Angel of Vengeance

by Trevor O. Munson

  A sick, tight feeling in my stomach, I watched her break the man’s neck. Turning, Coraline looked at the wife still trying to make sense of it all on the couch and allowed her fangs to distend. I listened to the wife’s pitiful scream as she stood and for the first time I saw she was pregnant. Filled with horror, the woman ran for the stairs, arms cradled around her bulging belly. Frozen in place, stunned by the awful spectacle unfolding on the other side of the thin pane of glass, I watched Coraline smile hungrily as she transformed and gave chase.

  I moved then. I ran to the door, flung it open, and raced up the stairs and down a long hall toward the master bedroom where I could hear sounds of a struggle. It was too late by the time I got there. Too goddamn late. The woman was already dead, her neck snapped backward. If that had been the worst of it, it would have been bad enough, but it wasn’t. On the floor by the four-post bed, her face covered in gore, Coraline sat feeding on the unborn child she had ripped from the dead woman’s belly.

  She looked up when she sensed me standing in the doorway, strings of blood hanging from her fangs. She smiled and held the child out to me.

  “Hungry, baby?”

  For the first time I saw behind the mask. Really saw. Sure, I’d caught glimpses in the past—like when she murdered Roy—but I had always been able to explain it away. I told myself with all she had been through growing up she had good reason to do what she’d done to him, at least in her own mind. Now I realized she was a broken thing and always had been and I had just seen what she showed me; what she wanted me to see. Hard as it was to accept, I suddenly realized the girl I loved didn’t really exist and never had. She was just smoke and lies and mirrors.

  Coraline’s laughter chased me back the way I’d come; up the hall and down the stairs. I made it as far as the porch railing before throwing up in the landscaped bushes that ran along the front of the house. The same bushes no one would come out in the morning on their way to work and decide needed a trim.

  Hunched there, smelling the sour fumes of my own sick, I realized that Coraline was wrong. There had to be rules. Even for vampires. Rules gave meaning to an otherwise mindless existence. Without them, thinking beings were reduced to feeding, fighting, and fucking just because it was in their nature. If there was any point to any of this, then there had to be an attempt to rise above one’s nature; to be better than one’s basest needs and desires. Otherwise we were no better than animals.

  None of us.

  As it turned out, that night was a test. One we both failed. In my eyes Coraline was a monster and in hers I was weak and unworthy.

  I knew for sure that everything had changed when I awakened two nights later to find Coraline looming silently over my opened coffin.

  “What are you doing, Coraline?” I asked her, trying to keep the cold terror that was creeping into my guts out of my voice.

  “Just watching you sleep, baby,” she said with an emotionless smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “You know how I’ve always liked to watch you sleep.”

  After she had disappeared in darkness and gone to hunt, I lay there thinking for a long time. Brasher had been right. Whether or not she had planned to before, I knew now that the woman I loved intended to kill me and the only way I could stop her was by killing her first.

  Problems just don’t get much worse than that.

  I felt like Brasher; old and disappointed and too worn out to care. I’d given up everything for the love of a woman and found it was nothing more substantial than a morning mist that burns away with the first light of day. She was the reason I’d done it all; the reason I’d become this thing I hated.

  I considered taking my own life then. Just ending it. I had died for her before, I could do it again. One final gift. It would have been the easy way out, but if I did it I knew that Coraline would only go on committing atrocities. If I went that route—if I didn’t do anything to stop her—every innocent life she took from that point on would be on my shoulders. I couldn’t have that. Whether it was a murder or a murder/suicide, she had to go. After that I could decide if I wanted to live on without her or not, but on that one point I was clear. Coraline needed to be put down.

  My mind made up, I went and waited for the woman I loved to come home so I could kill her.

  Of course, in the end it wasn’t as simple as that.

  Things with Coraline never were.

  20

  CORALINE

  Things with Coraline ended like they started. With a bullet.

