81
“What the actual fuck happened here?” Ghost pulls me from my thoughts as he walks in with the boys. I didn’t even hear them pull up.
“Why did you call him?” I look at Cage. I don’t ant Ghost caught up in this mess.
“Um, for one he didn’t. Two, I heard them roll in from a mile away. Three, I’m kinda like ya best friend, so me not being here is kinda not right,” he bites out walking toward me. I’m on my knees praying to her gods, the person she worships, that she can come back from what she had seen tonight.
“Is she dead?” Ghost looks over the couch to Jade.
“No!” I growl. His hands fly up in front of him.
“Fuck, okay brother.” He walks away and looks around the room.
“What the fuck happened here?” he asks again. This time it's a demand.
“This little lady thought she could kill demons alone.” I stood up from Jade’s stone-cold body, pulling another blanket over her.
“Should she be so cold?” I look at Cage. He knows shit that none of us know. “Shock does strange shit to a person, so maybe,” he answers. Tigg walks from Jade’s room
“Ya know, there is a dead dude seeping blood all over the floor up in there. Judging by the clean cut, I’d say that’s an 81 kill and not hers.” His hand moves toward Jade.
“You guessed right,” I say to them.
“Right. So, we are here for clean up?” Tigg asks, pulling his phone from his pocket and dialed the cleaner and the collector. We have multiple people on call for such events.
I start putting furniture back in its places. Cage begins to sweep up glass. I take a sheet from the cupboard. Ghost followed me, wanting answers that I don’t have.
“Here, take that corner and pin it up.” I passed him some pins and a sheet.
"Are you going to tell me what happened?" Ghost asks as I pin the sheet to the wall, covering the smashed window. It'll do till the morning when I can get it fixed.
"I might as well just tell you.. I don't fucking know. I walked into this fucking mess and her ex with his hand wrapped around her throat, Jade pointing a gun to his."
“Mmm, right. Sounds like normal shit to me.” He nods. We are still cleaning up when the cleaners arrive. They don’t knock but walk right in as the door is still not on its hinges. They ask no questions, just get straight to work. The boys and I sit down and drink whiskey, smoke and watch. It’s like poetry in motion watching a bone collector cut up a human into pieces and stuff them into a black rubbish bag. I blow smoke rings toward him. They break above him like a cracked, sinful halo. Fitting for his character. Fitting for this moment.
Taking a sip of the whiskey, I hear my brother’s voices murmur together as I watch in a sick type of awe at their movements the way they work, the way they move, the fluid strikes and swipes. It feeds my beast. He lays sedated inside the pit of darkness within me. Killing has always been pleasant to me. Has always gotten me harder than any woman, harder than any line of coke or bottle of liquor ever could. But this, this new art form, the way a body snaps, pops, sounds when its being distanced from its joints and flesh being cut and peeled back from bone, is something else. It’s pure fucking disturbing porn to a demented man like me.
I rub my hands over my jeans shifting in my seat, as I move my eyes and watch while the cleaners eradicate any type of smell of death and seeped blood from the home. It smells like lemons and leather. She will be thankful for that, I’m sure, when she wakes up. Dealing with that aftermath of this shit storm may have just been the tipping point for her mind. She would have slipped quite peacefully into the cold dark never to return as my little bird, but as a cold, hardened by death woman, whose eyes will scream of horrors that a human as beautiful as she should never have to be to feel numb.
The Bone man hums quite a catchy tune as he goes about his work. “What’s that tune brother?” I ask him as he looks up and over my shoulder out the only window that’s still whole.
“It’sThree Little Birdsby Bob Marley,” he says, his eyes moving from the open space behind me and back to cutting up the dead man below him. going back to the task at hand.
“It’s quite a happy tune,” I say to him, “for a dark task.” He stops again and looks at me.
“Well yes, brother, but even the dead need to know that everything will be alright even if they are scum. Makes me sleep easier at night, anyway.”
“Right, brother. I hear that,” I say to him, then I move back to the conversation about the ride and shower of bullets the Mexicans laid down on us.
The boys all have different outlooks as to what it could be for and why. Me, I don't give a fuck. I'm more consumed with my little bird and just how fucking dark shit must have been for her to wanna up and kill that dude. I know she had it rough, but she could have spoken to me. I would've handled it before it even got to the point of him entering a place that is her safety net.
For the first time in a long time, I feel lonely in the presence of my brothers, and as I look into my glass, I see my life differently. More for Jade, less for them and nothing at all for Hannah. It’s quite a weird feeling. My whole life I lived for them, the club and a woman who was poison. And now look at what’s in front of me —a woman who walks that is oh so broken, but you would never be able to tell. Because she is made from a strength very few possess. It is called being so alone that even the voices left. It’s called a darkness that only pure evil can place inside you from hands or people with nothing but malice.
It is a life that not many souls can handle walking, let alone by themselves.
Watching them all begin to pack up their things, it blows my mind that a human body can fit into two black rubbish bags.
The bone collector nods at me when he leaves. I know Carl will never ever be seen again. For Jade, I am thankful. For her dreams, I am worried.
