Ten Melinoë
Ten
Melino?
One of the advantages of being an Angel is that I don’t need much sleep, though that’s mostly for the audience’s benefit, not mine. It would be horribly boring to watch a live stream of me napping. If I really can’t fight the exhaustion, I can usually climb into a tree, strap myself to a sturdy branch, and get in an hour or two.
But I can’t afford it now. Not on this Gauntlet. I’ve already spent far too long hunched on the side of the road, waiting for the bullet wound in my shoulder to knit shut and for the blood to stop running. The viewers are probably starting to get restless and fed up. So I use one of the other tools Azrael has granted me: stimulants.
The sleek, silver capsules turn my veins into live wires and fling my eyelids open. My limbs feel lighter, my muscles stronger. They come with the slight drawback of increasing my heart rate—and thus making me a slightly worse shot. And when the effects of the pill wear off, my body feels unbearably heavy, heavier than it did before, and dark thoughts crowd my head like storm clouds.
I know the risks of taking a stimulant right now. But I tell myself that I’ll be dealing with the withdrawal symptoms from the safety of a Caerus helicopter, away from the cameras, the Lamb’s body growing cold hundreds of feet below. Azrael will tuck me under an electric blanket for the chills and smooth back my hair, letting me sleep until the drugs pass through my system. Or at least until the post-Gauntlet parties and photo shoots start.
So I take one of the pills and swallow it. The capsule slides coldly down my throat. The effect is almost instantaneous: My muscles seize, my heart starts to pound, and my real eye fills with a rush of blood. A little bit of moisture pools along my lash line, and I raise my hand to dab it away.
There . Now I can run for hours.
The sun is up, and even though the dark is better, because I can see in it and my prey can’t, the light makes me feel hopeful. Or maybe it’s just the stimulants. Either way, I streak through the forest. I leap over rocks and roots, dodge tree trunks and bushes.
The red dot of the Lamb’s tracker is pulsing in front of me. She’s moving—but not fast enough. I’m gaining too much ground on her. The trees, the bushes, the rocks all blur as I run past them, just smudges of green-brown. There’s a faint crackle of thirst in my throat. I swallow hard to shove it down. I have to redeem myself with a swift kill, calculated and brutal. If I stop now, I’ll lose. I’ll lose the Gauntlet. And then I’ll lose myself—or whatever part of me I have left. She’ll vanish with the plunging of a syringe.
I keep running.
The forest opens onto a scraggly clearing, tree branches arching overhead like a dome. The beat of the tracker is close now, so close. Yards, not miles. Just another few minutes. My mouth tastes like metal, the way it always does when I’m on the stimulants. The way it always does before a kill.
The tracker blares an alarm, and my vision burns red. I throw out my arm and grasp a nearby tree trunk to stop myself. I’ve built up so much momentum that my elbow joint nearly tears out of its socket.
I bend at the waist, gasping for air. Pain shudders from the wound in my shoulder and down my arm, but the stimulants keep it dull, at a distance. With this exertion, there’s a risk of the skin tearing open again. It’s a risk I’ll have to take, though. I need the Lamb dead. I’ll deal with the fallout later.
Still panting hard, I whip my head around the clearing. No movement.
My comms chip must be glitching. I exhale with annoyance. I tap my temple to reset the tracker, but then catch something out of the corner of my eye: a length of red fabric knotted around a tree trunk.
It’s a strange sight, here in the middle of the woods, miles away from civilization, and my curiosity is piqued enough to examine it. My comms chip buzzes, like a fly trapped in my ear. I tap my temple again and the nasally sound fades to a low whine. I’ll have to call Azrael; he can fix it.
I reach the tree and tug at the red fabric. It’s ratty and a little damp. When I touch it, my thumb comes away dirty. With something the color of rust.
I stagger backward, brushing my palms to try to get the blood off. It’s not that I have a weak stomach—but the breeze is carrying an even stranger scent toward me, one of rotting meat, and the stimulants are coursing through my body, making me feel sick with unspent adrenaline. My vision rocks. My hands are trembling.
Overhead, the sky darkens. I only notice because it happens so suddenly, the scattered light fading from gold to gray. My palms feel sticky. And the smell is getting stronger, thicker on the wind that blows my pale hair around my face.
I raise a shaking hand and tap my temple again. Once. Twice. There’s only the fuzzy sound of static. Panic surges up my throat, squeezing out my breath in short, quick gasps. I wish I hadn’t taken the stimulant, because now I can’t tell if the rocketing of my heart is because of the drugs, or because I’m really in danger. Caerus has ripped everything out of my brain and installed new wiring. But there are tangles and faulty connections, short circuits and cables with fizzing, frayed ends. My body and mind don’t quite work in sync anymore.
But the screaming I hear is real. So are the footsteps. I snap my head up, and my vision explodes with red.
The Lamb breaks through the trees, her brother right behind her. She skids to a halt when she sees me, letting out a choked sound.
