Natural Born Angel (8 page)

“Hello, I’m Professor Archangel Archson,” she said. “But you can call me Susan.” With her olive complexion and rich, dark hair pulled into a bun, Susan seemed at first glance like another impossibly gorgeous Angel, but there was an accessible side to her that Maddy immediately sensed.

Sadie excused herself, leaving Maddy and the professor alone together. Susan offered Maddy a cup of tea, which she politely declined.

“Well, if you don’t mind. . .” The woman poured herself a cup of the steaming brown liquid, mixing in a few drops of honey and fresh-squeezed lemon. She smiled warmly again at Maddy.

“You look confused,” Susan said. “Sometimes we Archangels teach classes. It keeps us close to the incoming classes of Guardians.”

Maddy tried to smile back, but the fact that her teacher was not just an Angel but an Archangel made her feel even more nervous.

Susan looked at Maddy. “Tell me what you know about frequencing.”

Maddy’s mind went back to what Jackson had told her, as well as her own experience with the phenomenon – her own strange visions, Angel “abilities” dating from way before she knew she was part Angel, the grisly premonitions that would overrun her at random times.

“Well, every person has a frequency. It’s unique. And every Angel has the ability to pick up on these frequencies.”

“That’s right,” the professor said, nodding encouragingly.

“But normally it’s like static, if you don’t know the frequency. It doesn’t make sense, it’s all jumbled. That’s what used to happen to me . . . before I knew.”

“Every Angel has this, except you weren’t aware. And every Angel has to learn how to control it. Some have to work very long and hard at it, and some may never even master it. Did you know that?”

Maddy shook her head.

“I’ve gone over your case file. Apparently you’re already well on your way.” Professor Archson looked at Maddy. “I bet you didn’t know that either, did you?”

“No, I just always thought I was a . . . freak.”

“I know what you mean. Visions started interpolating themselves with me at a much younger than normal age. I’d become so disturbed that my parents thought of sending me away to Angel boarding school as young as age seven. I thought I’d never master frequencing, not have those terrifying images own me. And now here I am, teaching them. You’re not a freak, Maddy. You’re just one of us.”

Maddy nodded, her blood chilling for a moment as she recalled the premonition of the boy in the striped shirt, reaching out to her from fire at the homeless shelter.

“Are you OK?” the professor asked.

Maddy regarded the kind Angel in front of her. “Professor Archson, can I still have that tea? It sounds good.”

“Sure.” The professor poured her a cup. “And remember, it’s Susan.” She leaned forward in her chair. “Now, should we get started?”

Susan turned to her computer. She typed a few keystrokes, and a deep rumbling started in the room. An eerie blue aura began to fill the space, and Maddy realized it was coming from the mysterious metallic platform in the middle of the room. Susan led Maddy towards it. The blue gleam from the sphere began to grow brighter, and Maddy thought she even felt some heat emanating off the gleaming skin of the metal.

“This is what we call a frequencing modulator. Professor Crosstone, who helped found these grounds, built the first crude prototype, and I have since perfected it.” Susan reached her hand close to the sphere. The blue light seemed to slowly gravitate towards her hand as it neared. “If you’re on it, it vastly amplifies the frequencies of those within a certain range. It’s like throwing darts at a board and all of a sudden having the bullseye made ten times bigger – it’s a lot easier. You can then practise on isolating and identifying frequencies, sharpening your skills. Which, if all goes well with your training and becoming a nominee, you’ll use the day you meet your Protections.”

Maddy stepped closer, the blue luminescence from the sphere illuminating her face. She looked at the hundreds of screens surrounding her. They were still all dark.

“What about them?”

“As the modulator brings in frequencies, we project them on each of these screens, graphically. The neural feedback of isolating them both in your mind and through the projections of the screens makes the learning process twice as effective.”

Susan stepped away from the platform, leaving Maddy there.

“Want to take it for a spin?”

“Sure,” Maddy said uncertainly.

“That’s what we’re here for,” Susan said, laughing. “Don’t worry, it won’t bite.”

She walked over to the small control area and began typing in some keystrokes.

“Stepping it up to full speed,” Susan’s disembodied voice came over the intercom.

Maddy felt the slightest bit light-headed, but otherwise nothing seemed to change. The screens surrounding her remained blank.

