Bloodbath

by Stephanie Ahn

  I press my hands to her cheeks and meet her eyes. “It’s okay. You defended yourself, you survived, that’s all that matters right now. You did exactly what you had to, and you’re going to be okay. Got it?”

  I keep her focused on me until she nods, her tense shoulders relaxing just enough to stop shaking.

  “He bled over there.”

  The alien voice raises every hair on my arms at once. It’s rasping and reed-thin but hauntingly melodic, each piercing syllable hanging in the still air long after it’s been spoken. I turn to its source—Nikki. Even as I watch, the wrinkles on her face are receding, her chalky skin returning to a color much closer to its original hue. I only now notice that her colorful choker is gone from her throat; she has it clutched in one hand, its frayed ends dangling over her knuckles.

  “You can work with blood,” she continues in that same voice. “You can find him, can’t you?”

  I follow her pointing finger past the tangle of Isabella’s wheelchair and the splintered remains of the living room table, to a dark stain on the glass-strewn beanbag nearby. I make my way over, pulling my penknife out of my coat, and crouch to slice some of the soaked fibers off. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Nikki exhale and sink to the floor next to Izzy, cradling her injured arm.

  I get out my glasses, examining them until I find a pair of specific sigils carved into the sides of the frame. A smear of blood on each sigil, and the view through the lenses shifts; instead of revealing all active and potential magical energy in the vicinity, my glasses are now tuned into a single frequency. When I put them on, I see the bloodstain on the floor glowing like a scarlet taillight. There’s a fainter, similarly colored impression stamped onto the hardwood right next to it, vaguely foot-shaped. And another, and another, and another, creating a fresh trail out the door and into the hallway.

  “You,” I say, pointing at Nikki. “I need to talk to you. Later. For now, can you take care of Izzy?”

  Nikki still looks haggard and in pain, but she’s now almost totally back to her human appearance. She hesitates, glancing down at the choker in her hand. Then she presses it to her chest, meets my gaze, and nods firmly as she can with her tiny stature and limited shoulder movement. As she presses closer to Isabella, Isabella leans into the crook of her neck. Izzy also extends a hand to her side, draping her fingers lightly over her gun.

  “I’ve… still got two rounds,” she says. She sounds uncertain at first, but with each word her voice grows steadier and stronger, her gaze more focused and alert. “And I think the neighbors called the cops.”

  Nikki tilts her head, ever so slightly. “They’re still on the line,” she whispers, whistling undertones creeping through the sentence. “I can hear them through the wall.”

  I almost respond to that—then I shake my head. Priorities, remember priorities.

  Isabella glances at Nikki, then at me. Her hand curls more decisively around the gun. “We’ll be alright.”

  The approaching sound of sirens confirms what Nikki said. I give both her and Isabella a firm nod. Then I follow the trail of glowing footsteps out the door.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tag, You're It

  There’s nowhere for this guy to hide. His footsteps are like neon signs on the sidewalk, a glaring record of each time his soles impacted the pavement. And this early in the morning, there are fewer pedestrians to trample and scatter the energy remnants. He’s screwed.

  Spatters of blood adorn the trail for the first block or so, then cut off; he must have wrapped the bullet wound. My breath is coming in shallow, burning pants, and the simmering discomfort spurs me on, like an engine warming up.

  I can catch up to him. I can make him pay.

  I swing around a corner and find myself at the gaping entrance to an underground parking garage. The scarlet footsteps lead down and in; I follow them, my feet skidding down the smooth incline. As I pass the parking attendant’s booth, I glimpse the person inside raising a doughy, freckled cheek from where it’s pressed against the counter and blinking groggily as I race by.

  The lights turn a grimy, green-tinted shade, like someone’s stuck fluorescent mold to the ceiling in patches. Everything looks dirtier than it actually is—and yet, my path announces itself loudly and clearly. It’s actually getting brighter and easier to see, nearly blinding me with its urgent glow.

  He’s close.

