An Angel's Touch Read online

  “It’s like a picture postcard,” she said. Her eyes glossed with a thin layer of liquid. “Given my father was born here, I wonder if I have relatives nearby.”

  I really hoped she did. Relatives would provide an excellent distraction for her while I snuck back to Chile to further investigate the alleged battle to be. I scanned Paris with my mind, quick-time mind probing Parisian brains for a hint of connection to Jen’s lineage. None. I expanded my search to the outlying towns.

  I found what I sought in a small cottage in Les Hermits, in an old woman sitting in a rocking chair. I moved into the woman’s mind—tunnels that wound and branched in a gigantic maze. I found a remnant of knowledge underneath a great pile of memories.

  “You have a great grandmother. She was outcast from the Renlé family years ago, something to do with an illicit affair with a foreigner. Her name is . . . Charlotte Vervin. Eighty two years old, lives alone, loves animals.”

  She took a step back and cocked her head. “How do you know this?”

  “Mind magic.”

  She looked down, not liking the way I answered most of her questions. “I . . . I would be curious to meet her.” She looked up. “Can we?”

  “You can visit her tomorrow.”

  “You mean—us?”

  “You would trust me?”

  “I can . . . can’t I?”

  “Yes. However, I won’t come.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know I don’t appreciate sentiment or relate to kinship: why people want to keep it, cry when they lose it, and form it if they don’t have it.”

  Her eyes widened excitedly.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re sharing feelings with me.”

  “So?”

  “So, you don’t characteristically share your feelings with me.”

  “I’m not sharing my feelings. I’m disclosing my lack of feelings.”

  “But you’re sharing your feeling about having a lack of feeling.”

  “No, Jen. Don’t read your wishes into my words.”

  “I think you want to experience kinship, but you don’t realize it.” She rose on her toes, threw her arms around me with boundless affection, and kissed my cheek. Hope, Shens were good at that.

  She had definitely jumped to an erroneous conclusion. I had zero interest in kinship, nor did I want it, not even with her. All I wanted from her was approval. I wanted that which was light to acknowledge the beauty of that which was dark. I don’t know why I wanted that. I just did.

  I cupped her shoulders with my hands and pushed her back to view her face. “Don’t view me through false eyes. That’s not what I’m after. I want you to view me as I am, and stretch your moral boundaries to accept me anyway.”

  Her bright face faded. She stepped back and sighed. “There is no way around this, is there?”

  I shook my head, feeling a sad pang in my heart. Ah, feelings after all. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her that.

  “What am I going to do about you, johnny?”

  “Give me a chance.”

  “A chance for what?”

  My eyes said, to receive your unconditional love. But my lips said, “You know what I want.”

  “Geez johnny,” she said turning away, “what do you expect of me?” She toured the suite, touching table and tapestry, rubbing her fingers over the embossed paisley wallpaper. “I mean, I am with you, and I want to be with you, and I am happy to be with you—” she glanced back at me, “most of the time.”

  I sighed hard. She was an escape artist . . . the best.

  She turned and walked through the archway over to the bed and traced her hand down a wood post. She called out in a feigned casual tone. “What hotel did you say this was?”

  I leaned against the ridge where bay window joined wall, crossed my ankles, and manifested a lit cigarette between my fingers. “Le Grande Mansion, built by order of a French King.” I sucked on my cigarette—hard . . . mad. The end blazed orange. I would toy with her, punishment for steering away from what she needed to take hold. My words slid out in a cloud of smoke. “I remember when he did it.”.

  Her weighted glare gratified me. She disliked me mentioning things that insinuated I wasn’t mortal. “I enjoyed haunting his honored guests.”

  Her glare intensified.

  I took another drag, and exhaled with a light jerk of my head. “You’d think the King’s guests would have ceased to come, but on the contrary, Le Grande Mansion became quite an attraction.”

  She walked under the archway. “johnny, this room is going to cost a fortune. I have to pay.”

