All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (2 page)

“
It’s
the name the bastard gave me,” I muttered glancing from gun to
a face I’d met a few times and seen many more on the news. The
muscles in my jaw clenched and released as I silently counted the
passing seconds in my head. “We seem to meet under awkward
circumstances, don’t we, Detective?”

“
Sometimes
happens between serial killers and cops.”

“
I
didn’t kill anyone.”

“
Right.”
He leveled the gun, his eternally tired eyes unwavering. “And
I’m Serena Williams. Put your hands behind your head.”

A little firework
went off in my brain, interrupting my mental countdown. He obviously
wasn’t Serena Williams—wrong sex, wrong skin color, and
he didn’t look like much of a tennis player—so why pick
her out of a thousand possible celebrities to use sarcastically? I
chanced pissing him off and stole a peek at my watch: t-minus one
minute. My gut wrenched one twist to the right.

If I don’t
get out of here quick--

The thought cut off
half-formed, bullied aside by another. The detective was the lead
investigator in the Revelations Reaper case, the guy the newscasts
interviewed no matter how uncomfortable he looked on camera, so I’d
seen his face a hundred times on TV. And every time they showed him
offering his oft-quoted ‘no comment’, they emblazoned
his name on the screen in white letters.

How did I miss
it?

Detective Shaun
Williams.

I raised an
eyebrow. “Detective Williams?”

“
Yeah,
that’s right. Now that we’ve been properly introduced,
put your fucking hands behind your head before I shoot you.”

I peered past him,
then to both sides. With his name on the scroll in my back pocket,
there had to be someone waiting to ambush this man scheduled to die
in about forty-five seconds.

“
You
need to get out of here,” I said, eyes still searching the
shadows. “You’re in danger.”

“
Me?”
He stretched his arm toward me, pushing the barrel closer. “If
you don’t get your hands up right now, you’ll never walk
again.”

The seconds ticked
off in my head, echoing down the hallways of my mind. I gritted my
teeth, fought the compulsion to try and save him.

Not my job.

They sent me to
retrieve his soul after his death, not prevent it. But so many
already died because of me and my poor choices. Maybe this was an
opportunity to make amends—with myself, if no one else. My
eyes found his and held his gaze for a second; I didn’t have
much more than that.

“
You’ll
thank me for this later,” I murmured and darted toward him,
moving faster than he expected an out-of-shape-almost-forty guy like
me could.

He squeezed the
trigger but I was on him before he got the shot off. The gunshot
nearly deafened me, the explosion echoing through my head, ringing
in my ears. My arms encircled him, pinning his at his sides, and
inertia carried me forward, driving him to the ground. Breath
whooshed out of his lungs when we hit, but I didn’t let go.

“
This
is for your own good,” I said into his ear. His body jerked
but my grip held. The last few seconds counted down in my head.

Five...four...three...two...one.

When I reached
zero, I held on a few seconds longer in case my timing was off or my
watch was slow. Nothing happened. No gunshot, no one jumping from
the shadows; a grand piano didn’t drop from a balcony.
Nothing.

I leaned back, a
hand on his gun arm to prevent him from shooting me. Some thanks
that would be for saving his life. I gripped his wrist expecting him
to squirm away, but he didn’t. His lack of movement should
have tipped me something was wrong, but I was too concerned with
making sure we weren’t about to be attacked to notice. Nothing
moved in the shadows, no one approached down the alley.

Could the scroll
have been wrong?

Unlikely, but it
happened before, when other forces manipulated events. How did I
know the same wasn’t the case this time?

I didn’t.

A small movement
caught my eye and I looked left to see a figure standing five yards
away. Fear forced bitter, electric saliva into my mouth like I’d
bitten down on a piece of aluminum foil, and I snatched the gun from
Detective Williams’ hand, jerked it toward the silhouette. The
man didn’t react, but simply stood watching. His presence made
a knot form in my stomach which worked its way quickly into the back
of my throat. The figure stepped forward into the light and the
muscles in my forearm tensed, my finger brushed the trigger. It only
took a second to realize he wasn’t as opaque as he should be.

This wasn’t a
man, but a dislodged soul.

“
What--?”
I began but the lump in my throat got the better of my voice.

