A long, thin line of clouds stretched out across the azure sky all the way to the western horizon.  I descended through the cool air above the Steppe and a teasing updraft bumped to my left.  I dipped my wing to catch the uplifting thermal, but it dissipated before I wheeled into the column.  Two strong beats of my golden wings bought thirty feet of altitude. 

Below me and to the right I saw an eagle on a lazy upward spiral.  He had found a rising column of heated air.  I stretched my left wing up and out and traced my own lazy arc through the sky and down into his elevator.  I could see the apprehensive tension in the raptor as we circled at opposite sides of the column.

“No fear, brother,” I called to him.  He winged over and away; I slipped sideways and found that snaky, tightly-wound, central core of air that shot me upward.

With stretched out arms beneath my wings I flexed my fingers.  I arched my back, tensed my legs and splayed out my toes.  I flexed the long flat muscles along the cord of my wings.  My long primary feathers, the color of spun gold, stood out like individual fingers beneath the primary coverts. They were a darker russet, with flecked black and bronze variegations.

I spiraled upward and held as much of the air around me as I could.  Over the top, the column was gone and I soared.  All the world was beneath me, all of heaven above. 

A cloud front came up behind me and a sudden down draft caught me unawares.  I dropped a few hundred feet and left my stomach above; nausea took its place.  Eight long beating sweeps of my wings and I regained half the altitude.  The air cooled suddenly and tight little patches of gooseflesh puckered on my bare skin.

Gravity, always my unwelcome companion, pulled at me.

I beat my great wings again, not so easy now to stay aloft.  I raced ahead but still the clouds overtook me, then they condensed and squeezed out a sheet of rain.  Looking up as the drops fell was disorienting.

I beat harder, but I could feel the air settling around me in a down draft.  Panic welled up with the bile in my throat.  The dark, wet ground raced up to meet me.  A whimper escaped as I succumbed to gravity’s unforgiving embrace.

Hard wet asphalt pressed into my face.  The impact wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.  I reached up to brace against the ground and saw the syringe still hanging from my arm.  The stainless steel needle was pointing to a blue vein.  I let my arm sink back down, and watched the rain dimple the inky puddle near my face. 

I always relived that flight when I was lit.  I flexed my atrophied flight muscles and felt the wing stumps quiver and thought of the many, many things I had lost.  The phantom pain along the cord of my left wing made me wince.  I was cold, but I couldn’t tell if it was the soaked clothing or the cold flashes I got when I came down.

“Greg?  There you are.  You okay?”

I tried to focus on the voice and brushed the needle from my arm. 

“Greg, you shouldn’t shoot up in the open like this.”  That was Sarah’s voice in the dark. My judgmental little runaway.  Her smack habit wasn’t as bad as mine so she felt comfortable lecturing me.  Easy to do when she hadn’t fallen as far as I had. 

“I wasn’t in the open, I was behind that dumpster,” I slurred.  Now I was sprawled in the center of the alley, with the dumpster behind me.

“Someone could do something to you.”  Her genuine concern was both irritating and comforting.

But what could they do to me that hadn’t already been done?

She grabbed my arm to try to help me sit up.  I batted at her.  It was easier to just stay where I was and to lay there in the filth and the muck. The rain pelting down on me.

“Come on Greg, up and at ‘em. You’ll get pneumonia if you lay out here in the street.” She pulled me to a sitting position and I leaned against the dumpster.  The streetlamp shed a little light into the alley and I could make out her profile kneeling beside me.  She produced a crusty towel from somewhere and dried my face.

“I was flying.” I closed my eyes and rested my head on her shoulder.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m flying too.  Usually just a clean rush though.”

She didn’t understand what I meant and it would take too long to explain. 

“Let’s get you some coffee. I got someone I want you to read.”  She stood and walked behind the dumpster.

I rested my head back against the smooth, cold metal and let the drops run down my face. It was so real this time.  So real.  My tears were lost in the rain.

She came back around with my threadbare overcoat.  I guess I’d left it there before I launched.  She shook it out and draped it over my shoulders as I leaned forward.  Then she pressed her fingers to my temples, pulled my head forward and touched her lips to my forehead.

“It’ll be okay.”

No, it would never be okay.

“Listen, I’m no good for a reading right now,” I said.  One of my residual gifts; if I concentrated I could see a mortal’s soul.  As the soul rested slightly out of phase with the physical world I could often see hints of past events.  Sometimes a bit of the future.  How it worked could be debated by philosophers or theologians, but the trick usually earned me enough to score some junk.

