Love Bites Then it Sucks by Julie Steimle (story books to read txt) 📖

they don’t change how they live they can turn the greatest neighborhoods on earth into slums. That’s what had happened to Detroit, Hanz said.

I walked these slums about as far as I could go staring at all the people who were marked for death—and there were a lot of them. Most of them just had faint marks, like they were simply at risk by virtue of living in that neighborhood. But there were those that had actively glowing white marks, the kind which indicated they had bad habit which would most likely kill them someday. One was this chronic smoker with yellowed teeth. I noticed one woman with saggy skin from drug use with a slightly pink mark on her forehead. And there was a woman with a black eye whom I had the nastiest feeling that her boyfriend was abusive and would probably kill her before the year was over. To be honest, it all freaked me out.

Frankly, I grew up sheltered. I knew this. I knew this when I had gone to college and stepped into the ‘real world’ where my roommates ‘educated’ me about what ‘real life’ was about. I had witnessed in this ‘real world’ more debauchery than I had known existed outside a Hollywood movie. My hometown of Cliffcoast was a predominantly white neighborhood (mostly Irish and Scottish descent to be specific) full of church-attending folk who were either Catholic or Protestant, with a small ‘Mormon’ congregation on the skirts of town. The biggest dangers of our town was falling off the seashore cliffs, bad driving, drowning in the ocean, and the vampires in the mountains (though I had mostly gotten rid of those vampires my junior year of high school. Long story). So these New York slums were an entirely different world to me.

“Hey! You there! Get off my street!” someone shouted in my direction.

I looked up from the street corner where I was standing, thinking mostly to myself. My eyes searched for the source and quickly set on a woman in a pantsuit. She looked like one of those empowered types who worried more about her career than the people around her. She had raven-black wings, which oddly made her look like she was cosplaying for some comic book convention.

Pointing to my chest wordlessly to make sure she was taking to me, I stared back.

“Yeah I’m talking to you, you demon! This is my street!” And she crossed it as if nothing could harm her, counting the speeding cars and butch looking punks standing together smoking while listening to gangster rap. Her scythe appeared from her hand like a tall staff, jeweled as if conceived from a Japanese comic book. She had to be a fan.

I pulled out my scythe to show her I was a reaper and not just a demon. “Sorry. No one told me exactly where my territory ende—”

She struck at me with her scythe.

I, surprisingly, blocked in time. Paling, I snapped. “What’s your problem?”

Up close, the woman had that Mary Kaye layered make-up look to her face. She must have died with a lot of foundation on or something. Maybe she was at a comic convention when she died. Her mascara was impeccable, and her eyebrows perfectly shaped. And her teeth were perfect—exposed as she snarled at me. “You are!”

She swiped at me again with her blade. I was amazed how I could block it since she was moving lightning fast. But as I did not want to die just yet, still being alive while she was not, I dodged and fought back.

“Hey! Hey! Hey! I was just exploring!” I blocked and ducked. “Point me the way back and I’ll go! Chill!”

“Don’t you tell me to chill!” She slashed at me, making a cut near my wrist.

I stared at it.

I was bleeding. And I could smell it.

She got a wicked excited look on her face as she slashed more at me, aiming for my neck.

“HEY!” I shrieked. I spun my staff as I would one of my color guard flags from high school and whopped her upside the head with it. She stumbled backward with shock. “STOP IT! I wasn’t attacking you, you moron!”

She stared wider-eyed at me. Holding her scythe handle at a different angle, as if she would reap me like grass, she swung at me.

It clanged against a shopping cart.

I stared down at the little ragged bag lady who stood between us. She had messy salt and pepper hair, and on her back were wings made of newspaper. There was even print and photographs in each feather. In her creaky voice she said, “Now, now ladies. No in-fighting.”

I stepped back, retracting my scythe back into my palm, raising my hands to show I meant no harm.

“Now that’s a good girl,” the bag lady angel said with a nod to me.

But the cosplay pantsuit lady jerked away, raising her scythe for possibly another hit. She bared her teeth at me and swore a series of select words my mother would never have approved of. At the end of them she shouted, “—keep her out of my area!”

“You could have just told her where the boundary was nicely, ya know,” the bag lady said.

Scowling at her, the cosplay pantsuit angel stormed off.

Turning toward me, the bag lady reached out a hand with a wrinkly smile and hooked her fingers around my wrist. “Come on, sweetie. I’ll show your way back.”

“Can you show me my boundary?” I asked, breathing hard.

She shook her head creakily. “I don’t know it. Sorry. You have to figure that out for yourself.”

Frowning, I hung my shoulders. “…You gotta be kidding me.”

She shook her head more, chuckling.

As we walked back into my stinky neighborhood, she gave me a few words of sage advice. First, never eat out of a garbage can sloshing with liquid—which I assumed was what killed her. Second, never date a man who calls himself Joe and has a tattoo on his knuckles that say ‘Love Slap’. And third, don’t sleep under a statue—ever. “…And lastly, never pick on a cat. It isn’t nice. And some cats can see us, especially our shadows.”

