Strange Angels (3 page)

“You want one?” he asked again.

What the hell?I stared at the crucifix. Did he have any idea what that meant? Or how quickly it could get him in a lot of trouble, in some places?

Probably not. That’s why the Real World is the Real World: because the normal world thinks it’s the only game going.

“No thanks.” I want a cup of coffee and a club sandwich. I want to sit down someplace and draw. I want to find some place where the sunlight doesn’t get in and I don’t feel like

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a total alien. Leave me the hell alone. I should have told Dad about the owl. My conscience pricked me. “Sorry about Bletchley.”

He shrugged, a quick birdlike movement. All of him was birdlike, from his beak of a nose at war with his caramel-skinned baby face to the restless way his fingers moved. He tapped a cigarette out of the pack and produced a silver Zippo, lit the cancer stick, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and promptly went into a coughing fit. Jesus. Here I was freezing my ass off with Cool Goth Boy. Some days were so much worse than others it wasn’t funny. “It’s okay,” he said when he could talk again. “She’s a bitch. She does that all the time.”

Glad to know I didn’t interrupt anything.I stood there with no real idea of what to say. I settled for a shrug of my own. “See you.”

“Are you skipping?” He fell into step beside me, ignoring the fact that I was walking away

. “Off to a good start.”

Leave me alone.“I don’t want to deal with it today.”

“Okay. I know a place to go. You shoot pool?” He managed not to choke himself on another drag of cigarette smoke. “I’m Graves.”

When did I invite you along?“I know.” I looked back down at my boots, marking off time.

“Dru.” And don’t you dare ask what it’s short for.

“Dru.” He repeated it. “You’re new. Couple of weeks, right? Welcome to Foley.”

State the goddamn obvious and bring out your suburban Welcome Wagon.I couldn’t see any way to ditch him just yet, so I just made a noise of assent. We crossed the soccer field in weird tandem, him shortening his stride out of respect for my lack of grasshopper legs. I sized him up as we walked. I’d give myself better odds in a fight, I decided. He didn’t look very tough.

Still, I was walking into the woods with a kid I didn’t know. I stole quick little glances at his hands and decided he might be okay. At least I could kick his ass if he tried anything, and the greenbelt wasn’t very big.

He tried again. “Where you from?”

A planet far, far away. Where nightmares are real.“Florida.” The question always came up, sooner or later. Sometimes, mostly when I was younger, I lied. Most of the time I just pretended like I’d always lived in the last place we’d come from. People don’t really want to know anything about you. They just want you to fit into their little predetermined slots. They decide what you are in the first two seconds, and they only get nervous or upset if you don’t live up to their snap judgments. That’s one way the normal world’s like the Real—it all depends on what people think you are. Figure that out, play to what they expect, and it’s clear sailing.

“Yeah, you sounded a bit down-South. Big change for you, huh? It’s going to snow.” He announced it like I should be grateful to him for telling me. The strap of my bag dug into my shoulder.

I tried not to bristle. I do not sound Southern. I sound like Gran a little bit, but that’s all.

“Thanks for the warning.” I didn’t bother disguising the sarcasm.

“Hey, no problem. First one’s free.”

When I glanced up at him, he was smiling under his hair. It almost threatened to eat his nose, that hair. The proud, bony nose was putting up a good fight, though, and he looked miserably cold. He didn’t even have any gloves.

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For a second I toyed with the idea of telling him something. Hi. I’m Dru Anderson. My father went way-out wack after my mom died and now he travels around hunting things that go bump in the night, killing things you only find in fairy tales and ghost stories. I help him out when I can, but most of the time I’m deadweight, even though I can tell you where anything inhuman in this town is likely to hang out. I’m skipping school because I won’t be here in another three months. None of it goddamn well matters. Instead, I found myself almost smiling back. “You should wear some gloves.”

He peered at me, shaking his hair away. His eyes turned out to be green with threads of brown and gold, thickly fringed with dark lashes, change-color eyes. Boys always get the best eyelashes; it’s like some kind of cosmic law. And half-breed kids get some kind of extra help there from genetics, too. Once he grew into that nose and his face thinned out a bit, the girls would like him a lot. Maybe it would even go to his head.

