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Description
he kicked a stone, and looked around at the scraggly dead trees; blackened fingers reaching to a sky that would never reach back. These were the kind of things she would have written about, once. Silence that was heavy on your ears, the solitude that made her every breath, every movement a trespass upon nature.
The corpse of a bird lay rotting on the side of the empty asphalt. A crow, its feathers stark against the white line, its neck at an odd angle. She stepped past it- it was nothing, compared to what she had left behind.

Music. It had been too long since she heard music. How long, since it happened? Years? Months? Days? It seemed an eon. She had used to love music.
There was no music now.
Just silence. Dead silence.
The world a tomb and she a maggot in the corpse.

Something small started as she set her foot down, and without a thought she lunged. Hunger had made of her an animal. No more the hesitation, to see what it was, else it escape down a hole. Her arm she forced as far down the tiny den as she could, but her fingers brushed fur for only a moment, and then it was gone.
Her stomach growled.
She cursed, the foulest she could think of. She readjusted the backpack on her shoulders, and continued dragging the rusted red wagon behind her.
The world was growing cold, and the wind carried a smell of mould. Rain was coming.
She would have to find somewhere to hide.

Hot summers. Rainy fall, icy winter, rainy spring. Those were the years. She remembered other people, people long dead.
People she'd loved.
They beckoned; their faces blurring together, nothing clear anymore. Voices becoming one, and all calling her name. But she couldn't go to them.
To go to them was to die.

Sometimes he would show up, while she sheltered. This was one of those times.
She had tied a tarp over a branch, making a crude tent. She'd had a real tent, once, but someone had stolen it. This was easier to patch, anyhow.
She was lying under the tarp, listening to the water striking the tarp. It was bright blue plastic, and fraying at the edges. Blue like the sky used to be. Or at least, she thought so. She wasn't sure of much anymore.
He sat at her feet, crouching. He didn't say a word, only stared at her.
"Go away," she moaned, rolling over.
"You don't want me to."
She stared at the side of the tarp, at the water puddle by her head.
He crouched there, gazing.
Eyes like night. Eyes like death.
She wanted to die.
She didn't want to die.

To live. To die. What did she have to live for?
Maybe there were others.
But what would be lost? Everything. All culture. All poetry. All art. All music.
It was ashes.
All the gods were dead. The angels were corpses.

"I don't want you here," she spat at him.
"You're lying," he said. Unblinking eyes. Eyes as black as coal. "Without me, you'd have no one else."
She rolled onto her back, staring at the tarp. "I used to have real friends."
"And I'm not your friend?"
She didn't answer.

Things used to matter. She used to believe things.
No god for her now. No goddess, either. It was all lies. Except maybe the death gods. Maybe they were all that had really existed in the first place.
Now Hades ruled what Zeus once had, and Satan had taken Jesus' domain. That would make sense. Nothing else did anymore.

In the morning she took down the tarp, and shook the water from it. She was still hungry.
Her jeans were held up by a cord of twine. She had lost weight, since it happened. What she would once have considered a boon, was now only a mark of the world's curse.
They'd been a sickness on the earth, and the earth had fought back. A plague on men. The seven plagues of Egypt, a plague for all mankind, for their trespasses against the ground they walked upon.
He followed her- more closely now than ever. She knew who he was, but he was not real.
Her shoes were falling apart- already they leaked. She would have to find new ones.
The trees all around her, the asphalt under her shoes, the faded paint lines. All a part of the old world.
A big bull elk stepped onto the road in front of her, and she stopped. She might have picked up the rifle in her wagon, but it was too light. All she would do was wound it, and waste a bullet. She couldn't afford to.
The elk raised its wet nose, sending puffs of fog into the chill air. It watched her, with eyes that had a look she remembered. Curiosity.
Then it turned and walked across the road, disappearing into the trees. She watched it go, hunger gnawing at the inside of her belly. He leaned over to whisper in her ear, but she started up again, looking determinedly forward.
She would not let him win yet.

With a sharpened stick she speared the injured rabbit- otherwise she probably never would have caught it. It screamed, and she nearly dropped it. She didn't know rabbits could make noise.
He laughed at her, but she ignored him.
Food was food.
She skinned and cleaned it crudely. She buried its guts- she didn't want other hungry creatures to come looking- and threw water over the spot of bloody dead grass with a little beach pale. She carefully cleaned her knife, and dried it on her pant leg. If she lost the knife, she'd be dead.
Then again, she might be dead if she kept it.
The smell of cooked meat- even as primitively as this- made her mouth water. How long had it been since she'd had meat?
He watched her eat, frowning darkly.
She grinned wolfishly at him.
"You're an animal," he hissed.

