was still tootling happily in the background.

  “If he doesn’t find a way, he’s going to die like any other human being,” he said after a minute or two, I couldn’t tell, time had notched out of my perception. “It will be like he never was anything more than human.”

  I thought of the last times I had seen Chris. He had been a wreck. Lackluster and unable to spread his wings; but he had been able to sense my emotions. He couldn’t be a hopeless case. He still had forty years ahead of him where he could get his abilities back. He didn’t have to die. And part of his powers were still there, so there was a good chance he would soon get his wings back.

  For the first time in months, I felt something like a moment of hope in this mess of pain and despair around me.

  The sun was setting, and the downtown buildings were glowing red, accented here and there with windows that seemed to flash and burn with brilliant golden light. I felt better. Lucas had shared a lot of his knowledge with me and I had grown to appreciate the old librarian as a person worthy of trust.

  After seeing him struggle with that cough and runny nose, I wanted to be sure he would get home alright, so even though my house lay in the opposite direction, we crossed the bridge together and headed towards a modern apartment complex that looked out of place in its old neighborhood.

  We talked about angels all the way to his flat and he asked me questions about the exact consistency of the feathers on their wings, the color of the light when their eyes gleam and if it was true that they could vanish and pop up miles away. I answered all his questions willingly, trying not to give him too many specifics that could endanger the Gallagers’ secrecy—and Jaden’s.

  “Well, I’m home,” he said as we walked up to the entryway. He paused to fish his keys out of his coat pocket with stiff fingers. “Thank you for walking me. Now you’d better scoot, it’s getting dark.” He coughed again, this time a little more heavily than before. As I had feared, the walk in the cold air hadn’t done him any good.

  “Are you sure there isn’t anything I can get you?” I asked, concerned. “The drugstore will still be open.” But the old man just shook his head.

  “I’m fine,” he said and smiled. “You did enough for me by telling me about the angels.”

  “Okay, goodbye, then,” I said. “Call me if you need anything.”

  I headed back down the walk, turning around at the sidewalk to wave at him and make sure he got into the building. The door was already closing behind him. I hoped he would go right to bed. At his age he needed to be careful.

  I began to retrace my steps, headed on the long walk home. I could feel the temperature dropping as night came on and I pulled my coat collar up to my ears. By the time I re-crossed the bridge and left downtown behind, part of my mind was wishing I had thought to put some gloves in my pockets, but another part was noticing how very silent it seemed among the big, leafless maples and close-set houses of the old neighborhood. There were no cars, no pedestrians. Only a few children hurried around the corner away from a park I was passing.

  It was Sunday night, people had school and work in the morning, and with the sun fully set, Mother Nature was offering no further inducements to linger outside. But still I felt uneasy. An unseen dog barked—a big dog from the baritone sound of it—from a shadowy side yard and I hoped there was a fence between us.

  I was stepping carefully over a broken patch of sidewalk when I heard it. A low, rumbling, crashing sound, not far behind me. A most peculiar sound that I could not identify—similar to the noise of a garbage can falling to the ground but much, much lower. I paused and looked behind me to examine the darkening street. There was nothing.

  A porch light snapped on at a house across the street but no one came out. Maybe their garbage can, I thought with hope, but turned and sped up nonetheless. After a while, my heart was drumming and I was breathing harder with this faster pace but I didn’t let up. I had just crossed Woodley Avenue when a thought struck me. I stopped and thought for a second. From here I was closer to the Gallagers’ house than my own. I hesitated. I felt insecure, unsafe out there alone. It was cold and I didn’t know if I had really just imagined the sound. I felt paranoid, but I preferred being paranoid one time too many, to being dead one single time. I whipped around and recrossed the street but at an angle this time, headed up Woodley toward the familiar long driveway that spelled safety to me.

  Crash. I hadn’t gone more than five steps when the noise sounded behind me again. Clearly not a garbage can. I turned my head without stopping, fighting back panic, but there was nothing to see aside from the empty intersection, lit by a dim streetlight.

