"Charles de Lint - Someplace To Be Flying" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

wound. Unable to take his gaze from the girl, he explored with a finger,
found a pucker of skin where the bullet hole had closed, nothing more.
The girl grinned at him.
All he could do was look back at her, stumbling to frame a coherent
sentence. "What . . . how did you . . . ?"
"Spit's just as magic as blood," she said. "Didn't you ever know
that?"
He shook his head.
"You look so funny," she went on. "The way you're staring at me."
Before he could move, she leaned forward and kissed him, a small
tongue darting out to flick against his lips, then she jumped to her feet,
leaving behind a faint musky smell.
 "You taste good," she said. "You don't have any real meanness in
you." She looked solemn now. "But you know all about meanness,
don't your"
Hank nodded. He got the feeling she was able to look right inside
him, sifting through the baggage of memories that made up his life as
though it were a hard-copy resume, everything laid out in point form,
easy to read. He grabbed hold of the cab's fender and used it to pull
himself to his feet. Remembering that first image of her he'd seen
through his pain, that impression of dark wings rising up behind her
shoulders, he thought she must be some kind of angel,
"Why . . . why'd you help me?" he asked.
"Why'd you try to help the woman?"
"Because I couldn't not try."
She grinned. "Us, too."
"But you . . . where did you come from?"
She shrugged and made a sweeping motion with her hand that
could have indicated the fire escape above his cab or the whole of the
night sky. "We were just passing by-same as you."
He heard a soft scuff of? boots on the pavement and then the other
girl was there, the two of them as alike as photographs printed from the
same exotic negative.
The first girl touched his forearm. "We've got to go."
"Are you . . . angels?" Hank asked.
The two looked at each other and giggled.
"Do we look like angels?" the second girl asked.
Not like any kind he'd ever seen in pictures, Hank wanted to say,
but he thought maybe they were. Maybe this is what angels really
looked like, only they were too scruffy for all those high-end Italian
and French artists, so they cleaned the image up in their paintings and
everybody else bought it.
"I don't know," he said. "I've never seen real angels before tonight."
"Isn't he cute?" the first girl said.
She gave Hank another quick kiss, on the cheek this time, then the
two of them sauntered off, hand in hand, like one of them hadn't just
healed a gunshot wound, like they weren't leaving a dead body behind.
Hank glanced down at the corpse, then looked back up the alley where
the girls had been walking.
 They were gone. He leaned against the cab for a moment, dizzy.