Betty hurried over to the bed. “Sally.” She shook the skeleton’s arm. “Sally, your daughter is here. Angela came to see you.”

  Angela’s mother rolled her head from side to side, mumbling something as she worked at opening her eyes.

  “That’s right, your daughter Angela is here.”

  “The girl in the moon?” her mother said in a thin, moaning voice. “Is it really the girl in the moon?”

  Betty beamed a smile back over her shoulder at Angela as she motioned for her to come stand next to her mother.

  Angela did as instructed. Betty put a comforting hand on Angela’s back, urging her a little closer.

  “Hi, Ma.”

  Her mother was so thin Angela could make out all the bones in her hands and arms. A nightdress—one of her mother’s favorites, the one with the leopard print—covered her sunken chest. Her face was hardly more than a skull covered with waxy, blotchy skin. Her eyes were set deep into their nearly hollow sockets. She had only a few white wisps of hair over a scalp covered with irregular, dark spots. She had lost a few of her remaining teeth since Angela had seen her last. Now there was only one yellow, rotted tooth on the top, and three on the bottom.

  She had the smell of death about her.

  When Sally held her arm out a little, opening and closing her fingers, Betty knew what she wanted. She put a plastic glass of water in Sally’s hand, helped guide it closer, and put the straw between Sally’s cracked lips so she could take a sip.

  A towel lay beside her shoulder. It was obvious that she used the towel to spit up blood. Betty snatched it away and replaced it with a clean one.

  “It’s time for her pain medication,” Betty said in a low voice.

  “No!” Sally said, her eyes opening, suddenly more alert. “Not yet.”

  She reached out for Angela’s hand. When Angela offered it, she grasped it in frail, cold fingers. Wrinkled, paperlike flesh clung to bone.

  Betty leaned to the side so she could speak to Angela confidentially. “She’s a little more lucid when it’s time for her pain medication, which is good, but it also means she’s starting to have a lot of pain. Even on the medication, she’s still in pain, but for the most part she’s not conscious enough to feel it. We give her the medication every four hours, but if she is feeling pain she can have more as often as she wants.”

  “That’s good,” Angela whispered back.

  “It’s powerful narcotics. Very addicting,” Betty confided. She cast a sidelong glance at Sally. “But that’s not something to worry about at this point. I thought you should know.”

  “Sure, thanks.” Angela didn’t think there was any point in saying anything about addictive drugs and her mother.

  Angela thought it was ironic that Sally would die as she had lived—doped up and stoned out of her mind.

  “I’m going to go in the kitchen and get your next round of pain medication ready,” Betty told Sally in a rather loud voice as she patted her frail arm. “You have a nice visit with your daughter.”

  Angela’s mother nodded.

  SEVENTY

  Watching the ever-cheerful Betty shuffle toward the kitchen, Angela thought the woman seemed downright out of place in the dreary trailer. She was a lone streetlight happily illuminating the gloom in a storm. The world needed more people like Betty, instead of people like Rafael. Or Cassiel. The thought of Cassiel lusting to kill people like the innocent, ever-agreeable Betty made Angela’s anger boil up.

  She reminded herself that she had stopped those men from harming innocent people. And Cassiel was no more.

  Angela finally looked up at the hallway leading to her old bedroom. The dirty, beige shag carpeting had been worn through to the jute backing in places. The hallway looked narrower than she remembered.

  She had told herself that she would visit her mother, but she was not going to go back to look at her old room.

  “Betty is going to get your pain medication, Ma,” Angela said, turning her attention back to her mother.

  “I don’t want it yet,” her mother said, her head rolling from side to side to emphasize the point. “I want to be awake to see you, first.”

  Angela had never known her mother to turn down narcotics in favor of remaining aware of anyone.

  Sally grasped Angela’s hand in both of hers. “Do you think God will take me in when I come to call on him?”

  “If anyone could use his compassion, it would be you, Ma.”

  Her mother smiled. The smile twisted as the pain started to bear down. She grabbed the towel by her shoulder to cough into it for a moment.

  “I’m sorry it hurts, Ma,” Angela said, feeling a pang for her mother. “I wish I could make the pain go away.”

  Her mother put the towel down as she gasped to catch her breath. She lifted a hand partway both in frustration and to dismiss the concern.

  “The pain will end soon enough.” She finally looked up at Angela as tears welled up in her eyes. “All the pain will end soon enough.”

  Angela didn’t know if her mother meant the pain would end when Betty brought another dose of drugs, or if she meant when she died. Either way, Angela didn’t ask.

  “Can you tell me something, Ma?”

  Her mother’s brow drew down as she focused on Angela’s face. “What?”

  “Why have you always called me the girl in the moon?”

  “Ah,” her mother said with a nod as she sank back a little.

  “Why have you always called me that?”

  “Because that’s who you are,” her mother said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s who you are. You’re the girl in the moon. Cold. Distant. Hauntingly beautiful. Untouchable. That’s you—the girl in the moon—that’s who you are.

