Djinn: Cursed (2 page)

Surely he wasn't looking at me, I looked back at the bar and realized he must have been looking at Hailey.  I mean, what's not to look at there?

I put my head down and navigated the rest of the way to the girls and sat down, assuring them, “Drinks are on the way.”

Billie said over the music, “And she seemed to be giving you an appreciative once over.”

I muttered to her, “I hate you.”

She giggled and leaned in to place her head on my shoulder playfully.  I shook my head, unable to stop my smile and wrapped my arm around her head in a silly hug.

Then we sat back to pick out perspective hookups for the girls.  I sagged back in my chair and held my head when the world tuned out again, my vision tunneling.  I could hear whispers from all around, I somehow knew some were even outside the building, in the neighboring blocks.  I could make out some words.  “I wish I were dead”  or “I wish he'd look at me that way” or  “I wish she understood me.”  It was coming from all around me, and I bit back a frustrated scream over the fact I couldn't seem to control it.

Then just as suddenly as it hit me, it was gone, and I was gasping and reeling when the world snapped back into place around me.  The girls looked overly concerned, Stace asking, “Drake?”

I exhaled and said, “I think I might puke.”  That was apparently the signal for my roommates to spring into action.

Billie was by my side helping me stand on shaky legs.  “Let's get you to the restroom.”

Stacy was scowling.  “You didn't drink anything from a strange glass at the bar did you?”

I chuckled and let them lead me along to the back hall and the restrooms, saying in an indignant tone, “No I haven't been roofied.  I've just been having dizzy spells today.”

We stepped into the little hall in the back by the restrooms, it was overcrowded as usual, and I glanced up at Stace, who smiled down at me.  That's when all hell broke loose.

Her eyes had gone wide with confusion then she fell forward lifelessly onto the floor as the screaming started.  There was a huge knife sticking out of the middle of her back.  Blood spreading around it.

I looked at her in shock as people panicked and started running back into the club.  Stacy?  Someone had killed my friend?  What was going on?  I started to look up when I was slammed against the wall of the narrow corridor, a hand around my throat.  I blinked as I looked into the eyes of the bald man.

He had a wild look in his eyes, he enjoyed bringing pain.  I slapped at his arm ineffectually, he had a grip like an iron vice and he towered over me.  He must have been six foot four.  I couldn’t get any air into my lungs.  I saw two other men beside him, one had a gun in his hand.  I was reeling in confusion.

Then Billie was there, hitting the bald man's arm with a fire extinguisher.  She was screaming in fury.  The second blow caused him to release me as one of the other men grabbed her hair and yanked her away as I slid down the wall.  My vision swam with motes of light as I fought to remain conscious.  I saw Billie being slammed head first into the other wall repeatedly until she slumped down into an unmoving heap.

I tried not to slip into hysterics.  Stacy was dead, and Billie might be too.  What was going on?

I heard a sharp metallic sound over the screams and music and Hailey's voice booming out, “Hey!  Asshat!”

Then there was a tremendous roar of sound and light as the shotgun she was holding spit fire.  The man who had attacked Billie slammed back into the wall, breaking the drywall and leaving a halo of red blood spattered on the wall.

She yelled my way as the third man dove at her,  “Angelina, run!”

I nodded as I saw her knock the gun out of the man's hand with the butt of the shotgun.  Then she hit him with a solid right cross as I scrambled to my feet and staggered as fast as I could down the hall, Baldy in pursuit.

I slammed the emergency exit open and ran out into the alley, my mind numb.  I was in shock.  Someone had just killed my roommates.  Now I was running for my life while Hailey took on three armed men alone.

The door was almost knocked off its hinges behind me as Baldy burst into the alley.  Ok, so Hailey was facing two armed men, one of which was most likely dead already.  I whimpered and ran.  I could hear sirens in the distance approaching.  I stumbled out onto the sidewalk at the street, and the man had almost caught up.  I heard air brakes and looked up, I was at a bus stop.

