The warning movement cost him. I shot again and Skamar engulfed him with her jaw, crunching down on his skull like a nutcracker. His expression literally shattered before me. His black tongue lolled from his mouth, then fell, severed by his own teeth.
But his flailing blade finally found a home in Skamar’s side. I shot him again, but it was too late. She twisted, her face scrawled in agony, but dove in once more. I turned the weapon back on her, causing her to jerk but also causing her to grow.
Her jaw was the size of my head now, and she easily engulfed the whole of Mackie’s crushed skull, right down to the base of his neck. And she bit. After snapping it, after his muffled cries fell silent in her mouth, she jerked back, ripping it from his body. Mackie’s shoulders slumped, his posture both defeated and confused, and from there it was an easy thing for Skamar to dismantle the rest of his body.
“Motherfucker,” I whispered, lowering my weapon. She ate every bit of him, every bone, dried jerky muscle and gristle, and she licked her fingers when she was done.
“Old habits die hard,” she finally said, offering me a bloody, lopsided smile. It was how we’d met. She had been a doppelgänger- my doppelgänger-and so hungry for life she was willing to eat me.
Then Skamar convulsed and let out an agonizing scream. Jerking back and forth, she forced herself to stop with visible effort. A moment of stillness.
Then, like a shark’s fin breaking the surface, the knife burst through her belly.
“Spit it out!” I screamed, wanting to go to her, but knowing well enough to stay away. The man was in pieces inside of her, but he was somehow still alive.
Skamar winced, clearly wanting to, but slowly shook her head. “I can’t.”
And screamed again.
Because Mackie’s soul was in the blade, I realized. She had to swallow him whole, masticating his body, blending it with hers until she totally blotted out his existence…which meant the blade too.
And that, I suddenly realized, meant Skamar would end up like Luna-a fully conscious being trapped in a body of flattened nerves and destroyed tissue. Sentient, but with no way of communicating with the outside world. A bright mind in a decaying body. It’s why she’d hesitated, and I couldn’t blame her…yet it was also why she’d returned. No one else could stop Mackie, and he would never stop.
“When he’s done,” she said, seeing my understanding, “suck the last breath from me. That’s where the soul resides. Th-That should do it.”
I swallowed hard. “But I’m mortal.”
She winced. “You’re alive. You…count. Please.”
I nodded at first, unable to get any words past my thickened throat, but I owed it to her not to leave her to a fate of conscious death, just as she hadn’t left Luna. “I promise.”
Skamar’s eyes were wistful and she was breathing hard. “Tell Zoe…I love-”
The blade reared up inside her throat then, severing vocal cords to poke through the white flesh, the shark’s fin trailing blood behind it. The last bit of Mackie’s soul fought for escape, but she punched her middle, breaking her own ribs as she pummeled him into submission. She gurgled loudly, defiantly, and finally, pitifully.
Simply watching was the bravest thing I could do. But I cried as I did so, choking down vomit numerous times, and at some point my knees numbly gave in. Mackie’s frenetic thrashing gradually ceased, and after a while the deft flicks forcing Skamar to jolt and twitch turned into lethargic slices that only caused more blood to trail from her body. In desperation, or maybe his last hoorah, he gave a final energetic swipe at her heart, and the still-beating thing popped from her chest, pulsed over the top of splintered ribs, pounded a handful of times, then slowed.
The breath stilled with the blade. When neither Skamar nor Mackie moved, I climbed shakily to my feet and crossed to the pulpy mess. Hesitating, I licked my lips before leaning close. Skamar was flattened, destroyed. But her eyes, tucked deep but still whole, swung my way.
“Oh, God…oh, God…”
I fell forward, ignoring the squishing slide of destroyed flesh beneath my knees, and found the carved ruin of her lips. Mackie’s blade had cut through the flesh of her lower jaw, but most of her skull was intact, which was probably why she was still able to exert her will over him. Knowing she was still there, thinking and feeling and simply being alive, actually made it harder to kill her, but it was also the only way to destroy him. Besides, she’d already forgiven me for the death. She wouldn’t forgive me for letting her live.
So bending down, I placed my lips against hers, already cold, and I sucked. The dry coil of breath worked its way into my mouth like rising steam, surprising me and reverberating strangely in my throat, like it was someone else’s voice…and it was. Skamar’s dulcet pitch smeared my esophagus on its way into my lungs.
Mackie’s black fanged timbre clawed at it.
I pulled away, coughing, the throbbing in my chest threatening to make me ill. Out went Skamar’s soul, a taste of creamed blood, and out went Mackie’s soured one. Skamar’s consciousness thanked me as it sailed free, but when the last of Mackie’s deadened soul was hacked from my body? It screamed.
A gelatinous shudder rolled along the entire pulpy mass beneath me then, followed by a long, gentle sigh. The whispered exhalation probably wasn’t a whole lot different than the way Skamar first entered the world. Just the flip side of a lone, fateful breath taken by a woman begun as a vision. One given life by a powerful woman’s mind.
My mother.
Zoe.
I sat back on my heels, wiped my bloodied mouth with the back of my hand, and closed my eyes.
Suzanne.
31
The soft ceremony of morning’s birth in the desert is one thing. Yet the neon metropolis flourishing in the Mojave’s middle creates its own dawn, and in the moments before the sun slams into the desert floor, the lights of Las Vegas shimmer, almost as if they exist in another world. Determined to leave an imprint on the valley’s day, they fight for their right to burn air. It’s a futile battle, of course. The first rays of morning exert their dominance, the city lights flicker, and then each snuffs out under the onslaught of the sun touching the valley like a kiss of gold.
Only three days after the catastrophe that was so-called Suzanne’s so-called wedding, I was alone on a quiet residential street, with only the sun’s kiss to keep me company. Well, that and a Beemer-sized dog stalking me from the shadows. I’d picked up the morning newspaper from the corner convenience store, glancing up at the security camera in the corner as the cashier sleepily rang up my purchase. If anyone happened to check those tapes-and there was no reason they should-they’d see an overage goth girl with soft hair in a sharp bob. The black shade was absolute, no high-or low-lights to warm it up, and it sat like a storm against my too-white cheeks. The nose stud and brown contacts were probably overkill, the ankh tattoo temporary, and the black clothing cliché, but I’d already been far too sorry. It was time to be safe.
I’d seen no television in the last thirty-six hours-reception was pretty shitty in a blown-out bunker within a top secret nuclear site-but my guess was it had been a continuous broadcast of what I was reading now: the wedding disaster recap, and a fabricated explanation of how a floating Plexiglas dock had collapsed, trapping the wedding party under the water. Also how Olivia Archer, the last living member of the Archer family dynasty, had disappeared.
At first it appeared to be an accident, but the prevailing theory now was that Olivia, the bride, and the billionaire groom, Arun Brahma, were all kidnapped by a South Asian terrorist group that had been targeting the textile magnate for years. They’d turned Arun’s passion for a westerner into a weakness, reportedly the sole vulnerability to ever visit the pathologically paranoid prince. It was a lesson, some were saying, to the limitations of love.