Page 67 of Vanish Into Light

“You don’t say,” Beck said, mildly, and then, “I’m going to duck. Shoot the man that comes out of that door.”

“What–”

Beck dropped to one knee, wings fanning low, across their knees. A door at the end of the hall opened, and a man filled the threshold, hands together in front of him in the unmistakeable posture of someone armed.

Lance was ready to fire, but Rose beat him to it.

The man fell back with a shout, blood blooming, a spray of it arcing along the doorjamb as he toppled to the carpet.

Behind him, someone else fired in the opposite direction.

Something touched his arm, and Lance nearly startled, until Morgan’s voice said, “It’s in there. In that room.”

Beck launched to his feet, wings flapping once, speeding him along as he ran forward – and swept through the door, wings angling back at the last minute as he crossed the threshold.

“He’s got to stop doing that,” Lance muttered, as they followed.

They stepped over the dying man just inside the doorway, and entered a room made lavish with heaps of absolute junk: overwrought tables, chairs, a bed swagged with garish blue satin. Lance had a glimpse of mirrors, and pyramids of glassware; too many liquor bottles and several TVs, all of them tuned to different channels.

He took all of this in with a quick glance that panned back and forth, searching for threats. He spotted three women huddled in a corner, crying and clutching one another. In addition to the man Rose had shot, another lay sprawled on his back, throat a gaping wound that poured blood down onto the carpet, mouth working silently as life left him.

Beck had a third man bent back over a table, hand on his throat, both wrists pinned back and secured by his tail.

“You must be Midas,” Beck said, flashing his teeth in a humorless grin.

And he must have been, because he was dripping gold. At least a dozen chains around his neck, all of varying lengths and thicknesses, a few sporting huge medallions. He wore gold rings on each finger, and a gold wallet chain. His shoes were glittery gold, too, as were the small hoops in his ears.

He stared up at Beck in abject, lip-quivering horror.

“Nothing to say for yourself?” Beck asked. “That’s fine. I’ll just help myself.”

With his free hand, he lifted a chain from Midas’s chest, held it up so that the light caught on its medallion – its silver medallion. One in the shape of some sort of four-legged animal; Lance couldn’t see from a distance.

“Ah,” Beck said. “Thank you.”

Midas cried out when he yanked at the medallion, and the chain came apart with a loud scattering of links across the tabletop.

Beck withdrew his tail – and then set the edge of its spade tip against the man’s throat.

Time seemed to slow. Lance knew what was going to happen before it did; could see the subtle flexing of Beck’s tail, tendons leaping in the back of his hand as it tightened on the man’s throat.

Still, somehow, the gush of arterial spray when Beck slit his throat from ear to ear was a shock.

Lance had seen death, had seen terrible injury. Blood was a common sight, one he’d become inured to.

But he’d never watched blood splatter a man’s face – and watched him smile; watched the pink of his darting tongue as he licked it from his lips.

Beck stepped back from Midas, King Midas, a king no more, not even a pathetic pimp of one, and left him twitching and dying on the table; turned to them.

It was then that Lance saw blood of a different kind.

Beck’s own.

Red striped and flecked his face, a crimson-bright diagonal slash over chin, mouth, cheek; it skirted the corner of one eye. Stained his teeth, when he grinned at them.

But Lance’s gaze caught on his chest, the way it hitched and stuttered, his breathing unsteady. Through the parted halves of his coat, his whole torso gleamed, slick and shiny. With blood. A glimpse of pale flesh showed through a hole in his shirt, and blood welled in fat pearls and rolled down to add to the mess that had already soaked the fabric.

“Beck!” Rose whispered.

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