On the way to his bedroom, Gabriel paused, glancing into his office. His eye was drawn to his absinthe spoon collection. He was wandering into dangerous territory again. He was condemned to be alone, by his own sins. He couldn’t involve Sara, regardless of how tempting a simple friendship with her was. He’d get her a T-shirt and send her home, and maybe tell her she needed to work from her apartment. They didn’t need to be sitting together to sort through research.

But when he came back with a shirt, after digging through three drawers trying to find one that wasn’t too old and torn up, didn’t have a strange phrase on it, and wouldn’t swallow Sara whole like the whale did Jonah, Sara was asleep on his couch. She was stretched out fully, and the kitten was still snuggled in the towel on her chest, out cold like her owner. He couldn’t wake Sara up. That would be cruel, given that she’d been having so much trouble sleeping. He also suspected she was afraid to go outside, that the streets at night had truly terrified her.

So he found a blanket in his closet and put it over her bottom half, below the cat. Then he paced around his apartment, refusing to acknowledge that she looked battered, yet so at peace in her deep sleep. Refusing to see the way the lamplight filtered over her cheek and hid the dark shadows that offended the beauty of her face. Refusing to see the way her delicate fingers dug into the cat’s fur, clinging and cleaving, a desperate need to hold on.

He would not sketch her. He had not picked up a pencil in a hundred and fifty years, hadn’t felt the urge to do so. He did now. His fingers itched, the artist inside him wanting to reemerge and capture the view, the light, the woman, in front of him. He wouldn’t do it.

There was no beauty to be found through the skewed lenses of his sinful eyes.

Police Description of the Crime Scene (Undated), written by William Davidson

The room in which Miss Donovan resided and was murdered was approximately six by ten feet, street facing, single window shuttered. Miss Donovan’s bed was on the south-facing wall, next to the doorway leading to the interior hallway. Bed was an inexpensive wood frame with a thin mattress. Dressing table and chair on opposite wall, covered with various female toiletries. Chair and small table in center of room, facing bed. An opium pipe, one empty bottle of absinthe, second bottle of absinthe one-third empty, empty glass, and spoon on tray on table.