by Sawyer Black
He growled, climbed into the driver’s seat, and slammed his foot on the gas, tearing back into the street and through a pair of stop signs. He raced along the road as the murderer turned the van floor into a one-man show of despair and pleading. Henry wasn’t sure where he was headed, but he made it three blocks before the emptiness claimed him.
Henry turned to Tiny Eyes. “What’s wrong? Scared?”
He stepped on the gas and pushed the van harder. Far too fast for a residential street, but he was blinded by the moment’s rage. “How about now?” The van swerved out of control and he slammed into a parked car pointed the wrong way on the street. The van came to a crashing stop.
Two air bags went off, preventing him and Tiny Eyes from flying through the window, though the impact surely hurt the man to his right. Henry tore the bag from the steering wheel, tossed it aside, then turned to Tiny Eyes, ready to finish him off.
Lights appeared, one after another, dotting the darkness.
An orchestra of dogs started barking in the surrounding yards and houses.
If Henry didn’t flee, he was dead. Just as Boothe warned.
Henry crawled from the driver’s side, slamming his left heel into the murderer’s chest. Tiny Eyes whimpered.
He spied a duffel bag behind them, half-wedged under the driver’s seat, then jumped over the seat back and hunched over the bag. Picking it up and unzipping it, Henry growled at the tape, rope, and hammer. The bundle of assorted knives.
He dropped the bag to the floor, then clambered back to the front. “What in the fuck were you planning to do with all that, huh? A few late-night repairs?”
The murderer stared at Henry in horror, homicidal eyes bugging from his face. Eyes, the last time Henry had seen them, that had been tiny and fierce.
Henry wondered what he looked like to Tiny Eyes. How much could the man see beneath the hoodie? Enough to know he was dealing with a monster, not a man?
Sudden activity outside the vehicle. Neighbors approaching with whispers and shouts. Henry would have to cut things short, and he realized Boothe was right.
He should have waited.
Henry grabbed Tiny Eyes by the throat, then yanked him from the passenger side and into the back of the van with one clenched fist. He picked him up and slammed his body against the metal floor. The murderer lay there, broken. Bleeding inside by now, for sure. Henry straddled the man, pinning him down. In his best gravelly Batman voice, he roared, “Why were you outside of my house? What do you want with my family? Live and die by your answer!” He leaned in close, splattering the man's face with spit as he repeated, “One chance. Why were you outside of my house?”
“Your … your house?”
The murderer barely made words as he whimpered. Tiny Eyes had no idea who he was.
“Samantha Black! Why were you outside her house?” Henry roared so loud, the coward would have to be an ignoranus to not see he was a wrong answer away from not breathing.
“I came to f-f-finish the job.”
Henry squeezed his fingers into the killer’s throat. “Keep going,” he growled, letting loose enough for the man to confess his sins.
“Lady got lucky first time, got away when the cops came, and we couldn’t catch her. She disappeared. Didn’t show up until two days later. We were supposed to come back and finish her off. It was my job to do it.”
“Who sent you?”
The roar made no difference. Tiny Eyes said, “Fuck you!”
Too many lights and barking dogs made it time for Henry to go.
He was about to send Tiny Eyes to Hell when the tattoo on the asshole’s forearm stopped him cold. An F and a C inside of a circle. And it looked damned familiar, though Henry couldn’t place it.
The tattoo filled him with rage, though he had no idea why.
Henry had only seconds.
He shoved the tattoo from his mind, turned his attention back to Tiny Eyes, and squeezed his fingers into the asshole’s Adam’s apple.
The man tried to scream, but couldn’t. Instead, his arms and feet thrashed as Henry choked him.
Henry let go of the man’s throat, pulled the hoodie back from his head, and forced his true self through the shadows, revealing the monstrosity that was about to end Tiny Eyes’s life. The man gasped for air as he tried to push Henry off and squirm away. His fear felt like a rush of adrenaline through Henry, fueling him in a sudden powerful surge, gathering inside him, waiting to explode upon the murderer.
