Life and Death in the Stacks

[whistlersmum]

Whistler had so become a fixture at the university library, students had started approaching him for reference information.

UNLV's Special Collections housed unique, rare, and specialized research material that documented the history, culture and physical environment of the city of Las Vegas, the Southern Nevada region, the gaming industry, and the University of Nevada Las Vegas.The collections included books, pamphlets, posters, serials and periodicals, scrapbooks, archives and manuscripts, maps, architectural drawings, photographs, and more recently, video and audio tapes.

Everything he needed about the history of Searchlight, the boomtown years, the historic landscape, prominent citizens. And, after days of searching, the Agent finally found the real treasure map he'd sought: a map of the town before it's decline in the nineteen forties.

His finger traced the streets that led to the (former) Catholic Church. "Here's the church, and here's the steeple. Open the doors..."

Comments

[whistlersmum]

Whistler fell out of his chair, a clumsy attempt to add distance between himself and the girl.

No, not girl.

He knew that pull. A man of his years and experience didn't escape the world unscathed.

"Fuck me."

The Agent reconsidered his words. She might have taken it literally.

"Custodi me a morte personam."

[dori_bell]

"Protect you?" Dori sat still in her chair, looking all the more stoic for his outburst. She tilted her head in curiosity. "I'm not here for you. It isn't your time." Not by far, if the life force stowed in his chest was a proper measurement of such things. Was he really so afraid of a woman he'd taken for a teenager?

Well... perhaps it was wise to be. Dori had been no more than three when she ushered her first soul from this plane to the next. Barely old enough to comprehend death, let alone embody it.

[whistlersmum]

"Thank Christ for that, then."

Whistler sunk down in his chair. Casting a protection spell like that took an enormous amount of energy.

"So... if it's not my time..." and he was very excited to hear that, "then why are you here?"

In a town this size, it could be anyone or...

"The way you talked about things decaying. Are you here for Searchlight?" The Agent went pale.

[dori_bell]

“I have to be somewhere,” she said, shaking her head lightly as if it were an obvious conclusion. She was not an angel, not some ephemeral, winged creature that managed to be everywhere and yet nowhere, swooping into the bedrooms of the elderly or the wreckage of crashed cars to collect souls. She was human. She breathed, ate, and slept like all living creatures did. She aged. One day, she would die. Why she and her brother were called upon to live among humans, as humans, to occasionally use their power to take life or give it, she didn’t know. She did not have a gospel.

[whistlersmum]

"But you're here, in this library. With me, now."

He didn't believe in coincidences. He didn't believe in luck.

Whistler believed things happened for a reason. Sometimes, he was that reason.

The demon leaned over the map, placed his head in his hands and sighed.

"Some days," he groused, "I really hate my job."

[dori_bell]

“I am going to take someone,” Dori said. She considered his predicament with roughly half the information she needed; his job was still a mystery to her, as was the identity of his boss. “Maybe you were meant to see.”

To see, but not to stop her. Nothing could stop her.

She pressed her palms on the wooden table and stood up. The hem of her skirt rolled up in the back, making it two inches shorter and lopsided. Death had many faces; today it looked harmless and mousy. Before she departed, a tick mark formed between her eyebrows. “Did you know that someone close to you almost met her end? She stared at me for a moment. Through the veil. I felt it.”

Dori eased away from her chair and began her descent to the first floor of the library. Her shoes made hushed noises on the carpeted stairs, her fingers whispering on the waxed rail. As she passed the circulation desk, they dusted along the edge there, too, and a librarian keeled over in her seat, the pain behind her eye revealing itself to be an aneurysm.

[whistlersmum]

He watched the girl descend and pass by the desk, saw the librarian pass. Knowing he was helpless to stop it. Wondering if he was powerless for what was to come.

And then her words, once more.

'Did you know that someone close to you almost met her end? She stared at me for a moment. Through the veil. I felt it.;

That death would've been too much for him.

By that reasoning, if he stood by and did nothing, Whistler valued other lives less.

Which would make him, what? A monster? Technically he was already a demon. No, part demon. But he was also part angel. An Agent of Balance.

Well. Screw that.

It was time to pick a side.