Mann 01 - Where Angels Rest Read Free Page B

her car. Blood rushing now, the Angelmaker got out and circled the truck, exhaust fumes rousing a cough. It was a nice touch: a lone driver stranded at night in the cold, hacking up a lung…
    The Camry rolled closer, unable to pass, and the driver’s side window cracked an inch. The Angelmaker’s fingers tightened around a stun gun, a surge of power flooding in. Such a simple device: plastic-cum-mother-of-pearl, one hundred thousand volts, seventy-five bucks on the Internet. It was no bigger than a cell phone, no louder thana whisper, and for twelve years now, all it had ever needed was a couple of three-volt lithium batteries.
    “Rebecca.” Use her name, take away that edge of natural fear.
    Her window slid open a little farther—just a few inches, but enough for the stun gun. The Angelmaker stepped closer. “Rebecca, I need help. I need a phone. Do you have a phone?”
    “What?” she said. Cautious, but not overly fearful.
    “Rebecca.”
    “I’m not…”
    Another cough. “P-please, a phone.”
    “Hold on.” She cranked the car into park and twisted toward the passenger seat to find her phone. The Angelmaker reached in.
Pzzt.
The stun gun sizzled against her shoulder.
    Rebecca collapsed.
    Now time surged forward, racing as if God had pushed a button on a remote. Move, move. Ditch the car, get the truck turned around and get Rebecca home and into the workshop. So much to do—the transformation, the possession, the preservation—and the clock started running from the first shock of the stun gun.
    The Angelmaker opened the driver’s side door and Rebecca lolled sideways, hanging half out onto the pavement. A click of the seat belt released her and she tumbled to the ground, a baffled
uhhhh
vibrating in her throat and the scarf dragging from her face. She was a pretty girl, but wore too much makeup. Always caked on like—
    The Angelmaker froze. What? The girl’s face glowed in the truck’s headlights.
    Rebecca?
    No.
    Panic leaked in. This wasn’t right, this wasn’t right. Who was this girl? Not Rebecca. This girl was a stranger, a nobody. She was
nothing.
    Shock hardened to sheer rage. Stupid,
stupid
girl. Goddamn, stupid bitch, pretending to be Rebecca—
    Her arm moved, trying to fight the leaden state brought on by the stun gun.
No.
The Angelmaker swallowed back a primordial scream, hooked a foot beneath her ribcage and shoved. Her body rotated half a turn. Again, another half-turn, and again and again, and five kicks later, gravity took over and rolled her into the gully along the road. She groaned and the Angelmaker followed, dropped a knee into the middle of her back and straight-armed her face—that
wrong
face—into the mud, pressing down on the back of her head and neck. The girl who wasn’t Rebecca gasped for air, sucking rain and wet clay up into her nostrils. Her sinuses filled with mud and her lungs seized and the Angelmaker held tight, muscles screaming with tension while the girl made a series of wet, rasping sounds, jerked, then went limp.
    Bitch. Stupid girl. Wrong girl. How dare she?
    The Angelmaker staggered out of the ditch, panting. The wrong girl lay dead in the mud. Not Rebecca. A nobody.
    The magnitude of that error clenched inside, and the weight of failure bore down like a hand from heaven, pushing, pushing. The Angelmaker fought the invisible weight, tapping every last ounce of strength, and looked up at the sky.
    The sight set every bone to shaking: The moon was smiling.
    The dream was the same as always—a three-year-old boy hiding in a cardboard box while his mother lay in aDumpster, choking on the fragments of her own hyoid bone—except this time the phone cut in. Nick Mann jolted from bed, reaching for his gun and the phone in one motion, then stood by the bed blinking details of the here-and-now into focus. Thursday night. Friday morning, really. The house was empty, the clock on the nightstand punching red numbers into the darkness: three-sixteen a.m.
    The phone rang