Only Ashes Remain

by Rebecca Schaeffer

  Kovit looked to Nita, and she shrugged.

  “Why did you attack me?”

  He hesitated, and Kovit’s knife dug into his face. Allen whimpered, snuffling and snotting as the tears choked him. Kovit shuddered, a soft moan escaping his lips.

  Allen tried to turn his face away, but it only made the knife cut deeper, and he stopped, voice nothing more than a whimper. “The money. Please.”

  “What money?” Nita pressed.

  “I saw the video of you on the internet.” His watery eyes flicked down to the dried blood on her now-healed neck. “People will pay a lot of money for you.”

  Nita frowned. So this was some random attack? But what were the chances?

  Something was missing here.

  Kovit sensed it too. He tilted his head to the side. “Where are you from?”

  “Buffalo.”

  “Buffalo. New York.” Kovit made a face and said in distaste, “You’re one of that bounty hunter gang. The Pompasaurus?”

  “The Pomadors.” His voice was mildly strangled with offense, and Nita rolled her eyes. Why did people always pick such stupid names for their groups?

  “That.” Kovit’s eyes narrowed. “And why were you in Toronto?”

  Allen stared at them, brows furrowed, lip quivering. “I told you. She’s all over the internet.”

  A chill slid down Nita’s spine that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. “Are you saying you came specifically to Toronto to hunt me?”

  “Well, yeah.” He swallowed again, and the fine dusting of stubble across his face scraped against Kovit’s knife.

  Nita frowned. “How did you know where I was?”

  He hesitated, and Kovit slid the knife in deeper. Allen tried to scream, but Kovit cut off his airways so it turned into a desperate choke.

  “Answer her,” Kovit hissed.

  “I bought the information,” he gasped, once Kovit had eased up on his airways. “Online.”

  “And it included that I would be on this subway at this specific time?” Nita’s voice was dry.

  Allen hesitated, and Nita frowned. Then her eyes widened.

  She yanked her phone out of her pocket. It was warm. Too warm.

  She stared at it. She’d been so careful. So certain.

  Idiot.

  She should have copied the information and ditched the phone. Let her mother toss it out the window.

  She yanked the back of the phone off and popped the battery out. She pocketed each part of the phone separately.

  “We need to go,” Nita murmured to Kovit. “We need to go now, before more people show up.”

  Kovit nodded, then turned to the man. “Did you bring any friends today?”

  “I thought one person would be plenty to take on a little girl.” Allen’s eyes narrowed. “But my associates will learn from my mistake. They’ll come in force next time.”

  Great. Just what Nita needed. Black market hunters out for both money and vengeance.

  Allen’s eyes flicked to Kovit. “Though I would have thought twice about coming alone if I’d known you’d hired a zannie for protection.”

  Kovit’s jaw clenched. “What makes you think she hired me?”

  Allen stared at him. “Zannies only have employers and victims.”

  Kovit’s eyes narrowed, fingers tightening on his knife.

  “He’s my friend.” Nita’s voice was quiet.

  Allen gave her a pitying look. “Zannies don’t have friends, they’re not capable. You’re a fool if you think differently.”

  Nita caught the look of hurt that crossed Kovit’s face before it transformed into rage.

  “No, you’re the fool.” Nita whispered, as Kovit’s knife dug in and peeled the skin of his cheek off in one neat slice. The piece of flesh hung on the blade a moment before Kovit flicked it off.

  Allen opened his mouth to scream, but before he’d filled his lungs, Kovit leaned forward and shoved his switchblade in the back of his neck.

  “You don’t know me.” Kovit’s voice was cold.

  It was an excellent strike. Very little blood, instant death from the spinal cord severing. Neat. Tidy. The kind of death Nita liked. Kovit really was good at what he did.

  Allen’s body slumped against the pillar, and Kovit sighed softly, his eyes dark and heavy-lidded as the last trickle of pain slid through him. He examined the crumpled form with regret. “I would have liked to play awhile.”

