Black Wings bw-1

by Christina Henry

  “Not by a long shot,” I said, and turned to leave.

  “And next time you come in to work, be sure to dress a little more professionally,” he added as I slammed the door shut.

  “You’re lucky I remembered to take my apron off,” I muttered, and headed back to my desk to finish filling out the forms. When I got to my cubicle I looked at the forms, picked them up and then crumpled them into a ball. I wasn’t doing anything for J.B. until I found out how he knew I’d spent such a brief time picking up that soul today. Damn the consequences.

  A couple of hours later I was at home trying to re-create the pear tart recipe that had been interrupted earlier. I gave up after an hour when I kept forgetting to add ingredients to the crust. I couldn’t stop thinking about my conversation with J.B.

  The doorbell rang just as I finished washing up my mixing bowls. Beezle still hadn’t moved from his perch on the mantel.

  “Nice to know you’re looking out for me,” I said conversationally as I went to the speaker. “It could be anything at the door.”

  “It’s Patrick,” Beezle grunted. “And it doesn’t really matter what’s at the door anymore now that you’ve let in the devil.”

  I stopped and glared at him. “Why don’t you just tell me what it is about Gabriel that bothers you so much?”

  He gave me a cryptic look and crossed his arms.

  It was my turn to grumble under my breath as I buzzed Patrick in. He swung the upstairs door open with a flourish. “I have arrived.”

  “Hooray,” Beezle grumbled.

  “What’s his problem?” Patrick asked as he hung a leather blazer on the coatrack by the front door and unwound a gray cabled scarf from his neck. Patrick was tall, slim, and had electric blond hair and adorable dimples.

  “He’s a gargoyle,” I said in response, and kissed his cheek. “I didn’t expect to see you for a couple of days at least.”

  “Sadly, Justin turned out to be decidedly not all that,” he said. “How was the pickup this morning?”

  “She wanted to stay with her cats,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  Patrick gave me a knowing look. “Did Jakeass chew you out?”

  “And how,” I said fervently. I debated telling Patrick about my suspicion that J.B. was monitoring us, but decided against it. I wanted to look into things further myself before getting Patrick—or any other Agent—alarmed. “He’s probably going to take a bite out of your ass, too.”

  “Well, it’s nothing you and I haven’t seen before.”

  “Class troublemakers,” I said, and grinned.

  He grinned back. “Can we have pizza and beer? I need cheese and mushrooms and alcohol, and possibly some zucchini fried in large quantities of oil.”

  “I don’t have any beer,” I said.

  “Then let’s have pizza and whatever you have. I’m buying,” he said firmly. Patrick was independently wealthy, which had something to do with his father making brilliant investments and passing on that talent to his only son. He’d offered to invest some money for me, but as I pointed out to him, you had to have something to invest in the first place.

  “I think I have milk and chocolate syrup,” I replied.

  “I can’t imagine anything better,” he said, and slung his arm around my shoulders.

  Pizza, chocolate milk and my best friend. I couldn’t imagine anything better either.

  A couple of hours later Patrick left to walk the six or so blocks to his home, both of us somewhat sedated by the large quantities of food we had consumed. I waved at him from my front window, which gave me a view of the residential street on which I lived, although the enormous oak tree in the parkway blocked the view. The rain had blown through and left a clear, almost perfect autumn night. The window was cracked open about an inch and I could smell cool air and the faint scent of smoke from someone’s fireplace. It was past eleven and the streets were quiet save for the hum of traffic from nearby Addison Street.

  The time spent with Patrick had taken my mind off J.B. and Gabriel Angeloscuro, but I found my worries nagging at me again almost as soon as he disappeared out of sight on the street.

  Beezle had barely spoken to Patrick, which was unusual since Patrick was about the only person in the world Beezle would deign to speak to other than myself. He wouldn’t tell me what was bothering him specifically about Gabriel, and I wasn’t about to let his vague pronouncements of doom stop me from taking on a badly needed tenant.

