“You don’t have much of an imagination, do you?”
He smiled tightly. “I don’t know that your story is better than anything I imagined.”
“Doesn’t innocence help salve my soul?”
“Technically, you don’t have a soul. You’re a creature of other creatures, a compound of other people’s lives.”
“And in what way are you more than the flesh you are in and the memories that rule you?” we asked sharply. “Are you not who you are because experience makes you this way? Are we not the same?”
“I don’t bleed blue blood.”
“It’s all about oxygen bonding,” I retorted, glancing at Oda, who tilted her chin defiantly back at me, “and we saved Sinclair’s life.”
“You needed him,” replied the man. “Besides, he is useful but obscene.”
“He’s long-winded. I don’t see why that makes him obscene. We had his documents, his information. So do you really think that
He sucked in a breath between his teeth. “Tell me,” he said, “just this, honestly. If you thought a thing looked prettier in flames, would you really not set it alight?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“I wasn’t asking you.”
“Oh, get a bloody sense of perspective.”
He hit me, again. I thought we’d been doing quite well, so the shock and surprise of it, more than the pain, injured me, sent me recoiling back inside my shell. After a moment lying curled around our own unhappiness, we picked ourself up and glared at him.
He said, “You… blue electric angels… you are children with the power to kill, destroy and burn. You know nothing about life, its rules, norms, laws and understandings, and probably care less. Why should you not set the field on fire for the prettiness of its burning; why should you not kill wherever you go, simply because you can; why should you understand anything that the rest of humanity can?”
“Because I’m here,” I growled.
“You are just one man,” he retorted. “The angels are the sum of millions, billions, more than that; although before you start, I do appreciate that your relationship is complicated.”
“We do not need to… to change anything. This life of yours is wonder enough without us setting it on fire.”
He smiled, shoulders jerking as if a laugh was brewing, hijacked halfway up his throat. “You really are just a child, aren’t you? A poor little bumbling power, crawling out of the nice safe confines of its telephone line. Utterly ignorant and totally confused. You must be going mad inside that good disguise of yours. But perhaps all you’ll do is drool and gibber, when reality finally takes you down.”
He paused and sucked in his breath. Overdramatically, I thought. Enjoying his power, perhaps, a bit too much. I felt the dirt between my fingers, the tiny heat of it. Not enough to do anything spectacular. But enough, maybe, to burn out something vital under his skin, before we died.
“I’ll have to think about it,” he said, with an unsympathetic face, and nodded at one of his henchmen. “Good night, angels, good night!”
We pinched that fragment of magic between our fingers, ready to slip it into the blood of anyone who dared to touch us. “You will be a shadow on the wall,” we snarled. “A remnant of the night. You will fade, and your darkness will blend into the memories of the city and be forgotten, lost inside all the better things that happen around you.”
Oda stepped towards me. Her hand went into a jacket pocket, her eyes meeting ours; and I hesitated. The grey-haired man leant down until his face was almost level with mine and whispered, “You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
I grinned, and leant forward sharply, banging my head against his. Not hard, but it was contact I needed; just that moment of touching was enough. I let that morsel of power slide into his skin, a maggot of blue, burrowing down in an instant, seen out of the corner of the eye, and gone. Where our heads had banged, blood from my battered skin slid a thin red slide over his own. Some magics never change. Blood is one of them.
He blinked and recoiled, then slapped me, open-palmed. This time I didn’t even bother to get up, but lay curled on the ground and said nothing. My blood on his hands; even better.
“We are the Order!” he snapped. “We watch you people all the time, we are everywhere! Can you begin to imagine our power?”
I laughed despite myself. “So powerful,” I exclaimed through hysterical bursts of breath, “you can’t even kill Bakker by yourself. You need to get us to do your work for you. We know you. We heard your voice inside our mind, when you whispered into the phone. You are an infestation in our skin, a worm in our flesh. You’re part of us. Think about that next time you shoot us!”
He rubbed his head, a nervous gesture. Could he sense our magic, the tiniest curse, working through his body? Probably not. It was out of our hands. “Maybe I will,” he said.
He nodded at Oda, who stepped up to me, pulled my head back with a quick gesture, and stuck something into my neck that filled my throat with oil and my head with the sickly blanket of darkness.
I woke and had never been more grateful to find myself uncomfortable. Everything ached, throbbed or stung; and it was bliss, simply because there was too much of it to be a dream. Nor, I suspected, was it anything resembling an afterlife. I was on a small, bare wooden floor in a small, bare room with rough plastered walls that had once been painted blue and were now a theme of faded and chipped. The room sported a plastic panel of flashing green lights that circled the head of Jesus Christ like fairy lights on a Christmas tree, while he looked on benevolently. There was one door, one window, and a smell of dust. It was also, very much, in the city. The smell of fumes hit immediately, and I heard the rumble of traffic, the screech of brakes on a bus; I was back in my home, alive.
I risked getting up on all fours, and looked round the room. By the door, fiddling with her rifle in the casual manner of someone accustomed to bullets, Oda said, “Hi.”
“Hi,” I replied, pulling myself into a sitting position and feeling around the inside of my mouth for any more loose teeth. There was blood on my shirt and face; I hadn’t considered how quickly a vendetta, and prolonged magical confrontation, could eat through my wardrobe. We said, as reasonably as we could, “Why are you here?”
“Got to keep an eye on you,” she said. “I’m not happy about it either, if you’re wondering.”
“You are – not afraid?”
“Afraid?” she echoed, raising one surprised eyebrow.
“Pissed off doesn’t really cover it,” I said. “We would kill you for what you did. And I want you to be impressed, by the way, at the fact that I’m not spontaneously combusting, because I promise, it’s just two nerve endings and a snappy word away.”
“The blue electric angels are much quicker to go around killing than the little sorcerer, aren’t they? Or at least, much quicker to talk about it,” she said, not bothering to look at me. “If you’re going to throw up, there’s a toilet next door.”
“Why would I throw up?”
“It’s a standard reaction to the drugs.”
“What have you done?” we barked.
Perhaps the anger in our voice jerked her from her complacency. “Just to make you sleep for the trip,” she said in a defensive tone. “We want you alive – for now.”
“I’m not happy about this arrangement.”
“And I am under orders to shoot you at the first sign of overly Satanic inclinations.”
“What are those?” I asked, my genuine curiosity briefly overriding our fury.
“My remit is to use my own judgement to determine when the harm that you might do outweighs the necessary evil of using you against a worse danger. Or in order words, if you look like you’re going to shape up to be a son of a bitch worse than Bakker, I pop two in your skull and three in your chest and make sure the phones are switched off.”
