Broken Angels

by Harambee K. Grey-Sun

a common promise,

  a compromise between false love,

  imperfect peace.”

  The singing continued after the lyrics stopped, but there was no need for more words. Darryl knew them. They were a perversion of the lines that began Death’s Heart. He opened his mouth to speak, but someone else spoke first.

  “There’s something very primal about poetry, don’t you think?”

  This too was familiar. The voice, not the words. It was the same chalky voice of the woman he’d heard but not seen a moment before he blacked out…when? How long ago had that happened?

  Questions, questions—Darryl had a bagful. He chose one closest to the top.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “At the heart of what really matters,” someone answered.

  Riddles. Darryl was in no mood or condition to deal with them.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “What am I not?” the voice responded. “A knot of your peaceful deeds—blessings kissing sins—made flesh.”

  Damn it. Darryl’s headache flared. He decided to try one last time before switching tactics.

  “What happened to me?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

  “You should be more careful about what you drink.” These words were spoken by a far more familiar voice. “And about what you think.”

  “Veronica,” Darryl said.

  “What happened to ‘V.,’ honey? Or ‘Miss Blake’?”

  She or someone else at the club had put something in his orange juice. He’d been drugged. That had to be it. That was the source of his headache. Some kind of drug used to help tenderize his mind before knocking him out with a burst of concentrated light. Drugs, music, poetic words—a magick concoction. Whatever Veronica had done, she was keeping it going.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

  “Helping you save your life,” she said. “And helping you save our world.”

  Darryl couldn’t figure her position by just listening to her. He got to his feet and looked around, in every direction, turning and readying himself for a confrontation. The glowing circles didn’t help.

  But he didn’t need them.

  Veronica emerged from the blackness less than ten feet in front of him, giving Darryl a start. She stopped at the edge of his red circle. It took him a moment to notice that, as she appeared, her partner had done the same directly behind him. The similarities and differences in the two women’s appearances were striking, and strange.

  Veronica wore a cloud-white halter gown that showed off both shoulders and the fuchsia-and-indigo tattoo that had disturbed Darryl enough to do some quick Internet research on its meaning; he’d only discovered the symbol represented something called “Charma.” In the area of her right thigh, Veronica’s white gown displayed a tilted tomato-red cross; Darryl couldn’t imagine what it might represent. Veronica’s partner wore the same outfit, only it was midnight-black instead of white and had a tilted lightning-blue cross on the upper half of the gown, over her left breast. She had no tattoos, but her skin had the color, sheen, and smoothness of a clean, white ceramic vase.

  “Welcome to the dark room,” she said.

  Maybe it was because he was seeing her for the first time, or may-be it was because he wanted to get a good look at the one who’d managed to evade all of his Watcher-agent-honed senses before pinning his arms behind him with unusual strength. For whatever reason, Darryl’s eyes were drawn to this woman. He made a quick study of her long cherry-red nails, her chin-length, ink-black hair, and her expressionless face. In her wide-open eyes, eggplant irises were on clear display, as if her top and bottom eyelids were magnetically repelling each other. She seemed incapable of blinking, and Darryl had to make a strong conscious effort to do so when his pupils were in direct line with hers. The link was no easier to break than it had been to establish, as she was at least a full head taller than him. He had to look upward and she downward in order for their eyes to even meet. But he managed to snap the line, and he saw she was barefoot.

  Darryl turned to look at Veronica, who was also barefoot and standing nearly seven feet tall, as if she’d undergone a significant growth spurt since he’d last seen her, outside, out in nature’s air and light. Despite the dizzy-ill feeling the dark and boundless room gave him, Darryl wasn’t confident the women’s heights were an optical illusion.

  “Don’t look so worried, honey,” Veronica said. “Soon you’re going to see a beautiful day.”

  “We’re going to help make all your fantasies come true,” the other woman said.

  “Skip the fucking rhetoric, riddles, and other bullshit.” Darryl tried to figure a safe position from where he could keep his eyes on both of them at once. “Just tell me plainly what the hell’s going on, what you want from me.”

