Half Discovered Wings Read Free Page A

fingers, stemming the sudden blood flow with the cloth,
pushing with both hands until the cloth felt damp.
    He heard a
voice from outside the door. ‘Joseph?’
    Gabel kept the
pressure consistent, looking at the mess of her neck. Her bare
shoulders were slack against the mattress. Now that he was here, he
didn’t know what to do with her
    The voice came
again. ‘Joseph?’
    ‘ Yes, Father.’
    ‘ What was it that attacked her?’
    ‘ A theriope, Father.’
    ‘ Theriope?’ Response muffled through the thick door.
    ‘ One of the were-creatures that inhabit the world outside of
town.’
    ‘ She is dead?’
    ‘… Yes. She just died.’
    There wasn’t
another sound that night. He sat with his back against the cold
wall, looking at the figure pale and still on the bed beside him.
The morning was long in coming, and he awoke with shifting fingers
of sunlight warmly stroking him through the window. He snatched
another glimpse at Bethany who was now much whiter, her blood
darkly staining the straw mattress.
    ‘ Joseph, I’d like to see her.’ It was the Father again, waiting
outside. Had he been there all night? Like Gabel, he most likely
hadn’t slept a wink.
    ‘ You should stay out there.’
    He stood and instantly smelled the blood on the kris. He’d
always had a powerful sense of smell. It was one of the reasons his
enemies called him an animal, a savage. He picked up the wavy
dagger and wrapped it in a small cloth, put it inside his jacket.
His boots were heavy and loud on the wooden floor as he walked
across the room.
    ‘ Turn around, Father.’
    He opened the door and saw the priest’s back. Father heard
the door close and he turned. Tears sparkled unhappily in his eyes,
the black rings underneath them slightly darker than usual, and
puffy from crying. His palms were red. Gabel caught a sparkle from
his left fist, and looked to his neck to see that the icon necklace
he usually wore was missing. He had probably been rubbing it
continually all night in front of the altar. The man looked
indescribably tired.
    ‘ Bethany should be buried before the end of the day,’ said
Gabel, already walking away.
    ‘ Joseph!’
    ‘ Yes, Father.’
    ‘ Did you get the … theriope?’
    ‘ It got away. It was fast.’
    The theriope had once been a man, but was now substantially
less than that. Or more. The man had long since ceased to exist.
Gabel couldn’t tell the priest that the creature had once been
known to him, although Father had probably worked out that much for
himself. The look in his eyes told Gabel that he had already
suspected what Gabel had been doing with Bethany’s body: ensuring
that the theriope’s bite did no more than kill her.
    Gabel left the church and walked to the edge of the town. The
sun was out, and he saw from it that it was almost ten o’clock. The
ground was wet still, and when he followed the water up to the
square he saw a figure dressed in blue, standing very still by the
bench where Bethany had died.
    The woman was scrubbing something by the bench, then seemed
to finish or give up and moved away. He stopped at the place that
she was cleaning and saw a dark stain over the bench and floor. His
fists clenched and he thought of the kris in his jacket; he could
smell the blood and didn’t know if anyone else could.
    He opened the
inn doors and Cul looked at him, his arm still mechanically wiping
down the smooth surface of the bar.
    ‘ Do you remember the man that was in here before me last
night?’
    ‘ I had quite a few men in here last night,’ the barman
replied.
    ‘ This one was black. With a long coat.’
    The barman
shook his head, mournfully. ‘I think I would’ve remembered.’
    Gabel left. Arriving at the building where he lived, he
walked inside and climbed the steps to his apartment on the second
storey, where the wooden slats let in light that striped him as he
sat on the dirty floor. There was nothing in the room that revealed
it as his own, nothing that betrayed the