She screams again. Shouts come my way.
The angel grabs his cart and hurls it at the window. Glass explodes in every direction. I cringe but a distant part of my mind is aware that the angel has shifted, using his body to block the shards from hitting me.
Something thumps hard against the locked door of our office. The door rattles but the locks hold.
I grab the cart and pull it up to the window sill, trying to help the angel get out.
The door crashes open, bouncing off the wall with broken hinges.
The angel spares me a quick, hard glance and says, “Run.”
I vault out the window.
I land running. I dash around the building, looking for the back entrance or a broken window to jump through. My mind is crowded with what might be happening to my mother, to the angel, to Paige. I have an almost irresistible urge to hide under a bush and curl up in a ball. To shut off my eyes, ears, and brain, and just lie there until nothing exists anymore.
I shove the horrible, screaming images in my head into the dark, silent place in my mind that is getting deeper and more crowded each day. One day soon, the things I stuff in there will burst out and infect the rest of me. Maybe that will be the day the daughter becomes like the mother. Until then, I am still in control.
I don’t have to go far to find a broken window. Considering how many times I banged at my window and still failed to break it, I hate to think about how amped up the guy who broke this one must be. That doesn’t make me feel any better about sneaking back into the building.
I run from office to office, cubicle to cubicle, whisper-shouting for my mother.
I find a man lying in the hallway leading to the kitchen. His chest is bare, his shirt torn away. Six butter knives stick out of his flesh in a circular pattern. Someone has drawn a powder-pink lipstick pentagram with the knives at the end of the points. Blood bubbles up from each of the knives. The man is all eyes and shock as he stares at the ruin of his chest as though unable to believe it has anything to do with him.
My mother is safe.
Seeing what she did to this man, I can’t help but wonder if that’s a good thing. She has purposely missed his heart, and he will slowly bleed to death.
If we had been back in the old world, in the World Before, I would have called an ambulance despite the fact that he had attacked my mother. The doctors would have fixed him up, and he would have had all the time he needed to recover in jail. But unfortunately for all of us, this is the World After.
I step around him and leave him to his slow death.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of a woman-shaped shadow slipping out through a side door. She stops before the door closes and looks back at me. My mother frantically waves her hand at me to come with her. I should join her. I take two steps in her direction, but I can’t ignore the grunting and crashing of the colossal fight at the far end of the building.
The angel is surrounded by a gang of scruffy but deadly-looking men.
There must be at least ten of them. Three are strewn about at odd angles beyond the circle of the fight, unconscious or dead. Two more are taking a beating from the angel as he swings the cart like a giant mace. But even from here, even in the thin moonlight streaming in through the glass doors, I can see the crimson stains seeping through his bandages. That cart must weigh a hundred pounds. He is visibly exhausted and the others are moving in for the kill.
I’ve sparred with multiple opponents in the dojo, and last summer, I was one of the assistant instructors of an advanced self defense course entitled “Multiple Assailants.” Still, I’ve never fought more than three at a time. And none of my opponents have ever wanted to actually kill me. I’m not stupid enough to think that I can take on seven desperate guys with the help of a crippled angel. My heart tries to gallop out of my chest just thinking about it.
My mother waves at me again, beckoning me toward freedom.
Something smashes on the far side of the lobby and a grunt of pain blots out the other sounds for a moment. With every hit to the angel, I feel Paige slipping away from me.
I wave my mother away, mouthing the word, “Go.”
She beckons me once more, more frantic this time.
I shake my head and wave her away.
She slips into the darkness and disappears behind the closing door.
I bolt over to the filing cabinet beside the kitchen. I quickly think through the pros and cons of using the angel sword and decide against it. I might slice up one person with it, but without training, I’m sure it would be taken away from me in no time.
So instead I grab the wings and the key to the angel’s chain. I stuff the key in my jeans pocket and quickly unwrap the wings. My only hope is that the gang’s fear and desire for self-preservation will be on my side. Before my brain can kick in and tell me what a harebrained, dangerous idea this is, I rush over to the dim hallway where the moonlight is bright enough to silhouette me, but not bright enough to show much detail.
The gang has the angel cornered.
He’s putting up a good fight, but they’ve realized that he’s injured—not to mention chained to an awkward, heavy cart—and won’t give up now that they smell blood.
I cross my arms behind me and hold the wings behind my back. They wobble, out of balance. It’s like holding up a flagpole with my arms contorted. I wait until I can hold them steady, then step forward.
Desperately hoping that the wings look right in the shadows, I kick over a side table with a surprisingly intact vase on it. The unexpected crash gets their attention.
