Strange Angels sa-1

by Lili St. Crow

  “Come on, pretty boy. Let’s see what you’ve got.” He sounded like he was having a grand old time, whoever he was—I couldn’t see out through the windshield. I got the box open, and let out a relieved half-sob. The modified Glock lay there, three clips next to it, I racked one, chambered a round—it seemed to take forever—then ducked back around the driver’s door, gun pointed down.

  Now that I wasn’t half-blind with fear, I saw a jagged hole in the fence, just big enough to duck through. The field was now trampled, snow flung all over the place and dead grass sticking up in spikes. How had that happened?

  They circled each other, the boy—because he didn’t look any older than me—moving with fluid grace, his boots light atop the snow and landing like it was solid ground. The wulf limped and slipped, favoring its left side, and snarled again at him, the sound rasping at my brain like sandpaper. The streak up the side of its head glimmered just like the snow.

  “I’m behind you,” I warned him, wishing my voice didn’t squeak halfway through. My throat was dry. The wulf’s coal-like eyes flicked toward me, back at the boy as he took another step, getting its attention again.

  “You should get out of here,” the boy said conversationally, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Or seeing.

  He had no footsteps. No footsteps at all. The powdery snow didn’t give under his feet.

  “I’m armed.” I edged forward, raised the gun as he slid out of my field of fire. The circle they were drawing around each other was getting smaller with each step. “Besides, I’ve got some questions to ask you.” I raised the gun, sighted just like Dad taught me, and put some pressure on the trigger. Snow whirled down, the flakes getting bigger, the clouds overhead losing their bloody light as the sun slid under the horizon.

  The werwulf snarled again, its lean muzzle wrinkling. Blood spattered loose, the snow steaming where it landed. My palms were sweating, wool gloves sodden with melted snow and my own fear. Hold it steady, Dru. Don’t point that thing at anything you don’t intend to kill.

  It eyed the boy, and me, and a shadow of madness crossed its glowing gaze before it backed up two steps, shook its slim head, snarled again—then whirled and bolted.

  He fired, and so did I. The wulf howled as bullets struck home. I aimed for its back and knew I’d hit it as soon as I fired; the shotgun blast probably wasn’t as effective. The wulf nipped smartly through a boarded-up window, leaving behind only a chilling howl echoed by the wind. Snow blew—and I half-turned, training the gun on the boy and breathing so hard my ribs heaved hysterically.

  He lowered the shotgun and gave me a sidelong glance. His eyes were blue, like mine—but a very light cold blue, like the sky that morning before it clouded over. Winter blue. I saw this before the last bit of pink dusk faded out and the eerie orange half-darkness of snow reflecting city light replaced it, softening the sharpness of his profile.

  “Who the hell are you?” I coughed once, rackingly, but the gun didn’t waver. A thin thread of melting snow slid down the back of my neck, and a few wayward curls that had worked free of the braid bounced in my face. “And why did you tell me to go halfway across town?” And why the hell did Dad have your number?

  He was silent for fifteen seconds, his head tilted as if listening. “We’d better move,” he said finally. The odd spacing between his words didn’t go away. “This is an old haunt of his, but still useful. His other pets will come back in force, sooner rather than later.”

  What’s this we, white man? And whose other pets? I’ve never heard of werwulfen being pets before. “Who the hell are you?” I was only faintly relieved to see that he had a shadow, but his boots rested lightly on the snow, not disturbing it a bit. Jesus.

  That earned me another sidelong glance. “It’s Reynard, Christophe Reynard, nice to meet you. Can you drive, little girl?”

  I backed up carefully, testing my footing with each step. My boots crunched right through the top crust of the snow and kept sinking until they hit dirt. “Of course I can drive. I’ve got my permit and everything.” And two sets of fake IDs for if I need to look a little older than I am.

  “Then you’d better see if that thing starts. Go on.” He didn’t move, staring at the hole in the wall the streak-headed wulf had squeezed through. He wasn’t even breathing hard. His mouth drew down at the corners, that was all. “The cold around here can play havoc with batteries.”

