Strange Angels (8 page)

“Hey.” Graves had appeared right next to me, crouching down. Strings of wavy hair fell in his face, and he pushed them back with a quick flick of his long fingers. “You okay? You hurt anywhere?”

The question struck me as absurd. I hurt all over, every muscle in my back was tight, my legs ached, my shoulders felt like lead bars, my arms were heavy—and my heart, speared with something dark and terrible, hurt worst of all. My hands shook. Even my hair ached, now that I was sitting down, not moving from one thing to the next. I opened my mouth to tell him so, and a dry, barking sob interrupted me halfway.

“Oh shit.” He sounded really alarmed, and he dropped down next to me. “Dru? Jesus. Dru?”

I couldn’t answer him. Sobs racked me, horrible sounds like I was being strangled because I couldn’t keep them back but I tried so hard my teeth locked together, grinding. My jaw creaked, and I couldn’t smell the coffee after a while because my nose was full. Graves put one bony arm around me and didn’t say anything while I cried. It was decent of him, and I liked him for it. I was almost sorry I was going to have to blow town and leave him behind.

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He gave me the cot and the sleeping bag, and I passed out clutching my messenger bag to my chest, Dad’s coat on the floor next to the bed. When I woke up hours later, Graves was gone. There was a scrawled note attached to the inside of the door with a wad of spearmint gum.

Went to school. I’ll bring your homework

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back.

. There was another line, more heavily

crossed out, that I couldn’t decipher, then: Stay as long as you want. I’ll be back. I dug in my bag until I came up with my watch, a waterproof Swiss number Dad had bought in New York when I was twelve. He’d left me with August for about a month while he was up near the Canadian border doing something or another. Even though August was pretty cool and knew more about the Real World than a lot of books, he still wasn’t real company, like Dad. And besides, he always made me stay inside while he was out “working.” A whole month in New York and all I knew was one street in Brooklyn.

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It was a little after 3 p.m. I’d slept for a long time; my head felt heavy, my mouth sandy and nasty, every muscle stiff and my back hurting like a sonofabitch. I’d definitely pulled something getting away from the zombie.

The thought hurt, but not as much as I thought it would. It was like pinching your toes after they’ve gone to sleep. Dad was a zombie. Had been a zombie. Whatever. What am I going to do now?I stood staring blankly at the note on the door for a little while, just breathing and feeling the inside of my head full of cotton wool. A thought swam through the fuzziness, linking up with the memory of August’s close, stuffy apartment. Contacts. Dad has contacts. I should go find the list and let one of them know.

We weren’t the only ones hunting down ghosts, poltergeists, flickers, bad hexes, chupacabras, gator spirits, bad voodoo, or anything else you care to name. There’s a whole underground movement, checking in at occult and Army-Navy surplus stores, passing along information and trading tips on how to best clean out a haunted house or take down a sucker, how to disperse a poltergeist or where the next wave of weird crap moving through a region is coming from.

I shivered at the thought of suckers, gooseflesh rising hard and hot on my arms, spilling down my back. They were bad news, like werwulfen—though wulfen were generally not dangerous to people like Dad, having their own running feud with the suckers to keep them busy.

I shut my eyes. Why hadn’t I told Dad about Gran’s owl? He might have listened and not gone out that night.

Which made it my fault, in a fuzzy sort of way. And the house was standing open, getting colder and colder, with a hole the size of Texas in the back door and a stain on the livingroom carpet, plus a bullet hole in the living-room wall. What am I going to do?

First things first. I was starving . I needed food, and I needed to think. I had to make a list of Things To Do. I’d have to go back to the house during daylight. Daylight was safest. I needed to get the ammo together, and all the weapons. I needed to pack up, and I needed to find Dad’s truck.

Our battered blue Ford truck rose up inside my head like a beacon. If I could find the truck, I could make it out of town and figure out what to do next. Gran’s house up in the Blue Ridge was still standing solid—we’d been there a few months back, swinging through to check in on it—and mine under the terms of the trust fund she and Dad had set up. I could hide out there. Once I was up in the mountains, I would have a little space to breathe. Nobody would come looking for me there—it took two dirt roads and a piece to even get close, as Gran always said.

