by Cole McCade
He was made all of gold, as if the sun’s pale yellow light shone at night—but if not for the shimmering banner of his hair he would melt into the shadows, with his dusky, tanned skin and long, trailing black coat hanging open over a sleek, body-molded Kevlar vest. He wore the vest brazenly, a silent badge of violence whispering of black things not meant to be seen by the light of day. He wasn’t meant to be seen by the light of day; he was made of whispers and darkness, and were the sun to rise in this single moment he might cease to exist entirely, fled back to the place where eldritch things and nightmares hid come dawn.
He continued to regard her in measuring silence, until all the low secret places inside her drew up tight with fear and she couldn’t breathe. Every moment was a small infinity, seconds ticking by and yet all nothing more than one instant frozen, lasting forever, never to break—until he lifted one brutishly large hand and adjusted his glasses with quiet precision, nudging them up the bridge of his fine, straight nose.
Then he inclined his head to her in a polite nod that carried the weight of a bow, and walked right past as if she wasn’t there.
She swallowed, her mouth sticky and dry. Her lungs unlocked, and she dropped where she stood, her legs melting from beneath her and spilling her to her knees, her fingers clutching the strap of her messenger bag like a lifeline. She’d thought—she didn’t know what she’d thought. It didn’t matter.
Willow shifted to twist awkwardly back, flopping over onto her butt when her legs wouldn’t hold her enough to stand, and faced the fox-eyed man and the bleeding guy. “Hey,” she gasped out. “He needs help, I think he’s been shot—”
“No,” the fox-eyed man said, his voice a soft thing of quicksilver and deep pools of black water, subtly inflected with an accent she didn’t quite recognize. “Not shot.”
“What—”
“Not you.” The bleeding man stared at the giant, the stranger, the Nephilim towering over him, eyes wide, already pallid skin turning a waxy gray. He pushed himself back against the wall as if he could melt through it, feet scrabbling desperately, breaths coming in loud, wild rasps. “Not…n-not you…not you, get away from m-me, no, no, no no no no no—”
The fox-eyed man darted forward: silent, swift, like a crow folding its wings and diving in a flutter of feathers. A flash of silver sliced the air, trailing a reflective glow in its wake—and drawing forth a fountain of blood. The bleeding man’s cries cut off in a gurgle, then silence. His throat opened in a lipless mouth, a wide leering grin with too-smooth edges. A scream came up Willow’s throat like vomit. She clamped her hand over her mouth to stop it, trapping all but a squeak. Her eyes welled hot with liquid-fire tears, blurring her vision and turning the fox-eyed man into a towering blur of white-gold and black and the slow drip-drip-drip of such red, red blood coursing down the edge of the blade in his hand.
He’d killed him.
Right in front of Willow, he’d killed him.
Terror raced in and out of her lungs, riding her breaths and chilling her from the inside out. She didn’t dare move. Trembling, she fought that need to scream, to sob, but couldn’t stop her soft whimper. The fox-eyed man’s head jerked toward her, street lamps reflecting off amber eyes and turning them viper-yellow, piercing. He craned his head in a strange, eerily fluid-mechanical movement, watching her, his expression utterly unreadable but his lips parted like a snake scenting the air for prey. He took a single step toward her.
And Willow found her legs.
She found her legs like a deer with the wolf’s jaws already snapping at her belly, and one hope of escape. Scrambling to her feet, scraping her hands on the pavement, she launched herself toward the mouth of the alley. She didn’t look back. She didn’t dare. If she looked back, she’d meet his eyes and turn to stone. One glance, and she’d be dead.
Please, she thought as she spilled out onto the street, and flung herself toward home.
Please. I don’t…
I don’t want to die.
CHAPTER THREE
SHE DIDN’T STOP RUNNING UNTIL she reached home.
She tumbled against the chain-link gate of the house, scrabbling for the latch, her fingers slipping and the links rattling under her panting weight. She couldn’t breathe, her throat on fire and her chest straining like bursting stitches when she couldn’t get enough air and there was acid in her lungs and a hitch in her side and a mouth full of tears and the taste of her own screams. She managed to rip the latch free, scraping her fingertips in a raw slash of pain on the twisting wires poking over the top, then yanked the gate open in a protesting shriek of rusty hinges. Spilling inside, she slammed the chain link shut behind her and latched it desperately, as if it would keep the fox-eyed man out—then whirled, staring back down the street with her heart a wild stampede.
Nothing.
No shadowy figure at her back, lunging to wrap her in the crow’s wings of his coat and carry her away. No silent predator skulking under the street lamps, the light gleaming off his glasses and turning that white-gold hair into a fallen angel’s halo. No acid-yellow eyes stripping her bare, peeling skin from flesh from bone and looking for the best place to slit her open and leave her bleeding out.
She’d lost him.
Or he hadn’t even bothered to follow her, because he didn’t care and she wasn’t important enough to matter.
