Late at night, she sleeps curled by the fireplace with her wings folded tight along her back. She won’t sleep in the bed with me, afterward. She’ll rise and stretch, and settle on the woven hearthrug like a dog, with the firelight washing red and gold over her skin.
Tonight I can’t sleep, though. Got too many awkward thoughts running through my head, like: does she love me? Will she leave for good one day? And, how can I make her stay?
There’s no place to go with notions like that. She comes when she comes, and goes when she chooses, and all I can do is be grateful for the times she does come, slipping out of the night and into my arms.
I click the TV on, damping the sound so I don’t wake her. Late night news blooms across the screen, fire and screams and sooty dark faces twisted with weeping, and I don’t need to raise the volume.
I know those sounds. They’re in my head, I hear them again and again in the middle of the night, for all I’m half a world away. I can recite the anchorwoman’s words by heart: renewed airstrikes pound insurgent strongholds in the south; warplane down, hospital got bombed, uncounted civilian deaths . . .
And I remember. Heat like an anvil on my back in the heavy street armor, the reek of ripe vegetables and live chickens in the marketplace and the chatter of kids and old men all around me just before the bomb goes off and it all goes black. Months of surgeries and therapies and a shiny new leg, and then I’m back in the world with a pension to feed me, and a hole in the soul too big for anything to fill.
Until she came, dropping soft as a raindrop onto the patio one spring evening, furling her wings as she landed. She’d taken my hand and led me inside, and lost in her arms, I’d forgotten the pain and the death and the blood that haunted my dreams.
My fingers tighten on the remote, punching the volume button hard. Her eyes snap open at the sudden blare.
She’s on her feet before I can blink, reaching for her leathers and her boots. She stares at the screen, awash with images of contorted faces and columns of smoke, and her face comes alight with a wild bright joy.
“It’s time,” she says.
“Time for what?” I blurt.
She dresses fast: leather jacket and khaki pants, white T-shirt and heavy lace up boots. By some magic the wings emerge from the back of her jacket, flexing absently as she buckles her belt. She checks her knives in their sheaths and frowns at me.
“Go to sleep. This is not for you.” She points at the chaos on the TV screen. “The world is burning. Can’t you feel it? Time to go. I have work to do.”
Questions crowd my mind, questions I don’t dare to ask, for fear the asking would drive her from me. So I sit there on the couch, tongue-tied with my heart hammering, all the fear of losing her freezing my limbs.
“Where are you going? What do you have to do – out there?” I manage to say, waving a hand at the blackness beyond the patio doors.
“You’ve always been asleep, before.” Frowning, she gathers her hair, white as smoke and moonbeams, into a long whiplash braid.
“Not any more,” I say. “I don’t want to lose a minute of you.”
Her mouth twists, only half a smile. She glances up, and then I hear it too: a rising wind, screaming like the fighter jets swooping low over the smoking desert sands, and underneath, the thrumming beat of wings.
Then she sweeps aside the curtains and pulls the glass doors wide so the night pours in, and she steps out onto the patio.
“They’re here. I have to go.”
“Wait!” I scramble up from the cushions, grabbing the crutches I hardly use anymore, because if I take the time to put on my leg she’ll be gone, out to whatever’s waiting for her in the dark.
She shakes her head. “No. You’re done. You made it through. It’s not your job anymore.”
“Is it yours?” I stand up, swaying. A memory teases at me, tickling at my brain, bubbling up from the dreamtime of sedatives and pain, and the groaning of airplane engines on the way across the ocean.
“It’s always mine,” she says. “And theirs.”
A wind blows through the open doorway, icy as the breath of gods, and I step out with her onto the patio, where summer flowers tremble in the sudden cold.
Theirs: a trio of armored women astride satin skinned horses, spiraling down from the sky in a flurry of wings. I breathe in the smell of fuel and burning wood, a faint whiff of apples from her hair.
One of the riders drops down low, tossing the reins of a riderless black mare to her. She catches the reins one-handed, holds up the other: wait. The rider, ice-white face painted in blue and silver whorls, nods and looks the other way.
She turns back to me, and her eyes fill with tears.
“I have walked the fields of Flanders, “ she says slowly. “And Waterloo, and Crimea. Culloden and Normandy. All those places where warriors die. I held their hands, and kissed them as they passed. And then we took them home, my sisters and I, to the halls of the heroes, to feast forever with the gods.”