The brother reaches for his rifle. But my muscles are coiled and taut with the effects of the stimulant, and my instincts are quicker. I unsheathe the knife from my boot and hurl it at him.
It spins through the air, catching the sleeve of his jacket just as I intended. I can’t kill him, but I can stop him. The blade sinks into a nearby tree trunk with a thwack , pinning him there. The brother lets out a furious snarl of protest, straining and fumbling to free himself.
I’m across the clearing in seconds. I grab the rifle from his hand and toss it into the bushes, out of reach. The brother’s face is red with the flush of anger and his eyes are full of hate. He reaches for me with his free hand, but I take a quick step back, and his fingers just claw at the air.
“Fuck you,” he bites out.
I suppress the instinct to strike him. The rule is that I’m not allowed to kill anyone on my Gauntlets except the Lamb, but the guidelines are a bit fuzzy when it comes to how much “nonfatal” damage I can cause. But rage and temper don’t fit with my Angel persona, and torture isn’t part of my repertoire of skills. I’ll leave that to Lethe. My kills are cold, swift, precise. Bloodless, mostly.
“Bitch,” he hisses.
I hope the cameras don’t catch the slight clench of my jaw.
With the brother still stuck fast to the tree, I turn around to take my kill. But before I can, my rifle is snatched off my back. It’s so sudden and so forceful that I topple backward, onto the ground.
When I scramble to my feet, the Lamb is holding my rifle aloft. Her whole body is shaking. There are scratch marks across her nose and though her earth-colored eyes are bright, her gaze is unsteady.
“Don’t move,” she says, voice thick.
I still myself.
I’m not afraid of her. From the way she’s holding the gun, I can tell she doesn’t know how to use it. Moreover, I don’t think she really would. It took years of training before I could pull the trigger without flinching, knowing there was a person at the end of the barrel. Years to annihilate my conscience, my pity, my weak human heart. To become the frigid killing creature I am now.
By contrast, the Lamb’s humanity suddenly overwhelms me. It’s the dried blood on her face. The warm color in her cheeks. The way her chest heaves with every breath. The way her finger trembles against the trigger and her throat pulses as she swallows. In the mingling of terror and blustery courage, she looks so alive .
Overhead, the sky darkens further. There’s a rumble of thunder, and lightning cracks through the coal-colored clouds.
The Lamb’s gaze flickers upward, and I seize the moment. I launch myself at her, knocking her over and pinning her to the ground. My rifle slips from her grasp.
She chokes out a wordless protest as I straddle her hips, one hand pressing down on her throat.
Thunder crashes. Tears squeeze from her eyes.
I press down harder.
It takes five minutes to strangle someone. So it won’t be my quickest kill, but it will be bloodless. The Lamb reaches up and claws weakly at my face.
“Please,” she croaks.
I can hear the low hum of the cameras flitting around our heads, capturing every twitch, every breath. The Lamb’s eyes are shining, the color of damp leaves, of moss soaked with morning dew, deep green with flecks of brown. I feel her start to go limp.
And then I feel a droplet on my back. The coldness seeps through my hunting suit. At first I think it’s sweat, or moisture from the trees. The wind comes howling into the clearing, whipping my hair around my face, nearly tearing it loose from its sleek ponytail.
The downpour comes with another strike of lightning.
I flinch as the rain gushes over me. It’s only a matter of seconds before I’m soaked to the skin. The Lamb’s hair is plastered to her face, her eyelids fluttering. Her lips move vaguely, but I can’t hear her desperate, feeble pleas over the deafening rush of rainwater.
My vision ripples. Steadies, then ripples again. There’s a fizzing, staticky sound—water leaking into my prosthetic?
When I blink through the rainwater, the Lamb is gone.
There’s a body beneath me, but it’s not hers. It’s a small body, delicate, frail-limbed. Blond hair spreads out around the girl’s head. Her face is bloodless, blue eyes wide and fixed on nothing. Blood stains the front of her dress, spouting from a bullet hole in her chest.
From my bullet. The water washing over me, weighing my limbs down. Every other sound fades into the periphery. There’s only the pounding rain, my heart skipping beats as I stare at the girl who is not the girl, at the blood that trickles from the corner of her mouth.
No.
No.
It’s not real. I’m not here again. I raise a hand to wipe the water from my face, but I can’t even feel it. My fingers are numb and so are my cheeks. The scene in front of me flickers, like a tablet screen trying to load, and then I see the Lamb again. She’s moving groggily but determinedly, trying to wriggle out from underneath me. In lifting my hand from her throat, I’ve given her just enough slack to get loose.
“Don’t,” I pant, but the word is swallowed by the roar of the rain.
Her throat is red, red, red where my hands have pressed down on it. I reach for her again.
And then I feel a sudden, breathtaking pain as something is thrust hard against my temple. Static crackles agonizingly in my ear, driving needles into my brain. I sway for a moment, my body going limp.
I fall. Blackness swallows my vision and pulls me under before I even hit the ground.