Dad deserved a funeral service. There wouldn’t be anything left of him but greasy dust and bits of bleached bone, though. Zombies fall apart amazingly quick. One scorching tear trickled down my cheek, then another. He wasn’t going to come stamping in the door yelling, Dru, honey, get your ass up! He wasn’t going to walk in tired and heavy, lock the door, and ask me what was for dinner. He wasn’t ever going to quiz me about sage smudging, hex-breaking, or poltergeist-clearing ever again. Or even leave me a note reminding me to do my katas.

I came back to myself with a jolt and looked down at my watch. It was buckled on my

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wrist now, my clever little fingers doing the work for me. Thirty minutes had passed while I stood staring at the note on the door. My back ached, every single muscle glued to its neighbors and protesting. I needed some aspirin in the worst way. I had money. I could make it up to the food court—but what if someone saw me behind the mall’s scenes? Would I get in trouble I couldn’t lie my way out of, or would someone start watching the halls and catch Graves on his way back?

Oh, for God’s sake. You’ve got plenty of problems without worrying about him. But you don’t blow someone else’s bolt-hole. It’s like a law among hunters. And if Dad was gone, I was the only one left to do the hunting. Thatwas a scary thought, and one I pushed away as soon as I could. I stamped back to the bed and dug in my bag. It was deathly quiet down here, but even if I made any noise someone outside wouldn’t be able to tell where it was coming from, would they? How often did people scurry down to the dumpsters during the day, anyway?

Who used the cardboard crusher?

My artist’s pad was a bit worn around the edges from being smashed into my bag all the time. I flipped through it, looking for a clean sheet so I could leave a note for Graves. The strength went out of my legs, and I sat down hard on the concrete floor, my teeth clicking together as my ass hit.

There was the drawing of the iris I’d been working on, shaded lovingly. Then the doodles of shapes, the closet door, and my nightstand. The pile of laundry. On the next page the pencil had dug into the paper, rasping harshly and shading giant blocks of shadow. I didn’t remember drawing this, but I knew I had. Who else could’ve?

It was the back of a warehouse or another large building butted up against an even larger one, broken windows suggested with slices of pencil shading. There was a busted-down chain-link fence, and in front of the fence was something familiar—a truck crouched like a big cat.

Ourtruck. I’d know that camper anywhere. My mouth went dry and copper-tasting. My heartbeat thudded in my throat and ears.

I don’t remember drawing this. I fell asleep after drawing the laundry—I know I did!

But I’d dreamed , hadn’t I? A bad dream, about . . . what? Dad, and a door. And something behind the door. The more I looked at the building crouching behind our truck, the more certain I was that something horrible had happened in there, something that ended up with Dad getting turned into a flesh-eating, shambling horror. The pencil had been broken in my hand, digging in with sharp edges when I woke up. The drawing had obviously been done quickly, using shortcuts I knew about from years of scribbling sketches. It was ridiculous, impossible. Gran would have been proud of me for displaying a new talent, but I wasn’t so happy about it at all. I was still staring at the drawing’s heavy, thick strokes when a scratching sound from the wall brought my head up. I dove off the bed and rolled, grabbing the jacket and ending up full-length on the floor, my hand squirming for the gun just like Dad taught me. Get down first, then return fire. Making yourself a target while you fire back is bad business, sweetheart.

Sanity caught up with me just as the door swung inward. Who else knew I was down here?

Graves hopped through the door and shook his head sharply. He was soaking wet and

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shivering, water dripping from his curly hair and the hem of his long black coat. His lips were almost blue, his nose bright red and dripping, and his cheeks looked yellow-raw.

“It’s c-cold as sh-shitout there,” he stuttered, and blinked owlishly at me as he swept the door closed, a black backpack hanging wetly from one sodden bony shoulder. “And snowing again. I had a hell of a time getting back in here. I brought you something.”

