Strange Angels sa-1

by Lili St. Crow

  The cold was full of exhaust and a bitter metal tang that probably meant more snow. I crunched down the sidewalk—a sheet of deicer pellets that looked like blue rock salt lay unreeled in front of every downtown business—toward the pay phone. I was pretty sure it worked; it’d given me a dial tone earlier when we walked past toward the coffee shop.

  I dug in my pocket for quarters and the number, copied onto a blank anonymous scrap of notepaper. I ran over the plan again, trying to look for weak spots or angles, anything I’d missed, and I suddenly wondered if Dad had ever felt this way. This responsible. Throat dry, stomach churning, worry like a diamond-eyed rat chewing inside my head with bright, sharp teeth.

  When I was little, I used to think he could do anything. He’d show up at Gran’s every few months, sometimes with bruises or walking a little slow, and Gran would bake a cake, lay out a supper with everything he liked. It got to where I could tell when he was coming in by how early Gran got up and started cooking in the morning. She always knew before he would come bouncing up the washboard driveway, even though the house had no phone.

  I remembered him picking me up and whirling around until I was dizzy while I shrieked with laughter in the front yard, a field of daisies and grass Gran hacked at with a machete every once in a while. Or him taking me out into the woods a little later and teaching me to shoot—first plinking with a BB gun, then with a .22 rifle, and last of all with a pistol and a shotgun. That was my twelfth summer, the one before Gran died.

  I shook the memory away and stepped up to the half-booth. The mouthpiece slipped against my gloves, and I consoled myself that not a lot of germs would be able to live on it when it was this goddamn cold. I plugged the quarters in and dialed, then stuffed the paper back into my pocket. Leave no trace, Dru girl. Think about what you’re doing.

  I waited, heart pounding, a nasty sour taste filling my throat up to my back teeth.

  Ringing. The phone worked, at least. Two rings. Three. Four.

  Someone picked up.

  They didn’t say anything, though. Instead, there was the peculiar not-quite-dead sound of a line with someone breathing on the other end. I listened, counting off the seconds. There was faint, indecipherable noise in the background, like traffic.

  One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand.

  There was a hissing sound, breath escaping between tongue and teeth, not quite whistling.

  Six one thousand. Seven one thousand. Eight one thousand.

  “Don’t hang up, little girl.” Male. Sounded pretty young, too, but something in the spacing of the words was off. Like an accent, and unlike.

  My entire body flushed hot, then chilled. I tasted wax oranges and salt, but faintly. Nine one thousand. Ten one thousand.

  “Quiet as a mouse.” There was a short, bitter little laugh, as if the guy at the other end had a mouthful of something foul. “Fine. When you’re ready for more answers, come find me. Corner of Burke and 72nd. You can just walk right in.”

  Fourteen one thousand. Fifteen one thousand. I jammed the receiver back down in its cradle and stepped back, breathing heavily, all my muscles threatening to turn into noodles. Jesus. Jesus Christ.

  I glanced around. The dangerous taste of oranges intensified, coating my tongue. Shit. What now? My legs took care of moving me away from the phone, hugging the building side of the walk. There were even dry patches where the building overhangs kept the snow off.

  I didn’t wait to see if Graves peeled off and headed for the bus. I hoped he’d be smart.

  Burke and 72 nd. I had to find a map. The transit center would have one, and it was a good place to lose a tail. I wasn’t sure if someone was following, but the thick, clotted citrus filling my mouth warned me. Sometimes Real World baddies can get a lock on you even over the phone line, Dad said—hey, they were psychic, too. It was why we bothered being cautious about phone numbers—and my best bet was getting enough distance to confuse whoever it was.

  There hadn’t been an inked cross, so it wasn’t a safe number. But he, whoever he was, might not know for sure it was me. Hopefully he wouldn’t know if Dad had given the number to another hunter, if there had been a backup, or just who I was.

  Too much you don’t know, Dru. This might have been a mistake.

  Still, now I knew something. I knew where a trap was. Where there was a trap, there was a way to spring it and find out who was behind it. If I was careful, and lucky.

  You might be careful, but you’re just a kid. Dad should be doing this. He was smart and strong, and if someone turned him into a walking corpse, you don’t have a chance.

