Angel Blood: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance Novel

by Jae Vogel

  At the little girl's encouragement, I gave Rae my gun and crawled out the back of the house. The process was slow and agonizing, but the house wasn't that large overall, which meant it didn't take me long. I think the process was slow because I couldn't believe I was going to trust my life and freedom to a twelve year old girl. I guess the idea just made sense to me at the time.

  I climbed out from beneath the house, and then walked around back. The idea was that I would simply be walking down the street, trying to figure out where my buddy Hep was, and so that's exactly what I focused on achieving. I turned the corner and walked down the driveway which lead to the front of the street. As soon as I saw the car from the vulnerability of my position on the street, I suddenly became much less confident about this girl's plan.

  Too late now, I reminded myself.

  Summoning what courage I could, I pushed myself forward into the exposure of the front yard. I walked across the street to grab myself a beer, doing my best street girl impression. If these fuckers were going to take me in alive, they were going to have to earn it.

  The whole time I was in the store, I was totally and completely paranoid. Rae had stuffed some cash into my hand before I crawled out, otherwise, I wouldn't even have the cash to keep up the pretense of buying something. My mind was totally consumed, and drinking was the farthest thing from the surface of my consciousness.

  I thought about all of the times I had purchased forties with Hep, and the two of us had walked throughout the city, drinking merrily while our problems sat completely unattended to at the bottom of an ocean of malt liquor. The days of that level of carefree abandon were no more. Perhaps they would be at some point in the future, but as it stood, I couldn't really imagine myself in that position any longer… or even walking down the liquor aisle - a store we had actually frequented several times, without me hearing a word from Hep that his family owned a restaurant right across the street. Come to think of it though, whenever we came here, he always bought, which was nice of him, and totally makes sense now that I think about it.

  The aisle toward the beer was familiar.

  The same sorts of dried bulk goods and ecologically friendly toilet paper that you might expect in a store like this. Over in the beer section, they didn't exactly have the cheap forty-ounce drinks like they had over in the slums. These were more designer crafted, with weird or interesting labels. If I were to be honest, the labels, like the store, were incredibly pretentious, but who didn't want a pretentious beer when they were going to try and get fucked up. Beers that cost more than a couple of bucks and made you look highly selective over the type of fucked up that you were willing to get were a psychological boost as well as a sensory pleasure. The beer itself was a status symbol for those without the means of acquiring status symbols of other kinds. Likely because they were too busy blowing their cash on beer.

  At the cooler, I realized that none of them looked appetizing, so I picked one that had a skull on it and walked toward the counter. Didn't matter much which beer I got, as long as it was big enough to swing and actually do some damage. I suppose it also helped if it looked like I was an alcoholic. You know how it is.

  The bottle I picked out was a thick brown one with a demon on the cover. The demon was buff, and the title of the beer was something about arrogance being a virtue. I thought that actually purchasing the beer in this particular moment held a particular tone of irony to it, so I went with it. Sometimes, you need to make choices based on the sheer absurdity of the options available before you. I could only hope for the best.

  I didn't even bother to put the drink in the bag before wandering back out the door. I suppose if the cops saw me walk across the street, and stopped me, all the better. At this point, I didn't really care what happened to me, as long as the girl was all right. Something about being an older woman, or perhaps something about just being a human made it seem like something was terribly wrong. The girl was basically living like a stray cat off of the affluence of her father’s business. She was healthy, and alive, but I could only imagine what kind of hell this whole process was wreaking on her mind.

  I cracked open the beer and took a swig just for the hell of it. Fucking delicious as far as beer was concerned, though I didn't particularly go deep into it too quick. What bummed me out about beer was that I felt like I would lose something; an edge that I had been working from ever since I quit junk. I didn't want to get rid of that razors line of lucidity. I guess there just seemed something wired in me to indulge in a drink while thinking about miserable shit in the world.