“Ruins the image,” he said. Silver glittered in his left ear, an earring I couldn’t quite make out.

“You’ll goddamn well freeze to death.” We reached the end of the soccer field and he took the lead, going to the right along a dusty footpath. Bare branches interlaced above us, and the dry smell of fallen leaves tickled my nose with dust. The brick pile of the school behind us would soon be out of sight, and that made me happier than I’d been all day.

Graves snorted, tossed his hair back as he took another drag. The smoke hung in a feathered shape for a moment as he exhaled, but I blinked to clear my eyes. “Hey, we’ve got to suffer for beauty. Chicks don’t go for guys with gloves.”

I’ll bet chicks don’t go for you at all, out here in Stepford Podunk.“How would you know?” I stepped over a tree root, my bag bumping my hip.

“I know.” He shot me a look over his shoulder, his hair almost swallowing his grin, too.

“You never said if you liked shooting pool.”

“I don’t.” I felt a little guilty again. He was trying to be nice. There was one in every school—some guy who thought his chances were better with new girls. “But I’ll beat your ass at it, okay?”

I decided I could wait to find the local paranormal hangout. Dad would probably give me another version of The Lecture if I went looking for it alone. There was that one time in Dallas when he found me trading shots of Coke with a pointy-eared goggle-eyed gremlin and about had a cow—

“Fine.” He didn’t even sound insulted. “If you can, Dru .”

I thought about telling him Dad had taught me to shoot pool when we were low on cash, and decided not to. Maybe if I embarrassed the kid he’d leave me alone. CHAPTER 2

I got home alittle after five, riding the jolting, bumping bus all the way from downtown. Graves had wanted me to hang around and shoot a few more games, but the place—an allages pool club with a jukebox and indoor basketball and tennis courts—was loud and full of funky smells, as well as being jammed with kids who should have been in school themselves. So I bailed and had to figure out the bus. I’m used to figuring out the public transportation in just about any part of America, and this place actually had a good system.

Dad’s truck was gone, but he’d left the light on in the kitchen and a fifty-dollar bill next to

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a note. Don’t wait up. Order pizza. Homework before TV, kiddo, and do your katas. Love you. Dad.

Other dads actually sat at the dinner table. Mine left me a fifty and a reminder to do my goddamn katas.

I was cold anyway, so I dropped my bag in the kitchen and bashed my way out into the garage, the big broken-spring door rattling as the wind teased at it. The heavy bag creaked, swaying a little, but I shucked my coat and shivered in the middle of the concrete floor instead.

Dad liked karate, and he was big enough that it was a good choice for him. But I’m built rangy, like my mom, except she had nice chestworks and a pretty curve to her hips. I’m just angles except for the breasticles, which are more trouble than they’re worth, especially when it comes to boys. I don’t have the kind of muscle mass you need to meet a punch with direct force.

So for me, it’s tai chi and what Dad called “The Basic Dirty-Fightin’” when he was sober and “Six Great Ways to Bounce an Asshole” when he’d had a few Beams. I like tai chi—I like the slow way each movement flows into the next and the breathing smooths everything out. It’s still hard work, because your knees always have to be a little unlocked, and after a while it really murders your quads and hamstrings, but it’s nice. Push-pull. Part the horse’s mane. Catch the swallow’s tail. Warmed up and loosened, and feeling a little better, I finally inhaled and exhaled, as close to at peace as I guess you can ever get. The outside world rushed in as soon as I opened my eyes, and I began worrying about Dad again before I even opened the door to the kitchen and stamped through, making a lot of noise I really didn’t have to.

It’s the only way to fill up an empty house.

I dug through the fridge and eventually settled on a bowl of Cheerios. I’d scarfed a greasy slice of pizza at the pool hall, and the thought of more half-cardboard cheese didn’t appeal to me, even with pepperoni. So I wolfed the cereal, spiked a glass of Coke with some of Dad’s Jim Beam, and wandered up to my room to lie on the bed and look at the light on the ceiling. Every room is different, and the way outside light reflects up onto the spackle stuff smeared on most ceilings is unique. I could probably describe pretty much every place we’ve ever lived in terms of ceiling light.