She stumbled back across the walk, tripping on the haphazardly placed stepping stones, the overgrown lawn crunching under her feet. The backs of her ankles hit the front step and she crumpled, dropping down to curl up on the porch stairs. Hunching into herself, she covered her head with her arms—as if she could protect herself from the crushing horror, shake its terrible and smothering weight. God, he’d just…flashfire-quick, that blade across his throat and blood everywhere, the way it had showered like scarlet spray-paint, that blank empty look on the man’s face, those eyes still so green even as the light went out of them and they turned so glassy it was like nothing had ever been behind them at all.
Something inside her burst. This bubble of fear, of sickness, shock and horror swelling until it couldn’t contain itself anymore and popped inside her, gurgling out in a hoarse, harsh sob. She hugged her messenger bag to her chest and rocked forward, back, again and again, crying in throat-scouring gasps, hurting every time she gulped out another barking sound so hard it shook her body from head to toe. She had to get it all out now, because her father was waiting inside and he needed her help, and she couldn’t dump this at his feet when stress could trigger his multiple sclerosis symptoms into overdrive.
She should call the police. Report that she’d witnessed a murder. An execution. But then they’d ask why she hadn’t done anything; why instead of calling 911 she’d run, like a weak and frightened thing. They’d ask what was wrong with her, and she wouldn’t have a single answer.
It’s your fault, they’d say. You should have been a responsible citizen and done something.
What could I do? How could I have stopped that?
You could have done anything, the stern, officious voice in her head accused. Anything would have been better than nothing.
“Willow?”
She nearly screamed. But it was only her father’s voice, muffled from inside the house. Even through the peeling, off-white clapboard siding he sounded tired. He always sounded tired; sometimes waking up was all it took to exhaust him, rolling over in bed with those hard deep hollows carved under his eyes and the lines of pain etched around his mouth.
“Willow, is that you out there?”
Sniffling, she scrubbed at her nose and looked over her shoulder, at the torn screen door. “Yeah, Dad.” She was afraid to raise her voice when the fox-eyed man might be skulking a block over, following her trail and waiting for the right sign to point him her way. “I just got home. I’ll be in in a minute.”
“Okay, sweetheart.”
Breathing in deep, using each inhalation to force her constricted throat open, she dragged her fingers through her h
air and rubbed her eyes. She couldn’t go in like this. Even with the electricity off, he’d see her by the light of the Coleman lanterns, her face red and blotchy and her nose and lips all swollen and her hands a scraped-up mess. But she couldn’t stand to stay out here, either, when if she was smart she’d go to ground and not show her face around the Nests for a few more days. If her father asked if she’d been crying, she’d say she got turned down for another job.
Better than saying I saw a man murdered tonight, and it might be my fault.
She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her eyelids, massaging against the heat and tension building in the backs of her eye sockets.
It is my fault.
If I hadn’t frozen…if I hadn’t panicked…
If I hadn’t been such a coward.
She could rationalize all she wanted. Tell herself running was common sense; that she was only one girl, unarmed, and she couldn’t have done a thing when the man was already bleeding out, dying, with no hope for someone like her against a man who stood as tall as a Titan and hunted like a striking red crane stabbing deep into its prey’s vulnerable underbelly. It was practical. Logical. Self-preservation.
It was cowardly.
And she hated herself for the glassy look in those dead green eyes.
With a shaking breath she pushed herself to her feet, smoothed over her clothing, then used her shirt to wipe her face. The porch boards creaked under her feet as she stepped onto it, followed by a querulous groan from the screen door and a squeaking rattle from the tumblers on the front door lock. Theirs was a house of sounds, always talking to her, grumbling and chirping and sighing, but right now those little voices that made up a house were all saying the same thing with every creak and groan and rattle:
Coward.
You let a man die, and you’re a coward.
She stepped inside to moon-shafts shimmering over the sparse space of their two-bedroom house, everything crafted of simple, pale raw wood with minimalist floral things here and there, making the small rooms look bigger than they really were. She liked neatness, openness, and liked to think of Japanese apartments that made the most of every inch with as little clutter as possible, turning a shoebox into an elegant micro-home.
She didn’t quite have the hang of that, but she could at least make their simple home into an airy space without the walls crushing in like a trash compactor to crumple and cube the junk inside. She set her messenger bag on the unvarnished pine of the kitchen table, then pulled the freezer open. She’d kept it somewhat cold by filling it with bags of ice; it couldn’t actually keep frozen food frozen, but it worked as a substitute refrigerator in a pinch. Right now it was keeping several sandwiches cold in ziplocked bags, ready-made and marked with dates and easy to open even with shaking, nerve-damaged, aching fingers.
She counted them. There had been twelve this morning when she’d left to use the library computers to put in a few more job applications, but the count came up at ten now. Good; her father had eaten.
The clack-thump-thud of her father’s crutches drifted down the hall. His every step was a process, lifting the cane-like crutch with a clack and hiss of the spring supports and arm cuff, shifting his weight to the other one, putting the crutch down with a thump, dragging his leg forward with a thud. That sound told her how close he was, clack-thump-thud, clack-thump-thud, counting out the seconds until she had to put on her game face and pretend she hadn’t just watched someone get his throat slit by a wild animal in the guise of a man.