  Nita shivered and looked away from the hungry expression on his face. She could see his imagination in the curl of his smile and the flash of his teeth. It made her body want to huddle in a corner and hide.

  Voices echoed through the platform, becoming louder as a group of shadows headed their way. Their shoes clicked on the cement floor, and Nita’s eyes narrowed.

  The train pulled into the platform with a whoosh of air. Kovit took her still-bloody hand, and she stepped over the dead body and followed him. Her shoe made a small bloody half footprint to match the scuffed handprints.

  Nita glanced back at the crumpled form against the pillar. He looked small and fragile, as though he’d just slumped against the pillar to rest from a long day of work and fallen asleep, sliding down to curl at the base.

  The train doors slid shut, and they were rolling away, body disappearing from sight.

  Twelve

  “YOU HAVE BLOOD all over your shirt.” Kovit said, his voice soft.

  Nita looked down, and sure enough, her entire gray INHUP shirt was dark red with streaks of blood. It formed a strange almost Rorschach pattern. It looked kind of like a man falling, unraveling as he went.

  Nita edged closer to Kovit, glancing surreptitiously around the car. There were only a few people, and no one had noticed them yet.

  Kovit unzipped his sweater and handed it to her. She put it on without hesitation, zipping it up to hide the gore. It was still warm, and it pressed the cooling blood on the shirt against her skin, making her shiver.

  More people got on at the next stop, and Nita shifted closer to Kovit, away from the press of strange bodies. She kept her neck tucked into the sweater and shoved her bloody hands into the pockets. Her eyes stayed trained on the red stripes on the gray floor, slightly raised.

  Kovit pulled her toward two seats facing backwards. The seats were strangely laid out, facing every possible direction so they looked haphazardly thrown in the car.

  The two of them sat in tense silence. Nita wondered what would happen when the body was discovered. Were there security cameras? Had they left fingerprints? Were their fingerprints on file?

  She’d been in Toronto less than a day and with Kovit less than an hour before she’d been involved in a murder.

  And she hadn’t even had a chance to dissect the body.

  No, we aren’t supposed to think like that.

  Why not? He was evil. We didn’t know him. Why shouldn’t we want to dissect him?

  Because . . . well, actually, yeah.

  She closed her eyes and tried to pretend she didn’t feel the eyes of the people in the train car on her. In her pocket, her hand twitched for a scalpel. What she would have given for a chance to take that body apart. She just wanted a few hours of peace. Of straight lines and clear glass jars. Of labels and weights.

  Nita pulled her phone from her pocket, and carefully examined each piece for physical bugs. Pulling the battery meant that the phone couldn’t be tracked by any spyware on the device, but it wouldn’t help if someone had just stuck a physical tracking device on there.

  There was nothing.

  She looked down at the two pieces of the phone and thought of leaving it on the subway. It wasn’t like she could ever use it again.

  But then she had a better idea.

  She pocketed it as the subway doors opened, and Kovit tugged her sleeve.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “The blood is seeping through your clothes.”

  Nita looked down and saw he was right. She hunched over herself, trying to hide the stains. They le
ft the train and ascended the stairs. They were in a transfer station, and Kovit snagged a touristy T-shirt on a newsstand and bought it.

  They found a handicapped washroom, and Nita took the new T-shirt from him and went inside.

  The room was grimy, and there were stray pieces of toilet paper on the floor. But it was empty and she was alone.

  Nita locked the door.

  She leaned against the wall and just breathed, taking huge gulps of air and trying to steady her nerves, calm the adrenaline rush.

  Finally, she stripped off Kovit’s sweater and the grimy T-shirt and used paper towels and the bathroom sink to start washing the half-dried blood covering her body.

  The water was warm, and it melted the dried blood from her skin and soaked her body in a faint red sheen as the blood trickled down the sink drain. Nita ran her hands over her throat, where the garrote had dug into her flesh. She swallowed, the memory of pressure choking her air out and digging into her skin.

  She shook as the enormity of her situation came crashing down around her.