“I’m going to stop talking for a while,” Susan’s voice said through the intercom. “What I want you to do is quiet your mind. And then start listening with it. I know this may sound strange, or difficult. But just start to
listen
. We don’t expect anything amazing this first time around; it’s enough just to understand that there are always frequencies out there to listen to, even if they are jumbled. Take as much time as you need.”

“OK, Profes – I mean, Susan. I’ll try to do my best,” Maddy said. Closing her eyes, Maddy tried to focus. All kinds of thoughts began rushing through her mind: what Louis Kreuz had said to her, how Uncle Kevin was handling her being gone, what the other Guardians in training thought about her, how she might need to get her own car, whether she’d swapped the washing from the washing machine to the drier. Maddy had never even really realized what her own mind was constantly churning over. It seemed to be amplified by the frequency modulator.

After what seemed to her like an eternity, her thoughts began to calm down, until there was a kind of clearing in her own mind. Taking a breath, she tried to begin to listen with her mind. To her astonishment, Maddy began to hear and feel things outside herself. At first they were far off. Then they became closer. They were a disordered tangle of voices, images, senses. Maddy could almost feel them, taste them herself, if only for the briefest moment. This was the static. She had felt this before, but never on command. Only at strange moments, seemingly by chance. And not this strong, either, except for the few times she’d had an actual vision, like last year when she foresaw her own death outside the high school party just before Jackson had saved her.

“Opening the frequencies,” Susan said.

Suddenly, one by one, the screens began flickering to life: this one showing a man in a meeting with a boss, this one a woman buying roses at the florist, this one a teenager sitting in traffic on Angel Boulevard. As each of them hit Maddy, her mind was overtaken for a moment, and she felt like she was
there
. Until the next frequency came upon her. Soon the TVs all around were coming to life, as Susan opened more and more frequencies into the modulator for Maddy to deal with. The voices and noises in the frequencing room became loud, unruly, cacophonous.

Maddy remembered what Susan had told her about isolating and identifying frequencies. With total concentration, Maddy tried to unravel the chaotic images in her mind, one at a time. If she focused extremely hard, she could isolate one, but then it would be gone. Slowly she was able to grab on to one and start to keep it there. The energy she suddenly felt was tremendous.

“That’s enough for today. We’ll try isolating specific Protections next time.”

But a puzzled look flashed across Susan’s face as she saw that more and more TVs were coming to life, and the entire room was now filled. Maddy was drawing more frequencies even though Susan had stopped adding them to the modulator.

Maddy’s eyes closed. The chaos of voices and images in her brain was incredible. Without even thinking about it, her brain started sorting each frequency strand and filing it away as its own. At long last, Maddy had just one main strand left.

And it was Susan’s.

As soon as she locked in on the frequency, it was as if the world switched from black and white to colour as she was able to see Susan with perfect clarity. Maddy’s own perspective shifted entirely. Suddenly Maddy saw Susan frantically running up the platform to Maddy, who was collapsed, unconscious on the steel deck. It was all as clear as day.

The experience was overwhelming. Maddy felt as if she had suddenly been ripped out of her own body. Adrenaline and almost feverish excitement flooded her body.

“I see you! I see you!” she shouted.

“What? That’s impossible!” Susan’s voice was loud and insistent, but it seemed a million miles away. “Maddy, be careful. You’re not ready!”

“I see you!” Maddy shouted again, swept away by this incredible feeling of the moment. Suddenly she felt extremely light-headed. The edges on her vision of Susan darkened rapidly to black. Her entire sense of balance and presence had disappeared. Almost as if in slow motion, Maddy felt herself crumpling sideways, her body unable to follow her simple commands.

With a sickening
thud
, her body struck the smooth metal platform. Instantly all the TVs went black.

Susan, in a panic, ran towards the platform – just as Maddy had seen in her brief vision. Her face paled as she saw Maddy crumpled and unconscious. She leaned down over Maddy, who slowly came back to consciousness.

Blinking her eyes, she looked at Susan.

“Maddy, are you all right?” the Angel asked.

Maddy nodded slowly, sitting up. She rubbed her elbow where she’d fallen on to the hard metal.

The instructor shook her head. “It’s amazing, Maddy. I thought it would take weeks for us to get to this point. And here you did it in minutes.” Susan led Maddy off the frequency modulator. “I think that’s enough for today, don’t you?”

Maddy touched her side, wincing a bit. “Yeah, maybe that’s a good idea.” She laughed. “Only I could hurt myself just standing. I thought the dangerous part would be once I get my wings and start flying.”

