But few will ever face it
~William Brookes III
I could choose anyone in Thorpes and know I was killing a guilty man. No one there was good or could offer the world anything of value. I had a slew of candidates to choose from. Murderers, rapists, cheaters, liars. They would all taste of disease and drink, but I could get past that to indulge in something more filling than a dried piece of goat meat or a stale slice of toast and beans. My body needed more than that.
I walked through the crowded streets, peeling apart every sound and every smell until I could sense every body around me in moderate detail. I could smell the type of material that clothed them. How long it had been since they bathed. What kind of drink they enjoyed most and how long they’d been on the water. Most had been land bound for a while, it seemed. Their skin barely smelled of salt anymore. Instead, they smelled of mud and filth.
Finding a suitable meal in the overpacked streets was not proving to be an easy task, though. And even if I chose someone,it would be difficult to drag them from the chaos into a private place to feed.
I needed someone to wander off on their own. A wounded deer.
I leaned up against a wall, my hat concealing most of my face, and crossed my arms, watching the clusters of people move and undulate and shift in all directions, over and over. Finally, a woman with a heavily painted face and rouge lips bumped into a man stumbling across the street. He saw her and immediately, his long, bony fingers were around her arm. She tried to shove him away, but she, too, was full of drink and teetered like a toddler learning to stand.
Eventually, the two found themselves in a scuffle until the man dragged the woman by her hair into a dark alleyway.
I followed their shuffling footsteps into the shadows where the voices and music were muffled behind layers of decrepit buildings. Turning a corner, I found the man pinning the woman against a brick wall, his hands under her skirts. She was struggling, but even intoxicated, the man’s strength was twice hers. She kept turning her head from one side to the other in confused distress, but her sly little hand still managed to find its way to his belt where a pouch of coins hung unprotected. She was reaching for it when the man ripped open her bodice, letting her breasts spill free. She screamed, writhing out of his grip, but once she gained any sort of control, a glint of steel caught my eye under the muted moonlight.
The woman screamed again, but that time it was filled with pure horror and panic. Red blossomed on the side of her torso where the man had driven a knife between her ribs.
“Stealing from me, you whore!?” the man groaned. “This is what thieving whores get.”
I cocked my head at the depravity as the man fussed with his trousers and then forced himself into the woman, holding her increasingly limp, bleeding body upright.
And yet her fingers somehow found the strength to keep reaching for his coins.
It made no sense. The greed. The warped desires.
I stepped in, grabbing the man by his thinning hair and ripping his head back. He gasped, his yellowed eyes wide with surprise as I yanked him away from the woman.
“What the fuck!” he shouted.
The woman slumped to the ground holding her wound, screaming like a banshee as I threw the man into the opposite wall and tore the dagger from his grip. My hand around his throat, I lifted him inches off the ground, shaking my head until my hat fell and my hair unraveled down my back. I could feel the blackness eating the gray of my eyes as my vision adjusted to the dark, displaying the man in perfect, ugly detail, from his drying complexion to his rotten teeth to the deep red tones of his blood beating beneath his skin.
He sobered quickly at the sight of me, and he began to flail. His voice became shrill like that of a woman as I lifted his knife to his groin and thrust it upward.
I was meant to be subtle... that was Vidar’s request.
“Silence,” I said, noticing no traces of bronze on my little trek down the alley.
He wasn’t wearing a silentium. Foolish.
My voice rolled off my tongue like one and many were speaking all at once. When it reached the man’s ears, his tongue folded back into his throat, choking the air out of him until he could no longer make a sound. I twisted the dagger, feeling muscle and bone scrape on the blade’s edge as hot blood seeped onto my fist.
The woman behind me whimpered at the sight as I dropped the man to the ground, letting him bleed out on the muddy path. I turned to her, blood-soaked dagger in hand, and saw her slowly crawling back to the square. A wet trail was stretching behind her. She would not make it out of the alley let alone to a healer of any kind before she bled out. I walked over to her, watching as she turned onto her back, eyes filled with glistening tears.
“Please, miss,” she trembled. “Are ye… are ye one of ‘em?” I cocked my head curiously at the way she started to smile, her lips trembling. “Please. If ye are one of ‘em, take me away. Take me away from this world. Make it quick. Put me out of my misery.”
I hated those words, but at the very least, they absolved me from the little whispers of guilt in the back of my mind. I knelt, grabbing the dying woman by her golden, curly hair, and slid the blade across her throat, silencing her as well. The way she closed her eyes as she lay back, peace and panic fusing her brows together, made me wonder if she even had enough life in her for me to call it murder. Her soul seemed to have already shriveled up a long time ago.
It was hard to come by someone who led an honorable, unburdened life those days.
I had two bodies and not much time to dispose of them.
I took the woman by the ankle and I dragged her half-starved body out of the alley toward a low cliffside. There were rocks beneath, but the waves were kind. Meridan would be circling the island, waiting for an unfortunate soul to creep too close. I apologized silently to the woman lying at my feet before I rolled her body into the water. There was a hint of remorse in the pit of my stomach at the idea of taking her life, despite how she seemed to welcome the end. She was young. She had a future. Or at least she could have if she was not on that damn island.
Pitiful. Cursed. That was what everyone was like those days.
Sighing, I watched the woman’s body hit the water and drift with the gentle waves like the ocean was cradling her into the afterlife. Then I turned on my heels and headed back to the alley to find my spoils. The man was twitching, but he was dead, for the most part. I grabbed him by the front of his coat and hoisted him off the ground, hauling him to a place where prying eyes would be less likely to find me.
