Total pages in book: 45
Estimated words: 40901 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40901 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
3
Starlight
I do not waste much time with my recalcitrant and erstwhile guards. I want to get back to Katie’s side. I want to be sure that she will recover from her injuries. I have perhaps been a little impatient with my workers. Maybe I took out a few too many of my frustrations upon them. Certainly it takes a good amount of time to scrub the blood out from under my fingernails before I am permitted into the room where Katie is recovering.
She is lying very still on a white linen bed, medical lines running into her. She is breathing on her own, though, and I know that to be a very good thing. Her hair has been brushed back from her face and tied up atop her head in what I suppose qualifies as a messy bun. Her eyes are closed, and she is quiet. I find myself staring at her, taking in her beauty once more. Katie would be special no matter what she looked like, and I am certain there are those who would overlook her charms because she is no longer a young woman. I believe maturity has sculpted her features in even more desirable ways. I can see the determination and strength reflected in the fine lines that have marked years of expressiveness. She is a strong woman. I will have to be even stronger to keep her safe.
“She’s doing well,” Doctor Champ says, coming in to meet me. “Must be high percentage angel. She had a lot of natural healing taking place. Unfortunately for her, that meant we had to cut the flesh again to get the bolts out. Broadheads are brutal. Might want to rethink those.”
“I would have thought the blessed silver would stop some of the healing?”
“Blessed silver is, well, garbage,” Champ says. “It’s just superstition.”
Unlike the guards, Champ is familiar with and excited by the divine nature of the creatures we intend to keep here. This is his first time working on a woman of angelic blood, but from the way he is speaking one would be forgiven for thinking he had performed a thousand surgeries on a thousand angels. He would be shocked if he realized how much superstition reflects the metaphysical realities of our world.
“She will survive,” he says, giving voice to the obvious. Katie is strong. I knew that. “But she’s going to be sore. She’ll need care for quite a while.”
What Champion doesn’t know is that I am going to care for her for the rest of eternity.
Katie came onto my radar almost nine years ago. At the time I did not have the resources or the wiles to capture her, but I have been building to this moment every minute of every hour of every day since I first encountered her.
I have tracked her, watched her, lusted after her with everything I have. She is no mere angel. She is my angel, and she has been from the moment she first kicked my ass.
Nine years ago…
I’m at my old saloon in my home town, drowning my sorrows and everything else in a pitcher of ale. This bar never changes. It underwent the formality of being decorated sometime in the sixties and has stubbornly refused to change since. There’re touches of hippy you wouldn’t expect to see in most Texas watering holes, clipped articles about Vietnam on the walls in the bathroom. Graffiti relating to Ford and Nixon. Someone tried to put a Clinton sticker above the urinal. Someone else tried to rip it off. Now, only the C remains. The sticky edges have gone yellow and brown.
This is not a place young people come. Anybody who steps in here, regardless of age, becomes old. The bar where I’m sitting now has cut out wood tree boughs hanging from the upper parts of the walls, like cheap stage props for a play that never stopped running. Off to the side, there’s a stage for up to five people to play guitar and wail about life. Two performers are doing that now, a man and what I’d probably be wrong in assuming is his daughter, judging by the way he keeps looking at the way her prairie skirt clings to her ass. They’re singing about loss.
I was born upstairs in this saloon thirty-something years ago. My mother was running from a bad marriage when fate decided she was going to drop her infant upstairs. She kept running. I stayed.
Back then, the laws around custody and childcare were a little more lax. Finder’s keepers was the rule. I was found by a very nice couple, who were old even then. Their framed sepia-toned faces beam benevolently down at the patrons from the top of the old wooden bottle rack behind the bar. They left this place to me, as generous in death as they were in life. But I could never bring myself to call them Ma and Pa. They were always Mr and Mrs Sheridan.