Tiny Eyes screamed, louder and more horribly than anything Henry had ever heard, frantic to get away.
“Shut up,” Henry snarled. He grabbed the man’s right wrist and planted his foot on his shoulder. He heaved, and he tore the arm from the murderer’s body — the one he had used to threaten Samantha.
Tiny Eyes screamed, his eyes bulging wide. The man was about to either die or pass out.
There were people outside the front of the van. Maybe three. A few dogs.
He leaned into Tiny Eyes, holding his murdering limb like a trophy. “Is this the hand you used to touch my wife?” He was close enough to bite the man’s face from his skull.
“I didn’t touch the bitch,” Tiny Eyes whimpered.
Henry thundered, “Fuck you!”
There were definitely three people outside the van. Two men and one woman. The moment Tiny Eyes screamed at the loss of his arm, they backed away. Still, they were too close, and Henry couldn’t be sure how much they could see through the windows. Henry felt their fear as if it were his own, flowing into his nostrils with every fresh breath.
From a Hell inside him, Henry bellowed, “I’ll find the others!”
Claws sprang out, and he thrust his hand through the man’s chest, like a stake through a vampire’s heart. Fingers splayed inside Tiny Eyes’s torso, giving Henry the leverage he needed to lift the murderer’s body and hurl him out the back of the van to shrieks and screams.
Energy flowed up through his arms. The scent of fear replaced with a sweetness on his palate. Time slowed, and he felt every heartbeat as the passing of an hour. The scraping footsteps outside. The hushed voices. Light and sound rising into his senses like the taste of the kill.
Henry heard a gun cock. The number of dogs barking had climbed to a half dozen.
He pulled the hood over his head, made himself one with the shadows, and raced out of the van and into the night. A blur.
It was time to see Sam.
CHAPTER 11
“Did it feel good?”
Henry looked at Ezra. “Is it supposed to?”
“It depends on the man doing the killing.”
Henry wasn’t sure what to make of that, so he ignored it. “What time is it?”
“Forgive me, Master Henry, but why does it matter? I mean now, after everything …” Ezra looked down, as if Henry’s eyes might burn his.
“I know Samantha’s routine. Knowing the time gives me an idea of what I’m walking into.”
“But her routine is different, Master Henry. Nothing is the same.”
“What’s the time, Goll?”
“One in the morning, Master Henry.”
“Thank you.”
“Maybe you should hold off on going inside. You’re still very energized from the kill, and less likely to control your emotions.” Ezra pointed to the top of the guest house on the far side of the pool. “Come up to the roof, stay with me. We can keep watch together.”
“No, thanks. There’s nothing to watch right now. The thug they sent tonight is a baby mountain of broken bones. No reason to worry about him. As far as my emotions are concerned, we’re good, and I’m going in.”
“How do you expect to get inside the house without this?”
Ezra handed Henry a key, fat and wide on one end, instead of long and skinny like the old one. Copper rather than silver. He ran his thumb across the top. Something about a new key to his house made him feel even more like an outsider. An intruder.
“Thanks. I guess I’m not supposed t
o ask you where the key came from, right?”
“It came from a locksmith, Master Henry. No magic. Samantha had her locks changed. That’s a copy of the new key.”
He had a hard time looking at the goll. The poor creature was too ugly. Henry winced. The same thing was true about himself.
Henry told Ezra not to worry, waited for the goll to go about his business, then turned the key in the lock, trying to keep his movement at a whisper. He opened the front door, stepped inside the house, and closed it quietly behind him. He stepped into the foyer, making five strides in six seconds before the alarm started screaming.
Shit!
Henry froze, too surprised to find the focus to turn himself invisible. He leapt to the corner and ducked under the winding stairs. No time to try any of the dozen kill codes he imagined Sam using to silence the alarm. He slipped into the shadows as if they were a second skin and pressed his body hard against the wall.
