Angel Stations Read Free

Now you do stuff for me. Tell me who do my sister. Then I cut their balls and eyes out and make their mother eat ’em for lunch. You say who, I give you reward. You be grateful.’
    Elias glanced at Mik, who was still hovering in the room. Mik had a cocky smirk on his face, though he gazed with open admiration at Josh. Clearly, for Mik at least, there was some very definite mentor–protégé stuff going on here.
    ‘It true you do what they all say, Elias?’ Mik asked him then. ‘You do stuff like magic, all kind shit?’
    ‘Not magic,’ said Elias carefully. ‘Something else. It’s hard to explain.’
    ‘Bullshit. Not magic, what then?’ said Mik. ‘I hear about you. Stuff you do, no people dare lie to me. They tell truth. I hear you only half-person: fucked-up mongrel made in lab.’ Mik’s voice had taken on a jeering quality.
    ‘Shut up, Mik,’ said Josh and, to Elias’s relief, the boy shut up. ‘I don’t give shit what you do, just you find out who kill Mia. Then I give you reward. Okay?’
    ‘Sure,’ said Elias. ‘Give me a couple of minutes.’ His mind was racing. Maybe Mik was just guessing about the lab, but he’d stumbled on the truth. Somehow Elias didn’t think so. And with stories about him like that flying around, it would get harder and harder to avoid official government attention. And if it came to that, maybe Elias would be better off dead.
    Josh and Mik fell back into the shadows, leaving Elias to do what he had to do. He forced himself to sit by Mia’s broken, ruined corpse, breathing through his mouth to alleviate the stench. He touched her hair, soft and dark, knowing as he did so that in future any time the memories came back of those few days when he had known Mia so long ago, they would be mixed with the memories of now kneeling on a bloodied mattress, studying her ritually mutilated corpse.
    Elias let the light take him. He thought of it as a tiny star, bright and fierce, something that had always been with him, part of him. Like a star, it seemed to flicker in his subconscious with a thin, pale light, which neither he nor Trencher had ever been able to find appropriate words to describe. It was as if they could each open a mental valve and let it spill out into the world beyond. With that thought in mind, he felt it flow out of him, discharging through his fingertips, seeking out the flickering trace of life still trapped somewhere inside Mia’s body. Josh and Mik meanwhile stood near the wall, staring, but unable to see the light.
    So he reached out, touched the flickering residual life within Mia, already deep into the terrible abyss it sought and craved. In his mind’s eye he pictured his hand probing to grasp that last tumbling fragment of Mia’s life-force, feeling it writhe, holding it back.
    Mia’s eyes twitched rapidly, then widened. Someone nearby gave out a low moan of horror, but Elias didn’t look up to see if it had come from Mik or Josh. A keening sound, almost like whistling, now came from Mia’s throat. Elias didn’t want to know what it felt like to be trapped again, no matter for how short a time, in that shattered body.
    ‘Tell me who did this, Mia. Tell me, and you can go.’ He glanced up, saw Josh standing right above them, clenching and unclenching his fists. Elias ignored him, looking back at Mia’s face. Muscles writhed like snakes under her cheeks. He wondered if she could feel anything.
    ‘Let me go,’ Mia whispered weakly, partly in Elias’s mind, partly out loud; it sounded as if she were gagging on the words.
    ‘Tell me first,’ said Elias. ‘Tell me who did this to you, Mia. Tell me now or I won’t let you go, do you understand?’
    ‘Macey,’ she said, her voice so small and frail Elias could barely hear it. The flickering life within her seemed to grow a little weaker. Elias tweaked here and there, and Mia’s back arched, a high keening sound escaping her lips. ‘Oh fuck,’ she whispered, entirely in the real now. ‘I