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ArchangelA Deed Without a Name

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STEVE HAMMONDWWW.STEVEHAMMOND.ORG

BRYAN SEVILLAWWW.bryansevilla.deviantart.com

script & letteringsteve hammond

art bybryan sevilla

archangel created byscott torwalt

original demon designoO

emersen ziffle

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Like all cities founded by a river bank, thenight reveals a second city in thereflections of the water. Where the

estuary widens to receive the sea, wind churnsthe water so that this reflected city is broken,discontinuous, senseless. Silver and glasstowers, monoliths of commerce.

A mirror­image is the city’s true face.

Residential lights go on as most office lightsgo off. Some remain, from high­rollers thrivingon pressure to interns, desperate not to fallbehind the rest of the rats. It is too late to catchthe underground with any sense of self­preservation.

Closely, now.

A career­chaser hopes to impress hisuncaring boss with unpaid overtime, cooking thebooks as he does so. In his delusion he expectsgratitude, even as the ache in his stomach isworse than he remembers. He’d get it checked ifhe could afford to.

A tryst between a middle­manager and hissecretary starts to fail as she realises his interestis only physical after all. The night­porter hasbeen silenced with a depressingly small stack ofbills. He’s tantalised with the possibility of‘accidentally’ walking in on them, like a scenefrom the late night cable porno he’s pirating.

A hotshot hacker makes further adjustmentsto the trojan he’s been placing in his coworkersworkstations to search for blackmail material.The word ‘hacker’ is baggage­heavy so hisbusiness card, without any irony, self­describeshim as a ‘code ninja’. The FBI intend to bust himbefore dawn. In the dark, they will mistake hishand­painted nerf gun for an AR15.

A limousine pulls up to the plaza of anotherof those silver and glass towers.

At least one of the occupants is a monster.

The tower’s doorman, weighed down witha routine twenty years in the polishing,

marches across and opens the rear kerbsidedoor with studied obsequiousness. He nodswordlessly, a mask of a smile presented to theoccupant, but it is not the VIP who emerges.Anyone watching the scene, whether the vagrantacross the road yelling at bespoke demons, orhustlers on the corner looking for a mark, cantell it’s the hired muscle which pushes free fromthe limo. Something in his movements. Precise,efficient.

Closing the door, the doorkeeper’smovements are also precise, but only fromrepetition; a groove worn deep into his days. Butthe Muscle’s movements are precise frominstant to instant, renewed each moment,wasting nothing. They serve the dual­purpose ofmotion and a stance from which to defend bothhimself and his charge. Bringing himself about,he heaves through a full rotation, clocking thetramp, the hustlers, a dozen passersby, a skylineempty of peering heads, and the streetwalkersreadying themselves for business transactions.Reading body language, expression, movementand history leads to an understanding of intent.

No­one, currently, gives a shit.

Which means it is safe.

Xavier Montoya does all of this faster than ittakes to describe, and is satisfied as to thesanctity of this small sliver of sidewalk leadingto the entrance. He taps on the roof of the limo.

The Maybach can’t be heard over theambient traffic noise, though its engine is stillrunning, the better for a surge of accelerationshould the situation change. It doesn’t and theVIP exits with a fluid grace, showing adetachment from the temporal world whichwould remain even if the situation did change.Money allows one the outsourcing of worry,though it leaves a hollow for fresh worries.

James Morgan is not alone. His datestumbles out of the car on pole­dancers’ shoes.As does his other date.

Did you know that Archangel is based on a work-in-progress web tvseries? We hate to leave you in suspense, so as a bonus here's a shortstory I wrote based on one of Scott's vignette scripts. I'm going tocall it The City. I want to show it to you because no comic worldwould be complete without the bad guys. That is to say, the really badguys.

-- Steve.

THE CITY

Montoya motions him towards the building,a subtle signal, little more than a flick of afinger. For all that the signal is small, it containsa great deal of information. It is not aninstruction, it is status indicator. One does notgive instructions to James Morgan. In the fewsteps across the sidewalk, Montoya’s gaze neverceases. The corner of the building, the patchbehind the mailbox, the truck turning intofourth. He projects a notional shield ofawareness around Morgan.

