The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge (37 page)

He stuck the revolver in his waistband, took the car key from Buzz, and stood up. He nudged me with his foot. “And you, doll. If you don’t die, look me up sometime.”

I lifted the Colt I’d dropped when I took it from Gil. The Colt was heavy. “I died once already,” I told him. “It’s not as bad as you’d think.”

I shot Eddie. I shot him three times, in the chest. And I didn’t feel the least bit bad about it.

9.

I drifted. The old part of me, the part that had seen other seraphs bleed and die, knew that I wasn’t going to last long. I was bleeding, and my shadow-body would die. Where would I go then? Down with Gil? Into the Nothingness, to be torn apart and remade for the rest of eternity? Neither possibility thrilled me.

Gil stood grinning over me. His body was falling apart, and his demon face was showing. “Looks like I’m walking away.”

I watched him smile at me, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

“You know, I should have asked you how you fell,” Gil said. “Always enjoy those stories.” He grinned. “But seeing as how you’re a whore, I guess it’s not a mystery.”

I returned the smile. “Tell the truth . . . I never really knew.”

“Never?” Gil laughed, barked it. His chest made a sucking sound. He was old, and strong. He’d find another body before this one gave out. Keep going. More Bettys, on bathroom floors.

I thought of what I felt when he touched me. I thought of lying naked on the Earth, the night I fell.

I looked up, and thought of the stars.

Gil hissed at me. “The hell are you doing?”

I reached out, and up, and snatched him by the hand. “I’m not walking out of here,” I said. “And neither are you.”

There are doorways, if you know where to find them. Passageways between the spheres, between the City and Hell and here, where I lay bleeding to death on a threadbare rug, in a drafty farmhouse, in a tiny pinpoint of light at the crossroads of two highways. There are exits and entries, and you can find them all sorts of ways. You find them by dying, or by living. Seraphs know the way, know it from birth, to pass through the spheres and send demons back to Hell.

I’d forgotten, but the demon had shown me. He’d shown me that I wasn’t really dead, not yet. That the blood that made me human also made me something else, not seraph and not demon, but not just meat either.

I held on to Gil and the feeling of the doorway. I was close, standing on the edge of the whirlpool, but I didn’t let go of the demon. I peeled back the layers of its blood and bone, got down to the core of the thing.

And I let go.

Gil got out one sound, just a half a scream, before he lost his grip and Hell took him back. His stolen body had been dead for a long time, old injuries running like railroad tracks across its skin. Buzz was gone, not nearly as strong as his buddy. Eddie lay with his eyes open, like he was waiting for someone to tell him it was all right to go to sleep.

After a time, the man in black appeared. He looked at Buzz and Gil, Eddie and the man on the sofa. “I did tell you to leave,” he said.

“I’ve never been very good at taking advice,” I told him. He smiled, and knelt beside me.

“What I like about you.”

“I guess this is where you make some big speech,” I said. “About how it’s not so bad. Dying.”

The man in black smoothed my hair back, and then he leaned down and pressed his lips to my forehead. “I’m not here for you,” he whispered. “Not tonight.”

He lifted my hand to his cheek. I left a bloody fingerprint on his jawline. “I do miss you,” he said. “It’s a lonely road. A dark road, filled up with souls, but nobody like you.”

My fingers were numb, or maybe it was just the man in black’s skin, cold as the dead of winter. “I’m here,” I whispered. “I’m here . . .”

“Yeah,” the man in black said. He brushed his lips against mine, and then gently lowered me back to the floor and stood up. “I’ll see you again,” he said. “Not soon, but some day.”

I raised my head a few inches. The bullet still hurt, but I could feel the whirlpool draining away. This sphere wasn’t done with me, not yet. “You know,” I said to the man in black. “You don’t have to wait until then.”

He nodded, the faintest ghost of a smile wrinkling that hard, perfect face. “I think I’d like that.”

Breathing still hurt, but I tried to keep it slow and steady. “There’s a girl upstairs. Betty. Are you . . .”

He shook his head. “Not tonight.” He went into the hallway, and then raised one finger. “By the way,” he said. “What’s your name here?”

“Samantha,” I said. “Call me Sam.”

The man in black nodded. “See you around, Sam.”

The door opened, the wind and the snow came in, and the man in black left with what he came for.

10.

Betty and I stood at the bus stop on the side of the highway, a little bend in the road carved out of the frozen fields. The cold cut through my thin coat and boots, and I smoked just to keep warm.

“Where are you headed?” Betty asked me. Her face was still blue and bruised across the cheek and jaw on one side, and her wrist was in a sling. Doc Pritchard got there in time to take care of her internal injuries. I’d let him work out his payment with May. I was already packing my things.

