Short story: The Angel Hunter
The Broken Wing has wooden slats nailed across its windows and a paint job that flakes from the walls in brittle scales. The only sign it’s not abandoned is the rectangle of yellow light outlining the door.
It’s where the angel hunters drink.
What a lonely, desperate job angel hunting is. The work is too repulsive for society’s palate, its participants too ruthless for friendly bonding. They don’t come to the Wing for conversation or company. There’s no jovial gossip here. No swapping tricks of the trade. Miserable nights are wasted staring into the dregs at bottoms of mugs. They come here because… where else?
Angel conservationists — those pale papery types who hand out leaflets on street corners far away from the Wing — estimate there are fewer than a hundred angels left. Maybe much fewer. That’s one reason hunters don’t talk among themselves. You can’t turn a profit selling a dead angel’s feathers if your rivals snare them before you do.
Grimy silence hugs the Wing’s interior. Trains rumble past across the street. The fan’s blades whirr through thick smoke. The barman’s name is Eddie Staunch and he’s the offspring of a side of ham and a row of knuckles. You never have to tell Eddie what you want to drink. He always knows.
The Wing’s door croaks open. No one looks up. It’s always just some loser hunched in the doorway, fresh off another failure.
But this time…
Even Eddie Staunch puts down the glass he’s wiping.
It’s Sven Ketcher. Sven Ketcher! The greatest angel hunter in the world! They say he hates angels so much he doesn’t just steal their lives and their wings — he slices out their eyes, he tastes their blood.
The silence in the bar solidifies. No one looks up from his glass but every man’s attention uncurls, focuses on Sven’s approach to the bar.
Angel hunting is a lawless business, but like all lawless businesses it has rules. Rule number two: be quick. When angels die they evaporate into the ether, their divine cells uncoiling into light or pure goodness or some other arcane substance. Their faces collapse into golden dust, their wings disintegrate into mist. The precise physics of the process are unclear. But if you take your time you walk away with nothing.
A competent hunter hopes he might cut away two feathers before the body of his kill disappears forever. The legendary angel hunter Rafael Gonzales scored seven feathers from the angel Daphiel before it faded — a hunt he described as once-in-a-lifetime lucky.
Sven never walks away from a kill with fewer than ten feathers. How does he do it? His incredible mysterious skill must have made him a millionaire ten times over.
Yet here he is, in the squalor of the Broken Wing, dressed like a bum whose good rags are in for cleaning. Sven’s tall, blond, maybe good-looking under that crusty sandpaper stubble. There’s a tint to his skin. They say his father’s a Swede and his mother Indian.
This cold-eyed man has slain more angels and won more feathers than anyone in history, and every other hunter knows it. The men in the Broken Wing — they’re always men, the angel hunters — admire him, but they fear him and loathe him. Every time Sven makes a kill, that’s one less kill for someone else.
Sven eases his long, lean frame onto a stool at the bar. Eddie passes him a squat glass brimming with something clearish, brown. It looks like liquid headache.
“Sven, my man! How’s business?”
This interjection is unfathomable. The creature sidling up to Sven is Arnold Malone, who nicknamed himself “Rat” when he entered the trade. He’s short, his body twisted by the tangled chromosomes he was gifted with at conception, and he’s never made a mess — that’s what hunters call it, when they finish an angel; it’s what passes for a joke — though he likes to tell a convoluted tale about almost catching the angel Nazaraf in the Osaka subway.
Sven ignores Rat and the lukewarm beer clutched in his paw. The scattered hunters who still have capacity for emotion register surprise: Rat talking to Sven is a peasant addressing the Pope.
Sven tips back his glass, lays it on the bar. Eddie slides it away.
Rat forces a smile, cowers like a slave about to be whipped. “I heard you messed Sifuriel in Berlin couple months back.”
A long, dangerous pause punctuated by the click of fanblades. Then…
“No.”
That’s one more word than Sven’s ever uttered to most angel hunters. He resists anyone’s attempts to talk, to get close.
Rat swallows. “No?”
Sven looks at Rat for the first time, focusing his clear hard eyes on the little man’s dented beak of a face and its patina of forced confidence.
“It was the angel Zinnen in Berlin.” Sven knocks back another shot of acid dishwater. “Sifuriel I cornered in Rabat a year ago. Thirteen feathers. Not so unlucky.”
Yellow snaggleteeth show in Rat’s mouth. He’s smiling. He thinks he’s pals now, pals with the best angel hunter in the world.
