but down these mean streets a man must go.

Desperate for help, she looked around.  At the bar end of the hallway, Ravi passed by, sipping a drink and glancing her way without subtlety.  

“Ravi,” she called.  “Help.”

She pounded against the door again, but there was no movement and no answer.  

It was how the shadows got to you: by separating you.

Not Oliver, damnit.  

Ravi ran to her side, drink still in hand, and looked at her with wild eyes.  “What’s going on?”

“It’s Ol— he was just here— and now he’s—“  The words gurgled out, panic threatening to wreck her.  

Ravi, more focused if not calmer, grabbed the fire extinguisher from the wall next to them and slammed its base against the door.  Its collision with the metal was dramatic but did little more than dent the door.

“Give,” Audrey said.

The door handle was her target, and she brought the extinguisher down hard— once, twice, three times until the handle and its lock mechanism went with it.  

It was enough to let them push the door open.  

Audrey was first in and heard the sound of her name, strangled: “Audrey.  Get out—“

Oliver was suspended, mid-air, against the far wall, his legs pumping, fighting for traction.  Something unseen had hold of his throat.  His hands grasped at it.

Nothing to see, nothing to fight against.

But if she blurred her eyes, she could see the outline of the shadow.

A by-product of what had happened to her.

She’d take it.

Still armed with the fire extinguisher, she ran to the figure and crashed it against the side of what could have been its head.  

Oliver gasped.  Fell, rubbing at his neck.  

Then the shadow came for her.

It started with the lights, bulbs blowing out all over the restroom until the only light was the mottled gray from the exterior window.  And then it slammed the door again.

This time with all three of them in the pitch blackness.

“Marco,” Ravi said, his voice shaking.

“Polo,” she responded.

“Magellan,” Oliver croaked.

“My least favorite explorer,” Ravi said.

“Dumb and dumber, shut up,” Audrey said.

Ravi replied: “Good to know she’s still feisty.”

“Like that’d change,” from Oliver.

“Shhhhhhhhh.”

“Who was that?” Audrey said.

And then silence.

“Guys?”

Nothing.

From all around her suddenly was the sound of water running, a constant shhhhhh.

And then, in the darkness: “Folllloowwwwwsssssss.”

Something pushed her, hard, into the porcelain sink.  It hit her stomach, knocking the air out of her lungs.  In the low light, she could see the figure approaching her in the mirror, gangly and bent.

She’d been here before.  Nine months ago.

She wasn’t going to do it again.

She immediately turned the water on in the sink at full force.  The big farmer’s sink quickly filled up.

She counted until it felt like it was on top of her, its breath on the back of her neck.  

It caressed her back, her cheeks, her collarbone.  

It wanted inside her.  She could feel that.

“Better me than them,” she said to it, and she turned to face the shadow.

It happened as quickly as she’d remembered it: like an inhale, and then the shadow consumed her.  

A veil fell over her eyes, darkening the already black restroom.  The emotions that tore at her were strong, brutal: sorrow, loneliness, grief, fear.

Everything she’d felt over the last eight months, a thousand times over.

Pain tore at the inside of her stomach, and she doubled over, coughing up blood onto the tiled floor of the restroom.

The blood was the brightest red she’d ever seen.

So easy, the thing inside her thought, to just give up here.  To give in.

To all those terrible feelings.

She’d almost done that once already, and it had cost her everything.

Not.  This.  Time.

Audrey grabbed one of the legs of the sink and felt wet: the water was overflowing.  

She dragged herself up until she could brace her arms on the corners of the sink.  

There, in the mirror, the shadows under her eyes, the nightmare rings.

“Get the fuck out of me,” she said to it.

And pushed her head under the water.

Stronger than the shadows— that’s what she had to be.

It took all her strength to keep herself under.  She felt the thing wriggling in her.  It whispered to her: Follloowwwwsssss.

Loss, horror, anxiety, heartbreak.

It wanted all of hers.

It pulled her head back out of the water, and she heard, distantly, the sound of her name and her own gasp of breath.

Stronger, that’s what she was now.

She shoved her head into the sink again, and the thing inside her screamed into the water.  Water flooded her mouth.  She choked, coughed.

Death seemed so very close.

Audrey was stronger than death, too.

The shadow in her wracked her body, and she felt things shutting down, her eyes growing weak, her arms weaker.