“She’s scared and she can pay.”

That got my attention. “How much?”

“Dinner for both of us and fifty bucks too, I bet.”

“Is dinner your booking fee?”

She smiled.  I couldn’t see it in the dark, but I knew she wore that little gapped-tooth grin.  She helped me to my feet and we balanced awkwardly for a minute as I dry heaved. She reached up and wiped my mouth and chin before we started off.   She was little.  But her soul was bigger than any two people.

I remembered the first part and said, “Scared of what?”

She didn’t say.  She didn’t have to, I could feel it.

Alone with the monsters in the dark, that’s what everyone is afraid of.

I stumbled beside her with that kicking feeling in my left leg.  She helped to support me and guide me as I shook the cobwebs out.  Soon I’d be good for a few hours, maybe through until morning.

“How’d you know where I was?”

“Jimenez said she saw you get a score from Beenie when she was working sixty-third.  I just checked every alley from Beenie’s to the apartment until I found you.”  She sounded pretty proud of herself.  The apartment to which she referred was a room we shared in what aspired to be a slum.  No running water and no electric, but it was dry.

We stopped a few times so that I could dry heave.  Slow going, weaving between the deeper puddles.  This wasn’t at all like flying.  She shepherded me to a late night café.  It was the kind of place where people like us could be served.  I saw my reflection in the big plate glass window coming up.  I had been radiant once.  Now my straw-colored hair hung greasy and limp, framing those high angelic cheekbones that used to drive the women wild.  My reflection told a different story now.  Gaunt and haunted, I looked like every other burnout in the city.

The woman I’d come to meet was sitting alone, pretty and young, swathed in a heavy coat.  I sat down, and she looked at Sarah, and then furtively at me.  She complained about how long she had waited and Sarah made an excuse.  Her soul was old and I saw a line from a poem I’d once read: ‘she wanders in eternal fear of falling into the indefinite’.  She wouldn’t look me in the eye and didn’t believe that I could really read her and I told her that.

“Is that all your magic?” she asked, a little flash in her chocolate brown eyes.

“No, that’s the surface stuff.  Tell me what you want and we’ll see if I can reveal your inner most.”

Sarah nudged me.  “Be nice.”

“How nice?”

She didn’t answer.  She just looked at the pretty young woman and said, “This is Greg.  Like I told you before, he’s the guy that can tell if there really is anything funny going on with your dreams.  Greg, this is Maria.”

“He looks like a junkie.”

I half-shrugged.  I suppose my appearance was an occupational hazard.

“Is that how you can see into the Santeria?  Because you’re on the stuff?”

“He’s okay now,” Sarah said.  She didn’t want to jeopardize the deal.

“How long you been using?”   She had a Latin accent.  Maybe Puerto Rican, I couldn’t tell.

“Heroin?” 

“Yeah.”  She didn’t say it tough.  Her hostility had an undercurrent of sadness.  Maybe it was the loss.

“On and off since eighteen-ninety, I think.  Mostly on.”

The young woman tucked a wayward strand of black hair behind an ear and gave a disbelieving cluck of her tongue. 

“Greg used to be an angel,” Sarah whispered proudly.

Maria raised an eyebrow.  She didn’t believe.

“It’s true; he still grows little feathers where his wings used to be.”

“What happened?  You get demoted?”  Maria held her elbows close to her sides like a boxer ready to deflect the body blows.  She looked into my eyes then.

Such sadness. 

The waitress came over and took our order, then poured out old smelling coffee.  I held the mug against my face to warm my cheek and then took a sip.  It was acrid but still good enough, and it made my stomach growl.

“Judged.  Judged and found wanting, with ninety-eight of my closest friends.  Believe me sister, that was a really bad day.”

“The reading is fifty bucks on top of the meal, like we talked about,” Sarah interrupted.  “Remember how he helped your friend, Jessica?  With her dreams?  So he can do the same for you.  Right”

I didn’t remember a Jessica.  I usually didn’t remember any of them after I got a score though.  Except Sarah.  I couldn’t get her out of my head after that first time I read her.  Now she was my booking agent, and my best friend.  She and Milton.

Maria nodded and pulled a billfold out of her thick wool coat.  She took out three dog-eared bills and rested them at the midpoint on the table.  Such a trusting soul.

I laid both my hands out, palms up.  The sleeve of my overcoat pulled back to reveal blue veins, stark against my pale skin.  The veins traced up and disappeared into the elaborate tattooing on my forearms.  Marks that weren’t meant for human eyes, but too much trouble to keep covered. 

