Metal Angel Read Online Free

your eyes.”
    Volos obeyed. Texas turned off the light, found his way around the bed in the dim cityglow of the window, settled in the room’s beat-up excuse for an armchair, and tried not to think. He slumped down, propping his long legs on the edge of the bed. Dozed for a while. Became aware that he was effortlessly sleeping, which surprised him so much that he jolted awake. Took a look at his foundling. Volos lay still, but his eyes were open and staring.
    â€œClose your eyes,” Texas reminded him.
    â€œI am not asleep, then?”
    â€œNot hardly. Not if you’re talking to me.”
    â€œPeople do not tell each other things when they are sleeping?”
    â€œNot that I know of.”
    Volos said, “Perhaps she is awake, then. She might be awake in the night?”
    Texas looked at him. Under the shadow of his brows the kid’s eyes seemed large and darker than he remembered. Keeping his voice quiet, he asked, “What are you talking about?”
    Volos said, “It is not the usual thing? A young woman far to the east, a silent woman, I can hear her. A shrouded woman. She is thinking, or dreaming, and sending me the dreams.”

chapter two
    Far to the east: sitting at a kitchen table in a stolid brick house in Jenkins, Pennsylvania. It was morning there. The dishes were done, the beds made, the laundry churning in its rectilinear machine. Her husband was out of the house, the children playing in the fenced back yard. Therefore she could get out her Bic pen and tablet paper, sit down a minute and write the words.
    This angel’s taking a fall
    This angel’s full of the devil
    Red rhythms pulsed in her head. Physically, as if addicted, she craved rock and roll, the music that made her feel like dancing naked. But even with the children outside she did not dare to bring out the garage-sale radio she kept hidden in the bottom of her Kotex box. She would have to wait until they were napping. Little Michael and Gabe were only two and three years old. They might need her suddenly, and then someone might hear, however faintly, the low, ominous thudding of drums and bass guitar. Or the boys themselves would hear and blab. One way or another, word would get around fast if people found out that Angie Bradley, Reverend Crawshaw’s daughter, listened to the devil’s music.
    You say die and go to Heaven
    Gonna be an angel
    But this angel ain’t no dead person Daddy
    This angel is alive
    I WANT TO LIVE
    A knock at the back door.
    The sound acted on Angie like a cattle prod. With panicky haste she thrust tablet and pen into a kitchen drawer. Her hands checked her hair (innocent of perm, smoothed back and decently bunned beneath a stiff white prayer bonnet) and her skirt (long enough to cover her knees). She knew without looking who was knocking: her father. No one else dropped by without phoning first.
    And there, sure enough, on her scrubbed back stoop he stood, Reverend Daniel Ephraim Crawshaw in his crow-black suit and bow tie, his head thrust forward slightly for a close look at her. “I been praying for you, daughter,” he told her.
    â€œGood.” She stood back to invite him in.
    â€œI pray for you constantly, Angela.” He passed through the hallway and stepped into the front room, looking around. Light poured in through entirely too many tall windows. The house was as old as her father, precisely square, two-story, built with fearsome symmetry. Across each of its four faces windows marched wherever there was not a door. In the wintertime, coldness poured in like daylight. Angie and Ennis hoped to build a place of their own someday, something cozier, more private, but meanwhile Angela spent most of her life housecleaning. There was no place out of that fierce light to hide anything, nowhere to let the dirt lie. Yet her father glowered around at her hand-me-down furniture as if expecting to find a murdered body. “Have you read your Bible this