  But I was all there was. What else was I going to do?

  Skip town. Get the hell out.

  Yeah, right. In the snow. With no car. That sounded like a way to get caught by something or someone. And not a nice way, either.

  I put my head down and lengthened my stride, still sticking to the building side. The sky was a freezing, aching blue, clouds blinking over the lens of the heavens. Some of them were heavy gray, a thick billowing edge trailing infinity in its wake.

  I didn’t look back to see if Graves was doing what I’d told him. He was on his own for the next few hours, until I was sure it was safe for me to go home.

  Until I was sure I wouldn’t bring anything home with me.

  The transit center was two streets over. I stood looking at a map of downtown and finally found Burke and 72nd on the edge, where the streets started to bleed away into the suburbs. Only one bus went out that way. I checked the sky, traced the route with my fingertips, looked for escapes. There weren’t any.

  This would be a lot easier if I had the truck. Come on, Dru. Plan. Use that brain.

  I stood staring at the transit map, willing it to show me something different. I needed to make sure my trail was clear, go home, and plan.

  A bolt of glassy pain lanced through the center of my brain. I sucked in a breath, flinching, but it passed as soon as it had come, leaving only a ringing sound in its wake, like a wet wineglass stroked just right. Everything else was drowned in silence like deep water.

  I looked up.

  The world stood frozen in sharp detail. The buses were caught mid-idle, clouds of breath hanging out of everyone’s mouth, each puff of exhaust or breath solid like wax castings. A guy in a long dark coat was flicking away a cigarette butt, its smoke trailing thinly from his fingers like a leash. People stood, balanced on one foot or another, like the movie of life had just hit pause and someone had forgotten to tell me.

  A snow-pale fluttering moved atop one of the buses. I stared.

  There, on top of the long, blunt-nosed shape, Granmama’s white owl fluffed its wings, pinned me with a yellow stare. Its head cocked to the side, as if to say, What’s up, boss?

  It was hard to move. Clear air had hardened to syrup around me. The best I could manage was a swimming amble, fighting against drag. Three steps, four, toward the bus, which stood with its door open, the driver inside motionless, a CB handset to his mouth and his eyes shut, in the middle of a blink.

  The world snapped around me like a rubber band. Sound flooded back, engines and coughs and people talking, the low moan of the wind. I stood for a moment, staring up at the driver as he finished jabbering into the radio and glanced down at me.

  “Getting on the bus, kid?” He had Santa Claus apple cheeks and a full white beard, and a kerchief of the American flag knotted around his neck. His knuckles were swollen and reddened, and he looked as cheerful and nonthreatening as you’d want someone to be behind the wheel of several tons.

  I climbed aboard, heart thumping, showed my bus pass, and took a seat a quarter of the way back—close enough to the driver that delinquents or crazies in the rear wouldn’t bother me, but far enough back the driver wouldn’t notice much of anything I did unless I had some sort of vomiting seizure or something.

  The way I felt, a seizure might’ve been an option. I had to struggle to breathe deeply.

  I was sweating u
nder my coat, scarf, and hat. But my teeth kept wanting to chatter, and goose bumps prickled hot and hard on my arms and legs. I folded my arms, trying not to feel as if I was hugging myself for comfort, and when the bus started up and began lurching, I wondered if the owl was still on top. Or if anyone would see it.

  Way to go with the woo-woo, Dru. But there was a curious comfort—Gran had taught me about running on intuition. If her owl was here, I didn’t have to worry much about being led astray. I just had to go with it, and I didn’t have to convince Dad that it was serious and for real instead of just kid fears or an overactive imagination. Sure, I was supposed to watch out for stuff he couldn’t eyeball, and he always said my instincts were good. . . . But still, I guess adults have problems with this sort of thing, even when they know the monsters are out there.

  I’d never had the world stop around me before. And the owl had never shown up during broad daylight. It was a nighttime thing, a dream thing.

  I shivered again.

  Watch your ass, Dru. Just because you’re getting a message doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

  It was just what Dad would have said. Gran might have just nodded, her peaky gray eyebrows going up in that particular way, the one that meant I’d just stated something so obvious it didn’t bear repeating or remarking on.

