Page 32 of Hate Me

And I drank the dark liquid in, letting its toxicity burn through my veins and feed me the power I needed, while keeping out all the rest. Namely, my humanity.

I stepped over one of the dead bodies that had bled out from its throat, my knife having severed its carotid artery. I made my way through the dive bar that fronted a whole lot of illicit activities. Whimpering from the joint owner rolled through me. He was sprawled amongst a carpet of jagged glass and booze. As I neared the bastard, a hand wrapped around my ankle.

I leaned down and yanked on the offender’s hair, forcing his pained gaze to mine with my free hand, while I spun my ballistic knife in my other. “You have something to tell me?”

“He… he was here,” he croaked.

“And?”

“He… wanted to… recruit… us.”

There it was.

The bastard was building an army.

“What was your response?”

“Need the… money… power he has… had to.”

A thump sounded to my right and I looked to see the lanky guy who co-owned the place with the one currently feeding me the intel I’d come here for, now digging his nails into the bar top as he pulled himself up to lean against it. His long, gray hair was matted with booze, blood, and shards of glass, and the gut wound I’d inflicted had soaked through his checkered shirt.

“I’ll show you… the surveillance footage.”

I smiled, baring my bloodied teeth from a couple of hits I’d taken while putting down the five assholes in this shithole.

Then I reached down and jerked back the fingers grasping my ankle, making the guy scream out into the eerily quiet bar.

It only served to feed the darkness infusing every cell of my body.

I wrenched him up by his hair and brought my knife to his chest.

Eyes wide, he actually trembled as he told me frantically, “You don’t need… to do this.”

“Sure I do. You’re a mercenary. No loyalty. That makes you dangerous. Worse, it makes you detrimental to my mission. You know what I’m capable of now, can’t have you using that intel against me and I can’t have your boss learning too much there either.”

With that, I thrust the blade forward, burying it deep in his chest, tearing and twisting, ensuring I hit my target of his heart. More shrieks filled my ears. Gurgled ones this time, especially as I wrenched my blade out and he collapsed back onto the floor.

I rose to my feet and continued toward the one guy still left alive by the bar, wiping my slick blade on my leather pants as I went. “Show me the footage.”

It was him.

A specter made flesh.

Well, what should have been a fucking specter.

He’d escaped death, cheated it.

Just like he cheated everything.

Not for long.

I gritted my teeth as I took in that peroxide hair, more overgrown than the last time I’d seen him, the gelled spikes higher than normal, as he stood there in his jeans and white tank all that muscle on display as he held court in the center of the dive bar with the very guys I’d now destroyed.

“Taken two days ago,” the lone survivor of tonight’s slaughter told me.

He was slumped in an old wooden chair in the backroom as I kept an eye on him in my peripheral vision while I took in the surveillance footage via the screen of his desktop computer.

I nodded to myself, then rounded the desk toward him.

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