A strange expression passed across Susan’s face, and she looked away, examining a computer monitor. “Oh?”

“What is it, Susan?” Maddy asked nervously.

Susan took a deep breath and looked back at Maddy, light lines of concern crossing her still-youthful face. “It’s really nothing. But I know the Archangels and other doctors have told you that your wings will be coming in just like an Angel’s. From what I’ve seen in the charts, your Immortal Marks have developed enough that wings should be emerging literally any day. And I know this is what the media expects now, too. But the truth is we don’t know when or, really,
how
you will . . . mature. There’s no reason to expect anything will be different. But this is a whole new world for us.”

Cold, sharp anxiety washed over Maddy like a sneaky wave at the beach.

“Different?” Maddy said, remembering her recurrent nightmare of those almost demonic appendages, deformed, unwanted. Had her dream been some kind of harbinger of what was really going to come, no matter what the Angel specialists or Jacks or anyone told her?

The professor turned away again, distractedly making keystrokes on a small keypad linked to a monitor. The insistent blue light in the room slowly started to flicker and fade.

“I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry. We have no reason to believe anything will be different at all, Maddy.” The computer screens powered down. Susan turned back to Maddy, a big smile on her face, pulling up enthusiasm. “Now what do you say we go find some lunch, seeing as Sadie seems to have gone among the missing?”

“Sure,” Maddy said, gathering her bag. Susan opened the door, and the shocking sunlight poured into the dimly lit room. But Maddy’s mind was far away. Still turning over this word, and what it might mean for her:
different
.

T
he man walked down the dark back alley, passing overflowing skips that reeked in the still-hot night. His shoulders slightly hunched – a bad habit. Above, in the hazy night sky only a few blocks away, the lights of the sleek office skyscrapers shone above downtown. Although heat from the sunny day still radiated off the bricks and asphalt in the back alley at night, the man wore an overcoat, his hands thrust deep in the pockets. He preferred it that way.

The soles of his battered loafers stuck to the asphalt, which was covered with the residue of waste and rubbish that never seemed to get scrubbed away.

Downtown in the glorious Immortal City. Once upon a time, the Angels were an integral part of downtown, drinking in swanky bars, dining at old-school steak restaurants, holding Angel events in the ornate auditoriums, driving their beautiful, glamorous cars underneath the towering buildings that were being erected almost every week. But that was years ago. Now every night it became an abandoned camp for the homeless and hopeless, a teeming ground for roving criminals and those who didn’t want to be found. It seemed like a lifetime away from the manicured, glorious lives of the beautiful Angels – but their sparkling houses on the hill were only a five-minute drive away.

“
Spaarrre
some change, mister?” a man slurred, pulling a swig of liquor from the brown paper bag between his legs. “Barely survived the Angel City Mission fire and hav –
hiccup –
haven’t been able to sleep a wink since. The dreams, I tell ya.”

The voice came from beside the olive green skip, startling the man in the overcoat. Looking down, he saw a scraggly man with a bloated face and red nose, his hair and beard matted. The man was dressed in what seemed to be a collection of filthy rags. The bum’s image reflected in the standing man’s wire-rimmed glasses.

“Maybe next time,” the overcoat man said before moving on.

He soon reached an unmarked door in the alley. His fist moved forward and rapped on its metal surface.

After some shuffling behind the door, a slat opened up behind a metal grate, which was at eye level. A pair of dark eyes inspected the man outside suspiciously.

“Closed.” The man’s voice inside boomed into the alley before he slid the slat shut again. The alley lay silent.

The man in the overcoat reached forward and banged on the door again. This time harder.

“I’m here for Rusalka.”

The slate behind the metal grate stayed halfway open.

“Oh, it’s
you
,” the man inside said. “Wait here.”

The slat closed again. He was gone for maybe thirty seconds. All of a sudden, the sounds of multiple deadbolts unlocking came from inside.

The door into the alley opened. The man inside was wearing a white wife-beater, which stretched against his sizeable gut. It was tucked into a cheap pair of grey polyester trousers.

“Why didn’t you say it was you? Freddy said you was coming. We’ve been waiting. . .” The man in the wife-beater trailed off, his eyes growing wide.

The man in the overcoat had pulled out a Smith & Wesson pistol with one hand. Slowly, the other hand reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a badge.

Detective Sylvester smiled briefly at the look on the man’s face. Sometimes he enjoyed doing his job.

