Misguided Angel: A Parnormal Romance Novella

by Lucy Blue

  She squeezed paints onto a palette, gold and pink and brown and icy blue. Taking a long, ragged breath, she started to paint.

  She didn’t stop until she was done, sixteen hours later. She had taken off her skirt and sweater to keep the paint off them at some point. Now she stood in her underwear and t-shirt with paint smeared on her face and hands and the other places where she had wiped her face and hands, looking at the painting she had just finished.

  The paint was still so wet it glistened. A near-photographic image of Asher, her beautiful hallucination, now covered more than half the canvas. The angel of her dreams now loomed over Jake’s portrait of her, standing behind her. His perfect hands were reaching for her shoulders, almost but not quite touching her; his golden wings were spread. His beautiful face wore the look of terrible sadness he had worn when she sent him away. The woman in the painting seemed oblivious. She was Jake’s Kelsey. She didn’t know what was coming for her.

  Suddenly the phone rang, making her jump. For a moment, she considered ignoring it. But if it were Jason, he’d just come over instead, and she couldn’t face him, not when she’d ruined the painting he had loved so much. “Hello?” she said, answering it.

  “Kelsey?” It was Jake’s voice, unmistakable. “Honey, is that you?”

  “Hello?” she said again, starting to tremble all over.

  “Kelsey, this is Lucas Black.” A lump of ice formed in her chest. “The cop from the alley, remember?”

  “I remember.” She had been afraid of him.

  “Kelsey, I need you to come to County General Hospital,” he said. “A friend of yours has been attacked. A Mrs. Sylvia Berman.”

  “Oh my God.” He’s lying, she thought. But why would he lie? “Is she all right?”

  He made a noise that could have been a sneeze or could have been a snicker. “Not remotely,” he said. “She’s asking for you.”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t come.” She had sworn the last time she’d left County General she’d never set foot there again.

  “She says she needs to talk to you,” he said. “She’s been gravely injured, maybe fatally. The doctors don’t know yet. Whatever attacked her has put her husband in the loony ward. And she seems to think you’re in danger, too.”

  “Put her on the phone,” Kelsey said. She thought about the blood in the alley, the poor homeless woman he had said had been slaughtered there. She thought about the men who had attacked her, the ones Asher had…but Asher wasn’t real.

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.” He was starting to sound angry. “Kelsey, are you in some kind of trouble? Do you want me to send a squad car to pick you up?”

  “No,” she said. “I have a car…I’ll be right there.”

  The Hospital

  The ambulance bay streamed garish green light into the night. Kelsey pulled Jake’s car halfway up on the sidewalk and threw it in park. She drew the collar of Jake’s coat tighter around her throat and plunged out into the falling snow.

  An orderly in pale green scrubs and an orange parka was pacing the sidewalk under the awning, bouncing a little girl in a pink coat in his arms as she cried. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” he was crooning. “Everything’s going to be fine.” When his eyes met Kelsey’s, she saw it was a lie.

  She ducked around an EMT as he was coming out. “Hey miss!” he called. “Is that your car?”

  She hurried to the reception desk. “Sylvia Berman.” She stripped out of her gloves. “Is she here?”

  The nurse paused for a moment before answering. “She is.” She knew I was coming, Kelsey thought. She’ll call Black. “If you’ll just have a seat.”

  “Thanks very much.” She reached across the desk and punched the big red button that controlled the heavy swinging doors to the exam rooms, squeezing through the crack as soon as they started to open. She checked her watch as she hurried down the hall…seven minutes since she’d spoken to the cop on the phone. Maybe three minutes before he found her here.

  She pushed past the weeping family gathered in the hall outside the first exam room, looking away from their faces. The second room was empty, the bed cranked high and bare, the lights turned up bright. The third, across the hall from the nurse’s station, was mostly dark. “Miss, can we help you?” a male nurse said, standing up from behind the counter as she passed.

