Crouched against the far wall, using his body to shield Katelynn from the heat, Sam realized what the creature was going to do. Once it reached the edge of the roof, it would launch itself into the open air. While the wind of its flight might fan the flames, it would also allow the beast to reach the lake on the other side of campus. Once there, it could plunge beneath the lake’s surface, extinguishing the flames and finding a place to hide. There it would have the safety to gather its strength and slowly heal itself.
Sam knew he could not allow that to happen; they’d gotten two chances at the beast. They would not get a third.
He had to act now.
The creature’s agonized shrieks of pain echoed off the room’s stone walls; nearly deafening in their intensity. Sam pulled Katelynn’s head closer to his own and put his lips next to her ear so she could hear him over the noise.
'Take care of Damon.'
Before she could react, he sprinted across the room at full speed directly at the tall burning figure that was just reaching the edge of the roof.
Halfway in shock from the pain of her broken leg, it took a moment for Katelynn to realize what Sam was doing.
When she did, she screamed in horror. 'Sam! Noooo!'
It was too late to stop him, and deep inside she knew it.
At the edge of the roof, the Nightshade spread its wings wide, preparing to cast itself off the rooftop and escape.
Sam was only a step or two behind it, and with one, great wordless scream of rage and despair he launched himself at the beast.
In that moment, just before his body collided with the burning form of the beast, Sam realized something.
It was okay to be afraid.
Fear is what makes us all human. It is fear that allows us to rise above ourselves, to reach that much further and that much higher, to strive to achieve just that little bit more. If we had succumbed to our fears, man would never have made it past the Ice Age. There is too much to be afraid of in our lives; fear of ourselves, fear of others, fear of our emotions and our lack thereof, fear of every action we might take every day of our lives. We rise above that and we move forward, facing our fears with a sense of courage that lives within us all, waiting for the chance to be let out.
As Sam’s body closed the distance that separated him from the beast’s burning form, he was very, very afraid.
But that was okay.
I guess I’m not as much a coward as I thought, he mused to himself as his body crashed into Moloch’s, the momentum taking them both over the edge of the roof. The intense heat of the flames against his flesh only caused him to lock his arms that much tighter around the body of his enemy, effectively pinning the creature’s wings against its sides.
As they dropped over the edge and the ground rushed up to meet them, over the shriek of the creature and his own wordless cries of rage, Sam thought he heard Katelynn call his name.
In the second before he and the Nightshade crashed to the ground, Sam whispered a single word.
'Goodbye.'
Epilogue
Two weeks later.
Glendale Hospital Intensive Care Unit.
Damon was resting in bed watching television when Katelynn knocked on the open door to his room.
'Come on in,' he said, a genuine smile crossing his face, the first in days.
Katelynn crossed the room on her crutches and settled into the chair next to the bed. She was tired; the last two weeks had been a blur of activity as the police and several different agencies worked to understand just what had happened here over the last several months. With Sam dead and Damon in ICU, she had been their primary source of information.
'I heard they downgraded your condition enough to let you have visitors, so I wanted to come by and see how you were doing,' she said to the Sheriff.
'I’ll make it. They tell me if it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have made it off that rooftop. Thanks.'
Katelynn shrugged, uncomfortable with the gratitude.
In a softer voice Damon added, 'I’m sorry about Sam.'
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak on that topic yet.
As it turned out, Sam’s action had been a smart one; with the creature’s wings pinned to its body, it had been unable to arrest its fall. The added fuel from Sam’s clothing had helped spread the fire, so by the time the two of them crashed to the ground below in a tangled heap, the Nightshade had become a pyre. The added injury from the fall had been too much for the beast’s regenerative powers. It simply could not recover in time to defeat the flames. The beast perished in a raging conflagration on the ground, which burned for nearly twenty minutes until firefighters arrived on the scene. Since the beast’s remains were so badly entwined with Sam’s, the whole bundle had been transported down to the morgue, where it was still being studied.
The investigation remained inconclusive; awaiting the results of the forensic studies and scientific evaluations. Katelynn told the entire story, as she knew it, from beginning to end, without leaving anything out. She received a number of strange looks from the investigators the DA’s office sent in until the photos of the scene came back from the lab.
It was hard to argue with black-and-white photographs showing the charred remains of a wing jutting from the back of one of the corpses they pulled from the ground.
'I hear you’re leaving the force,' she said, by way of reply instead.
'It’s true. Even if I could pass the physical again, I don’t want to. After what we just went through, there is no way I could return to a life of parking tickets and speeding fines. What about you?'
'If they let me leave town, I think I’m going to go visit my aunt in California. It’s too cold for me here now.'
Damon knew without asking that she was referring to more than the winter weather.
Neither of them really knew what to say. They had been through something extraordinary and the wounds were still too fresh, too painful. Maybe in time they would find the ability to talk about it between them, but for now idle chitchat was all they could manage.
It saddened Damon’s heart to realize it.
They talked of inconsequential things for a short while and then Katelynn announced that she had to get going.
'Stay in touch, okay?' Damon asked her.
'Sure,' Katelynn replied, and they both wondered if it would be true.
She clambered to her feet with the help of her crutches and bent to give Damon a kiss on the forehead.
'Get well,' she said and turned away before he could see the tear in her eye.
As she hobbled toward the door, Damon called out once more.
'Katelynn?'
She looked back toward him.
'Would you mind?' he said, pointing toward the window.
Through the open drapes, Katelynn could see that it was late; very soon the sun would set and darkness would be upon them.
She nodded wordlessly, and moved to pull the curtain shut, blocking out the sight.
They’d both grown uncomfortable with what the darkness of the night sky might hold.
She suspected it would remain that way for a long time.
