The Price

Thomas's chest was a blast furnace as painful breath pumped through his clenched teeth into the winter air. Despite the warning from his heart, beating like a desperate fist against doors to asylum, he continued to run mindlessly allowing new instincts to take him where they pleased. Sweat drenched his fine clothes; clothes that he was tearing away like a molting skin.

Under the cold dark winter sky of a twenty-first century Harlem, he was nothing more than a dark, lithe shadow. Keeping a safe distance, the usual menagerie of junkies, bums and muggers appreciated his presence with icy glares.

The landscape of the old borough had the atmosphere of a middle eastern demilitarized zone: condemned buildings waited for chaos to consume what remained, islands of trash spanned city blocks and territorial graffiti tattooed every wall and surface that still withstood the urban elements.

A full moon was rising in the east. Legs, aching with adrenaline and new alien hormones, strode effortlessly through the rubble and waste for a place of refuge. In the cold, dank shell of an old city tenement he came to finally rest and trembled there like a junkie caught in the talons of a withdrawal symptom. Naked to the world, he sat on freezing, littered earth and wrapped his arms around his legs, hiding his face between the cleft of his lap. The skin there, like the rest of his body, was cold and clammy. Thomas whimpered like the child he was never allowed to be.

A voice spoke, "Forever is the word of a child."
The phrase was like Zen wisdom, simple in its presentation yet enigmatic in its content. An image of the old man came to his memory: slender and too small for his worn clothes.

"Nicodemus?" Thomas inquired timidly.
The fetid, oil-black darkness did not answer. The pupils of his still-human eyes, strained to focus for anything beyond three feet of them. He dared not waste a second enquiry lest he receive the regretted answer.

He could feel his conscious self, being eaten away by another, new and fiercer inhabitant occupying space in his mind. Like a drowning man, his consciousness struggled to remain above the surface of reality. As the new form gained authority memories gushed forth like blood from fresh wounds: The schoolgirl at the subway whose chest had parted so easily, like an orange. The mother and child at a parking lot, each begging for the mercy of an indifferent god. The vagrant, his emaciated body flailing like a meat-puppet, as he was slammed from wall to wall in the cavernous sewer-ways under Manhattan.

What livid part of his mind that remained thought back to the moments before this. Before finding himself hurled out of the comfortable bossom oh his opulent world to spasming like a hellish fetis within the womb of an condemned ruin.

All the while the old voice was present repeating the same words like a gloating insult.
Forever is the word of a child.
• • •
Every reign must come to an end. No matter how complicated the facts of history might seem it could always summed up to that one fact. It was a paradigm among the powerful. In early childhood Thomas had arrived to this conclusion which fostered the one emotion to motivate all his actions for the rest of his life. That one emotion was greed.

His father, a man blessed with the silver spoon and wit of his ancestors, was not the sort to give his son a taste from that very spoon itself. Instead Thomas was trained and lectured in the higher schooling of virtues, discipline and control.

The first he had no use for, the second he learned to exercise when required but the last he planned to thoroughly administer but never become the recipient of.

As a child, when boundaries applied, Thomas had had no use for them. To him fences and walls were simply obstacles; made to be disrespected and torn down. And as the years passed and Thomas entered manhood he came to understand that his agenda was universal among great men. Throughout history ignoring and breaking through the barriers of justice and compassion for their very gain was the formula for prominence.

The fences and walls corresponded to the others, the sheep, who cowered before the wolves. To Thomas there were no lines to keep him from what he wanted not even between king and prince. Father and son.
• • •
On his twenty-fourth birthday, a few days after Thomas’s graduation from Harvard school of business, the king died. The death was a curious thing, there seemed to be no family history of cardiac arrest, although that's what it had seemed like. There was really no history of any illness; the family genome was as spotless as the silverware used to serve the evening dinners. Thomas's father should have lived longer.

As for his mother, who had seemed like the mute, debutante breeding mare of his father's early manhood, she put aside all pretenses and claimed her place as dictator and pilot of the world's largest conglomerate, Price-Wales industries. There had been, of course, the expected band of parasitic relatives who insisted upon rocking the industrial boat for their own gain but they had eventually been quieted with either compensations or threats.

