Shadow Kissed 03 - Shadowman

echoing within the empty warehouse space, the mournful bellow of a ship on the river beyond the docks, and the soft pats of a trio of footsteps moving down the street, the bearers’ heartbeats an overlapping, near-tribal drumming of life. The gate’s Open me! was reduced to an insidious whisper in his mind.
    Yes, insidious and perilous. Damnation was infested with devils, twisted souls of those who’d spurned life and love and hope for evil and destruction and pain. Once cut from mortality and delivered to the Hereafter, they existed in agony, suffering eternity by torturing each other.
    Soon, Kathleen. I will rescue you.
    The heartbeats quickened when they neared the warehouse. The atmosphere became tinged with burgeoning mortal fear. The unease rapidly escalated to terror.
    Shadowman cast his attention outward, away from the gate, beyond the walls of the warehouse, to find a young woman pursued on the street by two swarthy thugs. The lust coming off the men reeked like rotted fruit. The woman held her keys like spikes through the fingers in her fisted hand. Her fear pervaded the area like a wild, living thing.
    Open me! the gate called in his mind. Death ignored it and observed the woman.
    What could have possibly driven her to wander this street, amidst the industry and violence of the docks?
    Calloused by eons of experience, he watched as she picked up speed. Death could sense the threads of her life glowing in the ether around her, drawing her toward her final destiny. The lines formed a strange map, forces urging her this way and that, subtle tugs that drew the pattern of her existence to intersect at this point, at this moment.
    Why here? Why now? Irrelevant.
    A shimmer of dark faelight broke over the dun of the street, visible only to him. A glittering sleeve, a sweep of glossy gold fae hair, the twinkle of madness in an eye. Moira. Fate leered toward him, girlish and laughing. Moira had three faces, but she preferred the young one best. She leaned with her sharp scissors toward the woman’s lifeline. Death caught the glint of the silvery blade as the mortal’s lifeline was cut, her thread in the tapestry of the world at its ragged end.
    It happened to everyone.
    The woman must have sensed it herself. She cast her eyes up to the sky, praying no doubt, and strained for breath. Moira had already departed from the world, her work done. The woman, of course, had sought a higher power. Her gaze arced from God to over her shoulder, her mouth parting as she met the hot eyes of her pursuers.
    Would she stumble and fall, as so many others had throughout the centuries?
    No. The woman leaned into a run. A hopeless flight.
    Death marveled as she gathered her terror to her and bore down on it as she ran. Curious that a spirit should burn so bright when closest to death.
    Kathleen’s had as well. Bright and bold enough to pierce Shadow.
    But, like Kathleen, this woman would die. She had to. Moira had cut the thread of her life. It could not be undone.
    One of the men, dim by comparison, reached out to grab her jacket.
    The woman spun and planted her spiked fist in his face.
    Good girl. Fight your Fate, then. Cross in a blaze of glory.
    The man reeled back, one hand going to his bloody cheek, the other still clutching her sleeve. The men’s lust was threaded with a heat for murder, like a sticky tar to stain the soul.
    She peeled out of her jacket as the first man grabbed her flying hair, jerking her suddenly back. She raised that spiked fist again as she shifted her weight. He stopped her at her wrist, and Death grinned in appreciation as her shift of weight moved into a vicious knee to his groin.
    She managed four steps before the other man struck her at the back of her neck. She fell, skinning her palms and chin on the pavement. He grabbed her by the ankle, dragged her back to them, and heaved her up by the waist of her pants. Though she kicked and bucked, he pinned her arms with one of his.
    From her gut she screamed, a sound that ripped through the atmosphere of the deserted street. The man put a fat palm over her mouth and nose.
    Was Kathleen fighting this hard in Hell? Did her spirit still burn bright, or had she dimmed with hopelessness?
    The men looked this way and that for a place to enjoy their prey. One tried the door of the warehouse. He kicked at the knob, breaking the lock and splintering the frame.
    With a flex of power, Death compelled Shadow to slam the door and bar their