All target practice, no tried-and-true.
She thought of her brother and mourned him like he was already dead.
The Shadow smiled, flashing long white fangs. “Poor little girl lost in the wood. You think Duran’s your hero? You think he’s going to rescue you? Let me tell you that he won’t. That male is going to desert you when it counts and you’re going to end up dead in a place where your kin won’t find the body. If you’re smart, you’ll back that SUV out of my garage and get gone. For someone like you, it’s better to admit defeat up front than be forced into a failure that puts you in the Fade. At least if you cry uncle now, you’ll still be able to enjoy pumpkin spice lattes and the last season of The Big Bang Theory in September—while you’re working out at the gym and shooting targets on the range—”
“You’re wrong,” Ahmare blurted.
“About what?” The Shadow started flipping the gun again, like she had to do something to stave off boredom. “Do tell, on the outside chance I can learn something new about you. But you should know that I catch liars like fish in a stocked pond. And I like to eat them.”
“It wasn’t a gun. There was no gunpowder.”
Those eyes flicked over. Before the Shadow could interrupt, Ahmare found herself speaking in a direct voice.
“And I don’t know what I’ll see or smell when I close my eyes because I killed him just after nightfall tonight.”
She thought of Chalen wanting to know what it had felt like. When she had denied him the story, failed to fulfill his greed, it had been an act of defiance in a situation she had no leverage over.
Now, she spoke through a tight throat to prove herself.
And not to the Shadow.
“I spent the night before watching the human,” she said. “He lived with two other males, but he worked alone, outside of town in a trailer in the woods. I tracked him to his lab. He made meth, I guess. What else could he be doing with all those filthy tubs and chemicals?”
“What did you use,” the Shadow said. “If not a gun, then what.”
Ahmare reached to her hip. “This knife. Chalen wanted proof he was dead.”
“What did you cut off?”
“His head.” Ahmare licked her lips with a dry tongue in hopes of getting the syllables unstuck from the sides and roof of her mouth. “I was waiting for him out at the trailer. I spent most of the day practicing in my mind how it would all happen, but nothing went like I thought it would. He had cleared the field around the trailer to get a clean shot at anyone who came on the property—so I had to lay flat on top of the roof, on the far side of the slight tilt. It was hot. The asphalt shingles were like a griddle from being in the sun all day and my palms were sweaty. Maybe that was the fear, too, although I’m not sure what I was more worried about. That he would show up or that he wouldn’t.”
Everything was so crystal clear, the memories like the glare of chrome, making her eyes and her head hurt even though this was all just a tape played backward, a book’s passage being read instead of written.
“I dematerialized behind him after he got out of his car. I don’t know how I did it. My plan had been to slit his throat before he knew I was there, but he sensed me immediately and wheeled around. His eyes were wide and glassy—he was clearly high and that’s the only reason I got the job done. He was sloppy with his defenses. I was sloppy with the attack. I stabbed at air instead of his chest because he jerked to the left, and then I sliced his shoulder. He went for his gun. I caught him in the forearm . . .”
She closed her eyes. Reopened them immediately. “I dropped the knife. It just popped out of my hand because of the sweat. As it turned out, that was how I took him down. My hands functioned better when there was nothing in them. I punched him in the side of the head. Then I broke his nose. There was blood everywhere. I kicked him in the groin. As soon as he fell facedown on the ground, I got on his back and I didn’t let him up. My body . . . it knew what to do.”
Ahmare looked at the Shadow. “I watched me submit him. I know that sounds weird, but I swear, I was standing five feet away from myself when I got his throat in the crook of my elbow and started strangling him.” She moved her arm into that position, pulling up her sleeve, clasping her wrist, and making like she was pulling back. Then she released the hold on herself and looked at where she had just gripped. “I have bruises right here.”
She turned her arm around so the Shadow could see the purple and blue marks. “When I was driving down here, my wrist ached and I couldn’t figure out why. But I have my own handprint in my flesh.”
Dimly, she was aware that the Shadow wasn’t tossing the gun anymore.
“I think he was still alive when I rolled off of him.” Ahmare put her arm behind her back, hiding her wrist like that could erase what she’d done. “I mean, he was breathing or at least seemed to be, but he was limp and both of his pupils were fixed and dilated when I turned him over. I sat back in the dusty dirt and caught my breath. Something told me I had to decide what I was going to do then, which was nuts. I had already decided what I had to do. I had spent all day thinking about the steps I needed to take. Yet I hesitated.”
