The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons by Paula Guran

Author:Paula Guran
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781780338002
Publisher: Constable Robinson
Published: 2013-05-16T06:00:00+00:00

What are we going to do tonight? I asked the Angel as we left the restaurant.

Keep out of harm’s way, Angel said, which was a new answer. Most nights we spent just kind of going around soaking everything up. The Angel soaked it up, mostly. I got some of it along with him, but not the same way he did. It was different for him. Sometimes he would use me like a kind of filter. Other times he took it direct. There’d been the big car accident one night, right at my usual corner, a big old Buick running a red light smack into somebody’s nice Lincoln. The Angel had had to take it direct because I couldn’t handle that kind of stuff. I didn’t know how the Angel could take it, but he could. It carried him for days afterwards, too. I only had to eat for myself.

It’s the intensity, little friend, he’d told me, as though that were supposed to explain it.

It’s the intensity, not whether it’s good or bad. The universe doesn’t know good or bad, only less or more. Most of you have a bad time reconciling this. You have a bad time with it, little friend, but you get through better than other people. Maybe because of the way you are. You got squeezed out of a lot, you haven’t had much of a chance at life. You’re as much an exile as I am, only in your own land.

That may have been true, but at least I belonged here, so that part was easier for me. But I didn’t say that to the Angel. I think he liked to think he could do as well or better than me at living – I mean, I couldn’t just look at some leather boy and get him to cough up a twenty-dollar bill. Cough up a fist in the face, or worse, was more like it.

Tonight, though, he wasn’t doing so good, and it was that woman in the car. She’d thrown him out of step, kind of.

Don’t think about her, the Angel said, just out of nowhere. Don’t think about her any more.

Okay, I said, feeling creepy because it was creepy when the Angel got a glimpse of my head. And then, of course, I couldn’t think about anything else hardly.

Do you want to go home? I asked him.

No. I can’t stay in now. We’ll do the best we can tonight, but I’ll have to be very careful about the tricks. They take so much out of me, and if we’re keeping out of harm’s way, I might not be able to make up for a lot of it.

It’s okay, I said. I ate. I don’t need anything else tonight, you don’t have to do any more.

Angel got that look on his face, the one where I knew he wanted to give me things, like feelings I couldn’t have any more. Generous, the Angel was. But I didn’t need those feelings, not like other people seem to.

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