He ground the pieces under his boot, smiled, and looked like he was about to enjoy a nice game of trash the rabbit. The black was shaking his shoulder. “Chuck the bunny, Earl. That’s not what we’re here—”
She told herself that these guys weren’t a hard-core gang, or they’d have trashed the bar by now. The adrenaline was pumping, and she could feel the edge on her nerves driving her to do something. She held herself back, but her muscles were vibrating with the effort. She couldn’t explode, not when she was drunk, and if she went along, she might get out of this with her hide intact.
Earl wasn’t listening to his friend. “Look’t he did to my jeans—”
The pronoun did it. “I’m a girl, you shitheads!”
Angel grabbed the seat of the bar stool, spun around, and planted a back-kick directly between Earl’s legs.
That ugly bass voice gasped and was choked off with a breathless squeak. He lost his grip on her shoulder and fell to the ground, clutching his groin. Angel’s kick was something of consequence.
Especially when she meant it.
The bar stool was still spinning, and time rubberbanded, slowing as it stretched.
“Earl, you fuckhead—” Angel heard the black say to the lump on the ground. She was slipping off the stool, into the gap she had made in the wall of humans, even as she heard the whistle of air toward her.
She ducked, but not in time, as something very hard slammed into the right side of her head.
She stumbled away from the bar stool, head thrumming, vision blurred. The fur on that side of her face was suddenly warm and tacky. She backpedaled, paralleling the bar, retreating toward the bathrooms.
The Hispanic was twirling a chain in his right hand.
To hell with the nonhuman gun control laws. She was going to dig her automatic out of the underwear drawer and start carrying it again.
The Hispanic swung the chain, but she managed to dodge it.
As she dove, blood got into her eye. Blinded, she ran—and slammed into a wall. The entire right side of her body went numb with the shock of the impact. She didn’t start aching until she was assdown on the floor.
The Hispanic laughed. Angel didn’t feel fear or pain, just a stomach-churning embarrassment. Even after five Coronas she should be able to handle herself better.
The Hispanic’s laughter stopped so abruptly that she forced her eyes open, despite the blood gumming them shut.
She was on the floor next to the “men’s” room. It gave her an oblique view of a black-furred arm sticking out the door. In the hand was an equally black Heckler and Koch 10-millimeter Valkyrie automatic.
Her gaze shifted to the three punks. Earl, the fuckhead anglo, was on the ground in a fetal position. The black was bent over him. The one with the chain was halfway to the door to the bathroom.
A calm voice with an almost liquid Brit accent echoed out of the bathroom. “Please drop the chain.”
“We know you. Fucking hairball don’t . . .”
“Scare you?” The owner of the arm stepped out of the bathroom. He had to be the handsomest vulpine Angel had ever seen.
“Chico,” said the black, “I think Earl’s dyin’.”
“Shut up with the names, man.” Chico, the one with the chain, was losing his bravado. He tried to face down the vulpine. “If cops catch you—”
The fox laughed. A soft sound, but deep. “They’d approve of you? Please, drop the chain and leave.”
“Damn it, Chico, I’m calling an ambulance.” The black ran out of the bar. In search of a public comm, Angel thought.
She looked at Earl.
Earl wasn’t moving.
She looked at Chico.
“You can’t fuck with this—” Chico wasn’t moving either.
The fox cocked the automatic. “Please.”
The sound of the gunshot was deafening. It was still echoing in Angel’s sensitive ears when she heard the sound of metal hitting the ground.
The truncated section of Chico’s chain was swinging about three centimeters short of his right hand. The rest of the chain lay on the floor.
“Fine, keep the chain,” said the fox. “Just leave.”
Chico bolted, nearly tripping over Earl. The fox kept his gun aimed at the doorway for a few seconds before he holstered it.
He wore a green suit that looked good on him—unlike most every other sort of pink-type clothing you could drape on a morey. The green brought out the luster of the red fur on his face and tail. She barely noticed that it was tailored to conceal a shoulder holster.
He held out a black-furred hand to Angel. She realized that she’d been on her ass all along. She grabbed his hand and frantically pulled herself to her feet.
“Please,” he objected. “Be careful. Head wounds—”
“Bleed a hell of a lot,” Angel snapped. She shook her head. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be short with you.”
“You can’t help the way you were designed.” His engineered vulpine mouth managed to form a rather nice smile. And Angel realized that her savior had just taken a cut back at her.
She rolled her eyes and walked over to Earl. The world was looking a lot less shaky. A combination of adrenaline and an engineered metabolism seemed to have cooked off most of the alcohol. She was somewhere between the tag end of a buzz and the start of a splitting migraine.
Earl was curled into a ball. It looked like she had not only done a number on his balls, but had had a pretty bad influence on his pelvis and a few ribs as well. Earl’d coughed up his share of blood. Fortunately, Angel could still hear him breathing. She shook her head. “I didn’t think I hit him that hard.”
Yeah, but look at him now—sailed two meters before he landed.
She felt the fox’s hand on her shoulder. “Are you going to wait for the ambulance to show up?”