  “No, thank you.” In Exam Room 3, a single light was burning behind the bed. Lying on the bed was a woman swathed in bandages and blankets with her long, curly brown hair spread on the pillow—Sylvia. Moving closer, Kelsey saw her throat was wrapped with bandages, stained red at the edges. More bandages crisscrossed her chest and shoulders under the thin hospital gown and braceleted both arms. A deep, blood-black scratch peeked from underneath the gauze at her wrist. She was hooked up to monitors, and the hesitant chirp of her heartbeat made Kelsey feel sick. How many nights had she listened to that sound, waiting for the moment it would stop?

  “Sylvia?” She touched the back of her hand above the IV drip. “Can you hear me?”

  Sylvia’s eyes snapped open. “Kelsey?” Her voice was a raspy whisper, and her eyes were wild. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me.” Sylvia was trying to grab her hand; she slid her hand under hers and held it lightly, being careful of the IV “What happened?”

  “Where’s the angel?” Sylvia said, the words half-garbled in a nasty, gurgling sound in her throat. “Asher…where’s Asher?”

  “What did you say?”

  “Falling….” She tried to raise her head from the pillow. “Kelsey, run.”

  “Excuse me, miss,” a woman’s voice said from behind her. “Are you Kelsey?” The voice was vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place it. She turned and saw the nurse in silhouette, the bright light of the hallway behind her. “There’s a policeman here,” she said, moving closer, and Kelsey saw her face. “He says he has to talk to you.”

  Kelsey thought she must be dreaming. She recognized this woman—this was the homeless woman she and Jake had walked past barely seeing nearly every day for years. The woman Lucas Black had told her had been murdered. But why would Kelsey dream her beautiful? The thin, white-streaked hair was now thick and glossy black, barely contained in a neat bun at the nape of her neck. Her lips were lush and glistening with scarlet lipstick. Her whole face was plump and seductively painted, and her nails were perfectly groomed scarlet talons. As she moved closer, Kelsey caught a whiff of thick, spicy perfume over something nasty—the stench of rotten meat. The nurse smiled, and Sylvia moaned, her eyes falling closed. “He’s being very persistent.”

  “Asher,” Sylvia said again, barely louder than a whisper.

  “Okay,” Kelsey said. If you’re real, I need you, she thought, willing the angel to hear. If you’re not real, I probably need you anyway. Either she really had lost it completely and she was imagining all of this, or Asher was real. If Sylvia had seen him, if she knew him…but what was this nurse? Everything was falling into place—a fearful symmetry, Jake would have called it, a favorite phrase of his. She made herself smile back at the nurse that she was afraid couldn’t be human. “Let’s go.”

  Asher had been walking the streets all night, desperate and helpless. Unless Kelsey called out to him and ended his banishment, he would never find her. She could have been standing right in front of him, and he would never have seen her. But he couldn’t just stop trying. Lucifer had made it very clear he intended her harm, and somehow Asher would have to find a way to save her.

  Suddenly, he heard her voice like a thought inside his own head. If you’re real, I need you. If you’re not real, I probably need you anyway. He reached out to her again, and this time, he could feel her. She was in trouble, terrified and confused.

  He started to take flight, and two dark shapes rose through the sidewalk in front of him, uncurling from the concrete like thick, black plumes of smoke made flesh. A third slunk out of the shadows of an alley to join them. “Give me your wallet,” the tallest one said, pulling
a long, silver blade that had been ancient when the whole notion of a wallet was invented. The silver piercing in his lip glittered like pus at the edge of a nasty, disfiguring scar. These were Lucifer’s minions, the same three who had attacked Kelsey before.

  Asher drew his sword. With no Kelsey to protect, he could fight more efficiently, dispatch vermin like this almost without thought. He swung the sword in a wide, easy arc, cleaving the leader’s head neatly from his shoulders as one of the others attacked him like an animal, claws extended, shrieking like a cat. He caught this one by the nape of the neck with his free hand and shook him, the claws slashing harmlessly through his coat as he dragged the creature back. He flung him down on the sidewalk and stomped down hard on his chest, pinning him to the ground. The demon writhed and swore terrible curses in the ancient tongue as Asher raised his sword like a scythe, screamed as the sword sliced off his legs. He clutched and clawed at Asher’s leg, and the angel took his arms as well, cleaving each at the shoulder with surgical precision before kicking all four squirming, disembodied limbs down the sidewalk.