Someone stepped off the bus, and I stumbled up the steps.  The bus lurched into motion as I fumbled for my bus pass.  I looked out the window as we pulled away from the curb while I made my way to the back, Baldy glaring at me before he ran back down the alley.

I was hyperventilating.  I went to dig out my cell to call 911, but it wasn't there.  I remembered putting it on the table back at Hailey's.  Damn it.

Who were those men, and why were they trying to kill my roommates and me?  And to do it in public with so many witnesses?

I needed to think.  I glanced up to see what area we were in.  I just needed to get far away from the man.  Wait, the bus driver could call the police.  I started to get up to make my way back to the front of the bus when I was hit by another nauseating wave of disorientation.  The whispers were back.  I closed my eyes tight against the onslaught, clenching my fists to my forehead as a thousand voices from all around me echoed in my brain. “I wish I had a car like that” and “I wish mommy and daddy would stop fighting” with “I wish Brad would shut up and kiss me.”

Was I going insane?  Had I lost it?

I don't know how long I was assaulted by the whispering ghosts of wishes of people around me, but when the bus stopped to pick up another passenger, I needed air.  I stumbled out the back doors and onto the sidewalk.  I took in deep breaths of night air and looked up.

There was the Coit Tower, looming above me.  I always came here to think whenever the pressures of life and my lack of love life got to be too much.  Had I subconsciously come here or was it just a coincidence?

It was closed now, but I still walked up to the concrete tower.  I needed to think.  I know it was irrational, but I wasn't thinking really clearly with all the excitement and violence and blood... oh, the blood.  I whispered, “Stacy?”

My vision was blurred by my tears as I stumbled up to the tower.  I swung my gaze back to the road when two dark SUVs screeched to a halt, and Baldy and three other men piled out of the vehicles and started running toward me.

I screamed, “What do you want with me?”  Then I turned back to the doors.  I blinked.  They were propped open with some hoses leading out to a cleaning van.

I stepped inside the tower quickly and called out, “Hello?”  Where were the workers?  They could help me.  I looked at the elevator at the center of the tower and hit the button a dozen times in my panic, the workers were probably cleaning upstairs, I reasoned.

The elevator doors closed just as the men in their dark clothes came sliding to a halt.  I heard Baldy call out, “The stairs.”

I was shaking, I'm sure I had more adrenaline than blood in my veins at that moment.  To my relief, there were two workers buffing the floors on the observation deck level when the elevator doors slid open.  And they were big men.

I stepped out begging, “You have to help me there are men chasing...”  I blinked as a spray of blood splattered across my face, accompanied by the concussively loud sound of gunshots.  The two men fell with bullet wounds to their heads.

I bit back a scream and turned to the men who had just arrived, led by Baldy.  I backed up to the doors to the observation deck.  I pleaded, “What do you want from me?”

He sneered and said, “That's an easy question.  I'll tell you what the man who hired us said.  Though I'd wager, he's just a madman, but his money is good.”

I backed out the door, and the men followed.  I continued backing to the railing as he smirked and said, “We just want you to make a wish.”

With that, he lunged forward and hoisted me up like a sack of grain over his head, as I struggled uselessly, and he threw me over the railing.

That's how I found myself facing the last couple seconds of my life here.  As I fell, I asked in confusion, “Why did they want me to make a wish?”  He was right, whoever hired him was a madman.  If I were to make a wish, it would be something like... I mumbled as I accepted the fact I was already dead, I just need to hit bottom to finalize it, “I wish I could fly.”

My words boomed in my head, echoing in so many tones like dozens of voices and whispers echoing my words.  They were young and old, male and female, in dozens of languages, but they were all me.  Threatening to drive me mad before I died.

I screamed as my back felt as if it were on fire as my skin tore and stretched then with a whump and fluttering sound, something sprang from my back. I screamed again with the pain and effort as the wind pushed against the new pieces of me that sprawled out impossibly far to my sides as my angle of descent changed. The strain of it threatening to tear the new appendages from my back, and I swooped back up and away from the ground that promised an end to the insanity of the night.