My brain finally
registered the detective’s lack of movement and I looked from
the soul to the detective’s face. His tired eyes stared up at
me blankly; a dark circle of fluid spread across the grungy pavement
beneath his head.

“
No,
I--”

The sight of his
glazed eyes hit me like a spinning kick to the gut, stealing my
breath and energy. My gun arm sagged, the police-issue .38 resting
against my thigh, forgotten. I resisted the urge to shake him by the
lapel of his wool coat or slap him awake, call out his name. I
already knew what the result would be. The overhead light reflected
in the pool of liquid around his head making a grisly halo.

I was responsible
for another death.

I shook my head in
disbelief and looked back at the spirit. There were no black bags
under its eyes or worry lines at the corners of its mouth, but there
was no mistaking to whom the soul belonged: except for the felt
fedora tilted over the soul’s left eye like he’d stepped
out of a Mickey Spillane novel, the spirit wore the same clothes.

“
I
didn’t--”

My words stuck
again. Or maybe I didn’t want to complete the sentence because
it would make what happened real. No need to worry, the ghost took
care of that piece of business for me.

“
You
killed me.”

Bruce
Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost

My head didn’t
want to stop shaking, like it would change things, reverse time like
Superman flying counter-clockwise around the earth to save Lois
Lane. I must have looked like one of those bobble heads they give
away at baseball games.

“
You
killed me,” the spirit said again and I bit back a spark of
anger.

No need to rub
it in.

“
But
how?” I glanced at the pool of blood under the detective’s
head and figured I knew how, but my mouth spoke ahead of the
thoughts in my head. “I only tackled you.”

The apparition
crouched beside his former body, two feet separating us, and reached
toward the corpse’s face but his ethereal hand passed through
without effect. Freshly released souls forget such details. A look
of frustration crossed his face.

“
Do
you mind?” The soul gestured toward its earthly head.

“
Sure.”

Hesitant, I lay the
gun down on the pavement beside the detective, suddenly unconvinced
that danger had passed. My fingers touched the detective’s
cooling cheek as I turned his head. The sharply pointed rock it had
struck when I tackled him was still embedded in his cranium. I
sucked a whistling breath through my teeth.

“
Man,
I’m sorry.” My statement felt woefully inadequate, but
it was all I could think of to say.

The spirit
shrugged. “An accident.”

I nearly opened my
mouth to ask why he wasn’t angry, but I didn’t. I’d
seen enough dead people to know they all react differently.

“
Yeah,
but you’re still dead.” I removed my hand from the
detective’s head and let it roll back, the murder weapon
protruding out the back stopping it halfway. “And I still
killed a cop.”

The spirit was
staring at me, his gaze sending lancets of guilt through my chest,
but he didn’t say anything, so I didn’t either. We
stayed there for probably two minutes, him staring at me and me
glancing away and back, away and back, like someone who’d done
something wrong and couldn’t bear to hold his gaze.

How appropriate.

During the pause,
my mind raced: what would Mikey think about this? How badly did I
screw up? And, more importantly, what would the repercussions be?
Mike sent me on a brief trip to Hell for botching a job once, a trip
I didn’t like so much. I thought of Gabe and Poe and all the
people whose souls ended up condemned because of me. The spirit
watched my head swivel back and forth a few times like he really was
Serena Williams and I was watching him play a tiny, invisible tennis
match, then he tapped me on the shoulder as best a ghost can.

“
What
do we do now?”

I must have stared
at him like he’d spoken some indecipherable ghost language
because he felt compelled to rephrase the question.

“
What
happens next?”

I finally focused
on him, grabbed the gun from where I’d set it down, and stood,
feet straddling his corpse. The spirit stood, too.

“
Now
you go to Heaven.”

I started down the
alley, but after a few steps, realized he hadn’t followed, so
I stopped and looked back over my shoulder.

“
You’re
going to take me to Heaven?”

His
disbelieving tone irked me a bit—
why
shouldn’t
it be me who takes him to Heaven?—
but
I
attempted to keep my irked-ness from showing in my response.
Accident or not, I’d just killed the man; he deserved some
compassion.

“
Sort
of. I do the earthly part.” I resumed walking. “You
better come, there might be others looking for you, and they’re
not as nice as me.”

An ominous
statement coming from the guy who just killed you.