“So, Sven. Who’s your next target?”
Someone coughs, chokes on a half-swallowed mouthful. Angel hunters never discuss targets. Never. The question is a disgusting breach of etiquette, or what passes for in in this business. Hunters spend months chasing their quarry, years, jealously guarding useless scraps of information. You don’t just ask.
Sven’s voice smoulders like a cigarette. “Who’s yours?”
Even Rat isn’t so stupid that he doesn’t know a line’s been crossed.
“Nah, mate,” he says, “I don’t have one. I got nothing. But you, you gotta be in town for a reason, right? Gotta be tracking something?”
Eddie passes across another glass. Sven lifts it between two fingers and a thumb, swirls it. The Wing’s patrons strain their ears for his answer.
Sven says, “I just came for a drink.”
“Right.” Rat forces a smile, casual as a royal wedding. “C’mon, Sven. You must have something lined up. Go on, give us a hint. What’s the harm? Not like I’ll ever beat you to it!”
Rat’s shifting on his feet now, squirming with desperation. He’s begging. Probably owes someone ruthless a buck or two or thousand.
“You know, I heard a rumour. From them brains at the Tenshi Institute.” Rat leans in close to Sven, a starving mongrel offering gristle to the alpha wolf. His breath is stale. “They reckon there’s an archangel in the city. Right now. Hiding out.”
Sven lays his empty glass on the bar. His face hasn’t changed.
“So?”
Rat’s face crumples like a car slamming into a bollard. “You know about Zephron?”
Silence now. Even the fanblade’s shut up. None of the other hunters lurking in the Wing have heard spit about Zephron. But damned if they’ll reveal that to each other.
Rat backs away from Sven as he stands, muscles stiffening under his cracked leather jacket. He uncurls a few soft bills, several more than the cost of his drinks, and hands them across to Eddie. He casts a surly eye around the Wing and lopes out the door.
The roads are slick. Sven strides through the streets, hunched against the rain, till he’s sure no one’s following. He sidesteps into a garbage-strewn alley, far from the light, and rubs his chin.
So. The angel Zephron might be in town. Interesting.
Every hunter in the Wing will now be on Zephron’s trail. But Sven works fast. No one tracks angels like he does. He has sources in high places. They can find just about anyone.
Just seven nights later Sven is hunched behind the wheel of a car. It’s a dented black bomb with the look of a Holocaust survivor. The neighbourhood it’s parked in has been abandoned by the rest of the city, which has thrived while this little pocket of misery and poverty shrivelled.
Sven strokes at the stubble on his face, so coarse it almost takes off the tips of his fingers. He lifts his legs off the dashboard and stows them under the steering wheel. It isn’t any more comfortable. Nowhere is, after you’ve spent 24 hours in an unmoving car.
Angel hunting has a dangerous, ugly mystique. Everyday folk imagine debonair men with eyepatches whittling away their riches in exotic bars, sipping sour cocktails with rascals and damsels, stalking celestial beings and rubbing them out without mercy.
In reality it involves hustling the dregs of humanity for a hot tip. Living out of a battered suitcase in countries that can barely be described as third-world. Endless stints on Google, poring over records in dusty libraries.
Most hunters hire people — amphetamine-addicted students are the popular option — to do that boring research for them. But unless he doesn’t have a choice Sven does all his research himself.
Of course he could pay someone. He must have a fortune stashed away. He does not spend any of it on his appearance: his close-shaven hair is choppy, his beard patchy, his leather jacket unravelling. He doesn’t look tough or cool. He looks like a man who sleeps in his car.
Sven does not spend his money on research. He spends it making research harder for other hunters. He has a vast army working for him: not collecting information but spreading misinformation, sowing false trails in the stacks and databases and gossipy back alleys of the world.
Sven winds the window down a fraction. Cool air seeps in. He reaches to the back seat and hefts over a ream of paper bound together with a mean-looking bulldog clip. He unpegs it and flicks through the pages he’s typed up, the barely legible notes he’s scrawled. All the intel he’s pulled together for his quarry.
Target: the angel Zephron, Sven’s written on the top page.
Rank: archangel. An archangel’s feathers sell for a lot more on the black market. They’re almost impossible to come by nowadays. That’s why it’s so important Sven pulls this job off.
Permanent appearance: unknown. But digging around the bowels of the internet has revealed Zephron prefers the earthly guise of an olive-skinned, curly-haired young man.