  “Hey psycho!” The third one, the one from the alley, had drawn a gun. His eyes were wide with fright; white showed all around each iris. But the gun barrel was steady. Asher flipped the sword up and caught it, driving the blade into the creature’s chest as the gun exploded, firing wild.

  Hot human blood poured over his hands.

  The mortal he had mistaken for a demon gaped at him, eyes bulging, blood pouring from his mouth. Asher heard the real demons behind him start to laugh as the mortal staggered. He withdrew the sword, and the man clutched his stomach, his eyes glazing over as he started to fall. Asher dropped the sword and grabbed him, reaching out with his angel’s senses, finding the damage, struggling to put it right. But it was too late. The heart was split apart, and he had no demon’s blood to sustain him while the angel’s power did its work. With a final retching cough, the man slumped dead to the ground. Asher had used his holy sword to kill a mortal.

  The limbless demon was giggling too much to speak, but the head lying in the gutter at Asher’s feet had stopped laughing. “Oopsy,” he said, grinning up at Asher. “Welcome to the family.”

  Asher didn’t feel himself making a choice, didn’t think at all. Rage like a blinding white light exploded out of him, burning away every thought. Kicking away the sword he was no longer worthy to carry, he extended his bare, bloody hands and roared the word of destruction he was forbidden to speak in this realm, the word of power saved for battle on the fields of Heaven itself. The demon’s head erupted in a gush of burning, stinking blood. His body was still lying face down on the sidewalk, and it began to collapse, imploding, disappearing in moments like a crumpled wad of paper in a furnace.

  The limbless one began to scream, writhing on the pavement like a worm. “You can’t!” he sniveled as Asher moved toward him. He tried to wriggle away, his severed limbs flopping and twitching just out of reach. “Absolute destruction is forbidden!” Asher whispered the words through lips drawn back over his teeth, and the demon howled in agony. A massive, steaming crack opened up in the ground, swallowing the severed limbs as they melted into flaming sludge. The demon’s torso was melting, too, slowly, up from the hips. “It is forbidden!” he screamed again in the ancient language just as his head was consumed.

  Humans were starting to come out into the street to see what had happened. Asher looked down at the blood on his hands. He could change his form to any shape he could imagine, look like anyone or no one, disappear from mortal sight completely. But nothing in his power could wash away this blood. He could still feel Kelsey calling out to him, needing him, a silent scream of terror. He let his bloody hands fall to his sides as a man from the jazz club on the corner reached him, staring at him in pity and horror. Meeting the man’s eyes, he extended his blackened wings, his shadow swallowing the mortal up, blocking the light of the streetlamp. The man crossed himself as the angel turned and took off into the air.

  The Waiting Room

  When Jake had finally died, Kelsey had missed it. His mother and sister had gone home to sleep. But she had been there watching him carefully, listening to every painful, shuddering breath, feeling his hand she was holding twitch ever so slightly once or twice an hour. But when the moment had come, her attention had been elsewhere; she had been lost in her own thoughts. The alarms on his monitors had been turned off for more than a day by then. He had been past all sense of crisis for the nursing staff. Heaven or Hell only knew how long she had sat there holding the hand of a corpse, half-dozing, not knowing he was gone.

  When she had finally realized, she had stayed absolutely still for several minutes, staring at his empty face. His eyes and mouth had been open. After a few minutes, more quickly than she would have thought possible, his hand had gone cold and hard, the fingers still laced with hers. He had died alone.

  When the nurse had finally come in and found them, she hadn’t said a word. She had walked back out of the room and come back two minutes later with another nurse. Kelsey had known it was almost exactly two minutes; she had been watching the clock. This second nurse had come to her, speaking softly and distinctly, words Kelsey hadn’t understood. She had gently and carefully lifted Kelsey and Jake’s joined hands as she was speaking, untangling Kelsey’s living fingers from Jake’s dead ones. Taking Kelsey by the shoulders, she had lifted her bodily from her chair and turned her toward the door. She had kept on asking, “Is there anybody I can call?” Kelsey couldn’t remember now if she had ever answered. They had walked down the hall together, the nurse supporting her like she might have been a patient….to the same small waiting room the demon nurse was leading her to now.

