Fury’s Kiss

by Nicola R. White

  “Thanks sooo much.” I turned back to the sleazebag in the motel room with me. “I was just so worried about my sister breaking down somewhere, you know? There are, like, a lot of really crazy people out there. Like that Slasher guy? So scary, right?”

  “Uh-huh. You gotta be careful.” He kept it short, clearly trying to get rid of me.

  “And, like, that body they just found at that bar? Spyder’s? Sooo crazy, right?”

  That got his attention. “They found a body at Spyder’s?” I watched him, trying to gauge the sincerity of his reaction. Something wasn’t adding up, but I couldn’t figure out what.

  Then it came to me—I’d seen him buying a newspaper at the gas station. He had to know something had happened to Miller. It had been front-page news.

  I took another quick glance around the small room. The bag of Doritos lay over by the television, but no newspaper. Why was he pretending not to know what had happened?

  “Ohmigod, it sounded sooo creepy,” I gushed, staying in character as I tried to pump him for more information. “It was in the paper this morning and it was, like, really mysterious.”

  “I was just at that place last night with my buddy Clint, but he ditched me for some chick. Man, she was a bitch, too.” He laughed, but his eyes stared, cold and watchful, like he was trying to provoke a reaction from me.

  Sticks and stones, Walker. Don’t let him upset you. The last thing I needed right now was to get angry and end up with another dead body on my hands.

  Unfortunately, the voice in my head wasn’t talking things quite so calmly. Let us show him our true face, she hissed. Would he then be so eager to jest?

  Was that the ancient goddess version of ‘come over here and say that to my face’? And what was up with this ‘our’ stuff, anyway? As far as I was concerned, ‘we’ only had one face and it belonged to me. Just stay cool, Freaky, I thought at the Fury.

  I am Alecto, she hissed, not ‘Freaky’.

  OK. So freaky-me was giving herself a name now. Did that mean she intended to stick around inside my head? Taking her on this visit to the Stardust was one thing, but that didn’t mean I had any permanent vacancies that needed filling.

  She spoke up again. He is deserving. We must have our vengeance.

  Was she going where I thought she was going with this? Because I was so not interested. The first guy we’d taken out had deserved what he’d gotten, true. But this guy? The jury was still out on him. It was a fact that my life would be easier if he didn’t mention me to the cops, but I couldn’t just go around killing people because it was convenient.

  You’re a Fury, I reminded the voice. That means justice, not just killing people because they’re jerks. I’d given her the benefit of the doubt and followed this guy, but going all Furious on him would be going way too far. He hasn’t done anything to us, I reminded the thing in my head.

  He will, she hissed back. He lies. Can you not taste it? I had a crazy urge to stick out my tongue and taste the air, but I sniffed discreetly instead. There was something unpleasant about the air in the motel room, now that she mentioned it. It was faint, but bitter.

  No sooner had I detected the acrid scent than the man made a sudden movement, reaching for the small of his back to haul out a gun that had been hidden under the tail of his shirt. He grabbed up a pillow off the bed and Alecto screamed at me to move. I dodged to the side as he brought the gun up to fire through the pillow, and thanks to my newly developed reflexes, managed to dive to the left just in time to avoid serious injury. As it was, I felt a sting in my left arm, the one that had been hurt the night before, and looked down to see it dripping blood.

  “Oh, you asshole!” I exploded. “What is wrong with you? You can’t just shoot people!”

  Alecto flexed in my head. You see? He has hurt us. He would kill us. He must die.

  I wasn’t sure I was on board with the killing part of her plan, but not dying sounded pretty good. And we sure as hell didn’t have time to argue about it, not while the guy still had a gun pointed at me.

  I dove for the purse I’d dropped when I’d gone sideways and had my pepper spray out and pointed in his direction before he could track my movement with the gun. I pressed the spray nozzle before it occurred to me that spraying the stuff in a small, closed motel room would probably affect me as well as my target, but I caught myself in time to make sure the blast only lasted half a second. I narrowed my eyes, making them as small as I could, then dropped the can and took a few steps back to put as much distance between myself and the noxious spray as possible.