Sven’s sources high up indicate such a fellow might reside in the crumbling apartment block he’s been parked out front of for the last day. It’s as tall and squat as a footballer gone to seed, disfigured by rust and graffiti, most of the windows jagged holes.
Someone approaches the building, an umbrella held aloft against the tired sleet.
Sven’s instincts tell him he’s on to something here: the way the figure walks, the poise and shimmer of its movements. It’s subtle — but they reek of the celestial, wrapped in dirty rags of the mundane.
A lesser hunter might sit up in his seat and give the game away. Sven remains still. Only his eyes harden, watching the figure sidle up to the building, keeping out of the light.
The figure stops in the shadows outside the building’s front door. The umbrella comes down, revealing an olive-skinned, curly-haired… woman?
Interesting. Angels aren’t usually that clever.
It’s not they they’re stupid. They just aren’t cunning. Deviousness is a human trait; it is not in an angel’s nature. They can treat you to a rich analysis of the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita and countless other texts, yet believe A.N. Gel is an artful pseudonym.
That is why they’re all hunted, in the end. The only safe angel is a dead angel.
The curly-haired woman glances over her shoulder before retreating into the gloom of the apartment block. For a fraction of a second her eyes spangle with the depth and glory of a far-off galaxy.
Sven smirks.
He reaches for his plain brown satchel. Inside is a very old, very sharp knife. Sven examines his thick bundle of notes one last time, double-checking they contain all the necessary information. Satisfied, he clips the pages back together and shoves them in the bag.
He strides across the street, breath steaming in the frozen, putrid air. The front door of the apartment building is barred and locked. Sven eyes the deadbolt. He reaches into the satchel and extracts a smaller pouch of instruments. There’s a blur of silver around the lock, and the door slides open with a faint click.
Sven enters the building. Alone.
Rule number one: never hunt an angel alone. Always bring someone.
The isolated nature of the job decrees angel hunters don’t work in pairs. So “someone” is a hooker, a street kid, a naive stranger seeking adventure. Someone who means nothing to you.
Slaying an angel — that is the worst thing you can do. You incur the wrath of the universe when you steal the life of its most pure, perfect beings. Retribution is swift.
No one knew exactly what finished Rafael Gonzales. His final hunt ended with his death — because the someone escaped, because he decided to go it alone, because of some other blunder. Whatever happened, there had been no other soul nearby to absorb the fatal blast of energy released when the angel died. No soul but Rafael’s.
He was not the first angel hunter whose career ended with a mistake like that. He would not be the last. But no one hunts angels solo.
No one but Sven Ketcher.
He has murdered scores of angels of every rank — always alone. Yet he survives. Lesser hunters marvel at how he does it, envious and fearful of the skill. They say Sven wears a magic vest. They say he sold his soul for immortality. They say he’s half-angel himself.
He stalks up a stairwell that hoards darkness, senses sharpened by adrenalin. He can almost make out a glowing trail on the steps where the angel Zephron’s feet touched the ground.
The path ends on the top floor. It’s dark and deserted. A window at the end of the hall shows gleaming skyscrapers, far away. Most of the apartment doors have been knocked off their hinges or removed altogether, while the closed doors emanate stony silence. Some have holes smashed in them, revealing sad emptiness.
Perfect. No interruptions, no witnesses. Just Sven and Zephron.
He pauses outside the splintery door at the very end of the corridor. It’s unlocked. Sven turns the knob. Some angels he’s found praying, some reading, some watching television. But most he’s found doing nothing. Standing still in empty rooms.
Zephron sits in a chair, staring out the window, face illuminated by a blue shaft of streetlight.
The angel is disguised as the loveliest woman Sven has ever seen. Soft browl curls tumble down around the smooth skin of her shoulders. Petite hands are folded in her lap. In the faint light she glows like a bioluminescent rose.
She looks at Sven with huge liquid eyes that glimmer like a tropical ocean under the moon. Her perfect face is blank, save for a touch of mournfulness.
The two of them stare at each other for a long time. Then she stands, the folds of her skirt billowing to the floor and sweeping around her figure as she takes a single step —
“Stop,” Sven says.
She stops. Amazing, how compliant the angels are. They’d probably cut off their own wings if you asked, if there weren’t divine edicts against such things.
“Show me your true form,” Sven orders.
Zephron straightens. A gold-white hue penetrates the room like sunbeams through a stormcloud. The hairs on Sven’s forearms stand up as raw power coruscates and crackles around him. Shafts of light shine from the woman’s eyes, pierce her scalp, tear through her dress. She’s consumed by a searing corona that obliterates her earthly avatar, a pillar of fire that would destroy Sven if he stared at it a microsecond too long.