The reign of the queen mother was short lived though, she was discovered with slit wrists in the luxurious tub of a Parisian hotel penthouse. Many claimed she died of grief, the loss of her husband and new charge too great a pain to endure. Thomas agreed with a bowed head; a bowed head that concealed a satisfied grin.

The crown came to rest upon Thomas's young, eager brow. Even before the body of his diseased mother could cool he was engineering the company's power to ensure his seat upon the throne. He bought out all remaining competition his father had foolishly considered innocuous and forced the necks of those who would not sell through the noose of chapter eleven.

In little more than a decade Thomas had created the empire his father had not been able to. His influence was boundless, he frowned and a nation fell. Nothing was out of his reach. Or so he wanted to believe.

Upon a late evening following a party with the typical cast of international bootlickers Thomas shared personal time at his condo balcony with one of his employees.

She was young, a few years out of her teens, beauty and strength her greatest allies. She watched him with unbridled contempt sitting at a plush couch on the balcony.

Thomas had just had his way with her and there was not a thing she could have done about it. There were only two choices in the matter: give in and keep silent or resist and keep hell. She locked her knees her hands on them the fingernails white as they dug into the flesh. Her light evening dress was stained with the tyrant’s seed.

Thomas had found only really one thing attractive about her, her vulnerability. She had little to give but in his experience everyone, no matter whom, had something to lose. In this girl’s case, a mere receptionist for a facility in one of his many firms, was to be married. She loved her man. Thomas had noticed it on the moments she met with him on the sidewalk outside her building. They were happy.

He would take that away. Not because he was jealous love held no meaning for him but because he could. He was powerful he could do anything and have anything he pleased. Hadn’t he proven on more than one occasion to be the engineer of all destinies?

"What's going to happen?" she finally spoke.

"Come again? " Thomas answered politely as if he had merely shared evening tea with the girl, rather than raped her.

She would beg to be released of this. Thomas almost smiled at the thought, her perfect features twisting into a horrid mask of misery. The lesser beings could be so predictable. Yes, she would want to return to the comfort of her fiancé but when he learned of what she had done he would shun her. Thomas could just see it: The young man raising then lowering his hands in disgust at her infidelity demanding his engagement ring. She would return it, watch him walk out of her life. Not long after she would walk out of it also.

" When you're gone, I mean? You don't have any heirs do you?" The wind at fifty stories whipped about the girl pulling at the thin shimmering material of her dress, "Just think, when you’re gone, this will all be gone. You’ve worked so hard, for nothing!"

Releasing a pretty giggle of delight she wedged the nail of one of her thumbs between her front teeth assuming an innocent posture that was mocking.

“Like sand castles at the beach. Nothing is forever not even you,” she added with a baby voice.

During so many decades in power the thought of his own mortality had never stood in the way of the crosshairs that passed for his mind. But that fact now stared him in the face like a long forgotten enemy returned to exact revenge. For the first time in his life, Thomas was without power to handle a situation.

This new epiphany had so distracted him that he hadn't noticed the girl leaving, wearing a smug grin like a mark of victory. He was enraged beyond reason. This little bitch was not the simpleton she seemed to be. In an instant she had revealed to him the one flaw in his seemingly flawless plan.

He clutched her by the hair raising her face to be level with his own, there he thrust a fist at the perfect features sending a crimson spray in every direction. The girl managed only a half scream before she was pummeled again. With that he flung her away sending her sliding on her back several feet across the glossy marble floor.

The idea was like an infernal bee's stinger, after the initial attack it continued to pump its poison incessantly. Thomas couldn't be rid of it. He was wounded and the poison sank deeper with every moment of rage. He returned his attention to the annoying little bee that had started it all. She was struggling to stand and buzzing away with insults. He stood and approached her.

" Yes I agree. I guess we do all have our time but there is a difference when it comes to the two of us. Do you know what it is? " Thomas asked as the girl leaned insecurely on the marble rail of the balcony.

Thomas approached her, his clutched fist coated with her blood. He caught her by a clump of hair at the back of her head and brought her to his face pressing her waist against the balcony rail; her torso bent painfully under his strain.
He flashed a smile that appeared more like a pained grimace, "No one will decide when my time comes but as for you..." Thomas released his hold.