“But I don’t have a shadow,” I said, wondering if this bag lady angel was insane.

She glanced down at the ground under us then laughed. “Sorry. That’s a figure of speech. We don’t have shadows either. What I meant was they can sense us.”

“Oh.” Then I glanced back where we had just been. Thumbing that way, I asked, “What was her problem?”

“She’s a witch,” the bag lady replied.

My eyebrows raised. I half expected the bag lady to then call out to burn her, Monty Python accents in the back of my brain. But I also knew witches were real. So I asked, “From any particular coven?”

Eying me, the bag lady smirked. “Oh, so you know a few witches?”

I painfully nodded. “I was kidnapped by a coven back when I was in high school.”

“Is that how you became like that?” She gestured at me with a broken umbrella which I assumed was her weapon of choice. It could be put into a scythe form, I guessed. “Cursed?”

I shook my head, then I shrugged. “Kinda. I was born this way, but I am the result of a witch curse.”

Leaning back her face, her chin and wrinkles bunching up around it with a degree of shock, she said, “No kiddin? I don’t know much about witch curses. Only that witches are a nasty bunch of folk, and they rarely end up as reapers.”

“Because…?” I looked back that way once more.

“Because people entrenched in witchcraft are irredeemable,” the bag lady with the newspaper wings said. “Nobody, not even the demons, believe she is gonna make it. People like her always turn back to their wickedness. A witch never really leaves her coven.”

I paled. Not just because of what she had said, but because I knew she was wrong. And I said so. “I know two witches who have left their coven and—”

“Fakes,” she said.

I shook my head. “No. Not fakes. One of them died for it. I know her son. And the other, she has been dodging her coven and—”

“Lies,” the bag lady said, pushing her cart along with a sniff.

Shaking my head more, I followed her. “No. Not lies. I can tell when people lie.”

She snorted. “Oh ho? What? Like the CIA? A walking polygraph?”

I shook my head. “No. I can hear their hearts speed up. I also can see and hear their imps, especially when the imps are telling them to lie.”

“Imps?” The bag lady angel angled up her head at me curiously.

I nodded, then snatched the nearest flying imp to show her. I could still grab them, which gave me intense relief. And it materialized in front of the bag lady’s eyes, though no one else could see it—not the living world anyway.

The bag lady yipped, covering one hand over her mouth. She pointed one finger at it. “What’s that?”

Sighing, letting the imp go, I said, “An imp. They’re everywhere, but invisible. Honestly, I am shocked you can’t see them.”

But she was shaking, watching the imp flutter off and cursing at me. Slowly, the bag lady shifted her cart around so that it was between me and her. I realized then that the cart was actually a shield. She was a guardian angel. She was the oddest guardian angel I had ever seen, but she was one of them. She said, “What are you?”

I shook my head, shrugging. “Yesterday I was working class woman engaged to be married. Oh, and I am a vimp.”

Confused, she shifted more behind her junk-filled shopping cart. “And what is that?”

Sighing once more, I replied, “A very rare kind of demon.”

She pulled away from me.

“I won’t hurt you,” I said.

The bag lady shook her head at me. “No. You can’t. I’m already dead.”

I nodded. “And I’m not.”

She nodded. Then she gestured back to the witch’s territory. “Stay away from her. She’s a killer. And I might not be here the next time she takes a swing at you—demon.”

And that was it. She left in a zing and a zip on newspaper wings. I realized by then that there was a definite prejudice against demon angels. This new life was not going to be fun.

Then it started to rain.

And I got wet.

It was weird. Rain should have fallen through me.

Immediately I flew to a building overhang for cover.

 

Regardless of what George had said, I didn’t actually get hungry. I barely felt the cold, but that wasn’t much of a change from before. However, I did feel a certain degree of being not here while being here. It was an alternative version of being immaterial, I realized. It was why the imps ignored me, though they could see me a little. I was the equivalent to a ghost to them. I could affect their world and move in it, but I was no longer one of them. And yet, while walking the streets in the rain, looking at all the people struggling to get by, I did talk to the imps, testing to see if they would still obey me if I gave them a trouble-making suggestion.

My first suggestion to an imp was for him to tie together the shoe laces of a bunch of punks who were standing together smoking with their pants hanging down so that their underwear was on display for the world. I always thought that fashion was ridiculously stupid, and I had always wanted to punish somebody for dressing like that. It was a naughty thought, but this was the first time I gave into it.

The imp I told it to blinked at me, glanced at his fellows and then went and did it.

Watching the success of that imp—especially the hilarious tumbling down of those punks—made me gleefully happy. Yes, it as naughty. No, they weren’t hurt except for their pride and perhaps a small scrape from falling down. But I was thrilled that I was not entirely out of the loop in