The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge (34 page)

The bare mattress rubbed against my bare stomach. The guy behind me—Ron or Sean, I couldn’t remember—dug his fingers into my hip bones and pushed me against the edge of the mattress with each thrust.

It hurt, but not bad. I’d been hurt a lot worse. I’d started this life hurting, burning alive. And Ron or Sean didn’t even want anything too special—a little shoving, ripping my underthings, fingers clawing runs in my stockings and popping the elastic on my garters while he’d held me down on the bed. He didn’t have any particular sin on him, besides being drunk and horny. He was a country boy, passing through Eden on his way to somewhere better. Most of Maybelle’s customers were just like him. Passing through.

He grunted. “Come on, baby.” His rhythm increased. I tried to keep from rolling my eyes in the mirror. Ron or Sean wasn’t going to win any prizes for longevity. I made some obliging noises, and tossed my head a little bit so my ruined curls waterfalled down my back.

Ron or Sean slumped against me, hot sour-mash breath on my neck, his chest pressed against my back. After a few heartbeats he straightened and pulled up his pants, buckling his cheap belt and fishing around on the floor for his cheap shirt. Doris had turned up her nose at Ron/Sean when he’d come in. He looked poor. He was poor. But he was also grateful, and the grateful ones paid you, every time.

“Damn, honey,” he said. I rolled over and sat on the edge of my bed. My garter belt was the only thing still on me, but I put it back in place. Straightened my seams, and fished my hairpins out of the sheets.

“You ever come through Eden again, you come on back,” I said. “You’re a real nice guy.”

Ron or Sean grinned at me. His teeth were crooked and brown. Arkansas farm boy’s teeth. Ah, there it was. He didn’t get dates with nice girls. Girls who cared if you looked like Cary Grant versus Robert Mitchum. “You just bet I will, babe,” he said, and put a ten down on the dresser before he grabbed his hat and left.

I picked up the money and shoved it into the old sock that served as my safe deposit box, taking out four half dollars to give Maybelle her cut.

The arthritic grandfather clock down in the parlor was chiming two a.m. I got a robe and pulled my hair back any which way.

I was off the clock. I went downstairs to find a drink.

2.

Let me tell you a little secret about angels. Not all of us are good. Not even half of us. The word “angel” isn’t even proper. It’s Greek, a derivative of
angaros
, “messenger.” “Harbinger” is a better word.

And we fall. We fall all the time. Seraphs are delicate creatures, and when sin enters them they can’t sustain like a human. We fall. I did.

See, there isn’t God in the angry-daddy-in-the-sky way humans understand. There is a Hell, of course. And a City. Where I lived, with the other seraphs. All that separates a seraph from a demon is a little bit of wickedness in their heart. A little bit of red, human blood beating in their veins.

There are spheres, but not in the elegant, impassable way you’re imagining. The City and Hell and Earth are more like passengers crammed together on a railway car, overlapping, purses spilling into each other’s laps, spare change rolling up the aisles.

So yeah, there are angels. Angels and demons and everything in between that has a bit of one bloodline or the other. And believe you me, some of the nastiest motherfuckers in this sphere come from angel blood.

Don’t let it worry you. Chances are, you’ll never meet or see one of us. Chances are.

There are a lot more than seven sins. Used to be, it took a lot for an angel to fall. It took an act of extreme cruelty, an act worthy of a human. Lucifer was real. I’ve looked into his eyes and touched his hand, to give me strength before battle. He was beautiful, because we were all beautiful. All shades and colors of it. Beauty is predatory camouflage. Because we’re all predators, make no mistake. Lucifer was beautiful, a warrior and a thinker.

He still started a war. He still lost. And he still fell. Other than that, though, consider most of the holy books long, boring bedtime stories. Nothing is as clear-cut as all that Old Testament junk.

As the spheres weaken and the lines bleed, more and more of us fall. Some go straight through and end up in Hell, become demons or Nothingness, part of the howling void in between everything. More of us end up here on Earth, in shadow-bodies of ourselves, with shadow-wings and shadow-vision that lets us see sin, stripped of the majesty of the City.

We hurt and bleed and get hungry, need money like everyone else.