The girl's feet flipped up and over her head. In a few seconds, as he watched, she was nothing more than a speck of color hurtling to the jigsaw pattern of street lights below.
"I will decide my time!" Thomas screamed down at her.

Only the wind answered, howling a mournful reply.
• • •

The global headquarters of Price industries was a gargantuan blade of metal and glass. It towered above even the old titans of Manhattan rooted to the spot where the World Trade Center had once stood.

His office was not at the top of the building as expected but below. After the ill-fated twins fell, decades before, Thomas afforded himself no risks. The new Price building was designed with the most sophisticated escape measures should anyone decide to attempt to knock the crown off the king’s distrustful brow.

It had been a month since the girl's death and Thomas was still depressed. He sat in his leather seat, embraced by the custom-made contours. He faced the panoramic windows. Pigeons loitered on the outside ledge their cooing sounding like the rushed moans of clandestine lovers.

Distractedly Thomas looked upon his own reflection over-imposed on the glass. At fifty-five, he barely looked older than twenty, gene therapy had seen to that. But not even the miracle of twenty-first century modern science could deter the inevitable. Death had come, in the form of a pretty face, to remind him that he could not erase the line that had been drawn at birth.

The pigeons resting on the ledge burst into a cloud of dirty matted feathers. The flock spread out into the city hastily fleeing the Price building. Soon they were mere dots moving about in his reflection.

"To live as a god is not the same as being one," a voice spoke from behind him, strong and clear.

Thomas swung in his chair almost falling off. An old frail man stood at the head of his desk, a look of unparalleled calm upon his face. He was dressed like a janitor, simple and humble. His hair was all silver, even at the brow, as if the color of youth had been drained long ago. He pulled off the wool cap on his head with the humility of a Christian at church. His eyes smoothly turned away to the left while tilting his head as if listening to a melody only he could appreciate. He cupped his ear with his left hand.
"Listen. Do you hear it?" He asked his eyes wide like a wonder-struck child.

Not a single human being on earth could get past security in the Price building without say-so. But here was someone standing in front of the most powerful man in the world. With one word he could have this intruder wasted for just being in his presence. The Israeli bodyguards standing outside in reception were soon going to be out of work.

The man repeated himself patiently; "Do you hear it?"

For someone gifted with the sharp and eloquent tongue of a devil, Thomas only answered, no.
"Exactly, there is nothing. Not a single tick-tock in this room. I don't hear a single clock. A man such as you priding himself in harnessing so much power, it does not make sense, avoiding a harmless thing like a clock. Now I know that this is the digital era but from what I see around me, you are definitely the connoisseur of antiques.

Not a single one, not even a grandfather clock."
Thomas saw the mockery in the elder's eyes but kept his calm, "So, been familiar with many world leaders have you?" Thomas patronized and as he did reached under his desk to push an alarm button.

" Tisk, tisk!", the old man waved a scolding finger like a skeletal wand, "Not just yet my friend, I am not finished."

Thomas pulled his hand back as though the button were a hot coal. The old man turned about the room carelessly; he may as well have been in his own living room.

The word office did it no justice. It's ceiling was of cathedral proportions rising to infinity. Instead of content cherubs and sage prophets festooning the ceiling panels, there was a pattern of angels and demons interchanging between positive and negative space. The marble walls could be moved at the command of a digit to allow for more space and to reveal giant monitors on which could be viewed anything from business itinerary to entertainment of Roman debauchery.

Thomas's guest approached a painting to his left. Mobile lights washed the canvas enhancing the hues and defining the values. The technique was chiaroscuro, Two men of the renaissance stood shoulder to shoulder conversing trivialities. It would have been perfect save the vanilla colored smear at the bottom. The old man faced it first from the front then like a critic turned to both sides of the work at sharp angles; he began to chuckle lightly. Thomas had purchased the thing at an auction, and only because a Japanese executive from Nagasaki had put up such a fight in the bidding. Even now he still received offers from the Japanese for the painting. Whatever secret the painting hid maybe this old stranger saw it too.