  I swallowed a sudden wave of homesick loneliness. The taste of oranges faded as the bus wallowed through a turn, tires rasping and gritting on sand-covered roadtop, and crept out of the transit center. I looked steadily out the window, my eyes pricking with hot tears, and waited for the next thing.

  * * *

  Two hours later the sky had turned into a pale gray bruise, small stones of snow were pattering down, and my mouth tasted like I’d been walking in a citrus grove again. I heard that same ringing, like a gong after its tone has faded but before it stops vibrating, and pulled the stop cord. My hand just flashed out and caught it, really without any direction on my part.

  Running on intuition is like that. You never know what crazy shit’s going to happen next.

  “Keep warm out there,” the driver said as I passed. He’d said the same thing to every ever-loving person who got off. I just pulled my cap further down, almost to my eyebrows, and hoped I wouldn’t slip and fall on my ass when I hit the ground outside.

  I exhaled sharply, looked around. The bus shelter here was a shell of plastic, scarred with graffiti, and warehouses slumped all around under the iron-dark sky. The light had deepened but was failing fast, sunshine struggling to make it through whirling snow. It was late in the afternoon, and it gets dark quickly in winter this far north.

  Real dark, and real quickly.

  I cast around. Considered spitting to get the taste of wax oranges off my tongue. The snow hissed, driving in small particles against the bus shelter, and Granmama’s owl glided in on soft muffled wings, a cleaner white than the dirty sky.

  You know, I’d be diagnosed crazy if I told a shrink about this. What the hell is an owl doing out here? But I followed carefully, my soles crunching against snow that started to creak when I stepped in it. What sidewalk there was wasn’t cleared out here—I had to fight through a shin-deep freeze, scramble over a heap of dirty crap thrown up by snowplows, and cross the street. Then there was another waist-high mountain of exhaust-blackened, sand-laden snow to scale, and the mouth of a dark alley to navigate. The owl glided in noiselessly as if on a string, a tongue sliding through a gap in broken teeth. The warehouses on either side were abandoned, Sunshine Meatpacking on one faded sign spackled with chunks of frozen stuff plastered there by the wind.

  The alley had been sheltered from the worst of the snow. It was stacked with wooden pallets and other assorted junk. Good for an ambush, especially with the shadows growing by the second. The owl floated above me in a tight circle, then sailed down and around a bend.

  Great. A blind turn in an alley. Dad would be motioning me back to the open end of it to keep watch. He’d go from cover to cover, but I was just strolling down the middle as if I was on rails.

  Tiny little dots of snow drifted down one at a time, the alley only getting a desultory sprinkling. The wind rose with a moan, tiny ice pellets whispering wherever they touched a flat surface. I slipped my right hand in my pocket, touched the switchblade’s cold handle. My fingertips were frozen solid, not stinging anymore.

  The alley made an L shape, and the bend was choked with junk on either side. I halted, peered around the corner, saw more daylight.

  Looks okay. I looked up—no owl. The oranges vanished, leaving only the cold and the sudden miserable feeling that I was being watched.

  I slid through the gap between pallets and headed down the other half of the alley. There was less trash here, but it looked older and more rotten—a drift of decaying newspaper over a shape that might have been human.

  I flinched nervously. Looked again and it was just a busted-down old couch. Overflowing trash cans, one with condensation frozen on its sides, frost flowers blooming across the galvanized surface. I shuddered at the thought of what they might have in them and hurried past, because the end of the alley suddenly seemed brighter.

  I came out, blinking, in a weedy, trash-strewn vacant space. At the far end, a chain-link fence sloped drunkenly back and forth. It looked weirdly familiar. And there on the other side . . .

  I turned in a full circle. Yep, there were the two buildings squinched together, broken glass staring out into the cold night. I’d seen them from a different angle. I finished the turn, squinted at the chain-link fence. Let out a disbelieving sigh, my breath louder than the snow.

  Our truck hunched on the other side of the fence. It was buried under a hood of deep snow, but I’d know the camper shape anywhere. And under the snow it was faded blue, the blue of a summer sky, the best color in the world.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered. The buildings behind me crouched, groaning like they intended to get up and hobble for a hot bath.