Maria glanced down and the look she gave made me feel she thought them dirty. Then she gently rested her two hands on top of mine. They were small. Hard.  Sinewy.  She took care to use lotions and the skin was supple.  In another life maybe the hands of a wool sorter.  Her dark eyes locked onto mine and I could see.

I closed my eyes at the jolt of it.  There was a hint of familiarity there in that strong soul.  It was an old soul indeed, a soul that could really make a difference. The kind of soul a nether-worlder could really sink his teeth into.  She had paid for a show and that’s what I owed her.  A show, not the proclamation of damnation I saw.

“You live with your Mother.  Also Maria.  You work as a seamstress on the lower east side.  Three bus stops from home.”

I felt her nod encouragement, but she was not convinced.

“You lost jewelry.  A brooch.  It belonged to your Grandmother.  You had left it on the nightstand and it fell between the headboard and the mattress.”

She didn’t believe that either, but if she had time I knew she would check.

“Your little sister has passed on.  Three years now.  There is no fault there for you.  Sometimes the little ones are just called home early.”

She almost succeeded in pulling her hands away.  I opened my eyes and could see it.  She arched a raven black eyebrow.  She couldn’t know what I saw. 

The waitress came with our order..  Sarah asked for extra crackers for her soup.  I had a double stack of pancakes.  I noted the ghost of a jagged white line there on the left wrist as I disengaged my hands from Maria’s and cut into my stack.

“Ask him,” Sarah said.

Don’t ask if you don’t really want to know.

Maria steeled herself and then said, “There’s this man I see.”

“There are many men.  Billions in fact.  The earth teems with them like locusts.”

Sarah nudged me again harder. 

“There’s this man I see in my dreams.  Not really a man, I don’t see him so well.  Mostly the eyes.  It’s not good though, you know?”

Sarah nodded encouragement for me.  I speared a syrup-soaked wedge of pancakes.  I loved pancakes, I could eat them at every meal.

“It’s a bad thing.  Sometimes I even think that I see him standing behind me in reflections, but when I turn he is not there.”

“Reflections?”

“Yes, like in the mirror, a window or sometimes on the side of an empty glass.  He is there, behind me, and when I turn to see him he is not there.  This man, he makes me worry.”

You should worry.  There is nothing good in this.  In fact, within the next three hours or so, the harbinger for this man will crack you open like a nut and extract the sweet meat of your soul.  But what could I do about that?  I only felt like a hero when I was lit and now I was almost down.

She described the wicked strangeness of her dreams.  I knew them too well.  Then she asked me, “Do you see what I should do?”  I had misread the sadness in her eyes.  It was despair.

“If you see this man, leave him alone.  Get some salt on the way home.  When you turn in tonight, pull your bed from the wall and pour a thick circle of salt around it.  That should keep the dreams away.  Also, I’m told burning a fish will work, but I haven’t tried it.”

“Is that all?”

I tilted the plate, scooped up the extra syrup with an egg-yolk stained spoon and said, “You’ll find the brooch.”

“I mean is there anything else I can do?”

“Are you Catholic?”

"No, I’m a Baptist.”

“A Puerto Rican Baptist?”

”I’m Dominican. Why you ask if I’m Catholic.”

“I was going to suggest confession and candles with the salt, but I don’t know what Baptists do.  I’m old-fashioned religion.”

“We pray.”

“Do that then.”

I had nothing else for her so she left unsatisfied, but our stomachs were full.  When we were alone I got a Styrofoam cup for the rest of my lukewarm coffee while Sarah gathered up the bills and stuffed them into her coat pocket.

The rain was over but the streets were covered in thin puddles.  Sarah stopped beside a homeless man wrapped in garbage bags lying on the sidewalk and dumped her extra cracker packets into his lap.

I stepped over his outstretched leg and said, “Someday that Good Samaritan thing is gonna bite you in the ass, sweetness.”

The smile she gave me made me feel even better than the full stomach.

After a few paces she asked, “What did you really see, Greg?”

Maybe it was the coming down, or the positive vibe I was feeling, but I still shouldn’t have told her.  In the three years we’d been together I had always told her the truth.  I didn’t want to lie to her now, so I described my vision.

She didn't say anything at first.  Then she asked, “Why would they come for her?”

“I don’t know.  She’s special, the fact she dreams of them like she does tells you she’s got serious mojo.  Funny they come in the flesh though.  That’s so old-school for them.”

