HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (21 page)

Nick cleaned the
dampness from his cheeks, wiped his hands on his jeans. His wings
were already gone, disappearing into his back. He tore off his
shredded shirt and balled it in a fist. He walked the few blocks to
his rooming house, slipped inside without anyone noticing, put on a
new shirt similar to the one he’d been wearing, and left again
like an invisible ghost.

He was back at the
store before the cops showed up. When they came through the door he
was cuddling the cashier, Vivian, close to his chest, patting her
back, and whispering words of encouragement. She wouldn’t
remember he had chased the criminals from the store and only returned
scant minutes before authorities arrived. She could only remember
the gunshot and, once the boys left, running from her cash register
to where she’d heard the sound, seeing poor Dodge slumped on
the floor, bleeding and wide-eyed in a pose of violent death.

Nick left Phoenix
two weeks later. Dodge's loss left such an emptiness inside him he
couldn't even work at the grocery anymore. He cashed his paycheck,
said his good-byes, and bought a bus ticket north. He might go to
Montana. He might go to Canada. His bus ticket was stamped for Salt
Lake City, Utah, but that might not be his final destination. He had
to put space between himself and the town where his friend Dodge
died, just as he’d had to leave the town and the state where
his wife died. Their ghosts did not linger, but his love for them
did, and it haunted him with their voices and, now and again,
glimpses of people he thought must be his wife, his friend, but
turned out not to be anyone he knew, after all.

As he rode the bus,
the windows down, the desert air a thrilling tangle of sage and
sun-baked palo verde trees and blooming cacti, he tried not to think
about anything. Not his future. Not where he was going. Not heaven
and not hell. His mind, when he wanted it to be, was as empty as the
moon. He had trained it to be that way after so many thousands of
years in limbo, in the vast cold void where life did not exist and
even the hope of life was but a tiny ember in the far distance.

CHAPTER 23

ANGELIQUE IN
PURSUIT

It seemed to take
forever to find someone Nick had talked with recently. Angelique
trudged down a lonely paved road, her head hanging. Sweat dripped
from her temples, running in rivulets down her cheeks and into the
hollow under her chin. She was concentrating--concentrating so hard
she almost missed the house off the road with the bottle tree in the
yard.

A buzzing set up in
her brain like an angry wasp trapped trying to escape an enclosure.
She knew something was near, some place where Nisroc had been, where
he had walked. He had stayed a while because she picked up his scent
and his vibrations. The air twanged with multiple shivering notes,
indication of another angel nearby, or one who had stayed here a
while.

Her head jerked up
and swiveled on her neck. She had halted in her tracks, feet frozen
to the highway. She saw the house, the lone tree with colored bottles
gently swaying in a breeze.

She walked
purposefully, shoulders back, gaze steady on the screen door of the
ramshackle house. Before she ever got to the steps leading to the
porch an old woman came to the door, standing in shadow, watching her
approach.

Oh, this one is
gifted, Angelique thought. I don’t know her gift, but she has
one. She knew I was coming. It was as if the old woman expected her.
Not just a stranger, but her specifically.

Angelique stopped
before the steps, looking up. There was no point in dissimulation.
“Nick was here,” she stated.

The old woman didn’t
even blink, neither did she reply. She stood quietly, watching the
little girl in her yard.

Angelique went up
the steps leaping as she did so, putting her squarely before the door
in mere seconds. She put her hands on the screen. “There’s
no point in ignoring me. I’ll find out what I want whether you
want me to or not. You know that, don’t you?”

The old woman wet
her lower lip with her tongue. She said, “You’re an
angel, too. But not like him. You’re black as a deep hole in
the earth. You're dark as swamp water.”

“
Soothsayer,
you. I’m not impressed. Many of you humans possess these skills
and most of you haven’t a clue how they can help you. So I’m
black, am I?” Angelique reached for the door handle and opened
the screen door. The woman stepped back, but Angelique had to give
her credit for being so cool and collected. She did not look away or
tremble before an angel she felt was as evil as an endless hole
through the crust of the world.

“
I ask you
politely one more time. I won’t ask again because you’ll
tell me while you’re screaming for death. Now. Where did he
go?”

The old woman set
her lips in a straight line and it was just as effective a gesture as
if she’d put her hands over her mouth.

Angelique cocked her
head. “He told you something. Some hint. Didn’t he?”

The woman shook her
head slowly.

“
We’ll
see. We’ll just see.”

Angelique lifted off
the floor and began to spin, creating a small whirlwind inside the
house. Tin pots flew off the stove top, salt and pepper shakers fell
over on the table in the center of the floor, curtains flapped and
tangled at the windows.

The woman moved back
several feet and reached for a Louisville Slugger she’d found
in a trash bin in Harletsville, where she did her shopping. The bat
burst into flame and she dropped it, crying out.

Angelique ceased
turning and dropped to the floor. She raised her right arm and
pointed at the woman. “You’re suffocating, old woman. You
can’t breathe. Your throat is closing off air to your lungs.
You’re going to die just as surely as you would if you were
drowning.”

Response was
immediate. The woman’s hands flew to her throat and she arched
her head back. Angelique watched as her victim twisted and turned her
head, clawed at her throat, watched as eyes bulged and the skin of
the woman’s face grew taut and changed to the color of bruised
fruit. Finally the woman fell to her knees, hands on the floor, head
hanging, and she was in an agony to draw breath into her body.

