Tasìa peeked out of the door to catch sight of the ghoul. He lay prostrate with his head bowed down where she had seen him standing minutes before. The familiar hellish yellow haze rose above him in a gathering density.

A voice coming deep from his chest boomed out, but the prayer for which he chanted was unintelligible.

To her ears it sounded both monstrous, given the inhuman resonance of the ghoul's voice, and, as his voice cracked in its pleadings, pitiable.

Tasìa saw the wisp of a shape form out of the corner of her eye to her left. When she turned to get a better look, it disappeared.

In her deep intuitions, she understood.

"This is your doing, Wise One. I don't understand why, but you are helping me."

The dark purplish twirl appeared on the periphery of her vision once more. She forced herself not to look.

Though not as common as its serpent form, others spoke of what she now witnessed, Silent Dragon.

Tasìa continued to speak.

"Afterall, I am trying to obtain a means to avoid Manifestation. Is that not what you want me to become?"

From its familiar voice came two words.

Golden. Watch.

The Silent Dragon vanished.

From above the ghoul, the haze lowered and spread down like a blanket upon his entire body. His knobbed arms tensed up as he raised his head.

The ghoul howled.

It was not the wail of a frightened creature, but more of a wolf being released from barbed chains.

Boils percolated from his face.

Tasìa grabbed the pistol scope for a closer view.

The boils burst like carpet bombs on an already pitted city. Only to be replaced by waving successions of hundreds more still.

He stared at the moon with an exalted rigor mortis grin. His arms spread out.

"Hecate," he yelled as he rose up from the awning ledge that lined the brownstone roof.

Boils now spread out across his entire body and they burst as quickly as they formed.

A scent permeated a breeze against her face. It was pleasant and reminiscent of a beefsteak on a grill.

He ripped off his shirt. Beneath the bursting boils his skin now shown in a brilliant luster.

When the last of the festering boils sizzled away in steamy dissipate, his skin was no longer the sickly ocherous yellow common to ghoul kind.

"Golden," she whispered.

The creature yelled once again.

"Now, I shall be received!"

He stepped off the ledge.

Tasìa blinked several times. She could no longer see him. The asphalt he landed on was outside of her sight.

He was not dead. Laughter filled the night air. His voice cracked like someone who just got a joke after a long delay.

Tasìa peered around. There were several windows in the brownstone building, but she could see clearly through all of them.

Strange enough, the ghoul's behavior aroused none of the others of the Hijos Lux cult.

Where were they?

Tasìa ran into the lot through a row of equipment. She had a path in mind.

Once on the back row, she searched for the control cabin of the tall crane that ruled the backlot skyline.

When she discovered it, she climbed up the plates it used for treads on its continuous track.

The cabin proved to be a difficult climb. Broken glass and exposed metal shards, the latter shredded in ribbons, made pulling up on it hazardous.

Blood corrosive tetanus flared up as a feared risk in her mind. Kids from her youth back in the barrio got nasty cases of the lockjaw and the sangre verde after playing in an industrial dump nearby her home.

Ever since, catching the disease was a near phobia for her.

Tasìa carefully leaned her torso into the cabin to study the damaged interior; from the twisted metal and rust, she surmised an explosion had occurred inside it at some point at least a year previously.

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Perhaps, some kids or hooligans lobbed a mortar round that landed inside the cabin. Or the Hijos Lux neighbors tested a new toy perhaps, like a rocket launcher.

As she peeked up at what remained of the felt board head guard on the cabin ceiling, Tasìa had to nix those two possibilities.

The explosion had not occurred here.

A row of four bottom teeth were embedded where they had punched through the felt board.

Holy damn.

When the control cabin exploded, someone had been inside it. A pool of blood, covered in rusty mold, caked the floorboard.

No forensic expert, but Tasìa could see the explosion in her mind's eye. The bomb was placed, or the grenade landed, in the storage space behind the seat.

The arc of the explosion must have ripped through his vertebrae from his jawline to just beneath his ribcage. His torso landed in the passenger floorboard after banging into and then bouncing off the diagonal of the wedge-shaped steering device.

After a half-assed attempt at cleaning it out, likely with nothing more than a pressure wash, the crane was brought here.

She would have to ask Sachmilli about the incident.

Tasìa continued to the crane. Her plan was a simple one. Climb the crane. Where the last six yards dipped down, she would run down the length of it, and make her leap onto the side of the brownstone.

Easy peasy. Any spider monkey could pull it off.

However, she needed an assist none of her spider monkey friends from back at the barrio park needed given the rough calloused padding of their palms and digits.

Her three-year-old self would have gladly traded everything that was pretty about her own hands to be more like the spider monkeys. Thirty-two-year-old Tasìa preferred being a girl with well-manicured hands and painted nails.

