Butterfly Catchers – Details

Teaser

It spiralled up and up, light as air, clear and perfect, rising through the slanting shafts of sunlight as if it had been made to do nothing else, created for just this time and place, and for him to discover it here. He wanted to reach out and touch it, to impossibly grasp the air and trap it between his fingers.

Then the man sitting near the pulpit coughed and the moment was gone, the music just music.

The coughing idiot turned to the two lace-mittened ladies, who were the only other people attending evensong, and began delivering an apologetic pantomime of chest banging, as if that somehow covered the situation. Angelus growled low in his chest. But the mood was broken – the choirboy had finished his solo and the cathedral filled with the complex blending of the whole choir, not the lone spiral of the soloist.

Angelus glared about him and considered how pleasurable it would be to snatch from the wall one of the ragged flags crumbling above the memorials of the county regiment, leap across the gaping expanse of the nave, and thrust the staff clean through the man’s eye-socket. To leave it quivering in the solid oak of the pew-back behind, and then gently lap the blood as it trickled down one rigid, white cheek.

There was a time when he would have done just that.

Angelus scowled. He couldn’t leave for at least another hour, the shafts of evening sunlight streaming across the cathedral close would see to that, but the intrusion had taken away all his pleasure in the music.

After a moment he pushed off the pillar he had been leaning against, and made himself head up the nave again, rapping his knuckles against the flag staff as he passed in a little tattoo that did nothing at all to relieve his feelings.

But even as he moved he could feel his footsteps start to slow, the fire of his annoyance slipping away, and, like a gnat’s whine in his head, as he approached the gaping expanse of the crossing he could feel the fury building against him, the pressure of dismissal, of disgust. And once again he spun round and turned back into the dark cavern of the aisle.

The aisle felt safe. A stack of unused hymn-books and service sheets in cardboard boxes lolled against one wall, while in the corner the stepladders and paint-pots of some artisan lay piled, inadequately hidden under a sheet. And, littering the walls and floor, the dull effusions of memorial plaques proclaimed that in this cathedral were interred the remains of the great, the good and the grossly moneyed. The mundanity of humanity ruled here, not the other thing. The gnat’s whine was muffled. Barely noticeable.

He made to kick out at the hymn-books and then something inside warned him not to disturb the service and that made him crosser still. He paced away and told himself that if he left well alone the boy might sing again. It was worth being patient for that.

Read on…

Disclaimer

Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel, and all the characters in them, are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Twentieth Century Fox, the WB, UPN, and just about everybody else on the planet except me. I acknowledge this fully; and I promise I’m only playing with them without hope of profit. I will put them back in the box carefully when I’m done and apologise if they got a bit hurt while I was using them. But come on, they are vampires, they can probably take it.

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