Ambriel rang the doorbell again. Mrs. Cassini was a forgetful woman, but a lifetime of responding to bells had trained most people to open the door when it rang. The angel, wearing a wintercoat and a convincing glamor for his wings, took a step backwards and looked up the narrow brownstone, gauging whether there was anyone home. Was there a curtain twitching, or...?
Ambriel decided to try the neighbour, because he knew they had a key. And maybe they knew where Mrs. Cassini had gone to. The eldest daughter - Andrea - opened. A curly-haired girl of twenty-four - in New York (or Queens, as was true in this case), children kept on living with their parents for a long, long time. She knew him as Marx Matthews, a social worker who had been on Mrs. Cassini's case for a long time. "Hi, Mr. Matthews," she said with a broad smile, "can I help you?"
She told him she had not seen Mrs. Cassini in two days, which, come to think of it, was kind of weird, because she was always gardening, and yeah, he was welcome to borrow the key to her front door.
The door creaked opened slowly. "Mrs. Cassini?" Somewhere in the house, something slammed shut. Ambriel was instantly on his guard. Let alone any supernatural causes, sometimes his cases involved bad things - drugs, weapons, thieves... He always got out okay, but it always paid to be wary.
From the hallway, he looked straight into the kitchen. He saw that the back door that led to the small excuse to the garden was not shut properly. Its latch was ticking against the woodwork as the door was moved by a breeze. Ambriel frowned and advanced slowly. He had already made too much noise.
No one in the living room. Nothing in the downstairs bathroom. Alright. Slowly, Ambriel ascended the stairs, unconsciously reaching for where his sword would be if he was allowed to bring it along on these trips. The bedroom door was open. He saw a pair of feet, wearing Mrs. Cassini's purple crocs. He felt that sinking feeling in his stomach, but when he approached the door, he saw her feet moving.
She wasn't dead, but she was a gibbering mess. There were cuts on her face and a large gash on her arm. She had soiled herself, there was blood caked in her hair and there was fear in her pale blue eyes. When she saw Ambriel, she started to cry. He wrapped her in his arms, trying to make sense of what she was saying, but it was pure nonsense. He opened the window and called for Andrea, not wanting to leave Mrs. Cassini alone.
After he had let an ambulance pick her up and after he had put a call in to her family in South Dakota, he lingered in her bedroom. It was sad: Mrs. Cassini used to be a professor at UCLA, teaching engineering. She had began to suffer from dementia, which is why she had Marx Matthews to assigned to her, but last week, it had not been this bad. Something strange had happened to her, but...
Ambriel blinked, suddenly seeing what his eyes had been trying to tell him. Mrs. Cassini had moved from the bathroom to the bedroom, leaving some blood on the tiled floor and on the powder blue wall. The stains on the floor had been put there when she had dragged herself to the bedroom, but that one on the wall... Ambriel leaned in, examining the stain. How... strange. It was almost as if she had been trying to draw a squid.