Anthology.The.Mammoth.Book.of.Angels.And.Demons.2013.Paula.Guran (66 page)

He ducked into a corner store. The pack of cigarettes tucked in his inside pocket was empty already; this was looking like a two-pack day. He laid his money down on the counter; the clerk held it up to the light before giving him his smokes.

He took out the sketch and brandished it at the clerk. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen—”

“No habla ing-less,” he said, in a flat Midwestern accent, and grinned.

With slow clarity, Greyling saw himself grabbing the clerk by his collar, dragging him across the counter, breaking his nose. There was no joy in the fantasy; it was like a worn film reel, looping methodically inside his head. He turned away, crumpling the sketch in his hand.

Then he saw it through the window: a flash of nacreous white. A winged figure. It was standing not fifteen yards away, on the other side of the street. Watching him.

He was out the door in a moment. “Hey!” He started towards it, taking swift strides. “Hey, stop right there!”

It froze for a moment, wings outstretched. They looked terribly fragile, a delicate latticework of feathers. Then it ran, and Greyling took off after. It ducked under a fire escape, tucking its wings in close. A few steps away, beyond the building, Greyling could see the blue of empty sky.

With lungs like bellows, the great engine of his heart clanking, Greyling ran. A few more feet and they’d be out from under the fire escape – those wings would pump once, twice, and his suspect would be gone. He lunged, all the world contracting. He hadn’t moved this fast in years.

He landed hard but upright, and the angel was beneath him. He kneeled down on the curving joint of a wing. Great muscles strained up underneath him. That fine fragility was a con. One hand came down on the angel’s head – its hair was duckling-soft – and tangled hard, jerking upward. “You’re not going anywhere.” His breathing was labored, paunch and nicotine conspiring. “You have the right—”

A massive wing-heave nearly lifted him – nearly sent him sprawling. For a moment he rode the angel like a broncobuster. His heart was wild with pain, chest burning. Then, victory: it sagged beneath him, breathing slowly.

He cuffed together long lovely wrists, then bent back one wing at a painful angle. The angel cried out with a voice like a tuning fork. “Try to use these,” Greyling said, “and you’ll get a bullet through them; that’s a promise. You’re under arrest.”

The angel was locked in the back of Greyling’s car, and he had just got off the radio – he wished, for the first time in months, for a partner, any partner, even a whining rookie. Just someone else to make the calls while he was trying to catch his breath.

He looked in the rear-view mirror at the suspect. The angel was gray and white; a layer of city grime had settled lightly on its essential cleanness. The wings, massive in the back seat, quivered like wind-caught sheets.

“I am a messenger of the most holy,” the angel said. There was no arrogance in its voice, just a calm surety.

Greyling lit a cigarette. He couldn’t think of driving just yet. “You’re a thief.”

Wings shrugged, like a cat raising its hackles. The angel’s eyes were colorless in the mirror, like water or wind. “I don’t understand.”

“The man you robbed – you don’t remember that?”

“Robbed?”

They looked alike, a little, Greyling thought, the angel and the victim. That same invincible prettiness, so hard to sully. “You threatened him, took his guitar and his wallet.”

“Yes. I was protecting him.”

Greyling snorted. “Oh yeah? From what, playing bad music?”

The angel was silent.

“So, what, are you his
guardian
angel or something?”

“Yes.”

A low anger rose, like an ulcer. It figures; the charming boy got an angel all his own. To protect him. His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “Well, he turned you in. So I’m taking you in.”

He started the car. It took several tries, fingers fumbling with the key. Wings blocked the window and the mirror; he stuck his head out the window and carefully maneuvered onto the streets.

“Jason Greyling,” the angel said, “will you not let me go?”

He grimaced. “That’s ‘Detective Greyling’ to you. And I strongly advise you use your right to remain silent.”

“I have done what is right.”

Again that calm surety – the tone of the innocent or the insane. Greyling supposed the angel fell somewhere in between.

“Will you not let me go?”

“Shut up,” he said.

