Angel Slayer. Michele Hauf
is what makes me tick, as they say.”
“That’s weird.”
“Your opinion means little to me.”
“I realize that. Yet my appearance interests you to no end.”
“I could look all day. What about there? Are they real?” Ashur pointed to her chest and she looked down and stroked between her breasts where he imagined it would be soft.
“My breasts are real,” she said.
“Nice. And soft?”
A lift of her brow tweaked Ashur’s smile. “My God, you don’t have much of a moral compass, do you?”
“It isn’t necessary to my survival.”
She tilted her head. Soft dark curls as tight as a spring bounced over her shoulders and down to her elbows. He wanted to crush them between his fingers. “Soft? You want to touch and see?”
She was right on about his lacking moral compass.
Tracing his finger down from the base of her throat, Ashur closed his eyes as the softness of female skin tendered at his expectations. All things in his life were hard, impermeable, adamant. Yet beneath his skin glided something like fine silk. He remembered silk, slipping beneath his touch, waving in the breeze, gliding over his mouth …
“I think that’s enough.”
Six’s voice brought him up from the dive into lust. Ashur retracted from the one place he should not go until Zaqiel was dispatched. “Very soft.”
“Thanks. I didn’t expect you’d be so … well, forward.”
“You did invite the touch.”
“Yes, I did. Something about you. Anyway!”
Dismissing the intimate interlude, Six opened the door and strode into a vast room done in white marble. Floor-to-ceiling windows faced the far side of the blindingly white room.
“This is my workroom,” she explained, setting the coffee on a clear Lucite desk and pushing a button on the Macintosh computer.
“It’s different from the rest of the place,” he said. “It’s as if another person’s living in here.”
“Kind of. My artistic self is opposite from my chumming-around-with-friends self. I don’t want any distractions when I’m painting so I made it as neutral in here as possible. No music, either.”
He tilted his head, wondering.
“It’s an artist thing. Sort of like you explained the angels hearing in colors is an angel thing.”
“So what is all this stuff? I don’t see any canvas or paints.”
“CG painting is my method of choice to create. I use a spatial operating environment.”
He only understood half of what she’d said. But he wasn’t about to let on to that fact. He touched the smooth white exterior of the computer.
“Don’t touch,” she admonished sweetly. “No taking apart my computer, big boy.”
Ashur offered her a surrendering shrug, then strolled about the room, thumbs shoved in his front pockets, taking it all in.
A huge plasma screen flickered awake on one wall and he approached it, waiting to see what would appear.
Behind him, Six sat before the desk clicking away at the keyboard. Twisting at the waist, his eyes lingered where he had touched her between the curves of her breasts. Softness bound up and waiting release, or a dash of his tongue. If only the angelkiss had been placed there, and he would have had to lick it to grant her temporary relief.
Nice. Thinking about the carnal pleasures was almost as good as doing them. And when his erection tightened against his pants, he grinned. The old demon still had it. Some things were never forgotten, no matter how much torture.
Six typed rapidly. The sleeve bulged on her forearm. “Did you bandage the angelkiss?” he asked.
“I put some aloe on it again this morning, and tied a scarf around it. Seems to do the trick. You ever hear of CG art?”
“Sure.”
“You like it?”
He spread out his arms and swaggered toward her. “Doesn’t everyone?”
She sighed. “You have no idea what it is.”
He approached the desk and caught his palms on the edge. “Very well, what is CG?”
“You didn’t assimilate that last night?”
“I feel it somewhere in my knowledge, but it’s difficult to understand. It is to do with technology and much as I hate to admit it, that is beyond my comprehension.”
“It’s beyond every normal person’s comprehension, believe me.”
Yes, but he wasn’t normal. And how easy would it be to take this computer apart? It appeared to have a removable back—
“CG is computer-generated art,” she said. “I paint with pixels. The screen is my canvas. I’ll show you my latest. Look.”
Ashur turned around. The screen, which was as high as he and three feet wide, filled with grays and silver and shades of black and blue. Spreading his hands over it, he marveled at the screen’s give. It wasn’t glass but some soft surface that gave with his touch. Marvelous.
“Put your hands down,” Six said. “I’m turning on the spatial controls.”
He stepped back to take in the image that appeared on the screen. It startled him. He hissed lowly.
“My friend Todd had the same reaction when he built it,” Six said as she joined his side. She raised her hand and tapped her fingers in the air before her. The screen zoomed out to display the whole painting. “Spatial operation,” she said. “It’s all done by recognizing my hand movements. Pretty cool, huh? The technology is so new it’s still in beta form for home use.”
The technology did not concern him; it was the image she had constructed on the screen.
“It’s my latest angel. I only paint angels. I call this one my indigo savior.”
The figure on the screen was forged of blue metal and gears that glistened with white. Bulging steel muscles rippled down its arms and thighs. At its back a spread of wings stretched straight out five times as long as the body, and the wing tips curled, thanks to moving gears on each of the mercurylike appendages.
“How do you have this knowledge?” Ashur asked fiercely. “How can you know?”
“Zaqiel said the same thing to me in the same accusing tone. Of course, you’ve seen angels. And me? I have, too.” She tapped her head. “In my dreams.”
Coaxing his breathing to a steady pace, Ashur exhaled. “In your dreams? Are you a seer?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I once thought I might be an angel because of this.” She tapped the sigil on her forearm. “But it never quite matched any of the sigils I’ve seen in books on angels. I’ve had dreams about angels since after my mother died. I’ve tried to tell people about them, but they always think I’m a nut. My father threatened to put me in a psych ward when I was eighteen.”
“The place where they put those out of their minds? “ He looked her over again. She seemed quite sane. But then madness often cloaked itself in beauty.
“It was a stupid threat, but it brought me down from a weird place,” she said. “I was just so tired of people not believing me that I flipped out. And well, you know how teenagers can be.” She sighed. “Probably you don’t. So now here you are, a man who actually slays angels. You believe me, right?”
“That you’ve seen them in your dreams?”