He vanished at about noon. She went on, the meat like a lump in her empty stomach. She had been hungry long enough that she soon stopped, vomiting on the asphalt. She stared at the puke, with the bits of undigested rabbit meat in it.
She bent, and picked the meat out of the vomit, and ate it again.

She reached a pond that afternoon. She caught a glimpse of her reflection, and came to a dead stop. Her hair was a tangle of unintentional dreadlocks, her eyes looked sunken, surrounded by a dark purple, and her face- once a mildly attractive oval, now resembled the face of the Grim Reaper.
She looked like a zombie from a movie, when they used to make movies.
Maybe that's what I am, she thought, a zombie. Undead. Not dead, not alive.
She certainly couldn't be a vampire; otherwise she would have died of thirst.
She tried to see if there were fish in the pond, but it didn't matter if there were any or not. She had no way of catching them. She pulled dead grass and fallen tree limbs into a heap. The driest ones she could find. She checked the lighter.
It was almost empty.
He appeared at her shoulder, leering, waiting, taunting her. "Why do you resist?" he whispered, his voice like a lover's. "Why don't you just give up the fight? I will treat you kindly…"
"Go away," she hissed fiercely. "You're not real."
He laughed- his laugh like a bell. "I am the only real thing left!"
She ignored him. She didn't want him to be right. He was only a dream. He wasn't real.

She kept the fire alive, crouching in the shadow of an abandoned library. The books were all gone- used for fires, she thought. When others were still alive.
How did I stay alive? She thought. I always thought I would be among the first to die.
But here she was.
And he sat across the fire, with his oil black robes, and oil black eyes. A face, that in any other time, would have been hideous, but the longer she stared at it, the more handsome he seemed.
He never blinked, and as she stoked the fire, he never spoke.
But as she coughed, a small expression of triumph crossed his face. "I could end your pain," he whispered, the murmur like a lover's caress. "I could make it all go away."
She glared at him, and pulled the blanket more tightly around her shoulders. All the gods are dead, except the gods of death.
"You just have to give in," he whispered. "You'll be mine eventually… the question is whether you go willingly."
That face- she would not let that face win her over! Handsomeness never guaranteed goodness!
She looked away, the cold stinging at her cheeks and nose, the threat of a cough prickling in her lungs. She was sick, but she wouldn't let him take her without a fight.

They were standing across a vast river, ghosts of another life. They were calling to her, waving. They called a word, a word she didn't recognize.
She saw each of their faces, and remembered them. Mother, Father, aunts, uncles, grandparents, sister, brother, friends, cousins, lovers, enemies… all calling that strange word.
Then she remembered that it was her name.

She woke with a start.
A fever dream- she felt as though she were roasting from the inside out.
He crouched over her, smiling that smile of victory. She snarled and hauled to her feet, though her head throbbed, and her skin burned. She gathered up her things, stopping as coughs racked her body, or the headache became too painful. All the while he smirked over her, waiting patiently for what was and, in the end, had always been his.
She put on the backpack, and loaded the wagon, and began on her long path down the road. She wobbled dangerously on her feet, her vision a haze. He followed her quietly, but with presence. She would not look at him, and still she trudged on, trying to follow the yellow stripe on the blacktop.

He watched her, fighting viciously like a caged animal against an enemy she could not overcome. They were all animals, in the end. They either came to him in acceptance or in fear, but in the end all were in his domain.
She stopped, swaying, and corrected her path, placing one foot after the other along the line. She was stubborn, though she had nothing to cling to save her own breath.
Or perhaps it was merely to have victory over something.

Towards the end of the day she collapsed on the tarmac. Every part of her body ached, and burned, and she saw everything through a red haze.
Buildings decayed, trees burned.
How long had it been?
Months? Years? A week?
How long had it taken for everyone to die?
He crouched beside her head, looking down at her. There was no smile, no smirk this time. Only impassive waiting, as a child might watch a spider his mother has sprayed with bug killer.
You'll be mine eventually… the question is whether you go willingly.
She closed her eyes, and drew in a breath. She drew in with it the foul stench of blacktop, of decay, and of her own sickness. Then she slowly drew up her legs beneath her, and staggered to her feet.
He shook his head, amazed at her stubbornness. She wrapped a jacket about her shoulders, and continued in her slow, staggering walk, her eyes set on some unknown destination. South, she thought, was the direction she was going, but what she hoped to find even she could not guess.

