Page 45 of Wretched Thorns

Evil Two looked up from his satchel and saw something on my face that made him drop the chalk.

The chalk hit the floor and rolled.

The tall one didn’t see it. He was deep in his chant. His eyes were half-rolled back the way a man’s eyes go when he’s drinking deep, and he had a small smile on his mouth I have never wanted to see on a face turned in my direction.

The shadow at my left wrist lifted itself off my arm.

I didn’t tell it to.

It lashed.

It struck Evil One across the bridge of the nose like a length of cable swung at full force, and his face came apart at the cartilage with a wet crack I could hear in my teeth. He went sideways off his knees. His hand caught on the chalk circle as he fell and smeared it. The chant cut. The candles went out. The water in the basin came down off the rim of the bowl all at once and sloshed across the bed.

A second sound followed the first.

A high, ringing crack like marble under a hammer.

The copper basin had split.

The gold thread. I knew that the way you know which kid in the next room broke the lamp without seeing it happen.

The basin lay in two halves on the bedspread. Evil Two had stepped back to the wall. He was holding the door frame. His hands were empty. The chalk pouch at his feet had spilled, and he hadn’t noticed.

Evil One on his back on the floorboards with his hand to his face and blood pouring down his collar.

I sat very still on the mattress and looked at him.

I waited for whatever I was supposed to feel.

I waited.

It didn’t come.

There was no pity. There was no horror. There was no satisfaction, either, which I think is what scared me the most. I watched a man, or whatever he was, bleed onto the floor, and what came up was the way you watch a fly hit a window and slide. Distant. Almost academic.

Huh, I thought. That happened.

I went looking for the thing that was supposed to be there. The lurch in the stomach. The hand flying to the mouth. The hot animal rush of having watched a body break in front of me, which comes whether the body has earned it or not. It had come once at a wreck on I-20, a stranger’s blood on a stranger’s windshield, and it had ridden home with me and stayed a week. I went looking for that kind of week. Nothing answered. I sat and listened to a man choke on the ruin of his own face and thought only that the sound was unpleasant.

That part sent an icy finger down my spine.

What am I becoming?

I didn’t have the answer.

***

Marcus hadn’t moved.

He was still standing at the foot of the bed. Both hands still in his pockets. His mouth had gone white at the corners.

“Get him up,” he said to Evil Two. He didn’t take his eyes off me when he said it. “Get him out.”

Evil Two was slow to move. The hand on the doorframe didn’t want to come off. When it did, he had to use the wall to walk himself across the room to where his partner was bleeding. He got an arm under Evil One’s shoulder. Evil One made a sound that wasn’t a word.

Evil One — I don’t know his name, I’m not going to ever know his name, I won’t let myself want to know his name — got himself half-upright with Evil Two’s help. Blood across the front of his shirt. The bridge of his nose was where his nose used to be and was no longer. His eyes had a wet, animal quality that hadn’t been there ten minutes ago.

He looked at me.