  I made a note on the pad next to the phone to call Charlie McGivney the next day. He was a P.I. I knew who ran background checks on potential tenants for me at a nominal fee.

  The phone rang, making me jump about twenty feet in the air. Beezle shifted restlessly on the mantel, his ears cocked forward.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing. Only the crackle and hiss that sounded like someone on a cell phone out of range.

  “Hello?” I asked again.

  “. . . ddy?” A fragment of voice came and went so quickly I wasn’t sure I’d actually heard it.

  “Is someone there?”

  Another hiss, and a pop, and then, “Maddy! I need you!”

  I frowned at the receiver. “Patrick? What’s wrong? The connection is terrible.”

  “. . . ner of Ravenswood and Grace.”

  “What?”

  “I’m at the corner of Ravenswood and Grace, and I’m headed back your way!” He sounded out of breath and completely terrified.

  The phone clicked and went dead.

  I stared in astonishment at the phone for a moment. Patrick wasn’t prone to melodramatic fits. I dialed his cell number back and listened to several rings before his voice mail clicked on. I hung up the phone in frustration, hurriedly pulled a black sweater over my jeans and T-shirt and yanked on a pair of black Converse sneakers.

  “Where are you going?” Beezle asked.

  “There’s something wrong with Patrick,” I said as I grabbed my keys and cell phone from the basket by the door.

  “I’m coming with you,” he announced.

  “Why?” I asked, pausing at the open threshold.

  Beezle never wanted to go anywhere. Gargoyles are homebodies, preferring to stay near the portal they guarded. Over time, their soft flesh hardened until they were near-permanent fixtures of the building. A gargoyle could get up and fly away if it liked, even after it turned to stone, but most didn’t want to, or maybe they just lost the knowledge. Beezle was still pretty active for an old gargoyle, but as a general rule he didn’t leave the house unless I was going to Dunkin’ Donuts, and only then to make sure that I got enough Boston Creams.

  “Can’t I just want to get some fresh air?” Beezle asked mysteriously.

  “No,” I said. “But I don’t have time to argue with you. Come on.”

  I walked back to the mantelpiece and picked Beezle up, resting him on my right shoulder. His claws dug into my sweater and his wings fluttered against my ear as he settled himself in.

  Ravenswood and Grace was only a few short blocks from my building. I shivered as I walked, picking up the pace. The temperature had dropped to the low forties, far too cold for a T-shirt and sweater. Beezle’s warm, heavy little body snuggled closer to my neck.

  My eyes moved all over the street as I walked, looking for Patrick. There was nothing and nobody out. I saw the blue glow of televisions filtering through mini-blinds in several windows, but no one out taking their dog for one last walk or coming home late from a liquid business meeting. Everything seemed unnaturally still.

  I turned onto Grace and hurried toward the El. The Brown Line and the Metra commuter train both ran parallel to Ravenswood on this section of their tracks. There was a Metra overpass bridge right at the corner from where Patrick had called. A large warehouse that tenanted an assortment of small businesses took up most of the south side of Grace and a couple of small-frame houses were on the opposite side.

  I slowed as I approached the corner. I couldn’t see Patrick anywhere. It belatedly occurred to me
that it was deeply stupid to walk out into the night and the quiet with nothing to protect me except one overweight gargoyle and a cell phone that may or may not be charged.

  “So where is he?” Beezle whispered.

  “How should I know?” I tried not to show how disturbed I was. Patrick had said that he was on his way back to my house. We should have run into him already.

  I heard a sound, a flutter of movement like flapping wings, and then a wet, sucking noise. I turned toward the sound and saw the faintest of movements below the overpass.

  “Don’t go in there,” Beezle said, gripping my shoulder tighter with his claws.

  “Why?” I asked, walking toward the bridge anyway.

  “There’s something in there,” he said. “I can’t tell what it is. I can only sense that it isn’t natural.”