I felt ridiculous, lying on the floor, but he didn’t seem to notice. He shut the door and stamped, shaking himself like a golden retriever just come up out of a freezing lake. Water flew.

I clicked the safety back on and eased my finger off the trigger. Clambered to my feet, leaving the gun in my coat. “It’s snowing again?”

“God, is it ever. You wouldn’t believe what I went through to get inside the mall. Here.”

He dug in his backpack, shaking more water out of his hair. I could see the melting ice sticking to the dark strands. He was soaked .

“Jesus.” I crossed the small room and tried to take the backpack away from him. “Get out of that coat, your lips are blue. You’d better get into something dry.”

“She’s already trying to get my clothes off,” he announced to the ceiling, refusing to relinquish his bag. “You sound all Southern when you—hang on for a second. Jeez, patience is a virtue . Slow down, it’s for you.”

The backpack yielded a smaller paper bag that smelled like meat and fries. I got him out of the coat and was looking around for someplace to hang the heavy dark material when he dropped the pack, pulled his wet shirt off over his head, and shook all over again, splattering me with cold water and bits of ice.

“What did you do, roll in it? Jesus.” I rescued the bag of food. “Where did you get this?”

“Place on Marshall that never closes. I worked there one summer. They do good food. Start eating, don’t wait for me. You want some coffee?”

He headed off for the bathroom, his shoulder blades like fragile wings under copper-tinted skin. There was a bloom of red across his shoulders from the cold, and he was already unbuttoning his pants. He had nice musculature, a bit scrawny but developed, at odds with his baby-cheeked face.

A flush worked its way up my neck, found my cheeks. I looked quickly away, found a hanger and got his coat hung up where it could drip onto the floor. He came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and another one scrubbing at his hair. I dug in the bag and found three cheesesteak sandwiches and a triple order of curly fries. They smelled divine . “Wow. What do I owe you?”

A flash of a grin eased his face. “First one’s free, kid. Start eating; you probably haven’t had anything all day, have you? They even canceled school, for once. Bletch was madder than a jock with his balls kicked in. It took me a couple hours to get to the place out on Marshall and another—” He broke off, looking down at me with one half of his unibrow cocked. “You’d better eat. I didn’t haul it out here for nothing.”

At least he was looking a little less like a half-melted Popsicle. “Christ, will you put your clothes on?” Dad walked around shirtless whenever he wanted to and I was sure I wasn’t a prude, but still.

“I thought you were trying to get me out of my clothes.” He snorted his particular sarcastic laugh, half bark and half yip of pain. “Start eating.”

“Really, what do I owe you?” And where do you get your money, kid? Do I care? There

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were all sorts of questions about why a kid would live in a mall, but I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know. His problems were just that— his. I had enough on my hands.

“Told you, first one’s free.” He actually winked , his eyes more brown than green today. He grabbed a shirt and pulled it over his head, took a handful of other clothes while I looked down at the floor, that strange heat swamping my cheeks like water filling up a footprint.

“You bought me dinner the other day, remember?”

“But I didn’t buy you a Marshall Street Special. I wasn’t sure you’d be here, but then I thought you’d probably still be sleeping. You were passed out pretty hard when I left this morning.” He dropped down next to me wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt and dry jeans. The towel landed with a thump near the duffel bag that held his dirty laundry, and he picked up one of the sandwiches. “Hope it’s still warm.”

My coat was lying on the floor right next to him. It looked innocent, but I knew what was in the pocket. What would he say if he guessed what I’d been about to do?

Just who was this kid, anyway? “Why are you doing this?”

His shoulders hunched again. He took a massive bite of cheesy steak sandwich and closed his eyes. The floor was hard and cold, and I wondered where he’d slept last night. I hadn’t even thought about it before.

He chewed, his hair hanging in damp black strings over his eyes, and shrugged. “Mrfle.”

What the hell does that mean?I decided to let it go. He’d brought me down here, after all, and I wasn’t one to throw stones when it came to abnormal living arrangements. “Thank you. I mean, it’s been bad. Thanks.” The urge to tell him something, anything, rose in my throat.