Metal Angel Read Free Page A

bleeding in his room. Why the hell did he have to go and get involved? He held the cold ice bucket to his hot face. Back in the room, he found Volos seated with tissues in hand but his hands slack in his lap.
    â€œYou want to apply pressure.” Obviously the kid was rowing with one oar out of the water. Accepting this, Texas found it easier to have patience. “Here.” He set the ice down, took Volos’s hand, and guided it. “Do like I tell you. Press.” Only one nostril was bleeding, and it looked ready to stop soon anyway. Texas went into the bathroom, found a washcloth and wrapped it around some ice. Damn cheap hotel had given him only one washcloth. He sopped the corner of a towel and went back to Volos, dabbing at the kid’s mouth with the wet terrycloth, clearing away blood to assess the damage. As he expected, the kid’s lips were swelling. He had taken some hard hits. “You got to stop leading with your chin, Volos,” Texas said. He handed him the cold pack, showing him how to hold it to his mouth and jaw.
    â€œLeading with my chin?”
    Texas did not answer. He was staring. The kid’s wings (lifted somewhat to fit over the back of the chair, then trailing to the floor) had turned a pale opalescent blue.
    â€œHow do you do that?” Texas blurted.
    â€œThe chin thing?”
    Texas reached out to switch on the table lamp for better light and rounded Volos to have a look at him from the back. The mechanism that operated the wings was not immediately apparent to him, but he saw broken feathers and, halfway up the left wing, a sizable stain of bright red. Blood.
    â€œWhere’d that come from?” Jesus, had the kid been knifed in the back? Was he walking around with a stab wound? Panicked, Texas grabbed the wing, lifted it to look—
    The blood came from the wing itself. Texas knew that as soon as he touched it. Through his hand like an electric charge clear to his heart he felt an odd hot rush, a wordless recognition, and at the same time he heard Volos gasp with pain. Ice clattered to the floor. Volos had dropped it. The kid had gone ashen, and his hands clutched at the air as if it could support him. He looked ready to topple out of the chair. Texas caught him with an arm around the shoulders.
    â€œI’m sorry!” he exclaimed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you!”
    Volos trembled. “So this is pain,” he whispered, panting.
    â€œI’m god-awful sorry. I thought—” Texas gave up. To hell with what he had thought. To hell with anything he had ever thought, especially about this kid. Not a would-be wearing Styrofoam wings for a stunt, this one. Not a half-wit. More like a—a visitant, an innocent, an—God, he couldn’t say it or think it.
    â€œMaybe it is not that you hurt me so much.” With effort Volos straightened enough to look at him. “Maybe it is that I am not accustomed to pain.”
    â€œI hurt you,” Texas said.
    Volos went on, intent, not seeming to hear him. “Bodily pain, I mean. The other sort I know well, but this—it fights me, it takes over. It makes me feel thin as water.”
    His eyes were of the same moonstone blue as his wings, startlingly light in his earth-tan face, very direct in their gaze, almost vehement. His hair, brown-black and chopped without finesse halfway down his neck, hung in stringy dark curls over his forehead, making him look boyish, vulnerable. It was peculiar hair. Texas had thought at first that it was twisted in very thin braids or dreadlocks, that the kid had some black blood in him, what with his dusky skin and full lips—but now he saw that Volos’s hair had the texture of pinfeathers.
    Still holding him by the shoulders, Texas whispered, “You’re real.”
    Volos stopped shaking, grew still, and smiled. It was a small smile, but enough to show Texas that women could be blinded by this one.