Just doing what needs to be done.

The words lingered in the air of the OC.

Horus leaned into the microphone and let his deep husk of a voice take on an amiable tone.  "Tell me about it." 

He wanted Emily to feel that he was there with her—give her a sense of camaraderie.  Horus needed to feel like he was comforting her.  The guilt of letting the young woman take on such a horrendous task while he looked on calcified around his bones making his whole body feel old and heavy.  It was only compounded by the shame of not really paying attention to Emily as she toiled in the cesspit of the wolf room.

His brain seemed to have its own agenda and distracted him with a mental list of each and every time Kyle had appeared to him since he began work at the Music Box.  Once the list was complete, it would rewind and start all over again, pouring over every minuscule detail of the encounters and trying to find some rational explanation.

There had been seven sightings.  Horus didn't count the times he only imagined seeing the ghoul.  Frequently, he would glimpse a figure and his heart would race and his breath would seize up like he had a hand around his throat; a cold sweat would bead along his neck like pinpricks until the person turned or stepped out of a shadow and reveal themselves to be someone other than Kyle Silver. 

He also didn't count the times he saw the devil in his dreams.  Even if he had wanted to, the specter of the sinister princeling made far too many cameos to ever enumerate them.  Kyle was just as much a static component of Horus's restless nights as the paint on his bedroom walls.

The rational explanation for the sightings was that Horus was suffering from a schizophrenic breakdown.  If he was his own patient, he would probably tell himself that his guilt was the culprit and source of these delusions.  He would say: you are seeing Kyle Silver everywhere because you cannot live with what you've done.

But this diagnosis would have only proved what a poor psychiatrist he was.  First of all, he didn't see Kyle everywhere.  He only appeared out in public.  He never appeared when Horus was home.  Never down in the bunker.  He only showed himself in parking lots, grocery stores, gas stations.  If he were a delusion, he would be unconstrained in where he could go.  If he were a delusion, he should be sitting beside Horus in the OC nattering away and picking away at his conscience and sanity.

Second, Horus didn't feel the least amount of guilt for ending Kyle's life.  If anything, he was proud of it.  Not proud enough to ever tell anyone about it.  But it was the one thing other than his son that he could point to on Judgment Day and say, there; that is how I left the world a better place than I found it.

The memory of walking back from the zoo was lost.  The only thing he could dredge up was the faint flickering image of the rain.  It cascaded heavily down the glassed walkway as he returned to the mansion.  The constant hammering on the roof made it feel as though God had started a new tempest to wipe away the monumental sins of man.  An ark-less flood designed to end the world properly this time.

But other than the rain, he couldn't remember any other detail.  Not switching the security cameras back on, while Jack was making his patrol.  And not crossing into the east wing and making his way up to the second floor by the servant's staircase.

There were the rain and the rhythm of his feet echoing the beating of his heart, then he was back in Kyle's bedroom.

The fiend had barely moved.  His right arm was now above his head, instead of crushed beneath his chest.  It formed a protective L around his skull and trapped snarls of his greasy hair.

The room smelled of evil deeds.  There was a horrible saturated odor of sweat, alcohol, semen, and somewhere hovering at the boundary of reality and imagination—blood.  There was also Horus's own musky, animal aroma that clung to his sinuses, as though he had carried part of the zoo back with him.  But perhaps it was only in his mind.

His leather driving gloves protected his flesh from the taint of the grungy black jeans he lifted off the floor.  He returned the security card to one of the back pockets and two of the stolen vials into one of the front ones.  The jeans dropped back down in a clump next to a delicate scrap of fabric—soft pink in color and viciously torn.

There was a doorway in his mind.  A solid iron barrier between what he could do and what he couldn't.  All night, he had been pacing in front of that door, sniffing the air, and thinking about how easy it would be to walk through it.  But deep down, there was an unreality to it.  Crossing that threshold was something he knew he would never do.  But the sight of that scrap—was it from a shirt?  Underwear?  That scrap put his hand on the knob and the key in the rusty, neglected lock.

Horus gripped the remaining vial in his clenched fist and approached the black lacquered nightstand.  There was a well-used syringe resting between the base of the rococo gold lamp and an empty bottle of Vicodin.  The label for the pills was still new and sharp with "Dr. H. Benning," clearly visible as the prescribing doctor.  It glared at him with an unflinching accusation—a reminder of how Kyle Silver had manipulated him from therapist to dealer.

The last tumbler fell into place in that complex lock Horus was carefully opening—on the other side was the freedom to do what needed to be done. 

He sucked up every last dreg from the stolen Ketamine vial with the syringe.  He wasn't very familiar with the drug, but he was pretty certain that Kyle wouldn't wake up after being dosed with the full 500mg.  Especially not with all the pills and alcohol already in his system.

Gently, he stretched out the rock star's arm across the satin pillow.  When it was straight, he used the broad reach of his hand to clamp off the thin bicep.  Conscious of possible bruising, he kept his grip light.  Then he inserted the needle into the vein.

"If you were awake," Horus said to his patient.  "I hear this anesthetic would be very pleasant as it put you under.  You would most likely have some very interesting hallucinations.  But as you're fond of saying: you snooze, you lose."

There was no immediate reaction.  Kyle was oblivious to the entire universe.

Horus placed the needle back on the nightstand.  He rubbed the empty vial against the pad of Kyle's index finger and let it drop on the Persian rug next to the bed.  Then he cleaned up, gathering all the drugs from the room.  It took him four trips to dump all the pills, cocaine, and pot down the toilet.

He hoped when the scene was examined, the police would believe that in Kyle's desperation for a fix, he had taken the tranquilizer from the zoo's veterinary office.  And his ignorance with the drug had led to an overdose.

When he was done, he took one last look at Kyle Silver.  The young man rested with his mouth slightly open.  He looked like he was leering.  There was red rimming the underside of some of his fingernails.  Had he scratched the girl while struggling with her—while forcing her down?  What would the police make of it?

Would they locate her and discover what had taken place there that night?  What about all those other nights?  How many girls had there been over the years?  How often had he attacked someone, while Horus slept under the same roof? 

However many there'd been, there would be no more.  Kyle Silver, the Prince of Darkness, had stopped breathing.