Archive of Our Own

Of all the back alleys in all the towns, she was beat up and left for dead in mine.

The one my “Charlie Remiel, Private Investigator, No Job Too Small” office door opens onto, I mean.

I nearly slipped in her blood as I wrestled with the bolt on the door.

Of course I was surprised. It’s not like beautiful young ladies in gory fur coats are lying at my doorstep every night.

Always the gentleman, I prodded her with the toe of my boot. She stirred. Groaned a little.

Wounded animals, including beautiful young ladies, can be dangerous, so I stepped back. But there was no fight in the sound she made. I could tell she wasn’t gonna lash out at me. And I might be a mean fuck, but I’m not completely heartless.

Just completely stupid.

I worked the office door’s three locks again and dragged her inside.

~~~

Even the glare of the bare bulb in the ceiling couldn’t spoil her beauty. Even the red stuff smeared across her face and bare forearm. She might have been an angel fallen from heaven.

Sucker for a pretty face, that’s me.

I set about trying to wrestle her free of the heavy cape she was tangled in. It had been pure white once. Shame. Didn’t look like the kind of garment that responded well to dry-cleaning.

It was heavy, made of some kind of animal skin I hadn’t seen before. I struggled to get a grip on the thick material, but my fingers kept sliding off.

I grabbed and tugged fiercely. Then jerked back, startled.

She had cried out. Yanking her cloak was causing her pain.

Ever had that dizzying feeling of reality suddenly shifting around you?

It wasn’t a cloak at all. It was a part of her.

And the stuff covering the skin wasn’t fur. It was feathers. Long and sleek and shimmering white, where they hadn’t been stained with blood.

She had a pair of wings.

My ass hit the floor, and I was frozen stiff for a double handful of seconds. My hand still rested on her wing, and I realized for the first time the flesh under the feathers was warm.

Muscles flexed under my hand, and the woman-creature gave another sharp cry of pain.

I recognized that one. Lucifer help me, but I know the sound a person makes when they try to move a limb they don’t realize is broken.

“Don’t move it!” I snapped.

But it was too late. She’d already passed out.

~~~

Fortunately, bones are bones. I knew a little from my stint in the army. When they’re broken, you put them back the way they should be, pin them down, and then hope nature takes its course.

Best if you get a doctor to do it. But she wouldn’t let me do that.

“I need to go,” she said after we’d patched her back together as best we could. But her face was pallid and pinched with fear when she said it. So I wouldn’t let her do that. And when she acquiesced quietly, I knew I’d made the right choice.

A beautiful young woman staying in my office, until her wing bones knitted themselves back together? No problem. All in a day’s work for Charlie Remiel.

At least that’s what I told my bottle of Old Crow whiskey, those first weeks, whenever I came back from a night’s neighborhood ramblings to find her asleep on my couch.

I drank in the dark. Otherwise the iridescence of her wings mesmerized me.

~~~

Anemone, she told me her name was.

But she wouldn’t explain what had happened.

And I’m an idiot.

If I had been smart, I would have realized: I’d found her injured at my doorstep. She hadn’t gotten that way by playing in traffic. That meant someone was after her. Wanted to hurt her.

If I’d had the brains evolution gave a nematode, I would have made sure her attackers wouldn’t learn where she was lying low.

I figured out the danger too late. I’d just stepped out my door, the damned key was sticking in the lock again, and half a second later I’d been sapped in the skull and was dropping to the concrete.

I can’t swear to what happened next. I know that taking a whack on the skull can make you see and hear some pretty strange things.

“No!”

It was Anemone’s voice, but it was also a scream like a hundred jet engines.

Shadows passed across my eyelids. My face was buffeted by gale-force winds and spattered with liquid. When my mouth opened to gasp for breath, I tasted copper on my tongue.

Then I passed out for real.

~~~

There was a lump on my head the size of Kansas, but the ice pack that Anemone had applied was soothing it. Or maybe it was her fingertips stroking my temples.

Her face gleamed like she’d scrubbed it within an inch of its life, but there was a little spot of blood under her chin. And that brought back my spotty memories of what had happened.

I cut to the chase. “Did you kill them?”

She chewed her lip. The crease between her eyebrows told me she was worried. She nodded.

“I had no choice,” she whispered. Her voice sounded like wind stirring a field of wheat. “He was hurting you. And it was my fault.”

I scoffed, which made my head hurt worse. “Your fault? Sweetheart, I have plenty of enemies who’d love to drive my brains right out my skull. I made them all on my own.”

“Yes, but he was…one of us.”

“Us?”

“My people. The winged ones.”

I’d been avoiding this question. Looked like I’d be able to avoid it no longer.

“There are more people like you?”

Her glance was gently pitying. My head must have been worse than I thought, to come up with such a dumb question

“I don’t understand,” I told her. “If there are a whole bunch of you, how come I’ve never met any of you before?”

“You have,” she said.

“Honey, I’d remember meeting people with wings.”

“When we walk, we fold our wings away. Regular people can’t see them.”

“Then why can I see yours?”

“They’re injured. I can't fold them away.”

