Prisoner of Night (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(17)
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.”
Dropping her hands, she looked at the Shadow. “So you’re right. I’m not cut out for this. I’d rather teach self-defense, and I do like pumpkin spice lattes. But here’s another truth. We don’t get to choose all our destinations, and however much I hate that I’m going to have to live with what I did to that drug dealer—and God only knows what else is going to happen—what I cannot and will not abide is doing nothing to save my brother. He’s all I have left, especially now that I’ve lost myself, and however imperfect he is, I’ll take him alive over the cosmic nothing I’ll have on this earth if Chalen kills him.”
There was a long pause as their eyes met.
Then the Shadow holstered that gun and turned away to the refrigerator. “You hungry? I got food we can pack up for you both.”
10
DURAN HADN’T BEEN ABLE to tolerate the warm water.
Turning the cheap faucet handle to the inscribed “H” had been a rusty habit. Stepping under the warmth and humidity had been unbearable. He’d lasted for a split second, his body tingling with unanticipated pleasure, before he’d cranked things to “C.”
The bad news about that decision revealed itself when he got out: Without any steam, the medicine cabinet’s cracked mirror had been as naked as he.
So he caught his reflection for the first time in over twenty years.
Unrecognizable. And that seemed apt.