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Authors: Melanie Tomlin

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BOOK: Angel's Kiss
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Danny tilted his head to the side and raised his eyes towards the ceiling. It looked like he was reading invisible writing, or trying to decipher a coded message.

“It’s been far too long since I last reported in, and I’ve stayed too long in the one place. I need to leave for a while. Promise me you’ll stay here, out of harm’s way.”

“Hah!” I yelled. “Out of harm’s way? Look what
good
coming here did me? And how do I know you’ll return?”

“I admit you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I want to make sure you don’t make the same mistake twice, for your own good. As to my returning, have a little
faith
. I’ll be back before the sun rises.” Danny stood up to leave.

“An angel,” I mumbled, “how about that. You know, I used to dress up for some of my
friends
. They liked it when I wore wings —”

Danny held up his hand. “Don’t say it. I already know.”

“That’s right, you know
all
about me,” I said dryly. “I’ve got no dirty little secrets from you. No hidden skeletons in the closet.”

“I hate to burst your bubble, but not all angels have wings, contrary to popular mortal beliefs,” he replied, just as dryly. “Only the archangels —
His
favourites — have wings.”

That was an interesting titbit — God had favourites. Perhaps some of the other angels harboured some bitterness about it.

Danny turned and walked away. It took me a moment to register that with each step he was becoming transparent, the tacky wallpaper in front of him visible through his body. By the fourth step he disappeared, just as he reached the wall.

“Wow! Who needs wings when you can walk through walls,” I mumbled.

There was so much information to process. I wondered what he meant by
the administration of our heaven
. Did that mean there was one heaven for angels and one for mortals, just as we thought there was a heaven for us and a heaven for dogs? Did he stay on earth for his surveillance or could he ascend high into the atmosphere, and therefore cover a much larger area?

Why the heck am I thinking about this anyway? Is
any
of it
real
? Am I still alive?
Don’t I remember the never-ending searing pain?
Only the pain end eventually.
Doesn’t that mean I’m dead?
So is it possible that in
my
heaven, if that’s where I am, I’m living out some fantasy I once had when I was a child?

Nothing is impossible, just highly improbable.
That was as good a saying as any to describe my situation, though I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it before.
Why should I care?
It didn’t matter, if I was dead.

I gently probed my neck — the epicentre for the pain I’d experienced — with my fingers. I expected it to be swollen and tender, but I was wrong. With no mirror, and the windows boarded up on both sides, there was nowhere for me to check what I looked like. When I pulled my hand away from my neck I noticed the fingertips looked bruised. I rubbed my thumb against the tips of the other fingers to see if they truly were bruises, or simply some dirt that had worked its way into the whorls. They didn’t hurt and closer scrutiny revealed they weren’t bruises, yet I wasn’t sure what they were. It was as if I’d dipped my fingertips into a vat of dark red dye. No, that wasn’t it. It was more like I’d been fingerprinted using dark red ink instead of black ink. I sucked on one finger to see if the colour would come out — nothing happened.
What the hell is that strange pigmentation under my skin?
I looked at my other hand, which was free of the taint. Clearly it was something I’d touched with my left hand.

I looked around the empty room for anything that might give me a clue as to how I’d ended up with red dye on my fingers. My eyes finally settled on the body that lay no more than two metres away from me.

I was no stranger to death. I’d seen it all before.
What’s one more body?
I told myself. I shuffled the few metres to the body, on my butt, using the heels of my feet to help propel me. I couldn’t really see the point in standing up to walk the few paces. Maybe I was just plain lazy.

I didn’t recognise the face, pale in death. Danny had closed the eyes of my assailant and I wasn’t about to open them to see what colour they were. There was nothing special about this face — an average face on an average person, albeit a murderous one.
How did he die?
I wondered.
Did Danny save me?
I certainly wasn’t capable of doing it myself. I hadn’t eaten in days and was weak to begin with.

I patted down his coat to see if he had a wallet, and when I found the familiar telltale lump I was looking for, extracted it from his coat pocket and flipped it open. According to his driver’s licence his name was Chris Jones, and his registered address matched this very property. Why would anyone list a derelict house as their home address?

There were two credit cards in the wallet and several hundred-dollar bills. I stuffed the money into my jeans pocket. I needed the money desperately. I wasn’t foolish enough to take the cards, though. Call it recompense or restitution for his wrongdoings. Whatever, it was mine.

I carefully wiped down the cards, licence and wallet to remove all traces of my fingerprints and returned them to his coat pocket. He didn’t seem to have anything else on him. No phone, no drugs — carrying internally perhaps — no knife and no gun.

I remembered Chris — it was strange using the name of my attacker — pinned my upper arms to my sides. He pushed me hard up against the wall. That was when the pain started. I’d reached over with my left hand and used my fingers to try and prise his hand off my right arm — trying desperately to free myself. Failing that, I grasped his wrist, barely holding onto my life. I looked at my left hand again. It was the same hand that had the strange taint on the fingertips.

I picked up Chris’s right hand and examined it, looking at the back of his hand and wrist — nothing.

Wait a minute, I’m looking at the wrong hand. His left hand would have been gripping my right arm.

I let the hand drop and leaned over Chris’s body to take hold of his left hand. There was nothing on the hand itself, but when I looked at the back of his wrist there were five impressions — four on one side, one on the other — four fingers and one thumb. I wrapped my left hand around his wrist and my fingers aligned with the marks perfectly. I pulled his hand closer to my face to inspect it carefully and could even see the ridge detail of my fingerprints on his wrist. I compared the colouring of my fingertips to the colour of the marks on Chris’s wrist and noted they were exactly the same — dark red.