  I was waiting in the darkened study when she returned from her hunt. Coraline was as surprised to see me sitting there alone in the dark as I was to see the child in her arms. A lovely blonde-haired girl of about six in a black crushed velvet dress and shiny black metal-buckled shoes.

  “Look what I found,” she said merrily, holding the petrified child up for me to see. It made me feel sick to see the building terror in those sweet young eyes. “Doesn’t she look positively scrumptious, Mick?”

  “Put her down,” I said.

  “I will. Just as soon as I have a little taste.”

  “You’re not going to hurt that child.”

  Coraline laughed her windchime laugh as if she found me both ridiculous and amusing. She always did like to laugh at me. When she sobered she smiled circumspectly. “Now Mick, let’s don’t fight. You don’t have to join in, but don’t go telling me my business. I do what I want. You know that.”

  “Put her down,” I said again, showing her the .38 now. Coraline stared at it. For a moment I thought I saw fear flicker in her eyes. Her fingers tightened slightly, leaving imprints on the little girl’s soft pink flesh.

  “If I didn’t know better I’d think you were threatening me.”

  “I am.”

  “That’s a mistake, lover.”

  “Well, we all make ’em,” I said. “Just like you made one when you sent me to kill Brasher.”

  “How was that a mistake?”

  “Because he told me things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how you used me,” I said. “You needed me to kill him because you couldn’t do it yourself and turned me into a monster to do it.”

  “No. I saved you. They were going to execute you.”

  “They did execute me, baby,” I said. “But if you’d really wanted you could’ve gotten me outa there before they did it. You could have gotten me off the row any number of ways, but you didn’t. You traded on my feelings for you and you turned me.”

  “Is that what this is about?”

  I smiled bitterly. “It’s about a lot of things.”

  “So what now, lover? You gonna kill me?”

  I looked at her, taking in those glamour-girl features I used to like so much before I glimpsed what lurked behind them, and shrugged. “I guess maybe I am.”

  Coraline shook her head at me. “You can’t do it.”

  “You sure about that?”

  She nodded. “You can’t do it because you and I—we were made for each other, baby.”

  I snorted. “Yeah we’ve got something real special.”

  “What do you want? You want me to stop feeding on women and children. I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  Coraline bent and set the terrified child gently on the floor at her feet. “There, you see?”

  “Too late for that,” I said.

  “It’s not. It can’t be,” she said, moving like the shadow of death across the floor to me.

  “Stay back, Coraline.”

  “No. I won’t. It can’t end this way. I won’t let it. Not after all we’ve meant to each other. I may have made mistakes, Mick—I know I have—but I always loved you.”

  “Too late for that too.”

  “Stop saying that. It’s not too late. I could have killed you in your sleep earlier and I didn’t. I didn’t because we’ve stepped through a door together. We’re on the yellow brick road and there’s no going back. Not ever. We need each other. That’s what I realized.”


  She was right about one thing. This was Oz and I was the idiot Scarecrow and the sleeve-hearted Tin Man and the yellowbelly Lion all rolled into one. Even knowing all I knew, my heart was telling me one thing and my brain another and I was too damn scared to pick between them. Pathetic.

  “Fine.” A defiant look in her eye, Coraline took hold of the barrel of the gun and placed it dead center between her breasts. “If you can look me in the eye and tell me you don’t love me then shoot me, Mick. Kill me. I want you to. None of this is worth a damn thing to me if you don’t.”

  My head spun like a Kansas twister as I focused on the gun, trying to get right about what I needed to do. It was so clear before, but now it was no good. I was just as under her spell as I had always been.

  “You have to change,” I said. “You have to.”

  “I will, baby. I will. You’ll see.”

  “It can’t be like this. We have to have rules.”

  “We will. Whatever you want. Whatever you say.”

  “Promise me.”

  She looked me earnestly. “I promise.”

  Shaking with emotion, I dropped my arm to my side and let the gun clatter to the floor.

  Coraline wrapped her arms around me like twin white snakes and pulled me close. “There now, you see—it’s all going to be okay, darling. So long as we have each other,” she said, pressing her cool wet mouth to mine.

