Death's Rival

Beast does not run away, she growled softly.

 

But I could. If I wanted. A large part of me did want to head for the hills. Every time I blinked I saw the man I had left in the Learjet. Black road. Blink. Bloody body hanging on the jet’s bulkhead wall. Open eyes. The man I had left alone, unprotected, to be tortured by vamps. Black road. Blink. Bloody body. Open eyes. Black road. The hanging, bloody man had been familiar, part of an old memory, a memory from my Cherokee past. Familiar, but fading. Already the vision of the man in the past had merged with the dead man of tonight. The familiar, hanging pose. The distant memory tumbling into the present, yet not quite sliding into place. I had seen such a thing when I was a young child. I was nearly certain. Nearly.

 

For months, little bits and pieces of my current life had fallen away or were ripped from me, much like the man’s flesh had been flayed off. But my grief had all been internal—not overt—and therefore easily pushed away, shunted aside in favor of more immediately important matters. Ignored. But at the sight of the tortured flyboy, and the half-recalled memory, the enormity of my life changes had socked me in the face like some dark demon risen from hell.

 

Black road. Blink. Bloody body. Open eyes. Black road. Grip bike. Apply more speed. Bend into the turn. Wind beating at me. My breath was hot under the faceplate, almost panting. Almost a sob.

 

I’d lost my best friend, Molly, when I killed her sister. I could still feel the eighteen inches of vamp-killer-blade sliding into Evangelina. Her demon-heated blood, pumping across my hand.

 

I’d lost my boyfriend Rick LaFleur when he was attacked by werewolves and were-cats, and I had been unsuccessful in helping him with his shift-to-furry problem. I had been forced to say good-bye to him while he went to a special training camp outside Quantico for agents of Big Brother—PsyLED—the Psychometry Law Enforcement Division of Homeland Security.

 

I was, for the first time in my adult life, essentially homeless, friendless, empty, and alone. Just as I had been at age twelve when I wandered out of the forest after being stuck in Beast form for decades. But this time, I remembered some of my past, and the memories left me flayed just as the pilot had been. Just as the man had been in the old memory. Had he? I remembered blood. I think. But the distant past was shifting and changing and drifting away. Black road. Blink. Bloody body. Open eyes. Black road. My own bleeding was all internal.

 

I was stupid and pathetic and spineless. Everything I’d done, every decision I’d made, had taken me to a place I had never intended to go—working long-term for the vamps instead of just beheading the crazy ones. Learning that some of them were thinking, feeling creatures. Not human—but not worthy of death just because of their vamp-nature. Black road. Blink. Bloody body. Open eyes. Black road.

 

Tears started to fall behind the face-shield, caught by the air currents sweeping up underneath like mini tornadoes, cool and damp across my face and into my hair. I deserved losing my best friend because I’d killed her sister. I had blood on my hands and on my soul and I’d added to the toll tonight—it was my fault that the men in the jet were dead, because I hadn’t considered that someone would come after me, because I hadn’t taken precautions. I didn’t recognize myself anymore in the killing machine I was becoming.

 

Jane is killer. Only killer, Beast murmured.

 

“Go away,” I shouted into the teeth of the wind. She growled and went silent. I gave the engine gas, speeding into the dark, passing headlights that left smears on my retinas. Bent low over the bike, leaning into the turns, taking chances that would have been deadly to anyone with human reflexes. Black road. Blink. Bloody pilot. Bloody bearded man. Nails. Antlers. Open eyes. Black road. The bloody body was a nightmare memory brought forward in time. Was the man from my past someone I had cared for? A white man? How would that be possible? And I’d never know, not for sure.

 

Lost. They were all lost. Everyone I knew from my first life. Etsi, my mother, Edoda, my father, Elisi, my grandmother. All gone. All dead. Decades and decades ago. And now everyone I truly loved and truly trusted from my current life, Molly and Rick, were gone. I screamed out my grief, in long, hoarse sobs as the miles and black pavement raced beneath me, and wind buffeted the misery that dogged me. I screamed until there was only the wind against my clothes and the road beneath my tires. Black road. Blink. Bloody pilot. Open eyes. Black road.

 

When the tears finally stopped, my voice was hoarse and my throat was raw. I was empty and purposeless and useless. Jane is killer only, Beast thought at me.

 

“Shut up,” I whispered. “I didn’t kill the man with the antlers through his body.”

 

Jane is killer only.

 

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