  Lucas Black was sitting on the tattered love seat, flipping through a crumpled magazine. His left ankle was propped on his right knee, exposing his droopy, brown sock, and he was slurping mostly air through a straw from a white Styrofoam cup. “Hiya Kelsey,” he said, looking up. “Thanks for coming down.”

  Kelsey glanced back at the thing that was pretending to be a nurse. The demon smiled, exposing just a few too many teeth. Had she always been a demon, even when Jake had been making her a sandwich every night? Kelsey didn’t think so; this was something else, something that had taken that poor woman’s shape. “I didn’t really think I had a choice.” She didn’t smile back, just stared into the creature’s eyes. After a moment, it looked away, crossing its arm over its stomach as if it suddenly hurt.

  “Thanks very much, nurse,” Black said. “I think I can take it from here.” Head down, hunched over, the demon nodded, scuttling out. Black smiled at Kelsey. “Of course you had a choice.” He dropped his magazine on the battered coffee table with a slap. “That’s the great and awful thing about people like you, Kelsey—or people in general. You always have a choice.”

  “That’s awesome.” She made herself look him in the eye. “I’ll just go.”

  He got up fast, but he didn’t stop smiling. “That would be really, really stupid.”

  “Why? Would you arrest me?” He wasn’t scary, she thought, not like the ones who had grabbed her on the street, the other demons. Because that was what they had been, surely, and that was what he was. As soon as she had seen the fake nurse, she had known. In the deepest, most primal part of her brain, she had known it as soon as she’d seen him the first time in the alley. He was pure evil. But he wasn’t horrifying, really—except for the scar, he was actually kind of handsome. He didn’t smell bad the way the nurse had. Truth be told, he smelled kind of good, like a coal fire or gasoline or the freshly oiled barrel of a gun. But standing this close to him made her flesh crawl. “What for?” she said. “Murdering the woman who just walked me down the hall?”

  She saw a flash of anger in his flat black eyes, a tiny tongue of blue flame sparking in their depths. But his grin widened, twisting the corner of his scar. “Oops,” he said, taking a step closer. “So you figured that one out.” She stood her ground, meeting his gaze.

  �
�What are you?” she said. “Not a cop.” He shook his head, still smiling, bemused. “Not a human.”

  “I can be anything you want.” His beard grew longer, and his features thickened until he looked like the Irish priest. “Are you sure then you’ve nothing you want to confess, dear heart?” He laughed, making her stomach turn. Then he was changing again, his coarse black hair growing longer and finer as the beard and mustache disappeared, and his lips ripened to a familiar curve under the ghastly scar. Within seconds, Asher seemed to be standing in his place, Asher in an ugly suit and trench coat with flat black eyes and jet-black hair and the stomach-churning scar. He opened his arms and turned around, modeling his new form, and she saw the gun in its holster still under his arm. “That was cute of you, casting Asher out,” he said, facing her again. “Where is he, anyway?”

  He’s an angel, she thought. He’s really an angel; he really wanted to save me, and I sent him away. Her fear was like a clammy sweat breaking out on her skin, a phantom snake twisting in her gut. “I don’t know where he is,” she said, fighting down the tremor in her voice. “But if you try to hurt me, I bet you he’ll show up.”

  “Oh, I know he will.” His smile faded, but the flames burned brighter in his eyes. “Kelsey, baby, I am counting on it.”

  Before she could answer, he kissed her, taking her completely by surprise. His mouth was cold, but his hands felt burning hot as he grabbed her shoulders, even through Jake’s heavy coat. She pushed against him, and his tongue pushed deep inside her mouth, icy cold and much too long, slithering against her palette. He pulled her closer, crazy strong, and a weird, narcotic weakness overwhelmed her, sapping her hope and will away.