Page 15 of Girl, Unmasked (Ella Dark #28)

He was Cain now.

Not the snivelling weakling he’d been before. The one who’d let the world kick him in the teeth and grind its heel into his spine. That man was ashes in the wind. In his place stood someone new, and he was ready to unleash his mission upon the world.

Cain. The name felt right. Like a new skin stretched over old bones. Last night’s events had finally cracked open the chrysalis and revealed the monster within.

He reclined in a creaky diner chair and sipped a coffee that tasted awful but cost a dollar for unlimited refills.

He'd been coming here for years, ever since he'd washed up in this nowhere burg with holes in his socks and a head full of bad wiring.

It was familiar and unchanging. The burnt coffee, the sticky menus, the bored-eyed waitresses.

This place was a known quantity in a world full of variables.

Today, the morning crowd milled about as they jabbered on phones. But Cain was an island unto himself, adrift in his own thoughts as the plebs flowed around him like water off a duck's back.

Because today was the first day of the rest of his life, the first day he could walk in the daylight with his head high and his conscience clear.

Cain's fingers twitched towards the folded newspaper on the faux-wood table.

Tucked between the Metro section and the funny page birdcage liner was his pride and joy – a photocopy of the manuscript for Halo of Blood.

He'd pored over those pages so many times the words were burned into his brain, but he never got tired of drinking in that sweet poetry. Sometimes he’d just pick a page at random and start reading, and every time he struggled to pull himself away.

But it wasn't just a book now. It was a road map. An instruction manual for what had begun but certainly hadn't ended.

The girl last night had been the first, and now, in the cold light of day, the whole thing felt like a fever dream.

These calloused hands of his, they’d been the instruments that had stripped that woman of her human skin and transformed her into a fallen angel.

A blade to her back, a scalpel to her eyeballs – he’d pulled it off without a hitch and left her for the police to find.

Art had become creation, melded together until no one could tell where one ended and the other began.

But if that was the case, why was no one talking about it?

He'd scanned every inch of this damn newspaper as he searched for some acknowledgment of his work, but there'd been nothing. No screaming headlines or bolded bylines. Merely the usual parade of human misery, like car crashes, political scandals, celebrity DUIs, and Middle Eastern strife.

It was okay, he told himself. Everything was fine.

If the body didn’t get people talking, then the little gift he’d left behind surely would.

Cain had to think that it would take any detective a while to find his secret addition to the crime scene, because unlike the wings and eyes and halo, this one was lodged out of sight.

Cain imagined the looks on the cops' faces when they found his calling card. They'd know they weren't dealing with some garden-variety nutjob. No, this was a connoisseur's crusade, and he was the ringmaster of his very own circus macabre.

So lost was Cain in his revelry that he didn't notice the frumpy waitress at his elbow until she clattered his coffee cup onto her tray. Almost didn't register the tinny voice needling into his reverie like a drill.

‘Was everything okay for you?’

With her pursed lips and sour disapproval, the woman had a face like a pickled walnut. The crooked nametag on her uniform read Gladys – 30 Years of Service!

Thirty years too long, by the looks of her. Another drone, another worker ant skittering through her prescribed paces. Running her maze for a pat on the head and a peanut at the end.

Cain pasted on his best good ol' boy grin, the one that belonged to the man he'd been before. The spineless simpleton. Just another face in the crowd.

‘Great, thank you. Best brew in town, I tell you.’

Gladys didn't smile back. Her gaze had wandered to the papers fanned out in front of him, the manuscript tucked amongst them. Cain startled as his hands reflexively clutched the manuscript to his chest.

'Whatcha readin' there, sweetheart? One of them, Harlequin romances, my Suzy's always going on about?'

He hated when people called him sweetheart, sweetie, baby, like he was some doddering grandpa in the bingo halls.

‘It’s a novel,’ was all he could muster.

'You write it yourself? That's why it's on A4 paper?'

Cain felt his innards clench like he'd swallowed gravel. She’d seen it. This menial nobody had laid eyes on his bible. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt like he’d been violated in a way that went beyond the physical.

‘Just a little light reading,’ he said. Clutching the manuscript to his chest, he suddenly felt like a prize fool, like a little kid who wouldn’t share his favorite toy.

Such infantile behavior would only lead to suspicion, he reasoned, so he calmly placed the paper back down. It was flipped open on page fifty-six.

Gladys leaned over her tray and said, ‘Well, Mr. Fancypants, you’ve gone and got yourself a mistake right there.’

Cain wasn’t sure he heard right. There was no way she just said that. ‘What?’

‘Right there,’ she nodded. ‘Read that first line.’

He looked at the first line of the scene, then back at the waitress. A cocktail of vulnerability and offense swirled in his stomach as he regarded her doe-eyed expression jump from line to line of his bible.

‘There are no mistakes,’ he said.

'Could have fooled me. Says right there, the moon shed its glow across the sidewalk. Doesn't need a fancy-ass apostrophe on its. You’re talking about a possession, not a contraction.’

For a second, Cain wondered if he hadn’t fallen asleep at this table ten minutes ago and this was all some hallucination.

Who was this bitch? Who did she think she was?

Tearing apart this book like it was one of her grubby receipts?

There was no way this rube with a stupid nametag and yesterday’s mascara had found a flaw.

And then she did the unforgivable. Gladys placed her tray down and reached out one nicotine-yellowed talon and tapped the manuscript, right on the offending apostrophe, like she was a schoolmarm rapping the desk of a dim student.

Something snapped in Cain's head. The world tunneled to a crimson pinprick, and before he knew what he was doing, he was on his feet.

He scooped up the manuscript into his arms and, in his wild movements, nudged the tray on the table.

A coffee mug clattered to the ground and smashed with an attention-grabbing clang.

Gladys yelped something inaudible as she jumped back.

Cain suddenly struggled for breath. He looked around and saw ten pairs of eyes on him. Forks paused halfway to mouths, conversations guttered out. He had to get away. Away from the stares of the creep in the diner, away from Gladys and her sour-lemon judgment.

Without pause, Cain barreled out of the diner and didn’t look back.

His feet slapped the pavement as he made his graceless escape down Lodge Street, onto Hawthorne Close and round into a back alley away from prying eyes.

He slumped against the wall, gasping, cursing.

Dammit to hell. This bitch had seen the book.

Had she seen the book title? If so, what’d happen when she saw news of a dead body posed as an angel?

Even someone as dumb as her could put two and two together and remember the freak in the diner reading some weird-ass book with halo in the title.

He looked to the sky and rapidly filled his lungs with air. He needed to be more careful. No more carrying this book with him. Hell, he had the whole thing memorized anyway. It was okay. Mistakes happened.

With the manuscript under his jacket, his feet carried him out of the alley and into the flow of pedestrian traffic.

In just a few hours, he was about to bring the next chapter to life, and if the first angel didn’t get people talking, then the second definitely would.