  The trail gets jumbled where his feet stuttered in hesitation—maybe too much blood loss. Then the footsteps veer sharply to the right, past two neat rows of cars into the space beyond. I squeeze my way between a turquoise sedan and a brown two-seater stained with incriminating scarlet handprints, then a white rustbucket and a red convertible. The trail leads straight ahead, right between an empty parking space and a black van—

  Black van. I stop short. Black van with blacked-out windows, doors wide open, currently surrounded by four burly men dressed in dull grays. Two of them are eating burgers, one is sipping from a water bottle, and the last is shoving three French fries into his mouth at once. Well, he was. Now he’s staring at me, the fries hanging limply from his mouth.

  A moment of stunned silence. I stare at the men, and they stare back. Then the van jostles, and a head of slick, corn blond hair sticks out the backseat.

  “Garrett, more water,” it calls gruffly, in an accent that sounds like it’s turning the words over under a heavy tongue. “I’m still bleedi—”

  He sees me. He has a face cut from craggy rock, with a strong, pronounced brow only rivaled by his square chin. His eyes widen beneath bushy white eyebrows, glinting the purest shade of ice blue.

  “It’s the blood witch!” he shouts. “Kill her!”

  The burgers and fries drop to the ground. Greasy hands start pulling shiny black handguns out of holsters.

  I hightail it back behind a row of cars—just as I do, I hear the CRACK of a gun and the puncturing of a metal hood. Shit shit shit shit shit. Another CRACK CRACK CRACK—shattering glass, concrete impact echoing off the ceiling and floor. I scramble onto my knees behind the turquoise sedan, hunkering down with my ears ringing and my head full of bright white fear.

  I see a light. Something gently glowing, hopeful and encouraging, coming from below. I look down… and it’s my godsdamned sigil.

  “Yes, I know they’re trying to kill me,” I hiss down at my own abdomen. I wish I could punch it without impairing my ability to survive this encounter. Then I realize the light makes a lovely targeting beacon for the guys with guns—I try to cover the sigil with my arms, but the light beams cheerfully through the gap between them. “Gods fucking dammit, Lilith!”

  “You’re so rude,” Lilith says from behind me. I whip around and there she is, crouched right beside a car’s taillight, pouting with mock hurt. But her eyes glint and her tail flicks idly behind her, betraying the insincerity of the expression. “The whole point of being a damsel in distress is that you make people want to save you.”

  I am way too strung out to exchange banter right now. “It doesn’t matter if you want to save me, you have to,” I snap without thinking. “If I die I go to Purgatory, remember? No soul-in-a-jar for you.”

  Lilith blinks, very slowly, like an owl. I hear echoing shouts—the men are almost here. “…You’re right,” she says, eventually. Like she’s got all the time in the world. Every enunciated syllable makes my limbs jitter and my hair rise on end, and my feet are twitching with the need to push off and bolt. “If you die, I can’t have you. But hey, nothing I can do about that. No bricks in here. Besides, a bullet hole or two might teach you some manners.”

  She stands up and walks away.

  My jaw hangs open as I watch her go. The gunmen must be just as surprised as I am, because I only hear one more CRACK before all sound ceases.

  Lilith faces them and grins, teeth flashing, pupils lengthening into slits. Then she points at me and calls, “She’s over here!”

  I curse, get up, and run.

  The peace lasts for a secon
d longer, probably because the goons are still baffled by Lilith’s presence. In that time, I manage to slide into the space between two cars, clipping my shoulder on a side mirror—and the inevitable hail of bullets graces the air. Fuck, aren’t these guys afraid of witnesses? If I get onto the open street, will they stop shooting—or will they just shoot everyone in sight? Can I take that risk, no matter how small?

  Survival first, ethical questions later, I decide as I sprint for new cover. One fire at a ti—

  A spear of fire rams into my left shoulder and bicep. I gasp, losing precious air with the sound. Gods fucking dammit, where’s that numb shock response when I need it? The pain turns blunt and heavy, like a physical weight dragging me down to one side. One of my knees buckle—but I use the sideways momentum to make a sharp turn and keep running, barely staying upright.

  Jarring reverberations spread through my arm in seconds, reaching down to stab petulantly at my fingers. I clasp the wound with my other hand, seeping warmth coating my palm. My mind isn’t present enough to understand direction or planning—but out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse a blur of gray. The blood on my hand is already stirring with energy; I infuse it with a rush of pain and fear and desperation, compressing it into a crystalline shard like coal into a crude diamond. Then I fling it at the blur.