She curled her nose. “He smelled bad. His blood was flowing down the lower part of his face and all over his T-shirt, and it was like rotten eggs, all sulfur and rot from the drugs. I told myself he wasn’t going to survive long anyway. I told myself that he sold shit to kids that, even though they were only humans, didn’t need that kind of thing anywhere near them. I told myself . . . that he was the reason my brother was in Chalen’s custody. That what the two of them stole from the conqueror was this male’s fault, not Ahlan’s.
“None of that seemed to matter when it came down to it. I still don’t think I had a right to take his life. A person’s heartbeat is their own property. Even thieves and murderers get that gift from the Creator. And I knew . . .” She touched her sternum. “I knew, deep in here, that if I killed him, I was no better than he was. I was the drug dealer to children. I was a corrupter, too.”
“So what made you follow through on it?” the Shadow prompted.
Ahmare shivered and put her arms around herself even though the air inside the cabin was warm and a little stale.
“That’s the scariest part,” she said.
“How so.”
She met the other female in the eye. “I don’t know what made me do it, and that is terrifying because it makes me think there’s something ugly inside of me that I can’t control. I tell myself, so I don’t get scared I’m a monster, that maybe destiny was using my body as a tool, that the human was somehow getting his due. Or that maybe it was only because I had practiced things so many times in my head, and as long as I never think like that again, I’ll never do something like that again. All I know for sure is that I watched my hand reach out and pick up my knife from the dirt. I didn’t even wipe the hilt or the blade off. I left all the grit that clung to my sweat on the rubber and the blood on the metal where it was. It helped my grip, I guess, and what did it matter whether the steel was clean or not?” Her lids went down again, but she couldn’t bear the images she saw. “I only needed one hand for the front of the throat, but getting through the spinal cord required two and all my strength. Stupid me, I was trying to cut bone instead of finding the juncture between two vertebra. I fixed that by angling the blade differently. And then I felt the knife go into the soft earth on the far side.”
The shower went off behind the door, and Ahmare started to rush through the story. This was too private to talk about in front of anyone else—and what a strange thing to think given she didn’t know this Shadow any better than she knew the prisoner.
“I forgot a bag.” She stared at the scuffed floorboards of the cabin. “All my preparation . . . and I forgot to bring something to put the head in. That’s how I found out what was inside the trailer. I’d left my Explorer about ten miles away, in the parking lot of a strip mall full of outlets. If I dematerialized there with a dripping . . . well, the shops were closed, but humans are everywhere, even after dark. So I went inside the trailer. The place was filthy and toxic, but there was a box of Glad trash bags by the sink. I took two, put one inside the other, and went back out to the body. For some stupid reason, I felt guilty I’d only left him one more bag in that box, but really? That was what I was going to apologize to him for? And like he’d ever cleaned up that trailer of trash?”
Flapping from inside the bathroom. Like the prisoner was giving some terry cloth a workout.
“I threw up when I came back and saw him. His blood was running out of the arteries I’d cut, making this dark semi-circle in the dirt, a new kind of head to replace the one I’d taken from him. The fan pattern reminded me of when my mahmen had homeschooled me and I’d learned about the Mississippi River and the way it dumps out into the Gulf of Mexico in this shell-like formation of silt under the seawater. I teared up at that point. Somehow that perfectly unimportant photograph from a geography textbook in my childhood was now permanently stained, sure as if the man I’d just murdered had reached his soon-to-be cold hand back through time and gotten his blood on the page. That contamination feels, right now at least, like it’s going to spread to every single memory of my happy family and the way things used to be before the raids. I feel like in killing him, I killed everything that was protected by the hard guard of That Which Was Before. Before the lessers murdered my mahmen and sire, I wasn’t like this. I was myself. I was no one who would ever kill anything, and my brother would never have dealt drugs to survive, and Chalen the Conqueror and that prisoner in your bathroom and you and this cabin are all a foreign land with a foreign language I will never, ever visit.”
Ahmare rubbed her face. “But it makes sense that I should lose something when I took his life. No matter what my reasoning or justifications, it was not mine to claim, and balance needs to be maintained. He’s dead now, and I’ve lost the previous version of me that I had kept so dear, the last vestige of my family.”