  I walked down the driveway, as loudly and carelessly as I could, without seeming intentional about it. The bottle shifted unconsciously from my left hand to my right, and down by my side. My hand grabbed the bottle by around the neck, from the top down, and I relaxed my body. Before turning that final corner I started to twirl. I had no way of knowing what would happen, or if anyone would be there, but the girl said that they would probably hide behind the house, waiting for me, and I didn't want to be an easy fucking target to hit.

  A figure darted out toward me as soon as I rounded the corner. The bottle was raised high up into the air, and with full force and pleasure, I wrecked the bottle over the skull of the man approaching.

  I smiled when the hit connected, and felt the swell of satisfaction when beer sprayed me in the face after impact. The moment of connection happened in slow motion for me, which meant that I was in a position to savor the veritable cum shot of blood, glass and alcohol that exploded on the wall behind the head of the man in the suit.

  He was faceless to me, and if it were up to me, he would die faceless.

  I pulled back; my hand with the shattered remnants of the bottle gripped firmly by the neck. Shoving my hand out in a strike, my forearm dove for the man's neck. I was still smiling when the glass punctured his neck, sinking straight into his major artery. I kept smiling as another figure came at me from behind, bringing a heavy blunt metal object on the top of my head. And I'd like to think I was still smiling when my own body collapsed to the floor.

  Chapter 16

  According to Rae, the battle didn't last very long.

  Turn out the first guy was now bleeding out into the rosemary bushes behind the house, and I had fallen down to the ground next to my attacker's feet. The man now had two bodies to deal with, and was likely not too pleased to have lost a partner, and so he swore quite a bit. Not too loud. Just enough to really show he was incensed about the situation, and didn't believe anyone else was watching.

  The driveway was sheltered by a long row of thick, tall spire-like bushes on the side opposite the house. In theory, someone could drive by and notice some of the commotion that was happening in the driveway, but the street was relatively quiet, and apart from the swearing and the sound of a bottle breaking over someone's head, there weren't a whole lot of sounds that came out from the situation. At the very least the men who were sent to find me were professional enough to know when to keep their mouth shut.

  In order to deal with his body problem, the remaining man walked out to the car that was parked in on the street, started it, and backed the vehicle up along the back of the drive way. However, once he got there, the inside, left-rear of his car was treated to an immediate crossbow bolt to the tire. The car sank into the ground, obviously not inclined to move again until he bothered to change the damned thing. Without complaint, he set about first loading the body into the trunk of the car, and then loaded my body in afterward.

  When I found out that I had spent time in close proximity to a dead body, in a closed space, I was less than thrilled. However, it's understandable that a person who kills another should be subjected to that type of experience with the body of the one they have killed. I may have been displeased upon finding out that information, but in the very least, I wasn't bothered enough by it to dismiss the karmic impact of my own actions.

  It didn't take too much longer for the guy to fish out the girl from underneath the house. I
n exchange for his efforts, he got nailed twice with crossbow bolts. The first one was in the forearm. Had he not been quick to react, we might have had two bodies to deal with, and the little girl would have had to live through nightmares for the rest of her life of a man with a crossbow bolt stuck straight out of his eye.

  She was a little champ.

  The second bolt sank into the top of his ass when he went low. He finally got her, and I'm not proud to say, I wasn't there to protect her from him. She didn't scream though, which was probably to her benefit. He grabbed her in the crawlspace, and bound her up with ropes. The girl was dragged out, defiant and kicking from the crawl space into the backyard once more. The move was risky, and after hearing it, I wish we would have done it differently.

  The crux of the plan rested on the fact that the men didn't have orders to kill the girl, but to capture her if they saw her. We assumed that was the case, because the two men had been less than overtly aggressive about finding her each time they had stopped by.

  In retrospect, I have to say, we were extremely lucky that nothing worse happened.

  The final element of the plan was Rae. As soon as the man came out from beneath the crawl space, he got clocked in the face with a brick from the backyard; one of those cinderblock deals.

