Bloodsong Ch. 03

The kitchen had no exit aside from where Valerie had come in through. There was another door, but it led into the pantry where, if she recalled correctly — and she hoped to the gods she did — the spare propane tanks were kept. Right. Drawers first, tanks after.

Her head spun violently as she dragged herself to the counter by the strength of her hands alone. She pawed at the handle of the nearest drawer, pulled it out the whole way, got caught in a shower of dish towels — wrong drawer. The second she tried contained cutlery, which she narrowly evaded as it too rained down. She scanned her findings, thinking at light speed.

Cudgel . . . perhaps, for the tanks, but then again no, never mind, she'd only cut herself open trying to use it on them. Stainless steel chef's knife, no, too big, but then again, nice enough to use as a decoy if Jack asked himself why she hadn't attacked him with any of the knives scattered on the floor when there were so many. She might get some slices in. It was all down to how much coordination she had left over once she was through.

Paring knife, wooden handle. Better size, if she could get rid of the handle. Perhaps too small, though. Boning knife, same wooden handle, sharp enough — she nicked herself on it as her slackened fingers struggled to snatch it up along with the decoy, because she was fresh out of seconds to deliberate.

Valerie crawled into the pantry with both knives held to her chest and her heart in her ears. There were tanks, two of them. She fell upon the first, punching it at random until enough blows landed true to burst the shell and drown the space in a cloud of gas. She pondered breaking another, but no, no time. She tossed herself against the stacked shelves, upturning them so that they blocked the doorway and set loose a tidal wave of canned beans and packs of rice and pasta, leaned against the wall and started shimmying off her pants.

"What's this?" she heard Jack say, behind the blockade. Valerie's eyes followed his voice, making sure that although she could see parts of him peeking through the gaps in the shelf frames — he was armed with the blaster which she hadn't even noticed him grabbing off of her, stupid, inattentive, idiotic — he couldn't make out much of her or, more vitally, what she was doing. The cloud of gas coming from the pantry was pungent enough that he had to have smelled it from where he stood and become wary, because he'd stopped rather than barging in at once. "Val. What do you think you're playing at?"

"Leave, or I'll blow us both up." Valerie hadn't had the time to hunt for a lighter, so there'd be no way to make good on the threat even if she meant to, but as a bluff, it was serviceable. She sucked in a breath, looked at the boning knife precariously held in her hand.

Nothing for it. She stood no chance of avoiding capture, but she could improve the position she'd be in afterwards. Deep breaths. One, two, stab and push, push, break off the handle — try not to cut off hand whilst breaking off handle, too soon for that — force the blade portion of the knife into the fleshy underside of her left thigh, ignore her nerve endings rioting, the screams of alarm from the bits of her brain that had just now woken up and realized that she was once again doing something mad and reckless.

"Don't be ridiculous."

She ignored him. Push, push, until the glinting metal vanished under her skin, until the last of it was swallowed by flesh. There was blood, briefly, but she wiped it before it could run down and stain her clothes, and then the burst vessels purpling the section where she'd sheathed the knife healed over, leaving no sign that there was anything there other than an uneasy slicing feeling when she moved.

Valerie pulled her pants back up. They'd hang loose if she were able to stand, since she'd snapped the belt to get them down instead of fiddling ineffectually with the buckle. Shaking and, partly in shock with what she'd done to herself, or perhaps because the smell of gas clouded her mind, she laughed. She laughed and laughed, semi-hysterical.

"It's not funny," Jack said. He was shoving the shelves aside, so she could see all of him now. He looked more or less composed, despite the amount of blood matting his hair on the left side of his head, but annoyed. More so when she tossed another gas tank at him, which he had to duck to evade. He wasn't done righting himself before she forced him to duck again, this time to avoid a can of tomato sauce. Beans, next. She'd resorted to plucking objects from the floor at random and hurling them around, expecting that if she got a tenth part of them to explode in Jack's face, he'd count this as a hard-won victory. "Don't make me come get you."

"You will, regardless of what I do. And maybe I'll light this fire regardless of what you do. A spark! A big kaboom! There we go, bits and pieces of us spread all over town, dying together in as sentimental a deed as you'll ever squeeze out of me. Or one of us lives and inhales the other's ashes and carries them in their lungs for days after. How is that for romance?"