“You can’t just leave her to that, Greg." Her voice caught a little, so she cleared her throat and said, "You need to help.” 

“I did help.”

“The salt?  Will that really do anything?”

“Hell no.  For the dreams yeah, but not if one comes in the flesh.  Maybe slow them down and give her time to pray.  Perhaps the big guy will help.”

She stopped walking and gave me that look.  When I stopped and turned back she said, “Greg, think of what you used to be.”

I shrugged and said, “Sorry, my hero days were over long ago."

"You can do something.  I know you can.  You have it in you to do great things."

I just shook my head and gave a little shrug.  The look she gave me broke my heart, but I’d gotten used to letting people down.  She turned from me and ran into the shadows of the street.

I called after her to wait.  To come back.  I even threw my cup in frustration, but she didn’t stop. The rain slowed and was only a misty drizzle now as I turned the other way and started home past the few others still out on the street.

The night was at its darkest. And I was alone again.  A city of millions and I was alone.  But then, I had been alone for a long time.  Probably for the best, as the lives I touched never seemed to be better after than before. The full stomach was a nice change.  It would have been better without the ache in my joints and I started to plan my next narcotics offense.

Three blocks down from the café, I stepped off the curb and noticed something small near the gutter.  I reached down to pick up a dead sparrow.  I sat down on the curb with my legs over the rush of gutter water and cradled the little corpse in my left hand.  With my right I teased out the little wing.

“No flying for you either, little brother.”

I stretched out both the little wings then and gently rested the bird on the stream of water and watched it not quite fly away.  With the darkness the water was invisible.  And the broken bird weaved first left then right through the detritus of the gutter. 

I pondered that after I got my bearings and started back toward the pad.  The dead bird being pushed along involuntarily as if by an invisible hand, on his way to an appointment with a sewer grate.  It was too cold to philosophize.  I was wet and I just wanted to get back and crash.

***

A working girl sheltered in the alcove that led into my building.  Her soul was twisted and forlorn gray, shot through with little crimson rivulets of spite, all stuffed in an overweight body in fishnets and too much makeup.  She'd turned at least two tricks already and her pupils were little pinpricks in the dark.

"Party, Greg?" With a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, she gave me her best impersonation of something desirable and I stifled a laugh.

I tried to be nice because she'd been someone's little girl once.  I saw the father that died and the succession of her mother's boyfriends that turned the little princess into a whore.  The last decade she'd spent on the street had polluted and poisoned the pure soul she'd been born with beyond recognition.

"All partied out, Miss Jimenez."

"For you it's half price."  Her eyes roamed freely over me.

"Hard to refuse, but you know how Sarah feels about that."

She stepped to intercept and reached for me. 

I grabbed her wrist and wrenched it sideways.  Hard enough to move her along, but not hard enough to hurt.  She smelled of cheap perfume, cigarettes and that musky pungence of two people having gone at it.  A while ago.

"No touchey the goods, Anna."  Skin to skin was rough on me and I was cool not being mean, but that didn't mean I wanted to be her friend.

The used-up woman shot me a spiteful look but didn't press it. 

She looked away and said, "S'okay, your loss."

Loss.  A common theme throughout my existence.

I brushed past her, not inhaling, and pushed open the unlocked door.

Inside, I braced my hand against the hole in the wall where mailboxes were once mounted.  I waited while the tingly little wave of post-high nausea swept through me.  When I was sure I wouldn't puke I picked my way through the garbage in the hall to the room I shared with Sarah.

The hinges let out a screeching protest as I pushed the door open.  I flicked the light switch, forgetting the electricity was off.  Or maybe the bulb was burned out, I forget.  Enough red neon came in from the no-name liquor store across the street that I could make my way through the sparse furniture to the kitchenette.  The light started with one letter and then added one until all were lit and then it blinked on and off twice before starting again.  It wasn't quite a strobe, but the effect was great when I was lit.  Not so good when I was trying to hold down my
pancakes.

I opened the refrigerator and got a whiff of something old, but no light came on.  So it must be the electric.  I found a stash of fast-food ketchup packets and slammed the door shut. 

I should save them for when I was hungry, but I wanted to get the acidic taste of bile out of my mouth so I bit in and sucked a few down.

I spun at the sound of a little thump on the counter.

Disembodied yellow eyes stared reproachfully at me.  Then as the U-O-R blinked on I saw the rest of Milton come into view.

He gave me a low rumbling meow, followed by a shorter, louder one for effect. 