Samantha’s feet thundered down the stairs.
“Is anyone there?” she yelled, her voice stronger than he would’ve imagined, though he knew his wife well enough to hear the truth behind her facade. “I can hear you! I have a gun!”
Does she really have a gun?
She had been anti-gun, both before and after Amélie was born. She even had a T-shirt with a rifle in the center of a red circle and a line through it. Not that she ever wore it. Henry wanted to buy a gun back when they had lived on the corner of Chaumers and Dixon. The ghetto thugs seemed always a wrong look from putting a cap in his ass. But Samantha had said no.
After the TV deal, Henry was convinced they were an easy target, but she thought he was being paranoid and told him so whenever the subject surfaced. But getting raped after your family is murdered in front of you would probably turn most people into a card-carrying member of the NRA.
Samantha hit the bottom stair and moved slowly through the foyer, pistol in front of her body. Henry knew approximately dick about pistols, but the one in her hand looked like she’d swiped it from the set of Minority Report. Henry wondered how in the hell she’d managed to get a gun so soon.
Isn’t there a waiting period? How long have I been sleeping?
With her gun held in a straight line in front of her chest, Samantha made slow steps back toward the door and the shrieking alarm. Once there, she switched the weapon from her right hand to her left and moved to the control panel.
She entered the code one button at a time, taking peeks back into the darkness between digits, still aiming her gun in front. Right at Henry's chest. He stared out from the shadows, knowing he was being paranoid. Of course she couldn’t see the whites of his open eyes, even though it seemed as if she was staring inside them.
Samantha silenced the alarm, then crept through the foyer, pausing by the door for a full minute as she drew an invisible line across the room, moving from left to right with the barrel, several times in each direction. Her breathing was shockingly calm. Henry figured she was telling herself that the new alarm was acting quirky. She turned her back to the stairs and took them slowly, one at a time, gun still in front, marching as if to a drumbeat.
Henry waited in the shadows, longing to charge from his hiding spot, upstairs and into Samantha’s arms. When she reached the top, he followed.
Samantha crossed the long hall to their old bedroom, leaving the door open and making it easy for Henry to slip in behind her. She went straight to their bed, collapsed on the mattress, and started to sob.
Samantha cried for an hour while Henry watched. She finished, but only long enough to make a call to someone he couldn’t identify. Something told him it was a man. She thanked him, said she’d see him in the morning, then killed the connection, tossing the phone to the foot of the bed, falling back into her tears.
Eventually she stopped crying, but since she was the sort of woman who liked to stare at her wounds while waiting for them to heal, she left their room, crossed the hall, then went to Amélie’s room.
Henry followed as she drifted through their daughter’s bedroom, fondling many of her more tangible memories, one at a time and in no particular order. She started with a Percy Jackson book, picking up one before adding another and making a stack, running her fingers over their worn spines. Rick Riordan books were the only ones Amélie didn’t read on her e-reader, even though she had them all and preferred reading on the device for everything else. His books were special, the first she had ever read as a big girl.
Samantha finished with Percy, then moved to Amélie’s endless collection of stuffed animals before going to her art folder, then finally to the computer, where she sat, turned it on, and slowly sifted through Amélie’s photos and videos, sobbing through every one.
Henry sorted through a million thoughts of his own as Samantha looked through their daughter’s belongings. He wondered what she was thinking, and whether she had gone through this routine each night since the impossible had demolished her.
Samantha looked out the window, staring at the large pool for a tiny forever, until she finally turned from the glass, seemingly haunted and spent from the horror of what her life had become. She stood mostly still, slightly swaying. Again, he wanted to go to her, to hold her tight, and let her know he was there. That he’d never let anything bad happen to her ever again.
But he couldn’t.
