Vintage Memories

Chapter Ten "Angels Choking On Their Halos / Charlie's Uncertain Certainty"

Warning: Homophobic language.

Gore and gray-matter fanned out across the pavement in a glorious Pollock painting— a Convergence of grisly grandeur that sparked an unloosened passion in its beholder. Angel hovered over his masterpiece, coming down from the blinding whirlwind of adrenaline. The corpse lay at his heels obliterated from the shoulders up. The pipe, his paintbrush, had been warped to a hundred-and-twenty-degree angle.

His shoulders heaved with hefty breath as taxation set in. Sticky sweat rose beneath his fur. A zephyr blew through, creating a pleasing wash of coolness that brought him the rest of the way back from that transitory delirium.

Angel looked up at the three remaining brutes, who gawked like demonic rats caught in a kitchen pantry. They stood suspended in their actions, trespassing hands plastered to unwilling flesh.

He glanced at the girl, her mouth smothered by one of those many encroaching hands. Disturbed makeup marred her face in streaks of black liner and mascara. There was a look in those crimson eyes, wreathed in false lashes that began to come away at the corners. It swam within all that panic, and Angel saw an outline of it briefly like a fish rising to the surface of a murky lake. This was going to happen, her autonomy be damned, her eyes were saying, and she was capitulating in the way a drowning victim finally, after struggling with might and mien, relents to the water boring down their throat.

Angel's rage pulled itself from the past and grounded itself in the moment.

"You fuckin bastards think you can slide yer greasy dicks into whateva' hole ya want?" His grip on the pipe tightened, oiled with blood and difficult to keep purchase of.

A second demon, the one who had taken the reprehensible liberty to pry at her legs and pull them apart, stood. He trudged over, indignant over this unwarranted interruption. The stranger's lumbering form matched Angel in height, but in width, he was nearly triple. He pulled a switchblade from his back pocket, the steel leering at Angel, hungry to bleed something.

"Thisn't none of your business, queer," the lug brayed. The fingers wrapped around the cutter twitched, aching to stick Angel like a piece of butcher meat.

"Teaching you fuckers some manners is my business. Otherwise nobody else is gonna do it." Angel kept a close eye on that blade. If he didn't, it might be in him the next time he caught sight of it. "Just cause yer such a bad lay that no one with any standards wants it from ya, doesn't mean you can just take it."

The thug's snub-nosed and primitive-jawed face— like a furless, reptilian bulldog —opened in shock. The struck-dumb expression made Angel grin.

"If ya suck at it, ya pay for it, shrimp-dick. That's how it works. No pay, no pussy."

Angel hurled insults one after another, all the while keeping a keen eye on those flexing fingers. He had his many hands in enough fights to know what to look for. Using twice the brains halved the pain in any of these sort of scenarios, and it just about bowled him over at how little people fought with that proverb on the mind, if they fought with anything on it at all. With each word, Angel saw the faculties of the brute's brain, as under-used as they were, shut down to make room for all that anger. Those meaty fingers twitched faster.

"Ya gonna do something, big-man?" Angel's slithering grin bolstered his derisive tone. "Or are you too much of a biiitch?"

And it worked. The fingers stopped twitching, like a rattlesnake halting its warning dance just before it strikes. That was his cue, and sure enough, the brute swung his knife like some clod-hopping, mouth-breathing gorilla.

Angel ducked back. The blade sliced through the air like a bolt of light in the dark alley, and nicked a few hairs from his chest.

"Woah, bessie," he said and chuckled.