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The 12th Demon: Mark of the Wolf Dragon

By Bruce Hennigan

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The assassin’s garrote was woven from three sturdy strings: a black string for death, a red string for the bloody necklace it would leave around the jogger’s neck, and a bright green string for surprise. She had plucked all three strings from the body of her first kill and they had served her well over the years, but only in a pinch. The garrote was not her preferred method of execution. Unfortunately for the approaching jogger, she would put the garrote to good use once again. He had interrupted her carefully planned approach to the maintenance door on the shopping mall roof. Only a fool would jog in a thunderstorm. She pressed her back against the air conditioning unit and waited.
She drew in a deep breath to calm her nerves and gripped the handles on her garrote tightly. She listened to the approaching footfalls, sensed the emergence of the labored breathing, smelled the odor of sweat. She opened her eyes, muscles coiled just as the jogger passed the threshold of the doorway. But, the jogger never turned her way, oblivious to her presence. At the last second, she held back. He had not seen her as he exited the rooftop. He would live to be a fool another day.
She gathered her oiled gunnysack and hoisted it over her coveralls. Walking calmly, she stepped across the track and made her way toward the maintenance entrance. Through the glass roof she watched children skating on the ice rink six floors below her. They were so unaware of the cruel world that awaited them. With gloved hands, she slid a metal pick into the lock of the maintenance door. Rain trickled down her back. Even though it was the middle of July, the water was cold and it sent a chill down her spine. The lock clicked and she opened the door and stepped into a small, metal enclosure. Ahead of her, catwalks branched out across the underside of the roof to allow maintenance workers access to every nook and cranny. Delighted shrieks from the children ice skating echoed hauntingly. For a moment, she saw a young girl in a pink dress with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The girl blew out the candles on a cake and smiled as her stepfather cut into the cake. She heard the girl scream. The assassin closed her eyes and wrapped the memory in a bundle of gray twine until it stopped moving, stopped twitching, and then she shoved it into a dark corner of her memory cabinet where it would not interfere with her job.
Reaching the end of the catwalk, she stepped out onto an overhang enclosed with wire mesh and knelt to the corrugated metal floor. She slid a rifle from the gunnysack and attached the wooden stock to the barrel in quick, fluid movements. Tied around the narrow portion of the stock were twenty-seven colored strings, one for each kill. She took the string for her next victim from her pocket. It was dark red and she had woven it into the shape of heart. She hung it on the wire before her then lay down on the floor of the cage. She braced her elbows and slid the thin barrel through the crisscrossing wire.
The Chinese restaurant had an exterior dining area with twelve tables nestled onto an overhanging balcony. The table closest to the edge carried a reserved sign each day at noon. She didn’t have to look to know her victim waited for his bullet. He was too much of a creature of habit to make the change that would save his life.
She felt tranquility flow over her, filling her with tightly coiled power ready to be unleashed. She rested her cheek against the gun and felt the coarse touch of the strings. The strings reached and connected the disjointed chaos around her. In her mind, she traced a dark red thread across the space to the man’s heart. From there, the string turned and moved across space to a dilapidated doublewide in Tyler, Texas. It wound its way around the waist of a young woman who looked far older than her 21 years and then the string moved on to the hands of a snotty-nosed toddler who would never know his father was the man sitting at the table; a man who had taken advantage of an eighteen-year-old girl and then paid her off with a pitiful sum and a nondisclosure agreement. The young thing had lost all her money at the casinos in Shreveport and the future of this unwanted child was filled with endless misery.
Suddenly, the string turned blood red and her mind disappeared into the past—to another man whose cruelty had known no bounds, until she had stopped him just as she now stopped them all.
The assassin pushed these thoughts away and looked through the gun’s scope. The man was sipping his hot, green tea. She cast the string again, down the line of vision, through the teacup, and right through the man’s chest. She would blow out his heart. She noticed the movement of a shadow and lifted the gun’s barrel ever so slightly. A teenage boy sat at the far end of the table. He had short reddish-blonde hair and he wore a beige t-shirt. His eyes were directed at her. But, she did not worry. He could not see her through the crisscross wires.
Another shadow fell over the table. Someone sat behind the support beam, out of sight. She saw strong, lean arms laid out on the table. And then, the man sat forward bringing his face fully into view. He turned his head and looked up in her direction revealing bright, turquoise eyes.
