The old man sank to his knees, knocking over the oxygen canister. He held his hands before him, clawed and trembling.
“He’s dead! Dead! He has to be dead! He has to be!” He was sobbing.
Maybe leaving him on his knees and crying before the police was revenge enough.
Rick, hands raised, backed out of the line of fire. “I could have saved you some paperwork, Detective.”
“You’d just have forced me into a whole other set of paperwork. What the hell did you think you were doing?”
The uniforms had to pick up Blake and practically drag him away. They didn’t bother with cuffs. Blake didn’t seem to know what was happening. His mouth worked, his breaths wheezed, his legs stumbled.
“I take it you got your evidence,” Rick said.
“We found the shooter, and he talked. Blake hired him.”
He certainly didn’t look like he’d pulled any triggers in a good long time.
“So that’s it?”
“What else do you want?”
“I wanted to get here five minutes earlier,” he said. Not that any of it really mattered. It all faded from the memories around him.
“I need to ask you to depart the premises,” she said. She wasn’t aiming the gun at him, but she hadn’t put it away. “Don’t think I won’t arrest you for something, because I will. I’ll come up with something.”
Rick nodded. “Have a good night, Detective.”
He returned to his car and left the scene, marking the end of yet another chapter.
Rick hadn’t been able to attend the trial, but he’d met with Helen every night to discuss the proceedings. She came to Murray’s, tearing up with relief and rubbing her eyes with her handkerchief, to report the guilty verdict. He quit his shift early and took her back to his place, a basement apartment on Capitol Hill. With Blake locked up, he felt safe bringing her there. He owned the building, rented out the upper portion through an agency, and could block off the windows in the basement without drawing attention. The décor was simple—a bed, an armchair, a chest of drawers, a radio, and a kitchen that went unused.
They lay together on the bed, his arm around her, holding her close, while she nestled against him. They talked about the future, which was always an odd topic for him. Helen had decided to look for an old-fashioned kind of job and aim for a normal life this time. “But I don’t know what to do about you,” she said, craning her neck to look up at him.
He’d been here before, lying with a woman he liked, who with a little thought and nudging he could perhaps be in love with, except that what they had would never be entirely mutual, or equitable. And he still didn’t know what to say. I could take from you for the rest of your life, and you’d end with . . . nothing.
He said, “If you’d like, I can vanish, and you’ll never see me again. It might be better that way.”
“I don’t want that. But I wish . . .” Her face puckered, brow furrowed in thought. “But you’re not ever going to take me on a trip, or stay up to watch the sunrise with me, or ask me to marry you, or anything, are you?”
He shook his head. “I’ve already given you everything I can.”
Except for one thing. But he hadn’t told her that he could infect her, make her like him, that she too could live forever and never see a sunrise. And he wouldn’t.
“It’s enough,” she said, hugging him. “At least for now, it’s enough.”
The Island of Beasts
SHE WAS A BUNDLE on the bottom of the skiff, tossed in with her skirt and petticoat tangled around her legs, hands bound behind her with a thin chain that also wrapped around her neck.
She didn’t struggle; the silver in the chain burned her skin. The more she moved, the more she burned, so she lay still because the only way to stop this would be to make them kill her. They wanted to kill her. So why didn’t they? Why go through the trouble of rowing this wave-rocked skiff out to this hideous island just to throw her to her likely death? To save themselves the taint of murder? To keep themselves clean of whatever small sin her death would engender on their souls? Surely her life was not so large that her death would be such a burden.
“Why? Why not just kill me and be done with it?” she growled.
Her captors—the two rough men on the oars and the gentleman with the tailored frock coat and fine manners who sat at the prow—were wolves, like her. They smelled of musk and wild and moorland, of the beasts that hid inside their flesh. But they were civilized. They followed orders and bowed to their betters. Not like her. They also smelled of hearth fires and smugness. She smelled of fury.
The gentleman, Mr. Edgerton, laughed sourly. “You are not worth the cost of the silver ball it would take to kill you.”
She was not valuable enough to keep and not dangerous enough to kill. There was a pretty fate. Too dangerous to keep and not valuable enough to bother taming. And so here she was, dumped on the edge of the world, off the coast of Scotland. She could laugh and cry both, but her throat was too locked up with stifled screams. Edgerton would like it if she screamed. He’d tell his master, the Lord of Wolves in London, that she screamed. He’d likely tell the Lord that anyway, but it wouldn’t be true, and that would be something. She’d make the fine gentleman a liar.