The old man spoke, his back turned confidently to Thomas, "It's not them you really avoid but what they represent. Yes, they say to you time must run out but there is no avoiding that is there? Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Am I right, Tovarich?"

The man turned back to face Thomas but wasn't looking at him. His attention was turned to the ceiling where his eyes rolled to expose the yellowed whites. He smiled.

"Every reign must come to an end,” the little scarecrow man said.

Shock struck Thomas like a sledgehammer to the chest.

"No one can promise you eternity but there is always the possibility of an extension. Are you familiar with the term 'buying time'?"

Thomas composed himself enough to play the game of wits "If the price is right."

The man nodded his silver-gray head approvingly while touching palms like a bhuddist at prayer.

He placed his hands on the desk and leaned towards Thomas, his thin lips spreading into a feral grin, " I couldn't ask for more. "

If the lunatic passed the line, Thomas would skewer him with a spring-loaded NAZI dagger strapped to his right forearm. He couldn't tell if the little man had noticed hostility under the business-cool exterior. The old man's eyes didn't waver from Thomas but he was more than certain that those ice-cold orbs read everything.

As shadows lengthened the office was painted in late afternoon magenta; soon the early winter sun would be an extinguished memory.

"Are you a man who's expectations ride on faith?" the little man didn't wait for an answer, "No. Someone who takes so much onto himself would not have the meekness to depend on a higher authority."

The old man sat atop Thomas's desk. The man's right hand came forward to support himself as he leaned over to get his face but a foot from Thomas's.

"Six."

"What?" said Thomas.

"Six" the scarecrow man repeated.

"Six chances and one will convince you of what I offer."

The man's thin right hand held something; there was a gun. It was a Smith & Wesson six-chamber pistol, the type used by gunslingers of the old west. The barrel was long and the butt of genuine oak, it was old and surely an antique; Thomas recognized it as such.

"Use It." the old man said reading the confusion on Thomas's face. He placed the weapon in his hands.

"Not on yourself. On me." He rose from the desk and stood with both arms wide apart.
Thomas smiled like he had not since the death of his mother. If security heard they would come and find the old fool dead. The fool had wandered into the dragon's lair.

The old man smiled too. He knew no one would hear. Out in reception the Israeli bodyguards lay about the room with their heads ripped off.

Thomas expertly checked the gun's barrel and found it empty. A shine caught his eye; he looked down to his desk where a bullet sat like a tiny rocket of death. Placing the bullet in the chamber he spun it; it hissed like the tail on a rattlesnake. He flicked his wrist to the right and set the chamber into the gun.

"It's your funeral philosopher." He aimed the gun at the man's stomach knowing that upon recoil it would strike the chest and leave his heart plastered to the wall.

He pulled the trigger to an empty chamber, he tried again, a third time, then a fourth; all the while his heart racing faster with the near sexual anticipation of killing. The beat of the hammer on the fifth shot only another echo up to the ceiling pattern.

"Tovarich!” the old man yelled, "Forever is the word of a child."

The gun thundered, tearing the tension in the air like a cheap fabric. The bullet punched through the old man's chest making only a quarter-sized hole in the area of the sternum but it exited through the man's upper back in an explosion of bone, blood and flesh the size of a bowling ball.

He was raised off the ground and hurled six feet. The body somersaulted and landed face down to expose the splintered ribcage. Smoke rose out of the cavity in a lazy blue thread.

Thomas approached the corpse. He kicked it to turn it over. The eyes stared into death with a look of familiarity. As he stood over the body, Thomas clutched his groin with the left hand. Semen shot out wetting his thighs and soaking the expensive pants of his Italian suit.
He spied a skull and noticed it was within the chiaroscuro painting. At an angle the vanilla smear was a skull.

• • •
In his life Thomas was certain of only one thing; the unexpected would always arrive when least welcomed. He stood with one of the trio of new bodyguards at his side while he watched traffic flow under the overpass of highway 95. The second and third guard stayed by the schoeffer as he helplessly attempted to fix the limousine motor.

Thomas stood solemnly under the umbrella held by one of the bodyguards. The early winter rain pounded the highway with the force of miniature grenades. Against the better judgement of his retainers, he had chosen to remain outside. He watched the river of lights flow to its destination; it pulsed with oblivious life. So many souls blind to the inevitable. He could no longer feel the chest-swelling pride of his earlier years. Now he understood that there was more in common between the wolf and the sheep, there was a fiercer predator that skulked about unnoticed by both—mortality.

