Broken Angels (27 page)

The woman in the yellow gown had more than lady-like strength, possibly even more than human-like strength. Her swinging motion propelled Darryl at least fifteen feet across the floor. He would’ve stumbled on even farther if not stopped by a flat-footed kick to the center of his chest. Darryl fell on his back, hard.

The lady in lime who’d kicked him bent over Darryl and grabbed the top of his head with her right hand. She used just one arm to pull him back up to his feet. He didn’t marvel at her strength; he marveled at her face, the face that had taken on the appearance of another past charity case.

“Jana?” Darryl stuttered the name.

“Uh-huh,” the smiling woman said, “and nuh-uh,” before punching him in the nose. Darryl felt the impact, starting at the point of contact and rippling outward toward the forehead, ears, and chin. If she’d let go, he would’ve fallen straight to his back again. But as he was still standing and staring at the grinning woman he both knew and didn’t know, he couldn’t do anything but breathe through his gaping mouth while a thick, sticky stream of blood flowed from his nostrils.

The woman stared back at him as she recited a verse of something that was either terrible poetry or horrible pop-music lyrics. As bad and pointless as it sounded to him, it had the effect of changing the shape and contours of its speaker’s face. The words acted like a spell. A Dirty-Light Magick trick. When she stopped reciting, Darryl saw the woman appeared as yet another charity case.

“Irma—”

The woman punched Darryl in the nose again and, with the hand that had a firm grasp on his head, shoved him to stumble several feet across the floor, into the presence of the pale woman in black.

The porcelain-skinned woman appeared as she had before, her face wide-eyed and her mouth tight-lipped, unblinking and unexpressive. She grabbed Darryl by his shoulders and dug her broken-glass-sharp nails into his skin, looking him in his wincing eyes. Behind him, Veronica spoke.

“Vanessa there actually believes you to be much sexier than I ever did.” Snideness coated each word. “Now, don’t get me wrong, you are a very handsome man, with that vanilla-violet tan and all, but I just never felt the desire to go as far with you as she would. That level of passion just isn’t in my blood.”

As if reacting to Veronica’s cue, Vanessa opened her mouth wider than she should’ve been able, thrust her face closer, and closed her eyes and mouth. Her eyelids finally touched each other, but her lips didn’t. They were still apart, touching the skin of Darryl’s lower neck as Vanessa’s long, sharpened cuspids bit deep into his flesh. Darryl screamed louder than he’d screamed in years. The sight and sound of it all seemed to excite Vanessa. She opened her jaws and licked the neck wound, lapping the blood as it seeped out.

Darryl struggled, trying as best he could to ignore the pain, the pain in his head and the pain on his body. But Vanessa’s grip was much too strong. He couldn’t get free. Worse, he began to feel a cold, tingly sensation where her hands touched his skin, a sensation steadily spreading outward, getting colder as it moved toward his neck and down toward his elbows. Numbness. Soon he wouldn’t be able turn his head or move his arms. Soon he wouldn’t be able to fight back with anything but his legs, assuming he could remain conscious long enough to use them. He had to do something now.

Darryl reared back and kicked Vanessa’s shin. He hollered when the impact of his unprotected foot against her skin made him feel as if he’d kicked an unyielding slab of ice. He may’ve broken his toes.

Veronica laughed. “Looks like he’s trying to break up with you, Vanessa. Why don’t you let him go? I’ll be glad to welcome him back into my arms.”

Vanessa ran her tongue across Darryl’s upper lip and the area under his leaking nostrils. She pulled back her head and made sure Darryl saw as she mixed some of her saliva with the blood and mucous on her tongue, giving the thick substances a bit more fluidity.

His mouth was wide open. It was his only way to breathe. But when Vanessa kissed him, forcing the repellant concoction from her mouth into his, Darryl couldn’t breathe or move. Only a small part of his consciousness realized the action was perversion of his very own honey-kiss, his method of making his saliva more like honey before kissing his charity cases for the final time. Most of his thoughts, however, were focused on how to get free as he gagged and continued to struggle. It wasn’t until Veronica asked for him again that Vanessa spun him around and shoved him away.

As dizzied as he was, as battered as he was, Darryl’s victimizers had made a mistake—they’d announced what they were going to do before they did it. He went on the offensive the moment he was released.

He could only see through bleary eyes, but indistinct shapes were enough for him. He swung his right fist at Veronica’s head. Thanks to the disorientation, or the impaired vision, or the height difference, the punch only hit her in the neck, but it was enough. It hurt her. It did its job.

The blonde stumbled backward a few feet then sprang forward, her hands in front of her, her fingers bent and curled to resemble a hawk’s talons.

It was far too dark and Darryl was much too weak to manipulate light as he would’ve wanted. In other circumstances, he’d have blinded her with an old-fashioned-camera-like flash, or he’d have shot a thin ray of infrared radiation at her forehead. Instead he had to rely on the basics.

He grabbed one of Veronica’s wrists and ducked, dipping down to his knees, as he pulled the woman’s long body onto his shoulders and dumped her on her back, onto the floor, using a fireman’s-carry wrestling technique he’d learned from Robert.

He hopped back to his feet and rushed for the first woman he saw, the lady in the lime-green gown. He was stopped after three steps. The woman in tangerine blindsided him with a sharp-toenailed kick to the kidney.

Darryl fell down to a knee.

The lady in lemon helped him back up to his feet. She grabbed him by his bleeding neck, made fresh wounds with her fingernails, and shoved him back toward Veronica.

Veronica used her own wrestling technique to trap Darryl’s arms behind him and lock her hands. It was an unbreakable hold. The blonde chuckled before leaning in to whisper into his ear.

“Watched you fight on the Mall,” she said. “Just watched; didn’t need to study. You’re beyond pathetic.”

