Shadowfires

you?”
    In the frosty glow of the map light, Sarah's skin looked as pallid as carved bone. She cleared her throat and whispered, “Eric. Eric b-beat me.”
    Rachael had known this would be the answer, yet it chilled her to
the marrow and, for a moment, left her speechless. At last she said,
“When? When did he do this to you?”
    “He came… at half past midnight.”
    “Dear God, not even an hour before we got there! He must've left just before we arrived.”
    From the time she'd left the city morgue earlier this evening, she had hoped to catch up with Eric, and she should have been pleased to learn they were so close behind him. Instead, her heart broke into hard drumlike pounding and her chest tightened as she realized how closely they had passed by him in the warm desert night.
    “He rang the bell, and I answered the door, and he just… he just…
hit me.” Sarah carefully touched her blackened eye, which was now
almost swollen shut. “Hit me and knocked me down and kicked me twice,
kicked my legs…”
    Rachael remembered the ugly bruises on Sarah's thighs.
    “… grabbed me by the hair…”
    Rachael took the girl's left hand, held it.
    “… dragged me into the bedroom…”
    “Go on,” Rachael said.
    “… just tore my pajamas off, you know, and… and kept
yanking on my hair and hitting me, hitting, punching me…”
    “Has he ever beaten you before?”
    “N-no. A few slaps. You know… a little roughhouse. That's all. But tonight… tonight he was wild… so full of hatred.”
    “Did he say anything?”
    “Not much. Called me names. Awful names, you know. And his speech-
it was funny, slurred.”
    “How did he look?” Rachael asked.
    “Oh God…”
    “Tell me.”
    “A couple teeth busted out. Bruised up. He looked bad.”
    “How bad?”
    “ Gray.”
    “What about his head, Sarah?”
    The girl gripped Rachael's hand very tightly. “His face… all gray… like, you know, like ashes.”
    “What about his head?” Rachael repeated.
    “He… he was wearing a knitted cap when he came in. He had it
pulled way down, you know what I mean, like a toboggan cap. But when
he was beating me… when I tried to fight back… the cap came off.”
    Rachael waited.
    The air in the car was stuffy and tainted by the acid stink of the
girl's sweat.
    “His head was… it was all banged up,” Sarah said, her voice
thickening with terror, horror, and disgust.
    “The side of his skull?” Rachael asked. “You saw that?”
    “All broken, punched in… terrible, terrible.”
    “His eyes. What about his eyes?”
    Sarah tried to speak, choked. She lowered her head and closed her
eyes for a moment, struggling to regain control of herself.
    Seized by the irrational but quite understandable feeling that
someone-or something -was stealthily creeping up on the
Mercedes, Rachael surveyed the night again. It seemed to pulse
against the car, seeking entrance at the windows.
    When the brutalized girl raised her head again, Rachael said,
“Please, honey, tell me about his eyes.”
    “Strange. Hyper. Spaced out, you know? And… clouded…”
    “Sort of muddy-looking?”
    “Yeah.”
    “His movements. Was there anything odd about the way he moved?”
    “Sometimes… he seemed jerky… you know, a little spastic. But most
of the time he was quick, too quick for me.”
    “And you said his speech was slurred.”
    “Yeah. Sometimes it
didn't make any sense at all. And a couple times he stopped hitting me and just stood there, swaying back and forth, and he seemed… confused, you know, as if he couldn't
figure where he was or who he was, as if he'd forgotten all about me.”
    Rachael found that she was trembling as badly as Sarah-and that
she was drawing as much strength from the contact with the girl's hand as the girl was drawing from her.
    “His touch,” Rachael said. “His skin. What did he feel like?”
    “You don't even have to ask, do you? 'Cause you already know what
he felt like. Huh?” the girl said. “Don't you? Somehow… you already know.”
    “But tell me anyway.”
    “Cold. He felt too cold.”
    “And moist?” Rachael asked.
    “Yeah… but… not like sweat.”
    “Greasy,” Rachael said.
    The memory was so vivid that the girl gagged on it and nodded.
    Ever so slightly greasy flesh, like the first stage - the
very earliest stage - of putrefaction, Rachael thought, but
she was too sick to her stomach and too sick at heart to speak that
thought aloud.
    Sarah said, “Tonight I watched the eleven o'clock news, and that's
when I first heard
he'd been killed, hit by a truck earlier in