  “Charity.” “Clarity.”

  Veronica and her partner spoke the rhyming words simultaneously, but they were less of an answer and more of a cue. Once spoken, three more women appeared out of the black. One of them wore a tangerine-colored gown; another, a lemon-yellow gown; the third, a lime-green gown. With the exception of the tilted white cross on each, the gowns were uniform in their color. The three women stood on the painted circles that fit them. None wore heels or any other kind of footwear, but Darryl saw they all appeared to stand nearly seven feet tall, just like Veronica and her partner.

  He couldn’t find a position where he could keep his eyes on everyone at once. The ladies had him surrounded. Darryl would have to keep turning, keep spinning around, and keep making contributions to his increasing sense of dizziness as he watched them.

  “The girls and I had a little book club meeting the other night,” Veronica said with a distorted smile. “Lots of wine and giggles. I know you’ll just love to hear what we discussed.”

  “Death’s Heart,” her black-haired partner said. “The book of your despicable little life.”

  Another cue—the women all rushed to speak at once. Each offered her own commentary on the book, her own unique interpretation, and her own biting criticism. As they talked, Veronica and her partner stood still while the ladies in orange, yellow, and green walked along the paths of their colorful circles—two clockwise, the third counterclockwise—revolving around him. Whatever they were saying meant little to Darryl; he couldn’t even understand most of them. But he recognized the tactic. It was taken from The Blackbook of Autumn Numbers.

  Another book of narrative dramatic poetry, The Blackbook detailed the exploits of a lecherous teenager, a young man who at one point was confronted by the phantoms of his conquests. The armed phantoms taunted him about his past crimes of indifferent passion, cutting him with their words and with very sharp swords. The protagonist ended up okay, physically, after he fought back with a bigger sword and very few words of his own; it turned out the confrontation was just a dream, a fantasy with the theme of revenge; but he woke up psychologically damaged.

  Darryl knew his present experience was no dream, and he couldn’t fathom how he might survive it, psychologically or otherwise. So he retreated by resorting to his first tactic of defense, asking questions, and hoping for coherent answers this time.

  “I don’t know what any of you are talking about,” he said. “I just want to know, why am I here?”

  “To fill the holes in your holey book, honey,” Veronica said.

  Darryl ignored the others and looked at her, in her visible eye, remembering their last time together.

  “Veronica,” he said, “please. Just tell me what all this is about. Why’ve you brought me here?”

  “You brought yourself here,” she said. “This is a place of peace, after all. At least, in a very warped sense. Just as warped as you’ve left the minds and senses of too many women. Pretending to do them favors by rearranging their consciousness, washing white their minds while babbling to them about the blues.”

  “What? Listen, what I did—”

  Something caught in Darryl’s throat. It was too d
ry. He was dehydrated. He hacked while the other women in the room took the opportunity to throw more accusations at him, more insults, and more damning criticisms. He ignored them, and, when he could summon the words, he responded only to Veronica, but he spoke loud enough for all to hear.

  “I did what I did—to women and men—to help them. That’s all. If you had any sense, if you could see and think clearly, you’d know and understand this world is nothing but pain and suffering. Falling in love for most is a just a trip into an imperfect peace, an illusion that just makes things worse. I gave security to the insecure.” “The world doesn’t need your gifts,” Veronica said. “It needs those of a true saint.”

  “An artist,” the woman in the green gown said.

  “The Greatest Artist,” the woman in orange said. “Clearly not you.”

  “But you do have a great value,” the woman in yellow said, “a real use.”

  “You just need a little more seasoning,” the woman in black said.

  “We got to you just in time,” the woman in green said. “For you, and for the world.”

  “If you’d been allowed to go on your merry way,” Veronica said, “eventually you would’ve ventured into apocryphal territory, following in the footsteps of Vastion.”

  Darryl remembered. Veronica had an expanded version of Death’s Heart. He again looked at that bold blue eye.