"I think you need to get out of there before the fumes turn your head," came Jack's dry retort. "You don't want to die. Not even to spite me; especially not to spite me. Besides . . . as if I'd allow it."

A flash of blue. The magic smelled so much like the gas that Valerie had overlooked it, and her body bent in entirely the wrong direction when it sought to evade the blast.

The world turned to black-and-white static as she dropped like a stone. There was pain — so much of it — but pain had never stopped her before, so she gritted her teeth through it and tried to grab the chef's knife. Only her arms didn't seem to want to move at all. She shook them, but they cooperated even less. If before they'd been errant, rebellious, now they might be made of overcooked pasta, with how unresponsive they were.

Her sight returned, piecemeal, but Jack's profile remained spotty when he crouched down and took her hand. She could, however, make out a smirk, which was a depressing non surprise. She could do nothing but lie there. Putting up a fight seemed like a distant dream. Even when she'd been in a state that semi allowed it, this was an outcome foretold. He would have her. Briefly, but he would hold the most power he'd held over her in twenty-five years of enmity. Small wonder he wallowed in smug self-satisfaction.

Valerie thought back to the jeep, thought back to moments ago on the couch, thought of not just one kiss and all that might entail, thought of the way he had touched her, thought of the hunger lurking in the depths of his gunmetal gaze, of the self-control he'd always lacked and of how once his thoughts were set in a given pattern, they could only be redirected through judicious employment of a crowbar. Lastly, she thought back to that evergreen question; if handed the chance, would he dare take it all the way?

Would he at the very least hesitate?

Jack passed one hand around her back and sat her up, causing every thought to vacate her mind while she struggled to stop her boneless frame from sliding out of his grip and end up quivering on the floor, among spilled beans and a murder's worth of tomato sauce. No, wait, the tomato sauce might come in handy for disguising telltale blood stains — too late.

"I know how well you don't deal with losing." Jack's tone was conversational, incongruously light. For once, he noticed her not paying attention, and waited for the light of understanding to flicker back on instead of talking through her stupor. In the meantime, he kicked away the decoy knife. "I know that you have a hard time giving up, too. However, I hope I won't need to press you further to get you to recognize that there is no — why are you laughing?"

Because her voice was the one tool in her arsenal that had been hindered as opposed to nullified.

Because it was funny, in its gnarly, twisty, deranged way, that he made her wish, more than anything, for a mirror she could shove in his face to show him what having a hard time giving up looked like.

Because Jack wanted her laughing at him in inverse proportion to how much he wanted her to smile without guile or traps hiding behind her teeth.

Several replies sprung to Valerie's lips, most of them about pots and kettles and glass-roofed houses. She swallowed them all and laughed harder, because although she didn't know — had never known, not really — the man holding her, she knew things about him. Like which buttons to press so he'd blister himself from how hot his rage burned.

Jack lifted her and carried her into the kitchen proper, one hand under her legs and the other beneath her back. Valerie objected to it on principle and would have objected vocally, were it not for a nascent suspicion that protesting would see her slung over his shoulder.

"You won't get away with this," she mouthed. It didn't reek so strongly of gas here, although only by comparison. Should a human wander in there, they'd race back the same way they'd come, like a bat out of hell. "I won't let you win. Good will triumph in the end, the evil that is you will be vanquished, everyone who can will make it out of this town. All your best laid plans blown to dust because you are—"

He set her down on the chair he'd previously occupied, eyed the broken chains before seeming to conclude that he'd wrecked them too thoroughly to bind her with. Although there was little point in binding her, when him holding her by the hair was the only thing preventing her from slumping forward and banging her head on the tabletop. He pushed the chair against the table so she couldn't fall off so easily and slowly lowered her head, gently resting it on the wood. Valerie shuddered, feeling wrong in her own shape for an abundance of reasons, never least the fact that there was a knife in her thigh.

". . . insane, rotten . . ."