  Though the peppery taste of the air was far from comfortable, the oily orange liquid landed squarely on my prey and didn’t contaminate the room unbearably. Still, I grabbed a T-shirt the guy had thrown over the back of a chair and raised it to cover my mouth and nose. When I took a tentative breath in, I almost dropped the shirt to take my chances with the pepper spray. The thing reeked of sweat, cigarette smoke, and cheap body spray. I forced myself to keep the cloth in place, but resolved to hold my breath for as long as was humanly possible before allowing myself to breathe through it again.

  Unfortunately for my assailant, he had no similar protection. He’d sunk to his knees and was pawing around on the floor for the gun he’d dropped when I sprayed him, coughing and choking while tears ran through the bright orange mess covering his face. He didn’t look like much of a threat, but I knew I couldn’t let him get his hands on the gun again. I walked over to where he wheezed and scrabbled on the floor and spied the gun where it had fallen, half-hidden under the bed. I reached out with my foot and toed it toward me, then picked it up and pointed it at the guy.

  “Don’t move,” I warned as I dripped blood all over the place. “I’ve got a gun pointed at you and I will shoot you if I have to.”

  Alecto chuckled in my head. Perhaps you will listen to me next time, she suggested.

  Glad you think it’s so funny, I thought at her. How funny will it be when the cops find my blood all over the place? That shut her up for a second. I hadn’t figured out yet how I’d ended up with my own live-in Fury, but I doubted she’d had to worry about CSI in the good old days of ancient Greece.

  Maybe to pacify me, she offered up a helpful hint about my new anatomical features. You need not hold that rag to your face. This toxin you have released will not hurt us.

  Cautiously, I lowered the T-shirt and unclenched my eyes, waiting to see what would happen. A thin coating of something slid down from under my eyelids. My tear ducts were protected from the pepper spray lingering in the air, though the world was tinted with a milky, white filter, as though I wore colored contacts. There was no stinging, burning or watering, as I had expected. I tied the foul-smelling T-shirt around my arm to soak up the blood flowing from it, and hoped my healing abilities would fight off any germs the guy might have left behind.

  “Don’t shoot me,” my assailant gasped. I might have felt some sympathy for him if he hadn’t just tried to kill me.

  I’d never handled a gun before and didn’t know what to do with it or how to make sure I didn’t shoot myself, much less him, so I set it on the TV stand behind me. Then I hit the power button on the television and turned the volume up loud. Hopefully, anyone in a neighboring room would think our struggle had all been part of the program.

  I grabbed the guy under the arms and dragged him a few steps toward the bathroom, but his feet found purchase on the floor and he twisted in my grip to throw his arms around me in a bear hug. He slammed me into the wall, knocking down a generic watercolor landscape, so I head-butted him and shoved him off of me. The blow was plenty hard enough to daze him, and I gave him a push that sent him sprawling backward into the cheap fake-wood nightstand. Predictably, it collapsed.

  Between the broken furniture and the blood everywhere, there was no way the guy was going to see his deposit again.

  I hauled him to his feet a second time and backhanded him so he wouldn’t get any more bright ideas, then dragged him into the bath
room. I kicked the door shut behind me and flipped the switch to turn on the fan, then turned the cold water on full blast and shoved his head under the faucet. I didn’t know if it would do anything for the effects of pepper spray or not, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. And even if it did nothing to help the guy, I was getting a certain amount of satisfaction from seeing him gasp and gurgle under the frigid stream.

  After he was in better control of his breathing and the orange smears around his eyes had been washed off, I let him up. I flipped the toilet lid down and sat him on it, then faced him with my back to the door so it was clear he’d have to go through me if he wanted to get out.

  “So you don’t know anything about what happened at Spyder’s last night, huh? Lie to me again and I’ll make you wish you were dead.” I didn’t really plan to torture the slob, but he didn’t need to know that.