  She would pay . . . for changing the subject and evading truth. Not that I was one to talk, but duplicity was my calling. I did it for kicks. She did it because she was a coward, and that incensed me.

  “Don’t worry about paying,” I said.

  I made my cigarette disappear and walked past her to the bed. I felt her questioning eyes on me as I hurled my body suavely on the ochre comforter, propping my head up with a black satin pillow edged in gold piping.

  She walked to the foot of the bed, hands on hips. “I am going to pay,” and the look in her eye was stubborn.

  Yeah, she was going to pay all right, like I said, for evading truth. I clasped my hands lackadaisically behind my head and stared back at her with barren hooded eyes.

  “I’ll wire my bank,” she said.

  “I’ll make the withdrawal,” I added with a diabolical smile.

  “No johnny,” she huffed like mother to child. And I was no child. “You can’t use magic to withdraw the money. It will mess up their books.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I do.”

  She was really annoying me. I wasn’t used to compromising, and I had compromised too much of late.

  She must have seen the coldness in my eyes because her hands dropped to her sides, and her tone softened, “If you want to be with me, you must give a little.”

  I closed my eyes. Give a little? Didn’t she know what I was giving? She had my heart. She had mesmerized the Prince of Darkness. For her, I withheld my yearnings. Didn’t she know that every time I did that, I died a little? For her, I did not play. Didn’t she realize that humans had no challenge without a Tazmark’s play? For her I risked my life. Didn’t she understand that each time I taught her about her power, I endangered myself?

  “johnny? Did you hear me?”

  With my mind, I wrote Jen’s name on the front desk register, and marked on the computer that we’d paid. Then I imprinted Jen’s face on the minds of all the personnel with a memory of her paying by credit card. She didn’t actually have a credit card. She never seemed to need one, as she’d inherited a fortune when her parents were murdered in her early childhood.

  “johnny!” she declared, (her attempt to behave as a punitive mother). “I’m going to the lobby to pay for tonight.”

  “It’s taken care of,” I said wearily, eyes still closed.

  “I told you, no. We can’t use magic.”

  If only she knew to whom she was truly talking, she’d, as they say, ‘put a sock in it.’ I cracked a slit in my eyes just to see the little puff of anger I knew was on her face. She walked to the door and turned the knob. Miss goody two shoes was going to pay anyway, or try to, that is. She couldn’t get out.

  She gave me a little scowl with little words meant to be big. “I thought you weren’t going to restrict me anymore.”

  “I’m tired,” I said, closing my eyes again.

  The ordeal with my mother had zapped me. But why? Challenge usually stimulated me. Why did I feel weakened? I yawned and stretched, releasing the kinks of the day. I needed sleep. My standard rest period was sometime in the afternoon until 11:00 p.m. By 11:00 I was usually out the door beginning my nightly prowl. Though it was early in Chile, in France the sun would soon be setting, and I didn’t have long to sleep if I wanted to procure, toy with, and eat my kill before sunrise.

  Jen was still b
y the door. Even with closed eyes, I could see her little stance that fit her little demand.

  “Unlock this door or I’ll call for assistance.”

  “Try,” I said, “and I’ll silence your voice.”

  “You call this love?” She stomped over to me with her little stride. “This isn’t love, johnny!”

  It was coming, her little lecture on what love is. I manifested an easel, a canvas, and an array of oil paints in the corner of the room away from me, hoping to distract her from her little tantrum so I could get some sleep. She was an artist, quite famous actually, though she never flaunted it.

  She was little in every way, always trying to become smaller. I think she wanted to disappear.

  “Paint,” I said.

  “johnny! Can you hear me? Love means . . . ”

  I shut her out and went to sleep.

  Chapter Four

  I awoke in the dark. It was nearly midnight. I’d overslept, and that was not like me. I was losing something by curtailing my natural activities.