  It was just the sort of thing Dad might have said. “Who the hell are you?” I repeated.

  “I told you.” Apparently deciding it was safe, he turned away from the warehouse, holding the shotgun easily. “Maybe the silver load in those pellets will poison Ash before he gets home to tell tales, but don’t count on it. You need to get that truck started, Dru.”

  I gave a nervous little jump. What the hell? “How do you know my name?”

  He gave a slight nod, like I’d confirmed a guess, and I swore at myself again. Way to go, Dru, falling for the oldest trick in the book.

  “I know a lot about you.” He looked like he meant it, too. Snow whirled down, flakes now the size of dimes, and following every eddy and swirl of wind. “I know you should be in school, I know you’re alone, and I know you’re scared. You shoot me, and you’ll have more questions and a dead body on your hands. Go home.”

  I wasn’t about to give up so easily. Either he was a safe contact and Dad had forgotten to mark it—which wasn’t like Dad at all—or he was someone I might have to threaten to get some information out of. And if he vanished now I might never find him again, phone number or not. “What did you do to my father?” I felt like my hands were shaking, but the gun was steady as ever.

  “Your father?” He measured me with those burning blue eyes. I realized he wasn’t dressed for the weather—just a black long-sleeve T-shirt and jeans, snow beginning to cling to his sleek dark hair and eyelashes. Heavy engineer’s boots were clumped with snow despite the way he stood balanced weightlessly on the crust, and there was a spray of it up his left side, like he’d rolled or landed in it. “I told him to leave well enough alone, that’s all. I told him he was lucky to have made it this far. And I told him what I’m going to tell you. Go home and lock your doors, and leave the night to us.”

  My jaw threatened to drop. His eyes actually glowed, holes punched through darkness to a sterile place full of fox fire. And when he smiled, baring teeth whiter than the fresh snow already beginning to cover up evidence of the fight, I saw fangs that should have looked like a cheap set of Halloween falsies. But they didn’t, because they were growing out of his jaws, upper and lower canines too long, front teeth subtly modified to hold flesh down or tear it free so the animal could get at hot blood.

  “Ohshit,” I whispered, and my voice seemed very small. My entire body shivered, drawing up against itself. Have you ever been so scared your flesh starts literally crawling on your bones? Yeah. Like that. “You’re a . . . You’re one of them.”

  “I am Kouros. A djamphir.” His chin lifted a little when he said it, like it was a title or something. His hair ran with wet gleams, like it was oiled. “And you’re nothing more than helpless right now. Go away.”

  Helpless my ass. I swallowed bitter iron. He’s a sucker, Dru. Get out of here. OhGod get out of here. “Tell me what happened to my father.” It was hard, but I kept my eyes on him. I wanted to look at the buildings behind him. Somewhere in there was a long concrete corridor I’d seen before, and a door that still might have something behind it.

  Only, would that something be anything I wanted to see?

  His smile widened, the teeth prominently displayed like an animal’s warning grimace. “Some other time. Soon, since you’ll be seeing me again. Now go home, little girl. And lock your doors.”

  There was a sound like ripping paper, and he simply winked out, snow spraying up in an impressive fantail. I let out a scream and squeezed off a shot, tracking the smear of something wrong bulleting through the air. It passed close enough to touch my cheek, flipping
a few stray curls, and a flat, eerie little laugh echoed before falling dead against the snow. A breath of scent slid by my face, like warm apple pies.

  I lost sight of it slipping away down what was certainly the way in or out of here, a long channel, probably a dirt driveway under a blanket of snow. I swallowed sourness, tasted a bitter citrus rind against my tongue, and knew I had to get out of there too.

  I didn’t want to. I wanted to find that corridor and see if anything of Dad was left down there. There just wasn’t time.

  Instead, I clumped past the truck, the way the smear had fled. The scent of apples and cinnamon trailed slightly before the wind whisked it briskly away. And about fifteen feet past the back bumper, my boots sinking through and hitting gravel—a good sign—there was something else. A spray of crimson drops sinking into the white.

