Something More Than Night Read Online Free PDF

would make Bayliss yelp.
    The cop made notes on her pad, completely unaware or uninterested in the woman unbuttoning the compartments on her belt. Molly found a thin spray canister. She took a second to ensure the nozzle pointed away from herself and then advanced on Bayliss again. He retreated down the station’s handicapped access ramp.
    Molly charged. She thrust the canister forward in her right hand, steadying it with the left … and saw, in the corner of her eye, her naked arms. She still wore the nightgown from Minneapolis. Her legs were bare, too. The concrete underfoot was crusted with a thin layer of snow except where her bare feet had melted perfect five-toed prints. A breeze ruffled her nightgown.
    She wasn’t cold.
    The tinny clink and rattle of chains broke through the pregnant silence of the accident scene. A tow truck had arrived to haul away the taxi.
    Flitting through different scenes of her own life? That she could chalk up to trauma. Martin’s inability to recognize her? Maybe that was shock. But she’d just taken a weapon off a cop who couldn’t have cared less. Now she stood half-naked on icy concrete while a wintry wind tugged at her nightgown. And she didn’t feel it.
    Yet she could smell the alcohol in Martin’s puke and the salt in the ocean a few miles away. She heard the hum of electricity in the tram lines overhead and tasted the faint metallic tang of evaporated blood in the air— her blood—as the cop cars’ waste heat warmed the tracks. But for all that, she felt nothing. No discomfort.
    Molly dropped the canister. “Oh my God.” She ran her hands through her hair again. “Shitshitshit.”
    Bayliss said, in a quieter tone of voice, “Hey, chin up. It ain’t as bad as you think, angel.”
    “My name is Molly, not ’Angel.’ I don’t appreciate your chauvinistic little pet name.”
    Bayliss laughed. “Don’t you get it, doll? ’Angel’ ain’t a nickname. From now on, it’s your job.”

3
    TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN
    Maybe I should have eased into that one. I thought she was going to slip her clutch.
    Then she gave me a look that should have sliced through the back of my coat. Her fingers, tangled deep in that coppery mop, kept kneading her scalp. “What the hell are you talking about? And who are you? What are you?”
    “Told you. Name’s Bayliss. And at the moment I am one red-faced psychopomp.”
    Seemed like she was absorbing that, because she got real quiet. When she spoke again, her voice was fragile as spun sugar.
    “Am I really dead?”
    “Your human body squiffed it, yeah.”
    “But I’m still thinking and talking.”
    “You’re not human any longer.” Well, not entirely. “You’re a member of the Choir now.” I flicked my pill at the tow truck. It sizzled on bloodstained ice. “Hell of an introduction, huh?”
    She frowned at that. “You don’t look like any angel I’ve ever seen.”
    Oh, for crying out loud. Bad enough I tagged the wrong bird, but did the frail have to be so damn stubborn?
    “That so? Seen a lot of us, have you?”
    That shut her yap.
    She dropped her hands. She craned her head back, watched the sky. The stars had reverted to their sluggish twinkle. Junk fragments—real junk this time—flared across the sky from south to north, remnants of a polar orbit. But the world around us no longer ticked and wobbled like a scratched record. We’d stabilized reality, flametop and me, though she didn’t know it yet. I’d done my duty and was free to go back to my quiet unobtrusive life just as soon as I sent the girl on her merry. But she wasn’t making it easy.
    “Angels are a fairy tale, too,” she said. Somewhere to our south, the floodwalls boomed.
    “Beg to differ, sweetheart. I’m as real as you.”
    After that, I had to wait for the revving of a truck engine to subside. The tow truck jingled its chains like Marley’s ghost when it pulled the dented hack away. It slid through a gap in the traffic while the bulls kept