She could live with the compromise. Now, far away from the damaged cabin, Tasìa removed her tennis shoes. She clipped them to a clamp she kept on the back of her belt for that very purpose.

In her fanny-pack, she kept a pair of rubber slip-on shoes. They fit on her feet very sleekly. The soles bore the extra tread she would need to keep steady on the narrow crane rail, and to grip the wall from a mid-position grasp.

She began to slip on a pair of climbing gloves. This she did more to protect her nails than for necessity.

In prison, it mattered very little how her nails appeared as the choices for nail care products on the commissary were severely limited.

Now, however, she had her nails polished back to her Vida Escondida nouveau riche standards. It was the second thing she did upon arrival to her safehouse, after a hot bath in her ceramic tub.

Emeralds glittered above diamond spackled layers of polish. A pearlescent finish designed to fade from bold contrast at the cuticles to a smooth blend along the fingernail tips comprised the last layer.

Tasìa smiled to herself. The polished nails were the literal tip of her ambition to obtain her once exalted position for a glorious second reign as the Angel of Theft.

Filthy Vida Escondida nouveau riche.

A high pitched squeal pierced through her revelry.

The ghoul-now-golden was no longer laughing.

She could see that something twirled in the air near the ghoul, but could not make out even its shape. Just movement.

Tasìa began to climb up the length of the crane rail while keeping an eye on the anomaly.

It must be camouflaged by the brownstone wall behind it, she gathered.

Tasìa sat on the rail apex. She now had a view of the rooftop. Something was spread-out, oddly splayed like a vivisection pinned down.

She peeked through the gun scope. Indeed, she could make out the head of a ram, the body laid out in sacrifice. The exposed organs appeared singed. Smoke rose from crisped giblets.

Tasìa considered what she had just witnessed. Perhaps, some kind of an exchange between it and the ghoul on a cellular level made the transfiguration into the golden possible.

Tasìa peered down. She had a good view of the ghoul now. He wrung his hands as if he were pleading to someone for mercy.

His voice was now a whispery mumble.

Something wet appeared above the ghoul. It was a dark olive green.

Tasìa gasped. It was like no ascospore she had ever seen. It emitted a high pitched squeal. Dozens of high pitched squeals in a disturbing dissonance.

Another source for the same squeaking sound grew closer to her.

Tasìa peeked down along the direction from which she heard the noise. The second ascospore rose up above a tree from where it hid.

The tree of white blooms shook in a violent rattle beneath the ascospore. It seemed to shed, but the blooms did not fall.

They gyred in a circular motion that gained speed before shooting past the fence. The swarm of blooms thrusted upward, aimed directly at her.

Before the flower blooms could slam in her face, Tasìa hopped into the air in a vertical fall.

She grasped the tressed ridges beneath the crane rail.

She looked down.

The ghoul-now-golden howled infernal.

The ascospore stopped squealing just before it plunged down, shattering into the helpless ghoul. A dark, oily cloud of gas consumed the cultist. As it quickly dissipated, the cloud was replaced by a swarm of rats.

The ghoul-now-golden lay engulfed entirely by the rodents sprawled along the length of his body.

To her right side, the howl of the second ascospore grew louder. Now in its shadow, Tasìa threw her torso back over as she twisted in position. She coiled tight and thrust her legs up in a mule kick.

Her rubber soles made contact with the ascospore. It spun away from the crane and burst in a dark cloud above the lot. Rats rained down upon the ground.

Two landed on the rail near her. They were not normal. The rats appeared emaciated, calloused bodied with parts of their skeletons revealed at their joint extremities.

She had seen one like these two before in the aqueduct service tunnel beneath the medical center.

They rushed upon her. She swept one off with a boot. It tried to bite into the rubber sole of her slip-on with no success. It dropped down, groundward, when the rubber flex-back broke its jaw.

The second rat jumped up to bite Tasìa on the face. Her reflexes were even more feral than those of the nasty creature. As it came at her, she punched it on its nose. It too fell onto the lot asphalt.

Rats dealt with, she regained her full balance on the crane rail. With a running jump, she thrust herself past the fence and on to the side of the brownstone, eight feet from the ground.

The ghoul-now-golden lay there nearby her. He let out a whispery moan.

The rats were gone. They had chewed away at all his extremities beyond what a living thing would normally endure. There were no lids left to cover his eyes. One eye had been torn out. The little that remained of it spread beneath the curve of his cheek.

His one remaining eye watched her with patient fascination. As he spotted her, he no longer moaned.

Tasìa jumped down, and she got close to the ghoul-now-golden.

"Hello," she said.

They watched each other for nearly a dozen long seconds before he spoke.

"All she ever wanted was for her Sweetest Sunshine to know she loved him."

He collapsed dead.