“Rusalka down there?”

The man nodded mournfully.

“Show me,” Sylvester said, motioning with his pistol.

The man led the detective down the dismal hallway to a room. About six men sat around the table, a pile of chips in front of them, each studying a hand of poker. The room was hot and smoky from acrid tobacco smoke, and many had unbuttoned their shirts. They sat over their cards, sweat dripping from their brows.

Looking up, they saw Detective Sylvester standing there with a gun.

The men all calmly put their hands in the air. Sylvester motioned for the man in the wife-beater to go stand over by them.

“All I want is to talk to Rusalka.”

A balding man with a thick moustache slowly put his hand of cards face-down on the table and stood up.

“Let’s go to my office,” Rusalka said, leading the detective into an adjoining back room. “You won’t need that.” He pointed to the gun still in Sylvester’s hand.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to keep it handy,” the detective answered.

“Suit yourself,” the balding man said, lifting one eyebrow. He preceded Sylvester into a shabby small office. The desk was covered with papers and old betting digests from the horse races. Old humming fluorescent tubes lit the room from above. It smelled like stale sweat and halitosis. Rusalka closed the door behind them.

“You want one?” the sweating man asked, pulling a pint of liquor and a pair of small glasses off a shelf behind him.

Sylvester shook his head. The man poured a short drink and gulped it down all at once.

“What can I do for you, detective? I haven’t seen you down here in fifteen years. Since you helped take down Ellis and Perez.”

The look in Sylvester’s eyes changed. Only slightly. But enough. As if he were remembering something far off.

“I need information,” Sylvester said, taking the chance to wipe his glasses clean. He put them back on and looked at Rusalka.

“What kind?”

“A couple of weeks ago, a guy you had working as a look-out during one of your night-time ‘business transactions’. Travis Fittum. He disappeared, yes? A guy living down at one of the residential hotels on Skid Row. And sometimes the Angel City Mission, if he couldn’t raise the hotel money. The same mission that burned two weeks ago and caused the deaths of eight women and children. Fittum was a former associate of yours whom you were giving a second chance.” He looked at Rusalka’s face. “You surprised? Ten dollars can buy a lot of information around here.”

Rusalka looked unblinkingly at Sylvester. “If you think we’d be so dumb as to take out a guy like that and bring cops like you sniffing around, you’ve lost even more than what they say you have.”

Detective Sylvester slightly stiffened.

“The guy disappeared,” Rusalka continued. “Like
poof
, gone. We didn’t even pay him yet, and he was disappeared.” Rusalka shook his head. “Big deal. Just a bum. We were giving him a second chance, and he blew it. He was at a fleabag hotel this week, back on the street the next. Probably got tired of waiting and wanted to find another way to get his fix for the night.”

Sylvester shook his head. “We’d normally say the same thing, except his best friend filed a missing person’s complaint. He never showed up. This guy’s looked everywhere. All the normal haunts from Spring Street past Mateo. And turns out it’s the night before the deadly fire just down the block. We have one witness, not entirely credible, who puts him in the Angel City Mission shelter early that morning, say six o’clock.”

Rusalka shrugged. “Since when did you start worrying about missing bums?”

“When a dozen go missing in one week, even the ACPD starts to take notice.” Sylvester looked at Rusalka. “Do you remember anything out of the ordinary from that night?”

“Nothing. It was a hot night. We wanted to get out of there. We didn’t know where he went. We weren’t going to form a search party. If he couldn’t stand on a corner keeping watch for an hour without getting loaded, he didn’t deserve his twenty bucks.”

“And you saw nothing else? You don’t know anything about the other disappearances?”

“You’re chasing ghosts, detective. This is downtown. You know that. It’s different from the west side.”

Sylvester was deep in thought.

“Now, if we’re done, I’m hoping you’ll excuse me. I’m one queen away from a full house,” Rusalka said, motioning towards the card game outside.

The detective stood up and followed as the man led them out of the dingy room and into the smoky card game.

“Now where were we. . . ?” Rusalka asked the other men as he reached the table.

“I’ll show myself out,” Sylvester said, walking past the man in the wife-beater who had let him in.

Sylvester stood outside in the dark alley, taking a deep breath. He coughed, his nose burning from the thick pollution from all the trucks running on the freeways that encircled downtown like a noose.

Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he cleaned his glasses again and mopped his brow.

