Huntress (22 page)

A crunching noise sounded behind me and I whirled, ready to decapitate the intruder. It was Drew. His face was tense. He looked as angry as I was at the destruction.

"Any more?" I mouthed.

He shook his head and nodded at the door to the basement. I took that as a sign that we were going down.

"Don’t forget," he whispered.

"I won’t. I’ll run."

I wasn’t just talking out of my ass this time. After seeing that creature, I was going to run if I had to.

He silently swung the door open further and I squeezed my eyes shut after seeing what was waiting on the other side. Scooter’s large ebony eyes stared blankly up at me.  His head was lying neatly at the top of the stairs in the same position I’d found him in so many mornings on my way downstairs. Head down, waiting with those soulful eyes for me to come bounding down the stairs for my training sessions.

The problem here was that the rest of his body was missing. I didn’t want to see this. This creature had caused me more terror, pain and agony than any other - but he was
mine
. He was Dylan’s "dog" for the love of God. Nobody decapitated Dylan’s dog and got away with it. I was going to kill this motherfucker.

Drew grabbed me before I could go storming down the stairs. He took my face in his hands and stared me in the eye, warning me. I shook my head and fought off the tears that were threatening to overcome me.

"I’ll go down first. You back me up," he mouthed.

I nodded and grabbed hold of myself. I could do this. I
had
to do this. I had to be strong for Drew. I just thanked God that Dylan hadn’t been with us.

Drew glided down the stairs. As his foot touched the last step, iron talons flashed, ripping open his shirt. Had he been any slower, his stomach’s contents would have spilled onto the basement floor.

I stormed after him, raising my kukri as he dodged under the scaled arm, stabbing out with his short sword.

His sword met something solid and I swung downward toward the claws that were raised for another swipe. I was a fraction too slow and I skidded across the gore covered floor, nearly losing my balance. I caught myself as an iron lash skimmed across my back, causing me to shriek in surprise.

I twisted and lashed out with a foot. The creature was battling Drew with an ease that left my gut clenching. Drew alternately slashed and jabbed at the monster with his swords, but it was too fast, dodging and parrying with what looked like a whip made of iron razorblades.

The lash whipped out and caught Drew around his neck.  A forked tongue lolled out of the creature’s mouth in a morbid grin of triumph. It only took me a moment to assess the situation.  If I didn’t act quickly, this thing was going to decapitate Drew.

His fingers and neck were soaked with his own blood where the lash cut into his skin. I pulled out the .45 and fired twice. I didn’t hit the target, but it was enough to distract him from his purpose. It gave Drew enough time to disengage from the lash and slash upward with the scimitar.

The sword ripped into the creature’s side, causing a spray of blood that coated Dylan’s face and the walls behind him. He was following it up with a kick when his face whitened and he stumbled to his knees.

A hiss of malice left the thing’s lips and it raised the lash to strike again at Drew’s immobile body. I launched myself. I wasn’t sure how I’d even gained the purchase, as slippery as the floor was, but I hurtled into the body, knocking it down in surprise. I stabbed with my kukri twice - nicking its shoulder in one pass and missing entirely on the second. This thing was fast and it bucked me off with a howl of rage.

"Run." The sound was faint and slightly gurgled, but I understood him. I wasn’t leaving this basement without Drew. There was no way.

I skid across the floor and crashed into the shelf holding the free weights. My head thunked against the metal with a wet meaty sound and I briefly saw stars.

The creature was on me in a fraction of a second, its claws flashing as it stabbed and clawed at me. I rolled, twisted and dodged but couldn’t escape the flaying of my flesh.

This thing was taking its time as though it was trying to skin me alive. I’d lost my kukri when I was thrown across the room and my gun lay a few feet away. I didn’t think, I just reached behind me and grabbed the closest thing I could find.

A thirty pound barbell crashed into the creature’s head, stunning it long enough for me to gather my knees up and shove its body off of mine with a forceful kick.

I scrambled for the gun, desperate to reach it before that thing could launch itself at me again. I was starting to feel the pain. I shut it down. If my nanites were doing their job, they’d heal it.

I reached the gun and spun onto my back, glass cutting into my shoulder blades. I shrieked with pain, but closed my eyes anyway, took a breath and squeezed the trigger twice.

When I say that it’s a miracle that I’m alive, I’m not exaggerating. I opened them to see a look of shock cross the thing’s face as two holes in its forehead blossomed with blood.  The thing had leaned over me with its tongue out, inches from my arm as though it were about to lick the blood from my skin.

I shuddered with revulsion before I leapt up and dove for my kukri, not trusting that it was going down - even with the bullets. I rolled to my feet and came up swinging in a backhanded tennis move that I hadn’t executed since high school.
 
I cleaved through the tendons and iron plated sections of the neck, severing the creature’s head from its body.

An arterial spray of blood launched into the air coating everything within a three feet circumference. It burned slightly and I had to wipe the wetness out of my eyes so that I could see.

I looked desperately around the room for Drew. I let my eyes slide over Scooter’s body, huddled in the corner. I would deal with that later.

He was halfway up the stairs, panting, trying to pull in enough breath to move.

"Drew!" I shouted and sprinted to where he lay. I cradled him in my arms, turning him around and gasped when I saw his face.

He had been liberally coated in blood, but his face was turning blue. His lips were coming close to the color of my hair. I dragged him the rest of the way up the stairs and wiped as much blood as I could from his mouth so I could try to give him CPR.

His hand grabbed my forearm to stop me. "Poison," he croaked.

"What do I do?! I don’t know what to do?"

"Nothing," he whispered.

