That I could believe.
“Just tell me what you want,” I said, fighting to keep my voice even. “Anything you want. Me for her? Give the word and I’ll do it.”
“Oh, now you’re making deals, are you? Isn’t that noble, sacrificing everything for your sister. But you’ve done that before, haven’t you, Jo?” He grinned that corrosive smile. “Time to do it again.”
“No!” Olivia struggled against his iron grip. He just held on until she’d worn herself out. If it had been me, I could have bent forward until his weight was on my back, flipping him, or swept a leg, or scraped his shin on the way to breaking bones in his foot. But it wasn’t me. It was my sweet, harmless, innocent sister, and she could only stand there and weep. And choke.
“Take out the weapon in your left pocket, and throw it out the door.”
I didn’t wonder how he knew about the hidden kubotan. Even I could smell the cold, pressed aluminum. I did, tossing it through the doorway leading to the living room.
“Now step back…Step back,” he repeated, when I didn’t move. “I can smell the defiance on you, Joanna, don’t you know that? Do you really think you can do something to change what’s happening here? You think you can save Olivia now like you saved her before?”
I stepped back, but instead of relaxing Butch, this seemed to provoke him. Olivia struggled, her face going red, but his grip was a crowbar wrapped around a feather. If he’d shoved that knife through my jaw, I’d have felt less horror.
“No!” My fists balled impotently at my side and fear slicked my insides and rose like a tide of tar, oiling the air around me. I knew he could smell it on me. Desperation made my words earnest. “You said you’d trade me for her! Me for her!”
“Now why would I want to trade you for her?” he asked, loosening his grip. Olivia stilled. Butch raised the blade. “When I can have you both?”
With that he began to cut.
“Joanna?” Olivia’s voice was childlike, small. She looked at me as if seeing me for the first time, wide eyes filled with childlike confusion. I knew, though, that she was really viewing me through a veil of white-hot pain. I remembered how the world looked when buried beneath your own blood. Tears burned in my eyes for Olivia’s sake and a strangled cry escaped my throat.
Butch began to laugh. Laughing and cutting, precise despite his blindness. Beyond the brutality, there was just something horrifying about seeing that pure beauty marked. I’d never seen Olivia injured before and it was like seeing wings torn from a butterfly, like watching a temple being defiled. It broke something reverent in my heart, and her anguished cries filled my own mouth.
“Stop! Stop!”
Butch held out the dripping blade. “Stop? Yes, well…why not? She’s nothing to me, after all. Just a pawn, really. Just a way to get to you. Thank you, Olivia. For a job well done.”
The tips of his filed teeth sparked in a telling grin. I saw it, and still there was nothing I could do. Butch opened his stance, turned his shoulders, and propelled Olivia into the arching wall of glass. I heard the sick thud of her body hitting, the hollow crack of the pane, and in what seemed like slow motion, the glass splintered, then shattered. It collapsed, and Olivia fell with it.
Her scream razored through the night, lingering after her body had fallen. An answering cry burst from my throat as I rushed the window, clambering gracelessly over the wide bed and bounding across the other side. I clawed at the jagged glass, bloodying my hands and forearms, feeling nothing.
I couldn’t see her. She was already lost in the void of night; dropping like the rain, falling like a star, setting like a crimson sun.
Staring out into that cold black void, I had a momentary urge to follow. One step, a mere five inches, and it would all be over. I’d never have to move or fight or weep again. I wouldn’t have the unending chore of breathing anymore, and the screams pinballing in my skull would be silenced once and for all.
I heard my name; a taunting, singsong repetition, languorously drawing out the syllables. All I could think, all I could feel, was that I’d been wrong. Wrong to believe I’d taken every precaution to protect myself. Wrong in believing nothing else could be taken from me, that I had nothing to lose. There was one last thing that I had cared about in this world. My sister.
And now she too was gone.
