Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

He was trying to catch his breath.

As I said, I detest cruelty. I picked up the landline phone beside him, and without punching for a dial tone I spoke to the empty receiver. We needed a doctor right away.

His head was to the side. I saw his eyes close. I think he tried to speak again but he couldn't manage a word.

"They're coming, sir," I told him.

I might have left then, but as I said, I detest cruelty in any form.

By this time, he wasn't seeing anything too clearly. Perhaps he was seeing nothing at all. But I remembered that bit of information they always give you in the hospital that "the hearing is the last thing to go."

They'd told me that when my grandmother was dying, and I'd wanted to watch the television in the room, and my mother had been sobbing.

Finally he closed his eyes. I was surprised he was able to do it. First they were half shut, then shut altogether. His neck was a mass of wrinkles. I couldn't see any breath coming from him, or see the slightest rise or fall to his frame. I looked beyond him, through the white curtains, at the veranda again. At the black table, among the Tuscan potted flowers, a man had taken his place and appeared to be staring at us.

I knew that he couldn't penetrate the curtains from that distance. All he could see was the whiteness, and perhaps a veiled shape. I didn't care.

I needed only a few more moments, and then I could safely leave with the knowledge that the job was complete.

I didn't touch the phones or the computers, but I made a mental inventory of what was there. Two cell phones on the desk just as The Boss had indicated. One dead phone on the floor. There had been phones in the bathroom. And there was another computer, the lady's perhaps, unopened on the table before the fireplace, between the wing chairs.

I was merely giving the man time to die as I noted this, but the longer I remained in the room, the worse I began to feel. I wasn't shaky, merely miserable.

The stranger on the veranda didn't bother me. Let him stare. Let him stare right into the room.

I made sure the lilies were turned the best way, wiped up a bit of water that had spilled on the table.

By now the man was surely almost dead. I felt a full-fledged despair creeping over me, an utter sense of emptiness, and why not?

I went to feel his pulse. I couldn't find it. But he was still alive. That I knew when I touched his wrist.

I listened to hear his breathing, and to my uncomfortable surprise, I heard the faint sigh of someone else.

Someone else.

Couldn't have been that guy on the veranda, even though he was still staring into the room. A couple passed by. Then a lone man came, gazing up and around himself, and moved on to the rotunda stairs.

I wrote it off to nerves, that sigh. It had sounded close to my ear as if someone were whispering to me. Just this room, I figured, unnerving me because I loved it so much, and the sheer ugliness of the murder was tearing at my soul.

Maybe the room was sighing at the pity of it. I certainly wanted to. I wanted to go.

And then the misery in me darkened as it so often did at these times. Only on this occasion it was stronger, much stronger, and it had language to it in my head which I didn't expect.

Why don't you join him? You know you ought to go where he's going. You ought to take that small gun off your ankle right now and hold the barrel right under your chin. Shoot straight up. Your brains will fly to the ceiling maybe, but you'll be dead finally, and everything will be dark, darker even than it is now, and you'll be separated from all of them forever, all of them, Mama, Emily, Jacob, your father, your unnamable father, and all of these, like him, whom you've personally and mercilessly killed. Do it. Don't wait any longer. Do it.

There was nothing unusual about this crushing depression, I reminded myself, this crushing desire to end it, this crushing and paralyzing obsession with lifting the gun and doing just what the voice said. What was unusual was the clarity of the voice. It felt as if the voice was beside me, instead of inside me, Lucky talking to Lucky, as he so often did.

Outside, the stranger got up from the table, and I found myself watching in cool amazement as he came into the open door. He stood in the room, under the dome, staring at me as I stood behind the dying man.

He was a tall, rather impressive figure, slender, with a mop of soft black wavy hair and blue eyes with an unusually engaging expression.

"This man's ill, sir," I said immediately, pushing my tongue hard against the bite plate. "I think he needs a doctor."

"He's dead, Lucky," said the stranger. "And don't listen to the voice in your head."

This was so utterly unexpected that I didn't know what to do or to say. Yet no sooner had he spoken these words, than the voice in my head kicked in again.

End it. Forget the gun and its inevitable sloppiness. You have another syringe in your pocket. Are you going to let yourself be caught? Your life's Hell now. Think what it will be like in prison. The syringe. Do it now.

"Ignore him, Lucky," said the stranger. An immense generosity seemed to emanate from him. He looked at me with such focus that it was almost devotion, and I had, unaccountably, an instinct that he was feeling love.

The light shifted. A cloud must have unveiled the sun, because the light in the room had brightened, and I saw him with uncommon clarity, even though I was very used to noticing and memorizing people. He was my height, and he was looking at me with obvious tenderness and even concern.

Impossible.

When you know something is clearly impossible, what do you do? What was I to do now?

I put my hand into my pocket and felt for the syringe.

That's right. Don't waste the last precious minutes of your loathsome existence trying to figure this one. Don't you see, The Right Man has worked a double-cross?

"Not so," said the stranger. He stared at the dead man and his face melted in an expression of perfect sorrow, and then he appealed to me again.

"Time to leave here with me, Lucky. Time to listen to what I have to say."

I couldn't form a coherent thought. My heart was thudding in my ears, and with my finger I pushed ever so slightly at the plastic cap on the syringe.

Yes, bow out of their contradictions and their traps and their lies, and their endless capacity to use you. Defeat them. Come now.

"Come now?" I whispered. The words separated themselves from the theme of rage that was common to my mind. Why had I thought that,Come now?

"You didn't think it," said the stranger. "Don't you see he's doing his damnedest to defeat both of us? Leave the syringe alone."

He looked young and eager, and almost irresistibly affectionate as he stared at me, but there was nothing young about him, and the sunlight was spilling in on him beautifully, and everything about him was effortlessly attractive. Only now did I notice, a little frantically, that he wore a simple gray suit, and a very beautiful blue silk tie.