  The shard tugs at the muscles of my body, like an extra limb reaching out—I feel it thnk into meaty flesh. The gray figure gives a strangled shout. My tenuous connection to the shard stretches to its breaking point—the shard vanishes, and the connective tendon of magic snaps back to the scar on my neck like a rubber band.

  I slap my hand to my neck, cursing, pain boiling up under the mangled skin. Stupid useless Hell-corruption, can’t even extend my magic a few feet without—oh owch, owch, bullet in my arm. Can’t forget about that.

  Another two figures appear. They’re too far to snap shards at, and besides, I don’t know if I have the strength to try that again. As the figures raise their guns, I raise my forearms, and with them, a thin wall of telekinetic force.

  I’m bad at telekinesis. Almost as bad as I am at elementalism. Moving remote objects poltergeist-style is entirely out of the question, but the one trick Johanna made sure I knew was shields. Because sure, I can stop flesh-and-bone punches with blood magic, but bullets rip through my shards like torpedoes through water. Before the demon blood, I could keep a me-sized shield up for about four seconds, a little more if I was straining. Now I’ve got a shield the size of a trash can lid that I can keep up for one second, tops.

  I raise my shield between the two gunmen and my upper body, praying that I haven’t horribly fucked up the timing. A bullet headed for my ribcage slams into it, bouncing cleanly off but putting the whole structure into flux. A second bullet shatters it completely, but forces the bullet in a direction that narrowly misses my elbow.

  Whoever fires the third bullet is smarter; they aim for my legs.

  A searing, whip-thin firebrand grazes my right knee. It’s not the severity of the wound so much as the location that makes my leg give out. I fall forward—and keep falling, because staying still is a death sentence right now and I’m much better off this way, rolling head-over-heels and feeling my brain fluid churn as my breakfast inches up my esophagus. My knee and my arm scream and the world whirls around me as I raise another shield, purely on a hunch—the bullet that careens off of it tells me that, for once, my gut was right. My glasses fall off somewhere along the way, and I don’t care enough to retrieve them.

  As I roll onto my side, clutching my bloody arm, I finally see it—the entrance to the garage, shining with emerging daylight, sloping upward like a ramp to heaven. My renewed hope brings desperate strength, and I kick off from the concrete floor like a champion sprinter. I reach the beginning of the slope—just a short climb, just need to make it out—

  “Hey, what’s going on?” says a voice behind me just as I’m halfway up the ramp. I whip around to see the parking attendant stepping out of his booth, freckles twitching as he squints through sleep-heavy eyelids. His neon vest is inside out, showing frayed black stitching. “What’s that noise?”

  Oh gods. Oh gods oh gods oh gods, he’s so young. I’m instantly in reverse, running for him, reaching out.

  “Run!” I shout. “Kid, run! Ru—”

  He turns, and the man with icy eyes shoots him twice in the chest.

  The kid—he can’t be more than nineteen years old, oh gods—convulses like a marionette. As his shoulder slams against the open kiosk door, Icy Eyes is already aiming again—I’m trying to change direction but my shoes are skidding against the sandy concrete, I can barely stay standing, much less raise a shield—

  The first bullet sets my thigh on fire. The second goes straight through the fleshy part of my waist, off-center. I fall onto my bleeding knee—the pain is everywhere, clawing up my thigh to my hip, squeezing my ribs, paralyzing my arm. I take the pain, all the blood and strength spilling from me, grab hold of it, sink my teeth into it, and wring it all into one last, desperate climb up the ramp.

  For just a second, the agony is drowned out by a different roar of sensation, one of elation and relief and raw, brute power. I tap into the deepest recesses of my biology, the shit that the universe or God or whatever won’t even let you know about until you’re lifting a car off a toddler or wrapping your hand around the scorching barrel of an assault rifle. I do that thing blood mages are famous for—I make a shitty deal, buying myself survival now for a cost that I’ll regret later.