The sad weight of truth burdened him like chinked armor. Frustration and self-pity came hot and wet to his eyes and throat. Thomas hid his face within the raised collar of his coat.

"Go check on the others." Thomas said.

"You sure?" the guard who was a tall black man, seeming as intelligent as he was strong asked with concern.

"Go!" Thomas repeated, his voice quivering with weakness.

The man handed the umbrella to his employer and strode off with leonine grace. He seemed more like a humanoid panther than a common bodyguard. Morgan raised his desperate tearing eyes to the pouring sky. In the storming heavens a throbbing pattern of light and dark roiled and churned.

Footsteps came towards Thomas. He was anxious to be moving and away from this place of perpetual temporary.

"Let me guess, the tow will be here before that idiot figures out his asshole from a hole in the ground!" There was no answer and the footsteps stopped a few feet short of him.

"When will the other car be here!” Like the people of his social class Thomas always made questions in the form of a demand.

Cold instinct ran from the base of his spine to the top of his head. He turned around with the blade from his hidden weapon drawn. The wrist of that hand was seized by inhuman strength. Thomas looked into the face of a dead man.

"Still interested in my offer?" asked the little scarecrow.

The four men at the front of the limousine lay about the wet blacktop in pieces, their heads sitting on the concrete railing of the overpass all facing the river of lights. Thomas's other hand was seized and passed through the attacker's coat to his open shirt. The quarter-sized wound was gone as if the day before had never occurred.

"No!" Thomas screamed

"You see yet you do not believe." the scarecrow man complained increasing his grip on Thomas's armed hand, grinding the bones of his wrist painfully.

"Still interested?" He asked.

Trembling, Thomas answered through clenched teeth, "Yes, very."
• • •
It's in the blood, don't ask me why." The old man sat casually one leg crossed over the other, his arms folded.

Thomas’s office had been cleaned of all traces of the dare the night before. The walls of marble were spotless, the floor was a mirror and the bit of carpet that had been stained contained not a speck of betraying color.

"I would assume you have a name!" Thomas asked.

"Yes. I guess we weren't properly introduced the other evening." the old man watched the drink that sat in front of himself with absent fascination as though he were a child viewing a turbid Christmas scene under a glass dome.

"I've had many names. In the past century though, I've gone by the name of Nicodemus." The old man mentioned casually as though it were normal topic for conversation.

Thomas almost said what he thought.
"Quite some time." he stated with feigned detachment.

With this knowledge, as incredible as it sounded, Thomas 's interest in the old man sharpened to the usual razor-sharp caliber that patiently severed layers to get to the beating heart of any matter.

He noticed that Nicodemus, as much as he tried, could not hide the remaining vestiges of a first language. Where was he really from? What brought him here? Maybe he was a defector, seeking asylum from the wealthiest man in the world. He immediately cast aside the idea. The man could have found a sympathetic ear from other more compassionate sources. Yet Thomas was intrigued.

"You need to know no more than what I've told you. You saw for yourself that what I say is true. The truth is there." Nicodemus spoke as if he could read Thomas 's thoughts.

He pointed to the IV unit at Thomas 's right. A plastic bag hung from a thin aluminum pole. It hung there like a forbidden scarlet fruit.

The blood had been tested for contaminants; it was cleaner than the holy waters of Vatican. The type was universal; there would be no trouble. He had a green light, the green light of the century. What harm could there be in adding, an extra pint of blood to his system?

"What gives you the idea that this immortality is in your blood?" The enquiry wasn't made to question the integrity of the old man's blood but to pull apart the final layers to view the naked, pulsing truth. There was always a catch to everything, always.

"You think you're the first to have a taste from the fountain of youth?" he pointed to himself jokingly. "Did you believe Rasputin had the luck he did on his own?"

"Rasputin was killed." Thomas corrected the old man.

"No. He was destroyed; there is a difference. The debauched one made a poor choice of friends. He was a fool and paid his price."

