Metal Angel (31 page)

The light had changed. Behind Volos cars had pulled away, though the ones he confronted stayed where they were, blocking traffic. He had long ago learned of his ability to stop traffic … good, but what next? If he moved from where he was, the driver—what was his name—Ennis would just step on the gas and take off.

As he thought it, from behind the Yugo the Oldsmobile pulled onto the road's ample shoulder and accelerated past. Little more than arm's length away, Volos saw the two men in the front seat, the craggy face of the driver, fierce-eyed, glaring eternal torments at him, and—

Mercedes.

Mercedes!

Mercy, staring straight at him with a smile like a dog's snarl and lifting a hand to tell him Fuck You. The same hand that had once …

The Yugo backed up, skewed around him, and drove off after the Olds. People were getting out of cars and running toward Volos, their arms outstretched to touch him, clutch at him, get his autograph. He flew. Odd, he must have lost track of everything for a moment. The two cars were already through the next light.

Mercy. I cannot believe it
.

He caught up to the gray sedan and the brown hatchback as they turned onto the interstate.

They picked up speed, and he flew above them. He did not know what else to do. Land atop one, block the windshield, make it stop? But then the other one would go on without him. Angie could not help him. He had not heard a thought from her since that first terror-stricken scream. She had to be unconscious—by some drug Mercedes had given her, he hoped, not by a blow.

God burn you, Mercy. What Texas did to me was lovingkindness compared to this
.

Texas. It was easier for Volos to admit, now that he was in trouble, that it had been a mistake to drive Texas away and even more of a mistake not to try to make it right; why had he not tracked him down, begged him to come back? He had a good idea where Texas had gone. At the very least he could have called him and told him how much he missed him, missed his long-legged stride to walk beside and his soft-spoken advice and his absurdities. Missed his kindness … Texas would have made everything better somehow if he had been there. If he had been at the fairground, he would somehow have kept this nightmare from ever happening.

Maybe not. Maybe it was time to see truth: Maybe even God could not stop the blackwing side of life.

Headlights, stabbing around turns, hurt his eyes. Made him blink.

He followed for an hour, grew tired. These people he was trailing were going sixty along the expressway. It was hard on him to fly so slowly. And all their other offenses aside, he decided, Bradley and Crawshaw were despicable for owning such boring cars, dull cars, difficult to see in the night, instead of something white and sporty.

Jenkins exit ahead.

They took the ramp, as he expected and hoped they would. Hoped, because there would be another chance for a rescue, another traffic light, maybe—

There was none. Overpassing the highway was only a small country road, the kind with domed asphalt and no lines. At the top of the exit ramp the Yugo went one way, the Olds the other. Volos groaned, thought fleetingly of physical dismemberment, for how else was he to follow both boys and Angie? But it seemed he had to choose. Swearing, he hung in the air a moment, then veered after the Olds and the Lady of Angels.

The road steepened as it wound up Jenkins Mountain, turning to a dark tunnel beneath overhanging trees. Volos flew low, his wingtips brushing the woods on each side, his bare, dangling feet nearly touching the gray sedan's roof. Feeling very much trapped.

Halfway up a long hillside the trees ended. Gratefully Volos swooped up into clean night sky and circled, watching from far above as the Olds pulled into some sort of clearing and bumped to a stop.

There were no houses anywhere nearby. The place was one of those run-down township parks, once meant for family reunions and wienie roasts, now used mostly for illegal camping and illicit activities. Its picnic tables were gone, its pavilion roofless. At some time there had been a nonregulation ball field, with a backstop behind home plate, of which the supports, two twelve-foot sections of telephone pole solidly erected, still stood, as they might do until Stonehenge fell. On one of them were glass reflectors embedded in the gray wood, winking in the night like a three-eyed cat.

About where the pitcher's mound might have been, a bonfire blazed. Even after the Olds turned off its headlights, Volos could see the metallic glints of several other cars parked in that place. Near the fire stood men wearing rude black hoods that covered their heads and faces, with slits for the eyes.

Cowards. No-balls
.

