My heart is jumping in my chest, and my palms feel clammy. “I was just coming to see my father,” I say.
“Father?” the dark man asks. “Father.”
“Ah, the father,” the light man breathes reverently. “His… name?”
“Green. Edward,” the dark man says, his eyes twitching back and forth rapidly. “Edward Benjamin Green.”
“Transposed,” the light man responds. “One is the other and the other is one. Big Eddie? From the sign?”
“Yes,” the dark man agrees. “The sign.”
“Crossed?”
The dark man’s eyes twitch again. “No,” he says, sounding confused. “He… hasn’t. He’s…. paradox. Contradiction. How…?”
The light-skinned man reaches out a white hand and touches the dark man on his shoulder, a caressing slide of his fingers. “It doesn’t matter. Not now. Later. Now is blue. Now is Calliel.”
The dark man shakes his head quickly, as if trying to clear his thoughts. “Yes. Calliel.”
They look at me again. The angel’s hands are still pressed against my back.
The dark man says. “The angel Calliel. Where is he?”
“I told you,” I say, my voice high-pitched. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“You’re lying,” the light man says. And then he smiles at me, and it’s such a terrible thing that my stomach twists and my skin crawls. There’s no humanity in it, just a wide grin under the dead, black eyes of a shark. “The scratches? Wings, we should think.”
“What… scratches?” I say faintly.
“The angel?” the dark man asks. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know any angel!”
“Lies,” the light man says.
“Deceit,” the dark man says almost regretfully.
They take a step toward me at the same time, and then another. And then another. “We can make you,” the dark man promises. “We can make you tell us things. So many little things.”
I take a step back and glance down as something falls. A vase. Flowers spilled.
The light man continues to grin at me. “Things… you wouldn’t normally share. Things your heart keeps hidden. It will hurt. The angel. Where is he? The angel Calliel.”
“He has broken law,” the dark man says as they take another step. “He has disrupted order. The design. He is not belief. He has fallen from faith. His job was one single thing, and he broke. He broke from what he was.”
“Make him call out?” the light skin man asks. “I think he will scream and the angel will come. Make him scream? He can… scream.”
I feel like screaming. But I can’t.
They are five feet away. The light man stretches out his arms in front of him, his bone-white fingers waggling at me, like he’s saying mine, give me mine, mine.
“He’ll come,” the dark man says. “Scratches. On the ceiling. This boy is protected.”
“How—”
I bring my foot up and stomp on the vase. It shatters. The noise causes the Strange Men to take a step back. I reach down quickly and grab a large shard, the end wicked sharp. I point it at the Strange Men. “Come on, then, you assholes,” I snap at them. “You want to fuck with me? You want to fuck with my town? Come on, then!” By the end, I’m shouting.
A flutter of wings from overhead.