  I’d hit him. Whatever he was.

  I got the hell out of there.

  CHAPTER 18

  Five or ten miles an hour through blowing snow, chains rasping against ice and packed, sanded muck as well as a fresh, fast-falling layer of slippery whiteness that spun like feathers in the cone of my headlights. The drive home was no fun. I was shaking all over despite the heater blasting away, and when I finally made it into the driveway past 9 p.m., I parked at an angle that could only be described as drunken.

  The lights were all on, solid gold shining warmly through thin windows. The blinds in the living room were finally down, though. My teeth were chattering by the time I got to the front porch, and I saw the shadow of something moving in the living room.

  I hoped it was Graves, but my right hand went reflexively into my pocket and curled around the switchblade. I stood staring at the front door for a second—probably right where something else stood a day ago, I thought, and shivered harder. The memory seemed to belong to someone else, a long time ago and far away.

  The locks chucked, and the door yanked open. “Jesus Christ,” Graves said. “Where the hell have you been? Whose car is that? Are you okay?”

  I let go of the switchblade, finger by finger. All of a sudden I was so glad to see him it wasn’t even funny. He’d come back and waited for me so I didn’t have to come home to an empty house. He was right—nobody had twisted his arm into approaching me at the mall or taking care of me. And he really sounded worried.

  I didn’t blame him. I probably looked like hell.

  The porch creaked as I looked at him, blinking back something weird and hot. It overflowed, and one tear tracked its way down my cheek.

  “Oh, shit.” He was in his sock feet, and stepped out onto the porch, grabbed my arm, and dragged me into welcome warmth. I leaned against the wall inside the door as he closed and locked it, and just closed my eyes.

  “We need to talk,” I managed around the lump in my throat.

  “No. Really?” If the words had been loaded with any more sarcasm they would have staggered. As it was, they only fell flat. “What the hell happened?”

  “That’s my dad’s truck.” The shivers were coming in waves now. “I found it. I found the guy attached to the phone number. He kn kn-knows something.”

  He took it calmly. “Huh. You should get out of those clothes. You’re dripping on the carpet.”

  Then again, Graves didn’t know—and I couldn’t explain—about the streak-headed werwulf and the boy who stood on snow as if it was a dance floor. It’s not the sort of thing you can explain to someone who’s only touched the Real World once.

  I wasn’t able to tell him that the boy was probably something more inhuman than the wulf who had ended up shredding his shoulder. That the boy wasn’t a boy, was probably older than any adult I ever knew. And that he’d probably turned my dad into a zombie, and I was next unless I could come up with a plan, and a good one.

  Why would he turn Dad into a zombie, though? I mean, suckers aren’t the only thing that can turn people into hungry walking corpses. It happens all the time. Voodoo, burial in contaminated ground, black sorcery, working at big chain retail stores—there were endless ways someone could end up reanimated.

  Still, they like to play with their prey, the suckers. Zombification is only one of their tricks.

  They call themselves all sorts of tribal names, but hunters call them only a few things—suckers, nosferatu, “those undead bastards.” And they’re one of the few things everyone, no matter their personal feuds or dislike, will band together and try to kill. There were even whispers of werwulfen sometimes working with groups of human hunters to take a nest out. Wulfen and suckers don’t get along; nobody knows why.

  But why would a wulf and a burning dog and a sucker be after Dad or me?

  It was the same mental ground I’d been retreading for hours, not getting anywhere. Now that I wasn’t concentrating on driving, it was worse. But why did Dad have his number? What was Dad doing out here? He didn’t mention anything to me. He always had me help him find out what we were hunting.

  If Dad was hunting a sucker and he wanted me out of the way, why wouldn’t he warn me or leave me somewhere safe? Why would he take me along and not talk about it?

  I stared at the boxes stacked in the hall. It smelled red in here, like tomatoes and spice, and Graves put an awkward arm over my shoulder. “Look, I made some spaghetti. I also stopped by the mall and got some of my clothes and stuff. So, um, why don’t you just get cleaned up and dried off, and you can tell me what’s going on? You look cold.”

