Flesh Wounds, page 8
She spotted tears on his face. Gems in the moonlight, they traveled slowly down his cheeks to drip, silent and fast, to the river below. He swung his arm out over the river, opening his hand, and whatever he held sailed out and down.
Silver. That was all she saw of it. White gold perhaps. She heard it plunk into the river below and pictured it sinking through the murky water to rest in the mud and trash at the bottom. She imagined the fish darting forth to investigate—and their disappointment when they found it was not some part of her.
In the silence that followed, the stranger thought to look about, as if some sixth sense had suddenly warned him of her presence. Despite the questing clouds above, the full moon was currently unobscured, providing enough light for their to might meet across the ten feet of rail that separated them. He held her gaze, his green eyes reflecting surprise, embarrassment, and a tightly-reined hostility. Just before he broke eye contact with her the restraint painted across his face seemed almost painful.
Then he jumped.
Wait! she wanted to say, reaching out as if she could catch him, but he was already gone, plummeting towards her enemy below. With open arms, the water took him in, sucked him down, and, a moment later when the ripples had died against the reed-choked banks, erased all sign that he had ever been.
“Damn you,” she muttered, whether at the vanished intruder or the smug river even she couldn’t have said. All she knew for certain was that he had pre-empted her own suicide.
The wind rose again. Even so, getting down from the railing was easier than climbing up had been. The muggy breeze whispered vain encouragement the length of the bridge as she headed back towards her Mercedes.
On a whim, she paused beside the suicide’s red Ford. The keys were in the ignition, the radio was still playing the same sad tune, and there was a blood-encrusted butcher knife jutting from the passenger seat. She stared at the wooden knife handle with its brown flakings for a long minute, uncomprehending. She could smell the blood.
It was then she heard a splash followed by a gasping for breath. The noise drew her away from the Ford’s window and the mysterious knife. From the edge of the gravel shoulder, she looked down to find the stranger struggling through the reeds and cattails choking the river’s bank some fifteen or twenty yards below. She hesitated a second, thinking of the knife, the tang of blood still fresh in her nostrils, then stepped over the galvanized guardrail and started down.
He was vomiting black water and bile when she reached his side. His hair was plastered darkly against an ashen face that had traded its softness for a thin, haggard expression—a corpse’s face: blue lips, high forehead, sunken eyes, and preponderant cheek bones. He’d lost the trenchcoat. His blue chambray shirt had discarded most of its buttons, exposing a scarless, hairless chest, gaunt and pale like his face. His slacks were indecipherable in the dark and wet of the night; she guessed they’d been a light charcoal color before the river had had its way with them. One shoe was gone, exposing an argyle sock tugged down around his white ankle.
“You look like hell,” she told him.
“The water,” he started, choking before he could finish. He spit up more water, wiped his chin, and tried again. “The water threw me out.”
She cocked her head, giving no immediate response to what he’d assumed would be taken as absurdity. Despite his half-drowned condition, her silence obviously intrigued him. She watched curiosity crawl across his face.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
She offered him a hand. “Maybe I just think you’re crazy.”
“No.” He accepted her help, seeming not to notice the strength with which she drew him quickly to his feet. “I’m not crazy. Suicidal maybe, but not crazy.”
“Since when does suicide qualify as rational behavior?”
“Up there on the bridge, you weren’t exactly stargazing yourself.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I came to watch the storm.”
“You’re a poor liar.” He smiled to take some of the sting out of it; they both knew the storm had passed by thirty or forty minutes ago.
Actually, she thought herself an excellent liar, but she didn’t contradict him.
Still holding her hand, he gave it a gentle squeeze, pseudo-handshake. “Damon Thomas.” When she said nothing, he held onto her hand and waited patiently, expectantly, looking ridiculous as he dripped water. When she pulled back her hand, he prompted her with: “And your name is?”
“Names mean nothing.”
“Names are the basis of social encounters. Without them, you and I would just be that man and woman who failed to kill themselves one Thursday night.”
