Prelude
98 Bonnie Ct, Los Angeles CA, 90221. 01:08 on Sunday, 22 April, 2009.
A murder of crows gathered along a single rooftop. A few preened their feathers while others sharpened their beaks on the edges of the gutter. One hopped absentmindedly from side to side, but only briefly before settling down. Seven seconds passed.
A gunshot erupted from within the house, shaking its windows and flinging a third of the crows skyward. They announced the first death: Rachel Armbrust. They all cawed together, crescendoing until another gunshot brought up the second third of crows. In symphony with the first, they shouted out that Carl Armbrust was now dead. The calls turned to cacophony, hollering news of death to the streets all around.
The last of the rooftop crows puffed themselves, their feathers standing at the ready below the screaming whirlwind. More seconds passed, continuing the eighth minute of the day’s first hour. A final crack rang throughout the home, and up went the final blackbirds. In dissonance with the rest, they wailed at the loss of Dana Armbrust.
The murder swirled around the house, slowly descending and carelessly dropping their feathers. Through the flurry of black plumes, Samael, Archangel of Death, emerged at the domicile’s entrance. The door opened for him, and so he stepped through to the living room.
The scene was immediate.
In front of him lay two limp bodies. The first, face-down with her head right at Samael’s feet. She was a thin woman — concerningly thin, Samael thought — in her late thirties (or thirty-eight, to be exact). Further into the house was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his forties (forty-one, specifically), who was no doubt the source of commotion. The woman – Rachel Armbrust – lay in a growing pool of blood made by a nine-millimeter hole in her back. She reached for the door, but her arm was instead swept aside by Samael’s entrance. Death didn’t need to read the past to see that Rachel tried to escape, only to be halted by a well-placed shot to the back. The killer wasn’t aiming for her heart, but the bullet had no problems finding it.
Samael stepped past Rachel, going further inside to meet the body of Carl Armbrust. In his forehead, an identical nine-millimeter hole had given him a botched lobotomy. He lay with his face to the ceiling, his cold eyes failing to see an inch in front of them. His face was just the way it was before his life ended: one part confused and one part terrified. It didn’t make for a particularly amusing look, but Samael couldn’t help studying it out of habit. Every face expressed its end in a different way, with nuances that even Death himself would sometimes miss. In Rachel’s case, it was something expected from a cheap action movie. Samael was almost convinced that she wasn’t, in fact, shocked to see her son-turned-daughter-turned-son-again pointing a Glock 17 at her.
But then, across the house and against the wall, there he was: Dana Armbrust. Pistol still in hand, his body slouched to its right with a slack jaw and scrambled brains. Both temples were pierced and leaking, ruining an otherwise lush set of brown hair. The body’s skin was smooth, and even just by looking, Samael could tell it was still soft and warm. He kept both hands around his scythe and knelt down to see the young body’s face. Eyes of blue glass stared around Samael– not through him, but around. Their aim wasn’t for anything behind him, or for anything straightforward. There was no aim, nor trajectory. If Death were to trace the path they sent out, it might curve to his sides, plummet to his feet, or ascend to his halo.
Below those eyes were a button nose. A natural one; not the kind a celebrity like him would have molded onto their face. Below that, a pair of plush lips. Had Samael not known better, he might have reached out to test their softness; to feel his fingers sink into them and be surprised by their give. But because he knew better, he felt no need to mishandle such a harmless face.
Instead, the Archangel stood up and looked back at the young body’s parents. It was now that their souls sat up from within their corpses. There was the sound of wailing, like screams through pillows, as red auras lifted from the deceased. The auras took form as shapeless spheres, tethered to their prisons by thin cords on their torsos. And of course, the sound Samael would never get used to, the whimpering of their souls crying out for release.
Please! they said without words, Please let me go! I don’t like this, I want to leave! I want to go home!
Death’s hand slid down the scythe’s pole to its handle, turning the instrument upside-down as his other hand took it by the base. He turned back to face Dana, whose black soul was mimicking the cries of his parents’. Death lowered the blade, keeping it just above Dana’s body where the soul was still tethered.
He hummed, “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” then snuffed the soul’s plea. In a sweep, it was severed from the body.