  She tasted like fate.

  When it came, the bullet took me by surprise; she always was good at surprising me. Looking down I saw the big ugly gaping red mouth the double-barrel Derringer she held had torn in my gut. Coraline smiled at me. Eyes on that smile, I stumbled back as the pain set in, fierce as a chemical burn. It was bad. Real bad, if you want to know the truth. But it didn’t hurt me half as much as that smile, because some smiles just hurt worse than bullets.

  “Silver bullets?” I asked, jaw clenched against the pain.

  “Only the best for you,” she said. “I got the gun special while I was out tonight. I was going to seduce you and then kill you while you slept in my arms—send you off with a bang—but this will work too.” She thumbed the hammer back on the second barrel and took aim. “Sorry, baby.”

  The second bullet caught me in the neck. It was probably intended for my head, but I had benefited from the Derringer’s well-documented lack of accuracy. It was meant for close work. A whore’s gun. Seemed appropriate.

  I collapsed on my back to the floor.

  Dropping the empty pistol, Coraline moved toward me, fangs distending and eyes blackening as she came. Weak from blood loss and pain, I could only watch as she settled down atop me as she had so many times before. Only it wasn’t love she was after this time, it was death. Her fangs bit deep into my neck wound and I felt my life’s blood sucked from me in a torrent. The world grayed at the edges and I knew it was too late. This was how it would end.

  Then something brushed my fingertips. Moving only my eyes, I saw the child over Coraline’s shoulder crouched nearby. Wide-eyed and silent, she had slipped up and pushed the .38 into reach. I can’t imagine the resolve it must have taken, the sheer terror she must have overcome to do it, but I didn’t have time to think about it. My heart was already beginning to sputter like an engine low on fuel.

  I grabbed the gun, shoved it between us and emptied it into my dark angel. Gravely hurt, Coraline sagged atop me.

  We lay there on the floor like spent lovers, and then, little by little, I inched myself within reach of her neck. I admired the cool Elizabethan white of it, kissed her to mark the spot, and then I let my fangs distend and I fed.

  I drank her to the cliff’s edge of death, then I stopped and looked into her eyes. Without blood to sustain her, her skin was paper white. She looked withered; atrophied like some of the terminally ill I had seen during my time in the hospital. I could sense her pain. And her seething hatred. But mostly I could sense her fear. Her fear of the ever after and the punishment she suddenly worried might await her there.

  As I watched, she turned back. Her eyes drained of blood. Her fangs and brow receded. Her jaw re-hinged. And for a moment I saw the girl I had met at that club way back when. The one I’d taken a fall for I could never get up from. My precious doe-eyed beauty who wanted to see the dark side of the world at any cost, and who had recognized in me the sucker who could show it to her. Well, she’d gotten her wish, hadn’t she?

  Sure she had.

  I pushed Coraline off me and somehow managed to get to my feet. The study door was open and the girl was gone. Off hiding somewhere. Smart kid.

  With great effort I bent and picked Coraline up and carried her to the cold stone fireplace where I had burnt Brasher. Curled like the baby Jesus in a manger of ashes, her eyes followed me as I moved off and returned bearing a tin of kerosene.

  I stood over her, trying to come up with something more to say, but there wasn’t anything. It had all been said and none of it had made a bit of difference. It was over. Everything was over. I hunted up a cigarette to fill the silence instead.

  Coraline shuddered slightly as I doused her with the kerosene. It matted her hair and ran down her face and stung her eyes. She looked at me forlornly as I struck a long wooden fireplace match and lit my smoke with it. Her lips moved in a silent plea.

  “Sorry, baby,” I said.

  The match seemed to take a lifetime to fall. The first flames licked at her uncertainly, as if sampling an unfamiliar dish for the first time, and then deciding they liked the taste, rose and consumed her. Heartbroken and full of regret, I watched her blacken and die a vampire’s death. Like Brasher before her, Coraline’s eyes never left mine. Near the end, her lovely lips twitched again, but her final words to me were lost in a sigh of death and release.