  I hurried up the street only to see a shape that was indistinct in the darkness, but seemingly human. It was distorted, as if made up of several layers of shadows, and it was waiting for me ahead.

  I turned around in alarm and began to run back to the intersection but very nearly collided with the shape, which was now in front of me. At these close quarters I could make out arms and legs, billowing weirdly in the night air.

  Too frightened to look up at the face, I retreated a few steps, then turned and bolted back up Woodley, my only thought being to reach the Gallagers’ driveway, even though it was plain the creature could overtake me with ease.

  Crash. Crash. The noise seemed deafening but for some reason the creature held back. I was being chased, sadistically, while my tormentor enjoyed my fear. My situation seemed hopeless, but the desire to survive kept me sprinting, digging now into the gravel of the driveway, feeling only the pressure of my pounding heart and the overwhelming need to reach the front door.

  My numb fingers curled around my bag, which I was clasping against my body with all my strength. My legs were getting weaker with every step and my feet became slow and clumsy. I heard the sound behind me again and forced my feet to not give in to the exhaustion.

  They carried me on, steadily enough to see the house come closer with each step. I saw a light in the windows to the left of the front door. They looked so appealing to me, so safe, that I forced another burst of energy into my lower extremities.

  Where was Jaden? Couldn’t he feel that I needed his help? Didn’t he sense that I was in danger?

  Keep going, keep going, my brain screamed, like some insane cheerleader in my head. Just a little bit more and I’d be at the door. Just another few steps and I would yell.

  With the loudest crash of all, the shadowy shape planted itself in my path and a fearful whooshing sound above my head made me stop, confused and cringing and completely out of ideas about what to do next. Above my head, a vaguely human-like shadow swooped in tight circles, dropping lower and lower, as the creature in front of me floated slowly closer and closer. There was something familiar about the figure in the air but I had no time to figure it out. I was positive there wasn’t a way to escape.

  The shadow in front of me moved forwards, floating above the ground. It was too quick for me to even think about running. I saw the gleam of a well-remembered medallion at the throat of the creature before me. Demon. It was reaching out for me.

  And then, just when I looked up for what I expected to be the last time, I felt a tremendous blow from behind.

  I hit the gravel face-down and immediately tasted blood. A g
reat weight pressed my entire body, down into the tiny stones below me. My bag was squeezed somewhere between my stomach and the ground. I was sure it would break my ribs if the weight on my back pushed down just a tiny bit harder.

  Then there was a brief flash of light—entirely blinding--that enveloped me. And a loud, rough scream. Then the weight was gone.

  I didn’t dare to lift my head and look around. Uncertain, I stayed motionless on the gravel. There was no sound, none at all.

  When I finally lifted my face from the ground, my eyes looked into darkness.

  Artist

  There I was, flattened on the gravel drive in the cold, not quite at the door of the refuge I had been so desperate to reach just a moment ago, and completely alone.

  Gingerly, I rolled to one side, wincing. Every part of my body was hurting. The front, where the weight on my back had pressed me into the stones beneath, and my back and neck where the weight had slammed me into the ground.

  I began to shiver as the freezing air worked its way through my clothes. It was cold, but also, I felt like I might be going into shock. I needed to act while I could—had to get inside, away from the demons in case they decided to return. I had known all along they would come for me sooner or later. Just because I had somehow escaped this time did not mean they wouldn’t be back.

  Carefully, clumsily, using both arms, I pushed myself into a sitting position and sat for a moment, catching my breath and trying to reconstruct the attack.

  The demon with the amulet around his neck had clearly been the creature chasing me on the street, toying with me until he chose to kill me at the Gallagers’ front door. But the one in the air, that was new. I squeezed my eyes shut to call back its image. I could only conjure up billowing shadows that somehow evoked a human form. It was a troublesome memory.