The worst part about Dad being out on hunting runs was the way whatever house we were in got really creepy around dusk. Night is when most of the stuff in the Real World comes out to play—and by play you can mean “have a little fun,” “go grocery shopping because sunlight burns like acid,” or “make unwary people disappear, yum yum.” Take your pick.

I pulled Mom’s red-and-white quilt around me, snug as a bug in a rug, and sipped at the Coke until my taste buds burned off a little—I’d made it about half and half, and began to get a warm glow after a while. My clock blinked its little red eyes, and darkness gathered deeper and deeper in the corners. The wind made the glassed-in screen door on the enclosed back porch rattle.

When we lived in apartments, I would play the game of listening to the sounds in the building as everyone came home, and imagining stories for all of them. Most apartment buildings aren’t quiet if you’re really listening. After a while the noises begin to seem like family, and you catch the rhythm of each separate life in your building working together to

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make the melody called home. One place we lived, the guy next door played the cello after dinner every night. That was nice to listen to, even if the other guy down the hall beat his wife once a month when rent came due.

Houses are different. They creak to themselves, muttering, when night comes around. An empty house around dusk starts to talk, no matter how newly built it is. I used to play music to cover it up, but after a while the thought that I wouldn’t be able to hear if anything was sneaking around the hallways got to me. When you can see apparitions and poltergeists in living, solid color, that sort of thinking usually does start getting to you.

So I mostly listened and waited on nights when Dad was “out.” Night gets kind of strange when you’re waiting for someone to come home. I’ve seen shit on TV you wouldn’t believe, stuff that only happens when you’re alone and nobody can verify the sighting. Once Dad found me curled up on the floor of the mobile home we were renting in Byronville, clutching a baseball bat and sound asleep while a Twilight Zone rerun blared out of the television. I’d eaten a TV dinner and my hair had gotten into the empty tray. After that he made me promise to go to bed and not wait up, but that just meant that I fell asleep sitting up in bed and thinking about all the ways things could go wrong. Things can go very, very wrong. They go wrong all the time in the normal world, and the Real World just means they go wrong with teeth and claws, quicker than your average bear. August called it “the Situation.” Dad called it “gone south.” Juan-Raoul de la HoyaSmith called it “ malagoddamn suerte, chingada. ”

I didn’t know what Dad was after this time. He hadn’t said anything on the way from Florida. That was a little unusual—normally he had me looking through the boxes of old leather-bound books he picked up here and there, searching for odd bits of information. Or helping him make bullets and sharpen the knives, bouncing ideas off me or quizzing me on tactics. I’m probably the only sixteen-year-old girl in a three-hundred-mile radius who knows how to distinguish a poltergeist from an actual ghost (hint: If you can disrupt it with nitric acid, or if it throws new crap at you every time, it’s a poltergeist), or how to tell if a medium’s real or faking it (poke ’em with a true-iron needle). I know the six signs of a good occult store (Number One is the proprietor bolts the door before talking about Real Business) and the four things you never do when you’re in a bar with other people who know about the darker side of the world (don’t look weak). I know how to access public information and talk my way around clerks in courthouses (a smile and the right clothing work wonders). I also know how to hack into newspaper files, police reports, and some kinds of government databases (primary rule: Don’t get caught. Duh). Hey, even if you’ve got great intuition you can’t just walk up to people and ask them about the resident exorcist or the last unsolved murder that was committed during the new moon. You also can’t ask them about the haunted houses that serve as nodes or the local werwulfen hangout—where the burgers aren’t just rare, they’re raw. And served in big bloody piles.

Sometimes you have to go digging to find the pattern behind events that to other people just look like random bad luck.

Get information and you’ll find a pattern,Gran said. Find the pattern and you have your prey, Dad said.

He also said, Don’t let the backwoods woo-woo take the place of logic. He said that a lot.