The sack that was Dizzy stirred.
“Shit, shit—”
“Hurry!”
He gripped one dart with both hands and yanked until all he saw was a white sheet tight over his angry eyes and the damn thing finally popped out. It turned to rust in his hand. He rubbed his right palm and found a rust scar inside, sore, but closed.
Lash pulled at the other, but it would not budge.
“How fucking weak are you?” he asked, then gripped it and popped it out, releasing it in the air as it turned to rust and fell like copper snow.
“Thanks, Pretty,” Lash said getting to her knees, before Malcolm’s fist drilled her nose, cracking it back to a bad angle. Black blood caked her face, glasses flying off. “Okay,” she said, hand over her face. “I deserve that.”
The next shot cracked against her jaw, and black blood splattered.
“That’s for Milkwood.”
He dropped his right hand, right for a straight shot. “And this is for feeding me to that dead fucker.”
Hisses filled the air and turned to deep, dark cackles. “Dead?” Dizzy hissed, all six foot five of him seeming to fill the room. “Dizzy Colt is imperishable. Unlike a fresh born Vilkacis cub. Especially without his tasty mother to save him.”
Malcolm screamed and charged. The world buzzed with darts shot from a rubbery arm that cracked them out like a whip. The darts moved slower…quicksand time…but not slow enough for him to move out of the way—
Each dart pierced him with the momentum of a cannonball, firing him back against a concrete wall.
The darts were the size of daggers and stuck like nails into the wall through his skin and flesh. Breathing hurt.
“Pretty portrait,” said Dizzy. He gripped Lash by the neck with grey hands and brown-stained fingers, not seeing the shoe in her hand. “And this one prettier than your momma. And being the first dead blood to walk the earth in centuries, I can only pray she’ll have a heart of honey in my mouth.”
Lash drove her four-inch heels into at Dizzy’s face, piercing his eye. But he laughed, left it hanging there. His brown hand clutched her hair and drove her, head first, into the wall next to Malcolm with a violent crack. “Two wonder-rich hearts for the price of one,” Dizzy said, sucking black juice from the rim of his lip. “But which would be more filling? Fresh born wolf or wild-child vamp?”
Malcolm moved. Shards of pain flexed from every puncture holding him to the wall. “Well,” Dizzy said. “Your drippings are fresh and bright. And I wonder if you’ll scream hard and wild like Momma did.”
“Shut up!” Malcolm struggled but the darts would not budge. “Shut—”
Black juice squirted from Dizzy’s lips and covered Malcolm’s mouth like tar. He clamped down hard so none of the stinging dip trickled in his mouth. The smell seared his eyes like flaming shit.
“Hush now, cub,” Dizzy said, taking a step forward. “She enjoyed it. Had ourselves a real party. Oh, she struggled. All the good ones do. But once she tasted me,” his wet smile was wide, “that’s all it took to drive her shivering. She danced hard with me. I enjoyed every drip of her until I swallowed the last piece.” Dizzy swallowed black juice, but the wad in his cheek was still as wide and sick as a mutant tumour. “Oh, cub?” Dizzy said. “This would be where you struggle. Make some proud proclamations of vengeance and rage. Vilkacis are savages and I’ve never had a fresh-born to tangle with. Some of those punches almost hurt. So come on, cub. Tap the rage.” He smiled big and shiny.
Malcolm shuddered. Ripples of pain flared through his skin and blood flowed with any movement. Would the scars heal? Could he burst and do anything other than get his ass handed to him? How did Milkwood deal with every move bringing agony? The dip covering his lip dripped but did not thin.
“What?” Dizzy said. “Given up? Not even foul language?”
Malcolm screamed, but the word was garbled.
“Huh, can’t make it out a damn. All right. Fine. Just a word.” Dizzy’s yellow finger nails pinched the black goop and tore it off. “Come on, hero,” Dizzy said leaning down, nose tapping Malcolm’s. “Scare me.”
Snapping forward, Malcolm popped a head-butt against Dizzy’s nose so hard and fast Mr. Imperishable stumbled back, whiffs of sawdust coming up like those at the fairgrounds.
