Chapter 1: Chapter 1
Angel woke to gray light leaking through cheap blinds and the bite of metal around her right wrist. She tugged. The handcuff held, locked to the headboard of Lewis's bed. Her left ankle had been tied to the foot rail with a length of soft rope, and when she shifted her other leg, the same. Her mouth tasted like the whiskey sours from last night.
She was still wearing his shirt, the black one with the buttons half undone. That was something, at least.
"Lewis." Her voice came out rough. She pulled at the cuff again, and the frame of the bed rattled against the wall. "Lewis, wake up. This stopped being funny about ten seconds ago."
The apartment was quiet. No traffic noise, no neighbor's television through the thin drywall. Even the radiator had gone silent. She noticed that before she noticed him, the silence first, then the man standing at the foot of the bed where she hadn't seen anyone standing a moment before.
Lewis wasn't looking at her. He was looking down at a book in his hands, an old one, swollen with damp, the cover gone the color of weak tea. He'd put on trousers and nothing else. His hair was combed, which felt wrong too, like everything this morning had been arranged in advance.
"Morning, kink boy." She kept her tone easy, because that was how she handled men, with an angle of the hip and a joke. She rolled her shoulders back against the pillow. "If you wanted a round two you could've just asked. You didn't need the full hardware store."
He turned a page. Paper whispered.
"Untie me, Lewis." A little sharper now. The cuff had started to ache, a dull line of heat across her wrist where she'd been pulling. "Now. I mean it."
He raised his eyes. That was when the feeling started, low in the room, like pressure before a storm. The gray light from the window seemed to thicken. She could almost see it move, a shimmer bending the air above her stomach the way heat bends the air above asphalt.
"What is that?" she said, before she could stop herself.
"Genesis," Lewis said. His voice was flat, rehearsed, a man reciting along a track he'd worn smooth. He held the book up so she could see the columns of dense type, chapter headings in red. "'And there was war in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, he was cast into the earth.'"
"Lewis. What are you doing?"
"The vessel has to be willing at first. That's the doctrine. It has to be given." He turned another page and she saw his thumb was shaking, though his voice wasn't. "You gave. Freely. That's what the elder said counts."
"You're scaring me, and you should be very clear that I will call the cops the second one of my hands is free." Her arm pulled against the cuff and the chain sang taut. The bed didn't even slide. He'd bolted it down. Sometime in the night, while she slept, he had bolted the bed to the floor.
The shimmer above her stomach pulsed. Then the pain came, sudden and hard, a fist closing inside her. She gasped and curled as far as the ropes let her, which wasn't far. The pain rolled through her like a cramp three times too large, and when it passed, it left heat behind. Her skin felt too small. Her blood felt loud.
"Stop it," she breathed. "Whatever it is, stop it."
"'And the dragon gave him his power,'" Lewis read on, "'and his seat, and great authority.'"
Her body jerked once, all by itself, her spine bowing off the mattress. The heat in her veins thickened, turned green somehow, she could feel green moving in her, slow and enormous, like something waking from a long sleep at the bottom of her and stretching. Her muscles corded hard under her skin. Her shoulders, always narrow, felt wider against the bed. The seam of his shirt gave a soft tearing note across her back.
She looked down at herself and saw the veins of her forearms standing out dark and wrong, and beneath the skin of her stomach a faint glow, green as swamp water, moving.
"Lewis," she said, and her voice had dropped half an octave. She heard it and her own fear changed flavor, became something older than fear. "What did you do to me?"
He wasn't reading anymore. He had closed the book and held it against his chest with both hands, and he was watching her the way you watch a door you're not sure you locked.
"The elder said there'd be marks," he said. "He said I'd know."
"Untie me." The words came out of her lower, rougher, ground through gravel. She pulled, and the headboard cracked. A bolt shrieked out of the floorboard and the whole frame lurched sideways, her right arm suddenly free at the end of a swinging chain. "Untie me now."
Lewis backed away until his shoulders met the wall. The green light under her skin brightened. Her eyes, in the dim room, had begun to do it too.