I could go on and on, about fallen angels and demons and my personal theory about the Great War, about how it tore something fundamental open between the spheres, the suffering of six million souls, the blood of two million more, Oppenheimer and his bomb. I could talk about my time in the City, and why I fell.

It’s not important. Just remember: There are angels and demons and we walk among you.

We see you, even if you don’t see us.

And God? Doesn’t give a shit.

3.

I slept late, because that’s what you do in a whorehouse—go to bed when you see the sun and wake up when it’s mostly gone. At least in winter, in Kansas. By three p.m. the light was already long and slow, draining out of the world.

Of course, Maybelle’s was a nice whorehouse. Better than the first rathole I’d worked at, in Topeka, where a man named Allendale ran the place, beat the whores, shot them up with dope, and generally made life a living hell. May didn’t stand for any doping, and she didn’t let johns beat us, unless they paid a whole hell of a lot.

Doc Pritchard was there when I came down. I hadn’t bothered to put clothes on, beyond my cream silk robe. My makeup was all over my face, a map of last night. I got coffee and went to stand in line. Doc Pritchard came every few months and gave us penicillin, a glance down our throats, and the usual stuff. He took his pay in trade, off the books. He was a real doctor, better than the vet Allendale had called when a john beat a girl named Nadine half to death. Pritchard had a practice somewhere over toward Eden proper, and a respectable wife who had no idea that when he said he was treating poor farmers, he really meant whores.

He came other times, too, to set broken bones and to take care of the problems that came with working in a place like May’s. Those calls cost extra. Doc Pritchard liked us to tell him he’d been bad.

“Don’t you look a sight.” Betty pulled a cigarette from behind her ear and gave it to me.

“Right back at you,” I said. Betty was bottle red, from somewhere south of Kansas, and built like a house. She had the biggest tits of any human I’d ever laid eyes on. If a john paid for two, Betty and I usually took it. It was good money, and if he tried anything funny there would be one spare girl to scream. Theoretically.

“Snowing again,” she said, and exhaled. Her hair was pinned up, waiting to fall down in soft curls that begged your fingers to run through them.

“Thrilling,” I murmured. The snow was fat wet flakes, the kind that entombs houses and highways, cuts you off from every other living thing. If it kept up, there wouldn’t be any business tonight. I might actually get some sleep, though I’d be down cash for the week.

“Elizabeth,” Doc Pritchard called. “I’m ready for you. And put that out.”

Betty smirked at me and sashayed into the parlor where Pritchard ran his exams, trailing smoke.

I felt the friction burns on my stomach from the night before. I couldn’t get pregnant, but I could get hurt.

Most nights I tried not to think about it.

The kitchen was the end of the long main hall in May’s shuddering seventy-year-old farmhouse, and I could hear a radio. Frankie, the big man she employed to keep johns in line and do some cooking and repairing, was moving around humming to himself. Cold draft wound around my ankles. May’s house was tight as a two-dollar street hooker after Fleet Week.

But it was a place, and I’d done all right here. My looks weren’t anything like Betty’s. I was on the small side, dark-haired and pale-skinned. Something like I’d been back in the City. The shadow-body. I looked vulnerable. Some men like that. Some kinds of men, who aren’t the kind a good girl would want to get mixed up with. Men where you can see the sin on them bright as a Klieg light, and twice as hot.

I smoked, and waited my turn, and listened to the radio. Somebody had killed a family over in Lawrence. Somebody else had won a baseball game against Kansas City.

And now, back to the music.

4.

I always liked walking in the snow. It was like walking in the sky, white and alone, except for your footprints.

Two thirds of a mile down the road, at a crossroads with the state highway, there was a filling station, and I went to get me a candy bar and Betty a magazine and both of us more cigarettes. Frankie would’ve gone, taken May’s old Packard, but I liked the walk. Wrapped up in a coat and some boots that were too big, the flakes drifted onto me, and the blacktop. By dark, the snow would be deep. By midnight, it would cover the whole world, as far as the eye could see.

The filling station had a neon sign on a pole, a jackrabbit that ran in place all hours of the day and night. You could just see the sign from the attic of May’s house. The station couldn’t see us at all. Whores out of sight, whores out of mind. Or something like that.

