The Heavens Rise by Christopher Rice

Author:Christopher Rice
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Thrillers, Fantasy, General, Paranormal, Fiction
ISBN: 9781476716107
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

18

* * *

From where he stood, just outside the window above her kitchen sink, Marshall Ferriot watched the woman inside drag a meat cleaver across her left wrist, and then her right, and wondered, just as he had with her boss, Danny Stevens, earlier that morning, if it would have consoled her to know how beautiful she looked in the final moments of her life.

As she cut herself, Janice Walker appeared in Marshall’s gaze as a shimmering, colorless apparition, trailing little starbursts of quantum material that shifted through the air around her like ghostly impressions of herself, impressions that effervesced so brightly in Marshall’s vision, they distracted him from the resulting arterial spray when Janice effortlessly dragged the knife’s blade across her throat. It was the same experience he had every time he willed himself to open to his subjects and felt the velvety rush of their souls moving into his.

As with all of them, he’d experienced a brief flash of her soul when he’d first hooked her. He’d seen a woman he knew to be her mother walking a young Janice by the hand through the Audubon Zoo, and the monkeys in their cages turned to stare at them with humanlike approval and warmth, the product of young Janice’s fanciful imagination. And then the vision passed, and it felt as if he were drinking her in as he forced her to shuffle toward the cutlery block so he could get to work.

It hadn’t been Marshall’s intention to re-create that long-ago fantasy of what he wanted to do to Nikki Delongpre after she’d betrayed him. But that’s exactly what he’d done, in all its bloody splendor, albeit from a slight distance and with a much older and less attractive subject. The little tableau was so appropriate to the day’s agenda, Marshall laughed gently as the woman slid down the blood-splattered wall with lifeless, unblinking eyes.

Effortless, easy. No need for chitchat, no need to go inside and risk contaminating the scene as he’d done with Danny Stevens. And it was a painless death he’d granted her, despite all the blood. As far as Janice’s consciousness was concerned, she’d been rinsing dishes one second, headed off to the afterlife the next. No need to inform her that her ticket had been punched because her boss of seven years suspected she might have had some suspicions about how much he’d stolen from the Ferriot trust.

Now she was crumpled against the blood-splattered wall just inside the back door, her Pepto-pink bathrobe spilling open over her bloodstained pajamas, her eyes glazed and lifeless, but her slack jaw still drawing slight breaths. With impossible, steady determination, she rolled over onto all fours, lifted a hand to her gushing throat and began painting letters across the nearest wall with a splattered finger: S O R R Y M A R S H A

Marshall felt the sharp tug deep in his chest that told him the woman’s death had arrived. He released her, and he was relieved when she didn’t spasm with sudden agony or grasp desperately for her gushing throat.

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