Each sentence spilled from Nicodemus's mouth thick with conviction. Thomas rose from his chair and turned to the window behind himself. The city lights trembled like distant stars on the edge of the horizon; above, real ones did the same like the reflection in a lake.

To live without the fear of surrendering everything you've gained. To deny your enemies the satisfaction of seeing you upon your deathbed painfully coughing out those last breaths. This was a chance like none that had ever passed his cross hairs. He put his hand to his heart; it drummed out a rhythm of life within his chest.

Thomas had felt nothing upon having his hand forced on Nicodemus's slender ribs. He didn't have to be told about paying prices, he had paid more than his fair share of them. Sometimes compromise was the only option.

"What do you want in return!"

"Just my gun." Nicodemus casually answered.
He turned around and placed the weapon, he had been carrying, on the desk. He returned his attention to the burning skyline. A grin, cold as a slice of winter moon, crossed his perfect sculpted features. He would take the blood. Turning back to the offering and the scarecrow man, he almost thought of thanking him, almost.

Nicodemus was not at his seat and the gun was gone from the surface of the desk. He was nowhere in the cathedral-sized room. It was as if he had been just the ethereal creation of a desperate conscience.
• • •
After the medical technicians were done prepping Thomas for the transfusion, he was left to his own devices—literally. He lay back into the special gurney with his left arm resting on a support. An IV needle had been driven into an artery at the back of his left hand. He held a remote in his right hand. There was just one button to press; it was a luminous green casting a charmless light. Once pressed there was no return, he could, of course, pull out the needle. But would he be safe? What if it only took a drop? Only a drop, either to kill him or make him a true god in his own right.

The remote was a small shiny black rectangle; Thomas could see himself in its reflection. He felt the thumb of his right hand press the green button. Blood flowed cool and slow into his system.

A phrase spoken by Nicodemus came like a distant echo across the hills and valleys of memory, "Forever is the word of a child."
Thomas looked up to the ceiling where angels and demons locked hands and talons into infinity.
"True! But you can always acquire an extension."

Thomas thought aloud, as he drifted off to a sleep deeper than dreams but not beyond nightmares.
• • •
Thomas awoke naked and shivering, not from the cold or his fear but from pain; he was laying supine on the ground. Something searing-hot ran up the length of his spine and slithered its way to the base of his skull. He meshed fingers behind his head in a vain attempt to keep the pain inside from spreading. Someone was screaming and he realized it was himself. He rolled left and right in what seemed to be filth, rubble and broken glass. He felt the different textures assault his bare skin but were eclipsed.
Cockroaches ran in frenzy like remote-control toy cars. A few jumbo sized sewer-rats waited with the patience of vultures for the seizures to end and the feeding to begin. Suddenly they turned and fled sensing something terribly unnatural with this creature; he looked human but was something else.

Thomas 's ribcage expanded tightening the skin there until it became transparent. The bones of his feet lengthened to twice that of his shins.

Muscle fibers burned like fire as they thickened. Teeth broke through gums on their path towards metamorphosis. While the previously undetected virus served as catalyst, the remaining meal of raw flesh in Thomas's stomach sprayed from his mouth and through the growing teeth. Feces squeezed out of his sphincter forced by spasming intestines. Semen shot out in an arch, the last of his seed wasted to the darkness.

"Tick-tock-tick-tock..." someone clucked loud with the tongue against a sarcastic pallet.

The old man wasn't a figment of delirium; he was here amidst the rubble and trash; here, as he had been as everywhere else before. Shy threads of moonlight trickled through openings in the walls of the decaying structure. Thomas could see them now and he noticed that they were growing closer to where he lay by the minute.

"Does it burn you to the touch?" the strong voice asked.

Thomas wouldn't have answered even if he could, he knew the question was rhetorical and not worth the strain of speech. He rolled onto his belly and pulled himself into a crouch. His eyes opened. They were instantly flooded with a deluge of colors, values, shapes and textures; he shut them tight but it was no good, the memories remained behind the eyelids like film negatives.

In those negatives was the face of a man. A man called Nicodemus.

"Its terrible in the beginning, every time it feels like you won't survive, but you do—it makes sure you do." Nicodemus said. "And every time, a piece of your humanity that's left, goes with it."