Henry wondered what Sam would do if he were to step forward. Would she be relieved or terrified? He clung tighter to the shadows, slowly losing his grip, afraid he’d suddenly flicker from the swaddling dark and into the dim light of his dead daughter’s bedroom.
Samantha stood by the doorway, three feet from Henry, not moving.
If he lost his shadows, Samantha would see his ruined body.
She finally found her momentum and made it another step toward the door where she stopped short, turned around, then went back to Amélie’s bed and crawled under the covers.
She clutched Amélie’s pillow, pulled its squish into her chest, buried her face deep into its faux down, and inhaled. Samantha sobbed so hard into the pillow that when she finally pulled it away, Henry could see the soaking wet circle darkening its center.
He trembled in the corner, his heart in pieces.
Samantha started, sitting up in the bed.
Did she feel me?
She dropped Amélie’s newest favorite stuffed animal, Doggy the Rabbit, onto the bed, then darted her eyes through the room.
Henry would give anything to let her know everything was okay. Amélie was gone, but something else waited. A place where they could one day be together, and he had seen it with his own eyes.
But Henry could barely breathe, let alone move.
Eventually, she lay back in the bed, closing her eyes. He trembled in the shadows, upset and aching, ashamed for being a coward, terrified his wife would find him shivering in the dark. He couldn’t let her see him like this. He couldn’t risk what Boothe might do if he revealed himself to her.
Henry waited for Samantha to start snoring, which never took long when she was horizontal with her eyes shut. He slipped from one shadow into the next, outside of Amélie’s bedroom, then out into the hall.
Henry crossed to the more modest side of his house, the wing where he was most comfortable. When her parents had come to visit the previous spring for three weeks before finally going back home, Henry had been embarrassed by every room to the left of the foyer. The house to the right still felt like him, even if the left was nicer and newer and an awful lot larger.
Henry reached the hallway’s end, then climbed into the attic. Moonlight illuminated the room through a large square window leading out to the roof.
He went to his old laptop and opened the lid, but several days of being left unplugged had murdered the battery. His attic computer was used only to write and had nothing installed but a copy of Scrivener and a connection to his DropBox.
Henry sat at his desk, looking through a notebook at the last jokes he’d ever written, jokes he’d never share wi
th an audience.
Sitting at his desk, with Samantha sleeping downstairs, Henry felt his first bit of normalcy since his world had gone to Hell.
He hoped he wouldn’t have to return to Boothe’s apartment and wondered if the demon could force him. As nice and as private as it might be, the apartment held nothing for him. He was already in a place where he had everything he wanted, all that had been taken, and all he was driven to protect.
If Henry thought it was a good idea, Boothe would likely hate it and tear into him like a little bitch once Ezra went tattling. So Henry figured he would soak in the moment and enjoy his slice of home until Boothe’s inevitable reprimand came, tomorrow or whenever.
After reading through the last of his final musings, Henry rose from his chair and hobbled to the couch at the back of the attic, so exhausted that once he lay down, he thought he might never wake again.
But Henry was wrong.
He opened his eyes, startled by a noise blinking into the darkness, straining to unblur the hazy golden light circling the small girl standing by the attic entrance. Right where she had always stood while trying to grab his attention.
“Daddy?” Amélie said, staring at Henry, her eyes wide.
CHAPTER 12
Henry had seen a funhouse full of impossible shit since his death. But nothing shook his insides so much as seeing Amélie’s ghostly image flickering at the entrance to his attic office. She was in a white robe, like Randall had worn.
“Amélie … Is that you?” Henry inched toward the flicker, stepping through his disbelief, slowly at first, then faster, until he stood an inch from an Amélie who couldn’t be there.
She flickered again, her image more insistent, as if screaming for solidity.
She repeated, “Daddy? Is that you?”
Henry crouched, level with Amélie. For a moment she was almost there. His fingers twitched, as if they knew he should reach out and touch her. The second lasted as long as its name before Amélie was merely a gold-colored shadow. Another passed, and she was gone.
