It gained momentum, gnashing Gaby’s muscles, boring into her heart.
Ah. So this was why she’d felt the tension.
Only one thing ever delivered on her this prodigious pain: Tonight, she had deific duties to attend.
Loosing the ear pieces from her ears, Gaby sucked in deep breaths until she could isolate the pain, compartmentalize it for later use. She forced her constricted muscles to flex and pushed up to stand on her feet.
It looked like her meeting with Luther would have to be postponed.
Luther would be pissed.
And truthfully, she’d miss him. She hadn’t wanted to admit it, but she’d looked forward to seeing him again.
Focusing on Luther better enabled her to bridle the pain, keeping the worst of it at bay.
In the furthest reaches of her mind, she heard one of the hookers saying, “Gaby?” And then with very real caring: “Oh God. What’s wrong with her? What should we do?”
Fuck. Did her face look different?
One of the more distressing things to come from her relationships with Luther and Mort was the realization that it wasn’t only evil incarnates who showed their authentic natures through bodily appearance.
Gaby also suffered the affliction. By shared accounts, when called to duty, she looked different. Luther swore she wasn’t hideous, just altered in some way he could never elucidate.
Mort, when seeing her thus, was frightened.
Knowing she had to remove herself from the women before they witnessed too much, became too suspicious, Gaby swallowed hard and managed to whisper, “Butt out. I’m fine.”
“Don’t be silly, Gaby,” Betty said with her thick accent. “You’re sick. I can see it. So what can I do?”
Sick? Well, that was preferable to beastly. “I’m fine, I tell you.”
“You ain’t,” Tiff insisted. “Come to my room. I’ll—”
Bliss’s softer voice interrupted the others. “Gaby? What’s happenin’? How can I help?”
Gaby dredged up a believable snicker, and a thick dose of vitriol. “Like I need help from any of you? Not likely.” In a daze, guided only by her inner sight, Gaby started on her way.
“Stubborn to the bitter end,” Betty lamented.
“And proud,” Bliss added.
“Hey,” a guy called out. “I ain’t paying for this!”
Gaby ignored them all.
Now that she’d given in to the summons, each footfall grew stronger, more determined than the one before it. Her muscles became more fluid, her movements faster, more agile.
She left the lugubrious presence of the motel and stepped into hazy sunlight congested with street noise, human virulence, and malodorous dormancy.
No incarnation of evil lurked about.
Instinctively, Gaby knew that she needed her car. The distance this time would be too far to traverse on foot. For protective purposes, Gaby kept her Ford Falcon parked well away from the motel. Still, with God-enhanced speed on her side, she reached it in only minutes. Keys hidden in the hub-cap kept her from having to carry them on her person.
No one messed with her car.
Why would they? Despite the automobile’s reliable runningcondition, it looked as deserted, as broken as any rust-ravaged heap in the junkyard.
Because a speeding car was more obvious than a woman racing on foot, Gaby worried whenever she had to drive to a destination.
She had no driver’s license.
No IDs at all.
The less anyone knew of her, the simpler her complicated existence became. She had to trust that God would guide her safely, as He always had, to wherever she needed to be.
It was unclear to Gaby just how far she could travel within a paladin’s duty. Atrocities happened around the world; she felt only those in her small corner of society. If she couldn’t reach the malefactor, she couldn’t stop the evil committed.
It was a huge conflict in the cycle of what she did, how she justified her actions. If her ability wasn’t far-reaching, how much did her existence really matter?
As if to wring the doubts from her consciousness, more pain squeezed through her. Gaby gave in to the agony so that it could help her focus.
Navigating by divine intervention, she made the journey by rote, unseeing and unhearing. Her muscles knotted and wrung in agony, in the urgency of the moment.
The sun began its descent just as she reached the bank of a slow-moving, murky river. Dusk left everything dirty, cheerless and gray. Coasting her car up alongside a tree, Gaby put it in park and turned off the engine.
Through the distortion of her ability, her gift, she saw nothing amiss. Clouds rolled in. The rippling surface of the river turned silver.
Her pain receded—and under the circumstances, that wasn’t good at all.
Fresh alarm replaced the hurt; only two things ever caused Gaby’s suffering to abate: Luther’s close proximity, or a missed opportunity.
Breath catching and knife in hand, Gaby jerked around in her seat, looking out the rear window, searching the landscape, the prickling of scrub brush and dead trees. She saw wide-open spaces. There was no way for Luther to be nearby without her seeing him.
Relief turned her spine to jelly and she slumped almost boneless in her seat. She didn’t want Luther to see her like this—ugly, murderous.
More capable than any human being should be or could be.
The abnormal effect Luther had on her would always leave her agitated. He got physically close, and despite the veil of God’s emphatic instructions, she saw more clearly.
Rather than the evil within, she saw the human side of her target.
She saw the destruction she wreaked.
She saw her own vulnerability.
Luther affected her as no one ever had. He softened her, robbing her of a crucial edge.
During weaker moments, Gaby wanted to thank him for that. But when reality crashed around her, she knew it was far too dangerous to let him disturb her vantage over iniquity.
Shaking her head to clear Luther from her thoughts, Gaby opened her car door and stepped out. Her knees still felt weak, but a humid breeze struck her, thick with the foul odors of the river, and that motivated her.
As if it had never been, her pain evaporated altogether, leaving her sick at heart and muddled in spirit.
Raw with regret.
She was too late—but how could that be? It had never happened before.
She was always on time. Tonight, she hadn’t even struggled with the summons. The whores hadn’t let her. They were there, observing her, leaving her no choice but to give in and comply before they saw more than they could ever comprehend.
So . . . what did it mean?
Had God given her a unique directive? Perhaps, this time, He wanted something aberrant, something other than a total destruction of evil about to corrupt.
As silent as a wraith, Gaby walked away from the car toward the riverbank, awaiting guidance with each step. The heels of her boots sank into the loamy soil. Weeds prickled her ankles. Mosquitoes thought her a feast and dined on her flesh with gusto.
Gaby searched the riverbank, the rocks, the washed-up tree limbs, swirling moss and reeds . . .
Oh God. She went stock-still. She’d seen plenty of dead, massacred bodies.
She’d done the massacring herself.
But this . . . this was different.
The body—a bloated, waterlogged sponge on the shoreline—wasn’t dead by her hand. Someone had killed, and dumped the body, and God sent her to . . . what?
Find a murderer?
Maybe before more murders took place?
Okay, fine. But then, why the awful, wracking pain? Why the urgency?
From a distance, Gaby could tell that the body had been in the river for the better part of a day. There was nothing urgent in a rotting corpse.
Unless it was someone she’d recognize.
Vision narrowing, Gaby stared at the white body while a litany raced around her mind. Please, don’t let it be Luther. Please, don’t let it be Mort.