"Never again", he says, and stares through me with eyes as empty as fresh graves. It's nothing short of repudiation; denial, and I'm ripped apart.

It's too bright in here for these shattering dreams. Midnight is hours away, but I can feel it here, wrapping round us like velvet and fog, walling us away from the rest of the world, and each other. Fractured shadows fall drunkenly across the floor, harsh cast by the hot sun. Light spears in and diffuses in the air into drifting motes of fire, and the phantom scent of grain dust flickers across my senses. Ergotamine, I think, and poison. Quiet, useful.

Everywhere I am reminds me of my trade.

I turn and smile, because otherwise I will break; a full and unaccustomed stretch of muscle that surprises me. I want to break *him*, my fist a brush of bone to paint sunset bruises on his skin. I imagine the satin clay of his flesh moulded to my wants, a hollow here, a palm-cupped rise of desire there, a living sculpture unable to turn away or deny me. A willing touch to my cheek. I want his eyes open and raw and seeing me only, the way I am with him, though he never seems to see. That is not how it is between us, but I dream as a man who has hope and future both, when I will have neither. This is how it is, and sometimes we both remember that.

Then the statue in my mind opens blank grey eyes and smiles with the face of a recent memory, and with that memory I find *him* again, the man who lives within, my Janus face. I step to him and drag the ball of my thumb against the nap of his jaw as his vacant eyes look past me. A touch of lips to the shallow whorl of an ear.

"There is no one else." I whisper the truth to him, and feel him press into me as if a strong wind pushes him from behind.

"There never will be", he says, and his hair slides silken over the pulse of my neck as he lays a kiss on my collar. I hold him as best I can with the remnants of my whole self, and he rests his head on my shoulder like a lover.

I close my eyes and dream with him, in the shadow of a desert sun.

He is Abbadon, the angel of the pit, presiding over my own private Hell, he is Lucifer, bringing light and with it creating a hundred more shadowed confusions, he is the Beast, ripping me open even as I stand dumbly admiring his beauty, he is Odysseus, carrying on unharmed as his comrades fall behind him one by one. In my death lies beauty, and it lies in him.

How can I not love him?

3. A History

I was chosen simply because I fitted the shopping list. Looks younger than his years, plays a chosen role well, naivete a speciality. Efficient with blade and gun, to terminal but not unduly gratuitous effect. Intelligent, adaptable, ruthless, untrusting and untrustworthy, self-centred and alone. Later, I realised the very fact that they chose me pointed to my potential to move up, move on, make something of myself on my own. If I’d known that then, maybe I would have said no… maybe not. It all seems a lot easier at eighteen, however streetwise you think you are, and I was hungry for power, money, all the trappings and perks of success.

Two years were spent reading up on the subjects required, perfecting my more sharply edged skills and developing a suitable anonymity of bearing. I had the drive to apply myself to any task that would further my own interests, however repugnant I found it. At twenty I replaced some orphaned kid who’d just won a place at a decent University and was living off a modest inheritance, administered by trustees he never saw; finally matching my looks to an age I’d passed three years ago. He’d been the kind of kid who lived vicariously through books, chess club and space invaders, accent forever marking him an outsider. Not to be missed by anyone of any consequence, or at all for all I know. The matches in the accent and background I’d been provided with made me believe that the kid had been marked for death from the moment their plan was conceived, only son in a small insular immigrant family, parents conveniently dying in an auto wreck days after the SATs. I never asked, just deduced, used the brain they picked me for. I never understood how they could be so surprised when I turned on them, judging my makers and finding them wanting. It wasn’t the first time I’d been an ungrateful child.

I always assumed that they knew why I was living anonymously in New York, why I’d never gotten past High School when I obviously had the application and the intellect to do well. I’d never fooled myself into thinking I was untraceable, just that I was safe from any pro forma effort that might be essayed by my erstwhile ‘family’, unwilling to look bad in front of the rest of the community, never mind that He was well known as a punch happy alcoholic and She as a cheap whore. Maybe the neighbours knew what went on, maybe not. Sure as shit none of them ever bothered to ask the sullen kid with a fondness for black leather and the corruption of their perfect jock sons and the most treasured of their cheerleading slut daughters. I heard that I never appreciated what they gave me every single day for fifteen years, as far back as I can remember. Damn straight; what’s to appreciate about the black eyes and bruised limbs, burned skin and a bleeding ass? Later, I could’ve gone back and taken care of them, but I’d already decided not to give them that victory, when my new owners told me He’d been hit by a truck on the way out for more liquor one night, well on the way to drinking himself to death at the tender age of 42. She’d vanished off to the city to live the life of a parasite until she bloated and shrivelled and probably met the fate that catches up with every old and used up bitch once its looks have gone. I never bothered to ask, and after the apathetic response I gave to the news of His death, they never told me. Maybe it was a test of my dedication. I don’t know what they made of my reaction; as always, I kept my motives to myself.

I set off to college three years older than my peers and immesurably more experienced in survival. The instructions were simple. Keep the grades good but not spectacular. Don’t stand out. Don’t do anything to make yourself appear anything other than an ordinary, average Joe with ordinary, average ambitions. I drifted through the unreal cotton padded life, occasionally satisfying the baser human needs with quick fucks in the men’s rooms of bars, sometimes for money, sometimes not. I graduated after the mandatory four years, attended by the tar lunged man who pulled the strings and a blonde woman I never saw except on that one occasion. Progressed to the force, kept clean but not suspiciously so, played it straight in every sense, until finally it was Time, and I stuck my hand out and fawned and then you looked at me, through me, treated me like the shit off your shoes, and nothing was ever the same again.