Metal Angel by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online Page A

cool him down. In between times he kept busy putting ice and ice water on the kid’s wing, wrists, forehead. Most of the soup went to waste. Texas ate a little, but gave up trying to get any down Volos. The wound swelled tight and hard, and Texas switched treatment from cold towels to hot, worrying, never sure he was doing the right thing. Late in the day he opened the smallest blade of his penknife, held it in a match flame, explained to Volos as best he could what he had to do and why. Had the kid grab hold of something, wadded bed sheets around his mouth, then lanced the wound. The kid screamed once when Texas opened it, then lay shaking while he pressed out the pus and serum and sprayed on the stinging antiseptic. Afterward, he lay staring but unresponsive, and Texas did not know what to say to him.
    â€œGo to sleep,” he tried, and Volos closed his eyes with a quick obedience that wrenched at McCardle’s heart. But his breathing came fast and restless.
    The fever grew only worse. By evening Volos’s wings, except for the region of the injury, had gone pale. Belly down on the bed, he lay with eyes closed, but their lids fluttered, his hands twitched and stirred, his head flounced from side to side. He panted, and sometimes a breath sounded like a soft moan or sometimes a whimper. Moving in a stupor of fatigue, Texas felt his heart aching like his sore feet and his overtaxed back. Somehow he had become vulnerable to the angel’s wretchedness. Volos’s thrashings and weary noises made him remember how it had been when his daughters were infants, when they had fought sleep, how the babies, newcomers to a terrifying mortality, had seemed unable to manage the transition to oblivion, unable to give in to the helplessness of sleep and dreams. Sometimes for as much as an hour Wyoma would stand by a crib patting and stroking a small back until the little stranger slept.
    Volos’s eyelids trembled like moths beating at a lamp, then opened. His pupils had dilated, and his stare looked hard and distant.
    â€œSo this is suffering,” he mumbled. “Well, I hate it. And I hate you.”
    Coming over with yet another hot towel for the hurt wing, Texas protested, “Kid, you think I wanted to hurt you? I told you, it was something I had to do! You want poison in you?”
    Volos did not respond. His gaze burned far past Texas. With vinegar in his voice he whispered, “Father. Up there on your throne. You call yourself a father? What father would do this to his children?”
    Volos was not speaking to him. This was delirium. Feeling spooked, Texas took a steadying breath and gentled his voice. “Hey.” Instead of applying the towel, he knelt down at the bedside, looked into eyes so wide and deep they seemed midnight black. “Volos. Just go to sleep, buddy.”
    Sky-dark eyes focused on him for a moment. “Texas.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œYou’re a human.” It sounded like an accusation. “You don’t understand how it is. You have a father, all you bloody humans have a father—” His voice, though weak, was rising in hysteria.
    â€œShhh.” Texas laid a hand on Volos’s shoulder to try to calm him. He could feel the kid quivering, thought wildly of calling an ambulance, knew suddenly that he could not do it, could not give up his adopted angel to public uproar and the care of strangers. Hell, he could manage, his mother and his Aunt Zora had pulled him through worse than this when he was a kid, back in those West Virginia days when everybody was stony broke, when nobody called a doctor; poor people didn’t trust them. Volos would be okay.
    Had to be.
    Volos drew back from his hand, pushed himself up on shaking arms to glare. “A doting father. He yearns over you humans, even the worst of you, no matter what you do he loves you all as he has never—loved—” It was an old song, and anger was the flip side