| |
––––––––
He felt it even through the coveralls, hands braced, cheek inches from a hole in the drywall. Gabriel couldn’t see through the bones of the house, it was too dark for that, but he could hear the sudden intake of breath, the snap of a twig outside the back door.
A presence.
It was earlier than the appointed time. Couldn’t have been the dealer. Must have been someone else.
Demon began cackling and saying how much fun it would be to watch, how the blood was already pumping through Gabriel’s thick, mortal veins. “You are a brilliant host,” he said. “And I am a patient witness.”
“It’s a novelty to you,” Gabriel whispered, trying to focus on the threat. “A world teeming with life you want to destroy.”
“Not destroy. Educate. I want them to know how powerful they can be. Lords of their own manors. Imagine!”
Gabriel had imagined. That’s what had lured him away from a stifled existence in the first place, the in-your-face philosophies of how to be and what to say. He wanted to be king in his own world, wanted full control. It would be so much easier, wouldn’t it?
Focus.
He pressed a fingertip against the wall between him and the intruder, gauging the quiet but heavy sound of a boot, shuffling now to cover his approach. It had to be a male, Gabriel thought, and that made him mad.
He wasn’t aware he was being followed, should have been more careful, should have doused the single candle on the floor. It was the detective and he didn’t want to do it.
Pulling the hood up over his head, he waited, senses prickling as he held his breath. He knew exactly when the curtain would go up before the show, because it was more dangerous inside the house than out, and whoever it was stood no chance at all.
“You’ll cut him,” Demon said. “And cut him good.”
“He might have a gun.”
“He doesn’t.”
What cop doesn’t carry a gun?
Gabriel took the knife from the kitchen countertop, an antique slider his father once used for hunting. Thumb hovering over the button on the sheath, he estimated the detective was right outside the back door now, feet noiseless in the dirt and crouched behind the lower panel, eyes level with the keyhole.
Demon chuckled and the sound was flat. “Now, unlock the door and let him in.”
Gabriel twisted the lock silently, hearing only the continual chunter of Demon’s voice.
“By all accounts my kind should have been miserable when we were cast out. But we weren’t. Not at the beginning. Now I just watch, wonder what it’s like to be filled with hunger and desire. Man is one lucky―”
Shut up! Gabriel thought, flattening himself against the wall behind the back door. He realized the knife wasn’t enough. He would need something to bring the man down, knock him out. He looked around blindly and that’s when he saw the antique iron on the bathroom floor, metal, heavy, and leaning up against the baseboard. He padded only a few feet and lunged for it.
A scuffling sound.
He enjoyed the mounting fear the detective must have felt as he saw a flicker of amber through that key-filled cavity. Even so Gabriel stiffened and bit the inside of his cheek, anticipated the drop of the door lever, the thin shriek of metal hinges as the door eased open no more than a hand’s width.
The ice on the wind made Gabriel blink a few times and there was an odor of cologne, sickly, invasive. He waited, visualized the size of the man by the sound of his tread. Could only see one side of his face as he walked toward the center of the room.
Gabriel was behind him now. Saw a cloud of breath snaking through thin lips, sensed the detective was taking in the small space in front of him through an unfocused eye, the mattress, the black leather gym bag.
How foolish to enter a house without a weapon, no reason to be there in the first place. Unless he was looking for cash.
Detectives always carry weapons, fool! And they don’t steal cash.
The detective must have smelled shampoo and a faint residue of steam, but he never felt the terrible weight against the back of his head. Knees slammed into the floor and perhaps... just perhaps he felt Gabriel’s gloved hand at his cheek, the sudden jerk of his head and a cold blade that sliced through the large artery at his throat.
Blood arced as far as the mattress, a warm spray against Gabriel’s cheek and the taste of it on his lips made him retch. The detective attempted a wet gurgle, dropped to his knees, right shoulder hitting the floor with a hard thud. Then came the shudder and the spasms, hands clutching both sides of his neck as a dark pool collected beneath him. Slick and shiny, black as tar.
The man was slipping away. He would never see the cottonwoods in the Bosque again, or the copper skies of New Mexico in the summertime. He would never know what was in that black gym bag.
“There,” Gabriel murmured, wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Are you pleased now?”
There was no reply. No round of applause. Gabriel expected Demon to crow his knowledge of life and death, regale him with stories of how he fell to earth in a blaze of lightning, wings scorched even before he touched the ground.
“Did I fail?” Gabriel hated to ask, but imagined the killing to be a death worthy of Demon’s expectations, a mark he had earlier fallen short of.
The silence was unnerving.
Gabriel studied the corpse, squinted at it for a second or two. He re-sheathed the knife and slipped it in his pocket, didn’t want to ask any more questions, wanted to save himself the indignity of another lecture.
The eyes were bulbous and there was no life in them. It suddenly struck him as odd that there had been a living, moving body less than a few minutes ago and now it was a limp mass on his kitchen floor. Something in Gabriel’s dreams resonated with this scene, not so much the death itself, but the helplessness of the intruder.
Where Gabriel had extraordinary discernment, the type that Demon called near-divine, this man had not been able to sense anything at all. Certainly not death at the end of another passing day.
A tear collected in the corner of Gabriel’s eye and he was aware he had not been this emotional for years. He studied the man’s face, the curve of the body, the wavy hair, and through a haze of tears he could see the man was morphing into someone else.
“You knew!” he cried, hearing the deafening pulse in his ears. “Why didn’t you tell me!”
Demon was up there in that suffocating silence, spiraling higher and higher in the endless void of space. A flying gargoyle banking first to the left and then to the right, picking up speed and shrieking in an ear-piercing crescendo.
Gabriel pressed two hands against his ears, rocking back and forth at a heralding din of trumpets that seemed to phrase an impending finale. A sudden burst of light and the pain in his skull ebbed like the surge of an ocean upon a rocky shore.
“Wake up,” he said, stabbing dead flesh with a knuckle. He lifted himself off the bloody floor and staggered about in a viscous pool.
“Don’t torture yourself,” Demon whispered, voice drifting in and out. “Death... life, none of it matters.”
But it did matter. Like it mattered the first time Gabriel stepped on a sleepy butterfly on the lawn. He had been six then.
“Everything has to die,” Demon whispered on a downward spiral, coming to land on the kitchen counter as if he had burst through a roof that wasn’t there. “You just gave it a leg up.”
Gabriel closed his eyes and when he opened them again the man looked like he was homeless or a drunk looking for money to feed his craving. But the thoughts were empty this time as if Gabriel was trying to confirm something he knew to be false. Had no right.
“Of course you have rights,” Demon muttered. “All people have rights. You are the king of your own castle, the lord of all you survey. Isn’t that right, Gabriel? Isn’t that the truth?”
Gabriel shook his head and backed away from the scene as if it had taken on a filthy stench. “Get me out of these clothes,” he whimpered, scratching at his chest, his arms, his legs. “Get me out of here.”
“Just as I thought,” Demon said. “Feeble. Like all manflesh. You’re no better than the dirt you came from.”