My chest brushed the ground in a glancing blow, and I stared dumbly at my shadow as I arced back up into the night sky.  I glanced to my sides and blinked as I whispered in disbelief, “I have... wings?”

I absently soared, wings outstretched, one wingtip brushing the outer wall of a nearby two-story building as I gained altitude from the momentum and kinetic energy converted from my fall.  I just stared dumbly at the impossibility of those graceful wings with equally large feathers lining their arching length.  I tried to even grasp the concept that these great white wings were somehow part of me.

The human mind wasn't built to process something so inconceivable that it defies everything you know to be true in this world of ours.

I was snapped out of the shock, which was threatening to drive me mad, by the sound of gunshots from above and behind me.  If I hadn't already started dipping as I bled off the speed and energy as I just stared at my... wings, the shot that I could feel whizz past my right shoulder would have hit me square in the back.

I tried to process that too as I instinctively flapped my great wings and then folded them tight against my back to use the power of the strokes to increase my speed.  I dove toward the ground which I had been scared would be my end just moments before.  I could... feel the alien appendages and felt the disturbance of the air of the bullet passing the sensitive leading edge of my wing.

Just as I was about to hit the ground chest first, my wings sprang open with a great whump again, and I cocked them and flapped again, careening around the corner of the building, putting it between myself and the shooters in the tower, kicking up dirt and loose debris from the ground.

I poured on the speed and threaded my way between buildings, flapping and weaving in a complicated evasive action.  Hearing the gunshots becoming just echoes and more distant as I fled in terror.

I made a wrong turn into an alley near ground level and was traveling at far too high of a speed to stop before I would collide with the iron gate at the far end of the alley, which stretched one and a half stories up the alley walls.  I didn't have time to try another powerful stroke of my wings.

I could feel my heart pounding as if it was in my throat.  Oh come on, the world was out to kill me, didn't I warrant just one single break?  I hadn't been such a terrible person in life that I deserved this had I?

I squinted an eye preparing for the impact which would surely kill me just as dead as if I had completed my fall from the tower.  Then my eyes went wide when I saw the decorative hole two-thirds of the way up the gate, the wrought iron bars were woven in a wreath pattern, and it was just big enough that if I...

I slapped my wings tight to my back and spun my body as I corkscrewed myself through the hole.  I heard my tattered blouse tearing as part of it caught on the metal.  I heard the sound of the compressed air of my passing echo off the iron and the walls, and I was through!

I snapped my wings wide and soared around the corner and into the street.  I had lost so much altitude that I ran and skipped briefly on the road for a couple steps in front of an oncoming car.  I screamed out in anger and defiance, and flapped my wings with all my strength, leaping into the air.  The antenna of the old rusty white sedan whipped my foot, tearing off one of my sandals and sending shooting pain up my leg as the driver slammed on the brakes, horn blaring.

Then I was airborne again, whooping in exhilaration of the two near misses in as many seconds.  I couldn't hear the gunshots anymore, and I chanced a look back.  The tower was receding in the distance rapidly, I had traveled over a half mile in maybe twenty seconds or so.

I shook my head at everything that had just transpired as I absently flapped my way toward familiar territory.  I know it is stupid to go where someone looking for me would be sure to stake out, but the human mind is conditioned to be comfortable in familiar surroundings, to feel safe in an environment they know.

I swooped into an alley.  I knew I couldn't be out in the open like that, with the chance of so many people below seeing me.  At least it was dark.  I was... a freak.  Oh god, I was going to end up on some government dissection table.  I needed to go somewhere, to hide, to think.

Then my eyes snapped wide, and I started flapping with urgency.  Stacy, Billie!  Those men had killed my friends.  I had to get to them somehow.  They didn't deserve what had happened to them.  I felt tears streaking my cheeks and my vision blurred.

I screamed in anger and frustration.  Those bastards had killed my friends!  I glanced at one of my impossible wings, realizing that the feathers were a sort of mottled white and tan on top and white as the driven snow on the leading edges and underside.