He came closest to her as she slept that night, touching her for the first time. She trembled under the cold fingers, and would not look at him.
"You cannot run for long," he murmured. He never seemed to speak in more than a whisper. He drew his fingers along her arm, and she shuddered. "How long will you defy me?"

She did not know how long it had been when she saw the encampment. She nearly started forward in joy, but had to stop, because her head felt as though it might explode. She sank to the ground, cradling her head.
Her skin was covered in sores that had come out of nowhere, and she felt nauseous, though there was nothing in her stomach to come up when her belly began to heave. "Maybe they can help me," she whispered.
He knelt beside her, his icy breath tickling her ear. "You would only infect them, and they know it," he whispered. "They will drive you out and your sickness with you."
She looked longingly down at the camp, with the smoke from fires twining toward the sky. A woman's silk scarf in the wind.
"They will not help you," he whispered, "Even if they can."
She did not know what to do, and so she did nothing. She sat on the hill, watching.
Someone saw her, and a cry rang out. She nearly cried when she saw two men on horses. They had horses still. That meant they must have some kind of food.
When they came close enough to see her sickness, they reigned their horses sharply in. "Who are you?" one of them shouted. He was an adult man, with a thick brown beard. The other was not much older than she, with a thin dark shadow on his cheeks.
"I don't remember," she said, her voice cracking from disuse. "I don't remember."
"Why are you here? Are there other's with you?"
She looked at him, but they did not see him. "No," she said, "I'm alone… I saw the fires…" she cradled her head as it throbbed. Then her stomach began to heave, and she bent over the grass, coughing and choking, but only bile came up.
The men's horses stomped nervously.
"We cannot help you," the older man said, "We don't want anyone else getting sick."
She smiled ironically at them- the younger man flinched. It was a death smile. "Can… can I have a little water?"
The older man looked at the younger, who chucked an old plastic water bottle at her, though he came no closer. She twisted the lid from the damaged plastic bottle and lifted it to her lips, cool sweet water flowing over her parched tongue and throat. She sighed, lowering the bottle. "Thank you," she whispered, giving that eerie smile again.
The two men shifted in their saddles, uncertain.
She rummaged in her backpack- and he crouched beside it, gauging her actions.
She drew out the hunting knife, and looked up at the men. They thought she was going to do something insane, and reached for their guns.
"You should probably burn my things," she said, in a hollow voice. "But the gun… the gun is still good. Keep the gun." She looked down at the knife. "And the knife, I suppose…" She looked up at the younger man, and smiled tiredly. "In another life, I would have asked you to a movie."
The younger man stared at her, at once certain and unsure of what she planned to do.
But he, next to her, smiled a happy smile.
She would come willingly.

The young man spurred back down to camp, a chill in his blood. Behind him, a makeshift pyre flared into the day, black smoke curling toward the sky. The older man glanced at him, and said- "There was nothing we could have done for her."
The younger man looked at the older man, and at the rifle strapped to the saddle. "Could have or would have?" the younger man asked. The girl had been emaciated, her face a face of death, and that smile… God, that smile could have chilled fire.
"She would have brought that illness to our entire camp."
"We don't know that," the young man said softly, remembering vaguely high school classes he didn't used to think mattered. "She just… cut open her arms," the young man whispered, shaking his head. He was no stranger to suicide, not since it had happened.
But it was strange, how calm she had been.
"It would have been more merciful to shoot her," the young man said viciously, in reply to the silent look from his elder.
"She chose her path," the older man said, looking back at the pyre. "If you ask me, she'd gone a little mad, from being so alone."
"But what about that man who was with her?" the younger man asked.
"What man?"
They stared at each other.
The younger man looked up the hill, and for a moment, he saw a pretty young woman, in the arms of a skeleton.
Then a cloud of smoke moved briefly before his eyes, and the image was gone.
"Azrael," the young man whispered; a half-forgotten memory of something he had read. "The angel of death."

