Bone Deep(71)

The falling sun highlighted her tall form. Willowy and rail thin, she didn’t present much of a threat. Her long, wavy, wheat-blond hair reminded her of another time. Like the yellow crayon in my crayon box, that’s what Ninka’s hair reminds me of, Bullet had always said.

Bone blinked her eyes, the transposition of the past on the present throwing her for a second.

She inhaled slowly, deeply, letting the orchid-scented air soothe the wildness in her soul. “You were much smaller then, though your face and form remained in darkness. You smelled of blood and death. It was abhorrent to me.”

The setting sun haloed her, keeping her features in darkness but giving Bone an impression of frailty.

“And now, Bone Breaker, what do I smell of?”

The woman’s husky tones rang through the forest, ricocheting off the trees and seeking to stoke Bone’s rage.

“I do not know, Nameless,” Bone said softly. “Why don’t you step closer so I can be sure?”

The woman threw her head back and laughed. “I will not dance with you, killer.”

“‘We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once,’” Bone mused aloud.

“Nietzsche. Impressive. I wondered if you were all nothing more than brute force and a need to kill,” the woman responded.

Bone shrugged. “I am what I have always had to be. But in this you have no choice,” Bone told her. “We will dance. I didn’t come here to chat. I didn’t come here to discuss the monsters of our past. I came to here to put you down should there be need.”

The woman sighed and nodded. “It is something you excel at. ‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’”

Bone’s skin rippled with awareness. Someone else was headed their way. “Nietzsche becomes you as well, Nameless.”

“You have your fists, Blade her knife’s edge, Bullet her rifle, and Arrow her bow. My weapon is my mind and he almost took that from me,” Nameless imparted.

“You did not break and that is good, but you are not as we are.” Bone shifted, sliding to her right preparing herself. The woman’s body had coiled, muscles tightening. Blade was correct—she wasn’t trained. Whatever she’d learned hadn’t been at Joseph’s hands. “And I am not your abyss.”

The woman remained in shadow though it mattered not to Bone. She had fought shadows her entire life.

“You are all a product of my abyss. It is the truth I don’t whether to destroy you all or seat you a table of royalty and worship you. Perhaps I owe each of you something different. But you, Bone, you I owe more than the others,” Nameless whispered.

She’s having a child, Arrow had whispered so long ago, the demons she carried inside her swirling and reaching for Bone even then.

More screams and then a plea from the girl to get whatever was inside of her out. Bone had reached for her, seeing the darker shadow of her body lying on a cot of some short, legs bent, body heaving.

Help her, Bone! It was if Blade was there and Bone actually looked around, seeing the cobwebs and the dirty walls of the present.

“You do remember,” Nameless said with a small laugh. “That’s good. I had hoped it haunted your every waking moment but you remembering here, where I can watch your face, is enough.”

Take it out of me! The girl labored. Bone checked her pulse, finding it weak and thready and knowing she didn’t have much time left. She had only known death but she remembered a time when her mother had dragged her to the heart of Jericho. A fellow Zionist was giving birth and Bone’s mother had been a midwife.

Bone had remembered her mother reaching between the girls legs and pulling a baby out.

Get it out, please!

Her screams were weaker and with Blade’s fear scenting the air, Bone had done what her mother had done. She’d reached between the girl’s legs and pulled.

She remembered the wet feel of a rounded head, so tiny and fragile and she remembered grasping that head and tugging. She remembered the snap of tiny bones and a feeling that she had done something wrong—that this was not how it was supposed to go.

Push, she had said to the girl softly after begging Blade to shut her up.

The girl had pushed and the child had fallen into Bone’s hands, unmoving. Its head flopped to the side and Bone’s heart had shattered. It isn’t breathing.

Her own words echoed through from the past to the present.

She had broken its neck with her clumsy attempts. She had taken an innocent life and it had ripped her soul in two.

“You killed the first one,” Nameless said, her body shifting sinuously as she prepared to strike. “I have always wondered if it was intentional.”

Bone could not answer her because it was a truth she did not know and it tortured her unlike anything Joseph or Minton had ever done. Had she? Had her rage and fear been so great that maybe in the grips of it she had succumbed to the only thing she’d ever known? Death bringer.

“After all, you were created and honed to kill,” Nameless finished bitterly.

She struck then and Bone took the fist to the side, right over the area where she’d been shot and she staggered back doubling over.

Nameless followed it with another kick to the abdomen and Bone absorbed the blow. The pain spread like poison through her veins, wracking and demanding she fight this woman who thought she could take Bone down.