“Friday morning,” she corrected him, allowing a small smile to sneak over her features.
He found her beautiful when she smiled. She read it in his eyes, in the smile he returned, in the pulse that beat within his pale throat. “It’s Katherine,” she answered.
“Katie for short?”
Her smile shifted to frown. “If you must shorten it, I prefer Kat. Not Katie, nor Kate, nor even Kathy. Just Kat.” It occurred to her that he wasn’t acting at all like someone who had just attempted suicide; assuming she was any judge at all, which she was fast coming to think she was not. It bothered her not in the least. Within her, a tiny fire sparked, caught flame, and commenced to grow.
“Oh.” His eyes left her face, wandered the mud and marsh grass for a second, to return braver than they had been. “I’ve always been rather fond of cats.”
She allowed her frown to dissolve as if she hadn’t heard that line, or worse, a thousand times before. “You threw something in the water. Just before you jumped. What was it?” She moved closer, arching her back so that her breasts pressed tighter against the translucently damp fabric of her T-shirt. The fire within her was growing, consuming, spreading through familiar territory.
He held out his left hand, palm up. Against his pale, wet flesh glimmered a small, white gold band. A woman’s ring, tiny and delicate. Like the woman who had probably worn it. “Wife,” he whispered. “She died today—uh, yesterday.” He turned half away, forgetting the temptation of her nipples beneath the thin veneer of damp cotton.
Kat touched the ring, feeling the chill it had taken from the river. “I’m sorry. Did you love her?” She set her other hand on his shoulder.
“You ask that after what you saw?” He turned back to face her, the hostility he’d worn earlier on the bridge returning to cloud his face. “I wanted to die! My coat pockets were filled with lead weights. Hundreds of them! I sank to the bottom. Felt the muck close fast over my feet. Closed my eyes and thought of her. Begged God for forgiveness. Yet...” His voice trailed off, distraught and confused.
Forgiveness for what? She drew closer yet, her hand closing his over the wedding band. “I’m sorry about your wife. But killing yourself isn’t the answer. You’ve got to find someone. Someone to help you forget.”
“I’ll never forget. The others, yes. They were nothing, but her...”
“I can make you forget.” She took his free hand, cupped it over her breast.
“How did I get here?” he asked, confusion rising back to the surface. He met her warm eyes again. “You know, don’t you? I say the river belched me up and spit me out like sour milk, and you accept that. No questions. I show you a ring you watched me toss into the river just moments ago, yet you don’t find it strange that it lies now in the palm of my hand.”
Kat pulled her shirt off over her head, naked now from the waist up. Her breasts glistened copper against the night. “None of that matters.” Pulling aside his ruined shirt, she pressed herself against his cold, wet flesh. Her eyes, darkly volatile, echoed an ancient hunger.
“I... need to understand.”
“The river wanted me,” Kat told him, best explanation she could give—truth, if nothing else. Her arms encircled his neck. She licked his ear. “No substitutes allowed. It threw you back.”
“Threw me back?”
“Your own words. The first words you spoke to me.” His neck tasted of river. It excited her to have her enemy so close, yet helpless, spread thin and without potential across his flesh. She ignored the dangerous flow mere yards away, shielding its presence with hunger for Damon.
Surrendering, Damon’s arms circled her waist, stroked her back. In his left hand, she felt a tiny sliver of ice, his wife’s wedding band.
“I don’t understand.”
“Time for understanding later,” she purred against his neck. His shirt slipped free to drop among the thick swamp grass. Her hands fumbled at his pants. She was already stepping out of her shoes.
“Why were you going to jump?” he asked, voice faltering around the pounding of his heart, still seeking answers though he’d probably not have heard her had she chosen to answer him.
As his pants slid down around his thighs, she pushed him back among the soft grass, mouth hot on his neck, hands clutching at his semi-erection. In her hands, he grew, pulsing with blood and need. Her hands left him briefly to drag off her own jeans, then they were guiding him in.