  “You rise above us all, silently looking down on us, watching us, seeing what we can’t see.

  “You’re not like any of us. We are all lost souls. You watch over us all. That’s what you do. You are our light in the darkness, our guardian angel. My little angel.

  “You are apart, up there all alone.” Her mother shook her head. “None of us are worthy of loving you. We are all lost souls, that’s what we are. Lost souls who have lost our way. We can only look up to you, up there in the sky so very far away.”

  Angela swallowed back a lump in her throat. She felt a tear run down her cheek.

  She had never thought of it that way, but her mother was right. That was exactly what she was.

  She was the girl in the moon.

  Her mother was right, too, in that Angela felt no normal human connections. She felt no emotion at all most of the time.

  The only time she felt a rush of emotion was when she came down to earth to kill men who needed killing.

  She had been born broken because of all the drugs her mother took. Her mother’s habit left Angela something less than normal.

  And something more.

  Angela had always wanted to confront her mother about all the things that she had done, and not done.

  But she realized now it would be pointless.

  What was the use of confronting a hollow shell of a woman lying there at the end of her life. A life wasted. A life she herself never valued.

  “I’ve got your pain medication,” Betty said as she returned and saw Sally grimace and roll her head.

  Sally nodded. “Yes, please. God yes, give me that hit.”

  Betty stuck the needle into the IV port and started pushing the plunger. “Your drugs are coming now, Sally. This will take away your pain.”

  Sally smiled up at Angela. “Karma is a bitch.”

  Angela couldn’t help smiling back through the tears as she watched Betty push a syringe full of narcotics into Sally’s IV. Her mother smiled peacefully when she felt the rush of it coming over her. Her eyes rolled up in her head.

  Her hand slipped off Angela’s.

  The only thing her mother had ever valued was being loaded. She had lived her life the way she wanted, and now
she would die with drugs taking away her pain, her regrets, and any last thoughts.

  “The drugs will have her incoherent for the next three or four hours,” Betty confided.

  “How long?” Angela swallowed. “How much longer does she have?”

  Betty hesitated. “To tell you the truth, we’re all surprised she has lasted this long. My own personal feeling is that she lasted until she could see you again. I think that’s what kept her alive this long. It meant that much to her to see you.

  “Now that you’ve come to see her, I kind of doubt she will live until the next dose. I’m glad you could be here to speak with your mother. That’s a comforting thing—for both of you. I suspect that was the last coherent thing she will ever say. I’m glad you could hear it.”

  And it was the last hit of narcotics she would ever feel.

  This time, with this hit, she would live forever.

  Angela thought it was profoundly sad to see a life never lived slipping away.

  Within ten minutes after receiving the syringe full of drugs, her mother’s last breath rattled out of her.

  Angela was in a daze as she left the trailer park after her mother had died. She had trouble feeling anything. She felt like she was looking down on it all from very far away.

  She had talked to Betty about the arrangements.

  A funeral home was coming to collect the body of a woman who had been able to see the moon looking down on her, and know that it meant something.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  Angela was tired when she left work after Barry’s Place had closed. She felt good, though, because Barry had stopped in for a short time. Everyone had been happy to see him and toasted drinks to his health. His doctors wanted him at home, resting. Barry thought that going in to see how the bar was doing would be the best medicine.

  He had been shocked to see how busy they were, as well as how good the new decorations looked. He had never liked the idea of a ladies’ night because of potential problems. But when he saw how much business they were doing, how well Nate had things under control, and especially the WELCOME BACK, BARRY sign hanging out front, it put him in a good mood.

  At one point he had pulled Angela aside and asked her if she remembered the first time they met, when she had delivered a package for him. He had offered her a job when she turned twenty-one and promised that she would make more money than she ever had before. She remembered, of course. He said that he hadn’t known that day that it would turn out that he would also make more money than he had before.

  As she drove through the darkness after the bar had closed, Angela thought about her mother’s life and her funeral. Betty had come. A few people from the trailer court had come. That was about it. Her mother had never really lived, so there was not much of a life to mourn.

  Angela supposed that at least her mother had given her life. But she hadn’t cherished that life growing in her and had continued to do all kinds of drugs while she was pregnant.

  Jack had helped put it into perspective for her, though. He had explained how her ability to recognize killers was merely a genetic trait, like big muscles, or long legs, or brown eyes. He believed, though, that the gene responsible for her ability had mutated, as genes occasionally did when living things reproduced, and that mutation was likely what gave her an enhanced version of that genetic ability to recognize killers. Any prey animal that evolved new ways of evading predators had a survival advantage. He said it was the same with humans.

  Jack allowed that Angela might be right, that all those drugs had done something to her in the womb and maybe altered that gene, enabling her to have those visions, but he thought it was more likely a natural mutation of the gene—an enhancement that nature conferred on random offspring. That was how life advanced.