  “Who are you?” he panted. I almost said ‘your worst nightmare’ in my best Batman voice, but stopped myself just in time.

  “Never mind who I am. You just shot at me. What the fuck?”

  “What the fuck yourself. My buddy picked you up at a bar and wound up dead. That’s some black widow shit.”

  So he’d known who I was all along. I’d have to work on my disguises.

  “Your buddy deserved it,” I said. “He tried to rape me.”

  “I saw you last night,” he sneered at me. “Don’t pretend you didn’t want it. You know what they say—you can’t rape the willing.”

  I smacked him. Hard.

  My hair slithered under my ball cap in answer to my agitation, and the man’s eyes widened. It was terrifying enough when my hair was loose and doing its thing, but confined under the cap, it must have looked like something had burrowed into my skull and now wanted out. Wetness dripped down my cheeks and I reached up to swipe at the moisture under my eyes. When I looked down at my fingertips, they were red.

  My breath caught in my throat and I hesitated. Nora’s prediction was coming true—I was crying blood. But what could I do about it? I was in too deep to leave now.

  I pulled the hat off and dropped it on the floor, then pulled out the elastic confining my hair in a tight ballerina’s bun. Pleased with their freedom, the strands danced in a corona around my head and shoulders.

  “You can’t rape the willing, huh?” I turned my attention back to Miller’s buddy. “You’re on dangerous ground. Now—who are you and what do you know about me? And why did you shoot at me?”

  He looked at me, mouth working like a fish out of water.

  “What, did you not understand the first time I backhanded you?” I demanded. “Answers, now!”

  I raised my hand threateningly, but he just stammered, snappy comebacks forgotten in his terror. I grabbed a water glass off a paper coaster next to the sink and filled it from the tap, then shoved the glass at him.

  “Here. Drink.” I was pleased with my ability to strike fear into his heart, but I wasn’t going to find out anything if the trigger-happy fool couldn’t get a word out.

  He drank.

  “Now talk,” I ordered.

  He coughed a few more times, but managed to speak. “I didn’t think nothin’ of it when Clint didn’t come back to the bar last night,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Just figured he picked you up and got lucky, went home with you. First I knew something happened to him was when I saw the paper this morning.”

  “OK, so you saw the paper and then I showed up. That doesn’t explain why you jumped right to shooting at me.”

  “I saw it was you through the peephole, so I shoved the newspaper under the bed so you wouldn’t know I knew, and grabbed my gun. I recognized you from last night and figured you musta had something to do with Clint.”

  “And you didn’t think you should ask a few questions before you started shooting?”

  “Lady, you killed my buddy, then showed up looking for me. What the hell kind of questions was I gonna ask you? I figured I’d let you in, see what you wanted, and make a citizen’s arrest or something.”

  I rolled my eyes. Yeah, sure that’s what he’d intended. “You’re a real hero. What are you doing holed up in a motel room with a gun?”

  “I do construction for DeVille. They got us working on that new hospital they’re putting up outside of town.” He took a messy gulp of water and spilled half of it down his front. “Even if I hadn’t recognized you right off,” he added, “I’d have known your story was fake when you said you had the room next door. This is where the company puts us up while we’re on the job. The whole place is full of DeVille guys.”

  I made a note to work on my reconnaissance skills. “So what’s the gun for if you’re here doing construction?”

  “Protection. Can’t be too careful when you’re on the road between jobs.”

  Liar, Alecto hissed. There was no way anyone in their right mind would have shot at me for asking a few questions. Any normal person would have just let me leave and then called the cops. Aside from that, he didn’t seem to be too broken up over the death of his buddy.

  “You’re lying,” I said. “Try again.”

  He licked his lips and his eyes darted sideways toward the sink, telegraphing his next movement. I reached for him, but he shattered the glass he held before I could react. Shards flew in all directions, but he managed to keep a solid grip on a nice, sharp chunk. He lunged at me and stabbed at my face while blood ran between his fingers and down his wrist.

