Raptor: Urban Fantasy Noir

by Bostick, B. A.

  “Do you believe Zaki’s got this resurrection bug thing?”

  Ariel shrugged. “I think you have other problems right now.”

  “Jesus! Shit!” All four tires on his car had been slashed and his windshield was spider webbed with cracks.

  “Maybe this is part of the curse,” Ariel said dryly.

  “My car,” Bishop moaned. As he turned away something flickered in the air, caught in the light from a streetlamp. Ariel’s hand flew out and plucked the knife out of the air as it flew by. She whirled around and grabbed another.

  “Get down, Frank!” Bishop fell to one knee and reached around his back for the Glock. Ariel swatted away another knife. They were coming from the alley.

  “Step to the side!” Bishop shouted. Ariel stepped two feet to the right and Bishop fired three rounds down the alley. There was a clatter and he fired two more. Silence.

  “You alright?” he asked.

  “Yes. Think you got him?”

  Bishop pulled out his car keys and popped the trunk where he kept his old police issue flashlight. He pointed it down the alley, holding it under the extended pistol with his left hand so he could see what he was going to shoot. The alley was empty.

  Bishop lowered the gun and flashed the light around. There was blood on the cement, but no body. He squatted to take a closer look and Ariel peered over his shoulder.

  “It’s red,” she said. “Human.”

  “Your blood’s red.”

  “Okay, not demon. Look at this.”

  Bishop stood up. Ariel held up a fan of flat, black handled knives. “Throwing knives.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You keep calling the guy who worked you over and probably left the curse in your office a circus freak.”

  “Yeah, but only because he’s small, ugly, creepy looking, wears a weird suit and hit me a lot.”

  “He’s also a gypsy. Maybe he was a knife thrower in a carnival or the circus. Maybe there’s something symbolic about him trying to kill you with circus knives.”

  “Swell. I can’t believe I only nicked the little bastard.”

  “We don’t know how badly he’s hurt, only that he managed to get away.”

  Bishop shook his head. “What about my car. The cops will probably be here any minute.”

  “Call Triple A. The cops never come to this neighborhood except on bag day. You’ll be fine.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Things to do.” She waved the hand full of knives over her head as she walked away. “I’ll add these to my collection. Meet you at the Caf’ just before midnight tomorrow and we’ll get the tickets from Timmy Jon.”

  Bishop leaned against the front bumper of his car, pulled out his cell phone and hit the speed dial for Triple A.

  - 8 -

  When she got home Ariel stripped her clothes off and stood in the shower until the water went cold. She dried off and wrapped herself in a ratty old terry cloth robe.

  As she made tea her eyes kept going to the grey envelope on the kitchen table. She was determined not to be intimidated by it. Her worry about Mouser was bigger than her worry about herself. Maybe the envelope was just another assignment. Maybe the Guardian didn’t know that Tesslovich was still alive.

  And maybe pigs do fly.

  She picked up a throwing knife from the pile she’d dumped on the table and slit the envelope open. The message was one, hand written line: Tower, 3:00 p.m. She hoped that meant three p.m. tomorrow not today, because today was already gone.

  She finished her tea, crawled into bed and thought about Mouser until she fell asleep two long hours later.

  * * *

  Ariel heard voices, arguing. They seemed far away at first but louder as they came closer. The voices made her feel small and afraid because it wasn’t the first time she’d heard them.

  Then she started to see the faces. The man’s was angry and the woman’s face looked scared but she was yelling back. Then the man hit her, hard. Blood flew and the woman crumpled.

  Ariel knew she needed to get away. She’d been told by the woman-- “Get away! Run! Hide! He’ll hurt you too.”

  She began to tremble and sweat, fighting against hands that were holding her back: feeling caught, trapped, knowing she’d never get out in time. Then she was stumbling, falling, running. Heart pounding, knowing she’d never make it, that he was right behind her.

  A voice yelled, “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you, you little bitch! Don’t you run from me! I’ll teach you like I taught her. Nobody leaves me. Nobody! Nobody!”