I flapped my wings again and then wondered just how I was able to fly with them.  I mean, I had just gotten them a minute ago, and it just seemed natural to me as I flew and evaded the attack.  I flapped again.  How did I know how to use them?

At that thought, I lost all control of them, thinking too much.  Like looking down at your feet as you are running to make sure you put them one foot in front of another and winding up stumbling.  The wings sort of hung limply, partially folded to my back as I plummeted.

On instinct I wrapped the wings around myself in a protective gesture as I hit the ground, skipping and rolling across the alley and slamming into a dumpster in the darkness.  I was first aware of the crashing, thudding sound that seemed too loud to me before the pain of the impact caught up with my nerves and I whimpered in pain.

It felt like I had almost broken my back and I felt a searing pain from... I had hurt a wing.  My wing.  I blinked back tears of my physical pain and from the emotional anguish of my roommate's fate.  I was dazed, and everything was fuzzy.  I was hurt... bad.

I opened my eyes as I felt movement.  I didn't even remember passing out.  I would have rolled my eyes at myself if I didn't have a head-splitting migraine.  Of course, I didn't remember, I was busy losing consciousness at the time.

I felt the movement again and realized that someone was dragging me across the ground in the alley.  I squinted in the dark as the person heaved again, dragging me a foot at a time.  It was a girl.  She looked to be maybe nineteen-ish.  Her eyes looked to be wide in fear as she looked toward the end of the alley as she pulled me back further.

She was wearing tattered clothing, and her long dark hair was tangled and matted, plastered against her scalp.  She looked like any of the other homeless people in the San Francisco area.  Her eyes were dark pools, wide and almost manic looking.  There was something not quite right about the woman.  Those eyes were most likely a mirror of the near insanity in mine when I discovered I had...  Oh holy shit, I had wings!  This woman was dragging me on my back by my wings.

I tried to protest, but my voice was a groaning croak.  The girl turned her eyes from the alley entrance to me, and the wild look softened as she smiled a brilliant smile at me and she whispered, “You're awake.  Hang on Angel, we need to hide, they are almost here.”

I blinked at her.  She knew me?  I tried to place her but was coming up blank.  If it weren't for that manic look in her eyes, I'd say she was almost pretty.  If she got cleaned up, I was sure she would be.

I heard the screeching of tires on the pavement nearby, the sound of cars taking high speed turns on the asphalt.  Then car horns sounding their protest of the recklessness.

She cussed under her breath and looked around, her eyes locked onto something and she said, “Sorry Angel.”  Then with a great heave, she pulled us over the edge of a small stairwell down to some old basement in the degraded brick building.

I landed hard with an “Oof.”  I winced in pain as I landed on a wing.  I rolled slightly, and it wrapped around in front of me, and I weakly cradled it in my arms.  A moment later the woman fell unceremoniously on top of me as I heard the screeching of tires as some vehicles made a high-speed turn into the alley.

It was them, it had to be.  My heart was threatening to beat out of my chest, and every instinct in my body was screaming at me to flee, to take to the sky and not look back.  That made me swallow, whatever had happened to me, to make me a freak, had invaded my instincts as well if my first thought was to fly away.  Had... had my mind been changed as well?  Was I still... was I still me?

We sat there a moment, her on top of me our faces inches apart as I just stared into her dark eyes.  I swear they were reflecting her inner torment, something that haunted her to her core.  Then she just grinned despite the gravity of the situation.  And reached over for a dirty canvas trap which was draped over some detritus in the stairwell; Some boxes and paint cans that were likely put there long ago and promptly forgotten.

She pulled the canvas over me and hugged it tight to my wings.  I yelped in pain over my injured wing.  She put her other hand over my mouth and gave me a warning look in the darkness.  I held my breath as we listened to the cars slowly prowl down the alley.  I could see light sweep past our hiding spot as they searched.

Then a moment later the screeching of tires as they moved on and turned down the street once they reached the end of the alley.  I tried to sit up and move her off me, but she shook her head and released my mouth, putting a finger to her lips as she cocked her head and listened.

