My choice.

I’m safe. I’m safe. 

I hear the distant voices warbling from the television in the living room and I keep repeating these affirmations to myself, Samuel’s guidance hovering in the distance of time. Turn that which you fear into your armor, Bria. My breathing deepens and my heart rate slows as I focus on those early lessons with Samuel as he whittled away my layers like a knife through green wood. He found every fear and gave me the weapons to kill it. Now I just have to apply what I’ve learned.

Time slows down. The television drones on. And I wait, still, silent, deadlier by the second as I gain control and force myself to embrace this little fortress of shadow.

This is a keep. I am the dragon of my castle.

A few hours pass. Kaplan turns off the TV and heads to the bathroom. Moments later, he pads across the hall to his bedroom, Duke’s claws ticking along behind him. The light clicks off, the covers shift. I check my watch. And with the gradual passage of time, silence.

When fifty-five minutes have passed, I start to slide out from under the guest room bed. This should be enough time for Kaplan to be in Stage Three: deep sleep. Dreamless and hard to wake from. If he does, he’ll be groggy, and I will steal any precious seconds I can if I need them.

When I’m free of the shadows of the bed I stand, stretching my tight muscles, and then I wait, listening. No sound comes.

I pull the capped syringe of succinylcholine from my jacket pocket and creep from the room, pausing before I enter Kaplan’s bedroom.

Duke’s head lifts and his tail thumps against his cushioned dog bed when he sees me. “Lehni. Zustan,” I whisper. He lays his head back down, his tail still swishing softly. I smile, pleased that the commands I taught him have stuck.

And then I turn to Kaplan.

His back is to me, his breathing heavy and even. He’s in deep sleep, just as I’d hoped. The blanket lays across his shoulder, his jugular exposed. My eyes have adjusted sufficiently to the darkness that I’m confident I can stick him with enough accuracy that I’ll be able to escape his reach before the paralytic sets in.

Death whispers from the dark corners of the room. Succinylcholine, it says.

Yes. Succinylcholine. Known affectionately to certain people like me as SUX.

I drift closer. A lick of desire curls across my heart. I uncap the needle.

I should take this chance. I might not get another. The postmortem will find the triple dose of SUX. The medical examiner will know it’s murder. The investigation will begin. No forced entry. They may find my hair under the bed, but no prints. The tread of my shoes through the house, but that would only tell them my estimated weight and height. I’m not on any system, so there will be no DNA match if I leave anything more substantial behind. No reason to suspect me and every reason to believe that Legio Agni caught up with an expert witness for the FBI and decided to take him out. Computer forensics won’t tell them much either. If they find the keylogger software, it will lead them on a wild goose chase. Samuel is too precise to bring them back to us.

I can do this. I just have to inject and run; stay hidden for forty-five seconds as the drug takes effect.

I place one knee on the mattress and poise the tip of the needle over Kaplan’s jugular.

Death tightens its grip on my hand. Succinylcholine.

Kaplan’s slow, gentle breath rolls across the pillow. His scent rises up to me. Bergamot. Bay rum. Rich and lush. It feels almost like a sin. Not to kill the man, but to take the essence of something darker that sleeps beneath the surface. When I watched that video, I saw a creature not all that different from me.

I bring the needle a little closer.

Is this how Samuel felt when he first found me? 

That sudden thought hits me like electricity. My hand jerks away from Kaplan’s neck.

Aside from Samuel, I’ve never met anyone even remotely like me. Kaplan’s darkness is different, yet it feels familiar. He has a cache of shadows too. They beg to be let out. I can almost hear them, like the vibration of an engine on the other side of a window pane. When I was a child, the Disciples of Xantheus said the soul radiates essence. Mine never radiated anything at all, or so they told me. But looking at Kaplan, seeing the darkness that was ready to tear free of his skin in that video with the woman, I wonder if the DOX pseudoscience bullshit was onto something after all. Because his essence calls to mine. Could he have sensed it too when we met? And did it frighten him? Maybe he saw that my soul is a shade too dark.

I slump a little. The tension of anticipation dissolves from my arm.

I despise him for standing as a barrier between me and my work, and now my justice too. I hate the feeling he gave me of not measuring up.

But I can’t kill him. Not before I’m sure what I felt was real, at least. And if he is like me, with a soul of shadows? Maybe I’ll spare him for good, just to know another like me is nearby.

I cap the needle. I back off the mattress and pocket the syringe. It takes a long moment before I turn away and walk toward the bedroom door.

The rustle of fabric stops me on the threshold. “Bria,” a groggy voice says behind me. My blood freezes and drops into my stomach like shattered crystals. I grip the syringe and prepare to strike.

Kaplan’s still asleep. He’s turned over, facing me, but his eyes are closed and the cadence of his breath is unchanged. Adrenaline surges through the chambers of my heart and a tremor shakes my lungs.

He’s passed into REM sleep. Just a dream.

I watch for one moment longer, and then I back away with slow and careful steps. I walk out the front door, leaving it unlocked behind me. He’ll wake up and wonder if he forgot. He’ll be sure he turned the lock, but he’ll pass it off as a blip, nothing more than his imagination.

I stride into the night, thinking about how much I liked the sound of my name in his dreams.

And how much I hate it when he says it in the light.

OceanofPDF.com

8 BRIA

Despite being physically exhausted from days of sleeplessness and punishing workouts, my mind is still wide awake. After I return home from Kaplan’s house, I toss and roll across the sheets. Even imagining the flakes of flesh peeling from Tristan’s body in the bleach and counting them as they drift toward the filtration unit doesn’t help.

At three thirty, I give up. My limbs feel heavy as I pull on a navy one-piece swimsuit and head to my favorite room in the house, the pool room. In this room, I was reborn. I remember the first days of Samuel teaching me how to swim, the newest marks on my back still bright red slashes beneath his steady palm as he told me to lean back and let my body drift away from my mind. My head was still shaved. I was gangly and weak. But the water gave me something to focus on, a way to channel my rage until I was ready to tackle someone other than myself. The water was where I became my own woman. It was a baptism into a new life.

I’m turning these bright memories over in my mind as I switch on the swim trainer and the current whirls into action, rippling the surface with licks of white water. I pull on my swim cap and goggles and then I slip into the water’s cool embrace, starting my strokes. My body sways with the motion of reaching into the current and the kicks of my legs. I fall into the steady, familiar rhythm. One. Two. Breathe. One. Two. Breathe. I let my thoughts drift away.

But they drift right to where I don’t want them to go.

Kaplan.

I see that image of the woman in black lingerie, her long blonde hair swept to one side as she starts the recording. Every second of it replays in my mind. The way Kaplan’s muscles coiled as he prowled up her body. The pace of his thrusts. The sound she made when she came the first time. His voice when she looked at the camera. You like the thought of me watching this over and over, don’t you, baby? And then his hands around her throat, and the way she tapped out within mere seconds. The tension that flooded every one of his motions that followed. His effort to hold back, and the way he didn’t want to.