by Todd Young
“I fucking hate you,” Angel said, turning angrily on Finn. He lifted his voice so that it echoed through the cells. “I fucking hate you!”
74
The following day, Hunter came for Angel again. Angel had been starting to hope it wouldn’t happen. As the days passed, he’d been watching Hunter. Almost every afternoon he passed their cell with some poor, shattered guy, prodding him in the ass or leading him by the hand. Angel now grasped how many of them there were. Finn had said more than a hundred. Given that, surely it would take Hunter months before he came for Angel again.
Except it didn’t work like that.
Angel was new, fresh, in good condition.
And as he watched the daily procession, he came to understand just how sick Hunter was, seeing the bruises and burns and cuts and lashes he’d marked the bodies of some of the other angels with.
Hunter unlocked the cell in silence. He pushed the door open and lifted his eyes. Angel gazed at him impassively before taking a determined step forward. He’d had a long time to think, and he figured the best thing he could do would be to please Hunter. At the very least he’d be led to this mysterious sunny courtyard, though he was hoping for more than that. He was hoping to inveigle his way into Hunter’s affections.
Steeling himself, he reached for Hunter’s hand. The skin was dry and callused and too cool. He shivered as Hunter met his gaze. They stared at one another, Angel so frightened he withdrew his hand again.
“Come on,” Hunter said.
He didn’t speak as much as he had on the first occasion, but as the drugs were taking effect, Hunter began to question Angel about his life. Angel told him what he could. He spoke of his childhood, his mother, her illness, school, surfing and college. When he finally stopped, his body was warm and buzzing. His head felt as though it were made of cotton candy and his cock was stiff. He sat still for a moment with his mouth open and then dropped his head and stared at his penis.
“You ready?”
Angel shook his head slowly, sick and overwhelmed by an unexpected tide of fear. Not again, he thought. He lifted his head. “Can I fuck you?”
“What?”
“Can I just fuck you? I don’t want to be fucked.”
Hunter drew his head back. He squinted, considering Angel, and then said, “Fair enough. Sounds different.”
Angel exhaled and smiled in relief, a smile that twisted as he realized Hunter was reading him. “Fuck. You know, I don’t know what’s happened, but I really want to fuck you now.”
Hunter raised his eyebrows.
“I kind of like you.”
“Really?”
Angel nodded.
“I am pretty hot.”
Angel almost laughed, but managed to turn it into a stuttering nod. “I’ve been … jacking off to thoughts … of you.”
Hunter couldn’t quite accept this. He sat in silence for a long time, wincing at Angel before he suddenly said, “Right, then,” and got up.
Angel fucked him from behind, gritting his teeth and straining and trying to make it as good for Hunter as possible. When he orgasmed, he arched his back and closed his eyes, surprised at the sudden elation. It was like rising out of the depths of the ocean and onto a warm beach. He collapsed on Hunter and closed his eyes, wishing he were elsewhere.
At that moment Hunter came. He groaned and bucked, forcing Angel out of him and onto the floor with a crash.
“You get the sun,” Hunter said gruffly, as he was tightening his robe. He kissed Angel on the cheek and led him downstairs.
At the back of the house, a pair of French doors opened onto a small courtyard bordered by golden sandstone walls. Angel stepped forward quickly and ducked his head, expecting to lift his eyes to the top of the walls and glimpse open sky beyond. He traced the walls to a height of three or four stories, turning dizzily beneath them. They opened onto a rectangle of sky crisscrossed by a wire frame intended to keep the angels inside, he guessed. A cloud had fallen over the sun, but as Angel turned to Hunter again, the full strength of the midday sun kissed his wings and they opened with the rustle and speed of an umbrella.
Hunter stared at Angel impassively. A tic twitched the corner of his lip, a sign of anger perhaps. He closed the doors and drew the curtains, leaving Angel alone.
Angel crossed the courtyard and laid his palms on the wall. Within the stone, flecks of pale, multicolored seashells were glittering in the sunshine. He traced his fingers over them, wondering how many eons had passed since this stone sat at the bottom of the ocean.