"But then again you have what you wanted, isn't that right Tovarich?"

"Why!" Thomas asked , those commanding tones still present.

"Why not?" came the answer laced with rhetoric and spite. "Doesn't every great man deserve to live as a god? As I told you before, its one thing to live like a god but completely different to be one. And what is that one thing that makes all the difference between the two?"

"Tell me Thomas what was it that made all the difference between you and your servants? Right, absolutely nothing. Now there is. Do you know?” the old man tilted his head to the side again as he had done in the corporate throne room with his slender hand placed to his ear.

"Listen do hear it?" he asked in a whisper.

There was a terrible pause as though that companion, no matter how torturous, had abandoned him to this anatomical hell.

Thomas parted his slimy transforming jaws and by a miracle was able to pronunciate, "Ppplease Nicod..."

His plea was ignored, "God knows it. Such a simple word really."

A second miracle, "Nooo!"

"What, you reject my gift?" Nicodemus feigned offense.

He pulled out the Smith & Wesson from the folds of his coat; its cannon gleamed with the little light afforded.

"Besides fire, silver is the only other agent in this world that will be able to destroy you. Within the chamber of this gun is a bullet made from that metal, "Nicodemus held out a handful of bullets in a latex-gloved hand, he returned them to his coat pocket. He pointed the gun at Thomas.

"I could free you of your burden?" the old man spoke as if asking permission.

He pulled back the hammer with a well-oiled click.

"Nooooo!" the Thomas thing cringe away from the gun holding his arms up over a misshapen head.

The hammer was relaxed. Nicodemus returned the gun to his coat, "No, no right now you believe you've got too much to lose and in this case nothing to gain."

The scarecrow-man stood under a pale shower of moonlight and watched his suffering recipient for signs of remaining humanity. Their eyes met and he saw Thomas still holding on to what thin ledge of reality was available.

"Much change has come over the world I once knew. Revolutions have come and gone, each leader fueled by his own vision of Utopia. Each one promising a better world, instead worsening it.

It was during the winter, in the countryside just outside of Moscow. His name was Napoleon"; Nicodemus mentioned the name with a wounded voice. "His troops of Poles and Swedes were making their way to the city.

A Company of soldiers was going about the farms demanding provisions, tribute for their leader's cause. I worked on one of those farms, worked it even though our master had run off to avoid the heavy boot of the French Empire. They approached us and made the same demand. The soil had not been kind; we barely had enough to last the winter. I refused.

My wife was slain if front of me. My daughters were raped with bayonets; their husbands were castrated and slung to tree branches by their ankles so that all could see they did not die as men. My grandchildren had their heads crushed under the wheels of cannon wagons. But I was spared. To witness it all as punishment for my foolishness.” Nicodemus distrustfully watched Thomas with his hand at his coat.

"Not a hand had fallen upon me but I was given the worst punishment—I had been allowed to live. I wandered aimlessly like a soul in limbo. I tried to make my way to Moscow. There was nothing for me in the countryside anymore. I survived by any means; mostly I picked the pockets of dead soldiers in abandoned battlefields.

I had all but lost my will to live. I believed then that there was no fate worse than the one I had been made to suffer. I was gravely wrong. One night as I rummaged through the dead and dying for what sustenance I could acquire, destiny came to me with an unholy offer. I don't know if it was a punishment from God or a favor from the devil.

I was attacked by something in that corrupt field as I harvested trinkets from the vanquished. Afterwards I simply reasoned that it had been a wild animal. But in some dark place of my heart I suspected that it was more—something unnatural. The next month, on the full moon, suspicion won over reason."

The Thomas-thing convulsed as though under the spell of a granmal seizure and yellowish drool spewed out of his mouth like milk from a lidless blender. There was a pause as his brain caught up with the metabolic changes; wet muffled crunching came from under the skin as bone, muscle and tendon reconfigured to the wishes of an alien genetic design. A child's whimper escaped him.

"Don't be afraid of what you're becoming. Humans are so much worse. Stalin butchered more people than any of our kind ever did."

Nicodemus turned to leave; the creature, hunched in the shadows, stretched out a paw to the man and wailed in desperation.