“Jo-ahn-naa…”
Sucking in a deep, steadying breath, I lowered my head like a bull readying for the charge, and I did take that first, that final, step forward.
But not before I had turned around.
I sprang forward, body low, and used my weight to take his legs from under him. There were no thoughts of weapons as I wrapped my arms around his knees. No care of injury as his bulk collapsed and toppled forward. I swiveled, fighting for his back, but he was quicker than he looked, even blind. Before he could use his fists or weight against me, I was out of reach, regrouping, and readying for a second assault.
“What are you doing?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “You don’t have a weapon.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“No. I’d be able to smell it.”
Both of our nostrils flared, and we located the weapons; his scimitar that had skittered beneath the bed when I killed him the first time, my folding knife knocked from his grasp when I’d lunged, and that now lay outside the door.
“I am the weapon, you asshole.” And I hissed in his direction, my breath filled with the same black intent as my heart. For the first time Butch looked scared.
My movements weren’t as smooth as normal, my strikes less practiced. I swung out with more adrenaline than skill, but I got a few blows in, took a few too, before pulling back and forcing myself to think. I imagined Butch’s body as a grid. I overlaid it in strike zones, trying to see him as an opponent and not only the man who had just murdered my sister.
“Over here.” I circled him from behind. “What are you, blind?”
“I’m going to kill you.” He swiveled side to side, trying to locate me with his four remaining senses. Which gave me an idea. I backed away, edging toward my sister’s dresser until I found what I needed there. “Hear me? I’m going to fucking kill you!”
“No. You’re not.” I located Olivia’s perfume bottle by touch and picked it up. “But you’re going to die trying.”
Spritzing the fragrance into the air, I pumped until the room smelled like the inside of a sweet powdery seed. Then I sprayed the remainder on myself. The perfume sent Butch’s olfactory senses into overdrive. He stumbled about in the center of the room, oddly more at a loss with his lack of scent than he’d been with his loss of vision. Feeling my lip curl, I thought of the three senses he had left to work with—touch, taste, sound—and decided to fuck with them all.
Pushing the alarm on Olivia’s digital clock, I wrenched the knob as high as it would go. Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” filled the room. Startled confusion was soon replaced by helpless anger. Butch let out an outraged howl and began to totter unsteadily in my direction. I threw the empty perfume bottle into the opposite corner where it shattered against the wall. He whirled in that direction, his chest moving shallowly with his breath. Lowering myself to the floor, I rolled under the bed and came up on the opposite side with the scimitar clutched firmly in my fists.
Two senses left.
My anger was cold now, narrowing my resolve into an icy arrow poised for release. I was the hunter; like the big cats crouched in the waving grasses of Africa, the bloodthirsty eagle swooping to rip the flesh from its earthbound prey.
And there was nothing glorious or heroic in the way I toyed with him. I’d trained my body and mind in combat too long not to recognize a rogue warrior, a vigilante bent solely on retribution. I watched Butch revolving about the room, striking out with his fists and voice as he tottered this way and that. On his face was the dawning realization that he might lose. That he might die. That I might be the one to kill him.
Kurt Cobain’s voice rasped through the room, swearing
over and over that, no, he didn’t have a gun…
I waited until Butch calmed enough to remember the weapons, counting on his memory of the room’s layout and the relative distance between him and my knife outside the doorway. As expected, he lunged for the closer and more familiar weapon, the one he’d brought with him. The one I held in my hand.
He knelt, thrusting his hands beneath the bed, searching frantically with his fingers. His sense of touch. He couldn’t smell, hear, or see my approach. Too bad, because I saw my reflection in the dresser mirror—eyes black, muscles tensed, arms raised high—and I looked like a fallen angel.
Butch froze. I smiled. And that bowed blade sang.
The stubs Butch instinctively cradled to his chest were white with bone and red with blood, trailing strings of meaty flesh. He howled, demon’s mouth opened wide, head thrown back like a baby bird searching blindly for its next meal. Obligingly, I inserted the tip of the blade, pressing lightly against his tongue. His lips peeled back in a parody of a grin.
