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demise, which was traced to the man who lived two floors under her, Eddie ceased to live. The enormous change it wreaked on his life, the visions he saw behind his eyes when he went to sleep, the sly glances the police gave him as they ceaselessly questioned him down at the station, until the real murderer found, of course . . . This haunted a man. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t, do it again. Ever. End of story.
    He nodded curtly at Bryony, who was still in suspended animation, glass diamonding her hair, frozen in the process of hitting the ground. Hitting the streets of Seattle, why? Oh, yes, because there was a bullet. A bullet ripping the air asunder as it looked for a place to land that wasn’t glass, wasn’t brick and stone, but was something warm, something that would give underneath its nose, something that would invite it in to ricochet around until it found soft veins to decimate and organs to puncture.
    Until it found Bryony.
    Suddenly the world sped up again, the background music of life lurched up to its normal, frenetic tempo. Bryony fell to her knees, covering her head with her arms and curled up into a ball on the sidewalk. Eddie huddled beside her, and there was more noise or maybe it was screaming coming from one or the other or both of them, he could never be certain.
    A man was on the ground, not far from them, his cap knocked off and his hair running red. Shopping bags lay beside him, and Eddie noticed detachedly that he had been shopping at Nordstrom Rack, at Sharper Image, at Old Navy. A pair of small tennis shoes peeped out of one bag, tiny little things, shoes that would appear on the feet of a child just learning to walk. Strangers had gunned down somebody’s daddy.
    Eddie realized Bryony was shaking the glass out of her hair frantically, while she rocked back and forth.
    “Why? Why?” she screamed, and Eddie was shocked to see her in such a panic, surprised at how her earlier serenity and weary acceptance of her fate had crumbled away. He reached out a calloused hand to her, but stopped just short of stroking her hair, because he didn’t want to commit, didn’t want to touch her because then he would be drawn into her world, and he knew it. He knew it was a dark world of twisted mirrors.. It was a torturous place where she would forever be denied any semblance of rest, and would have to be vigilant. One night she would be too exhausted to lock every door and check every window. On that night, a neighborhood monster would sneak in and flay all that was living from her.
    Even now the monster’s breath fogged her window. Even now it watched.
    Eddie’s hand hovered half an inch away.
    Bryony’s face was streaked with tears. “Why do they all have to die? Why can’t I just die, instead of seeing it miss me and take them over and over and over and over?” She looked at the dead father and sobbed, buried her face in her hands again. “I wish it was over, I wish that I was dead. But I want to live, I want to live!”
    Our good and brave Eddie.
    He knew the consequences he faced. He was intimately familiar with the awfulness of murder and the way it destroys everything from the inside out. There is the murder itself, a gruesome thing, and then there is the parasite it leaves behind, worming and gnawing its way through everybody near enough to touch. The paranoia of the landlord, the suspicion of the neighbors, the heartbreak of the church congregation and the guilt of the loved ones.
    Oh, the guilt of the loved ones.
    If I was better or stronger or smarter, Bryony, he thought, I would be of more use to you. He looked at the girl, who seemed smaller somehow, a crying doll. Tiny gems of window glass clung inside the curve at the top of her ear, and somehow that made his decision for him. It was such a vulnerable area, how could the glass even dare to fall there? He was incensed. He was outraged.
    It needs be said that Eddie Warshouski didn’t make the decision lightly, but when he did, he knew that