Excerpt: “Angel of the Tarmac”
The tips of the Angel’s wings quivered as he paced, tiny down feathers puffing away with every agitated flick. They spiraled down to the oriental carpet and wound blazing corkscrews towards the sputtering waters of the nearby fountain. The feathers popped with a blue crackle of depleted energy at the slightest impact, filling the air with the tang of ozone and burnt toast.
Guests clustered around the perimeter of the lobby, giving the Angel wide berth. Dark eyes fixed on him from every side with gazes far less reverent than he thought was his due; not resentful or suspicious, just thoughtful. Indifferent, even. Like they were waiting for the inevitable.
Another twitch. A few more electric snaps. The Angel scratched the bridge of his Roman nose and glared at the petite Japanese woman behind the counter. She smiled, relentless in her cordial goodwill: Customer Service was her job, and she’d be damned if she was going to let some molting gaijin ruin her day.
The Angel turned his black scowl to the lobby, scanning the crowds as they stood waiting with infinitely irritating patience for their turn at the check-in desk. “Fucking tourists,” he growled, making his voice clang with the mighty thunder of a charging bull, the feral tumult of an unrelenting storm, rolling from deep within his chest like a judgment. He jerked his wings again, setting off another shower of lazy sparks, but their gazes remained impassive. This was between him and the beaming Customer Service woman.
“Goddamn savages. Stupid cocksuckers. Don’t even know enough English to get pissed off when I call you all motherfuckers.”
If they understood, they chose not to respond.
He turned back to the woman, his voice a bit on edge, a behemoth rumbling with an occasional hiccup of panic. “Don’t you have anyone that fucking speaks English around here?”
“Ah, gomen nasai, wan moment puleese, onegai shimasu.”
“I just need a goddamn phone,” the Angel said, conversationally, for the seventh time. “A phone. You know, ring ring? Hello?” He pressed his fist against his ear in the universal sign for phone.
“Eh!” the woman replied cheerily, and bowed again.
His eyes shifted up up up to the brass chandelier suspended in the atrium ceiling. “Eh,” he repeated. “Eh. You’ve got fucking payphones in every color of the rainbow out here, and not one has instructions in goddamn English. I tell ya. Fucking savages.”
The girl tittered, and bobbed a few more quick bows, maybe thinking he’d told a joke, or maybe just getting her kicks out of frustrating a big burly American. The Angel grunted and resumed his pacing, glancing towards the bronze elevators, the marble fountain, and the high windows in turn. The glass reflected the caramel-tinted light back into the room, adding to the soft glow of the chandeliers. If the lobby had not been one story below ground, he would have seen the flashing red and blue lights of the gathered law.
The Angel was happy to do without this reminder of a day gone terribly wrong. He peered at the sea of inscrutable Japanese faces, wondering which was the Enforcer-incognito sent in to keep an eye on him, make sure he didn’t bolt. Not that it would matter, even if he figured out which one it was—they all looked the same to him anyway. All of them could be Enforcers, as far as he knew. They even taught kung-fu to infants over here, he’d heard.
~*~*~*~
The Angel had watched his flight back to Texas take off four hours before, crashed to his knees on the hot tarmac like an abandoned lover, wings fizzing in and out of the visible spectrum behind him. His howl had shaken the bulletproof glass in the towering airport windows and set the iron supports of the terminal abuzz. Shinigami flocked around him, Gods of Death, one for every gun pressed to the four corners of his cranium, a dozen waiting as backup behind, two dozen more beyond those, until all the Angel could see was a sea of rigid figures clad in perfectly pressed royal blue uniforms, their placid eyes fixed on him, every sense zeroed in on whatever spot on the Angel’s body was close enough for a precise kill. Japanese Pointers frozen with their prey in sight.
A few minutes of struggling with the thick, weighted chains that wound around his neck and midsection and kept him firmly on his knees, straining against the tight iron cuffs that locked his arms behind his back, and the Angel had been reduced to panting and growling like a rabid wolf, as near to chewing off his own ankle as he’d ever been, if that would have helped. His wings singed his back whenever they flickered on, the crackling waves of static lifting his shaggy blond hair in a waving mane.
