For the Dead Travel Fast
"Denn die Todten reiten Schnell. (For the dead travel fast.)"
― Bram Stoker, Dracula
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Preface
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The blood was everywhere.
Cloying, hot, throbbing, and the smell.
She was dizzy with it. She was euphoric with blood, (loss, she mentally corrected; blood loss, be careful, be careful) but she was too crazed with grief, too weak with dying to edit her behavior, to censor her physical need.
She didn't want to. She wanted them both to live, damn it.
She crawled to her husband and feasted.
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He'd been shot. He had not known that pain could be this intense.
He was dying.
An Angel of Mercy descended, beautiful and awe-ful, beaming love above him, calling him onward.
The tunnel of white light opened for him. The hazy sense of time telescoped now to all points flooding this one: his life flashed before his eyes. His mother, his daughter, his wife, the many wives and girlfriends and stand-ins and one-nighters and woven through it all the writing, the writing, the plot lines for Nikki Heat and Storm and the characters all amalgamations of his life, to where he didn't know what was real, what was surreal, and it no longer mattered. Nothing mattered. He was at the end.
Rick Castle had a feeling of deep inner peace. Inviolate. Enfolding. The Angel gave him a blessing to nudge him on his way.
Whatever cares, worries, regrets about his death now shed from him like a molting skin, and he was new and raw and leaving his own body.
He rose up above the lifelessness, transcending the corporeal plane, heading for that light.
Only to be yanked back down. A snarl of ferocity, the hard punch of reality that made the breath gust from his lungs and tore a hole in his chest.
Everything burned. He screamed. The pain clawed its way out of him, his heart was encased in solid ice that burned.
And then the Angel lifted her head from his chest where she was eating out those shards of his heart and he knew now.
It was not the Angel of Mercy but Death.
And it wore Kate's face.
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