  Jen had fallen asleep curled up next to me in her long, pink silk nightgown. She never stayed mad long. No matter what I did, she always came around to loving me again.

  I kissed her on the forehead, and rolled off the bed.

  “johnny?” she whispered drowsily.

  She was going to ask me to stay, but she knew better.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Nothing.” She rolled on her side, feigning sleep.

  I walked across the dark room to view what she might have painted. The canvas was blank. I was dismayed. I wondered what picture might have emerged from her. She used to paint Angels. Then she painted horror, premonitions of her own fate. That’s when she met me. The last thing she painted was me. Through the portrait, she glimpsed the reality of my nightly ritual, and fled. It took me six months to get her back.

  The portrait was in my New York City apartment on the Lower East Side. I liked it there—guarding the place. If anyone should set eyes upon it, they would see horror. They would feel the pain I’d caused and flee, as Jen had. She’d not meant it to have such an effect, but she truly captured something of me when she painted it. Perhaps it was the last work she’d ever do. Maybe I’d ruined her.

  I glanced across the room at her sleeping pose, arms and legs bunched passively together. Her skin glowed soft, soft woman, soft girl. Yellow hair lay across her neck. So ordinary, so extraordinary. My chest hurt. I was so taken with her. Perhaps she was my doom, as mother had suggested.

  I loved her guilelessness, her gentle manner, and her willingness to forgive. Even rage flowed from her like poetry. And her life, as tragic as it had been, seemed like a song to me. I almost wished I was a Shen. Then we could die and fly away together into the universe, never to part. I didn’t want us to part with death. But I hadn’t the knowledge to change it. I invariably believed I’d figure a way to fix that problem before our time came, but my intellect was diminishing and I think my power was too. I’d been too nice—too nice for me, for who I was meant to be. Kindness was impairing me, perhaps killing me.

  I magically dressed in black: long-sleeved, button down shirt tucked into leather pants, the hem edging the ankles of my boots. I envisioned my long hair neatly combed. Strands that lay against my chest moved over my shoulders and joined the mane lying on my back. I envisioned my face clean and my breath like peppermint. And so they were. I wanted to attract, not repel my victims, not at first anyway—not usually, not if I wanted to draw out the kill for fun-filled hours.

  I walked out the door, locking Jen inside magically. As an afterthought, I manifested a poetic arrangement of her favorite foods on the table: a bottle of grape juice in a bucket of ice, banana bread, apple cinnamon muffins, cherries, kiwi fruit, fresh snap peas, pistachio nuts, cashews, Muenster cheese, and champagne crackers, all in the midst of gardenia petals.

  I sauntered down the gold-carpeted hall, and descended the winding staircase to the lobby, packed with people who never seemed to sleep. I stepped across the shiny, tan marble floor, glancing at the colossal, amber accented tapestries hanging on the walls. I passed tan ribbed pillars and white, Eighteenth century statues of cherubic people. Jen’s style, definitely.

  I went out the massive glass hotel doors into the night and strolled along the sidewalk along the shiny crowded street, rainbow wet with the aftermath of a September storm. Car tires splashed through puddles. A man in a brown suit cursed, staring at his puddle-splashed pants.

  Rain did not please me. Lightning and thunder were my pleasure.

  Nightclubs and movie theaters were filled with bustling people emanating Friday night cheer. The women passing by smiled coyly at me. Their mates hurried them along. The women twisted their heads back, longing for something in me they didn’t understand. They longed to be shaken out of the dream that men told them was life. They longed for their own dark side that could not flourish with all the wholesome puppet strings that held them prisoner in their own reality. So many people needed me, especially the ones who pretended they didn’t.