  Beezle sounded frightened, not exactly an everyday occurrence. There isn’t much that can frighten a gargoyle. I paused, and listened, and in that moment of silence there was a voice so soft that I wouldn’t have heard it if I wasn’t straining.

  “Mad ... dy ...”

  “Patrick!” I shouted, and plunged into the dark.

  3

  “NO, DON’T!” BEEZLE CRIED.

  But it was too late, because there, crumpled on the ground, was a body. I ran toward it.

  “Patrick!” I screamed again.Don’t let it be him. It can’t be him.

  Then I noticed the shadow. Just barely silhouetted by the streetlights on the other side of the overpass, something huge and dark crouched over Patrick’s limp body. The dark form turned its head toward me. Red eyes gleamed in the darkness. I froze as it sniffed the air.

  A deep rumbling began to echo in the quiet. It was a sound that held no joy for the listener, a sound that grated against your spine and the insides of your teeth, that scraped the backs of your eyeballs. It was, I realized with a start, the sound of the creature laughing.

  “You,” it purred, and its voice was more horrible than its laugh, a black velvet thing with razors underneath. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  It stood to its full height, well over eight feet, and took a step toward me. I heard claws dragging on the sidewalk while my mind began to gibber. Beezle frantically implored me to move, to run, but I couldn’t. Those red eyes held me, just as Gabriel’s eyes had, except there was no pull of mystery and romance this time. There was only death.

  The thought of Gabriel—a little non sequitur from my brain when I was about to get eaten alive—jolted me out of the monster’s burning gaze. It was still several feet away, apparently savoring the kill. I could smell the brimstone of its breath, and something else. Something like burnt cinnamon. And that smell made me pause again. That scent—I remembered it. It had been all over my mother when I had found her, dead in an alley. Only a few blocks from home. Only a few blocks from here.

  “Maddy, come on, come on!” Beezle shouted. He was off my shoulder now, wings flapping, claws tugging at my sweater like he was trying to pick me up and carry me away.

  “You,” I said, addressing the thing before me. I had the slightly hysterical thought that our conversation thus far had been less than scintillating. “I remember you.”

  It paused. I still couldn’t see the features of its face, but I sensed that it smiled. Sweat pooled at the base of my spine.

  “Do you, now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You killed my mother.”

  A chuckle. “And a very tasty morsel she was, too.”

  The sly remark filled me with rage. That was my mother it was talking about. My mother, whom I’d loved more than anyone, had been nothing but a bar snack to this . . . thing.

  I felt the familiar burn of magic in my chest, filling up my throat, pulsing on my tongue. But I couldn’t control it; I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d never called magic for anything but soul release, and I wasn’t sure how I was calling it now. I gasped for air and flung my hands in front of me.

  A ball of blue fire hovered above my palms for a split second, then flew where the monster’s chest should have been. I still couldn’t see much more than a huge black mass. The ball exploded and the monster howled its rage. The combined force of exploding magic and angry monster breath flung me backward through the air. I smashed into the stop sign at the corner and crashed to the ground. The last thing I remembered was knocking my forehead against concrete.

  I don’t know how long I lay there before I realized that Beezle was tapping my cheek with one little finger, his anxious face very close to my nose. It made me cross-eyed to look at him.

  “Maddy?” His voice was low and urgent.

  “Ugh,” I said.

  “Are you okay?”

  I took a moment to assess things. My ears rang, my vision blurred and every part of my body ached. It felt like I’d been hit by a train, or possibly an airplane.

  “I hurt all over,” I whimpered, and then I turned my head to the side so I could vomit.

  Beezle tactfully flew a few feet away until I was finished being sick. “Can you stand up?” he asked.

  “Working on it,” I said, and laid my cheek against the cold sidewalk.

  I must have passed out again. I had a vague sense of being lifted very gently. I heard Beezle and another voice fading in and out, although I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I wondered who was talking to Beezle. Most people thought he was just a statue, or maybe a stuffed doll. It sounded like they were arguing. The arms that held me gripped me a little tighter. I felt safe and warm, so I let go into the darkness again.