He gasped as she slid over him, sheathing his erection smoothly, completely, enfolding it in hot desire. He couldn’t remember ever having entered a woman so easily. Moaning in his ear, she rode him, pressing his buttocks deep into the grass and mud of the river bank. With each thrust, her pelvic muscles convulsed, squeezing him in a fold of moist fire. His hips trembled, straining to thrust back against her, seeking a depth he was incapable of achieving for she’d already taken him to the limit. It felt as if the warmth of her vagina had enveloped his entire loins, locking down with an unreal hunger short of nothing less than suction. Her thrusts held him firm against the ground, taking him in with a strength he could not match, let alone overcome.
Damon cried out when he came, closing his eyes against the voyeur moon, tasting blood where he’d bitten through his lip. She growled deep in her throat as his semen exploded within her. It didn’t seem possible, but she drew him deeper, drinking him down, taking his very soul in orgasm. Climax seemed prolonged, a moment frozen as everything he was was extracted through the point of their union. In that infinitesimal eternity, he was aware of little things: the cool wet of tears on his cheeks, sharp blades of grass beneath his back, the gurgling of the river nearby, and the hushed whispers of the night’s insects as they watched.
Her mouth closed painfully around his throat. For a second, he worried that she might be some drugged-out nympho with a vampire fantasy. Her teeth were sharp, her jaw incredibly strong. Locked on his throat, she spasmed, and he felt her come, a shudder and clenching of the muscles from her thighs to her breasts. And, again, the growl. It seemed to last for a very long time.
Then he felt the claws.
From where her hands lay on either side of his neck, razor-edged talons sank into his flesh, biting through muscle and tendon to hook under his collar bones. Pain erupted through the fog of his ecstasy, dissolving the blanket of euphoria under which he lay. Beneath his hands, which seconds ago had stroked the velvet flesh of her bare back, he now felt a thick, luxurious hide. His eyes shot open and met hers.
Her eyes were the same dark nebulae, deep and commanding, but all else about her had changed. Kat she’d dubbed herself, and cat she’d become. Her heavy coat was darker than the surrounding night. The jaws clamped over his throat had become feral, lips drawn back to reveal poised ivory. He wanted to scream, but his voice caught in his throat where her teeth threatened to break the skin and crush his windpipe at the slightest movement.
Jaguar, leopard, black lion—werecat. He didn’t know what to call her and, at the moment, didn’t care. He only wanted away. Even the suffocating dark of the river bottom was preferable to this nightmare. Her eyes smiled at him, shimmering sweet satisfaction as she read his terror.
Kat drew her hind legs up, slipping off his sudden limpness, and hooked her rear claws in the flesh just below his ribs. He did scream then, realizing her intentions as the powerful predator legs tensed. She kicked, opening him from xiphoid process to groin, spilling hot blood and organs beneath the baleful sky. His scream lasted only a moment before her jaws closed down, crushing though larynx, trachea, esophagus, carotid artery, and jugular vein. Blood sprayed in his face; he tasted it in the back of his throat and on his distended tongue. The last sound he heard before red faded to black and drank him down was her sandpaper tongue rasping across the raw wound of his throat.
Damon’s hands fell from her back to clutch at the marsh grass to either side. A silver ring rolled from the left one and disappeared in the mud. His legs twitched once or twice, then he was still, glazed eyes staring sightlessly up at the stagnant clouds.
When she’d drank her fill at his neck, she nuzzled at his intestines, dragging them from his pale corpse out across the bloody grass. In the shattered eggshell that was his abdomen, his liver was within easy reach. She ate it noisily, pink tongue licking at the dark blood clotting her muzzle. Her other favorite, the kidneys, took a bit more work to reach.
When her hunger was sated, she rose and walked off, long black tail twitching back and forth. She purred softly, contentedly to herself. By the time she’d reached the top of the embankment and climbed the guardrail, she was changing.
