I was dead. In death there is still a dream, but one dream. It is the dream of Dawn.

Shale had shot me dead, of that I was sure. The winged creatures were singing and their music made me feel naked, my soul revealed in its uncleanliness before my Creator. I was not expecting such warmth and love from my Creator. How could I?

I was one who had felt the teeth of the world once too many times. I had thought my Creator would chew me up. I had thought myself prey to Creation. I was wrong.

Waking from such a dream made reality seem unreal. I saw the bullet hole and never went that way again. Where then was my killer? I simply chose another path, after I knew his way. How can someone that is a stranger be familiar? Dreams were speaking to me more clearly than daylight.

Yet I was lost in such dreams. Always I could evade the next moment, unsure why or how. It was always just a paradox. Instead of being shot on one day I was gunned down on another. He had the loss of grace to just shoot me in the back, so frustrated had I made him.

Yet when I woke up in the State Hospital I wasn't, at first, sure if I was still dreaming. Had I died? My only certainty was pain, insisting I was still alive. It was easy to doubt that my Creator loved me, or even if such a creature existed. Even with all I had seen there was no reason to accept that my purpose wasn't exactly random. Otherwise I wasn't me. I was growing impatient with paradox. I was going mad, unable to tell dreams from reality.

That is when I saw it slipping into the cracks in shadows. Retreating from view. Again when I noticed it the shadow moved across the wall and behind the curtain, the shape of darkness like that of a person.

Had I not seen it, was I expecting reality to remain predictable, I would have died. It had come for me, its own path evading mine. I was Shale's bullets, to this thing. Agent Saint called me onto its case, claiming it was somehow related, at least as a case type, to those of her department.

I congratulated her for having her own department. She'd solved two cases with decidedly supernatural elements and was continuing an investigation into the coven of serial killers that had murdered Detective Winters. Off the phone there was a silence in the hospital room. The hall felt empty. I felt watched, listened to.

I met up with Agent Saint the next afternoon when she visited me in the hospital. I told her I had suffered multiple memories of dying. I told her that my path had intersected with the creature she was after, that it had known and come after me already. At least I had seen it, and her theory was that it only struck ignorant victims. Seeing it meant surviving it. At least for another day.

"How many people do you think it has killed?" I asked her.

"There is no real pattern to the killings, just that in each case we have the victims had met it and sought help. There could be many more we don't know about. Anyone who met the shadowy figure and didn't report it or that never saw it. I think it strikes when it is unseen." Agent Saint described.

"Maybe I can help." I said a few times. The last time I said it I was already in a wheelchair at her department's offices. She had four agents. I was told that they had their own operations order, and that it wasn' t important for me to know their actual title. I just called all of them 'agent'. There was Agent Heller, Agent Gilbery, Agent Nomak and Agent Pyresh. All of them were chosen by deliberate selection by Agent Saint. They were her team.

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Cory inspected them and said in plain English:

"Interesting, all of them are from exactly opposite directions when they introduce themselves." Cory noticed. "Agent Pyresh actually walked all the way around before turning to face West."

"I didn't know why I did that." Agent Pyresh had an odd candor. I had just thought:

"Well he is the good cop." About Agent Pyresh, an agreeable and low profile gentleman. His gaze was discreet and even his most excited tones were subdued and punctuated by thoughtful silence.

Detective Winters weighed in on the other agents, presenting himself sarcastically as a connoisseur:

"He is the good cop. Heller is the one to look out for, I don't like his type. Gilbery is just like you, Gaylord. Nomak, now there's a comrade I would trust. I can tell." Detective Winters had an opinion so I got to know it in detail.

"You've got voices in your head you listening to?" Gilbery sat staring at me unblinking. I had thought Gilbery was a guy. I guess for the most part she was. Agent Saint referred to her as him.

"I do. Detective Winters resides, in spirit, in my thoughts." I said like a eulogy.

"My Lord means literally." Cory found my tone of voice very amusing and made the sound of a shrieking tire as a laugh. Then he cawed merrily, trying for applause from the bewildered agents.

"Your bird talks, solves cases. You have a dead detective in your brain. Agent Saint says she has visions of you. Says you are needed so she can solve the triad killers case." Agent Heller stood behind me. I expected his arms folded or with his fists on his hips. Instead he held his hands behind his back while using that tone. Some strictness in Heller reminded me of my brother.

I noticed Agent Saint was watching us, observing carefully how I interacted with Heller. I said: "I have a lot of explaining to do about that case. It is not solving it that is the problem, it is resolving it. To that, a solution must be found. Those killers are not ordinary people set against an ordinary world. They are ancient beings and their destruction would cause severe unbalance, worse things would have an opportunity to rampage. Like I said, there is a lot to explain." I told Heller and the other agents. They just listened. So I told them everything I knew. Cory kept interrupting with his jokes.

"We already know all of that. There is one more thing you know." Agent Saint said when I was done. She made no effort to get me to tell them the last detail. I wouldn't have, I appreciated the respect.

"I expect you to tell us the rest on a need-to-know-basis." Heller demanded. I just nodded to him. It felt like a shrug. He frowned.

"I trust you know how best to use the information you have." Agent Nomak spoke up.

"Let's change the subject to the case on hand." Agent Pyresh said as soon as there was an awkward silence. He was right. The Silhouette had killed again, twice in the hospital after I had seen it.

We watched the security footage. Neither victim seemed alert to a killer's presence.

"How does it get from one place to another?" Agent Saint asked me. I figured that the creature could travel through shade, like the Folk. I said:

"It travels through darkness. The shadow it casts isn't from a body, it is its body." I explained. The agents all fell still and thought this over.

"I think we can trap it, if it had no shade to escape to." Agent Gilbery devised. "But how do we find it?"

"It tries again for victims that escape it." Agent Saint pointed to me gently. "Get started on your device."

I glanced around from my wheelchair nervously.

It did show up after the device was already constructed. Cory spotted it and said:

"Try fast, or lose the moment." Cory flapped. He was taunting the creature. The shadowy thing flitted towards me. Gilbery was alert and watched his device take hold of it. Trapped between the lights, it had no path to escape to. He enclosed it that way shutting it in.

"We've caught our suspect." Agent Gilbery grinned.

"Will it die in there? How long can it last, trapped like that?" Cory asked me. I shrugged and told him quietly, to his great mirth and squawking with uncontrolled laughter:

"Whether or not it is alive in the box or dead: we'd have to open the box to know. Otherwise it is both. It is, unpredictably, alive and dead."