For the first time in years, the assassin’s heart rate accelerated and her strings frayed and broke. Every muscle in her body contracted at the sight of that man. Without realizing, she pulled the trigger. The explosion echoed through the shopping mall. The ice skaters screamed beneath her. She bolted up and the rifle barrel snared in the wires. She jerked at it and it flew backward out of her grasp, skittering across the catwalk. It slid beneath the wire mesh and fell toward the ice below. As she watched it fall, she noticed the man with the turquoise eyes standing over the target and his fierce gaze was directed toward her. He bolted for the stairs to the roof. He was coming for her! She brushed the red heart from the wall and stepped on it as she hurried toward the roof.
***
“I still don’t know how I let Grace talk me into this.” Charles Atchison adjusted his napkin and studied his silverware. He sighed and motioned to a waitress. “This fork has food on it. I want a clean set. Now!”
Jonathan Steel drew a deep breath and tried not to be irritated. “I’m sorry about your schedule, Mr. Atchison. But Josh has to go back to his house today for the first time since his mother died.”
Atchison poured green tea from a teapot into a tiny cup. “Yes, so I’ve been told.” He pushed his frameless glasses back up on his thin nose and nodded toward the boy sitting next to him. Josh Knight was nervous and twitchy and he kept touching the hole in his lower lip. He was looking up toward the ceiling of the shopping mall.
“I’ve tried to get in touch with Cephas . . .” Steel said.
“Dr. Lawrence, yes I know. The boy’s uncle. Look, Mr. Steed . . .”
“Steel.”
“I’m in corporate law. I’m already missing an important board of directors meeting the idiots scheduled during my lunch. My lunch! So, you’re lucky I worked you in. But I don’t handle child custody or estate matters.” He poured two yellow packs of sweetener into the cup.
“I asked for Ruth Branson.” Steel said. “We’ve worked together.”
“She’s in Europe.” Atchison stirred the tea and then pointed the tiny spoon at Steel. “Look, I’ll get things started so Dr. Lawrence can come and claim the boy, and then Ruth can finish it.”
“Dude, you are unbelievable.” Josh said, his gaze still on the ceiling. “Jonathan, I think somebody’s up there with a gun.”
Atchison lifted the cup toward his lips as Steel leaned forward to look around the support beam. The man’s teacup shattered and hot tea splattered over the tabletop. Wood splintered from the edge of the table just inches from Josh’s hand and the teenager fell over in his chair. The bullet came to lodge in the concrete floor of the walkway in a puff of pulverized tile and dust.
Steel dove across the table and pushed Atchison behind the balcony wall. He glanced up toward the source of the gunfire and saw a small puff of smoke near the ceiling by a maintenance walkway. A slight figure in maintenance coveralls stood up and moved quickly inside the walkway as a rifle somersaulted through the air into a huge hanging fixture of tiny white lights.
Steel glanced once at Josh to make sure he wasn’t hit and then rushed toward the nearby stairs. In his haste, he shoved aside shoppers and stumbled over people prone on the floor. Reaching the doorway to the stairs, he bolted up them two steps at a time. He paused at the doorway leading onto the roof. Standing to the side, he shoved it open and waited for gunfire. Only rain cascaded through the opening and he rushed through the door out into the storm.
***
The assassin crashed through the maintenance door. Rain swirled around her as she hopped onto the metal support between the glass panels of the roof. Of all the people to surface out of nowhere, why him? He had nothing to do with Atchison! Or, did he? She cursed her employer for not warning her.
She heard the stairwell door bang open and knew it would be him. She pulled the brim of her cap down to hide her face and slid her hand into the coverall pocket for her knife. Irony of all ironies, it was the same knife she had used on the man years before. She spun and watched the man awkwardly run toward her. She slowed her breathing, concentrated and visualized a yellow string connecting her hand with the man’s chest. She released the knife even as she completed her turn.
The man stopped and his hand lashed out with inhuman speed. He caught the knife and his gaze fixed on hers. For a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, the rain slowed, the air grew thick and they looked at each other over the intervening years. She saw his hideously beautiful eyes, his square jaw, smelled his masculine fragrance, felt the stubble of his cheek on her hand, tasted the saltiness of his lips—and then she was back in the present. Their stare broke and he stumbled sideways and fell onto a glass panel. With a sudden explosion of cold air it collapsed. The man’s free hand lashed out and he snared the edge of the support beam. He hung over the vast expanse of the shopping mall.
She walked gingerly along the beam and squatted down. He looked up at her and rain pooled in his haunting eyes. She grabbed his hand just as it was about to slip and pulled him up onto the beam. The man turned over onto his back and gasped for breath. She took the knife out of his hand.
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Raven?” he mumbled.
There was a shout from the distance and she glanced up. Three security men were coming out onto the rooftop. She slid the knife back into her pocket as she hurried along the beam and down onto the roof. A short hop over the retaining wall led to where the rope waited, and she rappelled down to her waiting car. She sped off toward the now uncertain future. Her gun was gone. Her target was still alive. She glanced once into the rearview mirror and saw the man standing at the edge of the shopping mall roof. She would have to kill him. Again.

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