In trees all around, a hundred thousand insects shrilled, the crowd getting worked up in the cheap seats. Overhead the stars watched in ineffable silence.

They are gutless. Why am I frightened?

The black-suited, craggy-faced man got out of his car and dragged Angie out of the back seat, the rough movements of his hands showing that he did not care if he hurt her. Her father? How could he call himself her father? He who sat on the Throne seemed kind by comparison.

Slinging Angie over his shoulder, where her buttocks in their tight jeans appeared both indecent and terribly vulnerable, Crawshaw strode the short distance to the bonfire. Looking up, he grinned like a skull.

Volos knew then that despite open sky he was trapped still.

As if in response to a pressing invitation, he spiraled down the updraft of the—bane-fire, bone-fire, either way it spelled death. He did not want to die. He had not imagined himself to die until he had done much, much more living. Where was the blackwing power now that he needed it? But he knew it would not come to him. He had renounced it, he had imagined it out of himself. And in a way he could not say he was sorry. Blind anger was fit only for zealots such as these.

Ten feet above the flames he swooped away and landed atop the three-eyed telephone pole, teetering there, staring down at all of them. Careful, though, not to look at the small man who leaned against the passenger door of the Olds.

“Come closer, renegade,” Crawshaw challenged him.

Clinging to splintery wood with his bare feet, Volos did not speak. It seemed to him as if the sound of his own voice would make what was happening more real than he could bear.

“You want to save this slut, unholy one? Then come here.”

Texas, where are you? You never did teach me how to do the chin thing
.

“Come down, you who like to wallow in perversion.” As if slapping butcher meat onto a countertop, Crawshaw swung Angie down from his shoulder into the grasp of his hard hands, dangling her nearer the fire.

Volos felt his breath coming fast, his heart straining with a pain he could only dimly comprehend.
Rescue
, he thought, yearning to do it. But rescuer, savior, guardian angel—these were roles against which he had rebelled, for which he had not equipped himself. There were many strong men at the fire. He could not hope to fight them all.

“Pay the price of your sinning. Someone must pay. Choose! Will it be you or this fallen woman?”

Then Volos momentarily could not breathe at all, and the summery September night went cold, and insect chatter was a roar that engulfed him, the roar of the mob rushing the sacrificial hill, the roar of the congregation as the knife poised over the scapegoat. It was not a fistfight that was required of him. It was not wrath, a rebel's black rage, no better than the ranting of a fanatic. It was instead the one stance he had sworn he would never take: It was submission.

He looked at Angela. In her father's steely grip she hung unconscious and helpless, limp as a broken wing.

“Blasphemer. Profaner. Come accept your punishment, or your Jezebel will.”

“No,” Volos whispered.

With his eyes shining like a wolf's eyes in the night Crawshaw looked up, then swung Angela so near to the blaze that her long hair hung scorching and sparking in the flames.

“Stop,” Volos said.

The man with wolf eyes moved Angela perhaps an inch away from danger. “Are you coming?”

Volos said, “Yes.”

He kicked with his wings, let them carry him toward the fire and the black-hooded men around it, down to the ground. His feet when they hit felt like lead. He tried to look only at Angie, not at anything else. Tried to think only of her. If he could feel sure she would live, it would not be so hard to do this thing.

So this is love
.

His legs moved stiffly, carrying him forward, toward her. He stretched out a hand, wanting to touch her, to push her away from the flames, but his enemies seized him. Two of them gripped each of his arms. More grasped his wings. It was no joke, that he could have beaten them to death with the power of those wings, and they knew it. Through the feathers he could feel the sting of their hatred.

Crawshaw spat in his face. Staring despite himself, Volos saw that the man's eyes were fixed and soulless, like glass balls.

“Were you human once?” Volos asked him, afraid not for himself but for everyone with a future, everyone mortal, if things like this could happen. “Did you love her once? She is your daughter.”

The man glared, then turned away long enough to carry Angela the few steps to his car. He dumped her into it, reached into a suit pocket with bony fingers and handed Mercedes his keys. Smirking at Volos across the night, Mercy started the car and drove away.

