His fingertips rippled across the newsprint, slowing every now and then. The pages flew as he voraciously searched. After thirty minutes he leaned back, let his hands drop onto the paper and inhaled deeply, allowing the scattered sounds of other attendees at the Albuquerque library to creep into his mind.
The Watcher stood, stretched and winked at a young woman struggling with a photocopier. On cue, the machine clicked to life and she grinned. Momentarily forgetting himself, he candidly smiled back, then flushed slightly as he saw her eyes widen in astonishment, then narrow in fear as his intense presence deluged her. She flinched, her round face stricken, and stumbled out of his sight line.
He gritted his teeth, pining for the simple pleasures of flirting. Sometimes back at Saloman or “Sell, Man!” Brothers as he used to call it, he and the other inmates of the bullpen would escape the investment house’s noise and clutter and slip out onto the energetic Manhattan streets for a hit of eye-candy.
He sighed. Since his demonic rebirth, he’d had to exercise extreme caution in the “look” department, having been cursed with what ancients referred to as the evil eye, a diabolical bewitching ability found in suspected sorcerers with eyes of a piercing blue or of two different colors. At one end of his expression spectrum, an unprotected, impromptu gaze could terrify the recipient; at the other, an enraged stare could cause spontaneous combustion.
He glanced at the wall clock (his internal electrics were subversive to watches), reached for a stack of small market and local entertainment publications and returned to his scanning. “Yeooo!” he hissed almost immediately, mind filling with pain and the words: “Christian sensation and miraculous stigmatic John the Apostle and unknown companion celebrating his latest Billboard pop chart Top Ten hit.” Gotcha!
He quickly skimmed the old article, then ignoring the disapproving hisses around him, tore out the photograph, wondering why he hadn’t seen an image of the Apostle before. He eyed it carefully. John, his arm around a fair-haired beauty, beamed at the camera. Though the woman’s face was partially turned, it was familiar. Bonus!
He examined the handsome man more closely. His pulse flared briefly, building to an intense throb edging to his frontal lobe. A tingle of fear mixed with anticipation reverberated from his toes right up to his forehead. The Chosen One. Nauseated from the mental pounding, he tried to find his breath.
The coincidence was too great. At times he was inhabited by Asmodeus, one of Satan’s dark princes, and John the Baptist just happened to be the saint prayed to whenever this demon of lust and rage was suspected of possession.
The wait was over. He had to destroy the Apostle.
Something glittered around the singer’s throat. The Watcher peered, then delicately placed an index finger on the photograph, closed his eyes and emptied his lungs.
His sweating fingertip itched, then scored a single word into his brain. Sindon.
