Tell Me Like You Done Before by Scott Edelman

Author:Scott Edelman [Edelman, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lethe Press
Published: 2018-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

THE TREMBLING LIVING WIRE

Iz slowly tightened his grip around Mozart’s pulsing neck, savoring the last moments of life that remained. He paused, offering to the dog the gift of several final panting breaths. The beagle had earned that. After all, Mozart had been the key to unlocking Juliet’s heart.

Yet what difference did one breath more or one breath less really make, Iz thought. All lives, however short their sputter, however long their flame, still seemed ridiculously brief. And except for the lives of a very special few, poignantly pointless as well. Rare those were, extremely rare, but rarer still the ones who could be shepherded to ripeness under his tutelage. One of those was young Juliet, and as soon as he accomplished this final step, all he’d need do was to pluck her.

As the eyes of the dog whom he had trained to trust him widened in response to the narrowing circle of his fingers, Iz became aware of a second, more human, gaze upon him. He dropped his hands from the animal and moved back, suddenly both alert and confused. It had been decades since he had last felt off balance like that—or had it been centuries?—and the unfamiliar emotion prickled.

He had trained himself to leave no witnesses behind to the sort of action that he was about to take, yet...how could there even be any? He considered the unfolding of his previous hours, perfect and tantalizing.

The evening’s plans had proceeded smoothly. Juliet was now innocently asleep down the hall, slightly drugged, resting that beautiful, budding instrument of hers, and she would not rise until the timing was right, a timing Iz alone would control. Her parents, at the foot of whose bed he had been ready to act, were more deeply drugged, and would be unconscious at least until morning, if not beyond.

If there was any gaze upon him, it should only be that of the pet itself, and nothing more. But as Mozart lay there, one ear twitching eagerly as it anticipated what it mistakenly thought would be a comforting caress, it looked off toward a dark window on the far wall, eyes narrowing as if making a connection with the eyes of another.

Iz stood, and moved carefully, quietly, to the window outside of which something had apparently captured Mozart’s attention. With long, delicate fingers, he slowly widened a gap in the curtains by a few inches so he could peer out from the darkness of the room to the darkness of the street. As he searched the night for a hypothetical unknown observer, his heart was the darkest of all.

The streets were empty, as they should have been in the town he had chosen, at least for this decade, to call home. It must have just been nerves, nothing more. Ever since the local paper had sewn together seemingly random incidents over the years into a string and called it a pattern, tensions had emerged in the town. No one had yet deciphered what it all

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