The flame intensifies, resolves into a human shape — with blazing hands, eyes like coals, glimmers of hooves and scales and tails and coiled muscle swirling in the light. Sven’s ears roar, though the room is silent. He squints against the glare.
And the wings unfurl. Those gleaming, glistening, gorgeous feathers, and silvery and soft as the touch of moonlight, as calm and dangerous as the ocean. Against the fire of the angel Zephron’s body the wings are a balm that soothes the depths of even the most troubled soul. No wonder men trade away their fortunes for just one feather. They are more valuable than gold, rarer than unstable elements boiled up in sterile laboratories.
There are myths about children who are pure of heart, or virgins in distress, who received a feather from an angel as a gift. But no angel hunter has ever been given a feather. They must be taken.
Sven, careful not to look directly at the angel, slides the knife from his bag. The handle is black. The blade is black. The steely edge is so sharp it cuts the light radiating from the angel into spangling beams. Zephron, the sinews in its throat and lean tight like they’ve been carved from a slab of unblemished marble, watches the knife in Sven’s palm. The angel’s eyes glow like supernovas.
You are going to kill me.
The angel has no voice but its words resonate: they clang in your chest, pound in your stomach, quiver between your legs.
Sven tells the angel exactly what he is going to do to it.
Angels have no emotions. Not emotions as man understands them, at least: angels never show joy, or rage, or fear. But as it listens to Sven’s words, something flares in Zephron’s face. Some mix of understanding and resignation, and of sadness at the dark in mankind’s hearts.
“You don’t have a choice,” Sven says. His face is stony. He does not say “I’m sorry”, though the lack of the words rings in the air.
The angel nods gently, gazing at Sven with the intensity of a star.
Sven turns the knife in his hand. The light of those lustrous wings gleams on the blade. Then he steps towards the angel Zephron, holding the blade high.
The angel flinches but shows no other signs of pain as Sven makes the first cut, then another, then another. It holds it hands at its sides. From where he’s working Sven cannot see the angel’s face. He wields the knife expertly.
Finished, he steps back. Lays twelve angel feathers gently on the table. Liberated from Zephron’s wings, away from the turbulent glare of the angel’s body, they seem even brighter, cooler, richer. They are beautiful.
The storm of light in the room blows itself out. It’s dark again. Silent.
Sven wraps the cut feathers in soft cotton, stows them in specially made cardboard containers in his satchel. He takes one more thing out of the bag, then closes it, sighs, and turns to where the pillar of fire burned moments ago.
The beautiful olive-skinned woman regards Sven. He clears his throat. Does not return the gaze.
“You did a good job hiding yourself this long. You were unlucky. Turns out those idiots at the Tenshi Institute accidentally located you while they were testing some new particle accelerator,” he says to the transformed angel. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of them.”
It will take a lot of money and influence to shut down the Tenshi Institute’s research. But Sven has no shortage of the former, and therefore no shortage of the latter.
He holds out the papers bound with the bulldog clip. Zephron hesistates, then takes the dog-eared sheaf. A small frisson sparks up Sven’s arm in the moment when he and the angel are both touching the paper.
“Everything you’ll need is in there,” he says. “Bank details. Passports. Identity papers. And instructions. Read them tonight. Memorise them. Then destroy them. Follow them to the letter and I guarantee you will never be tracked. By anyone. Not even me. Do you understand?”
The woman nods. Her mouth opens, as if she’s about to speak, though she says nothing. But her words too ring on the air.
She takes Sven’s dossier, all the information she needs to make a new life for herself. Then she sweeps out of the room, leaving the faintest hint of sweetness in the air.
Sven lifts the satchel over his shoulder. Without the papers it’s no effort to wear. The feathers weigh almost nothing. Sven’s already thinking of the merchant in Chicago who’ll buy all 12 of them — and not be able to keep his mouth shut about it. In a matter of days every angel hunter in the world will know Zephron has been killed.
And no one hunts dead angels.
*
Author’s note: Thanks to my writers’ group for providing really insightful feedback on this short story (as always). I made the image that goes with this post so long ago I can’t remember where I stole borrowed it from and thus can’t remember who to credit. My apologies to the photographer.
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The Angel Hunter by Sam Downing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Tags: angels, Short stories, Sven Ketcher, The Angel Hunter