For a moment, all is silent as they look on my dark silhouette. I hope to all that’s holy and unholy that I look like an Angel of Death. If it was well lit, they would see a skinny teenage girl trying to hold oversized wings behind her back. But it’s dark, and they are hopefully seeing the one thing that makes their blood run cold.
“What have we here?” I ask in what I hope is a tone of deadly amusement. “Michael, Gabriel, come see this,” I call out behind me as though there are more of us. Michael and Gabriel are the only two angel names I can think of. “The monkeys seem to think they can attack one of our own now.”
The men freeze. Everyone stares at me.
In that moment, while I hold my breath, possibilities roll around the room like a roulette wheel.
Then, a really bad thing happens.
My right wing wobbles, then slips down a notch or two. In my rush to right it, I wiggle to get a better grip, but that just brings more attention to it as the wing waves up and down.
In the long second before everyone absorbs what just happened, I see the angel rolling his eyes heavenward, like a teenager in the presence of overwhelming lameness. Some people just have no sense of gratitude.
The angel is the first one to break the silence. He heaves his cart up and swings it at the three guys in front of him, crashing through them like a bowling ball.
Three of the others come for me.
I drop my wings and scuttle to their left. The trick with fighting multiple assailants is to avoid fighting them all at the same time. Unlike in the movies, attackers don’t wait in line to kick your ass, they want to pounce all at once like a pack of wolves.
I dance in a semicircle around them until the guy closest to me is in the way of the other two. It only takes a second for them to run around their buddy, but that’s enough time for me to snap a solid kick to his groin. He doubles over, and though I’m dying to accept the invitation to knee him in the face, his buddies take precedence.
I dance around to the other side of the doubled-over guy, making the others fall back into a line to get around him. I sweep the injured guy’s feet, and he comes crashing down on wife-beater number two. The remaining guy pounces on me and we roll on the ground in a grapple for the top position.
I end up on the bottom. He outweighs me by a hundred pounds, but this is a position I’ve practiced fighting from over and over.
Men tend to fight differently with a woman than they do with men. The overwhelming majority of fights between men and women start with the men attacking from behind, and almost instantly end on the ground with the woman on the bottom. So a good female fighter needs to know how to fight on her back.
As we struggle, I wriggle my leg out from under him for leverage. Brace. Then tip him over to one side with a twist of my hip.
He flips onto his back. Before he can get his bearings again, I slam my heel down on his groin.
I’m up in a flash and kicking his head before he recovers. I kick him so hard his head whiplashes back and forth.
“Nice.” The angel stands watching in the moonlight behind his bloody cart.
Around him are the moaning bodies of our intruders. Some of the bodies are so still I can’t tell if they’re alive. He nods appreciatively as though he sees something he likes. I let myself have an internal tongue lashing when I realize I’m pleased by his approval.
A guy staggers up and runs for the door. He holds his head as though afraid it will fall off. As if that was their cue, three more get up and stumble out the door without looking back. The rest lie panting on the ground.
I hear a weak laugh and realize it’s the angel.
“You looked ridiculous with those wings,” he says. His lip is bleeding and so is a cut above his eye. But he looks relaxed as his smile lights up his face.
I dig out the bike lock key from my pocket with trembling hands and toss it to him. He catches it even though he’s still chained.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say. It sounds less shaky than I feel. The post-fight adrenaline has me literally trembling. The angel unlocks himself, stretches and cracks his wrists. Then he rips a denim jacket off one of the groaning guys on the floor and tosses it to me. I gratefully put it on even though it’s about ten sizes too big.
He goes back into the corner office while I quickly roll his wings in the blanket. I run to the filing cabinet to grab the sword, then meet him in the lobby as he comes back out with my pack. I strap the blanket onto the pack, trying not to cinch it too hard under his gaze, then load up. I wish I had a pack for him but he wouldn’t be able to carry it on his wounded back anyway.
When he sees the sword, his face breaks into a glorious smile as if it’s a long-lost friend rather than a pretty piece of metal. His look of sheer joy stops my breath for a moment. It’s a look I thought I’d never see again on anyone’s face. I feel lighter just being close to it.
“You had my sword the whole time?”
“It’s my sword now.” My voice comes out harsher than the situation calls for. His happiness is so human that I forgot for a moment what he really is. I dig my nails into my palm to remind myself never to let my thoughts slip again.
“Your sword? You wish,” he says. What I wish is that he stop sounding so damned human. “Do you have any idea how loyal she’s been to me over the years?”