  I feel the grip of my rubber soles on the ground with every bounding step. My body has a new, overpowered engine that my skeleton can’t support, but I only need to keep this up until I’m safe. I hear nothing but the rush of blood in my ears—a bullet slices a bloody line up my back, nicking a shoulder blade and whizzing past the tip of my ear. Another one—a strangely aimed angle, or a ricochet—grazes my cheek.

  The light comes closer… engulfs me… and then I’m out, I’m out I’m out I’m out. A handful of early commuters stops to stare at me blankly, not comprehending the meaning of my state. And there, something yellow—taxi. Taxi.

  “TAXI!” I scream, my voice pitching itself two octaves higher than normal. I wrestle with the door handle, bloodying it, then yank the door open before the driver can stop me.

  “You’re ruining the seats!” he shouts as I collapse into the backseat.

  “Drive!” I scream back. I guess something about my grimy, bloodstained face convinces him, because the car lurches forward.

  “Fuck, fuck man, you need to go to a hospital, fucking hell—” the driver is babbling.

  “No hospital,” I wheeze, struggling to haul the door shut without falling out of the car. The momentum of a sharp turn completes the task for me. “No hospital, no—no hosp—no—” A swimming dizziness shoves me into the seats, making me gasp for air. Silver-hot flares race up the backs of my legs and explode in my lower back, imaginary shrapnel piercing my lungs. The effects of my power boost are wearing off. I’m crashing.

  My limbs are heavy stone, impossible to lift. Like an elephant’s sitting on my chest. Like thick Velcro cuffs are strapping me down.

  “No hospital!” I scream again to no one at all. With that last burst of stubbornness, I jam my bloody, shaking hand into my coat and pull out my phone. Blood is horribly inconducive to using touch phones; my eyes lose focus twice just while I’m trying to unlock it. Somehow, I manage to activate a call.

  “Luce,” I gasp into the phone as soon as she picks up. “Luce, help.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Know Your Enemy

  I never learned how to resist pain. I learned how to feel it, how to embrace it, how to draw power from it. But I never learned how to keep it at bay, how to wall it off from the rest of this head I call home.

  So as the taxi lurches its way through early morning traffic, I let the pain swallow me whole.

  I don’t know how the driver finds Luce’s place. I think I might have put
the phone on speaker at some point? I vaguely remember muttering words like “shot,” “hurts,” and “blood” with my cheek pressed against the phone screen as Luce yelled through the speakers. I don’t even know.

  As the duration of the ride stretches on and on like a wad of gum, I try to do something with the pain that’s rolling off me in cloudy waves and swirling thick, blue-black patterns onto the taxi ceiling. First I try to heal myself, but of course it doesn’t work. Hasn’t worked since the demon blood. Then I try to pour some of the energy into my brain, revive my flagging consciousness and clear the mud out my ears—but with clarity of sensation comes exponentially amplified agony, and I make a strangled noise before slumping back into the cab seats. I feel so useless. All this wasted energy just floating around and I can’t do anything with it. And of course it’s all my fault.

  I think I pass out.

  I’m half-dragged, half-carried into Luce’s apartment. Two pairs of hands; I think the taxi driver is helping. Decent guy, actually, I’m glad I found him. Or maybe Luce is throwing money at him. Heck if I know, I’m barely even conscious.

  There’s a bed. Rich purple sheets. Purple is Luce’s favorite color, has been since she was a teenager. Man, she’s grown up. Pliers?

  “Stay still, Harry, please stay still…”

  The pliers go into the holes in my skin. The cold sets my teeth on edge. I try to scream but I’m too tired, so I just groan. One, two bullets gets dropped on some hard metal surface, followed by… what are those, bone fragments? Luce swaps the pliers for a scalpel, slicing thin X’s into the ebony skin on the backs of her hands. You shouldn’t do that, I want to tell her as she puts her hands on me. There’s so many important tendons there, you don’t have to risk that much for—

  Healing. You’d think it’d feel soothing, and sometimes it does. Like a deep-tissue massage. But right now I have too much torn skin and muscle, and Luce isn’t taking her time. The second she touches me all the severed membranes and muscles sprout new growth, and boy, it itches like crazy. You think papercuts itch when they heal? Try bullet wounds. It’s not quite painful, but it’s intense, and I shudder and jerk in Luce’s grasp as her magic stitches me up from the inside out.