The clerk never looked me in the eye when I bought things. The fact I paid was the only reason he let me in the place. He was what people called “God-fearing.” He beat his wife and his daughter too, the sad hollow-eyed women who lived behind the station in the ramshackle little cottage with peeling paint the same color as the sky. He’d lost a son on Omaha Beach. I didn’t feel particularly sorry for him.

He grunted when I put the chocolate and the
Parade
and the two packs of Lucky Strikes on the scarred counter.

“Supposed to be a foot and a half by morning,” I said. I don’t know why I bothered.

“You should give that up,” he said, pushing the pack of smokes at me. “Nice girls don’t smoke.”

“Guess it’s a good thing I’m not carrying that particular affliction,” I said. “Niceness.”

I don’t know why I even opened my mouth. When I fell, the fight fell right out of me. I treated myself like a human. Fragile and fallible and human. I didn’t pick fights. Fights meant pain, and I’d bled enough in my time.

“Whore,” the attendant said. Like it was supposed to cut into my flesh.

“Good eye,” I said. The bell rang happily when it released me back into the snow.

At the edge of the gravel lot, a car waited. I say waited because it crouched, engine running, cloud of vapor streaming from the tailpipe, gleaming chrome teeth and hardened black body ready to spring forward. Against the car waited a man, a tall thin shadow on the twilight snow.

“You sure are a long way from home,” he said. His suit was black and his teeth were white, like the cigarette clamped between them.

I stopped before him, and cocked my hip. “Likewise.”

The man in black unfolded himself from his car. The Buick purred on, even though no gasoline ran through its veins. Not that car. Never.

“You ditched the wings,” the man in black said.

“You used to be taller,” I shot back.

The man in black patted the Buick’s flank. “Things change.”

“I suppose they do,” I said. “What are you doing in Kansas?”

The man in black dropped his cigarette into the snow, and walked out into the crossroads. The snow was everywhere now, and his dark eyes, all darkness, no white, were like coals. “Same thing I always am,” he said. “You should go. Just keep walking.”

I looked back toward May’s. The paper bag tucked up under my arm got heavy. “Why do you care?”

“Because I’m not them, upstairs or down,” the man in black said. “I don’t have a dog in their fight. But there’s bad blood coming down the road. Real bad blood.” He turned on his heel. “Can you taste it?”

I turned my face into the wind, same as him. “That’s not me any more.”

“No.” The man in black lit a fresh cigarette. “Suppose not.” He came back, passed me, and stopped. His thumb ran down my jawbone. “Last chance, kid. Walk away.”

I met those eyes, the black eyes that were older than any of the stars in the sky. “I’ve gone far enough.”

The snow was already around my ankles, but I lifted up my feet and walked. Death stayed at the crossroads, watching me go.

5.

Betty smoked like she fucked—hard and straight ahead. “Shit. We aren’t gonna get a single paying gentleman caller tonight.”

“Do you have to talk like a sailor?” Doris sighed. She sighed like a schoolteacher. Probably had been one. She hated the rest of us enough to have had a better life a while back, and to still resent it being gone.

“I don’t know. You have to be a dumb twat all the time?” Betty asked her.

I had the window seat. The girl in the window seat watched for cars and customers. I’d prettied up, put on a merry widow a traveling garment salesman had given me on his way through from Detroit to Fort Worth. He’d wanted me to lie still and pretend I was a virgin. Cry a little when he was done. I bit the inside of my own cheek to coax some tears.

Done my hair, painted up my lips red like flowers that wouldn’t come until spring, made sure my seams were razor-straight, but I’d never been gladder for a dead night.

I didn’t owe May any loyalty. She was a madam and she took her cut. She had a straight razor to make sure the girls didn’t hold out.

I didn’t owe Betty, even though she’d always treated me like her own. I should have walked.

Why the hell didn’t I walk like the man in black said?

I still don’t know the answer to that one. Another tip: angels don’t have all the answers. Not even close.

6.

None of us saw the car pull up. The yard was empty and then it was there, in the dark, a darker spot of fenders and chrome and reflective glass against the twilight blue snow. An old Cadillac—rounded top, gleaming clean, long black hood shaped like a coffin.

Hands beat on the door, and Frankie stirred himself from the armchair by the fireplace. “All right, all right,” he said. “Hold your horses.”