Page 64 of SIN Bone Deep

I did not recognize myself in the tarnished bathroom mirror as I fought my way to my feet. I wore a mask of blood, my features swollen and bruised. I sobbed a little at the shock of seeing myself and turned on the tap. I wet the hand towel in the sink and used it to remove some of the gore, trying to see the extent of the damage.

I needed to get out of there before he returned and finished what he’d started.

I staggered a little, reaching out to catch myself, accidentally pulling on the shower curtain around the bath when I pressed my hand to the tiles. The curtain parted in the center, and I drew in a shaky breath as I saw what lay within the bath.

Mother and daughter lay together, both dead, their eyes open wide and faces frozen in terror. I had seen this in the candles, the unbinding that had failed. I would join them if I didn’t do something fast.

My stomach rumbled. As I pressed my hand to it, I felt anger and exhilaration surge within me. You are immortal only so long as you feed, Ender had said. I wasn’t going to die. I was going to feast.

I opened the bathroom door and listened. The house was still and empty. Out in the yard, I could hear the bark of the dog echoing into the night, and then Warren’s sharp command for silence. The dog ignored him.

I used the walls, trailing my fingers along the peeling wallpaper and dripping blood onto the threadbare carpet. This had been Julie and Sophie’s home, and yet there was no sign that a woman or child had lived within it – no pictures of them on the walls, no little feminine touches, no childish artwork. I found Sophie’s room and paused to look within. It was a sad space, but I could see that Julie had tried. The little bed was made up with a faded pink cover which had been patched over with flower-shaped fabric. A toy box at the end of the bed was caught on the ear of a soft toy. The little wardrobe had been repainted with a cheerful scene of green grass, flowers, and blue sky.

My heart ached for the little girl and her mother whose lives had ended so violently at the hands of someone who should have been a protector.

“I’ll make sure he pays,” I told them quietly.

The kitchen was a mess. Warren was not a good housekeeper. The Formica bench tops were piled high with dirty dishes, and the floor was sticky, sucking at the sole of my bare foot. I stopped to remove the one high heel that remained, leaving it on the bench between the piles of dishes.

The back door was not fully closed, and the hinges groaned as I pushed it open with the palm of my hand and looked out into the night-dark garden. It was open to the scrub, and I could see between the trees a flash of torchlight. Warren was in the scrub. Considering the bodies in the bathtub and what he had said about burying me, it was not a huge mental leap to realize what he was doing in the scrub in the dark of night with a torch.

The dog barked as I crossed the yard wincing at the prick of burrs within the dried-out grass. I should have kept the other shoe on, I thought, and spared at least one foot. The small pain of my feet was nothing compared to the ache of my face and the throbbing pain of my body.

“It’s okay boy,” I told the dog. What a miserable life it had, I thought sadly. It looked like it hadn’t been fed since Julie and Sophie had left. “Good boy.”

The scrub was harsh underfoot and the dark caused me to trip and fall, smothering my cry of pain as I landed heavily on one knee. A broken tree branch punctured the skin, and I plucked the wooden spike out with a whimper before rising and continuing, following the bob of the torch light. As I drew closer, I could hear Warren’s grunts of effort and the slice of a shovel into the earth.

He was digging a grave.

His attention was on his task, and the sounds of it hid the crunch of the undergrowth beneath my feet as I came up behind him. He had already created a sizeable pit, standing to mid-thigh in it. I watched him toil, my hunger building within me combining with my rage into a vicious blood lust.

He paused, sensing me, feeling my hunger for him, sensing a predator, and started to turn. I leaped, the impact of my body against his knocking the shovel from his grip. I held onto his back like a monkey, wrapping my arms and legs around him and sinking my teeth into the meat of his shoulder through the fabric of his shirt, too greedy to aim for his throat. I tore the flesh and cloth and spat it as he shrieked in agony and bucked, trying to shake me free.

His efforts to turn his head to see what wild creature was attacking him exposed his neck, tendons cording in his panic, and the veins popping against the skin. I had him then, my teeth finding the blood my stomach sought, my sucks wet and desperate, blood flowing past my lips, over my chin in my clumsy haste.

He collapsed onto his knees in the grave, and my bare feet touched the shovel-soft wet dirt. I held him by his hair, pulling his head back on his neck, whilst I drank him down. I drank until my belly swelled, the skin feeling as if it was stretched tight, and my guts sloshing with his blood, and then I let him go.

He was alive, barely, and stared up at me in disbelief. “You’re dead,” he rasped, his throat swollen from my attack upon it.

“Not yet,” I leaned my hips against the side of the pit. “You have tried twice now to kill me and have failed both times. Did you not realize that it was me that you hit with your car?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What car?” He was slipping away, his blood still leaking from the wound in his neck and the one in his shoulder, his faltering heart slowly pumping his life away into the grave he had been digging for his wife.

“Your car, idiot,” I told him angrily. “On the hill into town. You were parked at the lookout spot, and when you saw me on my bike, you chased me down and hit me. You drove over my bike.”

“Not me,” he grated out. “Not me.”

“You’re lying,” I stared at him in dawning horror. Was it possible? Had I been mistaken? If not Warren, then who?

“Didn’t run nobody over,” his eyes fluttered shut and he went still.

“Nyx,” Ender was in his Grim Reaper form, his familiar face behind a mask of skull and curve of horn half hidden by the shadows of his hood, and his eyes aglow. He lifted me tenderly from the grave. “You are hurt,” his bone-like fingers cupped my face, their smooth cool surface soothing on my bruised and swollen skin. “I do not have the power to heal.”

“Did he tell the truth?” I asked him in a whisper. “Was he not the one that killed me?”

“That is also not a gift of mine,” he said sorrowfully.

There was a flash of flame, the heat scorching, lifting my hair and stirring Ender’s robes. I felt Malachar’s hands as he lifted me out from under Ender’s caress and scooped me up into his arms. “She is not yours,” he snapped at Ender.

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