But, it didn’t matter.
He understood what needed to be done. He hadn’t at first. Not for the longest time. He had been just like everyone else. In fact, he had been worse. He had committed sins that had eventually put him in prison. But his time there had been a hidden blessing. It was prison where he had learned of his true purpose in life. It was there he had learned he was a part of God’s righteous army. It had taken that incarceration for him to discover he was chosen by God himself to eradicate the infestation of heresy.
There would be others to help him of course; of that he was sure. He needed only to find these brothers and sisters, and then together they would show everyone the true might of God.
The warlock was struggling. Not as much as he had at first, but he was still fighting. Now, something pressed upward from beneath Eldon’s arm, cold and hard against the flesh of his wrist.
Puzzling.
It must be the warlock clawing at his hand again.
But this felt different. It didn’t feel at all like the hand that had fought to pry against his fingers moments before.
This was cold.
Hard.
Metallic.
A sharp, chemical odor blended with the moist air to tease Eldon’s nostrils. He knew that smell. Its pungent edge was painfully familiar to him.
Gun cleaning solvent.
In a panic he released his grip and rotated his arm quickly away. In that moment an explosion pierced his ears, and the muzzle of the handgun erupted with bright orange flame.
He just didn’t rotate it quickly enough.
Harried voices barked commands with life and death urgency through the cold night air. The tinny bursts of police radios punctuated the sounds coming from the scene above, all mixed with the frenzied pace of the music. The activity sounded rushed but methodical.
Intense.
And all focused on the rescue of the warlock, Rowan Gant.
A strong voice filled with authority but edged with what sounded almost like fear, parted all other sounds to make room for itself. “Goddammit, somebody shut that fuckin’ music off!”
After a moment, the frenetic instruments fell quiet, in comparison bringing what almost seemed to be silence to the landscape even though the voices and activity continued on unimpeded.
Fog was still clinging in a moist, grey shroud to anything and everything in its path, and most especially, to anyone. Eldon felt its clammy insistence as it pervaded his clothing, sending tendrils of cold dampness inward to chill him all the way past the bone and directly to the soul. Through his mist-soaked clothes, the cold metal of the girders pressed against him, mercilessly leeching the warmth from his body.
The sharp sting in his scalp, which had earlier occupied the foremost position in his list of unwanted sensations, had now taken a back seat to the fiery burn in his left arm. The bullet, which had been expelled at high velocity and point blank range, had ripped into the soft flesh of his wrist and fragmented in a diagonal trajectory along several inches of his forearm. He wasn’t entirely sure, but judging from the amount of movement still left in the appendage, the wound involved only muscle and no bone.
Even so, it hurt like hell.
But he knew the fact that he was here, now, feeling the pain, was yet another of those hidden blessings, because it could have been far worse. In fact, it almost had been…
As the projectile had executed its damage upon his arm, Eldon pitched to the side, absenting himself from the precarious balance that once kept him planted on the supporting steel girder. With that tenuous stability gone, he had begun to fall.
To him, how he managed to keep from plunging into the ice-choked Mississippi river was nothing short of a miracle. As he howled in agony, his torso had slipped quickly through the open space between the girders, moving heavily downward beside the warlock. At almost the same instant, his knees slipped from the latticed girder in the exact opposite direction, landing his waist along its edge with a sound thud. Then, he had continued his rotation forward much like an out-of-control gymnast on the uneven parallel bars. Out of a purely reflexive survival instinct, he had sent his uninjured hand pawing frantically for anything he could grasp to break the fall. Through what, in his mind, could only have been divine intervention by God Himself, Eldon managed to entwine his fingers in the lattice on the underside of the steel beam. With the forward motion impeded, he came to a stop, folded dangerously over the support.
He hung there for a long moment, a mere foot away from the suspended warlock. He fully expected another shot to ring out and bring an end to him. But surely, Eldon thought, God would not save him from the icy plunge that would certainly have spelled death only to allow the warlock to execute his demise?
He had remained as still as he could, gritting his teeth against the pain while waiting for any movement from the condemned Witch.
None came.
It was a sign…it told him that he would not die at the hand of Satan. There was a much grander plan at work, and his time had not yet come. There was still far too much for him to do on this earth.
Even as the ringing in his ears began to subside, he heard the sirens in the distance, punching sharp holes in the still clamoring music from above-and they were growing closer with every heartbeat.
He wondered if the warlock might well be dead. Perhaps the pull of the trigger had been done with his last breath. Of course, it was more likely that he was simply unconscious. Whichever it was, there was no time to check now. The authorities would be arriving soon, and God had seen to it that he had survived thus far. He knew that escape was his only recourse at this point and that it would be entirely up to him. God would help him, but only if he helped himself.
And now, here he was, hiding in the dead space between the diagonal lattice of supporting girders and the deck of the bridge, intently listening to the activity above. He could feel a cramp forming along the muscles of his back as he used his shoulders to hold himself in place. His free hand was occupied with keeping pressure on the pulsing wound in his left forearm. He would need to make a tourniquet soon, that much was certain. He just hoped he would be able to do it in time because he had a feeling he was going to be here for a while.
The cold and the pain were already taking their toll. He wanted desperately to sleep but knew that he couldn’t. He had to stay alert. He had to remain free.
He was positioned out of sight behind a diagonal upright support and beneath the deck of the bridge itself. If he kept himself still and quiet, he should be virtually undetectable. The detectives would most certainly piece together the visible evidence, and if so, they would assume he had met his end among the muddy water and buckled ice floes below. The assumption would be logical, as it had very nearly been fact. Eldon prayed that they would draw this conclusion.
Through a small gap between the girders, he could make out the form of the warlock, still suspended by the rope only a few feet away. A second rope had already been thrown down, and it was obvious from the sounds of metal tinkling against metal that someone was being lowered at this very moment.
The commanding voice that had earlier demanded the music be quelled spoke again, thickly layered with concern. “Can ya’ tell if he’s alive?”
“Not yet,” a much closer voice called back. “Another couple of feet or so… Slowly… Okay… A little more… A little more… Okay… Hold it. Right there.”
Glimpses of someone outfitted in a climbing harness shone through the gap. Eldon pressed himself further into the shadows and held fast against the surge of pain in his arm.
No movement.
No noise.
He listened intently for the verdict, hoping against all hopes that his mission had been carried out to its conclusion. Praying that, by the grace of Almighty God, the warlock was dead.