When finally, the last of the dozen died, it seemed Dig was not far behind them. Though he had only been stabbed and cut a few times, and I had heard a brief cracking from his bones, he loped down to the bloodied and dust washed ground, hurling over and groaned.
The muscles in his neck flexed. He looked so good like this. Beaten and ragged and heaving for life. Foreign blood mixing with his.
My thighs tingled.
I wondered if he would make love to me here in the butchery he had made. It would be worth the UTI.
He rested his cheek on the tarmac, blood oozing from his lower lip and coughed, pathetic-like.
I walked over to him and tapped my foot next to his face. “Have you finished? Can we go now?”
He wheezed, trying to speak.
The drone junkies finished their routine and spoke about an exciting new health supplement for hair loss.
The woman on the building in the cat-smoking-a-cigar shirt was yet to frown and merely sniggered at Dig hurled over in the street. “Aw, Diggy Dig, I told you it would be easier if you just came with us.”
“Hey!” I waved to her. “Come down here and say that to his face and he’ll beat you up!”
Dig grabbed my ankle. “Don’t say that. I think I broke my arm.”
“I don’t think it’s broken.”
“It could be.”
“What makes you think it's broken?”
“It’s bending the other way.”
“I can bend my arm that way easily. Look. Watch.”
“That’s fucking cool.”
“Yoga.”
Another swarm of people came out of the buildings, eyeing us with ugly smirks.
“Dig.” I prodded his back as he groaned, locking a dislocated finger back in place. “Can you kill all these people too?”
37
We do not speak the name of the most infamous Soulless serial killer that had lived in Uandra.
He had wanted fame and so we ensured never to give it to him. His name was tucked under the rug, his notorious feats of slaughter never gossiped over, his death best to be forgotten.
However, his eyes.
I remembered his eyes.
I saw them once, when I was very young, holding onto Magnus’s arm as we strolled out of the car and into a teahouse where he liked to take me on Sundays. I wore one of my lace-collared dresses, my hair braided into a crown, holding a tulip with a ribbon around it’s stem which Magnus had gifted to me along with a kiss on my forehead. I was six years old and freshly new out of being orphaned from my parents and adopted by my older brother. Magnus wore one of his crisp white suit jackets and turned us to pose for a journalist who snapped our photo and who proceeded to ask Magnus about his political work. They showed him a photo of a Soulless man, pushing it directly into his face and then a video clip of the same Soulless man in the Execution Battle getting harpooned in the chest with a spear.
I did not mind the spear going into the man’s chest, nor the spray of blood that was captured after; nor how he had fallen and how the people who hadkilled him had cheered and then severed his head and paraded it around like a birthday balloon in the air.
What had shaken me were his eyes.
Dark eyes. The shade of polished obsidian, of midnight hours when monsters crept from under the bed. They glimmered. They shone. Eyes that predators wore.
Magnus hissed with irritation and slapped his hand over my eyes, covering the obtrusion of what the journalist had knocked in our face.