“
I told you,”
Angelique said, softly. “You should cooperate when an ANGEL
speaks to you.”

Minutes later, after
horrible struggle, Angelique stood over the unconscious old woman.
She stooped beside her and drew back the curly gray hair to reveal
her face. The skin was pinking now that oxygen was flowing again to
the body. It would be a little while before she came to herself, but
she would be all right. She might not be all right during the next
session, but that was yet to be seen.

Angelique stood and
glanced around the small room. There were just two rooms in the
house, this one and through an open door a bedroom. Angelique
wrinkled her nose at the idea there must be an outhouse since there
was no bathroom in the house. What a primitive woman. What a useless,
primitive human being living a pointless life alone. She should beg
to be delivered from this purgatory.

Peeking in the
bedroom she found the bed made, a coverlet stitched together with
many colored cloths spread neatly over the mattress. At the foot of
the bed was an old round-topped wooden chest. A small bureau stood in
the corner and the old woman’s dresses hung from nails pounded
in the wood slats of the wall.

“
Pitiful old
thing,” Angelique muttered. “Spiteful old thing.”

A half-hour later
Angelique sat in the kitchen table chair when the woman woke and
pushed up from the floor. She turned to stare at the child. “You
can kill me, but it won’t do no good,” she said. “I
don’t know where he went off to. Maybe West, maybe North.
You’re going to have to find him yourself, little devil. I’m
no good to your purposes.”

“
Were you
useful to Nisroc? Did you tell his fortune, laying his future out by
reading the palms of his hands? Is that your true gift, old woman?”

“
I was just
company to him, that’s all.”

Angelique sneered at
her, lifting a top lip to show small, white teeth. “Did you
know he only exists here because of me? Did you know I got him the
body he parades around in as if it were his own? Did you know he’s
protected me when necessary, helped me deceive and rob and use humans
to my own end? Did you know he’s fallen? Just like me? He’s
cast out and will remain cast out no matter how human he thinks he is
now.”

The woman sat up
straight, squaring her shoulders. “He told me enough.”

“
But he didn’t
tell you he’s an unnatural THING, did he? He didn’t say
he was a godless THING, not born of woman.”

“
I already
knew that.”

Angelique jumped to
her feet, fists balled at her sides. “And you know more, I know
you do! You think you can keep any secrets from me? You can’t!”

“
You might as
well tear out my tongue because it won’t be used to tell you
one word that will help you track down that helpless angel I hosted
in my home. He may be godless, but he’s no devil like you.”

This speech
infuriated Angelique to the point that she lost control. She reached
out both hands in the air and caused the woman’s head to turn
left. Left again. And once more. The head kept turning, twisting on
the neck stem. The woman screamed, but she didn’t beg. Her last
words before her neck snapped were OH GOD and then she was dead,
flopping back to the floor like a rag doll.

It made Angelique
sick to her stomach. She hadn’t meant to take this woman’s
life so quickly. She’d been prodded to it and realized that was
the old woman’s intent—to have it over fast, to die
swiftly, without torture first. “Damn you,” she
whispered. The house seemed to settle around the little girl and the
lifeless body on the floor. Shadows crept in through the door. It was
evening, nearing twilight. She could see the black dog on the porch,
lying with its head on crossed paws, watching her.

Angelique sat back
down into the chair and rubbed her face with her hands. She needed to
find something to eat. She needed to sleep in the bed, get some rest.

Tomorrow she’d
be off again, wandering the highways, looking for her partner angel.
And she’d have to do it without any help from the old woman at
her feet.

“
Spiteful old
thing!” she shouted.

A wind came up and
shook the bottles in the tree in the yard, the tinkle of glass
setting up a cacophony of crazy sounds. Angelique looked out the door
at the tree and sighed. If that noise didn’t stop she would
never get any sleep.

Maybe she’d go
out and knock down all the bottles first, before it got dark. The old
woman wouldn’t like that and maybe that was reason enough to do
it.

She walked past the
body, giving it a glance, imaging one of the limp hands coming to
life to reach out for her ankle. But of course that didn’t
happen and it wouldn’t. As much magic as the old woman had, it
hadn’t been enough to save her from death and death was final.
At least to a true human, it was.

While the sky
darkened and the doves gathered in the high grass to make their
mournful sounds, Angelique worked on the tree untying string and
cords, untangling wires, bottles dropping like dead butterflies to
the ground. The dog kept a distance, watching, always watching.
Finally in the full dark she worked, muttering, sometimes weeping
with frustration and self-pity.

It was midnight
before she was done and could clamber down from the tree branches.
She was really hungry and tired, but she had one more chore to do
before looking for food. She had to drag the body out of the house.
She’d let it lie amidst the bottles, broken and soundless,
beneath the tree. It was a good resting place for her, the perfect
place.

A bad yellow moon
rose low in the sky as Angelique wearily tread the steps to the porch
and entered the house. Wind whispered against the eaves and whistled
around the house corners.

It was the night of
the dead witch. It was a lonely patch of land with a soulless house
harboring a tired child who had been called a devil. The dark would
not be kind.

***

Angelique rarely
dreamed or at least she never remembered them. But this night, lying
in a dead woman’s bed, covered by a quilt made by a dead
woman’s hands, Angelique suffered a nightmare.

The old woman came
to her and she was smiling with secrets. “What do you want?”
Angelique asked, backing away from the apparition.