She touches my face, her bird-bone fingers light as air, and suddenly, I remember.
Riding drugged and dazed through the night in the belly of that hospital plane, I’d thought I was dreaming. Among the smells of blood and antiseptics and metal, there was the scent of her hair. Over the noise of the engines and the crosstalk of the medics, the whisper of her voice in my ear.
“You were there,” I whisper. “When I was hit. And after.”
Now she does smile. “We came that day to gather you all. But they took you away, still living. Not long, I thought, and so I followed, to claim you when it was time.”
“But –-“ I stammer, as her words sink in. “I didn’t -- ”
“No.” The mare stamps air, impatient, and behind her the other riders gather, treading the wind. “And so I came to find you. To claim you, living. For me.”
The wind cuts clear through my thin T-shirt but a slow heat spreads in my chest.
“I have to go,” she says. “The desert is on fire. They’re dying now.” She grabs a fistful of the T-shirt and pulls me suddenly close. When she kisses me, the sharp teeth, that no human woman has, slice through my lower lip.
I taste blood. And I ask the stupid question.
“Will you come back? To me?”
She swings up onto the back of the sleek black mare, and her wings spread wide, like moonlight on her shoulders.
“Always.”
I raise a finger to the warm trickle on my chin. Then she turns the mare’s head to the sky, riding that cold cold wind that blows from Valhalla to here.
Behind the Scenes:
This story is another Los Angeles tale, hatched around the same time as “Looking for Ivory.”
The Santa Ana winds were blowing hard and hot across the city that January night when George Bush launched his war on Iraq. I watched the first fighter jets roar across the sky from a cafe in Beverly Hills, where the television over the bar blared a real time update like the play by play of a football game.
Later, in my little apartment in Venice by the sea, I listened to the howling winds and the song “Cold Wind to Valhalla” from Jethro Tull, which includes the lines:
“And join with us, please
Valkyrie maidens cry
Above the cold wind to Valhalla.”
I listened to a lot of music in those days. It helped me get through the mind-numbing work of grading hundreds of student essays and writing exercises.
So when I heard Christy Moore’s haunting performance of “Ride On,” that song added another piece to the puzzle that became this little story. “Ride On” is a cryptic song that’s often interpreted as a reflection on grief and loss. But I didn’t know that when I first heard it, and to me it spoke of love, magic and an encounter with the Other Side:
“When you ride into the night without a trace behind
Run your claw along my gut one last time
I turn to face an empty space, where once you used to lie
And look for a spark that lights the dark
Through a teardrop in my eye.”
All these impressions came together in “A Cold Wind.” This story’s setting is deliberately vague, because the same things happen in every war - and wounded warriors are left to pick up the pieces of themselves as best they can. I wanted this one to have a little help.
Stories (like this one) come from the most unexpected places. I’ve recently become a fan of Ancient Origins, a weird online mag that delves into the mysteries of the past. Some are a little hard to swallow, but that never stops a writer of weird tales. And right here on Substack, Historic Mystery offers wonderfully detailed stories about strange happenings of the past. You never know what spark might light a creative fire.
A reader recently asked if I’d create a playlist of the songs I’ve referenced in these Behind the Scenes bits. I’ll see if I can put one (or more) together. So many songs are stories in their own right.
Other bits:
I may be taking a break from weird Westerns in this space, but they seem to find me anyway. I just watched the Netflix series “Django,” which isn’t exactly “weird” but it is brooding and unusual - and it stars the wonderful Flemish actor Matthias Schoenart (yes I am a fan) as the title character, a mysterious stranger searching for his daughter. Only peripherally related to the better known movie “Django Unchained,” the series is an Italian-French production inspired by a 1966 Italian film of the same name. It follows the modern trend of upending traditional Western tropes in the service of a smaller, more intimate tale. Worth a watch.
Coming up:
I’m sorting out the pieces of the final chapter of “On Crow Water,” wherein we find out why Longman is hunting Luke Handy and what other mysteries await in those border mountains.
“The Woman Who is Part Horse,” a collection of poems and flash fictions about women, magic and power, is just about finished. Stay tuned for publication details.
Still working on building more sections into Black Moon Journal. Anything you’d like to see? Let me know in the comments.
Till next time -
JM
I love the hard-won ending. They have each other, but life won't ever be easy.
Thanks.