GROTESQUE ANGELS
by Gwendolyn Clare
The rain turns the city upside down. In the gutters the water pools and flows, each drop fracturing the surface until the slick streets glitter as if seeded with pavement-bound stars. Low-slung clouds glow orange with light pollution, the night sky lit better than the street below. Not that the street is too dark for her eyes; nothing is ever completely dark in Chicago.
From her rooftop perch, Kelsey waits and watches. The city feels wrong tonight. Something old and hungry lurks in her territory, and the streets moan silently under the unwelcome weight of it. The Old One hides behind the city’s glamour—her glamour—and she cannot see it. So she waits, wishing shadows were its only disguise, but the Old One is more clever than that.
Kelsey drops off the roof and lands on a narrow ledge part way down the side of the building, her claws scraping the neo-Gothic limestone façade. She crouches, motionless again, and the rainwater runs over her skin and streams from the tips of her wing-feathers as it might from a statue. The sidewalk below grumbles and sighs to her, unsettled by the Old One’s passage. It walked this street not long ago.
A muted wail of sirens cuts through the sounds of the storm and the sidewalk’s complaints, and Kelsey’s head snaps up to catch the distance and direction. The sound lies ahead of her along the path she has already chosen—the path to track the Old One. It could mean nothing.
It’s probably not nothing.
The rain stings her face when she flies, and she squints against it. Her nose detects the reek of bad magic from half a block away, vile and sulfurous. It leads her to a narrow alley wedged between a couple of brick four-floor walk-ups. She circles above, evaluating. Police lights paint the old brick in alternating blue and red, and the alley crawls with cops.
She alights on the fire escape above and watches through the black metal grate. The glamour cloaks her from sight. If they were to stare at her hard enough, they might see a shadow shape crouched in her place, but she knows they won’t stare; they will not think to look up at all. Humans have an odd deficiency of awareness for what’s above their heads. Perhaps their genetic programming is to blame, their pre-historic ancestors never having encountered airborne predators. An odd quirk of human psychology, Kelsey thinks, but convenient.
Below, the flooded alley looks like a biblical curse, rainwater diluting blood until there seems to be much more than a few liters and it flows like a river. Red streaks the side of one building, the evidence already smeared by the weather. Kelsey does not envy the humans as they splash through the remnants of their rapidly deteriorating crime scene. The corpse is a messy pile of ruined flesh likely to win the award for all-time low point in the detectives’ careers. Kelsey certainly has no desire to give it a closer inspection.
She has never seen such exuberant carnage before, and it worries her. The Old One’s misbehavior is escalating. Time to report in. Perhaps Duncan will know what to do.
A brick-and-glass monolith on State Street, the Harold Washington Library devours an entire city block in downtown Chicago—an impressive feat of architecture, and also Duncan’s daytime resting place. Like most grotesques, Duncan has a penchant for dramatic buildings.
Kelsey finds him on the broad balcony that circles the top floor. She lands beside him, drops down on one knee in a quick obeisance, and straightens. Duncan seems pensive tonight, and the rain slicks his shale-gray skin giving him a polished look. The feathers of his headcrest are the color of olivine—a deep greenish hue that darkens to black when wet.
Staring out over his city, he says, “What news of the Old One?”
Kelsey spits over the rail with savage disgust. “It has begun taking human lives, and messily. The police are investigating already. Problematic.”
“Find out what they know. Use it if you can.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
He turns to look at her, meeting her reluctance with a stern command in his eyes. “How do you think? The Change, of course.”
She spits again. “Fantastic.”
The first time, she was only a child and she thought she was dying. Her claws shrunk to useless, flat nails; her pale gray skin soured to a disgusting pink shade; her silver crest feathers yellowed like old paper and curled into strings of hair. Worst of all her wings melted away, feathers deliquescing and bones softening like hot wax, and the drops of her flesh vanished before they hit the ground as if the limbs had never existed.
She lived, but sometimes wished she hadn’t.
The other grotesques called her “half-breed” and “werehuman.” It didn’t matter that pure bloods were rare; it didn’t matter that few if any of them could claim a heritage untainted by humanity. The Change cursed her alone, and so she grew apart from them.
As she takes to wing, Kelsey’s stomach clenches with disgust at the thought of becoming that version of herself she has fought so hard to suppress. Duncan sends her forth to the task as if the Change were a gift and not a reason for shame. He knows what it costs her, but it doesn’t matter. Anything and everything in service of the city.
Kelsey wonders: if she is not a true grotesque, why does the city still compel her? Surely her human-self would let her sense of duty slide.
The question will have to wait for tomorrow night. Sunlight pales the cloud cover to the east, dull gray light invading the orange city-glow. She already feels the sluggishness of dawn pulling at her, turning her wing-strokes clumsy. She flies south to the university—her beautiful neo-Gothic university—where her own daytime resting place awaits. She takes her post atop the stone archway of Hull Gate and settles down, camouflaged by the city’s glamour to look like an architectural flourish, a gargoyle of the inanimate stone variety.
The city sighs relief as somewhere out there the Old One quiets too. Kelsey’s eyelids slip closed.
The storm blew off during the daylight hours, leaving the night cold and newly dry. Kelsey stretches her wings in the fading twilight and launches into the air to begin tracking the groans and shivers of the streets. The Old One has awoken, too, and the city hunkers down to endure the long hours ahead.
Tracking is slow business. The Old One keeps to a particular course for several blocks, then suddenly zigzags as if it knows it’s being followed and is trying to shake her. She must stop often to listen for the worst creaks and complaints from the pavement below. Perhaps if she were faster, perhaps if she could see her quarry—but “perhaps” is worth its weight in air.
So she keeps moving.
Up ahead the city wails softly to itself, the sound emanating from a spot too ravaged to send out a louder distress call. Another alley, chosen more hastily than the last kill site. Happenstance, or escalation? If the Old One is escalating, this won’t be the only tonight. Kelsey drops onto the edge of a rooftop to survey the damage.
The scene below is a blood splatter analyst’s wet dream: the full five liters sprayed in a spectacular starburst that spans the alley and climbs the brick walls on either side. No one is allowed close to the body—or what’s left of it—before the photographers finish their work, lest they trample the evidence.
A pair of detectives huddle off to one side, alternately staring and trying not to stare at the bloodbath while they wait for the forensics team to give them the okay. One of the detectives is tall and too narrow at the shoulders for his height, so his trench coat hangs loose on his skinny frame. The other’s somewhat shorter, somewhat older, and working on his coffee-and-donuts belly.