Page 65 of Theta

I strike upward with my foot with as much force as I can muster while seated, driving my foot up into his junk. He squeaks and folds forward, and I surge to my feet, slashing my blade in a short, hard horizontal arc across his throat. He gurgles, eyes wide in shock, and hits his knees; his gun thuds to the floor as he scrabbles, terrified, at his throat, blood pouring between his fingers.

In the instant after my initial kick, Enzo sends a giant fist into the nose of the man behind Pig, crumpling his face like a tin can.

BAM!

"Cazzo di merda," I hear Enzo murmur in a strange, tight voice.

I can't spare a thought beyond noticing—the third man has his weapon lifted, smoke curling up from the barrel. The man Enzo punched is writhing on the floor, making wet sounds as he clutches his face, and Pig is glassy-eyed in a spreading pool of blood.

The shooter turns to me—time slows, as it tends to do in situations like this. I see his finger tightening. Instinct is a merciless goddess; my right foot snaps upward like a striking viper, and my bare toes smack into the shooter's wrist. The gun barks as my kick connects, and the deafening report makes my ears ring and something hot slices through the skin a millimeter above where my ear connects to my skull near my temple. I lunge forward and hit one knee, slicing on an upward diagonal across the upper inside of his right thigh. Another report rings out and I hear the round crack into the wall somewhere above and behind me.

His gun thumps to the floor, and I rock back and straighten as the shooter drops to one knee, staring down at the veritable ocean of blood gushing like a geyser out of his severed femoral artery.

"Ay…aiutami," he whispers, fear in his fast-fading eyes.

He slumps to his butt, gripping his wound—the blood sieves through his fingers.

"I could." I crouch in front of him. "I am a nurse, you know."

"Aiutami!”

I close the blade and hold his eyes. "You were going to hand me over to Pugli."

"No, no. Per favore…aiutami."

"I've heard that Pugli is the devil himself." I stand up, staring down at the dying man. "Let the devil save you. You made the deal with him, after all."

Even now, it's a hard thing to not leap to his aid—the caregiving urge is so deeply ingrained at this point that I feel physically ill at what I just did.

I remember Killian immediately puking after killing those three men. And I feel it myself, now, the rise of acid in my throat. I look anywhere and everywhere, swallowing hard, but the hot, thick sour knot rises and rises and pushes against the back of my teeth, and there's the first man dead in the sea of gore, still spreading on the kitchen floor, and his eyes are sightless and vacant and seem to stare at me, accusing. And there's the other one, slumped sideways but not quite fallen over, not quite dead, leaking his lifeblood from his thigh in slowing spurts. The man Enzo punched is trying to get to his knees, spitting blood and teeth, reaching for his pistol with hate in his eyes.

BAM!

His head snaps sideways and a chunky pink cloud sprays the floor, and then he thumps to his belly.

"Story?" Killian is beside me, but the blood is a roaring cacophony in my ears, pulsing hard behind my eyeballs, and the vomit is a hot surge against my teeth.

I've seen blood. I’ve seen death.

So much; too much.

But this is different.

So very different.

I caused this blood; I caused this death.

"First, do no harm." I'm not a doctor, so I haven't taken the Hippocratic Oath, and the Nightingale Pledge isn't quite the same. But still, everything in my life, every ounce of professional training, has gone toward learning how to save lives, not take them. I always hoped, and foolishly assumed, that all the self-defense training would never be necessary. I thought Mom and Dad's and the rest of A1S's enemies were all dead. I made a lot of erroneous assumptions.

"Story?" His hand rests on my back. "Take a breath. It's okay."

I shake my head, stagger away from him, but there's nowhere to go—the bathroom is too far. The sink—I sprint a few steps across the kitchen and empty my stomach into the sink, panting, and then heave again and again, until my stomach is empty and nothing comes out but stringy saliva.

"Hey?" It's Enzo, in pain. "I am shooted."

Killian and I turn in unison to see Enzo slumped backward against the kitchen counter near the range, blood a spreading red splotch low on his belly's left side.

"Fuck!" I lurch toward him, and Killian and I catch him as his strength gives out and he starts to slide to the floor.