Bursting at every seam, Malcolm tore himself forward, and free, tearing out the darts. Air burned the wounds cold but he charged, feeling the phantom caress of his mother’s last touch vanish from his palm, leaving only a rusty scar, a vision of this dripping shit heel stalking her like a vulture at the fair, of the life that had tried to break him in half because the one good thing in his life had been stolen and butchered.
Malcolm sprang, thoughts disintegrating into black fire over his eyes, both hands tearing into Dizzy’s chest, pulling out cold, dead meat.
The heart. Get his heart. The bird inside his chest—
He wanted it in his hands, to tear and rip and gnash and shit all over it. Jellied blood as rotten as tobacco juice slicked his hands all over as Dizzy gripped his neck, each long and jagged finger like a Burmese python.
Malcolm kept tearing, ignoring the dead breath in his thumping chest, black spots infecting his sight. He tore into the meat. He tore until there was a shining black eye, then a beak, then a piercing scream like a dinosaur being swallowed in tar.
A roaring furnace filled Malcolm’s face as he dove his fist in—
Metallic thuds echoed against Malcolm’s head and drove him swimming into the darkness before the ground clocked him. Spinning above him was Lash, a tire iron in her hand. “Don’t,” she said, now leaning on the pipe, outfit torn and stretched, her black and white face spinning in Malcolm’s eyes. “If his heart is released…we…they…Dizzy is the lock, you ignorant shit. Break it, and the magic is back. We’ll be nobodies.”
Malcolm stumbled as he tried to stand, everything smelling like tin and blood, copper butterflies in his stomach. He tried to find Dizzy but everything was spinning. “He’s dead,” Malcolm said, voice so horse he wondered if the scream had burned his lungs. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
Another metallic echo thudded his head and spun him around like a top until the world was flipping by in circles.
“He dies,” Lash said here, there and everywhere. “And a prophecy comes true. Wonder slips back in the world. And we…we’re no longer special…and I will not go back to being a weak, pathetic plaything waiting for disease or old age to strangle me. I won’t do it!” Another gong went off in Malcolm’s head. “Ever!”
Every ounce of him was sore but his screaming head refused to shut off. The blows dropped from every angle—
Then stopped. Lash screamed, then nothing.
Malcolm gasped, looking around the spinning room, too weak to stand, when a face flashed before his eyes. Somewhere here, Dizzy was dripping, waiting. But that awful inward hiss was nowhere in the darkness. Instead, a soft word bubbled and burst.
“Kid?”
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
“CHRIST,” MILKWOOD SAID. “You look worse than I feel.” Milkwood held the kid up with his one good hand. He was heavier. Like he’d just gained a hundred more pounds of bruises. And his face? It was as if he’d done ten rounds against a bear with a chainsaw. Face torn and purple, and eyes a queer shade of blue in bruised flesh, hands stained brown and black with flecks of meat. “What the fuck did she do to you?”
“Not just her,” Malcolm grunted. “Him.”
Standing upright was a thin sack of shit in dirty rags, one cheek like a swollen balloon, a massive hole in his chest where, of all things, a bird’s head peeked out.
The same face that had been in the bathroom mirror.
The dude was shoving flesh from the floor and over the glimmering eye of an ink black bird.
“Dizzy,” Malcolm said. “He…he killed my mom.”
Dizzy patted the flesh down until the bird was stifled. He took a long, wet inhale. “So, this is the first born of Lash th
e Sweet. I can smell her on you.” He smiled high. “Wonder how she tastes secondhand?”
Milkwood laughed. “You talk like an EC comic.”
“He killed her.” Malcolm said, breath steadying, blood slowly dripping instead of rushing down from his wounds. “He took her away from me.” Nausea bit his gut and throat and Milkwood held him by the scruff. “He killed her.”
“I’m sorry kid,” Milkwood said.
Dizzy laughed. “I dined on the heart meat of this cub’s momma.”
Milkwood’s face dropped all emotion but for a singular flare in his red eyes. “You’re the one who left him with that nutcase brother?” He leaned Malcolm against the wall which was covered in dart holes.
“Take a breather, kid,” he said, then turned to Dizzy and cracked his little knuckles. “Shit heel, I’m going to enjoy this.”
Dizzy hissed with a smile. “Try me, dead blood. Never tussled with a corpulent pile of turds before.”