His last point of sensory perception was at my fingertips, the sense of taste. I leaned over to take his jaw in my free hand, forcing the blade to bite into his lower lip, and he whimpered as I lowered my lips to his ear. He had lied and laughed with that tongue, and both at my sister’s expense. With the gentlest press upward of my fingers, I lifted him to his feet. “Do you have something to say to me?”
He shook his head as much as he dared, tears streaming from his destroyed eyes.
“I think you do,” I said, my tone dry as dust. “In fact, I think it’s right there on the tip of your tongue.” I pressed, felt the bite of blade into flesh. Butch gurgled, a strangled cry for mercy, and I let up. “What was that?”
“Haar-yyy.” The points where his lips had touched the double-edged blade were stained scarlet. He’d said sorry. I straightened, my body deadened to emotion.
“Well that’s not good enough.” I whispered it, not even caring if he could hear.
I could have slid that curved sword down his throat, severing the roof of his mouth, skewering his guts from the inside. I could have twisted it, sending that tip burrowing up into his skull to flay the soft tissue encased there. Instead, with a brisk flick of my wrists, I tore the blade free.
Butch leaned forward, retching blood, and fell again to his knees.
“Don’t cry, Butch. All devils speak with forked tongues. This will just make it easier for others to recognize you.”
He was bereft of all his senses now, as helpless before me as Olivia had been in his arms, but instead of killing him, I lowered myself to the edge of the bed and watched. I wanted to observe the last seconds of his life, as death marched across his features. I wanted to see if he would heal.
Then I could kill him all over again.
But he did die. The sonofabitch died and left me there in my sister’s cream-colored, blood-splattered room, with a hole in the window like some large, gaping mouth. He exited this world the same way he’d entered it—squalling, miserable, and covered in a woman’s blood.
I don’t know how long I slouched there, bleeding and crying, and intermittently screaming with the rotting stench of this demon’s death rising up around me; willing both him and my sister alive again so I could change it all.
Eventually, I stood and turned off the music. Silence buzzed in my ears as I hauled Butch’s body to the window and pitched it over the side. I didn’t watch his tumble, but the rain had stopped and the whole world was silent, as if it existed in a vacuum, so I heard the thud, and the cracking report of his body hitting pavement. Never say I don’t learn from my mistakes, I thought humorlessly.
Then I keeled over and retched up my guts.
8
“Police! Open up!”
The words rang in my ears as I came to, lying next to my own vomit. Feeling leaden and hollow, I pushed myself to my knees, then my feet, allowing a moment for my head to stop spinning. My mouth was dust-dry, my eyes crusted over with tears. I didn’t know how long I’d been laying there, but the night sky had cleared outside the destroyed window, and though the lights of the city still rendered the heavens starless, a soft, crisp breeze blew against my back.
Another knock sounded urgently at the front door, and I drifted into the living room to answer it, my feet reporting hollowly on the tile floor. My martini sat perched on the coffee tray where I’d left it, next to my still unopened gift. Tears stung my eyes again, and I had to blink them away as the pounding continued. A neighbor had finally rang the cops. I wondered why they didn’t just knock it down, but swung it open anyway.
Ajax stared back at me. “Hello, Joanna. I’d have come sooner, but I was…detained.”
Shocked, my response was delayed, and when I slammed the door he caught it easily, wrenching it open again. I backpedaled as he shut it behind him. He made no move to attack, instead cocking his head to one side, like he’d just thought of something. “Why, Joanna, dear, there’s something different about you.” He sniffed delicately at the air before snapping his fingers smartly and pointing. “I’ve got it. You’ve changed your hair.”
