J. Ellison - The Immortals

There. There he was.

She hadn’t seen him inside because he was wearing an ill-fitting baseball cap. He must have walked right past her. Goddamn it.

The dyed black hair peeked out from under the edge of the ball cap, she knew this was him. She drew closer, careful not to alert him. The boy had several people cowering in front of him. He had his arms outstretched, a gun in each hand, pointed at the crowd.

She yelled, “Stop right there, Schuyler!”

People scattered, running, crying, but she held her ground, and so did the boy. Sensing this was their moment, the people around him cleared in an instant, and he was alone.

“Turn around! Get on the ground. Put your hands on the top of your head and get down on the fucking ground now!”

He put his hands up and turned, slowly, pirouetting on his right foot. Face to face with him, Taylor was shocked at just how young he really was. She could hear noises in the distance, weapons being readied, knew they were in fact right beside her, but she felt captivated, drawn in by the boy’s stare, a mongoose faced with a cobra.

“It’s finished, Schuyler,” she said. “Drop the weapon and get on the ground.”

He continued to look at her, his coal-black eyes flashing. Their eyes locked together in a battle of wills. He finally blinked.

“My name is Raven!” he screamed at her.

She felt the movement before she saw it. His hand was coming up, the glint of steel, the sunlight flashing off the gun. She didn’t think, didn’t hesitate, pulled the trigger three times in quick succession. Blood bloomed on the boy’s chest and forehead-three kill shots, clean, perfect. Time stopped.

He looked vaguely surprised for a moment, then crumpled in a bloody heap.

“Get the paramedics,” she screamed, advancing on him. She kicked the guns out of the way, quickly ran her hands over the rest of his body. He was clean. He looked her right in the eye and she felt a cold slithering down her spine. Blood bubbled over his lip as he died.

Hands were pulling her away now. Her gun was taken from her, standard operating procedure. The blood was roaring in her ears, she felt like she might faint. Cold water was pressed to her lips, Lincoln, rubbing her on the back. She started to come back to herself, realized that the deafening roar of the shots was making everything sound tinny. No ear defenders, she thought to herself, fighting down hysterical laughter.

The boy was lying on the hard ground, eyes vacant, waiting for the ME to declare him. Officer-involved shootings were a nightmare for everyone.

Taylor was segregated, talked to, debriefed, but didn’t hear the words leaving her mouth. The roar of the gun, the startled look on the boy’s face, the blood blooming in a spurt from the head-shot, replayed itself over and over and over.

Her day was only just beginning. She’d be investigated, cleared of wrongdoing, but saddled with yet another mark on her record.

Dear God, what have I done? He was just a boy. Just a boy. What have I done?

She managed to tear herself away, fumbled open her cell phone. She needed to talk to Baldwin. He would understand. He would forgive her.

Baldwin answered on the first ring. Her voice sounded foreign, not her own, echoing in her mind as she told him what had happened.

“Taylor, are you all right?”

She wasn’t all right. She’d never be all right again. She’d just killed a boy. Not a man, not a leering criminal, but a boy.

It was justified, she knew that. It was what had happened in the brief moment of clarity that she’d experienced before she shot him that was upsetting her.

She’d seen the boy’s soul, a dark mass of hatred and fire, at the very moment her finger squeezed the trigger. She’d seen a man before, in her dreams, who glowed with the same sense of righteous hatred, directed exactly at her. She might not have let her finger move otherwise.

When she shot Raven, she’d seen the ghost of the Pretender staring from the boy’s black eyes.

T aylor sat in the Adirondack chair on the back deck. She felt the chill of the breeze, but ignored it, let it bite and chap her. She was beyond feeling at this point, or so she thought. When the phone rang, she saw it was Baldwin, but made no move to answer.

After a few moments it stopped, leaving her in peace. She didn’t want to talk to anyone just now.

As instructed, she’d seen the department shrink, and that had helped a bit, but it wasn’t enough, not yet. She was on an enforced leave of absence, some vacation time, while they sorted through the mess at Hillsboro High School. She needed to get her head back in the game, figure out what she wanted to do.

Nothing. She just wanted to be.

Erasing the mental image from the shooting was proving to be harder than she’d ever imagined. The memory of those eyes burned into her. The gun snapping again and again. The small splat of blood that flashed from the wounds. The look of sheer surprise on his face as he dropped to the ground. The sunlight glittering off the silver ankh around the boy’s neck. No, those images weren’t going away anytime soon.

She took a long pull on her beer, eyes closed, basking in the meager sunlight. When she tilted her chin down, she thought she saw a flash of black. A raven? That would be fitting.

“Lieutenant?” a garbled voice asked. The black thing moved closer. Taylor opened one eye fully and saw a face attached.

“Ariadne,” she said, shuffling herself a little more upright. “You look like hell, if you’ll forgive me saying so.”

Ariadne mounted the steps to the deck, sat in the empty chair with a shrug. Her jaw was still wired shut, the bruises still livid, but beginning to fade. A quick healer. Taylor wondered idly how healed she could be, then let it go. Her head drifted back again. She was just so tired.

“I rang the doorbell. You didn’t answer.”

“How did you find me?”

“Detective McKenzie.”

Damn that man.

“I expected…” Ariadne started, her dainty hands shifting in her lap. “I thought you’d be happy. You solved the case.”

Taylor looked away, over the woods that backed to their yard. If there was one thing she’d learned in her years in Homicide, there was never such a thing as a closed case. Faces, wounds, last words, the screams of those left behind, images of caskets dropping into cold, hard dirt-these were the things that stayed long after the legal battles ended, the case files sent to storage. She could usually find it in her to celebrate a good solve, but this case didn’t fall into that category.

“Oh,” Ariadne said. “I had no idea.”

Anger flared, giving Taylor a spark of clarity. “You’re reading my mind again?”

“It doesn’t take a psychic to see you’re in pain. Maybe you should put the beer down. Why don’t I make you some tea?”

Taylor narrowed her eyes at the witch and polished off the rest of the beer. She tossed the bottle behind her, heard the clink of glass as it met one of its brothers.

“Like that, is it? You’re over here feeling sorry for yourself?”

With great effort, Taylor kept her tone civil. “Ariadne, why are you here?”

“I was worried about you. Detective McKenzie told me your man is out of town. You shouldn’t be alone right now.” There was an admonishment in her tone that fired Taylor up.

“Baldwin didn’t have a choice. He would be here if he could.”

As she said the words, she realized how upset she was that Baldwin wasn’t the one cajoling and nursing her back to an optimum mental level. She felt foolish. She’d been avoiding his calls because she’d resented the fact that he wasn’t guiding her through this mess. Since when had she become so dependent on him? Was it dependence, or something more?