How did it come to this?
Victor doesn’t know. The path he had been walking on seemed so clear at the time, his determination fueled by what he believed to be righteous fury. He didn’t see himself as a murderer then; he was God’s own instrument of justice, bringing the world back in balance one bullet at a time. All the way to Walter Jimes. Walter was the end that justified all means, and the means were dozens and dozens of deaths that he had caused on his warpath. He didn’t kill all those people. They signed their own execution papers the moment they associated themselves with Walter Jimes. It was alright to end them. Hell, he was doing the world a favor.
Only, this whole thing had nothing to do with Walter Jimes.
Leeahn Festian knew about it all along. Victor had confronted the Major on the morning after he shot Jotham DeVir like a dog, walking into his office and bleeding all over his good carpet. The Commander of the City Watch had tried to placate him, offering empty words and half-truths, but Victor saw through it. Leeahn knew. Maybe he didn’t know the details, maybe he didn’t want to know the details, keeping himself on the
need-to-know basis just as he kept Victor. Because it was easier that way. If you had a rabid dog on your leash, you didn’t try to talk sense into him. You set him loose and hoped it wouldn’t turn around and bite you in the ass. Victor almost did. He was a heartbeat away from blasting Leeahn out of this world and into next one before he realized it wouldn’t matter.
None of it matters. Nothing save the fact that in his madness he went and did to Angela DeVir what Walter Jimes did to him all those years ago. Sure, the circumstances were different and Jotham wasn’t exactly blameless – he
was a Ranger spy after all – but that didn’t change the fact that he murdered Angela’s beau in cold blood, shot him out of spite, in anger, shot him and enjoyed the pain that he had caused. On that night, as he had walked away from the dying man, he thought he could live with it, push the bad mojo aside and chalk it up to disinformation. But soon he realized that every time he closed his eyes the scene replayed itself, and sometimes Jotham was Aicha, and sometimes Jotham was Walter, and sometimes Victor Callahan was Walter on an oddly similar night ten years ago, shooting his beloved in his head.
Now he kneels in front of Angela DeVir, waiting for her to deliver the final liberation from a life gone horribly wrong. He cannot live with himself anymore, his shoulders unable to bear the fact that he is turning into the man he so thoroughly hated. His eyes are closed, the scene in his mind on an endless loop, and he waits for the thunder that will take him away.
But it never comes.
The sound of the shotgun hitting the floor brings him back to reality, where Angela is looking down at him with such hatred in her eyes that he feels she doesn’t need the gun. She can stare him to death with those daggers in her blue eyes.
“I will not shoot you, murderer,” the woman says to him, her voice low and cold. “Not because I don’t want to. I do. Oh, believe me that I do. But death would be an easy way out for the likes of you. No, it’s life that will be your punishment.”
She turns her back to him and looks out of the window, the silky white curtain billowing around her dark form. For the longest time she doesn’t speak, the silence in the room deafening, chilling. “I don’t know what set you on this path of destruction,” she finally says. “But I do know that by walking it, you became nothing but a killer. You’re like a ship in a storm; you’ve lost your rudder and now you’re hitting everything around you. And it’s only a matter of time before you utterly destroy yourself. And once that happens, you won’t need me to pull the trigger. You’ll do it yourself.”
“Now leave.”
He obeys. He never says a word. What could he say? That he was sorry? Apologies don’t cover things like this. He picks up his sawed-off like a beggar picking up alms and he stumbles out of the room. The DeVir family members stare at him as he passes through the foyer, but he doesn’t even notice them there. One of them could probably stab him in the face right now and he wouldn’t make a move to defend himself. Such was the power of her words. They struck harder than fists, harder than hammers, harder than bullets.
Victor knows of two things that can never be taken back once they were unleashed: words and bullets. And after tonight he is certain that of the two, the words hurt more.