Only after the Angel had thrashed and shouted himself into hoarse exhaustion did the placid sea of Shinigami part to allow another to amble out on the tarmac. Flanked by two lackeys, the man looked sloppy compared to his impeccable troop, dressed only in white shirtsleeves and tie, his wrinkled blue coat under his arm. Despite the man’s appearance, the Angel had no doubt that this was the captain. Even without the deference shown to him by the troops, a certain glint in his eye hinted at either mirth or cruelty. There was a fluid confidence to his rolling gait, something steely packed into his slim muscles; he seemed no more concerned than he might have on a walk through a pleasure quarter, and perhaps a bit more sated, gorging himself on the big American’s slathering rage with each measured step.
The Shinigami-Taichou stopped a few feet from his captive as the closest circle of gunmen compressed into a smooth semi-circle, their guns not even twitching. He drew a pack of Seven Stars cigarettes from his breast pocket and pulled one out with his teeth before offering the pack to the Angel, who growled a refusal. The Shinigami’s eyes smiled, crinkling so that only a slit of black was visible; his mouth set in a grimace as he accepted a light from one of the lackeys standing at attention beside him. He considered his captive a moment longer, drawing out his first few puffs. When he spoke, his English was crisp, precise, vanilla, with only a slight coating of strange inflection to mark him as a non-native speaker.
“You are a long way from home, Tenshi-san.”
The Angel rattled his chains. “I’d be a lot closer if you’d have let me on that plane.”
“Oh, but Tenshi-san, planes are for people who are at their proper departure point. A Mr. John Malachai was booked to arrive in Japan four days ago, and, after a brief business trip to Okinawa, to leave again on that flight, seat 24A, right beside the window. But your name is not John Malachai, Tenshi-san,” the delicate finger he had raised to indicate the departing plane, now only a glint, fell towards the Angel. “You merely hold the man’s tickets, though I dare not presume why. You are not anywhere at the moment, Tenshi-san. You stand as a ghost before me.” The Shinigami turned to squint up at the receding spot over the bay, Seven Star dangling from his dry lips. “I do hope Mr. Malachai was able to make his flight. It would be such a pity to be detained in our country overlong.”
The Angel glowered at the captain in a sullen silence, clenched jaw twitching. With every blue crackle of his wings he caught a whiff of his own flesh burning. The incongruous compulsion to worry about the holes and yellow singe marks that must be forming on his favorite white t-shirt swept over him, and he almost laughed.
They had tried to detain him before boarding and he had tried to escape, smashing a hole through the steel walls of the jetway and launching himself out over the runway, blue lightning licking the walls as he burst through. The invisibility field clamped down on him at the same time, an Easter egg snapping shut. It took only a moment; he should have been home free. He was invisible for a few seconds more, could see the reassuring shimmer of his skin, visible only because he was looking from the inside out, then suddenly it felt like he’d hit a wall. The world inverted, the invisibility turning inward, and he was blind. Repressor chains caught him around the waist and neck and snapped him back to the ground, already hundreds of feet below, with a crack like thunder. Only the last failing splutters of his shield spared him the worst of the impact—then his blindness was black rather than the yellow cream of inverted invisibility, dark spots gurgling ink inside his ringing skull.
It was Fatima, Babylon, the Angel of Mons, but worse. Those were technological failures: a couple of shakes to the cloak generator, a quick scan through the code, and wham, bam, back in business, Angel’s left a bit tetchy, but no harm done. Those Angels didn’t get tackled by Enforcers for their little ‘oops’, thrown face first onto hot black top and chained down with heavy duty electrical suppressors, only to be surrounded by a bunch of trigger happy monks.
He almost wished they’d off him quick. Being caught with your wings out felt like exposing yourself to a bunch of little kids—maybe a pervert would get his rocks off on it, but not this Angel, not when he was Off The Job. And being caught with wings that flickered like a dying lighting bug, well, that just made him feel small. What would they call him Stateside when they heard? The Angel of the Tarmac? The Disco Angel of Osaka, with his flashy, sputtering wings?
“Let us start with introductions, Tenshi-san,” the Shinigami’s voice broke through the Angel’s distracted misery. “I am Tanaka Yuuji, Captain of the Shinigami, Japan’s Special Forces for the containment of social threats.”
Shinigami Takana bowed, and waited. The Angel just scowled.
“Well then, Tenshi-san,” the Shinigami’s smile was cold as let the cigarette fall from his delicate fingers and ground the stub beneath his heel. “What shall we do with you?
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“Angel of the Tarmac” and other works (c) 2006-8, Barbara Steele. All rights reserved.
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