Total pages in book: 45
Estimated words: 40901 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40901 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 205(@200wpm)___ 164(@250wpm)___ 136(@300wpm)
“Deimos! Home!”
Katya
It is spectacular, how impossible he seems to find it to listen in any way, shape, or form. Of course the rivers flow with the blood of the innocent. Starlight’s actions have been cursed since he began this vendetta against me, and likely long before. If he has not bathed in rivers of blood before, I would be very much surprised. He just has the arrogance to believe that he will always control where they flow. There, of course, he is wrong.
Deimos rises from the ground, as obedient as ever, and bears us back to the great prison that mars the desert like an ink stain on a brand new shirt. We approach the wall of the prison at a gallop, and I feel Deimos coil beneath me like a spring as he contracts in order to make a leap of a height no mortal horse would ever be able to make. He springs over the black obsidian stone walls, over the razor-sharp wire, and lands in the middle of the prison yard where more than one atrocity has taken place.
“Thank you, Deimos,” Starlight says. “You,” he says to me. “Come.”
I follow him, obviously to the shower. He wants to cleanse himself of his sins. He is peeling his clothing off his body as fast as he can, making himself very pleasantly naked. In his hurry to rinse the bloody river water from his body, I lean against the doorway and wait for his inevitable shriek when the water from the shower head flows thick with sanguine water.
“JESUS CHRIST!”
That’s not who his problem is with.
Starlight rounds on me, his pupils dilated with fear. He is keeping control of himself, but he has clearly never come into quite such close contact with the consequences of his actions before. Most people never do. The universe prefers to keep things indirect. Cosmic spankings like this are rare.
“You’re doing this, aren’t you,” he accuses me.
“No,” I say, honestly. “I’m not. But my presence might very well be causing it. You cannot sin so terribly in the presence of the divine without reaping something in the way of consequence.”
“Make it stop,” he commands me.
“I can’t. It’s not about me. It’s about you. You could let me go. That might very well stop it.”
I hear the devil chuckle, unseen. He appreciates that gambit of mine. With how white Starlight currently looks, he might very well take me up on that offer.
“What am I supposed to drink if I can’t get water?”
“You have beer?”
And that is how we end up in the kitchen with Starlight wearing nothing but boxer shorts while cracking a beer with an expression of a man who knows he has fucked up and has no idea how to fix that fuck up.
“Thank god,” he says when he realizes beer is still beer. He downs the can very quickly and reaches for the next can. I sit and watch him. I’d almost feel sorry for him if he wasn’t so intent on treating me like I am a reprobate while he is such a repository of sin.
“You had all this built, and you have nobody here. What a waste. You could have clothed the naked, fed the hungry, cured the sick. You could have done anything, and instead you built a monument to empty stupidity.”
“I didn’t pay for the construction,” he says.
“No. The devil did.”
He doesn’t respond, just keeps drinking. I can see he’s trying to think his way out of this predicament. It’s not going to be easy. He’s going to have to come to the obvious conclusion of his own accord. To do that, he’s going to have to consult whatever of his conscience he has left.
For now, I sit about in wet and bloody clothes, dripping pinkish fluid onto the floor. It’ll clean up fairly easily. I assume no cleaners are actually coming in. The hospital staff are the only ones who actually seem to be here. There’re no office workers, and no custodial staff, no guards anymore. There’s just Sheriff Starlight, lord of his largely empty domain, a doctor, two nurses, and me.
“Okay,” he says. “Alright. Okay. It’s… alright.”
“Feeling any better?”
His hands have stopped shaking. He might be ready to talk.
“You are right that I have sinned,” he says. “I have taken lives. Too many to count. So many I barely notice anymore when I do it.”
“Tell me who you were before he found you. The man with the money. The one who sent you out to hunt angels.”
Starlight stares into the dark void of his beer can as if salvation might be in there.
“I’d been discharged from the military after an operation went wrong. My team was killed. I survived with a wound to my shoulder, and little more. Went back home, found my home being foreclosed on…”
“And that’s when he came.”