  He said that since the ability was genetic and passed on in family lines, it was highly likely that either her grandmother or grandfather, or even both, had that ability to recognize killers.

  That clicked in Angela’s mind. That was why her grandfather had built their house over the hell hole. That was why her grandmother had told her that they thought little clues they had seen in her meant she was destined for something more than other people. It was why they wanted to leave the place to her rather than Sally. Because her grandparents had recognized that special trait in her, they had trained her with firearms, as well as the virtue of life.

  For the first time in her life she thought that maybe it all made sense.

  Jack told her that the base ability was in her genes, so if she had kids, that gene would very possibly pass on to them. It was why super-predators killed entire families.

  As far as Angela was concerned, that was a good reason not to have kids. She didn’t think she would wish her ability on anyone. At the same time, she wouldn’t give it up for anything.

  That ability that ran in the Constantine family had also gotten her grandparents killed, along with relatives in Italy. She wouldn’t want to have kids only to have them hunted down and butchered by some super-predator like Cassiel.

  She wasn’t sure which explanation of her ability was correct, but she liked Jack’s theory. She had always thought of herself as a freak. She would rather be what Jack thought she was—an advancement of the species.

  A different kind of human.

  Angela drove deep in thought for a time, mulling it all over. She trusted Jack. He was doing something important. He was using people with the ability to recognize killers to try to save lives. She grasped the importance of that.

  Besides, since she had first recognized a killer, she thought that was what she was meant to do. She saw eliminating murderers as her mission in life. Whatever else she might do in life, that was her thing.

  Angela Constantine, slayer of monsters.

  Jack was, in a way, doing the same as Angela: going after murderers, eliminating people who should not be allowed to live among innocent people. He also tried very hard to protect those with the ability from the predators hunting them.

  She reached over and touched one of the tattoos of the moon she had gotten on her shoulders—crescent of a new moon on her left shoulder, full moon on her right. She’d had them done by the same guy who did the tattoo on her throat, the same guy she had bought her truck from. He’d done a great job. It felt good having those there now, in addition to DARK ANGEL across her throat.

  She would see Jack again, and she found herself looking forward to it. They shared something that other people couldn’t understand. That was a good feeling. She knew that she and Jack would work together in the future. She looked forward to that, to going after killers.

  She was already feeling that itch that needed to be scratched.

  Jack also protected her from bureaucracies that didn’t like what she could do—that dark swamp of the nameless, faceless intelligence complex and authoritarians who would use her as a scapegoat, twist her life for their own agenda, or, more likely, eliminate her because they didn’t like what she was able to do.

  Jack had worked it out with Angus so that she would not be touched by any of those government agencies ever again—as long as she kept the whole atomic bomb thing a secret. Jack had something that he held over their heads to make sure they kept their end of the agreement. Jack told her, though, that if she talked to anyone about the atomic bombs that had gotten into America, if she let that secret get out, he wouldn’t be able to protect her. She had absolutely no intention of ever telling anyone that the United States had almost been nuked.

  Angela was very, very good at keeping secrets.

  Just then, blue lights suddenly illuminated the cab of her truck and strobed in the mirror. A police siren flicked on for a moment, commanding her to pull over. Angela had been so deep in thought she didn’t even know if she had been speeding, but she usually did, so it wouldn’t surprise her to get a ticket.

  She pulled over to the side of the road and rolled to a stop. They were at the edge of Milford Falls, so she could see the city lights, but the high
way out of town was deserted at that time of night.

  Angela rolled her window down and gripped the top of the steering wheel as she waited, so the cop could see her hands and wouldn’t get nervous. In her mirror she saw the door of the police car open and the cop get out with a flashlight.

  When the cop reached the side of her truck, the flashlight shined in, blinding her. She squinted, trying to see.

  “Well, well, well, look who we have here. Ms. Constantine.”

  It was a woman’s voice. Angela shielded her eyes with a hand, trying to see who it was.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  “That’s right,” Angela said. “I’m Angela Constantine. Do I know you?”

  “I’m Officer Denton. We met at the hospital. You were carrying a concealed weapon. I let you off with a warning.”

  “Well I told you at the time—”

  “Step out of the vehicle. Hands where I can see them.”

  Angela groaned inwardly. She just wanted to go home and go to sleep, but she did as she was told, hoping the officer would simply write her a ticket for speeding and then let her go.

  “Hands behind your head. Lace your fingers together.”

  When she did, Officer Denton bent Angela’s hands down behind her back, one at a time, and put on handcuffs.

  “Is that necessary?” Angela asked. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Walk to my car.”

  Angela let out a heavy sigh as she walked toward the headlights. Officer Denton stopped her in front of the car, in view of the police car’s camera, and started patting her down.

  She immediately found the gun in the holster at the small of Angela’s back. She pulled it out, holding it between a finger and thumb. She whistled as she held it up.