"I'm not in the mood, cat." 

Milton continued to stare and then slinked his inky-blackness across the counter, sitting on the edge and looking away.

I reached down and scratched between the ears with the tips of my fingers.

The cat pulled away and repeated his short loud meow.

"Didn't Sarah feed you?"

I rummaged in a cabinet while the cat paced the counter watching.  I finally found a little pull-top can of tuna and left it open on the counter for him.

The overcoat made a rustling swish as I dropped it on the hall floor.  I went into my room and flopped down on the mattress that rested on the floor.  I rolled on my back and thought of Sarah.

The blood red neon went through its brighter, brighter off and on routine and I stared at the dark moldy splotches on the ceiling.

Sarah was liable to do something stupid.  I didn't see it, but I knew she was going to warn that Dominican girl.  This was a really bad time to play the Good Samaritan.

Milton padded in the door and then hopped up on to my chest.  His breath smelled like fish and his yellow eyes bored into me. 

"She made her bed, cat," I said.

Sometimes I think cats are tuned into something the rest of us can't see.  Other times I think they just serve as a really good vehicle for our own guilt.

"I'm not the hero she thinks I am."

Milton never blinked.

I rolled the cat off and said, "Fine.  But you owe me for this one.

I grabbed my overcoat on the way out to rescue my friend.  My friend who had saved me from falling any further than I already had, so many times.  

***

Five blocks and a bridge later and I’d left the multi-storied tenements for a real neighborhood. Small frame houses huddled together in the dark.

I was good with general directions, but not so good with specifics.  I could tell Sarah was close, but not exactly where.  I slowed and tried to concentrate.  Her soul was masked to me, so it was hard to place her.  I recalled the image of the Dominican girl’s soul and reached out with my mind to find it.  Ahead and to the right.  I skirted a row-house that blocked my way and went into the alley beyond.

I paused again and closed my eyes.  Then I heard a crash of glass and a scream and I knew where I needed to go.  I stumbled on a length of rebar protruding from a tidy heap of garbage in an alley and grabbed it up.  I vaulted over the sagging chain-link fence and stumbled through the cluttered yard to the rear door of a house. Locked.

I heard another scream.  Muffled this time, but it wasn't Sarah.  I kicked the door in, ran through the empty kitchen and knew I'd be there again.  There was movement above me.  I rounded the corner and bounded up the stairs.  There in the hall, half out of a doorway loomed a vision from Maria’s dreams.  Maria knelt in the hall beyond and called to me.

It stood taller and broader than me.  Great leathery wings stretched out from the second scapulas.  One wing in the hall, the other reached back into the room.  The smoky gray skin was thick and covered in oozing boils.  The eyes were dead, the pupils blown.  The skin of the lower face had torn away and the yellow-white mandible shown through.  It turned to me and then paused.

“Araqiêl?  Is that you, little brother?”  His voice rasped like a file being pulled across a steel pipe.

“Semjaza.  It’s been a long time.”  I stood ready on the balls of my feet. 

“You look terrible,” it rasped.

“Yeah.  Not so bad as you, though.  You look like hell, Sem.”  All the nausea, the after effects of the drugs, any extraneous thought all left as my body readied itself.

Semjaza shrugged and the upper half of the face smiled.  The lower half didn’t have enough skin to complete the expression and it leered. “What can I say?  Brimstone is bad for the complexion.”

“I can’t let you take her,” I said abruptly.  I flexed my fingers on the rebar held down at my side.

The demon looked at the girl, and then back at me.  “You always were a sucker for the pretty ones, Ara.  Capital vices and all.”

I shrugged, and turned the motion into a twist as the demon shot out a twisted reptilian claw.  Eight feet in an instant.  It cut through the fabric of my coat, but didn’t touch skin and I slashed down with the length of iron.

His skin blistered and hissed where the bar struck, leaving a thick wide burn.  The iron rod smoked and glowed red where it had touched Semjaza.  Iron was good for that with demons.  Something about a fire elemental being struck with an earth element.  Like a metaphysical game of rock-paper-scissors.

Semjaza hissed at me.  I had seen him leading hosts of angels to war once, and now he hissed like a cat.

The hallway was too narrow to maneuver and this would be a slugfest.  The demon was bigger and stronger than me and I wouldn’t last long if I couldn't maneuver.

“How did you come to the middle world, Sem?”

“Crack in space-time, little brother.  Same as before.” 

I backed slowly to the head of the stairs. 

