"Rusch-SpiritGuides" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

rose, dripping from the water.

The glimpses had haunted him since he was thirteen. He'd been in St. Patrick's
Cathedral with his mother, and one of the stained glass angels left her window,
floated through the air, and kissed him before alighting on the pulpit to tickle
the visiting priest during mass. The priest hadn't noticed the feathers brush
his face and neck, but he had died the next day in a mugging outside the subway
station at 63rd and Lexington.

Kincaid hadn't seen the mugging, but his train had arrived only a few seconds
after the priest died.

Years later, Kincaid finally thought to wonder why he hadn't died from the
angel's kiss. And, although he still didn't have the answer, he knew that his
second sight came from that morning. All he needed to do was look at a body to
know who had driven the spirit from it, and why. The snapshots remained in his
mind in all their horror, surrounded by faces frozen in agony, each shot a sharp
moment of pain that pierced a hole in his increasingly fragile soul.

As a young man, he believed he could stop the pain, that he had been given the
gift so that he could end the horrors. He would ride out, like St. George, and
defeat the dragon that had terrified the village. But these terrors were as old
as time itself, and instead of stopping them, Kincaid could only observe them,
and report what his inner eye had seen. He had thought, as he grew older, that
using his skills to imprison the perpetrators would help, but the deaths
continued, more each year, and the little girl in the Burger Joint had provided
the final straw.

Make him better.

Kincaid didn't have that kind of magic.

The angel flew out of the wide crevice, past the canyon walls, its tail feathers
dripping just as Kincaid had feared. Somewhere within a two hundred mile radius,
someone would die violently because an angel had brushed the earth. Kincaid
hunched himself against the bright morning, then turned and walked along the
rock-strewn highway to his car. When he got inside, he kept the radio off so
that the news of the atrocity would not hit him when it happened.

But the silence wouldn't keep him ignorant forever. He would turn on the TV in a
hotel, or pass a row of newspapers outside a restaurant, and the information
would present itself to him, as clearly and brightly as it always had, as if it
were his responsibility, subject to his control.

The car led him into Phoenix. From the freeway, the city was a row of concrete
lanes, marred by machine-painted lines. From the sidestreets, it had
well-manicured lawns and tidy houses, too many strip restaurants and the
ubiquitous mall. He was having a chimichanga in a neighborhood Garcia's when he
watched the local news and realized that he might not hear of an atrocity after
all. He finished the meat and left before the national news aired.