ARCHANGEL ARMS
an excerpt

Chapter One

I’ve never been good at saying no.

Even in the days before I fell between the cracks of the city and became a straddler, back when my mother and brother still remembered me, before the police took my fingerprints, before I learned more than I ever wanted to about how very lost a person could become, and back even in my youngest and most innocent days, that single syllable would stick in my throat.

It was jammed in there now, pressing rhythmically into the walls of my windpipe in synch with the footsteps that kept pace behind me.

It’s not the first time I’ve been stalked. Straddlers attract beggars.

I picked up my new fan at the Colombian take-out place, my last errand stop of the day, along with my order of a dozen hot cheese buns for the gang back at the Archangel Arms, twenty cherry sticks for myself—one which I was sucking on with more fervor than usual—and two chicken-stuffed arepas for lunch. The scrawny, strung-out shade was lagniappe. I knew I had a problem the second he went slack-jawed. The whole time I waited for my goodies, he’d stared at me with clasped hands as if I were his Holy Grail.

I’d noted the washed out irises and the grayish whites of the eyes. I knew what drove him.

Now he tailed me, drooling at my heels. Ignoring him for the last four blocks hadn’t worked. All the tense and negative body language I could muster in both worlds—real and Shade—hadn’t put him off his quest one bit.

He dogged me. He pleaded his case, shouting to be heard above the barrier of my earphones. I cranked up the volume and tossed up a couple of prayers that came crashing back down with the clear message that I needed to handle this myself.

Or I might just be misreading the message. I make mistakes often enough.

I sped up. The corner where I turned toward home neared, just a couple of blocks away. Safety. Protection. Peace. It was so close.

“Bring something real down for me,” the shade said, with a voice all hollowed out and full of errant, whiny breezes. “That bag of food. You could give me that, maybe. I could get a lot for that. Whaddya say? I can find a way to pay you for it, straddler. All sorts of ways.”

I didn’t like his tone or what I read between those particular lines. The ways people paid for favors in The Gloom, well, I didn’t want the tiniest part of it. Not anymore.

I pulled the cherry stick out of my mouth and slashed a hand in the air behind me. “Stop asking. I can’t get you anything. Not a thing.”

“But—”

“I can’t,” I said louder, too loud, and attracted the attention of a couple of normals on the lightly crowded sidewalk. I’m sure they tagged me as one more mentally frazzled young woman talking to herself on the streets of Miami.

Normals didn’t know--how could they?-- that I existed on two streets simultaneously, the one bathed in the sunshine from a cloudless late spring sky, and the one shrouded in the murk only partially dispelled by an anemic sun that dropped a tired light upon surreal vistas that real people--solids, normals, Realsiders--only glimpsed in nightmares.

One of the normals strode right through my stalker.

That kind of thing never stops bothering me. Man, I hate straddling.

I put a bit more oomph into my body language, until every inch of surface area screamed go away. The shade wouldn’t take the hint. He rushed me and I felt his hand against my neck as he pulled the earphone off one ear.
I stopped. He stopped.

“Anything,” he wheedled in a tone no human being should ever use. “There’s nothing I won’t do. Try me.”

Anger got a bruising grip on my ribcage when he said that. The kind of things he was assuming I'd go for—well, it was like calling me the worst names a woman could hear. Too bad I can’t ever manage purified anger. Pastor Frank would say that was a good thing, but I still had my doubts. I’d seen unadulterated fury and it had a way of scaring people off effectively. Sometimes, permanently.

No, my anger always gets diluted by pity. After that, shame. Who was I to look down on the guy? Didn’t I have some nerve thinking I was better than a junkie shade? Who was I to make his day worse than it already was? Had I forgotten that I once crawled around in the murk?

There but for the grace—

Right. That’s exactly the sort of thinking that made me say yes when I shouldn’t.

I shoved aside the pity and shame and tapped right into the main flow of blazing red anger. It spurted, hot and mean, through my stomach and up. At once, the pressure in my throat eased up. I could speak.
I turned to the shade, glared right into his monstruous eyes. “No.”

“I—“

“No!” I started walking again.

Twice I said it, and he didn’t know how it cost me and didn’t care. He kept coming, staying well within my peripheral vision—and my eyes are sharp, too sharp to miss that his teeth were the most solid parts of his face as he grinned.

Obviously, I’d attracted one of those idiots who takes a no for a yes.
I told myself I had no choice as I halted again and said with a serenity I’d learned to feign in order to survive in The Gloom. “You heard of Selah Segundo?”

His feet got the message before his muddled, dream-eaten brain. He halted. For a couple of seconds, he blinked fast, stunned, processing. Then he nodded what was left of his head, which wasn’t a whole lot. Above his shoulders, what sat there was a ratty thing, all ripped around the edges, as if he were some faded photograph of himself that an overeager puppy had used for a chew toy.

“I heard she was dead,” he said. He sounded scared.

A bad name, a chilling reputation, unfortunately, has its uses. Today, I used it to protect the Arms. And even if this doofus killing himself with other people’s dreams never figured it out, I was protecting him too. If I supplied him with bartering materials for his next fix, I’d just be helping him commit suicide via gruesome dematerialization.

If I lied, we’d go our own ways, each keeping something important intact.
I had to make sure he didn’t hang around these streets and corners waiting for me to show up again. Eventually, he could wear me down.

“I am dead,” I said. “Remember that seeking favors of the dead is dangerous business. Don’t ever ask me again to play fetch for you. You’ll regret it.” I started to replace the earphone.

But I couldn’t leave like that.

He had backed off, his heels inches from the curb. I knew I had his attention, and maybe he’d really hear what I was saying.

“Eight blocks south from Santa’s. The house with the blue shutters and a butterfly painted on the front door. Tell them I sent you.”

“They’ll fix me up?” he asked with the wrong sort of hope.

“They will, if you want real help. If you want to keep sucking on dreams that aren’t yours, then no one can fix you up. You’ll turn into mist and blow away.”

“Blue shutters?”

“And a yellow butterfly.”

I doubted he’d take the chance to save himself, but all I could do was offer. I covered my right ear again, lowered the volume to where I usually kept it, and strode off, fast, worrying that the choppy rhythm of his steps would start up again.

Nothing.

I sighed out my relief. The trembling just under my skin eased up when I turned the corner and saw, across the street, the golden stones of the Archangel Arms.

Then I saw the woman that stood between me and my sanctuary, and my stomach heaved.

Lord, you know, it’s just not fair.

The birdlike woman wasn’t a shade. She was real, and that was worse, because she was the biggest sort of soul-slicing no lying in wait.