After a few seconds, she nodded her head and said off to the side, “Thanks,” For some odd reason.

Then she looked at me.  It was hard to make her out in the darkness under the canvas.  In a sweeping move, she whipped the canvas off of us and rolled off of me, saying, “They say they are gone now, Angel.”

I sat up, cradling my wing and wincing at the pain in my head and back.  I shook my head and asked, “Who says they are gone?  Who are you and how do you know my name?”

She cocked her head and asked in confusion, “Your name?”

I nodded as I started examining the leading edge of the impossible wing, feeling for breaks.  It seemed to be only deeply bruised tissue with no breaks unless there was a hairline fracture of the light bones.  “Angel.  How do you know me?”

Her face screwed up in confusion, then she looked to her left and said, “I know, lay off, just let me talk.”

Then she turned her eyes to me and said far too cheerfully for how insane she sounded saying it, “You're a fallen angel.  I saw you fall from the sky myself.  Those men were looking for you, they must have seen you fall from the heavens too.  But you're my angel, I found you.”

Oh... she really was mad.  She didn't know my name, she seriously thought I was an angel.  Then I blinked and started laughing almost uncontrollably.  Maybe she wasn't as far gone as I thought.  After all, here I was, examining my wings for injuries.  My wings.  I had fucking wings!

I looked more like an angel than human now so what I would have thought impossible just minutes before was staring at me in the face as I subconsciously wrapped both wings around myself in a protective cloak.  Maybe I was the mad one, and she was... wait, she was talking to someone who wasn't there.

Could my life get any more fucked up?

I assured her, “I'm no angel.  Those men are trying to kill me for some reason, and I don't have a clue why.  And I don't know how I got these wings.”  Then in a confused voice, tinged with a bit of wonder as I spread them wide to look at, I said, “But they saved my life.”

She looked at me dubiously, and I took a deep, calming breath and centered myself.  Then I exhaled and offered my hand out to her as she looked away from my face, her eyes tracking the length of my wings.  I blushed under the scrutiny, folding my wings to my back as I offered, “Angelina Drake.”

She looked disappointed I had hidden my wings away from her, and she accepted my hand and reached her other hand out timidly to stroke the top of my left wing.  It sent shivers down my wing and spine to my toes.  It felt sinfully good as she absently said, “Everyone just calls me Mouse.”

She had such a look of fascination on her face, and it seemed to chase away that haunted look that shadowed her dark eyes.  I blushed again and extended my left wing a bit letting her look at it, and I shivered again as she brushed the feathers lightly in wonder.

Then she inhaled sharply, stepped back and shut her eyes tightly and then asked a question that took me by surprise.  “You're real?  I can feel you. You're not like the others.”  She motioned her chin to the empty space beside her.

Then I got it.  She was hallucinating.  I narrowed my eyes and took her in the best I could in the poor lighting.  She didn't have any telltale signs of drug abuse.  The poor woman must have some form of manic schizophrenia and was hearing voices.

She was looking confused and almost disappointed as she asked, “You're not an angel?”

I shook my head, and she stared at the wings on my back, and I could see despair and horror widen her eyes.  I knew she thought she was imagining my wings and that she had dropped deeper into her mental prison.

I quickly reached out on instinct, wrapping my left wing around her, to comfort her.  I said with conviction, “They are real.  You aren't seeing things.  I don't know how but I have wings, and there are men trying to kill me.  You saved me Mouse.”

She closed her eyes and took three quick breaths then seemed to snuggle into my wing and opened her eyes.  It broke my heart when a tear ran down her cheek, and she nodded to me.  I was a little distracted as she ran a hand along the leading edge of the foreign appendage as she asked, “How?”

She accepted the wings easier than I had.  But I'm sure she was used to hovering somewhere between sanity and a madness nobody else could imagine.  It was all new to me.  I opened my mouth then remembered Stacy and Billie.  I blurted, “I'll tell you, but I need to get to my friends.  I think... I think they're dead.”