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He couldn't say why that one little detail bothered him more than the nests of sharpened pungi sticks on the path, or the humiliation of being stripped in front of joking guards. He turned and trotted back along the path toward the buildings.
* * *
He found them on the other side of a little wall-less Japanese building, between two gardens filled with stones. The Reaper loomed behind Colin, poking him in the kidneys with a long, black fingernail, urging him toward Mona, crying, holding out one hand as a plea to stop and covering her sex with the other. Valentine could hear the breathy, high-pitched voice.
"one two three four, I declare a food war. five six seven eight, the winner gets to make the gate".
The Reaper jumped and landed next to Mona, who tripped and fell.
"you can take him. he's out of breath, wounded in the foot! go for his other leg!"
Colin jumped on her, got his fingers around her throat.
"now rape her! spread her legs, inside, inside, and i'll let you live". It hung over the couple, its cloak drawing a curtain around them...
Valentine flitted between trees, put the cement of the little pagoda between himself and the scene.
"No! No, please! Oh God!" Mona screamed.
Something at the base of his spine woke up and twitched. It ran hot up his back, perched between brain and skull atop his head like a spider.
Valentine hopped up on top of the pagoda, and made the jump with the thoughtless ease of a house cat leaping to a kitchen table. Dirt and clinging plants fell, displaced by his weight, but before they hit the ground he was a gargoyle shape half-hanging from the pagoda roof.
Below, the Reaper opened its jaw and shot its tongue toward Colin's back, teeth following. Colin screamed.
The greenery hit the ground next to the Reaper. It turned its head; eyes followed the trajectory up...
And met Valentine on the way down.
He landed atop the Reaper, driving the femur down toward the great beehivelike organ that sucked down the blood. It reached up, backward-hinging arms moving for him, but Valentine was off it, moving on white-hot instinct, hardly knowing what his body was going to do next.
He swung a stiff-fingered uppercut, felt fingers break through skin, grabbed the Reaper under its hyperextended jaw, fingers closing on bone, dragged it off Colin, who had a gaping, tongue-sized wound in his back. Valentine whipsawed and the Reaper sprawled.
He held its white-painted jaw in his hands.
The Reaper rose, confusion in its eyes as its tongue lolled. Valentine cast the jawbone aside and readied his femur for another strike.
The Reaper turned and ran, but Valentine was after it, a wild predator drawn by flight, got on its back and drove the sharpened femur up through the gap left by the jaw.
Crying, Mona pressed her hands against the wound in Colin's back. Blood came up under her fingers anyway.
As the Reaper collapsed there was another, running from the woodland path in the direction of the goalposts, its feet a blur, a strange oversized leering jack-o'-lantern mask atop its head. Valentine picked himself up, left the twitching, dying, genetically engineered corpse, and ran toward the new one, ink-smeared bone in his hands. The Reaper slowed, perhaps not used to a man running toward it.
A mindless feral howl sounded from Valentine's throat. His heart seemed to fill his entire chest cavity, its throb rattling his ribs and collarbones...
Some sane corner of his mind hammered out thoughts as fast as letters flew from a quick typist:
You don't know how to fight you great thirsty slug you've forgotten how, send all the puppets you want,
you can no more fight than fuck time to face me, product of a warrior race bred and tested in ten thousand years' battle, scarier than any costume, don't run you'll just die tired...
The Reaper turned and ran. Its mask slipped, and it blindly plowed into a tree, lurched onward, tearing the mask free to run.
Valentine angled through the trees, yipping like a hound on a hot scent, caught up to it just outside the glowing eyes of the goalposts. It turned at the last second, threw up its arms to ward him off, and Valentine caught it at the knees with a diving tackle, knocking it down, felt claws open wounds in his shoulders as he drove his femur up between its legs. The Reaper didn't have sexual organs, but its skeleton had a gap.
Kill it so they send me another. And another... no.
Valentine fought to form words.