For once, Jack did not try to kiss her, although his thumb traced her mouth, chasing her bottom lip when she sucked it in. It was unclear why. He had her perfectly positioned, pliable as clay, in no shape to put up a fight. Perhaps whatever look she wore was a turnoff, or she smelled too much like an impending explosion to make the prospect of trading saliva as tantalizing as it would have been otherwise. Be that as it may, Jack's hands withdrew, skimming her arms on their way away before leaving her entirely to collect her empty cup. Valerie's reaction of surprise when he paced towards the counter was contained, but she couldn't mute an uncomprehending exclamation when he stopped by the espresso machine.

An errant limb pulled open a cabinet — the same one he'd been rooting through when she'd found him in the kitchen — and grabbed a minuscule ampoule, half full of what looked like water, that had been hiding behind a cookie jar. Jack gave her his back as he puttered about with the things on the counter and the machine hummed. She didn't bother to keep track of his movements, already having a solid enough idea of what he was doing.

"All out of stock phrases? That was fast."

"You don't want to do this. This isn't the way. I know that if you look deep within your heart—" He'd placed the steaming blue cup on the table and divested himself of the shirt she'd made him wear, maintaining eye contact throughout. Valerie prayed for strength. "— actually, never mind. Keep your hands and your yogurt gun to yourself, else by the time I'm through with you, you'll be in so many scattered pieces that whatever god lands the task of returning your sorry ass to darkness everlasting will feel as though they're on a scavenger hunt."

"You really don't deal well with losing."

"That you wouldn't recognize the hypocrisy inherent to that statement if I rubbed your face in it . . ." Valerie trailed off, watching him blow on the cup. Scowled. "Wonderful. It's not enough that you'll force feed me poison, I'll also have to ingest your germs."

"Paralytic, not poison," Jack countered, returning the scowl without bite. He seemed to be in too high spirits to be affected by her bile, although she was dolling it out by the gallon. He dipped his pinky in the cup after blowing on it again, ostensibly to spite her. "I think this is a good temperature. Not that you'd care about burns, given that you just threatened to make me snort up your ashes. Although, come to think of it . . . I didn't see a lighter anywhere."

"Because I was bluffing, you cretin."

"I guessed as much. Here, I think I've added an adequate amount of sugar."

He positioned himself at her back and turned her, and the chair with her, away from the table, raising her to a sitting position and placing a hand at her nape so that she wouldn't collapse sideways.Her neck still kept a residual mobility, though it felt limp and her coordination was shot. Valerie spent her thimble of leftover energy struggling in Jack's grasp as he angled her head and pressed fingers against each side of her jaw to force her mouth open.

All she managed was to fall against him, and although some coffee got spilled, enough remained in the cup that Jack didn't look as vexed as he would if she had disturbed his plans even slightly.

Tentacles came sliding up her shoulders, locking her arms against her torso and snaking up her neck to get a hold on her chin. More bound her legs, although Valerie suspected that those were meant to make a point more than they were evidence that he found her lower body worth restraining. Her awareness of the knife remained, sharpening whenever Jack moved her, worsened by the position he'd sat her in, but it was a sort of discomfort she could think through now that she'd halfway lost feeling below the waist.

Jack didn't request that she drink. Perhaps he wasn't so out of touch with reality as to believe she would, when she knew what the cup contained. Perhaps it was also that he didn't want to offer another opening for her to deny him, since that seemed to get his goat even worse than her laughing at him. He tipped her chin up and, instead of pressing a finger against the corner of her mouth, used the tapered end of a tentacle to make room between her teeth.

Valerie still bit him, but without previous exposure to a softening agent, his appendages were tough and rubbery and didn't forward stimuli with enough acuteness to incapacitate. Jack hardly flinched when the tip of the tentacle got snapped off. He simply tilted her head further up so that the detached piece fell against the back of her throat.

Valerie sputtered and coughed, pondered swallowing just to spite him, thought better of it when it occurred to her that he'd be thrilled to have any part of him inside her. She couldn't spit it out, however, since the rest of the tentacle blocked her mouth. Which left her in the ungainly position of having to push the severed flesh around with her tongue as she fought to bite off enough, fast enough, of the rest to spit out everything.

Jack watched her struggle with an expression both nonchalant and sardonic.