Milkwood let go, charging into the darkness.
* * *
Malcolm’s knees bent under his weight, while Dizzy tore darts from his bandolier and threw them in a wide arc, each one rusty-red and fast as bullets. They sank into Milkwood, but the fat bastard rolled on without so much as a grunt. He drove his right shoulder into Dizzy’s wiry guts, charging all the way to the end of the room and smacking against a crate of bottles that showered them in whiskey and glass. Milkwood’s haymaker rights rocked the long face until it was just black juice and putty skin.
“His heart!” Malcolm yelled, stumbling toward them. “You have to—”
Pain shot into his neck from behind and the burning life that had birthed from his gut flushed out. Knees buckling, the pressure bit into his neck, then tightened until iron fingers pulled him up by his hair. Lash’s teeth pulled back and he hung like a puppet on a string.
“Damn that’s…better,” she said, voice sharp as her nails, her nose slowly crackling back into place, from witch to bitch in seconds. “Maybe just one more for the road.” Again, her mouth cinched on him. Breath faded from his lungs. His arms drifted above him without strength. In the distance, Milkwood and Dizzy scrapped like starved wolverines until Milkwood threw a glance back.
* * *
Larissa’s eyes were pure malice while her mouth dug into Malcolm’s neck. She’ll drain him dry. Until his heart goes cold.
He hammered the creepy shit in front of him, turned, and bolted toward them like a runaway train. Hold on, kid. Just hold on.
* * *
Behind Milkwood stood Dizzy, hunched over, black blood flowing down his filthy grey face, and a single knife-long dart locked between his fingers.
Malcolm’s vision hazed as he raised his hands, but they dropped. His mind yelled, “Don’t! I’m just the monkey in the middle. He’s going to kill you!”
Milkwood had cut halfway across the room when the dart sailed from Dizzy’s awful hand, growing as it came closer to Milkwood’s back.
“No!”
* * *
Pain. Real pain. From a pin prick to a blow torch to an atom bomb blowing into his back, deep, piercing a rib and the skin of his heart—
The strength in his legs faded in the wake of a burning tide of cold heat paralyzing his body at Mach speed. He kept rolling forward with the pain. Lash’s head was nestled behind Malcolm. Only one shot. The thought made him sick but there was nowhere left to turn.
Milkwood’s eyes flashed before his mouth formed the word “Sorry.”
* * *
The little white fist drilled Malcolm with an upper cut so hard his skull cracked against Lash’s head. Gravity failed as Milkwood crashed into them and they rolled back against the wall. The cold on his wet neck shocked him as he felt Lash’s teeth snap off his flesh. Strength bled back into his bones as he pushed away from her, pain on his face like an ice storm of shards, and he fell over on to his stomach.
Slowly.
In quicksand time, Lash crumpled, grabbing her face.
Belly flopped on the ground was Milkwood, eyes wide, shaking with pain. A dart jammed in his massive back. Right above his heart. A single word gasped out of him. “…holyfuckingshit.”
Malcolm crawled toward him. “Milkwood?”
“Can’t…move,” he said. “Something…stuck in my heart. Not complete…it hurts, Kid. It actually hurts—”
“Take the kid,” Lash said. She was back in her feet, cracked glasses on her face, wobbly in one high heel. Wiping her mouth, she licked her fresh, new teeth clean. “Eat him raw. And take this lard ass’s heart to my father. You’ll have what you want. Food and freedom. He was my first.”
Dizzy’s leather boots slithered through whisky, glass and blood with a slow, sleek cadence, his scarred chest stitching itself together with what looked like worms beneath his ragged shirt. “Still trying to bargain with a gallows bird. Your daddy said you were shifty. There is only one ending to this gutter epic, Tasty. You drip with my seed, your heart goes to daddy, and Dizzy feasts on two hearts of blistered wonder. So here is the only choice you have. On all fours now, or after I pluck out your heart, either way, you’re mine.”
“You limp dick faggot,” she said, the knuckles of her small fists like clumps of angry diamonds, green eyes blinking as she tried to focus. “You think you scare me?”
“Not yet,” he said. “But I will.”
