“What do you want?”

An honest question with an honest answer, but things could never work out that way- there wasn’t time, and I have none to spare for petty dalliances all the same.  She would tell me, or I would make her tell me.

Where is the Key?

“I don’t rightly know what you’re talking about sir.” It was miniscule. A tightness of the eyes, a curl of the lip, tucking a single lock of hair behind her ear; small things, but adding them up painted a different picture. Liar.

Cold blue fire danced around my fingers as I dug them into her stomach, searing open some terrible bloodless wound in search of- I palmed a rope of intestine and squeezed. Her scream was a waste of air.

Where is the key?

She shrieked a babble of pointless words while drawing my map to the truth. Good enough. An old stone by a nameless tree, cresting a barren hill amidst the lush spring grasses. A shallow metaphor to be brushed aside.

I left her there, stepping over her smoldering door and back out into the pouring rain. A snap of my fingers and a jagged stitch of azure ripped an arc out of the sky, lighting the house aflame; stark shadows danced wildly across the cobblestone streets.

“Sure took your time, whitey. You always were soft on the girlies.”

He looked so damnably smug, rubbing at his stubble with a hand as big as both of mine. Drenched hair fell short of his eyes, dimly alight with scorn in the glow of the fire. I did not grit my teeth.

Two leagues south. Passed it on the way here.

A guffaw. “I knew somethin’ was up with that old tree! Damn strange for a tombstone to lie about near a traveled road.”

I did not grit my teeth.

Not even as we walked away, and I saw that that towering black nightmare had vanished into the night. I knew he was in the house, and that it mattered as little as the woman being alive mattered to him. She wouldn't be alive for long.

An oily laugh slithered between the raindrops.


The woman followed behind us, naked, playing skiprope with her intestines as she walked; her eyes were crying, blank, as sutures slid around beneath her skin. Her mouth was sewn shut, so at least she was silent as she died.

A chuckle rumbled out of the thing in black as it shadowed her, never more than a step behind; the bloody meat passed through him as if he were made of smoke.

"So you mind tellin' us what this Key actually is then, whitey?"