Read Reapers Are the Angels for Free Online

into one of the storage rooms and wouldn’t let him have any. And when he says it, his tongue slithers across his lips, and she can see spittle dried white in the corners of his mouth.
    So she gets up and goes to the other side of the room and sits on the edge of a marble planter and watches the game and tries to ignore Abraham’s gaze, which she can still feel wanting to bite on her.
    Fifteen minutes later, one of the men at the game accuses another of pocketing pills on the ante, and a fight breaks out, the two men clawing at each other over the tabletop and others trying to hold them back, until the table is overturned and a colorful spray of pills scatters across the marble floor and a wild grab is made for whatever anyone can get.
    Temple’s seen enough, and she leaves the lobby and climbs many flights of stairs—until she’s out of breath—to a dark quiet floor where she can feel a curious breeze that she recognizes as authentic night air and not just the recirculated air from the ventilation system. She follows the breeze until she finds the source—a hole in the building itself. At the back of one of the wide-open office spaces there’s one set of windows, floor to ceiling, about eight feet wide, that has been broken out entirely. There are some chairs set up in front of the hole. An observatory.
    There’s no one around, so she goes to the hole and, bracing herself with both hands, looks out across the rooftops of the city. She must be twenty-five stories high, and it makes her dizzy, but she forces herself to look anyway. Down there, in the yellow pools of the streetlights that are not yet broken or burned out, she can see them moving lethargically, the dead, without direction or purpose. They move, most of them, even when there’s nothing to hunt—their legs, like their stomachs and their jaws,all instinct. She raises her gaze and her eyes blur teary in the cool wind and all the lights of the city go wild and multiple, and she wipes her eyes and sits in one of the chairs and looks out beyond the periphery of the power grid where the black rolls out like an ocean. It’s a place she knows—knows beyond the telling of it.
    She must be gone deep down the well of her brain, because she is not even aware of the man until he sits down beside her—a massive bearded figure who makes the chair groan metallic when he leans back on it. Moses, Abraham’s brother.
    I was just looking is all, she says, glancing around and finding that the two of them are alone. I wasn’t doin anything.
    The big man shrugs. He takes a cigar from the pocket of his jacket and bites off the end of it and spits it out the hole and strikes a match with his thumbnail and puffs the cigar into life. When he’s done with the match he flicks it out the window, and she watches the pale red ember disappear down into the dark.
    She watches him, not knowing if she should make a run for it. But he pays her no attention at all, just puffs on his cigar and stares out into the night.
    Finally she says, What you want anyway?
    This is the first time he turns to look at her, like she’s a ladybug landed on his knuckle or something.
    I want lots of things, he says. But nothin you got the power to deliver.
    She squints at him a little while longer but determines the threat is not an immediate one, so she sits back.
    That’s just fine, she says.
    And for a while their gazes over the city are a perfect parallel.
    He takes a puff of his cigar and then asks her a question.
    You ever seen a slug with no legs?
    She can’t figure out the direction of the question, but it seems safe to answer it.
    I did a few times, she says. Walkin all arms and elbows like a katydid.
    Uh-huh. He puffs the cigar again and goes on. You know, I heard of one commune over in Jacksonville decided to make a perimeter of gaspipe fire to keep the slugs scared off. What you think of that?
    I think that commune’s dead reckoned by now.
    How come?
    Because meatskins ain’t scared of