Game. Set. Match.
My prey wasn’t dead, not yet, but it would be soon. Even now, my blood was spreading through the hellhound’s nervous system, a toxin every bit as lethal as a serpent’s venom. I wasn’t planning on waiting for the creature to die from the poison, though. It couldn’t move. It couldn’t fight back.
Might as well cut off its head.
But first, I had to deal with its friends, who I mentally christened Thing 2 and Thing 3. Having seen their buddy’s demise, Things 2 and 3 must have known what I was (which, quite frankly, probably put them several steps up on me, since I had nothing more than a string of educated guesses). But even with the instinctual knowledge that they were about to see the ugly end of the Circle of Life, the ’hounds didn’t turn tail and run.
They couldn’t.
My blood smelled too, too good.
Since I wasn’t keen on the idea of letting either of the remaining beasts take a nibble of Kali-bits, I pressed the flat of my knife against the already-closing wounds on my left arm, coating the blade with my blood.
There was more than one way to skin a cat/decapitate a hellhound.
With my good arm, I flung my blade at Thing 3 in a practiced motion that left it buried in my target’s throat. Thing 2 was not amused. With a roar of fury that sent the smell of sulfur, already thick in the air, surging, the ’hound charged. Left with nothing but my own bloody fingertips, I let out a war cry of my own, raked my nails over its face, and fought like a girl.
Breaking the beast’s thick, leathery skin wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination easy, even with fingernails sharper than most blades, but I managed, because the imperative—you have to fight, you have to kill it, kill it now—was that powerful, that insistent.
Flesh gave way under my nails, and my blood mingled with the beast’s. The toxin was slower when injected, so instead of freezing immediately, Thing 2 and Thing 3 both began stumbling, their limbs gummed down by invisible weights.
“Sit,” I said as they staggered and finally went down. “Roll over.”
And then I smiled. “Play dead.”
A quick glance at my watch (which I wore on the hand I hadn’t fed to the hellhound) told me that I needed to hurry this along. I had three hours until my dad got home and another six before dawn—enough time to heal, but just barely.
“Knife,” I whispered. I felt a twinge, a ping in the back of my mind that told me exactly where my knife was, exactly how to retrieve it. Being what I was meant that I had a sixth sense for weapons—once I’d laid hands on a blade, a gun, a garrote, it was mine forever. I knew exactly how to use it. I could feel its presence like eyes staring straight at the back of my head.
I’d never lost a weapon, and I never would.
“Well,” I said, smiling at the blade as I tore it from Thing 3’s throat, “let’s get this show on the road.” The fact that I was talking to a knife probably said something revealing about my character and/or mental state, but the way I saw it, my weapon and I were in this together.
We had work to do.
Three decapitations later, my own blood wasn’t the only decoration on my body. Hellhound bits had splattered everywhere, coating me in gore. Another outfit down the drain.
Story of my life.
Glancing around to make sure I hadn’t been seen, I stripped down to my sports bra and jeans and rolled the bloody shirt into a small ball. It was dark enough out that stains on denim wouldn’t be visible from afar, and I had no intention of letting anyone get close enough to notice that I’d been Up to No Good.
Luckily, people like me?
We’re surprisingly good at fading into the background.
“Be aggressive! Be, be aggressive!”
My head was throbbing. My arm ached like I’d spent the entire night doing push-ups, and I was exhausted. So, of course, Heritage High was having a pep rally. A loud, crowded, too-early-in-the-morning, I’m-not-even-sure-what-sport-season-we’re-in pep rally.
With cheerleaders.
“Go Krakens!”
High school was, without question, the ninth circle of you-know-what.
As I slumped down in the bleachers, the sea of faces around me blurred, and I found myself longing for the University School, where at least the unidentified blur of my classmates would have been a familiar blur. I’d spent the first twelve years of my academic existence, from pre-K to grade ten, at the gifted program run by my father’s university. But halfway through my first semester junior year, Father Dearest had decided that such a “small environment” wasn’t good for my “developing social skills,” a decision that I deeply suspected had less to do with my ability to make friends and influence people and more to do with the fact that Paul Davis, the new head of my father’s department, had chosen to send his seventeen-year-old daughter, Bethany, to public school.