  “How did it end?” he asked.

  “Death’s Heart?” she asked. “Not with a beautiful creation. Your supernatural role model, Vastion, was a fool in Love, and a greater fool outside of it. I guess that’s what happens when boys lose their fathers.”

  The other women in the room laughed. Darryl ignored them. Only what Veronica had to say was important to him.

  “In chapter Indigo,” she continued, “among his other crimes, that son of Love Vastion sires a child on a human woman, a child who, while still a fetus, is preternaturally aware of its own nature. Seeing itself as too good for a world ruled by the false god Love, the child kills the mother, Kaprice, a worshipper of the false god, while still in her womb.”

  “What?” Darryl said.

  “Oh, it gets worse,” the porcelain-skinned woman said.

  Darryl turned and found himself again staring into her eggplantdyed eyes. He felt his headache blossoming and heard a faint humming as he gazed through those irises into the pupils.

  “But there’s no need for you to know the rest,” she said. “You know enough.”

  Darryl broke the visual link with another herculean effort and turned away, resolving not to make eye contact with any of them again.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, looking at their gowns. “I don’t believe any of this.”

  “Oh, no?” the woman in the yellow gown said. “The empty gift-giver doesn’t believe? No surprise.”

  “What you have believed,” the woman in orange said, “has been dangerous enough.”

  “There’s no room in your proud philosophy for anything meaningful,” the woman in green said. “No progress. Nothing.”

  “Only spaces for the absence of love. No positive creation.”

  “Couldn’t you see that?” Veronica asked. “Were you reading that stupid book with your eyes closed?” Her tone carried far more anger than Darryl thought her capable of. “Didn’t it occur to you that Vastion was heading down a twisted path when he said, ‘She wants to pursue the wrong man? Let her have him. She gets mistreated, that’s her dessert, her problem’? Those dumb lines said nothing to you? Those ignorant lines, from the last poem in the version of the book you’ve memorized?”

  She walked to her right as the woman in black walked to her left. They were trading places, keeping Darryl between them.

  “See, I know you, honey,” Veronica said. “You’re fundamentally a good person. But you’ve gotten out of touch with the fundamentals.”

  Darryl struggled against what they were saying, what they were doing, and what was happening within his own skull. He was done speaking, and tired of listening. He put his hands on his ears and shook his head, but their words continued to come through.

  “It’s time for you to settle down, honey. Make a different type of commitment. We’ll put you on the path that leads beyond Vast, beyond Indigo.”

  “We’ll introduce you to The Beautiful One.”

  “But you can’t meet her in your present condition.”

  “First, we need to get the Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, and Blue out of you.”

  The white-skinned woman spoke the colorful sentence, and she punctuated it with a shove. Darryl stumbled toward Veronica, who grabbed his arm and used his momentum to swing him toward the woman in yellow. He managed to stop himself and sidestep out of the way of the woman’s swinging fist, but his years of training with the IAI failed him. He couldn’t think to counterattack. In fact, Darryl had no reaction at all when he looked up at the yellow-clad woman’s face and saw she had assumed the appearance of Melissa Packard, one of his earliest charity cases.

  Her appearance stunned him, and the woman’s kick stung him when her razor-sharp toenails dug deep into the skin of his left thigh. Her backhanded slap across his cheek cut his holler short. And when he raised his arm to block what looked like a two-fingered poke at his eyes, the woman grabbed the arm and swung him toward another.

  The woman in the yellow gown had more than lady-like strength, possibly even more than human-like strength. Her swinging motion propelled Darryl at least fifteen feet across the floor. He would’ve stumbled on even farther if not stopped by a flat-footed kick to the center of his chest. Darryl fell on his back, hard.

  The lady in lime who’d kicked him bent over Darryl and grabbed the top of his head with her right hand. She used just one arm to pull him back up to his feet. He didn’t marvel at her strength; he marveled at her face, the face that had taken on the appearance of another past charity case.

  “Jana?” Darryl stuttered the name.