Life was strange.
Incredibly strange.
He turned and frowned as he caught a glint of light shimmering in his peripheral vision. A rusty iron door, the door of a cell, it appeared, was set into the stone wall next to the house. Angel’s first thought was that it might offer some means of escape, and he walked toward it frowning. A small Judas gate was set in the center of the door, one food could be passed through, though the bars covering it were terra cotta with rust. Hesitantly, Angel reached for the handle. It was locked, as he’d expected, the steel hot under the beating sun.
He turned away, turned around, craned his neck at the sun, and then settled on his chest on the flagstones, stretching his wings wide. The midday sun beat with the power to burn, and within a matter of moments, his wings were buzzing.
He was drifting off to sleep when he heard a voice.
75
“You can’t be Angel.”
Angel started. He lifted his head and stared at the bare, sunny courtyard. He wasn’t at all sure it had been a voice; it was frail and dispirited enough to have been a passing shadow or a swirl or air. He glanced at each corner of the courtyard, decided he must have imagined it, and was laying his head on his forearms again when he heard,
“You are Angel, aren’t you?”
“What?” Angel said. He lifted his head and twisted his body, and because it had been a female voice, clasped a hand over the cleft of his ass.
“You’re Angel. That’s your name, right?”
Angel hesitated to answer. He got a fix on the direction the voice was coming from. Two or three feet from the cell door, a shadowy gap between two sandstone blocks opened onto the flagstones. It was perhaps wide enough to put a fist inside. Angel stared at it, wondering if this wasn’t some new trick of Hunter’s. Was this, too, part of his haze?
“Your mother’s dead?”
“I know,” Angel said, answering mechanically.
“No, I meant it as a question.” Silence. “She is dead, right?”
“Ye-ah,” Angel said, lifting his chest off the ground. He got up, span on his ass and cupped his hands over his groin. He leaned forward, peered into the gap, and was surprised to see something electrically blue shimmering inside it. It appeared to be a glittering figure.
“Oh, good,” the voice ran on. “I hate it when I imagine things. Some of them are so wispy I don’t know whether they’re me or not. She says she loves you, and to stop worrying.”
“What?”
“Your mother.”
“What?” Angel said, perhaps a little angrily.
No reply.
Angel’s mother? An ice-cold shiver coursed along his spine. His mother? He got onto his knees, ass in the air, and thrust his face at the gap. Just inside, on the dusty floor, he saw something gleam with the blue seductiveness of moonlight on a lake, and without a second thought, he took one hand from his groin and reached for the shining object. It was a feather, a deep blue feather that might have been plucked from a peacock given how brightly it shone.
“You there?”
Angel started. “Yeah,” he said, his voice a little calmer.
“Your mother wants you to stop worrying about it.”
“About what?”
“The gay thing and how you left her. She says it doesn’t matter.”
Angel nodded, trying to absorb this. Then he said, “You’ve been speaking to my mother?” as though the idea had just occurred to
him.
“Well, not speaking, not exactly. I can’t hear them that clearly.”
“Who?”
“The dead.”
Angel closed his eyes. A sense of unreality, one that had been growing on him for days, threatened to overwhelm him. He told himself that life was real, that he had an earthly body and that this was a physical universe.
He lifted his head. “Who are you?”
“Me?”
Angel nodded, peering into the gap.
“Miriam. Miriam Hardstaff.”
“Miriam …” He understood immediately.
“You’ve heard of me?”
“Hunter told me.”
Silence.
“He told me all about your life and how you met.”
“I doubt it,” she said.
76
As it turned out, Hunter had been less than truthful about his relationship with Miriam. Miriam had, as he said, been infected at fifteen, but that was in 1781, more than a century before meeting Hunter. She’d been raped by a highwayman, by a man named Jed who’d killed both her mother and father before taking her hostage. Jed was an angel in utero, and for years Miriam had lived with him as a sort of slave. His hope, like Hunter’s, was that he’d found someone to pair with. Unlike Hunter, however, Jed wasn’t prepared to pair with simply anyone. He wanted Miriam, and he wasn’t prepared to let her go.