His fingertips found my face and he traced the line of my jaw. Tears spilled from my eyes, dropping haphazardly onto his face.

"Not cool, Drew. I refuse to let you die on my watch. What can I do? Is there anything?"

He smiled sadly and shook his head. He tried to say something more, but the poison had run its course. He took one last rattling breath and then went utterly still.

My mind fogged over in a red haze of rage and I screamed. I screamed at the top of my lungs. The loss was profound. I’d lost so much in my life and
this
was the one that sent me over the edge.

The red fog of rage blurred my vision. It might have been the tears. I wasn’t sure anymore. My broken mind registered that there was a wailing sound but it wasn’t until later that I realized it had been me. The rage spurred me on. I was going to find whoever had sent these assassins and I was going to slice their skin from their flesh - one agonizingly slow strip at a time. There wasn't enough pain in the world to make up for this.

The air held so much weight, it was crushing me to the ground. I refused to believe that my inability to hold myself upright was because of the grief. It
had
to be the weight of the air. My body fell like a dead weight into the blood soaked carpet with Drew's still body pinning me down.  The only sounds in the silence of the night were my persistent keening wails.

My fingers played through Drew's blood soaked hair and I caught a flicker of a memory, something I should know that danced at the edge of recollection but the rage shoved it down fast. Over and over again, I thought of the different ways I was going to torture our attacker. My mind tried bringing me back into the present with something else familiar but I stubbornly refused.  The snap from sanity had given me leave to ignore pretty feelings.  Rage was my solace. Revenge would be a small victory.  

The nanites were doing their job. My arm itched where I’d cut it. Distantly, my body was telling me that it was time to stand up. My body should have listened to that part of my mind that was trying to get me moving because I was not budging. Drew would get cold if I let him go – the denial told me.

Some new noise cut into the silence and my ears grasped to recognize what it could be, but my brain shut them down, telling them to ignore it. Blurred movement broke across my vision, and again, I stubbornly refused to see what was in front of me.

It wasn’t until the sharp slap broke across my face that I was forced to register that I wasn’t alone with a dead body. The presence was diligent and it slapped me again. I could hear snatches of words but I wasn’t ready to come out of this grief coma yet.

With sudden force, I was yanked up off of the floor away from the body that was now growing cold. That snapped me out of the coma and into a rage. I flew at my attacker with renewed strength, clawing and kicking and screaming.

It wouldn’t take me away. If I could keep the body warm, it might come back. This person couldn’t take that fantasy away from me. I struggled, trying to fall limp so it would drop me back down. I had to get to Drew. He needed my body heat. If I could just keep him warm, he’d be okay. I knew this in the blackest, deepest part of my soul.

I almost succeeded in slipping out of the grasp when I was roughly yanked back up. I was staring into startling blue eyes. Or, I would have been if my head weren’t flopping back and forth from the solid shaking that I was being given.

My ears popped and the words filtered through the fog.

"Grace! Snap out of it you stubborn sow’s ass!"

Blinking a few times, I registered who was shaking me around like a ragdoll. Zeus had come to finally kill me. "Good," I thought. I
obviously
wasn’t good at keeping people alive. Dylan would be better off with his father.

"Ok," I croaked, then nodded solemnly.

He looked confused, his eyebrows drawing together. I was shaken a few more times before he responded.

"Ok, what?"

"Ok, you can kill me.  Just do it."  My voice was completely devoid of emotion.  Even to my own ears, I sounded wooden.  A piece of my mind that hadn't fractured as far as the rest thought that maybe I shouldn't go inviting disaster, but I ignored that bit of logic.  Closing my eyes, I tilted my head back, inviting the blade.  I was pretty sure that losing my head would kill me.  Hadn't he tried to kill me before and failed?  Beheading would definitely work, right?  Yes, I decided with a nod.

He dropped me with a grunt of disgust. "This is it?" he exclaimed in exasperation. "This was all it took to break you? Girl, I thought you were stronger than that!"

Frustrated, he started pacing and grumbling under his breath. I watched him moving steadily back and forth. He was mesmerizing. I don’t think that he realized how fast he was moving, but he was a blur.

Suddenly, he stopped and stomped back over to me. "Do I need to hit you again?"

My eyes widened as I thought this question through. Did he need to hit me again? Why had he hit me in the first place? Stupidly, I shook my head and answered with a question, "No?"

"Damn right no! Now get your ass up, we have work to do."

The authority in his voice shook me and I scrambled for purchase so I could stand. Still a little foggy, but pretty sure I didn’t want him smacking me again, I shoved against something sticky and soft and remembered why I wasn’t supposed to remember.

The wailing noise started again.

When Dylan was two, he went through spurts of time where all he wanted to do was scream. His pediatrician had explained to me that it was to test to see how long I could take it. He was testing the waters. He was also learning to be reactionary. His screams got louder the more frustrated I became.

I learned slowly that leaving him alone in his crib for 30 minutes stopped the screaming because he wasn't getting a reaction.

Before that lesson was learned, I yelled and screamed. I glared at him with murderous intent. I threatened and finally, I cried - completely defeated because I was certain that nothing in this human world was going to stop the pain being rendered upon my ears.

Distantly, I watched Zeus staring at me, mouth agape, wondering what in the hell he was going to do with me. I could see those emotions working through his expressions. He yelled, screamed and glared at me with murderous intent.

Then he did the one thing that I hadn’t ever done to Dylan. He hauled off and smacked me again. The force of the blow snapped my head back and I got mad because I couldn’t figure out why he kept hitting me.

"Would you fucking stop hitting me? For the love of Christ! That hurts!" I yelled and brought my hand up to massage what was becoming a swollen cheek.