She smoothed her hair back, ripped a paper towel off the roll, and scrubbed at her face and dirty hands one more time before balling the paper up and throwing it away in time to plaster on a smile. Her father limped into the room. For a moment her smile was frozen, awful, her lips two shutters locking in a shriek, when his staggering gait made her think of that man. That man staggering into the alleyway, reeling and bleeding and begging her for help—
“Hi, Dad,” she chirped, and kissed his cheek. The dark brown bush of his beard was soft and fuzzy against her face. Comforting. Warm. Familiar. This was her father, this was her home, and people didn’t die here. “You’re up. You’re okay today?”
His smile was strained. It was always strained now, as if standing, walking, living took all his energy and he didn’t have much left to move his lips. “It’s manageable. I’ve been around the house a bit. Read while there was light. I couldn’t stay in bed any longer. I’m starting to hate the sound of my own breath.”
He thumped toward the table. Willow hurried to pull out his chair and held it while he sank down heavily, breaths whuffing out. His forearms, when he shook the crutches off, were banded in red, aggravated indentations where the metal cuffs had cut into his skin past the padding. She sank to one knee next to his chair, touching his arm below one swollen welt.
“Dad.” She bit her lip. “How much were you up today? God, I told the doctor this model of crutch wasn’t any good—”
“Willow—”
“And they never listen. They never listen, it’s like they want you to stay sick—”
“Wil—”
“I just don’t understand why they couldn’t have given you a better model, they were only a few dollars more and what’s a few dollars, I mean—”
“Willow.”
She swallowed back the flood of words, choking them down, choking back that desperate need to cry again. That red, curving line on his arm. Like the red, curving line on that man’s throat. Right now she couldn’t take this—her father hurting himself just to be able to walk, just to be able to pick things up and do things other people took for granted every day.
“Willow,” he repeated softly, and rested one hand to the top of her head.
His hand was heavy—too heavy, without the nervous control needed to keep from dropping its full weight. His fingers subtly shook against her scalp, but she didn’t pull away. She couldn’t, not when so often the only time she was ever able to touch or hug or anything her father was when she was practically lifting him in and out of bed. With a whimper, her eyes aching and threatening to well up again, she rested her head to his leg, pillowing her cheek against his ratty jeans and leaning for as long as she could.
Clumsily, almost batting at her head, he stroked her hair. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong? And don’t say ‘nothing.’ You’ve been crying.”
“Nothing,” she said anyway, and smiled when that got a raspy chuckle. He laughed like a diesel engine running on unleaded, a guttural rut-rut-rut-cough that she hadn’t heard in weeks. She sighed, closing her eyes. “Long day. Put in a few more applications, though. Hoping someone will call back soon.” Hoping that ‘someone’ isn’t the man with the amber eyes, the man in the Kevlar vest, the man with the knife and the blood everywhere and that way of looking that turned blood to stone— “The water will be back on in a few days. The lights, too.”
“What? How?”
“I forgot about my savings account,” she lied. Her savings had bled dry weeks ago. She was getting too good at lying, rolling out little mundane nothings like she couldn’t still smell the blood mixed with the scent of hot summer garbage. “I had enough in there to make good faith payments. We’ll have to pay the rest soon, but I should have a job by then.”
“Wil, that’s your tuition money—”
“It’s okay.”
She looked up with a smile she didn’t feel, into dark brown eyes haunted by the shadow of cragged brows, the shadow of broken pride, the shadow of a man who felt his illness like a failure no matter how many times she told him: multiple sclerosis didn’t care about success or failure, didn’t care who you were or who you were going to be, didn’t punish past crimes with pain or reward good deeds with a reprieve, no matter how brief. She could tell him that all she wanted, but until she actually had to live with the pain instead of nothing but its ghosts and its knock-knock noises haunting in the walls of their lives, she couldn’t understand what it was like to hear it and never be able to believe.<
br />
But she managed to coax a smile out of him when she grinned and said, “I like being able to actually flush the toilet. We can’t all be spoiled with a luxurious built-in bedpan.” Then she rummaged in her bag, coming up with the wrapped, somewhat squashed packet of muffins. “I brought goodies. Hungry?”
* * *
THEY SAT TOGETHER OVER THE kitchen table and shared the last of the muffins. Willow gave the lion’s share to her father, and only picked at half a muffin for herself; she had no appetite anyway, what she’d eaten before a leaden stew in the pit of her stomach. The muffins went down dry with nothing but water from the ten-gallon jug propped over the fridge, but her father still made soft noises of appreciation—and accepted her deflections when he asked where she’d gotten them.
Small talk felt like both sacrilege and the only thing holding her together; small talk made her world ordinary, made what had happened at Mama Nina’s a dream. A nightmare. One that meant she’d never eat Italian again, not when every time she saw blood-red marinara sauce she’d only be able to think of blood splashing over the brick wall, spattering against the trash bags overflowing their cans, drip-drip-dripping onto the crumbling blacktop to pool like puddles after a crimson rain.
She shuddered and closed her eyes. Her father shifted in his chair, the legs scraping. “Wil? You look pale.”
She opened her eyes. “Sorry. I’m just tired. Really hot out today, you know?” With a faint smile, she stood. “Let’s get you settled for bed.”