  Ariel sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air, her throat so constricted she thought she’d never get another breath. She could feel the hands, the fingers around her neck, feel the weight of him, see his eyes.

  She threw the covers back and stumbled out of bed. Standing up usually helped, let her get her breath back, stopped the dizzy darkness. Sometimes, in the bathroom mirror, after she’d splashed cold water on her face, wiped the sweat away, she could swear she saw the imprint of his fingers on her throat, but in the morning the bruises were always gone.

  She was exhausted after the dream, none-the-less, she fervently wished she would never have to sleep again.

  - 9 -

  Mouser woke in a plastic box. His head was muzzy from the drug, and the lurch of nausea in his stomach made him crawl to the stainless steel toilet in the corner where he puked up what he thought of as his last pizza.

  He’d faked being unconscious, but when they pulled him out of the cage he’d fought them, earning another Taser blast that made him helpless to resist the syringe full of junk they’d stuck in his neck. He had no idea how long he’d been out or where he was. There was a piece of cotton taped to the inside of his elbow. He pulled it off. They’d taken some of his blood and the bruise told him they hadn’t been gentle about it.

  He sat up and looked around. He was in a small cell with a Plexiglas front that had a collection of two inch holes in it higher than his head and a triangle of smaller holes over an open slot further down. A narrow bunk hung on the side wall. It had been made up with sheets, a pillow and a grey blanket.

  The toilet he’d just puked into was on the back wall, next to a steel sink. There were no movable parts, everything was molded into solid pieces, worked by buttons. Nothing to pull apart and use as a weapon, nothing to help get yourself out of this place.

  The walls and floor of the corridor outside the cell were white tile. Everything had a glare to it. A sterility. There was no dust, no dirt or fingerprints. You could probably eat off the floor, and the drain holes implied they could hose the whole place down if they needed to and it would be like you were never there.

  They’d even taken his clothes. He was dressed in a light blue jump suit with Velcro closures and paper slippers. There was a row of similar cages twenty feet across the tile from him. He could see a blanket covered form on one of the bunks, but it didn’t move. He reached out to touch the Plexiglas wall and the contact gave him an unexpected shock. Not as strong as a Taser, but enough to throw him back a couple of feet.

  He sat down on the bunk and stared at his feet. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all.

  - 10 -

  Ariel’s response to her dreams was either to paint them while they were still fresh or to work them off with exercise until she was physically too tired to think, let alone dream. Tonight she couldn’t bear to put her terror on canvas one more time and she was afraid that if she tried to go back to sleep Mouser would visit her next and she was worried enough about him already without allowing her subconscious to play with her fears for him in her dreams.

  She had gone to bed in draw string pants and an old t-shirt, which was now soaked with terror sweat. The large room she used for everything except eating and sleeping had a heavy punching bag hung in one corner and mats on the floor. Juke, one of the motorcycle mechanics downstairs helped her hang it. They did her small favors from time to time and never asked questions.

/>   In return she shared with them interesting weapons and other bits of strange she picked up on assignment. Juke was into stuff like that. She’d given him a sword shaped like a scythe with two handles attached to the blade, and a couple of throwing stars. Today, she’d give him most of the knives she picked up in the alley. He was into those too. One wooden wall of his shop was scared with puncture marks made by different sized blades. She figured it was leftover biker gang stuff since Juke and Ham were older now and had obviously mellowed out. Dingo was younger, but he was still accepted as part of the pack.

  They were always polite to her, even gallant at times. And since they lived behind their shop, one of them, usually Juke, was often on the front steps of the building having a smoke when she came home late at night. He’d always say he was just getting in himself, or having a bout of insomnia and needed some fresh air. She could sympathize with that.

  Their colors had two snarling grey canines with red eyes embroidered on it with the words Bad Dogs underneath. Ez would like that, and the mental picture of snarling dogs on Harleys made her smile.

  Ariel taped her hands the way she had been taught by Tomas and started in on the bag with her fists. She began to alternate punches with kicks until the bag was swinging on its chain and small bits of sawdust were starting to leak out of the hole where the ring bolt was screwed into the beam.