  I was cold, a chill that had nothing to do with the weather running through the center of my bones. Ice in the marrow, a buzzing in my head. The circular mental motion started again, my brain struggling over the same rut it had been in since I turned the key and the truck ground into life.

  Go over it again, Dru. Think it through.

  Suckers could make zombies. I knew that much. As a matter of fact, it was one of the questions you asked first when you ran across the reanimated—was it voodoo, burial somewhere weird and bad, suckers, or something else responsible for controlling the shambling corpse? If it was just someone buried in contaminated ground, you could fix it easily enough. If it was voodoo, you could find out who had access to corpses and a nasty habit of raising them.

  If it was a sucker bringing the rotting bodies up from the ground or making their own corpses, though, you were pretty dead unless you had luck or backup. I was running low on both.

  “Dru.” Graves shook me a little, peeled me away from the wall. Peered down into my face, his unibrow puckering. “Come on. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He caught himself and gave his peculiar, barking laugh. “That’s pretty possible, isn’t it?”

  You have no idea, kid. I found my voice. “Pretty possible. Yeah.” It took an effort to step away from him. I barked my shin on a box and winced a little. “I’ll go get cleaned up. Spaghetti sounds good.”

  “Ragu.” He shrugged. “It was all that was around. You want me to reheat some?”

  I know it was all that was around; Dad loved Ragu sauce. With tons of garlic. My heart gave a squeezing twist. “Sure. Thanks.” My stomach grumbled a little, despite being closed up tighter than a bank after hours.

  His face eased. He let go of me and tried a tentative smile. “No problem. I was worried about you.”

  You know what? So was I. I’m already as good as dead. There’s no way I can fight a sucker. He’s just playing with me. There it was, the stark truth. “Yeah. Me too.” I made it down the hall and up the stairs, stripped out of my wet clothes—my back twingeing every so often, reminding me that I’d wrenched it again—and crawled into some sweats and a T-shirt. The side of my head, where I’d clipped it on the fountain, stung softly. My ribs ached, and I had to wriggle around in the bed gingerly until I found a position that didn’t hurt. I lay still, trying to make the no-pain last as long as possible, hearing Graves humming a little, off-key, downstairs. I stayed awake only long enough to pull the blankets a little higher up and feel a moment’s worth of regret at not eating when he was going to all the trouble.
/>   Then I blinked out.

  * * *

  I don’t often dream of my mother.

  When I do, it’s always the same. She is leaning over my crib, her face bigger than the moon and more beautiful than sunlight, or maybe it’s just that way because I’m so young. Her hair tumbles down in glossy ringlets, smelling of her special shampoo, and the silver locket at her throat glimmers.

  But there is a shadow in her pretty dark eyes; it matches the darkness over the left half of her face. It’s like the shadow of rain seen through a window, light broken in rivulets.

  “Dru,” she says, softly but urgently. “Get up.”

  I rub my eyes and yawn. “Mommy?” My voice is muffled. Sometimes it’s the voice of a two-year-old, sometimes it’s older. But always, it’s wondering and quiet, sleepy.

  “Come on, Dru.” She puts her hands down and picks me up with a slight oof! as if she can’t believe how much I’ve grown. I’m a big girl now, and I don’t need her to carry me, but I’m so tired I don’t protest. I cuddle into her warmth and feel the hummingbird beat of her heart. “I love you, baby,” she whispers into my hair. She smells of fresh cookies and warm perfume, and it is here the dream starts to fray. Because I hear something like footsteps, or a pulse. It is quiet at first, but it gets louder and more rapid with each beat. “I love you so much.”

  “Mommy . . .” I put my head on her shoulder. I know I am heavy, but she is carrying me, and when she sets me down to open a door, I protest only a little.

  It is the closet downstairs. Just how I know it’s downstairs I’m not sure. There is something in the floor she pulls up, and some of my stuffed animals have been jammed into the square hole, along with blankets and a pillow from her and Daddy’s bed. She scoops me up again and settles me in the hole, and I begin to feel a faint alarm. “Mommy?”