Description
he kicked a stone, and looked around at the scraggly dead trees; blackened fingers reaching to a sky that would never reach back. These were the kind of things she would have written about, once. Silence that was heavy on your ears, the solitude that made her every breath, every movement a trespass upon nature.
The corpse of a bird lay rotting on the side of the empty asphalt. A crow, its feathers stark against the white line, its neck at an odd angle. She stepped past it- it was nothing, compared to what she had left behind.

Music. It had been too long since she heard music. How long, since it happened? Years? Months? Days? It seemed an eon. She had used to love music.
There was no music now.
Just silence. Dead silence.
The world a tomb and she a maggot in the corpse.

Something small started as she set her foot down, and without a thought she lunged. Hunger had made of her an animal. No more the hesitation, to see what it was, else it escape down a hole. Her arm she forced as far down the tiny den as she could, but her fingers brushed fur for only a moment, and then it was gone.
Her stomach growled.
She cursed, the foulest she could think of. She readjusted the backpack on her shoulders, and continued dragging the rusted red wagon behind her.
The world was growing cold, and the wind carried a smell of mould. Rain was coming.
She would have to find somewhere to hide.

Hot summers. Rainy fall, icy winter, rainy spring. Those were the years. She remembered other people, people long dead.
People she'd loved.
They beckoned; their faces blurring together, nothing clear anymore. Voices becoming one, and all calling her name. But she couldn't go to them.
To go to them was to die.

Sometimes he would show up, while she sheltered. This was one of those times.
She had tied a tarp over a branch, making a crude tent. She'd had a real tent, once, but someone had stolen it. This was easier to patch, anyhow.
She was lying under the tarp, listening to the water striking the tarp. It was bright blue plastic, and fraying at the edges. Blue like the sky used to be. Or at least, she thought so. She wasn't sure of much anymore.
He sat at her feet, crouching. He didn't say a word, only stared at her.
"Go away," she moaned, rolling over.
"You don't want me to."
She stared at the side of the tarp, at the water puddle by her head.
He crouched there, gazing.
Eyes like night. Eyes like death.
She wanted to die.
She didn't want to die.

To live. To die. What did she have to live for?
Maybe there were others.
But what would be lost? Everything. All culture. All poetry. All art. All music.
It was ashes.
All the gods were dead. The angels were corpses.

"I don't want you here," she spat at him.
"You're lying," he said. Unblinking eyes. Eyes as black as coal. "Without me, you'd have no one else."
She rolled onto her back, staring at the tarp. "I used to have real friends."
"And I'm not your friend?"
She didn't answer.

Things used to matter. She used to believe things.
No god for her now. No goddess, either. It was all lies. Except maybe the death gods. Maybe they were all that had really existed in the first place.
Now Hades ruled what Zeus once had, and Satan had taken Jesus' domain. That would make sense. Nothing else did anymore.

In the morning she took down the tarp, and shook the water from it. She was still hungry.
Her jeans were held up by a cord of twine. She had lost weight, since it happened. What she would once have considered a boon, was now only a mark of the world's curse.
They'd been a sickness on the earth, and the earth had fought back. A plague on men. The seven plagues of Egypt, a plague for all mankind, for their trespasses against the ground they walked upon.
He followed her- more closely now than ever. She knew who he was, but he was not real.
Her shoes were falling apart- already they leaked. She would have to find new ones.
The trees all around her, the asphalt under her shoes, the faded paint lines. All a part of the old world.
A big bull elk stepped onto the road in front of her, and she stopped. She might have picked up the rifle in her wagon, but it was too light. All she would do was wound it, and waste a bullet. She couldn't afford to.
The elk raised its wet nose, sending puffs of fog into the chill air. It watched her, with eyes that had a look she remembered. Curiosity.
Then it turned and walked across the road, disappearing into the trees. She watched it go, hunger gnawing at the inside of her belly. He leaned over to whisper in her ear, but she started up again, looking determinedly forward.
She would not let him win yet.

With a sharpened stick she speared the injured rabbit- otherwise she probably never would have caught it. It screamed, and she nearly dropped it. She didn't know rabbits could make noise.
He laughed at her, but she ignored him.
Food was food.
She skinned and cleaned it crudely. She buried its guts- she didn't want other hungry creatures to come looking- and threw water over the spot of bloody dead grass with a little beach pale. She carefully cleaned her knife, and dried it on her pant leg. If she lost the knife, she'd be dead.
Then again, she might be dead if she kept it.
The smell of cooked meat- even as primitively as this- made her mouth water. How long had it been since she'd had meat?
He watched her eat, frowning darkly.
She grinned wolfishly at him.
"You're an animal," he hissed.