  She slowed it down, letting her muscles cool off until they were ready to accept the slower pace of a set of Tai Chi exercises, but the knots came anyway. That always meant she hadn’t paid enough attention to the other part of herself, the Raptor part that wanted its release. It was these times she craved to be out of the city and somewhere in the mountains where she could wheel and soar with the smaller, non-shifting creatures of her kind, but dawn was coming and it was too dangerous to fly.

  The other end of the room was covered, floor to ceiling, with mirrors. Maybe at one time this roof top apartment had been a ballet studio -- she could almost see a line of little girls in their pink or white tutus gravely practicing the positions of the dance – but now it was her aerie and she owed it to her inner Raptor to let it out, however brief and unsatisfying that might be in the enclosed space.

  Ariel knelt before the mirrors and stripped off her soaked shirt. Her tattered sweat pants hung on her hip bones, exposing the hard muscles of her flat belly. She didn’t look at herself in the mirrors, it wasn’t time. Instead, she slid one leg forward, curling her torso over her bent knee. Head down, she extended her other leg back as far as she could, taking the weight on her toes. She stretched her muscles, spread her shoulder blades, let the air leave her lungs until her diaphragm felt like it was touching her spine. She could feel the ripple start under both scapula, following their curves as muscle and sinew parted to reattach themselves to the internal structure that supported her wings. She felt them emerge as they always did in an exquisite rush of sensation that was beyond pain or pleasure, expanding like magic, dark, lustrous, and tipped with light.

  Ariel stood and spread her arms, her wings spread with them. The Raptor in the mirror looked back at her, fingers and toes claw tipped, the planes of the face sharper, cheek bones higher, hooded eyes brighter, the bridge of the nose narrower and slightly hooked over an upper lip that came to two sharp points in the middle. She smiled. This is what her enemies saw. This is what Zaki Kiriyenko would see when she came for Mouser. This was what she wished she could be in her dreams, the adult changeling she had become. Powerful and brave enough to stop the man who’d hurt the woman and tried to hurt her. Powerful enough to make the dreams stop. Powerful enough to let her sleep without fear.

  Exhausted, she sank to the floor. Wrapping her wings around her like an embrace, head on one arm, Ariel fell into a dreamless sleep.

  - 11 -

  Mouser suspected the slots in the Plexiglas were for receiving food and the arrival of a rolling cart filled with trays proved him right. The guy delivering the trays was dressed in white paper coveralls, a paper shower cap and latex gloves. If there was no movement inside a cell he banged on the plexi with a metal rod with a round ball on the end. If that got no response he shoved the tray through a slot near the floor. If a resident, (Mouser thought ‘prisoner’), made it to the wall in time, he shoved it through the upper slot. Nobody talked. When lunch-guy got to Mouser’s cell, Mouser was waiting at the upper slot. “Hey,” he said as the guy pulled a tray out of the cart. “Where am I? What is this place? You can’t just keep me here against my will!”

  The guy shoved the tray through the slot. Mouser had to grab it to keep it from falling to the floor. It was covered with a clear plastic top like they put on vegetable containers in the supermarket.

  “Hey!” Mouser yelled. “I asked you a question. This is kidnapping. It’s illegal.”

  The guy swung around and slammed the rod against the Plexiglas. Mouser jumped back even though the rod couldn’t connect with him. The guy gave him a hard stare. There was something wrong with his eyes, something weird about his face and the way he moved, like all his parts didn’t totally articulate.

  “Back up, rodent.” The guy growled. “You don’t talk to me. You don’t talk to nobody if you know what’s good for you. Toss can hurt you bad if he wants. Toss can make you piss yourself, an’ cry an’ beg. Toss can even make you die!”

  Toss stuck the rod through the tray slot and pushed a button in the handle. A bolt of light jumped at least two feet straight off the end of the ball. Mouser dodged sideways, barely managing to avoid it and still keep hold of the tray which he’d already thought of using as a shield if Toss took another shot at him. But the lunch demon just laughed, low and nasty, and went back to his cart to push it to the next cell.