"Enough?" he asked once she had to pause the shredding, her mouth having filled too much to allow such liberty of movement. Valerie shook her head. Never give an inch, never let him gain ground. Jack heaved a sigh and pried her lips apart, this time daring to use his fingers, as she'd left herself no room to bite. He pulled out one of the larger pieces of severed tentacle and tossed it like a piece of chewing gum that had lost its flavor. "I'll remove the rest . . . if you agree to let me wash down the taste."

Unfortunately, she also didn't have enough room to let him know what else he could remove.

They stared at each other, his gaze patient, hers fulminating.

"It's not so bad, Val. Giving in. I'll lie you down to sleep, and when you wake, I'll show you why it's senseless to keep resisting the reality of us being made for each other." Spoken like one who'd watched too many plays. The kind in which fate made absolute fools of men and women who seemed plenty foolish to begin with. Valerie would have blamed Marabeth, but Jack's twisted notions of romance had in all likelihood been conjured without her aid. The woman had seemed like the type to consider love a mental illness. In her nephew's case, she wouldn't even have been far off the mark. "You'll like the life I'll give you. You'll see."

Valerie spat out the leftover pieces of him. Jack smiled, looking as gratified as if she'd yielded. Maybe he'd mistaken it for yielding. Maybe she was indeed yielding, as she had no struggle left in her and was getting a stiff neck, and when he made tweezers of his thumb and index finger and pinched her tongue to her mouth floor, there was so little she could still do that she might as well have given up.

Syrupy poison pooled in her mouth in a slow but steady trickle until she choked, not even intentionally. Jack paused the pouring while she cleared her windpipe, discovering the task more cumbersome than it should be. Whatever the substance was supposed to taste like, she couldn't detect a trace of it as it coated her tongue on its way down. Only coffee, just as sweet as she liked it.

She choked again, this time on her own resentful wrath.

Jack pressed the rim of the cup to her bottom lip so that the last drops would cling to it and rubbed them in. Then he considered her, waiting for something Valerie didn't care enough about to puzzle out. She slumped against him again, having lost the will to stretch out this portion of the trek ahead. When the paradoxical effects of what he'd force-fed her — caffeine and muscle relaxants, taking all the longer to kick in for how much the contrast confused her body — started showing, she was already a third of the way gone.

Jack looked the faintest bit bothered by her lack of reaction, which was risible. Had he hoped to leave her so addled that she'd beg him for kisses, cock, praise his coffee making skills? Thankfully, there weren't many concoctions capable of breaking someone's brain that badly.

Valerie had a weak impression of moving, being moved, but didn't feel the ground disappear from under her feet, since she couldn't feel her feet. She was aware of Jack's arms slung around her and the tentacles holding her aloft simply because she had them in her sights. Her body had been imbued with a bizarre, floaty detachment that made it feel as though his grip on her were no more substantial than the tickling of a feather.

She closed her eyes and focused on her heartbeat and her breathing, finding them both so frail that she thought, for one irrational instant, that she was leaving her body altogether. Tenuous, sapless pain radiated from her left leg in slow pulses, easy to ignore yet peculiar, as even before the second dose of drugged coffee that part of her had been dormant.

It still was, at that, except for the spot where the knife sat. A flareup on a phantom limb that happened to still be attached. The reason for it became clear once she wrenched her eyes open and took stock of where she was. Jack had ensconced her beside him in the jeep, in a position that would have caused her strain even without the blade-in-thigh factored in. Valerie hoped that all the moving and changing positions hadn't made it break through her skin; if she started bleeding, Jack might notice and make it all have been for nothing.

He was digging through the glove compartment. Valerie remembered, much too late, that he'd had close to a minute of sitting inside the jeep while he waited to ambush her. Time enough to secrete away all manner of things; weapons, trackers, more drugs.

She wanted to slap herself for failing to consider the possibility. Another oversight among many. She ought to have dumped the asshole in the desert and tried reaching the next town over, Ring of Tescara be damned. She was better than this, when the matter didn't involve Jack. When killing could be her first, middle and last resort without a gnawing sense of aversion, melancholy and glasses tarnished but still rosy.