It all sounded pretty far-fetched to me. And anyway, I couldn’t keep my eyes open one more second.

~~~

She was almost healed.

Her left wing still stuck out a little. You couldn’t see it head-on, but from the side or back, there was a puff of feathers clinging to her back. If you saw her walking by on the street, you might think it was a new style of handbag.

I was almost healed. My body was, anyway. My mind still felt a little off. Kinda like being caught in an extra-long dream. Maybe because of what I’d just learned. There was a whole other species of people on Earth that the rest of us didn’t know about. It was kind of a big deal.

“It’s time to come clean, Anemone,” I told her.

She tittered as if I’d said something funny, but her face drained of its ethereal color. “About what?”

“Who’s after you? And why?”

She showed me the back of her head. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Look, I understand keeping secrets. And I get you can take care of yourself. But whoever it was attacked me. I want to be able to defend myself.”

“I’ll be gone in a few days, once I’m healed,” she said. “You won’t be in danger after that. At least, not because of me.”

There was something in her voice. I would almost have said it was pain. But that would mean she didn’t want to leave…and I had no idea why she might feel that way. An angel, or as near as you can get, hanging around with a two-bit private eye? Hardly a story they’d buy you a drink at the bar to hear.

I reached out and touched the tip of her wing. Then jerked my hand back when I saw her shudder.

I opened my mouth to apologize. But she spun around to face me, and her face was as hard as carved marble.

“All right, I’ll tell you.”

I’d never seen her look that way. It would make the hardest heart in the world shatter.

“Have you ever given thought to what my wings would be worth to collectors?”

“Collectors?”

“People who accumulate hunting trophies. Lion pelts. Elephant tusks.”

I couldn’t stand to think of it, so I ran for the tangent.

“But I thought my people didn’t know about yours.”

“A few know. Secrecy makes the wings more valuable.”

I couldn’t help it. A savage growl escaped me. “Show me those people and I’ll collect their fucking livers.”

Her laugh was low and melodious, but sorrowful. “I so like how you want to protect me, Charlie.”

“I’m serious!”

She put her hand to my cheek, and it drowned out every thought in my head.

“I know you are. But it’s worse than that.” I opened my mouth to protest, but was silenced by her fingers on my lips. “It’s not just human collectors any more.” Her voice became so icy that I began to shiver. “Some of my people are helping them now.”

~~~

I insisted that we move to my safe house.

She argued at first. “It’s too dangerous for me to go out while I still can’t hide my wings.”

I wouldn’t hear objections. “You can wear a cloak,” I insisted. “It’s only a cab ride away.”

But in the cab I figured out we were being followed.

I threw the cabbie my last benjamin. An hour later, I could have sworn we’d lost them.

I was wrong, as usual. I was rattling the key in the lock when they came swarming up the steps of the brownstone. Three of them. Two men, so anonymous they had to be hired thugs. The third, though, had the same platinum hair, the same sea-green eyes as Anemone. But he didn’t look a bit like her, because his face was twisted with some ugly emotion.

His wings flared out, twelve feet across if they were an inch, and he brandished them like the weapons they were.

I froze, unable to believe what I was seeing.

He struck Anemone in the face with his wing, knocking her back into one of the men, who grabbed her injured shoulder. She shrieked in pain.

For the life of me I don’t remember grabbing the .38 I’d dropped into my pocket. Never mind firing it three times.

~~~

I’d sworn off falling in love with people just because we didn’t-die together. Honest.

But when Anemone and I had finished cleaning the blood and sweat and tears off each other’s faces, when we’d taken off our bloody clothes and watched them turn into ash in the fireplace, my vow was lost in the obscure dream that was Life Before Angels.

I don’t remember who moved first, but we were in each other’s arms, and I wanted time to stop forever.

~~~

The moment of reckoning finally came.

I’d already figured out that this…whatever it was we were doing…had a sell-by date. We’d killed too many people, and we knew they’d just keep coming. We had to — well, I had to go to ground. I didn’t know what the equivalent would be for her. Whatever it was, we each had to do it alone. We were more of a target together than apart.

I wasn’t okay with it. Not one bit.

But the world doesn’t stop turning just because you’re not okay with it.

I was lying on the sofa, trying to pretend it wasn’t going to happen, and she was standing over me, and then down on her knees so she could bring her face close to mine.

“I have to go, Charlie.”

Her eyes were all the colors of the sea, and they glittered a little. Maybe with unshed tears. Maybe the tears were for me.

“Do you gotta?” I asked.

Then the tears did spill from her eyes, and she grabbed my face and kissed me like she could extract my soul by doing it.

I would have been fine with that. Suck my soul out and tuck it into one of the warm air pockets beneath your wings. Let me stay with you.

And then I was the one spilling tears, because with a great whoosh she had opened her wings, wrapped them around both of us, and the world went hushed and white and soft, and we were in a perfect dream of our own. Just us two.

That too came to an end. She folded her wings away and I wouldn’t have been able to tell she had any. She kept her arms around me, though, for a while longer.

“Don’t forget me, Anemone. Come back when the coast is clear.”

“I’ll come back to you someday, Charlie Remiel.”

She passed her fingers over my eyelids.

~~~

I woke on the old sprung couch that had been my companion during many a night of excessive drinking.

By all the gods I don’t believe in, what a weird dream.

I kept my eyes shut, waiting for my head to start pounding. For my limbs to start aching, demanding liquid — hair of the dog, water, or even a pot or two of the swill that my abominable excuse for a coffee maker spits out.

The pounding and aching didn’t start. I couldn’t even feel the lumpy springs under my back. I felt like I was sleeping on a cloud.

I tentatively opened my eyes, expecting to feel like a drill had just been shoved into them.

A soft dawn light greeted me.

I looked down at myself, dubiously.

There. On my chest.

A single, long, white feather.

“Well, I’ll be,” I muttered. “I wonder how that got there.”