He vanished at about noon. She went on, the meat like a lump in her empty stomach. She had been hungry long enough that she soon stopped, vomiting on the asphalt. She stared at the puke, with the bits of undigested rabbit meat in it.
She bent, and picked the meat out of the vomit, and ate it again.

She reached a pond that afternoon. She caught a glimpse of her reflection, and came to a dead stop. Her hair was a tangle of unintentional dreadlocks, her eyes looked sunken, surrounded by a dark purple, and her face- once a mildly attractive oval, now resembled the face of the Grim Reaper.
She looked like a zombie from a movie, when they used to make movies.
Maybe that's what I am, she thought, a zombie. Undead. Not dead, not alive.
She certainly couldn't be a vampire; otherwise she would have died of thirst.
She tried to see if there were fish in the pond, but it didn't matter if there were any or not. She had no way of catching them. She pulled dead grass and fallen tree limbs into a heap. The driest ones she could find. She checked the lighter.
It was almost empty.
He appeared at her shoulder, leering, waiting, taunting her. "Why do you resist?" he whispered, his voice like a lover's. "Why don't you just give up the fight? I will treat you kindly…"
"Go away," she hissed fiercely. "You're not real."
He laughed- his laugh like a bell. "I am the only real thing left!"
She ignored him. She didn't want him to be right. He was only a dream. He wasn't real.

She kept the fire alive, crouching in the shadow of an abandoned library. The books were all gone- used for fires, she thought. When others were still alive.
How did I stay alive? She thought. I always thought I would be among the first to die.
But here she was.
And he sat across the fire, with his oil black robes, and oil black eyes. A face, that in any other time, would have been hideous, but the longer she stared at it, the more handsome he seemed.
He never blinked, and as she stoked the fire, he never spoke.
But as she coughed, a small expression of triumph crossed his face. "I could end your pain," he whispered, the murmur like a lover's caress. "I could make it all go away."
She glared at him, and pulled the blanket more tightly around her shoulders. All the gods are dead, except the gods of death.
"You just have to give in," he whispered. "You'll be mine eventually… the question is whether you go willingly."
That face- she would not let that face win her over! Handsomeness never guaranteed goodness!
She looked away, the cold stinging at her cheeks and nose, the threat of a cough prickling in her lungs. She was sick, but she wouldn't let him take her without a fight.

They were standing across a vast river, ghosts of another life. They were calling to her, waving. They called a word, a word she didn't recognize.
She saw each of their faces, and remembered them. Mother, Father, aunts, uncles, grandparents, sister, brother, friends, cousins, lovers, enemies… all calling that strange word.
Then she remembered that it was her name.

She woke with a start.
A fever dream- she felt as though she were roasting from the inside out.
He crouched over her, smiling that smile of victory. She snarled and hauled to her feet, though her head throbbed, and her skin burned. She gathered up her things, stopping as coughs racked her body, or the headache became too painful. All the while he smirked over her, waiting patiently for what was and, in the end, had always been his.
She put on the backpack, and loaded the wagon, and began on her long path down the road. She wobbled dangerously on her feet, her vision a haze. He followed her quietly, but with presence. She would not look at him, and still she trudged on, trying to follow the yellow stripe on the blacktop.

He watched her, fighting viciously like a caged animal against an enemy she could not overcome. They were all animals, in the end. They either came to him in acceptance or in fear, but in the end all were in his domain.
She stopped, swaying, and corrected her path, placing one foot after the other along the line. She was stubborn, though she had nothing to cling to save her own breath.
Or perhaps it was merely to have victory over something.

Towards the end of the day she collapsed on the tarmac. Every part of her body ached, and burned, and she saw everything through a red haze.
Buildings decayed, trees burned.
How long had it been?
Months? Years? A week?
How long had it taken for everyone to die?
He crouched beside her head, looking down at her. There was no smile, no smirk this time. Only impassive waiting, as a child might watch a spider his mother has sprayed with bug killer.
You'll be mine eventually… the question is whether you go willingly.
She closed her eyes, and drew in a breath. She drew in with it the foul stench of blacktop, of decay, and of her own sickness. Then she slowly drew up her legs beneath her, and staggered to her feet.
He shook his head, amazed at her stubbornness. She wrapped a jacket about her shoulders, and continued in her slow, staggering walk, her eyes set on some unknown destination. South, she thought, was the direction she was going, but what she hoped to find even she could not guess.