She burst out of the water for air, gulping hungrily at it.

And then collapsed to the cold, wet tile floor.

The thing inside her body seizured and then crawled out of her.

The smell of rotting filled the restroom.

“Follows,” it cried at her, sounding like a dying baby.

“Fuck off,” she told it, coughing up water.

The lights flickered back on, one Edison bulb by Edison bulb.

She heard her name again, but this time it was in a strong, solid voice.  A voice she loved.

Her eyes were blurry as she rolled onto her back.  Arms went around her.  She was pulled into someone’s lap.

Cedar.

Oliver.

“God,” he said, rocking he.  “God, Audrey.  God.”

“Even he can’t get in or out of the Cape.”  Ravi— mild.  Scared.

“He probably knows better,” Audrey said, her voice hoarse, her throat raw.

Oliver helped her up, his arm around her waist, her body pulled tight to him.  She was too exhausted to think through the subtext.

“Shit,” he said, and he jerked his chin towards the ground.

The redhead was gone by the time Veronica and Frankie got there.  Her body was still there like a discarded scarecrow broken over the rim of a table, pondering one last sip of someone else’s whiskey sour, but someone had picked up her soul before they arrived.  It was a bad time for redheads.  She was the third that month in a city and a time where the only color that seemed to matter was the one that came out of a box pure yellow.  Veronica would have called them a dying breed except that the truth danced a little closer to murder.

The club was a place called Midnight, and some time between then and an early Angels dawn, someone had taken the girl and shot her five times in the back at a range close enough to be almost sentimental.  It was rage that did that kind of thing, but it was something else that left her face down in a puddle of her own blood at a table where the white silk linen tablecloth probably cost more than her monthly salary.  She’d lost a shoe somewhere, torn her pantyhose with the perfect seam in the back, a real seam, not drawn on like the girls in line for auditions for the kinds of thing they’d regret.  She wouldn’t have had much of a chance to fight.  There were a lot of pretty young girls who ended up dead in a city and time like this one, and it was a hell of a shame every time, but it was mostly never a mistake.  And because it was mostly never a mistake, mostly Veronica never showed up.  

“Hell of a thing,” Frankie said, an unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of his skeletal mouth.

They were the only ones in the club, save the body of the dead girl, the lights too bright for a place where the garish makeup around the edges showed its peels.  The stains showed.  The cops were almost always too late for murder.  It wasn’t their fault.  It had a way of showing up when nobody wanted much to do with it, carrying with it the smell of sulfur that took the kind of time to soak out of human flesh that the Living just didn’t have.  It was the kind of smell the Living couldn’t sense, but it was there, a smoldering under the shadows that reeked of death and whatever Deadly Sin had taken hold of it, the burned-up end of a cheap cigarette.  The Dead had a way of showing up when they were least wanted, too, but then they weren’t ever wanted anywhere, not even in their own company.  Veronica smelled it, because she was neither living nor was she dead, just something in the in-between, a result of her own hubris, but even her own rotten self awareness did nothing to drain the sink that the stink steeped itself in.

“What do you think?” Frankie asked, and he shoved his hands in the pockets of his well-cut suit, a move Veronica knew from too many hundreds of years to be one for the sake of stilling nervous hands.  “Wrath?”

“Greed,” she said, and she nodded to the gold-tiled linoleum floor around the girl, drenched in blood and the slippery tendrils that a Deadly sin left behind when it did the kind of thing that had happened here.  They shimmered yellow, too brassy to be gold.

“Huh,” he said, and he reached up a bony hand to light the end of his cigarette.  “Why are you better at that than I am?”

“Practice,” Veronica said.  “Years of it.  And I don’t have smoke in my eyes like you do.”

“This stuff can’t be good for you,” Frankie said with a sniff, and he inhaled like he had any lungs to take it in.  His empty eye sockets disappeared behind the smoke, and Veronica thought she saw some of it escape out the cuff of his shirt.  “Has she got a name?”

“Everyone’s got a name, Frankie.  Most people are issued with them, right out of the box,” Veronica said, and she stepped behind the dead girl and reached for her open purse, a couple of singles, a strand of bad pearls, and a tube of lipstick called Rosy Future.  “That’s a shame,” she said.  

“Careful.  You’re getting blood on your shoes.”