  I went further, falling, falling, falling through darkness, back to the beginning. And there was a girl, and her name was Evangeline, and I saw her, and I was also a part of her.

  At first Evangeline thought he was something she dreamed. He came to her as she lay under the half-moon in the cool of the midsummer evening. Her mother snored away in the hut and Evangeline, unable to sleep, had felt the stars calling her and gone out to listen to them.

  The warmth of the earth cradled her, and the grass stroked her long black braids with loving hands, and the stars told her their secrets in whispers. Her fingers pressed into the earth and she closed her eyes and opened herself to everything.

  Then she heard the great leathery flapping of mighty wings. Evangeline opened her eyes to find the dark angel blocking out the sky, and all she could see was his awful beauty, haloed in starshine and moonlight, and his black, burning eyes. He whispered her name, and his voice wound into her ear and down her throat and under her ribs, and she knew what he had come for. She opened her arms to him, and his smile dazzled like the Morningstar and he enfolded her in his great black wings.

  Evangeline woke the next morning to the sound of her mother’s voice. She was on her own pallet, her hair still braided and not undone by a lover’s hands, her shift clean and unstained by the grass and the earth. She sat up as her mother told her to get a move on, there were chores to do, and she wasn’t a princess who could laze around all day. So she rose, and felt herself all over as she washed her arms and legs with a washcloth from the bucket. Her body did not feel different, and she thought he must have been a dream, and her chest ached a little at that. But she put on her day dress and walked out barefoot to fetch some wood so her mother could bake bread.

  Evangeline’s mother had sharp eyes and a sharper tongue and she saw her daughter moving soft-legged and dreamy-eyed, and thought that it was time to go to the bone-counter and have a match made. She knew that when girls got that look you had to take them in hand and tie them to a husband before they got ideas about flowers and handholding, ideas that had them skinning off their shifts with the first sneaky-eyed and sneaky-handed boy that came along.

  Evangeline walked behind the hut toward the river to collect the branches that fell from the trees hunched over the bank. As she passed the place where she had dreamed of the dark angel coming to her in the night, she saw that the grass was tamped down, as if someone had lain upon it. Her heart quickened, an
d she knelt in the grass and ran her fingers across it. As she did she remembered a Morningstar smile, and she saw three drops of blood on three blades of grass. She pressed her hand to her belly, listened, and heard the fluttering of tiny wings deep inside. Evangeline smiled, and stood, and went to the river to collect wood.

  All day she smiled a faraway smile, and her sharp-tongued mother said sharp things to her more than once so that Evangeline would pay attention to her chores. Evangeline would start and remember that she was kneading bread, or stitching a blanket, but after a while she would forget again, and smile her faraway smile, and her mother would have to use her tongue as a lash.

  And all the while that Evangeline remembered her lover, her mother watched her and thought again that she needed to get to the bone-counter sooner rather than later. So after supper was finished, she told Evangeline to wash the stewpot; she was going to the bone-counter. Evangeline hummed a little noise, and her hand moved forgetfully inside the stewpot, and her mother went to the bone-counter with fear in her heart that her daughter may have been lost to her already.

  The bone-counter was a thin brown man with thin white braids and a long thin nose. He sat in front of his hut all day rolling the bones and reading them for the villagers. He knew all of the signs and portents, and whether that year’s crop would be good or bad, or if a woman would birth a boy or a girl, or if the wind might shift and bring the sickness from the Forbidden Lands, as it sometimes did, though not very often anymore.

  He also knew all of the old stories, how a long time ago there had been great, shining cities of stone and metal, and there had been noise and people crammed together, and all of these people were connected by roads. Then one day the Great Powers had grown angry and destroyed all of the cities. There had been a great burst of flame, and a white cloud of ash in the air, and then another, and another. And afterward many people got sick and many people died for many years to come. Evangeline’s mother had seen some of these roads once, when she was young and her family had moved from one village to another. They were cracked and filled with grass and trees, and they had felt strange beneath her feet.