“Oh shit!” I exclaimed.

This is all the evidence the police will need … even though I’ve done nothing but raid his wallet and even that was after the fact.

If there was no physical evidence of an attack on my person — and my neck seemed fine now from what I could feel — they’d never believe me. What to do,
what to do?

I let Chris’s hand drop, and huddled against the wall, drawing my knees to my chest and wrapping my arms around my legs. I rocked back and forth, back and forth. I’d been in trouble with the law before, sure, but never anything more serious than possession of illegal substances and solicitation. Minor offences really, compared to suspected murder.

“I’ve got to get rid of the body, or at least remove the hand — below the wrist — and dispose of that,” I mused out loud. “Burn it perhaps?”

“Burn what?”

I was startled by the voice. I’d been so focused on what to do that I hadn’t heard anyone come in. Danny knelt by my side and touched my arm gently.

“I told you I’d be back before the sun rose,” he said reassuringly. “What do you need to burn?”

Was it almost daylight already? Have I been sitting here like this for most of the night, trying to figure out what to do?
Probably yes. Here was the answer to my problem. An angel would know what to do, if he was as he claimed to be.

“Danny, look at this.” I held up my left hand. “I don’t really know how it happened, or what to do about it.”

I showed him my fingertips and rubbed my thumb across the taint to show him it wouldn’t come off. He reached out and grasped my wrist, examining my hand closely. He lightly brushed one of my fingertips and recoiled instantly, trying to hide the fact that something about what he’d discovered had shocked him.

“That’s pooled blood sitting just below the surface. What have you touched?”

I crawled over to Chris and held up his left hand so Danny could see the wrist. He didn’t touch it, he had no need to. Danny knew what I knew — my fingers were a match to the marks on Chris’s wrist. This was a frightening new twist in a totally bizarre twenty-four hours. Not even during the worst of the drug-induced hallucinations I’d experienced in the past did things get
this
weird.

“Hmm, this explains a lot. At least I know
what
you were thinking about burning — his hand. There is nothing for you to worry about in that respect. I’ll dispose of the body.”

Great! He was just going to sling it over his shoulder and walk out the door with it — as though he was carrying a sack of potatoes — unless he could do the disappearing trick with a body as well.

I held up my left hand and looked at the fingertips. “Whose blood is it, mine or his?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly.

“That doesn’t help me much,” I replied anxiously. “He could’ve had AIDS or one of a hundred other diseases of the blood. I could well end up dead anyway. I am still alive, aren’t I?”

Danny could tell I was afraid and spoke in a very calming voice, “Don’t be frightened. I won’t let anything hurt you. His blood can’t hurt you now, and yes, your heart still beats.”

His words were strangely soothing and comforting, even though that’s all they were — words. Part of me — the reserved and hesitant part — already trusted him, something I did not do easily. He hadn’t hurt me or made any physical demands of me, and had returned as he said he would. Okay, so I would trust him for now, while it suited me, but I was gone —
don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out
— as soon as there were any signs things were changing for the worse. Danny would have little chance of finding me if I didn’t want him to. I was very good at disappearing when the need arose. The preacher would attest to that.

“When Satan was cast out of heaven, on his way to hell he committed two acts of blasphemy on His other creations. The first was bitten savagely, the second scratched deeply.
He
wept for His creations — so defenceless — that had been turned into monsters by the one He had once loved most amongst all others.” I could hear the reverence in his voice when he talked about God crying. “Though they were monsters, He would not kill them, just as He would not kill Satan and his demons. Do you know what those monsters were?”

I shook my head.
How the hell am I supposed to know?
I was no bible basher. I’d be lucky to find a remotely religious bone in my body!

Danny waved his hand and images danced in the air of something large, dark, and sinister, falling and reaching out to the earth. It looked like it was trying to stop its fall by clutching onto whatever it could.

“The creation Satan defiled was man. The bitten became a vampire, the scratched a werewolf. As they were living, breathing men before they were changed, the cycle of evolution
endured
through them. In turn, those they changed, or
created
as some would call it, continue to evolve as well.” Danny let the implication of these
things
being able to evolve sink in for a moment before continuing. “It is now very difficult, but not entirely impossible, to pick them out in a crowd of mortals.”

“Vampires and werewolves — that they
are
real is bad enough, but growing and
evolving?
” My head was spinning. “What other monsters are real?”

“Many,” Danny waved his hand again and a myriad of images flashed through the air, “although vampires and werewolves are considered highest amongst all of the monstrosities, as they were
created
by Satan. Other monsters are the result of demonic activity and interference — sirens, chupacabras, wendigos and varakianas to name a few, though not all are humanoid in form.”

The names startled me. Clearly there were more monsters than I was aware of, and the images that Danny had shown me confirmed that. I counted twenty separate images.

“Apart from vampires and werewolves, I’ve only heard of sirens,” I replied. “So are the myths about vampires and werewolves being enemies true as well?”

“Yes. They vie for the highest place amongst Satan’s favoured. To that end they are constantly at war. In some ways it serves our purposes. They keep their own numbers down through their infighting, allowing us to concentrate on the task of seeking out and destroying demons. Occasionally they work together, when a mutual threat is detected. Things tend to go back to normal once the threat has been eliminated.”

BOOK: Angel's Kiss
11.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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