She was a black tempest of punches, kicks and elbows, hair spinning wild as she tore at him, forcing him back until he slipped into the whiskey and glass. On top, she elbowed his face so hard Malcolm thought he heard her touching the concrete. Then she was up, and running to the main door.
A terrible squirting sound came from the prone Dizzy.
Black juice hit the wall, the size of Dizzy’s long head. Lash ran to the door, and a massive dart pierced her back. She hit the ground stomach first with a scream so raw and hard Malcolm shivered. Dizzy cackled, slurping inward, and was on his feet and by her body before Malcolm could think. “Do I scare you now?”
Malcolm pushed himself up by his knuckles, then whispered to Milkwood. “Going to pull it out.”
“Do it,” Milkwood grunted. “Quick.”
Dizzy Colt picked up Lash by the throat and walked toward the stain he had made on the wall. “Gonna be fun smearing you with my snap. Will you tear the skin off your face before I break you like a mustang?”
Malcolm gripped the rusty dart’s black feather and yanked. Dirty pain filled his hands as he yanked it out—
* * *
Milkwood screamed, a high-pitched wail like an animal being burned alive. Burns flared in his heart, through his veins, nuclear firecrackers crackling against his skull as he saw a great gash of black light flare and die before his eyes…what the hell is that, he thought, before the cold spit of reality hit him again in the eye.
* * *
Dizzy tossed Lash against the stained wall and a scream muffled as her face hit the goo that had smacked Malcolm’s mouth earlier. “Not used to so many morsels not getting the gist of dying. Better main course it before sweet desert.”
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
THE DART EXPLODED INTO rusty dust in Malcolm’s hand as Milkwood pulled himself up on wobbly, ripped knees, blood staining the frayed jeans, pulling his arm out of his sling. “That…hurt.”
“Just the beginning,” Dizzy said, then spat two shots against the wall next to Lash’s struggling form. “Room for two more in my gallery.” Like a snaring tiger, he leapt on to Milkwood, who gripped the wretched hands as he landed on his back, left one not nearly as strong. Dizzy’s yellow right hand clawed lower and deeper as Milkwood’s left arm shook.
“Can’t win, dead blood,” Dizzy said. “I’m imperishable. Tear me apart and I tear myself back together until your heartmeat fills my turds.”
“Charming,” Milkwood grunted, left arm all but a quivering of bone and meat. “You’re a real lyrical miracle.”
“Hey!”
Both hands swinging the tire iron like a home r
un hit, Malcolm clocked Dizzy’s head. Shock tore through his arms and into his spine and the weapon dropped from his stunned hands. Dizzy’s head rocked back, juices still in his mouth. Milkwood tore at the weak flesh over his heart and Dizzy scrambled back and away from them like a one-man hive of bees, holding his flesh in place as his worms sealed the wound. Dizzy laughed, low and wet. “Is that the best you’ve got? Letting a cub do your fighting? C’mon, dead blood. Scare me.”
Milkwood wobbled on his knees, fists covered in black blood, eyes shut.
“Milkwood?” Malcolm
Dizzy laughed while Lash screamed in muffled tones, face still stuck to the wall. “My dart’s taken what blood he had left. See that, cub? In his red eyes? That’s hunger so deep no man can resist it. Oh glory, this should be sweet.”
Milkwood held himself up by his knees, an awful sound leaking out of him. “Kid?” He lifted his head. Eyes like red coals, fresh teeth in his mouth as white as moonlight. “Stop me.” He gasped, snarling. “Anything!”
The stains next to Lash—
Milkwood’s mouth gaped open. “Do it!”
Terrified, Malcolm ran and everything slowed…shoulder first…nailing the bulging gut…lifting the body from the air as a demonic growl reverberated through Milkwood’s body…charging forward…behind him the sound of darts, slicing through the air…legs straining, burning with exertion…until the back of Milkwood slapped against the wall.
Malcolm ducked as darts plunged over him and into Milkwood. The big man’s head, arm, and neck were stuck, and darts stuck out of him like massive metallic insects. He shut his flaming eyes. “Sorry, Kid. I’m so fucking sorry.” He seethed through his new…teeth.
Malcolm reached into his back pocket. The old teeth were still there. And fucking sharp.
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