  No shots were fired, and no hellish screams rang out into the air. Whether or not it would have been to our benefit to have the neighbors become involved was no longer a concern. We had managed to take care of the matter ourselves.

  The man who took the cinderblock to the face was stripped naked and bound in the back of the car along with his dead friend. Rae got a new suit out of the deal, and eventually I came back to consciousness on a patch of red clover.

  The first person I checked on was the girl, but I shouldn't have been worried. She was all right. Quiet, for sure, and glaring at the trunk of the car with a merciless gaze, but she was all right. I got the impression that she wanted to use his body for target practice - the man who had bound her up, and taken away her family.

  The cruelty that people can cause to one another when they are in pursuit of some specific gain is incredible. Of course, this man was not just some cog in a machine. He was a man, which meant that he was likely somebody's brother. Or perhaps somebody's boyfriend. Perhaps he even had a kid of his own. Sometime later, after he had suffered whatever punishments were in store for him, he might be able to rejoin with his family. However, the man whose life I took - or any of the lives which I have taken - they won't get the chance to ever join with their families again.

  While I wandered through my own self-reflective form of hell, rubbing the back of my skull, Rae was busy changing the flat.

  He had to shuffle the bodies in the back, hitch up the car with the bumper jack, and then fuck around with the nuts on hubcap. The whole thing took about thirty minutes, but he didn't complain even once during the entire process. He kept his head down, and he focused on the task at hand; dutifully following one process after the other. When it was done, he fished into the pocket of his new suit and pulled out a phone.

  It had a series of text messages, requesting status updates about the girl. Rae informed them that the girl had given us a flat tire, but she had been caught. They replied with an affirmative, and instructed us to bring her to an address that Rae had to dig out of the contact details, and cross reference with the conversation history. We watched him do the whole thing in front of us, and the girl smiled at him, no doubt giving him the spy seal of approval for his efforts. I received no such smile of admiration, but she did give me a conciliatory pat on the shoulder. I suppose my part was appropriate, given my skill sets, but we had worked together, and that was all that mattered.

  I turned to the girl.

  "You'll stay here then?"

  Her brief warmth toward me vanished immediately under a blatant show of displeasure.

  "Look," I said, “things could have gone bad back there, and I don't want to have to live with a dead girl on my conscience."

  "Selfish."

  Her reply caught me off guard.

  "Selfish and stupid."

  Damn... this girl pulled no punches.

  "You read the text message,” she said. “They’re expecting Rae to drive to the mansion neighborhood, with a little girl. That's me. I know you're a killer, and you're going to have to accept that about yourself. You were a warrior, and you fought. That's what fighters do. They kill people. Now, if you're done, I think we have some people to help, mainly Hep, and my Dad."

  As a matter of fact, those were all of the best reasons I could think of for stabbing that man in the neck with a broken bottle of pretentious beer, and for taking the girl with us to the mansion neighborhood. I wanted to protest, but Rae was on her side. He just sat there, looking suave as hell in his new suite, smoking some Russian fucking cigarette.

  The girl let out a sound of disgust, and grabbed the cigarette from his mouth. She flung it into the far planter, and then stood up on her feet.

  "I'm going to go check my inventory. You both should come, too. Might be something useful for you."

  Rae and I looked at one another while the girl stomped off, and couldn’t help but let a smile come to our eyes. I shook my head, and then the two of us followed her into the house.

  As it turned out, there was a whole lot of shit inside of the house for us to dig through, even though it actually looked more like a bachelor pad than a home.

  No doubt, the lack of appearance had to do with the fact that this girl didn't have a woman in her life. As it turned out, the house was used as an in-between spot for crashers who also happened to work at the cafe. Nobody on the payroll was in dire straits at the moment so the house was empty. If the "Unexpected Family Emergency" sign on the door of the restaurant didn't change soon, the entire kitchen and wait staff was going to be in bigger trouble than they wanted.

