He wanted to make them pay now. He’d stolen her the flowers and balloons from the cemetery. Stupid to bring those kinds of things to dead people. What could they do with them? He had meant to leave them for Candace to tell her he was here and coming for her but that was before he’d seen her take the cripple to bed. Before she’d made him disgrace himself. Now he would use them for something else. The flowers he’d tossed away, they were useless. The balloons were those shiny crinkly kind with messages on them. They were full of helium and tugged at his hand.

When he was in that place, one of the night guys used to watch a show that had an old bald guy who would do bad things. He liked watching him kill people, though he was smart enough not to let anyone know that. He always watched the show from behind his door after lights out. He’d seen Mike, the guy on the show, short out all the power to a house before he broke in with balloon’s just like these. He jogged back to the vacant house he was staying in next door and found a straw. The front of his pants were sticky from what she’d made him do. He walked out to the street from the neighboring house and found where the power line went from the street to Candace’s house. It was nothing to set up the balloons and the straw the way they did on the show. Then he let it go, watching it float up and wrap itself around the spot he needed it to. Sparks showered down and he worried about the grass catching fire but the rain earlier meant the grass was too wet.

It would be poetic to have the two of them die in a fire. Like the flames of hell consuming the demon and the harlot he’d made. His shoulders slumped, he’d been so excited to see if his plan could work he didn’t think it through and now he had nothing to kill them with. He ducked behind the cripple’s car so he could go back to being invisible. There were fewer sparks falling now. The street lights left pools of light below them but long dark patches where they didn’t shine. The car was parked in one of those making it easy to hide nearby and easy to see inside if you stayed invisible.

On the dash, he saw the demon’s business card. Why didn’t he think about it before? Because she had distracted him, taunted him, making him think she was the one because she was so broken. He needed to go to the library. He could find anything on the internet. He could even find where the demon hid at night. Voices near the front of the harlot’s house roused him to action. They were arguing, the demon was going to call the police about the balloons and the harlot thought it was just a coincidence. The cripple didn’t want to take any chances. They were going to stay at his place. Fine, they couldn’t really hide from him. He was on the street side of the car so they couldn’t see him from the house yet. He waited until they were distracted and eased himself further back into the dark. He could hide in the trees across the street and then go back to the house he was staying in when they left.