Midnight's Angels - 03 Read Online Free PDF

town’s inhabitants have jobs here. We cannot communicate all that much with the outside world because of the curse, but we do still manage commerce. And the folk around these parts are a generally industrious bunch.
    The supply roads seemed different to the way they look in daylight. The street lighting was noticeably paler than in other parts of town. Colder, harsher, making the rows of squared-off buildings look completely flat and lifeless. The shadows were dense in most places, and there was plain no one around.
    There wasn’t a night watchman anywhere that I could see. A prowl car might cruise through here occasionally but -- despite the problems our community has to deal with -- the vast majority of us are decent and honest. And we’d shed a number of our real bad apples back when we were dealing with the Shadow Man.
    The signs by doorways spoke of light industry and medium-tech enterprise. A lot of furniture got put together here. The massive lumber mill went by on my right, a slumbering giant from the Twenties, its lights out as well. Beyond it loomed a Victorian, brick-built smokestack. It’s a landmark of a kind, although it stopped being used a long while back.
    Willets’s place was only a few blocks away when something new caught my attention. I was steadying the steering wheel and continuing to wonder what was up. When a sudden flash of brightness made me hunch forward a little in my seat.
    What had that been?
    I tried to tell myself that it was just a streetlamp flickering. But it had been too bright for that.
    Staring ahead, I attempted to catch another glimpse. And couldn’t at first. But then I saw two of them.
    I applied the brake a little. What the hell were those?
    They were a good distance above the ground, but much larger than birds. Seemed to be man-sized, in fact. And they kept on appearing and disappearing, flashing on and off like neon lights. That was when I figured out that they were circling behind buildings and then coming out the other side. My pulse ticked over faster as I watched them. These were obviously supernatural beings of some kind.
    The real question was … good, or bad?
    The glow they cast was a stark white. They seemed to have a human shape, but not entirely that.
    I braked completely when I saw what they were doing. They were hurtling around the old, four-story building in the basement of which Willets lived.
    And they weren’t doing that thing in any idle way. They looked like they were trying to attack it.

CHAPTER 5
    As I watched, one of them moved in the direction of a grimy, broken window. It had almost reached the frame when there was a dazzling flash of bright red sparks in front of its face, like a vermilion firework going off. The blast didn’t appear to harm the creature, but made it back off swiftly. And when the second one tried slipping past, it got the same response.
    Red, I knew, was Willets’s color. The same hue as his glowing pupils. So I figured he was using his powers on the strange things, doing his best to keep them out.
    What in God’s name were they? I’d seen a lot of peculiar apparitions in my time, but nothing of this type. They looked like they’d been created out of the paired nightmares of William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch.
    I wasn’t close enough to make out too much detail. But the way that their bare faces seemed to be contorted, the way that their hands clawed at the thin air, left me in little doubt of what their nature was.
    My pulse was thumping heavily. My grip had become dampened on the wheel. But I edged my car a little closer, trying to get a better look. They didn’t appear to have noticed me as yet. And I killed my headlamps to make sure of that.
    I had to move in practically a full block before I got a clearer impression of them. The fact that they kept winking out of sight didn’t exactly help.
    They were … Christ, they looked like an illustration in some very old Bible, one that had been water damaged so the angels in