Page 10 of Red Demon
I get up, the slick metallic scent unmistakable. My eyes adjust to the darkness to see the slumped form of a man, my blade in his chest. I clean it on the rug by the fire. Sheathing it, I wonder who he was.
I force my eyes closed until I’m somewhere else.
“Okay then. Tell me everything.” A man’s voice, but not unkind. When I open my eyes, the blood is gone. It’s a little outdoor gazebo, tea on the table before me. My skin feels clean and clothes fresh, a cushion under my legs.
With a sigh, I plod on.
“I know what I’m good at, but I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I say with a shudder. The images in my head are not ones I like, the last blink of so many eyes, the crack of so many bones in my hands. That’s all I have to share with him. The man looks back at me with kind Chaeten eyes—someone good. I want to help him any way I can.
He flicks his shining black hair away and smiles like someone I’m sure I once knew. I decide to trust him when he reaches for my hand. “You can stay, but we’ll need to keep this secret. There are true dangers here, and I’m not talking about the wild dogs.” He chuckles, although I don’t understand the joke. His hand feels warm in mine, his grip strong and protective.
“Do you mean Mahakal?” I say. There are a few names I remember, but I fear that name. I don’t think the man in front of me fears much of anything.
We leave the gazebo and walk on through the woods on a summer afternoon. I listen to him and answer his questions, retaining only the feel of the words as they leave me. My name, why I’m there: I lose it all downstream. Perhaps this is a memory, and I remembered back then—perhaps it’s all lies. I watch his face when he accepts it—accepts who he thinks I am.
When he smiles, it’s dazzling.
The images rush, but I sift out what I can. I can see the silver trunk of the trees, the rippling of the water. Memories of good days with him. An open door to a stone cottage, painted over in green and yellow, bright colors he thought I liked, and I suppose I do. They remind me of him. I know the feel of every room in that house, the taste of the water, the softness of a bed that’s all my own. I remember a workshop, the smell of steel and leather, not blood.
My friend turns to me, with a few more lines on his face than I expect. I know what his smiles feel like. He’s never looked at me like this before.
“I’m sorry.” I mean that more than anything else I must have said before.
He doesn’t look at me as he pushes his hair out of his face in the way he always does, a few streaks of white speckled in with the dark. “I don’t think you are.” His voice falters. “You should have warned me.”
I can’t make out my next words, or his accusation. I struggle to hold on to the details, to reach out to him as he walks away, disgusted.
The cottage falls dark. I get up, knowing I’ve been here before, with the slick metallic scent between my fingers. I let my eyes adjust to the darkness and see the slumped form of a man against the wall. That man—the friend who I couldn’t name—a blade glittering in his chest. I clean it on the rug by the fire, then sheath it like before.
Like so many times before. I decide that next time I will write their names down before I forget. Keep a record of my wrongs.
I close my eyes, focusing on the sound of laughter in a tavern. There are happy people here. People I shouldn’t kill. I focus on that, knowing that if I wish for silence, I might create it—I open my eyes to find them dead, too.
“Bria, I need you,” I whisper her name, my throat dry.
The darkness thickens, pressing in on me, candles gutter in protest. I let it all go, turn to the icy air where there is no one to harm; no one to harm me. It’s winter now, cold snow under my running feet. There’s evergreen and cedar and blood in the snow where I clean my blades next to dead strangers.
“Bria, can you help me?” I plead, my voice a tremor in the stillness.
When I break her rules too much, she hides from me. I must have failed her again.
“Bria. Sister, I need your help,” I whisper, the words rasping like sandpaper against my throat. “It’s cold. I can’t focus. Tell me what’s real.”
Snowflakes sting my bare arms. The ground rumbles under me in the darkness where I’ve left the machinery of the mine behind.
From the top of a mossy deer stand, I glance down to see a pale-skinned man with blond curls lying dead by the stream, and there’s my little sister Bria beside him, her crescent eyes filled with tears as she looks over the boy’s body. I climb down and run to her.
My sister is a frail child, her copper skin muted with cold, her lips blue. She says nothing, just shivers with me in the expanse of white, her thin rags with swirling designs doing nothing to protect her from the wind.
I smile at her. “Bria.”
She steps away from the man and walks over.
“It will be over soon,” Bria says, offering her hand. “Let’s go.”
And we step into another dream. And another.
Chapter 5