A t the summit of the building Morganslides a large, traditional, key into thelock of his penthouse suite. Retinal

scanners, keypads and pressure­plates areintolerably gauche. They can be safely kept tothe downstairs levels with the staff who are paidto care about such details. Here, twenty levelsabove the city’s human miasma, it is not aboutappearance though it may seem to be. It is aboutcorrectness.

Behind, Montoya relaxes a fraction, a moodchange of which nothing is visible on thesurface. A scan of the room shows nothing out ofplace, so he attends to prearranged businessthrough another door, leaving his charge withsome measure of privacy, though never out ofhis awareness.

Morgan’s eyes are not still for a moment,mapping his dates’ contours like a mountainsurvey. On some buried level, he rememberswhen charm took effort, each off­the­ cuff quiprefined over months until requiring no thought.Once he might have felt a note of attractionabove the vulgar symphony of the physical. Butas with the city itself, only the surface ultimatelymatters.

The girls know the drill, bookending eitherend of the sofa as Morgan moves to the minibar.

“Feel free to start without me,” he jokes,though it’s not a joke, to giggles.

He picks up a Boston shaker and mixesthree drinks – apple Juleps – originated by acocktail designer his daughter once gifted forhim in London. Kait looks him in the eye,unwavering, as she takes the cocktail glassesfrom him one at a time, placing them on thecoffee table. They aren’t sitting so far apart, bydesign, that he can’t squeeze intimately besidethem.

Now the laughter of his dates isunconditional. Each giggle Jenna emits ismerely cover for a missing word in hervocabulary, a drop­in replacement for reactionsshe doesn’t know how to handle: she’s new.

Kait’s laugh is convincing, but entirely fake,being built from memories of prom night andSimpson’s episodes. She tries to kiss Morgan, inslow, liquid movements. Article One in thedates­for­dollars playbook.

“No kissing,” he says, “at least not yet.”

Jenna shrugs, starts popping open his shirtbuttons as Kait slides her hand into eachrevealed space, lower and lower. No­one isunder any illusion as to what happens next.

For their part, neither of the girls canbelieve the quality of their catch. Normally it’srich, dumb, tech entrepreneurs; the kind ofdweebs who keep their boxers on past thirdbase. A few strokes to the ego ­ gosh how smartyou must be to code up a big web site ­ and therest of the evening plays out on autopilot. Bycontrast, spending time in the presence ofJames Morgan is a pleasure. Closing his eyes asthey work reveals a man concerned with farmore than mere appearance.

Kait is already reinventing her backstory onthe fly. A touch of the exotic, customising herpersonal narrative to fit what a man like thismight appreciate. She majored in psychology,didn’t have the connections for a job. Gettingthose connections – social engineering, sweet­talking, Googling, and plain old­fashionedsleeping around – proved an end in itself.

It’s not about sex, power, control, or any ofthat pop­ psych horseshit.

It’s performance art.

Of course it’s only useful for what thosetextbooks called the bulk neurotypical, hertheory­of­mind applicable only to the middle67% of the Bell Curve. More plainly, her Jedimind­tricks only work on normal people.

A little­understood failure mode.

The door to the office opens.

“Sir, you’ll want to see this,” says Montoya.

“Can’t this wait?” Irritation rises in Morganfor the first time in weeks, though if Montoya istelling him at a moment like this, then he isalready certain that it can’t wait.

“No,” comes the confirmation.

“Pain in the ass,” he says softly to the girls,making light of the interruption as if to say ‘whois this doofus?’ Just another adorable momentin the evening, but his manner belies theseriousness to which he is taking this. “Keepgoing, I’ll be right back.”

Behind him, the girls eye­roll each other, toanother fit of giggles. “Me first,” whispers Jenna,

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pitched just loud enough for Morgan to hear,and starts another well­honed routine bystroking Kait’s hair.

Morgan’s office is in darkness, lit by thefaint orange glow of the night airentering the full­height window. The

single desk in the centre, the bookshelf fillingthe wall, the cabinet of curios filling the otherwall, each defined only by edges of shelvingcatching the spontaneous art installation ofever­present urban lightshow outside.Contributions from squad cars, neon adverts, afloodlit corporate logo from the next toweralong.