He was still shaking, he noticed. His heart would not calm. He sucked at the cigarette dangling hands-free between his lips; the ash fell in his lap.

He missed Mayer with sudden fierceness. He would have handled this better, his old partner. Mayer was never shaken, not by anything – Greyling only had the armor of his cynicism, imperfect protection against miraculous things.

A feather brushed his neck, so lightly. The tip of a wing slid in between the cross-hatched metal partitioning back seat from front. He flinched away, at first, then pounded the cage – it left diamond-shaped imprints on his hand.

“Your heart is known in Heaven,” the angel said. “And all that you are.”

Blackmail, Greyling thought vaguely. His hand ached; his lungs ached. Maybe he should consider retiring.

The traffic was impenetrable before them, loud with horns and smoke. Again there came the soft brush of a feather, against his cheek this time. He swallowed, Adam’s apple shifting painfully in his throat. Charm. “You’ll want to stop that,” he said, voice level, “or you’ll end up stuffing a pillow.”

The angel dropped its wing. In the mirror, eyes shone like light on waves.

The angel made bail – Greyling never found out how – and vanished. The paperwork was useless: there was no name, no address, only an elegant sigil the angel had consented to scrawl as its signature, before being processed as a John Doe and put in an empty cell. Marching past the holding tank, Greyling had heard the howls and hoots of the day’s catch, seen fingers reaching out grubby-greedy for the frail-looking wings.

The victim called a few days later. Greyling never spoke to him, but there was a message left on his desk: the stolen things had been returned, anonymously. The case was closed, no need to look further, except he was still finding feathers on the back seat of his car a week later.

And other places. They drifted into his path. Once into his coffee: a small tuft floating on its oily black surface. He fished it out and looked skyward, where there was nothing but clouds and wires.

He lulled himself to sleep at home with windows cracked, just enough to let the sounds in, and when he woke he found feathers clinging to the windowsills. Pigeons, he told himself. He took one between his fingers, turning it. The shaft was pearly white; the barbs shimmered like silver. Pigeons. Like hell.

He didn’t catch the angel watching him until after a week of night shifts. Coming home in the light, that’s what did it – hard to miss that stretch of wings, perched like a gargoyle on a cornice across the street. It looked fresh from the sky, sun-washed and brilliant.

Greyling shut the curtains with a hard tug. If he – if
it
came here, landed on his narrow balcony, he’d have every right to shoot it. He still had his old .38 revolver, kept it oiled and loaded.

There was a rustling – wings scraping his windowsill. No time to get his old .38. His new service revolver would have to do. Wings mounted over his fireplace.

What happens to men that kill angels?

Instead of shooting, he opened the curtains, opened the window. The angel came in.

“You’ve been following me,” Greyling said.

“Will you take me into custody?”

It almost sounded like a joke; Greyling smiled. “Why are you here?”

The angel reached for him, long perfect fingers outstretched. Greyling sidestepped the possibility of touch.

“Please.”

“What the hell do I have that you could want?”

The angel shook long downy hair. “I have to show you. Please.”

“Show me what?”

“There is something gone wrong. Jason Greyling, will you not let me show you?”

Every word sounded like a prayer from that mouth, sweet as a bell. If he had to be
charmed
, at least it took this creature. He stepped forward, mouth gone dry.

“You have to see.”

The angel’s wings were massive around him, and silver-edged, wavering between their form and their function. Here, where he could touch them, they were as strong as a swan’s wing; they could break limbs. Where angels lived, they were as strong as the laws of physics.

Between those wings the world shook, and he saw: the whole of his life, like a sphere in his hand. Where it began, and where it ended. How on a perfect summer day, with laughter and the scent of frying onions in the air, he thought, It will never be better than this, how he went to the roof with his old .38 cradled in his hands and took a last long look at the sky, waiting for wings.

He stepped out of the white parabola. “And you don’t come.”

The angel’s perfect mouth turned down, a sculpture of despair. “You were never further away from me.”