  Her location was up on the internet.

  There were potentially hundreds of bounty hunters after her, and she didn’t even know what her enemies looked like.

  But they all knew what she looked like.

  She pressed her forehead into the mirror and gripped the sides of the sink, bracing herself, as water trickled down her bare chest, washing all the evidence away.

  It had been necessary to kill the man. She knew it, she accepted it. But still, she waited for the guilt to hit, the sludgy feeling she got whenever she thought of eyes darkening and bodies falling, life leaching out of people.

  There was nothing.

  Nita took deep breaths and waited, telling herself it was okay to feel emotion now that it was all over. But still nothing came. She tried to remember the last time she’d cried over a murder. Had it been Reyes, her first kill?

  Yes. It had. But even though the screams from the people she’d murdered in the market had haunted her dreams, she hadn’t really cried for them. She’d felt something—guilt perhaps, though she wasn’t really sure if that was an accurate word for the strange mix of revulsion and satisfaction that came when she thought of her escape.

  But for this man, Allen, there was nothing. Just . . . emptiness.

  And that scared her more than feeling guilt ever could.

  She’d been hesitant and jittery over murdering Fabricio, but in a way that felt comforting. She wasn’t completely a bad person if she was conflicted about murder, right? In a way, her guilt made her feel human, made her feel more justified in her killing. After all, if she felt guilt, then surely that meant she was still good enough to recognize right from wrong.

  But this nothingness was different. The man in the subway was like Boulder’s guards, dead at her hand, nothing more than blurry memories of blood. Unimportant. Not worthy of the emotional capacity it would take to care.

  It was scary how desensitized to murder she was becoming.

  Nita tried to think of her future, imagine who she’d be when all of this was over, but all she could see were the blurry out-of-focus faces of a million dead black market hunters.

  She let out a long sigh. When would it end? Probably not until the whole black market was as scared of the sight of her as that receptionist was of Kovit.

  She wiped blood off her face. Now, there was a thought.

  She felt a smile curling up her lips, cracked and broken, twisted in a way that was slightly wrong. It was the kind of smile Kovit would appreciate.

  This was a disaster.

  But it was also an opportunity.

  She knew there was a group hunting her. She knew how they found her.

  This was the perfect chance for her to show everyone: Nita was not someone you should mess with.

  Thirteen

  IT TOOK ANOTHER FIFTEEN MINUTES for Nita to ensure all the blood was gone and put on the new T-shirt. The fabric was soft and deliciously clean. She still felt a bit grimy—washing blood off in the train station washroom wasn’t quite the same as a shower—but she was confident at least most of the blood was gone. She shoved her gory T-shirt into the waste bin on the way out.

  They boarded the streetcar and headed off to see the kelpie. As they rose from the underground and went along the shoreline, Nita looked out the window uneasily, not liking how close they were to the cold waters of Lake Ontario. Her mind supplied her with all sorts of stories of kelpies drowning people.

  There were a lot.

  She shuddered, wondering how many bones of his victims sat on the bottom of the lake.

  They got off at Bathurst and walked up the dark street, away from the water. Nita wasn’t comforted.

  “Whatever happens, if he tries to lure us into water, we run,” she told Kovit.

  He snorted, and turned down a long street of brick buildings advertising artsy stores, antique shops, boutique clothing, and used book stores. Despite how close they were to downtown—the lights of the CN Tower weren’t that far off—the whole area looked a bit grungy.

  “I feel like there’s no way he could lure us to the water without being extremely overt about it.”

  “He’s a kelpie. They’re semiaquatic.” Nita frowned. “His place will have water somewhere. I bet it has a pool or something in the basement that connects to the lake.”

  Kovit frowned. “Maybe.”

  “If he lures us into the basement, we leave.”

  “All right.”

  Nita didn’t know how Kovit could be so calm about this. Maybe it was simply that he’d met the kelpie before, or maybe he had less fear of dangerous unnaturals because he was one. Either way, Nita intended to keep her guard up.