  Mouser sat down on his bunk. That had shaken him up pretty good, but he was also hungry. He pulled the plastic top off the tray. It had compartments for each different, but unidentifiable food. It all looked like slop to Mouser. A large pile of beige slop next to a smaller pile of lumpy, green slop, with some gelatinous orange slop and a piece of unbuttered bread. He’d also been given a flimsy plastic spoon and the kind of napkin you got out of dispensers in fast food restaurants. A capped plastic cup that looked like it contained juice sat in the last compartment.

  He sighed. It wasn’t pizza, but he had to keep his strength up if he was going to escape. He scooped up a spoonful of beige. It was virtually tasteless with a vaguely metallic edge. The orange goop was sweet and the bread tasted like bread.

  Mouser ate it all although a small voice in the back of his head told him he was probably being a fool. By the time his eyes involuntarily started to close, he was sure of it. “Crap! You stupid . . .”

  The sound of the tray hitting the cement floor was the last thing he heard.

  * * *

  The light was so bright Mouser couldn’t open his eyes. It was giving him a headache, or maybe he already had one. He tried to raise a hand to block the glare and realized he couldn’t. His wrists and ankles were strapped down.

  “He’s awake,” a voice said.

  A head momentarily blocked the light, then tilted it aside so it wasn’t right over Mouser’s face. “I was afraid you might have gotten the wrong tray. Those dolts in the kitchen sometimes get things mixed up. That can be very unfortunate.”

  The speaker was wearing a white lab coat over blue scrubs and a tight fitting cloth cap. A stethoscope wound around the back of his neck. He looked at Mouser over half-spectacles, then referred back to the clipboard in his hand.

  “Interesting lab values,” he said. “You seem to have a remarkable immune system even for a healthy young man. I’d wager you have interesting DNA as well. We might want to test that before you join our little study.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” Mouser demanded.

  “Hmmm? A few more tests. Then we’ll see. You might have a remarkable future here eighty-three, if you cooperate. But that’s what you need to do–-cooperate. If you make that decision there will be rewards. If you d
on’t . . .”

  “You can’t make me do anything, you perv!” Mouser struggled against the restraints, then reminded himself that if he got too worked up he might shift. Instinct told him now was not the time. He needed to know more about the way out before he tried to escape.

  “On the contrary,” the doctor told him, looking calmly into his eyes and patting him on the arm. “We can make you do almost anything we want.”

  - 12 -

  “I wil kil yu”

  Bishop hadn’t seen the message scratched into the fender on the driver’s side of his car until the guy at the body shop pointed it out to him the next day. It had been dark and he’d been too busy trying to keep from getting a knife in the chest.

  “That’s a paint job,” the shop manager was saying. “Plus four new tires and a windshield, comes to twenty-two fifty. Did you try to start it?”

  “No.”

  “Good, but I think we better drain the gas tank just in case. Remember that time you were on that stakeout an’ the guy snuck up an’ . . .”

  “Vividly.” Bishop told him holding up a hand to stop the man’s cough and sputter down memory lane.

  “I’ll give ya’ a deal on draining the tank. Fifty bucks.”

  Sigh. “When can I have the car back?”

  “Couple, three days, more or less.”

  “I’ll throw in an extra fifty if you can do it in less. I don’t suppose you have a loaner I could use?”

  The manager scratched his head with the business end of his pen. “Well, I got somethin’ in the back. It’s not much to look at, but you bein’ such a good customer, I guess I could let you have it. You know how to drive stick?”

  Five minutes later Bishop was behind the wheel of an orange, ‘82 Ford Falcon. Except for the explosive bangs from the tail pipe when it started, the dents in the body, the moldy torn upholstery, pitted windshield and chrome skull with light-up eyes on the gearshift, it was a total piece of shit. But it was free. And he needed free because he was going to have to pay cash for the repairs to his car. His insurance agent was starting to treat him like a stalker. The last time he called him to report the latest in a series of career-related damage claims, he was sure he could hear the guy grinding his teeth through the receiver. He took that as a sign that unless the car was totaled, he’d better write a check or he’d be cancelled.