  I took another two steps forward, through a knee-deep drift. The wind smacked me, rising and moaning eerily, loaded with stinging snow-buckshot. My jeans were sodden, clinging below the knee, and I couldn’t feel my feet. I lurched forward again, tripped over something buried under the snow, and fell headlong. My palms hit snow, and I hoped there was nothing sharp under its soft white blanket.

  Good one, Dru. I floundered up to my feet, shaking like a dog to get the powdery stuff off me. Considered cursing, but another bolt of pain slung through my head, this one jolting down my neck and spreading across my sore, aching back. I let out a half-garbled sound and hunched, crossing my arms over my belly, cold burning against my cheeks.

  I pulled back into my own head with an effort, clenching myself like a fist. My eyes ran with hot water, and I lurched to my feet, aware of how the light was draining from the sky.

  Get to the truck. It was Dad’s voice again, urgent but calm. Get to the truck NOW. Run, Dru. Run.

  I made it up and staggered. My feet were so cold I didn’t think I could run, but I gave it a go just as a low, hissing growl sounded behind me and something snapped like a flag in a high breeze. Snow flung itself up and the wind screeched. I leaped like a fish with a hook through its mouth.

  “Down!” someone yelled, and habit grabbed me by the scruff. You don’t hesitate when someone yells like that.

  I hit the snow again, full-length, and heard something roar.

  Goddamn, that sounds like a shotgun. I floundered, rolled over on my back, and the world turned to clear syrup again, snowflakes hanging suspended, the sky flushed with one last long red smear of dying sunlight, and the werwulf hanging in the air over me caught in mid-snarl, a long string of saliva flying back to splat on the lobe of one high-peaked, hairy ear. Its eyes were like coals, and the white streak up the side of its head was familiar—I had time to see almost every hair etched on its pelt, as well as the ruins of a shredded pair of canvas pants clasping its narrow hips. Its legs bent back the wrong way, fully extended for the leap. Its long, lea
n face was screwed up in a snarl of pure hatred.

  It hung there for what seemed like forever as I struggled against deadweight, a scream locked in my throat—and the world snapped again, with a sound like ice breaking over deep cold water. Something hit the thing from the side, and it tumbled, turning in midair, landing impossibly gracefully, kicking up a sheet of snow as it slid.

  “Get up!” that voice yelled again. It wasn’t Dad’s, but I know the sound of a command under fire. I scrambled, made it to my feet, found out I’d lost my stocking cap, and bolted for the truck again.

  I made an amazing running leap as my back tore with pain again, the chain-link fence sagging under my weight. Fingers and toes madly scrabbling, I muscled up and made it just as that huge booming sound repeated. Definitely a shotgun, but I wasn’t waiting around to find out. Adrenaline and terror boosted me up over the fence—I dropped a good five feet and jarred myself a good one when I landed, almost biting a chunk out of my tongue. It was ten feet to the truck, the longest ten feet of my life. I skidded on something icy under the snow and fetched up against the driver’s side, grabbed onto the mirror, and snapped a glance over my shoulder.

  Someone crouched in the snow, shotgun socked to his broad shoulder and trained on the streak-headed werwulf. I saw a flash of black hair, lying down sleek and wet, before the gun spoke again. The wulf howled and tumbled away, a high arc of blood spattering free.

  My brain kicked into overdrive. Gun. Get a gun. Keys. I dug in my left coat pocket, dragged my keys out—spilling out a few spare pieces of paper and a gum wrapper—and found the truck key. My fingers tingled madly. Lock might be frozen, oh God, help.

  The key went in easy. I twisted it—and was rewarded with the little silver bar of the lock inside clicking up. I tore my key free, dropped it on the driver’s seat, and dug underneath the seat for the flat, heavy steel box.

  The field box. It held a gun, ammo, and a couple other things you might need in a hurry if the situation went south. I was never supposed to touch it, but this was an emergency, dammit.

  Another snarl. The sound almost made words. A werwulf’s mouth probably wasn’t built for human speech, but it sounded terribly, horribly almost human. As if an intelligent, murderous dog was trying to cry out.