Another dead end. Shouldn’t have been surprising. The detective’s higher-ups in the ACPD had thought he was wasting his time by taking this case. A dozen missing, mostly homeless men and women from Skid Row, half of them John and Jane Does, right around the same time as this fire at the homeless shelter: not exactly front page news after the mysterious bombing of the Angel offices just a week ago, and not exactly a high priority for the police, either. The Angels had pull in their namesake city.

But Sylvester couldn’t help feeling something was going on. And if there were twelve
reported
disappearances, how many
actual
disappearances were there? Sure, it could have been coincidence. But things were happening elsewhere. And Sylvester had learned to trust his intuition. Higher-ups in the ACPD had quietly urged the detective to quickly wrap the case up so it could simply be moved to a dead-end file in missing persons and they could label the fire as an accident, since the examiner wasn’t sure it was arson. But Sylvester wasn’t ready to move on. Not just yet.

The detective’s mobile phone rang from inside his jacket. Sighing, he reached into the breast pocket and pulled out his phone. He checked the caller ID: it was headquarters.

“Sylvester here,” the detective barked into his phone. He listened to the tinny voice on the other line. “Right now? I’m all the way downtown.”

He paused to listen again.

“Yes, I understand,” he said. “I’ll be there in fifteen.”

When the elevator doors opened on his floor at the ACPD, Detective Sylvester found himself facing his old partner, Bill Garcia.

“What’s going on, Bill?” the detective asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine. Susie and the kids and I were just sitting down to dinner when I got the call. I just got here.”

Sylvester simply nodded.

The two police officers began walking together through the open bullpen of cubicles that served as command for the Homicide Division of the ACPD. Sylvester’s mind wandered briefly back to the year before, when he had been tracking the demon that had been murdering Angels along the Walk of Angels.

He thought of the night he was taken off the demon case, when he’d had a cubicle in this very room. His dismissal from the case had come by direct order of the Angel authorities. His bosses had planned to boot him back downstairs to deal with petty larceny, but instead of going home that night, he’d tracked the demon to Angel City High School, just in the nick of time – it had cornered Maddy and Jackson. Then, after his plan to help the girl and wrongly charged Angel escape Angel City had failed, the detective found all hell breaking loose on the freeway when the demon attacked the convoy of Angel vehicles. With grim purpose, he had driven to the NAS headquarters and challenged the Archangels to act – before it was too late. Some people in the department had called him a hero. In his eyes, he was just doing his duty and didn’t want a fuss.

After Sylvester’s vindication during the demon crisis last year, all had been forgiven, and the detective had even been given a little more authority, along with his own office off the main cluster of cubicles. He’d become golden in the department. His office was small, the coffee-maker didn’t work, and the blinds looked like they came from 1982. But it was a good space for working on cases.

Taking a breath, the two police officers stepped into the office. Captain Jim Keele smiled broadly when he saw them. He knew how to lay it on thick when needed.

“David, Bill, come in,” the captain said, a steaming cup of coffee on his desk.

“Captain?” Sylvester said expectantly.

“You want to know why you’re here. Understandable.” Keele put his elbows on the table and grinned tightly. “You may have heard about the bombing of the Angel offices last week.”

Garcia raised an eyebrow. “You’d have to be living under a rock not to know about it, sir.”

“So you both understand the importance of this case. And right now we have no leads, except for a drowsy office worker on a smoking break who thought he maybe saw something. This is making things . . . difficult for us. For the department. A big black mark on our police work. Our lab hasn’t been able to pull anything of value from the site, and we’re standing around twiddling our thumbs.”

“We’re running labs, Captain? What about the Angels?” Sylvester asked. “From what I’ve heard, they’re confident they can find those responsible. They’re insisting they can handle it themselves. They’re convinced it’s the Humanity Defence Faction, or some kind of splinter group.”

“He’s right, Captain,” Sergeant Garcia said. “You sure you want to go against the Angels on this thing?” Garcia added, “We stay out of their way. I thought that was ACPD department policy if they gave the say so.”

Captain Keele clasped his hands together in front of him. He leaned forward on the desk. “I can’t say from where, but we’re getting pressure on this thing. It doesn’t matter if the Angels think they can handle this alone. We’re doing our own investigation, whether they want it or not. You’ve seen what’s going on with Senator Linden, the support he’s gaining across the country. Some winds may be changing in the department. This goes high up. Higher than you would even dream. As you can imagine, politics are involved. Which is why we’re keeping this close.”