Even so, it all adds up to something too faintto see the contents of the bookcase or thecabinet with. Ambient glow is not enough toreveal if Morgan is a connoisseur of 18th centuryliterary classics, 20s silent cinema or has anunlikely passion for 90s Seattle grunge. Only theharsh blue rectangle of the computer monitor,the sole concession to visible office equipment,defines the room by the spill of dominant light.Montoya stands by the machine, hawkishly, as ifguarding against cyber­threats as well asphysical ones.

“The message you were expecting came in,”he tells his boss, the item in question alreadycentred on screen for perusal.

“Excellent,” Morgan says to himself, havingonly seen the email’s subject line, then louder,“extend my regrets to the girls. It looks like wewon’t be having a party after all.”

“Yes, sir.”

He reads the message as Montoya exits theoffice, the moment of the door’s openingallowing more giggles in ­ Jenna and Kaitinhabiting their roles ­ then re­reads it again.

There is a moment. The giggles fade again,but a single waft of air current tells him the dooris still open. The sound is not blocked off. It hasstopped because of, he realises a fraction toolate, what is about to happen.

“Oh no…,” he whispers, but the screaminghas started.

Montoya has changed. Muscles havetightened, tendons stretched.Releasing the vampire within is

joyous, like kicking off tight shoes. Jenna lies onthe sofa at an inhuman angle, limbs bent in waysthey shouldn’t go, blood from the remains of herthroat forming a crimson waterfall pooling onthe carpet. Kait is proving more palatable toMontoya as he feeds, holding her effortlesslyabove the floor. Her mental schooling –

ultimately – of no use against a subject withouta human psyche. That particular axiom is null.She may as well have been a dog whisperer.

“Actually,” Morgan begins without a hint ofreproach, “when I said ‘extend my regrets’ I wasserious.” Morgan regards the meat with thedisappointment one might feel at ordering thewrong colour of binders for the office, or ofleaving the lunch requirements too vague. Amiscommunication, nothing more. No matter.It’s something they will laugh about later.

“I was going to invite them back. Theywould have made excellent breeders.”

True, Montoya would think, if his state ofmind in the vampire form can be said to havehuman thoughts. It is consumed with thetactility of flesh, an enjoyment of fooddownright Korean in its nuance. More than that,more than the raw human soup of blood is élanvitesse, the life force, a summation of all thatmade her human, her experiences, hermemories, all shaping the life force. A life well­lived is deliciously textured.

Montoya does not say anything as he dropswhat was Kait to the floor, all possible futuresfor her now erased. If nothing else, he’s gratefulthat Morgan’s dates are normally so classy.More than once, when feeding, a date’s hadlevels of methadone he could taste even weeksafter the last hit. Not that it could ever affecthim, not that way, but the sensation it gives hisgut is somewhat akin to eating rotting meat.

Despite his vetting, sometimes one slipsthrough.

The vampire’s head bows as the vasodilationin his face eases off. He takes a deep breath,then another, each one releasing some of thechange. Facial muscles shift again, skin stretchesin places, slackens in others. Once again hepasses for human, or a fine analogue of one.

“Nothing we can do about it now,” Morgansays, pondering. “Call in a cleanup crew.” Part ofhim wonders about new decor, replacing thechaise longue with a more traditional sofa,perhaps. But acting on the message takespriority. “Schedule a flight to Washington.”

He throws him a towel to clean the bloodslick from his hand, the better to use acellphone.

Xavier Montoya, the vampire muscle, turnsaway to speed­dial, prioritising the flight. On anairstrip fifteen minutes south, by the third ring,a crew is already spooling up the Cessna’sturbines. He tells them Ronald Reagan National,outlines expected times, who to buy off at

customs, instructs them to arrange a car at thefar end.

As for the cleanup crew, he tells them only“here,” omitting the qualifier “again,” andthumbs the hangup.

Not for the first time, he thinks, they oughtto have an app for that.

Lastly, here's some bonus character art fromBryan. We hope you enjoyed this. If you'd like to buythe complete issue, go search 'Archangel' onComixology. Thanks! (And as you can see, we're notdone making comics yet...)

-- Steve.

Elena Roskova

oliver Gant

Rachael Torven

also by lrdv comics

coming soon