  They ended up in front of a small shop. The sign out front was peeling, white paint coming off and making the sign striped. It read Antique Shop, but Nita knew a pawnshop when she saw one. The door was a dark green that looked brown in the evening light. The glass windows displayed old furniture, Victorian chaises with faded upholstery, curio cabinets full of ceramic dancing girls, all haphazardly crammed together so that you could only look at them from a distance, not actually get to them.

  The sign in the window read CLOSED, but the lights were on. Kovit knocked on the door, dislodging a sign on the door that said Sell your souls here! We pay better than the Devil and have a faster payment plan than God.

  “Interesting sense of humor.” Nita commented.

  Kovit looked at the sign and snorted. “You have no idea.”

  The door swung open suddenly, and a voice said, “It’s not a joke. Sometimes people want to sell souls to unicorns.”

  Nita looked up at the kelpie. He looked perfectly human. Maybe Kovit’s age, with skin so white it looked almost ghostly. His black hair had a slight wave to it, and his eyes were that murky hazel that seemed almost yellow.

  “I can’t tell if you’re pulling my leg or not,” Nita admitted.

  He grinned. His smile flickered like a hologram, just for a second, and another smile appeared beneath it. This one wasn’t human shaped at all. Rows and rows of needle-thin teeth, slightly yellowed, each about the length of Nita’s finger, all pressed together so tight they seemed to overlap each other, a forest of impossibly long teeth on a jaw not even remotely related to human biology.

  Then the human smile was back, like the other one had never been. Normal, flat teeth, a little too white, like they’d been bleached.

  Nita snuck a glance at Kovit, but he seemed perfectly calm. If he’d seen the glitch in the kelpie’s smile, he was hiding it very well.

  “Well, don’t stand there, come in.” The kelpie stepped aside and waved them in. Kovit entered easily, but Nita hesitated, eyes flicking over the kelpie’s face, now perfectly human. He raised his eyebrows at her, and she stepped inside.

  It was, if possible, even more cramped than it looked, and they wove their way through piles of curiosities. She bumped into a bust-high marble pillar holding a statue of a screaming horse he
ad with a lightbulb on top and a tasseled lampshade. Nita wondered who in the world would buy—or even make—something that hideous.

  The kelpie paused at the counter and turned to grin at them. “So, shall we go discuss things down in the basement?”

  Nita stared at him, then slowly turned to Kovit. This was their cue to run, though she hadn’t thought it would happen quite so fast. But Kovit just stood there, a slightly startled expression on his face.

  Nita repeated, “The basement.”

  “Yes.” The kelpie smiled. “I have a lovely underground pool there.”

  Nita stared at him, her mind not sure what the hell was happening, and if this was some sort of farce because that was the same as declaring, Come to my underground murder chamber, until the kelpie doubled over in laughter.

  Nita scowled in understanding. The twat was playing a joke on them.

  “Oh, God, Kovit, I knew you wouldn’t warn her. The look on her face.”

  “I thought your sense of humor had improved.” Kovit’s voice was dry.

  “Ever the optimist.”

  Nita turned to Kovit. “He did this to you, and you didn’t warn me?”

  “No, he invited us to chat over dinner, picked a beachside restaurant, and suggested we all go swimming together.” Kovit’s voice was deadpan. “It wasn’t funny then, either.”

  The kelpie continued laughing. “Oh, it was priceless. I still remember that moment of horror on your face. Your life flashing before your eyes. It was beautiful.”

  Nita scowled. “It’s not funny.”

  He grinned at her. “Yes it was. You looked like all your worst nightmares had come true, and you couldn’t believe they would be so blunt about it.”

  Nita’s scowl deepened.

  “I can’t resist. Every time they come in, they always think the same damn thing. Kelpie, water, basement murder chamber.” The kelpie grinned at her, eyes dancing with mischief. “Really, if they’d stop stereotyping, then the pranks wouldn’t work.”

  Nita raised an eyebrow. “So you don’t have a pool in the basement where you murder people?”