"Simon R. Green - Drinking Midnight Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Simon R)

(It was said that flowers and women withered when he smiled on them, and that he left a
trail of blood and suffering wherever he walked. Jimmy Thunder was quite prepared to
believe it.)
Hob's companion looked like a woman, but was actually Angel. In her own disturbing way,
she was just as powerful and terrifying as Hob. Incredibly tall, impossibly pale and slender,
she dressed in black tatters held together with safety pins and lengths of barbed wire. The
pins pierced her flesh, and the wire broke it, but she didn't seem to care. She wore her jet-
black hair cropped brutally close to her skull, and her face was coarsely good-looking,
sensual rather than beautiful. Her skin was as pale as death, and her mouth and eyes were the
same deep, vivid red. She smiled meaninglessly at the new arrivals, and her hands curled
impatiently at her sides, as though impatient to be hurting or breaking things. At her belt hung
a rosary made from human flngerbones, and a clutch of supernaturally white feathers that
came from no material wings. The newcomers avoided her gaze, as though the very sight of
her was painful to them. They all knew her name was more than just a name.
She really had been an angel once, descended now from the immaterial to the material
world, and though she was much diminished from what she had once been, she was still a
force almost beyond reckoning. No one knew what kind of angel she'd been, from Above or
from Below, and whether she fell or was pushed, or what terrible, unforgivable thing she'd
done, to be sentenced to the mortal miseries of flesh and blood and bone. No one asked; no
one dared. She was Angel, and that was all anyone needed to know.
Jimmy hadn't known she'd allied herself with the Serpent's Son. And he hadn't known that
either of them were involved in running the Reality Express. It couldn't help but make him
wonder what else was going on, on his own doorstep, that he didn't know about.
Hob's calm voice and presence was finally having a soothing effect on the uneasy crowd of
the newly human, as long as they didn't look at Angel, and he was soon bustling among them,
smiling and shaking hands and checking names and numbers against a list on his laptop. He'd
clearly done this before. At his murmured suggestion, Angel had moved away to lean against
the station-house wall, and was idly digging out long curls of mortar from between the stones
with a bored fingernail, clearly uninterested in the proceedings. Presumably she was just there
to ride shotgun. Jimmy realised with a start that Hob and Angel were the reasons why he was
there. The Waking Beauty had wanted their presence confirmed. The train and its passengers
were largely irrelevant.
Jimmy studied Angel from the darkest and most concealing shadows he could find on the
waiting-room roof. A line from an old song ran through his head, subtly altered: Did you ever
see a nightmare walking? I did . . . Just standing there, with her pale arms now crossed over
her small high breasts, she looked as dangerous and malignant as all hell. She hadn't been in
town long, and everyone had been wondering which way she would jump. When God wanted
a city levelled, or all the first-born slaughtered in one night, he sent an angel. They were
Heaven's stormtroopers. Angel's very presence in Bradford-on-Avon was enough to unsettle
any sensible person, man or god.
(Only one other angel had been reduced from the immaterial to the material in present
times, and that had been voluntary - supposedly. But the old city of Maggedon was no more,
and the angel was still chained to his rock in the cold dark heart of the earth, with nails
through his wings. A little humanity can be a dangerous thing.)
Jimmy Thunder let his hand fall to the great hammer at his side. It had been a long time
since he had been genuinely frightened.
Perhaps he made a noise, or he'd moved too suddenly; either way, Angel's head snapped
round, and she looked up and glared right at him with her blood-red eyes, seeing him clearly
through the concealing shadows of the chimney stack. She shouted a warning to Hob and ran
forward, the crowd scattering before her. She jumped from the platform, across the tracks and