Returning to human form was a slower metamorphosis, and an infinitely more painful one. She fell in the gravel screaming as her legs grew, the very bone structure changing as easily as if it were clay. The feline tail drew up into her changing spine. Her front legs transformed into human arms. Her skull popped and crackled like crumbled waxed paper, a bone-crunching sound that reverberated throughout her body. For several minutes of painful change, she writhed on the shoulder of the road, voicing her agony at the spectral moon.
Finally, she lay on the gravel, body shaking with aftershock, blood sticky-sweet on her face, hands, feet, and bare breasts. When she’d composed herself, she stumbled to her feet, using Damon’s car for support.
Another night, she thought grimly. Another kill. She walked drunkenly out onto the middle of the bridge once again. From the railing, she couldn’t see Damon’s corpse; which was just as well, she wanted no reminder. Leaning against the railing, she stared down at the hated river.
“Not tonight,” she hissed at its reflective black surface. She spit over the side of the bridge, heavy, crimson saliva that hit the water as a dark, viscous stream. Where it hit, the river swirled angrily.
No, tonight had been like hundreds of other nights. Her hunger had consumed her. She’d made her kill. It’d be another month before it came on that strong again. Another month before she had to kill. Maybe before the next time, she’d gather the courage to do what she’d come to do tonight.
Hundreds of years of this was just too much. Immortality wasn’t all it was cracked up to be—especially at this price. The water would take care of her problems. Of that she was certain. But... not tonight. Later.
Right now it was time to go. Before someone else came driving down the road to find a naked woman, sticky with drying blood, standing alone on the bridge. There were spare clothes in the trunk of her car, right where she always kept them.
As she neared Damon’s car again, the music stopped abruptly, midnote. “We interrupt for this special WKTY news update.”
She leaned against the door, smearing it with a darker shade of red. Her gaze was pulled suddenly to the knife she’d nearly forgotten.
“Police are currently combing the countryside for a man they’ve identified as the Gulf Coast Cutthroat, suspected in the brutal slayings of over twenty women throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
“The suspect, Damon Anthony Thomas, reportedly murdered his wife, Carol Hudson Thomas, between twelve last night and one this morning. Authorities speculate that Mrs. Thomas uncovered her husband’s activities and he killed her to keep her quiet. Thomas was last seen heading west on I-10 near Gulfport, although authorities suspect he will have abandoned the interstate for back roads by now. He’s thought to be driving a red 1986 Ford Taurus, Mississippi license plate YCW 132.”
She didn’t bother walking to the rear of the car. The knife was all she needed. If she had any doubt, it was dispersed a second later as the reporter went on to describe the man now soaking into the mud beside the river.
“Thomas is to be considered armed and extremely dangerous. If you have information on his whereabouts, please call the nearest law enforcement agency immediately.” The announcer paused to catch his breath. “Let’s hope they catch this fiend. Now, you’re listening to WKTY radio, the Rock of the South. Here’s Bon Jovi—”
Reaching in through the window, Kat switched off the key, silencing the radio. Thunder rumbled in the distance, but it wasn’t an ominous sound. Earth and sky were laughing. She joined them, briefly enjoying the universe’s ironic sense of justice.
But, were they two of a kind, she and this Damon Thomas? Guilt-ridden predators whose paths had crossed? Damon, distraught over killing the one woman he was able to live with. His words: I’ll never forget. The others, yes. They were nothing, but her... And Kat, suffering remorse for the hundreds she’d slain in answer to a hunger that overpowered her as regularly as most women have their period. Still, that hunger had kept her alive for more years than she cared to think about.
The thought that they might be two sides of the same coin sobered her. If there was any difference between them, it was that he had a choice—he could have been normal. Normal was not an option for her. Then the sound of the river lapping at its banks reminded her that she too had a choice.
But she killed to quench an undeniable hunger, he to satiate some sadistic lust. She for survival, he for sport. The real question, the one she’d come here tonight to decide, was whether her survival was justification enough?
