“You owe me … a hell of a lot more than your eyes.” I ran a finger at him, straight on, with all my strength, pointed at the one good eye he had remaining. “But I’ll take ‘em anyway—” He caught my wrist with his other hand and I felt it snap, the sound of bones breaking in my forearm filling my ears along with a scream I hadn’t meant to let go.
He levered me up and held my face against his bloody socket. “You are gonna pay for this, girl.”
“You’d make a girl pay?” I asked, trying to breathe around the crushing pain of his hand squeezing me tight. “Explains why you don’t date much.”
“You always got a smart answer to everything, don’t you?” His metal head was nodding, slowly, his mouth a thin line of barely contained rage. “You think you’re smarter than me. Better than me.”
“Yes and yes,” I said, squeezing in a breath. “But that’s a low bar to clear. Kind of like the one you were just in, only seedier.”
“You think you’re better,” he said again, looking at me with a calm self-satisfaction. “Miss High and Mighty. You ain’t looking so high and mighty now, girl.” He gripped my arm tighter and I heard the bones shatter completely; a scream tore loose from my throat as it felt like they turned to powders from the strength of his grip. “I’ve always been better than you. Always.” He leaned in closer to me, and I could smell the whiskey fumes on his stinking breath. “I think it’s time you realized that, too.”
With that, he wound up, dragging my body behind him and then released me, throwing me overhand with all the effort of a pitcher sending a ball over the plate. I sailed through the air like a fastball, and when the strike out came it was me, crashing through the boarded up windows of a building across the street. I blacked out as I hit the concrete floor and came to rest, finally just as broken in body as I had felt in my mind.
9.
My eyes blinked back open a moment later, and every single nerve in my body screamed at me. I took a hard breath, felt the sharpest sort of agony in my back, and tried to sit up. There were bones broken, I knew it—in my arm, my sides, maybe even my skull. The smell of refuse, the sharp odor of rotting garbage, was all around me and something else, like urine, stunk in the abandoned building. My eyes swept the darkness which filled the world around me. There was a faint flickering in the distance, and it took me a moment to realize it was coming through a roughly Sienna-sized hole in the plywood over the windows, my entry point to the building, where Clary had thrown me through the boards. It was only wide enough to admit a little of the light shining from the streetlights outside, which was blotted out a moment later by a face and broad shoulders as Clary peered in. He was shadowed, and I couldn’t see anything but his outline, but I moved swiftly, rolling to the side as quietly as I could.
“Girl?” Clary’s voice was unsure, as though there was some question about whether he had just thrown my limp body into the building. His hands came up and knocked away the remaining plywood, brightening the space around me by only a little. The lone streetlight outside wasn’t doing Clary any favors, I realized as he started to step inside. Coming from the lit street into the darkness of the abandoned storefront meant his night vision was completely shot for a few seconds as his eye adjusted, and that was to my advantage. I looked behind me at the back wall of the space; I wasn’t far away from where I wanted to be. Where I needed to be.
I brushed against a concrete block wall, now comfortably ensconced in the shadows of the empty storefront. I could see metal pillars that supported the roof, spaced every twenty feet or so. I wondered idly if I could ambush him somehow, maybe drop the roof on him or hit him with something from one of the refuse piles, but after a quick look around I dismissed both of those ideas. There was no sign of even a makeshift weapon anywhere in sight that would do any damage to Clary.
“Where you at?” His voice came again, but he was lingering toward the front of the store. I stayed still, now lying flat against the wall. Clary’s remaining eye had to be nearly adjusted by now and motion would likely draw him to me. My eyes scanned past the pillars in the middle of the room. There were piles of rubbish every few feet, what looked like heaps of broken drywall and lumber, as though someone had demolished the interior of the space before vacating it but never bothered to clean it up. My eyes searched the walls; I had heard that scavengers had taken to stealing copper out of the fixtures of abandoned buildings but I couldn’t see any pipes or fittings from where I lay.