  The major treasure for me inside of the house was the fact that I didn't feel the need to listen to the girl about not using the stove any longer. It had been far too long since I had enjoyed a solid cup of tea, and I wasn't about to miss out on the chance to get a little well deserved caffeine in my system. If you've heard the concept ‘people don't change’, I'm here to tell you, it's a lie, and also one hundred percent the truth. Habits die hard, and what they do, more often than not, is sublimate themselves into other addictive patterns of behavior.

  While Rae and the girl did the real work; locating the rifle in the house, as well as a few solid knives and a medkit, I sat on my ass at the kitchen table and enjoyed a cup of coffee. As a matter of fact, I got up from the table, and made myself a bit of grilled cheese, just for the fuck of it. Rae came out to give me a dirty look, and then saw that I was actually in the process of making three grilled cheese sandwiches, at which point they came over and helped themselves to a cup of tea.

  The girl, the poor thing, was the last to come out of the room. She was furious that she was doing all of the work at this point. A bundle of rope was in her hands. She had been busily trying to unknot the thing, but when she saw Rae sitting down casually at the kitchen table, and me at the stove, making grilled cheese, she just shrugged and dropped the rope onto the floor.

  We ate in silence, enjoying the quality of the bread and the warmth of the meal. Twenty minutes went by when Rae's phone started buzzing again. He rolled his eyes and showed me the flat surface of the messenger app.

  "Status update."

  I shrugged, and went back to my tea, clearly not giving enough of a fuck to tell him what to do with himself. If he wanted to keep playing the game, it was probably best for the three of us. I had no idea what we were in for when we got to the place, but for the moment, I wanted nothing more than to have a solid five more minutes of complete thoughtless indulgence.

  He tapped in some kind of response, and went back to the final bits of his sandwich. I sniffed and finished my tea.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Said I was getting something to eat, an
d that Wilkins was being a little bitch.”

  “Who the fuck is Wilkins?”

  “The fucker in the trunk with a hole in his neck. The guy you offed. He had a wallet, and his name was Jeremiah Wilkins.”

  “Well, thanks for that.”

  Rae shrugged.

  “Looked like a real wanker. No family. No dogs. Didn’t even have a library card. Besides, he started it.”

  “How did you know he started it?”

  Another shrug.

  “I watched.”

  “What do you mean you watched. You saw him knock me the fuck out and you didn’t do anything?”

  “Didn’t want to blow my cover.”

  I looked at them both in disbelief. The girl was totally unfazed by all of this, and was determined to enjoy her food. Recognizing a moment for myself to actually take it easy and clear my mind before moving forward, I decided to sit down for a minute and close my eyes. If the girl had to play inventory with real items, then I would clear out the space in my own head.

  Luna… are you there?

  I listened, but there was no response, which I imagine to be the same way God must feel.

  Chapter 17

  After finishing the sandwiches up and loading the shit into the car, we got in and drove off to the downtown neighborhood.

  I had to cosy up with Wilkins and Frederick in the trunk while Rae drove. The girl sat shotgun with a dour look on her face. She volunteered to have Rae tie cables around her hands and blindfold her, but I didn't want to push anything. The guards that patrolled the entrance to the top gate weren't necessarily innocent, and I also didn't care to risk that they had any conscience left in their soul.

  Rae seemed to think we wouldn't have much of a problem at all, and instructed us to remain silent throughout the car ride. I was assured that Rae and Hep had actually serviced the same client once, and that the client had lived on one of the lesser hillsides of the Solis Gated Community. Apparently all you needed to get inside of the first gate was a sticker on your license plate, and a passcode. After some scouring, Rae had found what he believed was the pass code in the series of text exchanges on the phones. Apparently, Wilkins and Fredrik had a bit more than a working relationship with one another, which Rae found to be endlessly amusing.