“Ara, don’t go away mad.  Or is it Greg now?  Isn’t that what the sweet-meat called you?”

“Yeah.  It’s sort of a nickname.  Short for egregori.”  I didn’t know who he meant by sweet-meat.  Sarah?  I didn’t see her.  The ward hid her soul so that Semjaza and his friends couldn’t take it.

“Ah, the watchers.  That was the job wasn’t it?  Before the fall?”

I nodded and felt for the steps.

“That is where you lost your wings?  Did Gabriel take them from you?  Clip you?”

"Nope.  Gideon, with his terrible sword.”  I didn’t care to rehash this with him.  I just wanted to keep him engaged.

”Gideon.  I hate that sanctimonious bastard.  I was gone by then though, wasn't I?”

I took the stairs slowly.  One at a time.  I could see that the inner phalange of his wings had a thick, hooked talon, two thirds up from the base to the end of the wing.

“We don’t have to fight Ara. Sêmîazâz made you an offer to join the team and it's still good.  Bygones and all?”  The laugh that followed was more hollow than his speech.

“Sorry, I’m not interested in your team.”  He couldn’t finish what he had come to do with me here.  I would either have to be run off or destroyed.

"You owe them nothing Ara.  They turned their backs on us.” 

I reached the bottom step and kept backing into the little foyer, and said, “We turned away, Sem.  Not them.”

Even though I saw it coming, I couldn’t avoid the wing as it snaked out.  The talon sunk into my neck with a wet sound.  A thick rope of blood fell out onto the tiles as the talon retracted. The hole it left in me fizzed. I swung the iron rod at empty air. 

The second wing snicked out impossibly fast, the talon sank into my shoulder, and then back.  Again I swung the length of iron at nothing.  A bubbling ooze ran down from the holes in me.

“Time is coming to an end, Ara.  We’ll bar the crack and then we will feast on the children of clay.”

He lunged at me again and I dodged.  I saw a plastic grocery bag on a sideboard. Through the plastic I could see the little girl holding an umbrella on a blue background and knew it was the salt I had told Maria to get.

I feinted with the iron rod and then twisted to grab the salt.  Semjaza stabbed his index and middle finger into my flesh, below the ribs.  I twisted away, but his talons reached under the rib cage and pulled me to him.  The pain pulsed in me, as I twisted like bait on a hook.  The wing talon pinned me through the bicep as I tried to raise the iron rod.

"Where will you go when you die, little brother?"

I had no answer.

“It ends now, Ara.”

“Yes,” I exhaled.  I briefly contemplated letting him have me.  If only it could be so easy.  I sank my fingers through the sides of the little round box and salt spilled out.  I slammed my hand into his face and packed the salt into his eyes, his shattered nose and the gaping hole of his mouth.

He screamed and released me.  His flesh bubbled and fizzed where the salt touched him. It was like salting a snail.  Then I held the iron rod with both hands and stabbed it into the left side of his chest as deep as I could.  I rode him over, still holding the rod. 

The flesh smoked.  A red ring formed in his chest around the iron spike, and I pushed harder, pinning him down to the step like an obscene butterfly.  My hands burned.  I had to hold.  If he got the spike out he might still heal. The hot red halo spread outward, leaving gray, charred coke behind.

He thrashed.  The talons of his wings sliced strips from my back.  My hands blistered with the heat of the rod.  Then Semjaza stiffened and his body emolliated.  I leapt back and watched him turn to dust and ash. 

I bounded over his outline of melted acrylic carpet and scorched wood and up the stairs.

Maria still knelt where I had left her.  I hadn’t seen it before, but she cradled the body of what must have been her mother in her lap.  Her body wracked with sobs, but no sound escaped.

“Where is Sarah?”

Maria didn’t respond.

“Did Sarah come?” I asked with more conviction.

Maria didn’t respond but instead cast a glance at the doorway in the hall.  I followed her eyes and saw Sarah crumpled just inside the broken window. 

“No. No-no-no.”  My wounds were forgotten as I crossed the small room and dropped to my knees.  I reached down and pulled her broken little body to me.

“Oh no.  Not her.” I reached down and brushed the wild brown hair from her blood-smattered face.

“No,” I keened.  Then I pulled her body to me and rocked her slowly back and forth. A friend.  A confidant.  A protector.  An empty shell.  I cried and cried and spoke of my bereavement in the ancient languages.

When I had no more tears to cry I laid her down gently.  Then I riffled through her pockets with my blistered hands, until I found the fifty bucks. 

I would need it later for Beenie.

End