  Before he could jam the glass into my eye, I snapped my hand out and grabbed him by the wrist mid-thrust. I squeezed hard so he would drop the glass, but before I knew what was happening, I felt small bones shatter under my grip. I dropped his wrist like it was on fire and recoiled, horrified.

  But there was no time to get squeamish about accidentally maiming the man. He’d begun to scream and I grabbed him by the throat, desperate to keep him quiet.

  Let us kill him and be gone from here before the CSI happens, Alecto said. We clearly had some work to do on her understanding of the twenty-first century.

  The CSI happens after we leave, I told her. That’s the problem.

  Kill him, she urged again.

  I shook my head as I looked around at the mess of blood and glass. Talk about a one-track mind. But, God, what was I going to do now?

  On one hand, it made sense to kill the guy, deal with the scene as best I could, and leave. After all, he’d tried to kill me, and he was the only real link between me and Clinton Miller. Getting rid of him would make me feel a hell of a lot safer. Besides, who was to say he didn’t deserve whatever I did to him?

  On the other hand…I’d never been a believer in the death penalty. And I was pretty sure the line between good guys and bad guys was drawn clearly on the side of not killing people. I could legitimately tell myself the first death I’d caused had been self-defense, but this time?

  If I killed this guy, it would be a conscious decision to take a human life.

  Kill, Alecto whispered again.

  Her voice was persistent, persuasive. But this wasn’t like the night before, when I hadn’t realized what was happening. My actions were my own, no matter how much she whispered in my ear. Whatever I did to this guy, I couldn’t blame it on her.

  I looked at my blood-smeared reflection in the mirror over the sink, then down at the man I held at arm’s length, and made a choice.

  Whoever Tara Walker had been before last night, things were different now. I was a Fury and my instincts screamed at me to kill.

  I pulled the man close and breathed in.

  Chapter 5

  A few seconds later, I stood over an unconscious but still breathing body with my hair in a tangled, matted mess around my head. Unsatisfied, Alecto had retreated, though I could still sense her coiled up in the back of my mind.

  Kill him, she hissed at me. He deserves death.

  No, I thought at her firmly. There’s more to you—to us—than instinct. I can feel it. The bloodlust that sang to me when I looked at the man was seduc
tive, but it was wrong. Killing people was wrong.

  I opened and closed my fists, remembering the surge of strength that had come when I’d sucked the air out of the man slumped on the toilet. I’d taken enough energy from him to knock him out cold, and it hummed pleasantly through my muscles as I cocked my head and listened for noise in the adjoining rooms. After a few careful minutes of intense, active listening, I relaxed and concluded no one was coming to investigate.

  I stepped over to my unconscious attacker, careful to avoid the glass littering the linoleum floor, and picked him up. My muscles tensed with the strain of carrying a full-grown man like a child, but the energy I’d sucked from him sustained me until I could set him down in the tub, out of my way. I checked the wound on my arm and saw it had stopped bleeding already, mostly healed by the energy I’d stolen, so I untied the strip of T-shirt wrapped around it and stuffed it in my pocket.

  Then I grabbed a washcloth to use as a gag and studied the man’s destroyed wrist. It was a mess, but he would survive. Mindful of the bones I’d crushed, I decided not to make things worse by tying his wrists together. The last thing I needed was his screams of pain echoing through the motel when he woke up.

  I walked over to the mirror and grabbed a towel from the rack on the wall. After blinking the protective covering over my eyes out of the way, I wet the towel in the sink and used it to wipe the blood off my face and neck, following bloody trails from the corners of my eyes to my jaw line while I thought about what to do next. Obviously, the man in the bathtub was hiding something. It made no sense that he’d gone after me with the glass instead of just answering my questions when it became clear I had the upper hand. I drummed my fingers against the cool porcelain of the sink, thinking. I’d have to interrogate him when he woke up, but in the meantime, I would search the room for clues.