“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t. I never had, and it had worked out with varying degrees. There was the body I’d left by the side of the highway outside Topeka. The bodies I’d left at May’s.

Betty had cried at night for weeks afterward, long shuddering sobs, her whole body shaking with remembered pain. I’d crawl out of my own narrow cot in Doc Pritchard’s back office and curl up next to her, petting her hair until she went back to sleep.

“I’m going home,” she said, putting out her cigarette in the snowbank on the side of the highway. “No goddamn snow in Louisiana, that’s a fact.”

“Amen,” I said.

“You know, I never thanked you,” Betty said. “May and Angie told me it was you got that ape off of me. Glad every last one of ’em is roasting in Hell.” She lit a fresh smoke with a crisp snap of a lighter. “Good riddance.”

“Good,” I agreed. “You don’t have to thank me, Betty.”

She reached out and squeezed my hand. “I know,” she said. “I know you were my only friend in that place, Sam. I never thought you really gave a good damn about any of it, but you did a terrible thing for me. I ain’t gonna just let that roll on by.”

I looked down the road. The silvery hulk of the Greyhound bus was approaching, chrome glinting in the sun. I could go on and find another whorehouse, or another bar, another place to be anonymously human. But I’d never forget that night in May’s farmhouse. Memories were indelible in my shadow-body’s mind. The centuries no longer bled together like a ruined painting.

I pulled Betty close, by the nape of her neck, before the bus got any closer. I brushed her lips, just the slightest touch, light and dry like a summer wind. She smelled like gardenias and tobacco. She was blushing when I stepped away.

“I’d do it again,” I said. “It’s my nature.” That much, I knew, was true. I wasn’t a seraph. I wasn’t a human. I was fallen, but I had plenty of time to figure out what that meant, if I could do things like I’d done to Gil again, if the man in black had passed me by because there was something else here in this mean, bloody, earthbound little place that I had to do.

The bus rolled to a stop, steam ripping a hole in the freezing air. The placard in the windscreen said los angeles.

Betty waved goodbye at me once I’d gotten a seat and the driver had started us rolling again. I waved back.

“Next stop, Junction City,” the driver hollered. “Final destination, Los Angeles, California.”

I leaned my head back against the vinyl seat, and let the rumble of the engine lift me out of Kansas, out of myself, and into a place where I could float and think.

Los Angeles.

The City of Angels.

That sounded all right for now.

CAITLIN KITTREDGE
writes adult and young adult novels about such varied topics as werewolves, demons, British mages, superheroes, and steampunk. She collects comic books, does pinup modeling and photography in her copious spare time, has partially purple hair, and lives in a real-live crumbling Victorian manor. Find her blog and other eldritch horrors at www.caitlinkittredge.com.

When I asked her for a few words about this story, she provided the following:

I was raised a Unitarian, so the fire-and-brimstone version of Heaven and Hell was, in my youth, a story for other people. I’ve used all sorts of mythology in my novels: Irish, Russian, Japanese, and even the Lovecraft mythos have made appearances. But I never really forgot paging through my mother’s theology textbooks when she was in grad school and marveling at the complex myth base of the Judeo-Christian faith. So when I had a chance to write something new, something unconnected to any of my series, I thought “fallen angels.” And naturally, you can’t have fallen angels without some demons, something I
was
accustomed to using in my fiction. As you can see in “Born Under a Bad Sign,” Sam’s version of Heaven and Hell isn’t exactly like the Biblical stories, either. But all stories are interpretation, so for my purposes, Sam’s version is the right one. As for putting my heroine in a brothel—postwar America was a very different place, and a single woman with no past had very few options. I’m a huge noir buff, and I wanted a fallen angel, who, let’s face it, is the ultimate noir-style protagonist, in a situation that could easily have unfolded in a B picture, circa 1947. Falling from grace isn’t just for crooked cops and nasty gangsters, and Sam’s story fit perfectly into the noir mode.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

David Drake provided his usual invaluable guidance to this still-learning editor.

My business partner, Bill Catchings, has as always both done all he could to encourage and support my writing and been a great colleague for over twenty-five years—even though this book will almost certainly not be to his taste.

Elizabeth Barnes fought (and continues to fight) to tame the library portions of my home office, an effort that helps me calm myself for the work.

As always, I am grateful to my children, Sarah and Scott, who continue to be amazing and wonderful people despite having the Weird Dad and needing to put up with me regularly disappearing into my office for long periods of time. Thanks, kids.

Several extraordinary women—my wife, Rana Van Name; Allyn Vogel; Jennie Faries; and Gina Massel-Castater—as ever grace my life with their intelligence and support, and I remain surprised and thankful that they do.

Thank you, all.