  I walked across town, enjoying the exercise and the feel of city life. I came into the Red Light District, neon lit with strip clubs, sex shops, and peep shows. Places like this afforded me prey whose demise did not much, if at all, stir the police or public, nor arouse Jen’s suspicions. Since I’d met Jen, I tried hard not to answer the call of the self-demeaning innocent, even though their victim attitudes triggered in me a demonic drive to destroy them. But still, they reminded me of her, and I’d refrained. Instead, I’d been forcing myself to answer only the call of those who played with fire and craved to feel the heat.

  I stopped to sniff the air, smelling trash and the scent of cheap perfume. I listened for the call. Collective calls, like from a country or culture, sounded like sonar in choir. The more full toned, the greater the call. Individual calls were single-toned. The level of suffering called for was indicated by the disparity between the beginning low tones and the resulting high tones. The level of chaos called for was indicated by how high the screeches were in a low toned pulse.

  I heard three tones in choir, very low tones turning high, and also very high shrieks in a low pulsing tone. This signified three people who were both victim and predator; tones intense enough to warrant an evening meal.

  The call came from a strip club lit in neon pink and blue. One step into the darkened joint and three hookers, like triplets in glittery red dresses, surrounded me. Tight material squeezed their breasts together, and almost showed their pantiless goods. They emanated common sexual energy, so unlike my Shen. They executed their seductive show, pressing bosoms against my body, grazing long, red-nailed fingers up my thighs. They needed lessons.

  Seduction was a fine art, not to be rushed. They were my callers. I would show them the seduction of their lives, turn everything around, make them beg me to bring them sexual relief, while I inflicted pain. I wouldn’t have to participate in actual intercourse for Jen’s sake. Not that she wouldn’t object to the rest, but I could only be ‘so good.’ Extracting and deleting these ‘its’ would be easy, old fashioned, sadistic fun. Perhaps in their future lives they’d learn not to roam the devil’s playground.

  Suddenly I lost interest. I needed more. I needed to get some of the old me back and restore the might I’d once had. At the very least, I needed to regain my equilibrium.

  I walked out of the club, ignoring grasping hands. The hookers hollered obscenities, angry that I’d not chosen any of them, or all of them. Under normal circumstances, I would have made them choke on their words—literally, but I was eager to execute my deed.

  I walked along the sidewalk under a row of blaring yellow street lights. I needed to implement a large scale catastrophe. I’d not accomplished such a feat since I’d met Jen. My last illustrious act was an earthquake in Asia. But there were too many damn Angels around that night. Not as many died as I’d wished, but I took their spirits anyway, leaving them like zombies to live out the rest of their m
undane lives.

  After I’d met Jen, I’d visited a few bars in Alphabet City and elicited people to murder each other, but that was a minor act compared to my other feats. I quieted my mind and listened. I listened for a full toned call, scanning directions with my mind, ignoring the symphonic collision of various keys and intensities of tone. Then, deep loud sound waves filled my ears from the north. My heart pounded. The devil’s chant rolled around in my head:

  They call us the destroyers.

  They blame us for their woe.

  They never understand,

  we reap the seeds they sow.

  I turned into a dark alley where two people were fucking. I flew into the sixth realm, heading north.

  The devils chant played on:

  They call us diabolic,

  as if life itself was not.

  Volcanoes erupt, bombs erupt,

  babes erupt

  in the blood of their mother’s

  sacrificial pain.

  Everyone dies. Everyone lies.

  We gain what we lose,

  and lose what we gain.

  They call us the destroyers.

  They blame us for their woe.

  They never understand,

  we reap the seeds they sow.

  Minutes later, having crossed the meridians of linear time, I arrived at the source of the call. Russia. Western Russia.

  I hovered in the sixth realm not too far from a city, over a military community with a temporary warhead storage site. The site housed a one-megaton Hydrogen bomb, eighty times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The harboring of the bomb was the manifestation of male power in Russia that sublimated woman and her ways. The call was two fold: One, from women generating a collective anger, released in the imaginings of vengeful scenarios that chucked man’s power back in his face. And two, from men who wanted blood. I could arrange that. Both calls could be abided in a single act.