Page 29 of Venomous Throne

The madness over something as simple as food was a strong enough drive to send me over the edge.

I forced myself to breathe, in and out, half a dozen times. On the sixth exhale, I pushed the bags back into place, lining them up as if I’d never been there. I retreated from the alcove, nearly tripping on a curl of broken concrete. I made my way to the front of the church, where I could appear to be only another vagrant, another stray. I walked up and down the steps, the rhythm of my boots on stone the only steadying thing about me.

Outside, the blast of summer sunshine burnt my eyes.

The urge to return to the cool interior was nearly magnetic. But it wasn’t just the temperature. It was the feeling of peace and humanity, right there, always out of my grasp. I began to pace the sidewalk. I was muttering to myself—sometimes in my language, sometimes hers, sometimes in a mix of both, a barely-audible chorus of reminders to leave, goddamn it, just leave. If Isabella saw me, she would know. If anyone saw me, they wouldguess. Still, I drifted along the path, not ready to break line of sight with the entrance. The bushes along the curb trembled, and a swirl of pigeons scattered in the wind. They seemed to urge me forward, to stay.

Something pink and soft caught my eye.

There was no leaving.

Isabella might be wearing black, looking like the combatants I sometimes trained with, but images of her in vibrant colors flooded my mind.

I plucked a rose before I knew what I was doing and hurried back inside. I placed it between two bags, where she would see it.

It was a small gift, an offering to the divine. Because that was what I saw her as. My obsession with this woman grew by leaps and bounds. The medical establishment would call me insane, the religious would say I was possessed.

I was both.

Before I could force myself to leave, I stopped at the door to the main entrance.

There she knelt, in the front pew. Her head was bent, dark braid falling over her right shoulder. Something holy glowed around her body.

Her lips moved in a silent intercession. For what did she pray? Was it something a monster like me could grant? Or would it take a god, good and wholesome, to bestow her wishes? If only I knew what, I would move the very heavens to give it.

I told myself to leave. I gripped the doorframe, my body unwilling to quit the scene, as if the old gods of the place had rooted me there. For a few moments, I watched her lips move, soundless, communing with something that would never answer. I recognized that form of communication—our kind did it constantly, begging the stars for a reason, for permission, for a loophole. Isabella just did it better.

Finally, she crossed herself, rose in a single, smooth movement, and went to the door. I ducked, unseen. I heard the rattle of the wagon, the scrape of her shoes on old tile. The sun caught her full-on when she emerged, and for an instant, she almost shimmered, surrounded by the radiance she herself denied.

She looked like a warrior, ready to do battle. Give her a machine gun, and she would rain terror on the enemy.

I let her get halfway down the block before following. It was not a conscious decision, but something hardwired into my bones, the way a predator was wired for pursuit. Every few paces she would check her phone, thumb skimming across the screen. Her route never changed, going from the well-kept, cleaner streets to those that seemed abandoned. She made the same stops in the same order, as if following a ritual.

The first stop was a townhouse, the door painted in long-gone blue, the numbers missing. She set the bag on the step, rang the bell, and left before anyone could open the door. For a second, I thought I saw a face at the window—a child, peering through a smear of grime, but maybe that was just the hunger talking. At the second house, she exchanged words with an old woman in soiled lounge clothes. I couldn’t hear the details, but the tone was of careful, practiced kindness, the sort of voice reserved for the dying or for animals. She stooped and accepted a folded scrap of paper from the woman, then walked away without looking back.

At the third house, the door opened before she even rang. A man’s voice—raspy and hoarse—spilled down the stoop, a sound like stones in a blender. Isabella didn’t flinch. She handed over the bag, and the man pressed a hand briefly to her arm. She nodded once, the barest acknowledgment, then retreated before the man could say anything more. I wondered, for thethousandth time, why she did this, why she spent her free time feeding the ungrateful, the doomed, the never-satisfied.

I kept to the shadows, using broken fences and garbage cans as cover. The city was built for ghosts. Some blocks, Isabella crossed without stopping, her wagon rattling like distant gunfire. On others, she would slow, as if searching for something, a landmark or a person who never appeared. At one point, a police cruiser rolled by, its windows glossed with dust. Isabella didn’t hesitate; she looked the officers dead in the eye, daring them to stop her. They didn’t. The message was loud and clear. This was her neighborhood, and the law was just passing through.

Eventually, she reached the end of her route: a warehouse with most of its front letters faded out. She stood in the shadow of the high fence, her back to the street, and checked her phone again. I was close enough now to see the sweat running down her temple. She looked tired, but not defeated. Funny how she didn’t move to the old industrial building. That was one of her late husband’s businesses. One that her brother-in-law now owned and operated.

To the world, it seemed an abandoned lump of rubble. My computer-savvy partner back at our base of operations had shown me what really happened there. Chase was good at computers. There were few places he couldn’t gain digital access. A valuable asset, I kept him around; otherwise, I cut all ties to people, refusing to work with anyone. And as of right now, I had no plans to use the information he gathered. I wasn’t going to stay long enough to see that play out.

Across the street, there was a final house that Isabella approached instead, a squat thing with windows covered by cardboard. The grass was long dead, the fence rusted to lace. Isabella continued up the walk, despite the wagon’s wheelcatching on a root. I slowed, keeping my distance. The tension in the air thickened.

She climbed the steps, balanced the bag on one hip, and knocked.

From inside, shouting rang out. A man’s voice, then a woman’s. Then the high, overlapping cries of children.

Isabella didn’t move, didn’t twitch. She just waited, her eyes on the peephole, her body squared to the door as if she could will the inhabitants into better manners, better lives. She flinched only when the door slammed open, hard enough to bang against the wall.

A little girl, hair wild, face smeared with something unidentifiable, stood blinking at Isabella. Behind her, the chaos roared: Two more kids, smaller, fighting over a game controller. The adults, their anger suddenly muffled but no less palpable.

Isabella smiled—small, but real. She crouched so she was eye level with the girl, and whispered something I couldn’t make out. The girl took the bag, eyes wide, and darted inside. The door stayed open. Isabella stood, wiped her hands on her black combat pants, and turned back toward the street.

The head of the house appeared behind her. “Hey! You!”

Isabella whipped around, facing the clearly intoxicated man who filled the doorway.