He did step forward then, and I retreated into the sunken living room. I knew he would kill me. I was injured and he was fresh, angry, and knew better than to underestimate me, unlike Butch. He also had all the inexplicable powers that Butch possessed, and I didn’t know if I could fight that again…or even if I wanted to. What was the point? I’d never been more alone in my life.
“Now,” he said, crossing his arms over his body. This time he unsheathed two serrated pokers, one in each hand. “Where did we leave off?”
Okay, so I’m alone. I swallowed hard. Get over it.
Pounding sounded behind me, and I turned and stared, not quite believing my eyes. There, clutching the parapet of the building, was the homeless bum I’d run over, still looking disreputable, and still popping up in the strangest of places. He was mouthing something, pointing and jerking his head toward the bedroom. I turned back to find Ajax as awestruck as I, his mouth open in obvious displeasure.
“Warren,” he said, lowering the pokers. “I should skewer you through your useless Taurean heart.”
“Warren?” I said.
“Shut up, Ajax, you pathetic excuse for evil. Who dressed you this morning? Certainly not your mother. You look like some B-movie cliché.”
I glanced back and forth, less concerned that they knew one another than with their being able to converse between a thick plate of soundproof glass. And that I could hear every word.
“Don’t talk about my mother!” Ajax said, enraged.
“She should’ve swallowed that load, dawg, that’s for sure. Don’t worry, she’ll make up for it tonight.” And he began to make a repetitively lewd motion with his private parts. Right there on the ledge.
It took another meaningful look from him to realize he was buying me time. Afraid of telegraphing my intent, I fled without glancing back. I heard Ajax’s curse, his feet pounding across tile, but I had the bedroom door slammed, locked, and was already halfway across the bedroom before it crashed open again.
“Give me your hand!” On the other side of the glass, Warren stretched out his own.
“Shit,” I said, looking down. The breeze was much stronger out there.
“Give me your hand now!” he repeated, and pulled me forward from my center of gravity. I cursed again, but was half pulled, half lifted out onto the ledge, and just out of Ajax’s reach.
“Bitch!”
“Come and get her,” Warren taunted. I’d rather he not, I wanted to say, but the bum was already moving away, palms against concrete and glass, back against the building. “This way.”
He paused at the buttress, and held onto me until I was steadied on the ledge. Then he turned and continued moving toward the living room windows. I hesitated. “He’ll see us.”
Warren glanced back, his hair swirling around his head like some mad professor’s. “It’s the only way. There’s a staircase that leads to the roof.
On that side, there’s nothing.”
I glanced behind me, swallowing hard. There was a swatch of material hanging from the jagged glass, torn from my blouse when Warren pulled me out, but no sign of Ajax.
“Joanna?”
“Okay.” The word escaped on an exhalation and I nodded. We inched around the corner, my feet a mere inch shorter than the ledge’s width. I traversed the facade, gaining on him, but a gust of wind slapped at me, and Warren grinned as I hugged the facing.
The living room windows shone like gems in front of us, and the light inside was a beacon, calling me back to reality. What the hell was I doing out here?
“Ready?” Warren said.
I nodded, took a deep breath, and followed.
Ajax appeared inside the cozy living room, framed like a slide in a projector. He was in a warrior’s stance, legs wide, arms cocked, hands fisted around the pokers. Warren seemed unconcerned and kept inching along the ledge, a turtle on a tightrope.
“What do we do if he breaks the glass?”
“Try not to get hit.”
I turned around. “I’m going back.”
“Joanna.” His voice froze me in place. I turned to find his crazed eyes sober upon mine. “There is no going back.”
He was right. What would turning from a possible death to a more certain one do for me? It wouldn’t bring Olivia back, or change the fact that I’d killed a man without remorse; and I seriously doubted I could sweet-talk Ajax into changing his mind about doing the same to me. Besides, how many times had I prayed for God to take away the past? To change events so I could wake up and be happy and normal and…like Olivia. Never once had my prayers been answered.
The Scent of Shadows Free with Bonus Material Page 10