Finally, after years of struggle, Miriam found a way to break free of Jed, or she thought so. She’d spent years trawling through the library of the old Georgian mansion in which they lived. She was an insatiable reader; there was little else to do.
It was a bitter night in May, 1873, when she first opened the volume that would change her life. Sleet was tapping against the window panes as her eyes fell on the title.
The Divine Plague
A Historical Investigation in Search of Remedy
She’d once or twice in the past heard the disease referred to as “the divine plague” but she’d never begun to suspect it could be cured. She began carefully, but so frustratingly had the book been written (by one M Grouse) that she was soon skimming through to the end. Finally, she discovered what she’d begun to expect.
There was no cure.
The final chapter (called Towards Remedy) dealt, firstly, with the long list of cures then rumored to have some efficacy, but which, on investigation, M Grouse dismissed: mercury, heroin, urine, bloodletting, trepanation, lice, pigeon dung, amputation, tapeworm and boiled toad, among others. The chapter then went on, in section two, to outline how a person afflicted with the illness might live best, before, in section three, outlining how to kill an angel in utero, with absolute certainty, which, though it hadn’t occurred to Miriam until then, was precisely what she wanted to know.
The blood of a hemophiliac wasn’t an easy thing to acquire, but as the nineteenth century progressed, Jed had been steadily climbing the social hierarchy. Every month or so he’d accept an invitation to dinner or to a ball, and Miriam would be expected to attend. In December, 1873, she met Leopold, Queen Victoria’s fourth son, at just such a ball in Washington. Somehow, though she didn’t seem able to explain to Angel, she inveigled Leopold into giving her a vial of his blood. She later injected this into Jed while he was sleeping.
“And it killed him?”
“Yeah — well, he made a lot of noise. It was pretty awful.”
“But you were free?”
“Well, yes. Until I met Hunter.”
This was several years later, toward the turn of the century, and it wasn’t at all as Hunter had said. He at that time already had considerable knowledge about the plague, though where he’d learned what he knew, Miriam couldn’t say. All she was sure of was that Hunter had sought her out intentionally, and once he’d found her, had been determined to be infected himself.
He wanted to live forever.
“He raped you?”
A sound escaped Miriam. A feeble protest. She paused and then said, “It wasn’t like that. I was in love with him. At least I thought I was.” She fell into silence. “But he made me. He tricked me.”
Angel listened carefully as Miriam went on with her story. Early in 1897, Hunter appeared at the firm where Miriam worked as a secretary. A few months after arriving in New York, he’d somehow secured a position as a young partner. He was extraordinarily handsome, and he started to pursue Miriam almost immediately. She was flattered, but she wasn’t about to fall for any man. Though it had taken her years to accept it, she’d decided she preferred women.
“But that was impossible,” Miriam said, “in those days.”
Angel nodded.
“And somehow … well, I really did fall in love with him, or I fooled myself. I do like men. And he was so different from Jed; it never occurred to me he had an ulterior motive.”
When it finally came down to it, he was prepared to marry her. She told him about the illness, hesitantly at first, yet he seemed to accept it calmly enough. It was only as the weeks passed that his desire for information started to seem a little odd. He wanted to know all about it, and spent hours drilling Miriam, seeking information which he didn’t yet have, she now knew, though she’d then excused his behavior as mere curiosity and concern. He was, after all, about to allow her to infect him.
And he was certain they’d pair.
“We were married in 1899,” Miriam said. “We’re still married. But when he didn’t get what he wanted he … started …”
Angel waited, but she failed to go on. “Didn’t get what he wanted?”
“The angel thing. He wanted to be an angel. That’s all he’s ever wanted.”
“But,” Angel said, glancing at the feather in his hand, “aren’t you an angel?”