Darryl struggled as best as he could manage. He might as well have been frozen.

“Fighting is futile,” Veronica said. “It’s all
Charma,
and it’s all good.”

Darryl cursed at her.

Her response was to shove him away as she shouted, “Ladies! Level two!”

The painted patterns on the floor began shifting from concentric circles to intersecting triangles.

Instead of standing and walking on the painted lines as they had been, the ladies in the fruit-colored apparel began to walk and stand only in the black spaces between the new geometric shapes.

Darryl continued to move wherever he was pushed; the ladies in orange, yellow, and green continued to shift and shape their faces into those of his past charity cases; and he continued to try to fight them. But he hadn’t been lied to. It was futile.

No longer constrained to circles, the women fought in a more sophisticated manner, using graceful styles of fighting that were foreign to Darryl. Even when he tried to dodge their blows or run away, he couldn’t escape. When he moved too far away from the colored lines, he felt as if he were suffocating on the shadows; he could only breathe when a foot or fist emerged from the black air, causing him to inhale with shock, and exhale on impact. As if to accentuate their new style and manner of combat, some of the ladies also broke out into song or recited familiar lyrics as they moved, avoiding the glowing lines, and making spot-on contact with some part of Darryl’s weakened, bruised, and increasingly bloody body. In between his hollers and screams, Darryl heard sounds he hadn’t heard in years, songs he had once associated with happy times or beautiful moments. But, as his torment went on and on, these sounds devolved into mere noises, purplish-white sounds, pale, irritating, drained of all meaning. He began to feel the noise was an appropriate accompaniment to the scene. As the ladies had hinted before they attacked, his life was being bleached of any purpose it ever had.

THIRTEEN

Robert tried to double the legal speed limit on the way to Darryl’s apartment. The Stang’s V8 engine was up to it, but at this point in the evening, it wasn’t easy to move so fast. Traffic was thicker than earlier in the day, thicker than usual. A lot of folks had come out with the sun after the midday rain shower.

When they finally arrived, Robert asked Ava to stay in the car while he took a quick look around. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t fuss.

Darryl’s Miata was parked in its usual spot. Its hood was cold, and the space under the vehicle was drier than the space around it. Robert still took the time to peer through each window, looking for anything of interest. He found nothing and moved on, up the stairs to the fourth floor of the garden-apartment complex.

The key-tool he’d borrowed from Zel got him into the apartment.

Robert’s first reaction on stepping into the one-bedroom was always the same. Darryl had “convinced” a talented interior designer to lavishly decorate it for free. The place was stylish and no doubt aesthetically pleasing to certain types of women and men, but to Robert, it all seemed a bit overdone. With all the plants, the randomly placed knickknacks, the framed photographs and other wall hangings, and the furniture chosen and arranged to match Darryl’s “life compass,” Robert felt like choking each time he crossed the apartment’s threshold. But he had a job to do, and he proceeded to do a thorough survey for clues to Darryl’s whereabouts.

After examining everything else, Robert turned his attention to the real potential treasure chest—Darryl’s laptop. He turned it on, entered Darryl’s password, and searched through his recent e-mails, his website history, recently saved documents, and anything else that might’ve been helpful.

On Saturday, his partner had apparently done a lot of searches on swastikas, the Star of David and, to a lesser extent, something called “Charma.” The strange word seemed distantly familiar to Robert, but all he knew—based the web pages Darryl had found— was that it referred to some kind of esoteric spiritual philosophy. There were no real details. And there’d been no other searches within the past twenty-four hours.

Robert left the apartment with no more useful information than when he’d entered, but there were other leads to follow. One of them was leaning against his car with her arms crossed.

“Well?”

“No luck,” he said.

“What’re you thinking?” Ava asked. “You know he’s not just missing. I can tell, you think something else is up.”

Robert looked straight at her eyes for the first time since she’d put on her new glasses. However crisp and clear the world now appeared to Ava, to him, her eyes were now obscured by the glass, which offered him a pale-but-detailed reflection of himself. Too close to a mirror, he found it difficult to look at the lenses. It made him queasy, but he maintained it, staring at this ghostly apparition of himself as he leveled with her.

“I found out how you lost your memory.”

“What?” She unfolded her arms and started toward him.

“At least I think I did,” he said. “At the house where we found you, you were beat up by two women. They were angels. That’s how you got your bruises, and it’s probably how you lost your memory.”

“How do you know this? How
long
have you known this?”

“I just found out this morning.” He purposely ignored her first question.

“Who told you? Adam? What else did he find out?” Her questions came out rapid-fire. Robert answered her in a slower manner, hoping to calm her a bit.

“There is nothing else,” he said. “I haven’t told anyone at the Institution about this yet.”

“Why the heck not?”

“Because I haven’t had time.”

“Use those stupid watches on your stupid wrists!”

“That’s something that has to be told in person, face-to-face.” Not necessarily, but Robert had set his own priorities. “Right now, we’ve got to find Darryl before the same thing happens to him.”

“Robert, you better take me back to that house—
now
.” Ava opened the car’s passenger door and slammed it behind her.

“Why?” He said it even though he already knew the answer; asking the question was just a natural reaction. He knew taking Ava back to the scene of her vicious beating—the crime scene where she was robbed of a portion of her mind—might perhaps trigger a recollection, a memory of where her attackers had come from, or a thought about the place the two women might currently call home.

When Robert got behind the wheel, Ava only said, “I want to look things over for myself.” That’s all she said, but he knew what she meant.

As they raced down Arlington’s streets, Robert told her Adam had contacted him while he was in the apartment to tell him the entire IAI had been alerted Darryl was missing. All anyone knew at the moment was Darryl had gone to brunch on Sunday morning. All Watcher agents not too deep into other research had been ordered to enter the field and follow up on any hunches they might have.