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He narrows all eight eyes at me. “Let you go? Keep you without keeping you?”
“Yes. What if I came back of my own free will?”
He considers that briefly. “Are you saying you want to come back?”
“Yes,” I say. “I want to come back.”
He tries not to look too pleased and fails. “You want to come back,” he repeats.
“You think I fuck men all the time like this?”
“I don’t know what you do,” he says, narrowing his many eyes. “All the more reason to keep you safe and with me, in case your lustful drives betray any dedication you might have.”
“That’s a really longwinded way of calling me a slut. I haven’t been with anybody in over a year.”
“But you offered me no resistance.”
“No. Because I wanted you.”
“Did you not want any other men?”
“No. Not really. They didn’t understand, and I knew they would think I was ugly.”
“Ugly? You are an incredibly beautiful woman.” He sounds vaguely irritated that I dared call myself ugly. Perhaps more than vaguely irritated.
“Not with my scars. Men don’t like messed up women, and the ones who do are twisted.”
Order takes hold of me with five hands and uses the sixth to turn my face up to his. When he speaks, he does so with a formal intensity, as if he truly wants me to listen harder than I have ever listened to anything in my life.
“You are mine,” he repeats. “My pet. You belong to me. And if you do run away, I will find you.”
I feel tears welling in my eyes. I do my very fucking best to hold back the emotion that suddenly threatens to overwhelm me. I don’t want to cry.
“Sounds good to me,” I say, just barely getting the sentence out without bursting into tears.
4
Iam nearly entirely wiped out when I get back to the station next morning. I start early. Early enough that it’s empty. Nearly empty, aside from two figures inside the chief’s office.
I recognize them both instantly through frosted glass. Connor is twice the size of his guest, who is short, lithe, and has hair so red and voluminous it can be seen even at a distance through the glass that usually drains color from everything.
“You’re an absolute little monster!” Chief Connor is yelling at Randy at the top of his lungs. “I should arrest you for what you’ve been doing. I want to know where you got those crime scene photos, or you can spend the weekend in a cell.”
“I’d love to spend a weekend in a cell,” she replies, sassy and unbothered like always. “There’s something strange going on at this precinct. Maybe if I was in the cells I’d see or hear something that made sense. You know, everybody is saying that some kind of mutant is stalking the neighborhood. I have reports of all kinds of strangeness going on in this precinct. It’s almost as if you are turning a blind eye on purpose.”
Words cannot express how much I hate Ramona Carrick, aka, Randy Carrot. She’s everything we don’t stand for. She’s an opportunist always out for herself, and she’s the closest thing I have to an enemy. She’s also the person I owe everything to.
Almost a year ago…
I am lying on the ground. The concrete feels warm, even though I know it is cold. I am cold too, and getting colder by the moment as blood drains from my body through a series of holes that didn’t exist until they were pumped into me.
There wasn’t any reason for this. There was no rhyme to it. I didn’t deserve it. The person who did this to me doesn’t know who I am or care. I was nothing but backdrop to them, part of the meaningless human scenery of their lives.
I have the sense of people moving back and forth around me. There are stars and or streetlights above me. I can’t really see anymore. It’s more like my eyes are imparting a vague suggestion of light, a light that gets suddenly brutally bright.
FWAMP!
For a moment, I am certain I have gone into the light. It seems to encompass me entirely, wrapping around me, making me part of it.