He came closest to her as she slept that night, touching her for the first time. She trembled under the cold fingers, and would not look at him.
"You cannot run for long," he murmured. He never seemed to speak in more than a whisper. He drew his fingers along her arm, and she shuddered. "How long will you defy me?"

She did not know how long it had been when she saw the encampment. She nearly started forward in joy, but had to stop, because her head felt as though it might explode. She sank to the ground, cradling her head.
Her skin was covered in sores that had come out of nowhere, and she felt nauseous, though there was nothing in her stomach to come up when her belly began to heave. "Maybe they can help me," she whispered.
He knelt beside her, his icy breath tickling her ear. "You would only infect them, and they know it," he whispered. "They will drive you out and your sickness with you."
She looked longingly down at the camp, with the smoke from fires twining toward the sky. A woman's silk scarf in the wind.
"They will not help you," he whispered, "Even if they can."
She did not know what to do, and so she did nothing. She sat on the hill, watching.
Someone saw her, and a cry rang out. She nearly cried when she saw two men on horses. They had horses still. That meant they must have some kind of food.
When they came close enough to see her sickness, they reigned their horses sharply in. "Who are you?" one of them shouted. He was an adult man, with a thick brown beard. The other was not much older than she, with a thin dark shadow on his cheeks.
"I don't remember," she said, her voice cracking from disuse. "I don't remember."
"Why are you here? Are there other's with you?"
She looked at him, but they did not see him. "No," she said, "I'm alone… I saw the fires…" she cradled her head as it throbbed. Then her stomach began to heave, and she bent over the grass, coughing and choking, but only bile came up.
The men's horses stomped nervously.
"We cannot help you," the older man said, "We don't want anyone else getting sick."
She smiled ironically at them- the younger man flinched. It was a death smile. "Can… can I have a little water?"
The older man looked at the younger, who chucked an old plastic water bottle at her, though he came no closer. She twisted the lid from the damaged plastic bottle and lifted it to her lips, cool sweet water flowing over her parched tongue and throat. She sighed, lowering the bottle. "Thank you," she whispered, giving that eerie smile again.
The two men shifted in their saddles, uncertain.
She rummaged in her backpack- and he crouched beside it, gauging her actions.
She drew out the hunting knife, and looked up at the men. They thought she was going to do something insane, and reached for their guns.
"You should probably burn my things," she said, in a hollow voice. "But the gun… the gun is still good. Keep the gun." She looked down at the knife. "And the knife, I suppose…" She looked up at the younger man, and smiled tiredly. "In another life, I would have asked you to a movie."
The younger man stared at her, at once certain and unsure of what she planned to do.
But he, next to her, smiled a happy smile.
She would come willingly.

The young man spurred back down to camp, a chill in his blood. Behind him, a makeshift pyre flared into the day, black smoke curling toward the sky. The older man glanced at him, and said- "There was nothing we could have done for her."
The younger man looked at the older man, and at the rifle strapped to the saddle. "Could have or would have?" the younger man asked. The girl had been emaciated, her face a face of death, and that smile… God, that smile could have chilled fire.
"She would have brought that illness to our entire camp."
"We don't know that," the young man said softly, remembering vaguely high school classes he didn't used to think mattered. "She just… cut open her arms," the young man whispered, shaking his head. He was no stranger to suicide, not since it had happened.
But it was strange, how calm she had been.
"It would have been more merciful to shoot her," the young man said viciously, in reply to the silent look from his elder.
"She chose her path," the older man said, looking back at the pyre. "If you ask me, she'd gone a little mad, from being so alone."
"But what about that man who was with her?" the younger man asked.
"What man?"
They stared at each other.
The younger man looked up the hill, and for a moment, he saw a pretty young woman, in the arms of a skeleton.
Then a cloud of smoke moved briefly before his eyes, and the image was gone.
"Azrael," the young man whispered; a half-forgotten memory of something he had read. "The angel of death."