“Blasphemer.” Crawshaw stood in front of Volos again. But Volos did not hear him. He was listening to the sound of love being taken farther and farther away, down the mountainside into the darkness.

Crawshaw backhanded him across the face. “Viper! Unrepentant slave to sin! Do you know how to pray?”

Softly Volos said to him, “I have sung ten thousand times ‘Gloria, Gloria, Gloria' before the Throne.”

His wings felt different than they ever had before, far lighter, filled and uplifted by some passion that was ardent and fiery yet soft and yielding as cloudstuff. Puzzled, Volos glanced over his shoulder to see what might have happened. There he saw a refulgence that did not come from the bonfire. For the first time ever in his incarnate life, his wing feathers shone a pure, lambent white.

chapter seventeen

The night of the League for Moral Purity bonfire, after helping lure Volos as far as the Jenkins overpass, Ennis took Gabriel and Michael to be baby-sat by their Grandmother Crawshaw. Though she had not seen the boys in nearly a year, she greeted them without much change of expression. She had been like that for as long as Ennis had known her: passionless, dutiful, supremely accepting of God's will. Years past, he had thought there was something wrong with her, something important missing, and had wondered how she got that way. But he no longer had such foolish thoughts. He understood now that what he had perceived as an emptiness in his mother-in-law was rather a spaciousness, a blessed purgation, the absence of sin. Hers was a life of obedience, an exemplar he tried to follow as day by day he grew more like her.

From her house he drove fast, reaching the park just as that treacherous sodomizer Mercedes was pulling out. Good. He had not missed much, it was just starting. By the fire he could see Volos, a tall sinner with white wings. Saw his father-in-law hit him. Saw how Volos stood on spraddled legs, like a gunfighter, and did not flinch.

His mind swerved at once away from grudging admiration. Reverend Crawshaw was the one to be admired, taking a strong stance against sin and sinners. Though Reverend Crawshaw, in his constant pity for human frailty, had allowed his followers to wear masks while performing this difficult task for the Lord, he himself wore none. Striving, as always, to emulate his spiritual leader, Ennis had decided to do likewise.

He parked the Yugo, got out, and opened its hatchback. He had some things in there that his father-in-law had asked him to bring from the house. Rope clothesline. An ax.

Hefting them, he walked up to the bonfire.

“Son!” His father-in-law greeted him warmly, then took the ax from him and turned back to the prisoner, displaying it horizontally on both hands. He spoke, chill now as a stone where no sun shines.

“He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword,” he averred. His voice grew terrible. “And he who lives by the ax of rock and roll music shall die by the ax of God's wrath.”

Watching Volos, this lowlife who had stolen his wife and taken happiness away from him, Ennis saw him sway a little, as if he had been struck a strong-fisted blow. Saw how he did not struggle or cry out or speak. His face looked pale even in the ruddy firelight, and in their sockets of shadow his eyes seemed huge, like a bewildered child's.

They took him over to where the two stubs of telephone pole stood and put a rope tight around each wrist and stretched him between them, cruciform, with his back to the fire.

This was a serious event, a culmination for the Crusade, and Reverend Crawshaw was treating it with befitting ceremony. “Show him what is going to feed the flames, men of God,” he declaimed. Ennis was ready. Like an usher passing out Sunday morning bulletins he distributed the things: record albums, cassette tapes, compact discs, several hundred of them, all with the explicit lyrics advisory label, all with Volos's blue-winged back on the cover. All copies of
Scars
.

“So many. Thank you,” Volos quipped, his voice struggling for the poise that would put him above what was happening. “I hope you got a discount.”

“Fool!” Reverend Crawshaw's voice lashed like a whip. “You are going to die. Be silent and pray.”

“
Sacre silentio?
No, thank you. The dead lie silent in their graves.” Volos stood erect, Ennis noted, not hanging against the ropes that bound him. “I came here to live. To sing and love and speak and live.” His dark eyes caught on Ennis a moment, then slipped past.

“Do not listen to him,” Reverend Crawshaw told his sheep. “His is the voice of Satan. Go on about the Lord's work.”