Sara stroked her cat’s head steadily, looking out the window behind him. “Yeah. That pretty much sums it up. And I appreciate your honesty. I get tired of people giving me ‘look on the bright side’ speeches. There is no fucking bright side. Even if they convicted someone, what does it matter? My mother is dead, and her last minutes on earth were torture. And yes, I have to figure out how to live with that, how to go forward.”

The curse from Sara surprised him, but he actually took it as a positive sign. She was venting, in a controlled way. She was letting it out, without losing it. That was a good thing. “Yes, you do.”

“Do you know that there’s no such thing as instant death? That if a person’s throat is slit, they are still conscious, unable to make a sound, as their arterial artery bleeds out enough volume of blood to cause death. So they’re aware, on some level, as the killer stabs them in the chest, the stomach, the face, and they can’t do anything about it. They’re helpless.”

“I know.” It was another layer of his guilt, that he could not die, but mortals did and could, painfully and slowly. That Anne had suffered that way while he had slept in a pleasure fog. “I know a lot about murder.”

Suddenly she laughed, rubbing her face with the palms of her hands. “God, we’re a pair, aren’t we? Call us Gloom and Doom.”

“Okay. I’ll be Doom, you can be Gloom. Though you’re going to have to ditch the kitten if you want people to believe you’re macabre.”

Her eyebrow went up. “What’s wrong with Angel?”

“That. You can’t be depressed and sour with a kitten named Angel. It’s an oxymoron. And I refuse to wear leather pants, by the way, so I think we’re going to have to give up our plan.”

“We’ll have to be happy?” Her mouth tilted up in the corner.

“I’m afraid so.”

“I guess there are worse fates.”

Indeed there were.

Sara’s cell phone rang. “Do you mind if I answer that?”

“Go right ahead.” He put his headphones on, classic rock blaring, so he wouldn’t hear her private conversation, and turned back to study the breakdown of the ingredients in absinthe. Ethanol—definitely psychoactive. Wormwood— arguably, though it was virtually impossible to determine how much might have built up in an absinthe abuser. Especially since it could be toxic at high levels, yet Gabriel had been immortal. So there was no telling how much had been in his bloodstream at the time of the murder. Nor had he been drinking quality absinthe at that point. He hadn’t cared enough to spend top dollar when a cheap substitute would get him drunk just as fast. It probably had been filled with lead and other filler metals.