"Ah. I think now you do hear it. It calls like a siren to wreck your life—immortality. That's the difference and the price you pay to be a god." he continued out of the empty tenement crunching garbage and a scattering carpet of roaches underfoot.

"Behold for I send you out as wolves amidst the sheep." he called out one last time with an altered version of the biblical passage, his voice echoing hollow and final.

So many centuries under this condition had made the old man practiced to the pain and change of shape shifting; he held the transformation at bay until he reached a block's distance from Thomas. The moon was beyond description; not even the most romantic of poets would have been able to do it honor.

As he surrendered resistance, Nicodemus immediately felt her terrible influence upon the tides within his veins. Bones and muscles tore and reconfigured to new shapes with familiar agony. Feeble hair shed as thicker darker ones rushed out to cover the pale landscape of stretching hide.

He didn't undress, as was his habit before a transformation; he knew, this night, he would not reach full metamorphosis.

Fishing the gun out of his coat he looked up to the merciless god that demanded her monthly tribute. Nicodemus held the weapon with a gloved hand under the moonlight. Tilting the weapon, thin white lines swam on the surface of the metal. They slid up the cannon and back down to the chamber caressing the grooves there. He reached into one of the coat pockets for a bullet. At contact they burned the tips of his fingers as though touching a branding iron. He cursed his mistake switching the glove to that hand.

One lonely silver-bullet slid into the gun’s chamber. Nicodemus flicked the weapon to the right and the chamber closed then he spun the wheel, its rattler whine loud in the cold air.

"Six chances. As many as the chamber of this gun." he mused.

Two pale clouds slid around the moon like a pair of hands trapping a bright moth. The transformation subsided as Nicodemus was covered in its shadow. He turned his eyes up to it and saw its eerily beautiful penumbra. A thin charmless smile crossed his tired face.
Opening his mouth he slid the barrel of the Smith & Wesson into it, the taste of gun oil pungent on his tongue. He pulled back the hammer with his free hand.

Centuries ago he would have been terrified at the notion of ending his existence but with the passing centuries his fear of oblivion turned to a loathing for life. This plane of mortality, he finally came to perceive, was just a perpetual sentence in purgatory, a grand central station where lives came and went destined to their own unique routes. Always they arrived but passed on leaving him behind, the sense of abandonment unbearable. How he envied the living.

Finally, after centuries as one of the immortal damned he understood what could be his salvation. Revenge. He didn’t expect heaven for cursing Thomas, even though he was a bad man it was not his place to cast judgement and punish accordingly. No. He only wanted departure from this world. Freedom and relief, even hell would be welcomed.

Nicodemus had not been able to find and slaughter Napoleon; the bastard had been too well hidden and protected. And even if had done the deed it would probably have been a double. This Thomas Price took no such measures. He was either impossibly arrogant or incredibly stupid!
Now with his experience Nicodemus would not have slaughtered Napoleon, had be still been alive. No. That would have been too easy. He would have done to him what he had to Thomas. But again this was not an option since the little emperor was now even less than dust. So he had chosen Thomas the next best thing. To exact such a perfect revenge, to see a braggart spread upon filth like a wounded animal. This was fulfillment.

Snowflakes fluttered to the ground; some lighted upon the old man's face and into his open mouth.
The cloud finally passed out of the moon's way, as it did Nicodemus heard a howling. To him it was like the cry of a newborn. Something unnatural had entered this world, a marriage of simian and canine. Crafted from a perverse genetic tampering, the handiwork of the fallen angel.

In time Thomas would come to the same conclusions but he would not do the same as Nicodemus was about to. He knew Thomas would suffer the curse of Tantalus. He didn’t dare die and lose his precious empire but at the same time could not enjoy it as he had before.

Yes he had achieved god-hood but the sort of god he now was would eventually cost more than even he, the richest man in the world, was willing to pay.

Six chances Nicodemus thought as he pulled the trigger. A thunderclap split the still-winter ghetto air; a flock of pigeons burst out of the splintered roof of a condemned wreck like a deck of playing cards.

As the bullet tore through the old werewolf’s brain he had but a fraction of second of conscious mind in which to revel in the fact that finally a tyrant would pay the price.