From the way he said it, she knew he didn’t intend to stick around. She didn’t blame him. It was illegal for a morey to own a firearm, and considering what was happening in the rest of the country, it wouldn’t be pleasant to have the cops catch you with one.
“Think his friends really called an ambulance?” she asked.
He shrugged. “There’s a comm up on the corner. We can call one from there.”
Angel nodded.
Behind them, on the bar’s holo, President Merideth finished speaking with a plea to end interspecies violence. The broadcast rejoined the morey football game. Frisco—Cleveland, scoreless in the third quarter.
Angel ignored it.
• • •
They saw the ambulance land from across Mission Street. Its lights were barely visible descending through the fog—rotating flashers cutting slices out of the night air. For a few seconds, sirens and the foghorns off the bay fought a muffled battle for attention.
The ambulance led the cops by about twenty seconds. A crowd had gathered out in the front of The Rabbit Hole, and Angel and her companion were half a block up the street. The cops didn’t pay any mind to them or to any of the two or three dozen moreaus up and down Mission.
The two of them stood in the doorway of an old earthquake-relief building, a whitewashed cinderblock cube that was wrapped in a cloak of graffiti, across the street from another relic of the ’34 quake, an on-ramp for the old Embarcadero Freeway. The on-ramp rose into the fog, so the abrupt stop it made in midair wasn’t visible. The end hung somewhere over Howard Street and anyone who drove on it now would eventually crash into the luxury condos that held sway on the new coast south of Market.
The ambulance took off, sirens blaring. Angel shook her head and winced when she started feeling the cut on her cheek again. She’d managed to wipe most of the blood off with a towel she stole from the bar, but she needed to get home and clean up.
The fox noticed her distress, and he handed her a handkerchief.
She press
ed it against the side of her face. “Shit like this ain’t supposed to go down here.”
“It happens everywhere.”
“This is San Francisco. We’re supposed to dance hand in hand over golden hills with flowers behind our ears.”
A soft laugh came from the fox. “Would you prefer LA? An incident like this down there and police would start a house-to-house—”
“And in New York the National Guard would call in an air strike. I’m still disappointed. I moved here to avoid this shit.”
“Where’s you come from?”
“Cleveland.”
“I’m sorry.”
They stood there in silence for a few minutes, watching the phoenix-emblazoned cop cars disappear into the mist, one by one.
“Damn,” Angel said. “I don’t even know your name.”
The fox turned his head toward her and smiled. “We’ve missed the formal introduction, haven’t we? My name’s Byron.”
Byron held out his hand, still smiling. Most moreaus Angel knew of didn’t have much of a repertoire as far as facial expressions went. Angel’s own smile amounted to a slight turning at the corners of the mouth, but Byron’s muzzle crinkled, his eyes tilted, his cheeks pulled up and his ears turned outward slightly. He smiled with his entire face, and somehow it looked natural, not like a fox aping a human.
Somewhere there was a British gene-tech who was very proud of himself.
The smile was infectious and Angel mirrored it, even though it hurt her cheek. She took his hand. “Angel.”
“Angel.” He said it slowly, his voice lending her name an exotic tone. The smile grew a touch wider, as if she’d just provided him with the answer to a complicated problem as opposed to just her name.
“Lovely name,” he said and Angel thought to herself that an English accent seemed to fit perfectly in a vulpine mouth.
And she’d always thought of her name as casting against type. “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”
“Section 5, Ulster antiterrorist brigade. God save whatever’s left of the monarchy.” Byron shrugged. “U.S. citizen for fifteen years, but I can’t shake the accent.”
“What’s wrong with your accent?”
“A vulpine accent is a few steps below Cockney. I’d lose it in a minute if I could.”
Angel thought of the bartender who tried so hard to sound human. “Don’t. I like it.”
Byron shook his head.
“Trust these ears. You have a very sexy voice.”
Byron smiled again. They were still holding hands and he brought his other hand up to trace the undamaged side of her face. “I would never argue with an angel.”
He lowered his hand and looked down Mission. The cops had all left, and the sky was dark beyond the fuzzy light of the streetlamps. A late October chill rolled off of the water. Angel shivered slightly.
“Apparently,” Byron said, “the crisis is over.”
Angel nodded and let go of his hand.
“We really should do something about your face—”
“Fine, really.”
“I have a first aid kit in my car.”
Angel looked up at Byron’s face and the look in his eyes made her wonder exactly what he was thinking, and if it was anything close to what she was thinking.
Chapter 2
Angel knew something unusual was going on when Byron walked off toward the bay. Wordlessly, she followed him as they paralleled the water past the new Oakland Bay Bridge and into the forest of condos on the postquake coastline. Occasionally the fog would roll back far enough for Angel to see some of the coast-hugging reef out in the bay. Even though it was less obvious here than it was on the coastline between Market and Telegraph Hill, if you looked at the forms sticking out of the water, it was easy to imagine the fifty-sixty meters of wharf and landfill that had slid into the bay during the big one.