Greyling laughed. “It’s your fault, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here. How did it end without you? Sixty, seventy, with my liver shot? Huh? Or in a cheap home. And that would have been
better
?”

“You have to live.”

“For how long?”

“For your lifetime.”

Angels’ wingtips sliced through time; their colorless eyes saw the whole of things. A stolen guitar, a feather in a cup of coffee: what consequences things had. And even angels made mistakes. He had become a ragged edge, a loose thread; he smiled. He wasn’t being fair, not at all. But then, what was?

“Then you’ll have to keep watching me.”

He took a desk job; it was that, or get used to a new partner. He could have, he supposed, but didn’t want to. Didn’t want to settle for second best. So he made a home behind his big metal slab, stamping paperwork. It didn’t matter. He was too tired for ambition.

A week after the angel left – two wingbeats, and into the air, from the railing of his balcony – he went to visit Mayer’s grave. He liked it: simple, another tombstone in a neat row under the shade of an ash tree. He didn’t stay long; he went home, went on with his life.

Some days he finds feathers floating around him, like a memory of snow, and smiles.

Maybe one day, when it’s summer and the sky is blue-gorgeous and shaky with heat, he’ll go up to the roof. And he’ll wait for wings.

Only Kids Are Afraid of the Dark

George R. R. Martin

A pair of nefarious adventurers stir up the supernatural evil of Saagael, Prince of Demons and Lord of Darkness, and eternal darkness soon rules the world. Never fear, a mystic avenger will save the world . . . and the virgin sacrifice tied to the altar. What compilation of demonic stories would be complete without a bit of devilishly sensational fiction? George R. R. Martin wrote this story while still a teenager; adapted to comic form for fanzine
Star-Studded Comics #10,
“Only Kids Are Afraid of the Dark” made Martin’s name in comic fandom. The author later went on to other claims to fame, but even as a kid, he could curdle your blood.

Through the silent, shifting shadows
Grotesque forms go drifting by;
Phantom shapes prowl o’er the darkness;
Great winged hellions stalk the sky.
In the ghostly, ghastly grayness
Soul-less horrors make their home.
Know they well this land of evil –
Corlos is the world they roam.

– found in a Central European cavern,
once the temple of a dark sect; author unknown

Darkness. Everywhere there was darkness. Grim, foreboding, omnipresent; it hung over the plain like a great stifling mantle. No moonlight sifted down; no stars shone from above; only night, sinister and eternal, and the swirling, choking gray mists that shifted and stirred with every movement. Something screeched in the distance, but its form could not be seen. The mists and the shadows cloaked all.

But no. One object was visible. In the middle of the plain, rising to challenge the grim black mountains in the distance, a smooth, needle-like tower thrust up into the dead sky. Miles it rose up to where the crackling crimson lightnings played eternally on the polished black rock. A dull scarlet light gleamed from the lone tower window, one single isle in a sea of night.

In the swirling mists below, things stirred uneasily, and the rustles of strange movements and scramblings broke the deathly silence. The unholy denizens of Corlos were uneasy, for when the light shone in the tower, it meant that its owner was at home. And even demons can know fear.

High in the summit of the black tower, a grim entity looked out of the single window at the yawning darkness of the plains and cursed them solemnly. Raging, the being turned from the swirling mist of the eternal night toward the well-lighted interior of its citadel. A whimper broke the silence. Chained helplessly to the marble wall, a hideous shape twisted in vain against its bonds. The entity was displeased. Raising one hand, it unleashed a bolt of black power toward the straining horror on the wall.

A shriek of agony cut the endless night, and the bonds went limp. The chained demon was gone. No sound disturbed the solitude of the tower or its grim occupant. The entity rested on a great batlike throne carved from some glowing black rock. It stared across the room and out the window, at the half-seen somethings churning through the dark clouds.

At last the being cried aloud, and its shout echoed and re-echoed down the miles and miles of the sinister tower. Even in the black pit of the dungeons far below it was heard, and the demons imprisoned there shuddered in expectation of even greater agony, for the cry was the epitome of rage.