  Knowing I could never live here now, I spilled more kerosene and set the whole place ablaze. If I hadn’t had the kid to worry about I might just have sat down and let myself burn up with it. But I did. With Coraline’s death I’d sealed a pact to rise above my nature. To be better.

  I found her hiding among dust bunnies under a canopied bed in a darkened guestroom. She let out a piercing brain-freeze scream and kicked her buckled shoes at me as I bent and peered at her under the dust ruffle.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s me. What’s your name?”

  “Lisabeth.”

  She trembled like a rabbit as I helped her out from underneath and lifted her small form into my arms. She grabbed onto my neck for dear life and I carried her from the house like that as it burned down around us. Outside, the growing wail of sirens pierced the night like screams of horror. I loaded her into the passenger seat of Brasher’s Cadillac, went around, got in.

  “I want my mommy,” Lisabeth whispered, as I started the car up and put it in gear.

  “Me too, kid,” I said.

  She just looked at me. I just drove.

  21

  Through the red haze of pain racking my body I come around to find Coombs and Elliot in the interrogation room with me again. I’m so out of it I’ve totally missed their entrance.

  “What’s going on? You on the drugs, son?” Coombs asks.

  “Son” he calls me. I’m old enough to have banged his grandmother. Hell, maybe I did.

  “Looks like narcotic withdrawal to me,” Elliot says.

  If he only knew. What I’m going through at present makes narcotic withdrawal look like a day at the beach. I would know.

  “You play ball with us, maybe we could get you a little something to help you out with that. Something to take the edge off,” Coombs says.

  The only thing that’s going to take the edge off at this point is running through his fat-clogged arteries. The way things are looking, I might just have to take him up on that offer. I’m going to have to get some blood in me if I’m going to get out of here. I’m in too much pain, too weakened to escape without it.

  The door opens and the blue-suit who took me to make my phone call steps in.

  “The witness here
?” Coombs asks.

  The blue-suit nods. “We’re all set up.”

  “Good.”

  “Sure you don’t want to make a confession before we go through with this, Angel?” Elliot asks me. “It’ll be too late to cooperate after this guy fingers you.”

  “Okay, I confess—I think your nose is way too big for your face. Makes you look like one of those caricatures they draw down at Venice Beach.” I smile. The pain is making me mean.

  The punch comes from Coombs. A hard one in the gut. It knocks the breath out of me, doubles me over the table.

  “You didn’t see that,” Coombs says to the uni still standing in the doorway.

  “See what?” the guy says, an ugly grin spread over the lower half of his face like bacon grease.

  “You know, you’re a pretty funny guy, Angel,” Elliot says, leaning close. “But guess who’s gonna be laughin’ when you’re sitting on your ass on death row?”

  “Been there, done that.”

  “Fuckin’ guy’s delusional,” Elliot says.

  “Whaddya expect? He’s a junkie,” Coombs says with disgust. “C’mon, let’s get this over with before he starts shittin’ an’ pukin’ himself.”

  They uncuff me and drag me off to the lineup.

  It’s me and seven other guys, most of them grungy looking undercover cops. We stand in front of a one-way mirror under bright lights and a series of numbers. We go through the usual process. Me, I’m lucky number seven.

  An authoritative voice comes over the loudspeaker. “Number six step forward.”

  Six, a denim-clad beanpole with a scraggly beard and greasy ponytail, steps forward.

  “Say the line,” the voice says.

  “That’s as good as it’s going to get around here for you,” six says, just like the five others before him did.

  “Step back.”

  Six steps back.

  “Seven, step forward.”

  I feel like I’m going to collapse any minute, but until then I do as I’m told.

  “Say the line.”

  I say it.

  “Step back.”

  I step back and wait while number eight goes through the rigmarole. Then I wait some more. I sense the eyes on me from the other side. They don’t know it, but if I strain I can hear them talking. Faintly.