She was silent for perhaps a minute or more. Then she very faintly said, “I’m a sorrow angel.”
“A sorrow angel?”
“It’s what happens finally — if you fail to find a mate over the course of … hundreds of years.” She sounded ashamed. “There was someone, but …”
Angel was afraid to speak. Yet still, he wanted to know. “So you are an angel?”
“Well, no. Not exactly. I’m a lone angel. I don’t have any powers — not really — and I … look a little different.”
The electric blue shimmering Angel had glimpsed beyond the slot flashed in his mind and he frowned. He wondered what she meant exactly, but was too afraid to ask.
“So,” Miriam began again, after moments of silence had passed. “What’s the plan for getting you out of this place?”
“The plan?”
“Mmm.”
“There isn’t one.”
Silence fell over the courtyard. Angel stared at the shadowy gap expectantly. When Miriam finally spoke, he flinched.
“How’s the sunshine?”
Angel glanced over his shoulder. He’d almost forgotten the sunny courtyard. He’d been sitting on his heels with one hand cupping his genitals, speaking to the slot, and all the while he’d been sitting here the sun had been beating on his wings, warming him and filling him with life. Now, as he remembered how much effort he’d put into getting out here and into the sun, he backed away from the wall and settled on his stomach, stretching his wings wide.
A few moments passed, and then Miriam said, “Good?”
“Yeah.”
“You know Finn’s probably right.”
“What’s that?”
“The two of you probably could bind.”
77
Angel didn’t have a chance to ask Miriam to explain. The French doors rattled just as he lifted his head. Hunter opened them, the cream, gauzy curtains fluttering into the room.
“Time’s up,” he said.
Angel followed Hunter into the shadowy house, blinded by the brilliance of the courtyard. He shaded his eyes, but was surprised, as they walked into the hall, to see a soft, silver light surrounding them. It was only as they left the house and stepped into the gloom of the cells that Angel realized it was
his own glow, which he hadn’t seen since the night he came here with Cole. It cheered him, lighting a puddle in darkness they could walk in. Perhaps he was growing in strength. Yet he’d only been in the cell again for a matter of minutes when the luminescence faded.
Finn had turned to him in hope, but now his eyes fell.
Weeks passed. The days became indistinguishable. Sunshine in the mornings, water in the afternoons, the calling of broken angels at night. Angel began to believe that it was hopeless, that he’d never be free. Either Hunter would get what he wanted, or all of them would die.
The bond with Cole weakened further, to the point where Angel felt as though Cole had deserted him. Then, one night, as Angel lay ensconced in Finn’s arms, trying to reach for Cole, he very clearly heard Cole say,
Get away from me. I know you’re not real.
Cole? Angel said.
Get the fuck away from me.
Angel shambled to his feet. It was deep into the night, but he called to Cole anyway,
“Cole!”
With the speed of a jack-in-the-box, Finn sprang up. He clapped a hand over Angel’s mouth and said, “Don’t call for him.”
“What?”
“Don’t call for him.”
“What? Why not?”
“He knows you’re safe. He knows where you are.”
“But he’s — he’s rejecting me.”
“It’s a trick. He’s confused by the darkness. You’ll only confuse him more.”
Angel narrowed his eyes at Finn.
“Trust me,” Finn said.
“Can you tell him I’m okay?”
Finn frowned, unfocussed his eyes, and then said, “Jason’s asleep. I can’t do it without Jase.”
Hopelessly, Angel dropped his head and swayed. As he was about to fall, Finn caught him. He engulfed Angel in his arms and said, “Come on. Sleep.”
78
Angel woke on his back, cold and alone. He’d rolled away from Finn in the middle of the night, and now, hours from dawn, he was freezing. He turned onto his side and reached for Finn. His fingers thrilled as they stroked his silky feathers, and despite the cold, he began to get hard. He shuffled forward and pulled Finn into his arms. Following a confusion of feathers, Finn groaned, waking.
