It took him a moment to realize she was watching. She'd BEEN watching, as a matter of fact. She'd been out there on her front porch with the light off for who knows how long. She had put a long, pink bathrobe on, her hair was messed up, and the look on her face...

You know that look: the one that says that her reality just shifted without a clutch. Her eyes were as wide and glassy as china plates, skin two shades away from dead pale. And she had a gun in her hand, turned just to one side, not sure which direction to be pointed at...

Now, my other half, he figured this is the right moment to do it. The gun wasn't pointed at him yet. He stepped forward and got down on one knee like he was going to propose to her, and tried to explain. I mean, it was pretty straightforward? He was here to see her, this guy was here to kill her, he did the only thing he could, right?

But there was just one problem: it's really hard to talk when your jawbone's lying on the ground about five feet away.

That last, lucky punch the other guy landed took away more than teeth, and the fight was in such a blur that he hadn't noticed - then or just before now. By the time he had noticed, he'd made a bunch of ahhhhg AHHHHHG AHHHHGGGG noises that sounded like air seeping out of someone's punctured lung. And you can guess what his breath smelled like.

What's a girl to do? She took one look at him, eyes almost popping out of their sockets. And then a really long look at the other guy. She started to stammer, and put the gun up... ever so slowly... up to his face.

So he tried to do it one last time. He really tried. He closed his eyes, put his hands together to plead, and said to her, as best as he could, I love you. I love you. I've always loved you. I will always love you.

There was a loud BANG! and he opened his eyes, just in time to see her start shaking and falling down to her knees. She was bleeding out of her mouth, her eyes were staring in different directions and the top of her head was bloody and misshapen. The gun was still in her hand, smoking and spattered with her own blood, trailing a slow, brain-dead arc away from her mouth to the ground...

Okay, you can stop laughing. It gets better. Much better. Really.

He started screaming like a baby. He scooped her body up in his arms and tried to bring her back to life. But it was just him trying to wish her back to life for all the good he was doing. He might have hung out with the Haunters, but he never learned what the Usurers can do. So he lost Juice all over the place and didn't get anything in return but a dead girl and brains on his sweatshirt.

Dead men don't cry - they just scrunch up their faces, hitch their breaths and howl in short bursts like a dog with something in its throat. You remember how bad it feels when the tears just won't come, right? At least in the Shadowlands, you and your other half can leak some plasm out from around your eyes. But after you get back to the lands of the living...

But yeah, I let him try, anyway. I'm nothing if not sympathetic. But after a while I laid it on the line for him: he'd better get inside and try to salvage the situation as best as he can, or it was going to be all over real soon.

To his credit, he pulled himself together just enough to do that. The sirens were wailing off in the distance, too, so that might have had a part in it. Either way we got away from her and into the house.

But was there ever a surprise waiting for him. You know that guy she was out with that night? He was on the ground of the living room, naked as a jaybird and dead as a doorknob. Smothered. His face was a cartoony shade of purple, he was bug-eyed and his tongue was flopped out and puffy.

There was a big pillow by his face, and it smelled of her perfume. And there was a digital camera nearby, just full of photos of his live, and then dead, face. There was that certain smell in the air, if you get my meaning, and he was pretty stiff for a stiff.

There was a photo scrapbook near the camera - white with little red, cartoon hearts on it. It was chock-full of digital pictures of live and dead people. Newspaper write-ups of dead bodies found in suspicious circumstances. Obituaries. Funeral notices. "Have you seen me?" posters. The lot.

And when he flipped through it, right to the very first entry, there was a front-page story of a local man killed in a hit and run accident. Poor SOB was smacked right in the chest - twice - and then left to die on the roadside. They never caught the car's driver. It was an unsolved mystery.

There was a color photo of the guy who died. He was young and smiling. Moderately handsome. Brown hair and bright, blue eyes... the shade of blue that even a few years in the grave can't dull.

I figure, you fight for a full half an hour with a dead man, you can recognize an old photo of him... right?

That started the non-waterworks up again. I verbally patted him on the shoulder. It was the damnest thing, wasn't it? I mean, how could he have known? How could anyone have known that he had the hots for a serial killer?

How indeed...?

Oh, come on. You think the only reason I talk to Spectres is to try and set up an ambush when he won't get with the program? Puh-lease! Those guys are regular chatterboxes when you get them going, and they'll tell you damn near anything you want to know about anything at all if it helps their purposes, or they just feel like talking. The information might be a little unreliable, as I said before, but after a while you get a good ear for what's on-target and what's way, way off.

So I put out a few feelers about the gal my other half was stuck on. Sure enough, one of them let me know that there were quite a few of their number that she was responsible for. And once I learned what she was really all about, I asked if anyone was trying to deal with her like the sick little monkey she really was. Sure enough, again, they knew of at least one victim who made it onto the other team. He'd been thralled and was under some clerk's thumb at the Citadel, but word had it he was looking for some Joyriders to teach him how to Rise...

That's why one of my other half's Renegade pals suddenly got the idea he wanted to learn. That's why I pushed my other half to set that goal and make it. That's why I let him do it. And that's why I let him moap around and wallow in his own insecurities when we got over here... just waiting for that one, special night when he'd finally decide to just do it, which - coincidentally - happened to be the same time a certain, other gentleman caller would be coming around...

The rest, as they say, is history.

The sirens pulled up right outside and stopped, leaving flashing lights and the sounds of boots on pavement and cocked guns. I let him feel sorry for himself just long enough for the police to ready, and then said nothing as he waltzed out the front door. He put his hands over his face so he could see in spite of the mag lights they were shining right at him.

I left him to his own devices at that point - not that it was too hard to figure out what they were going to be. Of course he was going to quote Sidney Carlton's last speech from A Tale of Two Cities, missing jaw and all. Of course he wasn't going to do anything but stand there in his stained, bloody sweatshirt with the hood up. Of course he was just going to let those riot-squad wanna-be cops shotgun his sorry ass apart, figuring he was some kind of expendable crackhead packing something heavy in his jeans...

And with no Juice left to hold it all together - he lost it all trying to save her, as you'll recall - down we went...

And that's my story. He had his chance, he blew it, and now I'm getting just what I always wanted. What we should have gotten when the dumbass in the milk truck turned us into ground meat wrapped in a Starbucks' uniform. An end to this sad, fucking mockery of an existence. An end to the pain.

An end. The End. Dash-Thirty, as they say in the trade he couldn't break into.

Yeah... I know he's supposed to get one last try to get out of this one, but it's only yours if you fight for it. And here he is: lost, in shock and just giving up - just like I knew he'd be after the inevitable happened.

Yes... I do plan well, don't I? I even had the last detail all sewn up, and it went down like clockwork.

So let that tale be a lesson to you; A little bit of foresight and planning ahead on your part, and you, too, could be on the way to The Void, leaving bits and pieces behind like a shooting star as you go right into the heart of the darkness, Itself.

I can just make out the walls in the Labyrinth from here, so we're just about in the Sea, now. The darkness has eyes and teeth. And... oh, it's so beautiful.

Just like that woman's eyes... little sparkles you could get lost in forever and ever...

Heh.

That's irony for you...