  “Uh-huh,” the smiling woman said, “and nuh-uh,” before punching him in the nose. Darryl felt the impact, starting at the point of contact and rippling outward toward the forehead, ears, and chin. If she’d let go, he would’ve fallen straight to his back again. But as he was still standing and staring at the grinning woman he both knew and didn’t know, he couldn’t do anything but breathe through his gaping mouth while a thick, sticky stream of blood flowed from his nostrils.

  The woman stared back at him as she recited a verse of something that was either terrible poetry or horrible pop-music lyrics. As bad and pointless as it sounded to him, it had the effect of changing the shape and contours of its speaker’s face. The words acted like a spell. A Dirty-Light Magick trick. When she stopped reciting, Darryl saw the woman appeared as yet another charity case.

  “Irma—”

  The woman punched Darryl in the nose again and, with the hand that had a firm grasp on his head, shoved him to stumble several feet across the floor, into the presence of the pale woman in black.

  The porcelain-skinned woman appeared as she had before, her face wide-eyed and her mouth tight-lipped, unblinking and unexpressive. She grabbed Darryl by his shoulders and dug her broken-glass-sharp nails into his skin, looking him in his wincing eyes. Behind him, Veronica spoke.

  “Vanessa there actually believes you to be much sexier than I ever did.” Snideness coated each word. “Now, don’t get me wrong, you are a very handsome man, with that vanilla-violet tan and all, but I just never felt the desire to go as far with you as she would. That level of passion just isn’t in my blood.”

  As if reacting to Veronica’s cue, Vanessa opened her mouth wider than she should’ve been able, thrust her face closer, and closed her eyes and mouth. Her eyelids finally touched each other, but her lips didn’t. They were still apart, touching the skin of Darryl’s lower neck as Vanessa’s long, sharpened cuspids bit deep into his flesh. Darryl screamed louder than he’d screamed in years. The sight and sound of it all seemed to excite Vanessa. She opened her jaws and
licked the neck wound, lapping the blood as it seeped out.

  Darryl struggled, trying as best he could to ignore the pain, the pain in his head and the pain on his body. But Vanessa’s grip was much too strong. He couldn’t get free. Worse, he began to feel a cold, tingly sensation where her hands touched his skin, a sensation steadily spreading outward, getting colder as it moved toward his neck and down toward his elbows. Numbness. Soon he wouldn’t be able turn his head or move his arms. Soon he wouldn’t be able to fight back with anything but his legs, assuming he could remain conscious long enough to use them. He had to do something now.

  Darryl reared back and kicked Vanessa’s shin. He hollered when the impact of his unprotected foot against her skin made him feel as if he’d kicked an unyielding slab of ice. He may’ve broken his toes.

  Veronica laughed. “Looks like he’s trying to break up with you, Vanessa. Why don’t you let him go? I’ll be glad to welcome him back into my arms.”

  Vanessa ran her tongue across Darryl’s upper lip and the area under his leaking nostrils. She pulled back her head and made sure Darryl saw as she mixed some of her saliva with the blood and mucous on her tongue, giving the thick substances a bit more fluidity.

  His mouth was wide open. It was his only way to breathe. But when Vanessa kissed him, forcing the repellant concoction from her mouth into his, Darryl couldn’t breathe or move. Only a small part of his consciousness realized the action was perversion of his very own honey-kiss, his method of making his saliva more like honey before kissing his charity cases for the final time. Most of his thoughts, however, were focused on how to get free as he gagged and continued to struggle. It wasn’t until Veronica asked for him again that Vanessa spun him around and shoved him away.

  As dizzied as he was, as battered as he was, Darryl’s victimizers had made a mistake—they’d announced what they were going to do before they did it. He went on the offensive the moment he was released.

  He could only see through bleary eyes, but indistinct shapes were enough for him. He swung his right fist at Veronica’s head. Thanks to the disorientation, or the impaired vision, or the height difference, the punch only hit her in the neck, but it was enough. It hurt her. It did its job.