Blood Of Angels Read Free Page A

strong. She reminded me a little of my mother, and if Beth Hopkins had still been alive it would have been tough to choose who to bet on in a fight. Patrice offered us the use of one of the cabins after we extricated her from a situation out in the woods. We thought about it, made some arrangements, accepted the offer.
    Patrice's acreage backed onto national land and had its own big pond. If you looked out across it on an autumn afternoon it was easy to believe mankind had never existed, and it was easy not to mourn the lack. Our cabin was on the far side, half a mile from the road. It had a sitting room with a fireplace and a kitchen area, plus a bathroom and a bedroom. It was plenty big enough. My life had condensed to the extent that I could store my possessions in the trunk of a not-very-large car. We had one of those too. It belonged to the woman I had first been introduced to as Special Agent Baynam.
    Nina. She was presently out on the porch in front of the cabin. The air was cold but not bitter and had a relenting quality about it that said winter knew its time was not quite come. Nina was supposed to be watching the sun go down, but I knew she wouldn't be. Just having your head pointed in the right direction does not count. The sun was probably grateful for the break. Being glared at by Nina when you're trying to slip gracefully below the horizon is more pressure than any celestial body needs.
    I was in the kitchen area of the cabin putting together a salad, and making a meal of it in more ways than one. Nina had been quiet for most of the day, quiet in the manner of a large rock resting halfway up a hillside. I had asked if she was okay and received affirmatives which were unconvincing but non-negotiable. I have no idea why women do this, but there's nothing that can be done about it until they're good and ready to talk. I knew that we were going to be having a conversation soon — it had been brewing for a week — and I was in no hurry for it to start. Consequently the salad was taking on baroque proportions. Any culinary aesthetic had long departed and it looked more as though someone had decided to conserve on counter space by tossing the whole salad bar into one bowl. I had gone as far as steaming some French beans on the stove and was waiting for them to cool in a bowl of ice water in the sink.
    To kill the time I wandered into the living area and flipped open Nina's laptop. I had one of my own but it wasn't really mine and was hidden in the roof space of the cabin. The material on it was backed up, encrypted and stored on a server far away. The files on the laptop were the earliest versions I had, however, and retained a kind of precedence in my mind. Strange how the human mind confers status and antecedence even on digital data, on electrons which can be everywhere at once and hence nowhere at all. We have to believe that things begin somewhere, I guess. Otherwise, how can they stop?
    I checked my email accounts once every couple of weeks at most. I wasn't really in contact with the outside world. The one guy who used to email me regularly was dead. It was his laptop which was stowed in the roof. The only mails I received now were sporadic opportunities to harden or lengthen my penis, be showered with college grants, or view footage of whichever bubblehead was currently juicing her celebrity through suspiciously well-lit home movie footage. The non-specificity of these invitations, their generic inapplicability, made them even less meaningful than total silence. Maybe that's what I was hoping for. Further quietness, additional white noise, and through these a promise that this thing we were calling life was going to continue for a while longer.
    So when I saw I had a single email, and that it appeared to be to me in particular, I suddenly felt very still.
    The subject line said just: WARD HOPKINS?
    I didn't recognize the sending address. It was a Hotmail account, favoured lair of spammers but not exclusively