"I set the Creator ever before me; with him at my right hand, I shall not be shaken."

That's what I believe. At least that's what I've been taught to believe and I do...most of the time.

But there are times when my right hand forgets what my mind knows. It shakes like a leaf and my fingers spasm as if they were jolted by electric shocks. That only happens when the memories become too much to fight.

Where is Conner? I asked the forest even though I didn't have to. He was easy to find because his strategy never wavered: count backwards from a hundred and then take off in a diagonal line to the right and try to circle behind me. Even if he hadn't done it the same way every time, I would've found him when the sun broke through the trees and revealed his shadow. I caught him in my arms and he laughed and squirmed and tried to get away.

It was like bubbling water and sunshine and rolled into one, that laugh. I'd give anything to hear it again, to touch his smiling face, to swing him up in my arms like I used to do when he was just learning to walk...to have that last moment so I could tell him how he was the one good thing in my life. Maybe the only good thing.

But it was a beautiful day when the blue sky peeked between the green leaves on the trees and the air smelled fresh and full of promise. Life was good and I wasn't thinking that this would be the last good day.

I could hear Conner's footsteps crunching through the leaves and dry grass that littered the ground. The crackle bounced through the forest along with the swish of his pants and his voice calling out to me.

I thought he was just teasing--that he'd finally changed his game plan and was taunting me from a new hiding place. But I heard him again and recognized his scream for what it was--one of absolute terror and need. I remember freezing in my tracks. The echo from Conner's voice was dying and I didn't know which way to run. The forest filled with a long, heavy silence followed by awful sounds like I'd never heard before. Later on, I would know what it was--the sound of an evil so ancient that most of the world had forgotten it--but on that day all I heard was danger and my son's desperate cries for me.

Red is no longer just a color for me. It's a slippery feeling on my fingers, spilling like paint. Long after I'd burned the clothes and showered off the stains, red was a copper scent that seeped into my skin and lived there, filling my nose and my lungs until there was nothing else. I could taste red on my lips and the tip of my tongue when I kissed him goodbye even though he was already gone. All that blood from such a small body. If I could have scooped it from the ground and put it back in him, I would have. I tried. My fingers sifted through the coarse sand and soil, feeling the clumps where his blood had mixed. It crumbled in my hand and all I could see was the remains of his life painted on my fingers.

And my hand started to shake, overburdened at the shock of my son's life slipping out of my hands like dust.

Red blood. Red anger. Red fires of hell licking at my feet. "We do not kill," the Prefect has said. We are but soldiers put upon the earth to fight Lilith and her kind. It's up to the Creator to give life and to take it away.

Or so I once believed.

Grief made me miss my chance the first time. Faith stayed my hand the second.

This time is different.

I've lost track of how many times my right hand has betrayed me since that black day. But, facing the death in Lilith's eyes, my hand is steady and true. The handle of the talus knife is smooth in my hands and the flesh under her jaw looks so soft and vulnerable. She holds a blade at my throat, but that doesn't bother me. She killed me a long time ago, in a forgotten cleft in the earth where she ripped my heart out and left it bleeding on the ground.

I press the knife a little harder and watch the red trickle down her pale throat. If I take away the point, maybe she'll heal. It's only a flesh wound, after all.

Or maybe I can do what I should have done three years ago. What I was meant to do. What should have been done when the world began.