There was something perverse in having people pay a good five hundred K to live right on the edge of the destruction in a shiny new luxury condo. If anything, it proved a direct relationship between wealth and stupidity. Angel could only make out the vaguest outlines of the first story of the building they approached—but from that glimpse Angel decided that the people living there had to be very stupid.
Byron led her to a secure parking garage adjacent to the building. His car was parked in one of the reserved parts of the garage. Money to service the parking had to run better than the rent on her apartment. The car fit the place.
Angel finally spoke. “A BMW?”
“A BMW 600e sedan,” Byron responded. He pulled a small remote out of his pocket. He pressed a few buttons and the trunk popped open.
“I’m impressed.” The sloping blue vehicle did everything to exude money and power short of grabbing her by the scruff of the neck and shaking her. She could be looking at a hundred grand, easy.
Angel finally noticed the cut of Byron’s suit. A morey wearing a suit had to have money. But Byron’s suit wasn’t an altered human three-piece. The damn thing was tailored for a fox. That was nearly as impressive as the car.
Byron rummaged in the trunk and came out with a green case with a red cross on it. He handed it to her. “Let me give you a place to sit.” He pressed a few more buttons on the remote and the passenger door opened behind her. The leather bucket seat rotated ninety degrees to face the open door.
Angel stared at it and didn’t move.
“It isn’t going to bite.”
Angel shook her head. “Never seen a car that did that.” Sitting, she sank five or six centimeters into the contoured seat. She wished she had furniture this nice at home.
The first aid case rested on her knees. Byron opened it. “First thing, let’s clean that off.” He withdrew a package of gauze and a bottle. “This may sting a little.”
Byron opened the bottle and Angel got a sharp whiff of alcohol. He doused the gauze and rubbed the fur on her cheek. Her eyes watered and her wince must have been noticeable. Byron pulled away the gauze, which was now red with her blood.
Angel looked up at a slightly blurred fox. “What?”
“It looked like I was really hurting—”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re crying.”
“I’m not crying!” she sniffed. “Just dress the thing.”
Byron nodded and went back to cleaning off her wound. It hurt like hell. Angel tried to get her mind off of it. “So—” She grimaced as Byron applied fresh gauze. “—what you do for a living?”
He pulled a small razor out of the kit. “Overpaid delivery boy.” Byron shaved the hair from around her wound. She felt a slight tug, and one of her whiskers fell in her lap. “Until I was laid off.” Byron finished. From the sound, he didn’t want to talk about it.
Angel sat, silent, as he finished binding up her face. When he was done, she was scared to look in the side-view mirror. But despite her fears, the dressing only formed a small rectangle on her right cheek.
She touched her cheek lightly. “At least the scars will be symmetrical.”
He leaned over to peer into the small mirror. “I’m curious about that other one.” He reached over her other shoulder and touched the reflection of her other cheek. On her left cheek was a scar that pulled up one corner of her mouth in a permanent smile.
“Long time ago. You don’t want to hear.”
“Maybe I do.” His finger dropped from the mirror, but his arm remained draped over her shoulder.
Angel sighed. He really didn’t want to hear this. “Ten years ago, a sleazy excuse for a ferret tried to rape me.”
There was an uncomfortably long silence. Byron finally said, “I’m sorry.”
“I told you.”
“Perhaps I should take you home.”
Did she screw up? Still had his arm around her shoulder—good, Angel thought. Let’s ju
st not tell him what happened to that ferret.
“I’d appreciate the ride.”
Byron let go of her and walked around to the driver’s side. “Where am I going?”
“The Mission District,” Angel said, rehearsing in her mind how she was going to ask him up to her place. If he was paying any attention, he could probably smell what she was feeling. She certainly could—even over the stale lime from The Rabbit Hole—and the lust-smell was making her self-conscious.
Angel’s building was near the center of the Mission District, in the heart of a swath of San Francisco’s ubiquitous Victorians and pseudo-Victorians. Many of the houses Byron drove by had survived two major quakes—in fact, there were jokes that restoration work had done more damage in this part of the Mission District than any earthquake could.
Despite the historical context, Angel still thought of her place as an architectural assault. A bay window squatted over an entrance that tried to look like a Roman arch. Both were flanked by square towers that were topped by merlons, of all things. The whole thing sat on a brick foundation wrapped in wrought iron that was close enough to the tilted street that it gave the illusion of being canted at a dizzying angle. The street was so cockeyed this far west of 23rd that, while there were six steps to the door on the right, there were only two to the left.
Byron pulled to a stop between a beat-up off-blue Ford Jerboa and a hulking, heavily modified Plymouth Antaeus. He turned his wheels to the curb and said, “Nice place.”
Angel glanced up and down 23rd, but he had parked right in front of her house. “You’re talking about that house, there?”
Byron shrugged.
No accounting for taste. Give it time, Angel thought, eventually she’d be in love with anachronistic monstrosities like the rest of the city.
But she wasn’t going to hold her breath.
“Come in for a drink?” She wished she’d come up with something less cliché-ridden for the time she spent thinking about it.
“My pleasure, Angel.” It might have been her imagination, but Byron made her name sound like an endearment.