Page 162 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

I was going to burn that cursed city to the ground. Not a cinder would remain. And if it did, I was going to bleed it dry. Ididn’t care if it didn’t have blood. Not a dust mote would float in the air after I was done with Ilasall.

Gedeon kissed her forehead so softly I wasn’t sure she noticed and headed for the door, toward the darkest part of the room. Since the day the funeral blaze had marked my forearm, darkness exercised its command over him.

“Gedeon,” I pleaded. This was not the time to leave.

He paused in the doorway. The tense contour of his back and shoulders reflected pure wrath. He stared straight ahead until, finally, as if my plea in the shape of his name had reached him, his head turned an inch to the left.

“Gedeon,” I repeated, my voice growing hoarse.

He was about to lose it. I’d been in his position twelve years ago, had fallen into that bottomless hole I’d just begun to climb out of, and I wasn’t sure he could. Or would.

The door creaked closed as he vanished.

Alone, I held Kali in my arms until her frantic breaths evened out and she grew limp, the overstrain lulling her back into sleep that evaded me until dawn.

52

GEDEON

Idunked the flayed head into the iron bucket of water and popped the eyeballs out with my thumbs. Soggy optic nerves and dripping water tickled my skin as I dropped the fleshy tissues in the leak-proof box. It had to survive delivery better than the three from before.

“That’s disgusting.” Ezra gagged above a rusted bucket in the far corner of our underground.

Pulling the skull out of pink water, I began scrubbing it of anything that might have stuck to the bones with an old, mottled towel I used for such things. The ivory surface gleamed in the dim light as I had already removed the tongue, skin, hair, gums, and any other bits that made up the messenger’s head. Once you had practiced enough, it ceased to be complicated. You simply had to know where to make the incisions to peel everything off as efficiently as possible.

“If you are going to vomit instead of helping me, get Eislyn here. She has a better stomach than you,” I told him.

She had my highest respect for assisting Zion in finding creative solutions for his endeavors with his playthings. Which could not be said for Ezra. He had been with us for over a year, and you would think the fourteen months should be enoughfor a person to become accustomed to the activities in Zion’s basement, yet sawing a person’s head off and cleaning it up made him nauseous.

Spit hitting metal reverberated off the damp walls of the basement. “I assumed helping you haul him here would be enough. I didn’t expect you to decapitate his remains and then methodically—” Ezra retched above the bucket. “This is too much for me, man.” Rubbing his temple, he disappeared up the stairs leading to the first floor of our central building.

I picked off the hanging bits of flesh from the skull in quick succession. The towel heated under my fingertips from how brutally I scrubbed the bone until the red streaks faded and a whitish color surfaced, identical to the shade of Kali’s cheeks when I had found her in bed three hours ago, her face puffy and her neck bruised.

Realizing how close and yet far away I had been from her during the messenger’s assault because of my foolishness for listening to her ask to leave her alone and not Zion’s insistence that was not what she needed… My jaw ground. Another mistake of mine that had hurt those around me.

“Gedeon? Ezra said you needed something down here?” The chill drenching the vast space carried Eislyn’s question to me, her voice blending with the sound of hers and a second pair’s footsteps. “I brought Eli for help, just in case.”

Taking my trusted serrated knife, I positioned the skull between my knees, so the light bulb above me illuminated the ivory surface clearly. A blank canvas for my message.

“I need you to divide him into pieces so they all fit in this box.” I tapped my knife on the cardboard box lined with layers of plastic sheets. Hopefully, it would look like a normal delivery from the outside.

Eli whistled. “We better get to it. It’ll take a while. Do you have a saw or anything like that?”

“Next to him.” I gestured to the headless corpse of the soldier sprawled on the large mortuary table in the center of our underground.

“Ladies’ choice.” Eli offered the instrument to Eislyn. “You’re the expert in cutting people up.”

“I want the top.” She rolled up the sleeves of her navy sweater and grinned at him. “You can deal with his dick.”

“Fuck me,” Eli grumbled, but dutifully hovered at her side while she sliced through the wrist joint. She triumphantly handed him the barely bleeding body part, and he dropped it into the cardboard box. “You sure you don’t want me to help you?”

“Not yet. But the lower part is all yours because I’m not touching his balls.” She positioned the saw on the soldier’s elbow. “You have a pair of your own, so you can handle his too.”

Ignoring their discussion on who should dissect which part of the messenger’s body, I carved out two precise lines at the top of his skull.

One letter down, fourteen to go.

The blade slipped and pierced my thumb as I engraved the last curve of the third word. A drop of crimson welled up along with the blooming sting, and I pressed my finger to my long-sleeved shirt. The black fabric absorbed the liquid, concealing it from sight, and I gripped the handle of my knife firmer. If Zion had not gone searching for Kali, she would have vanished precisely as my blood had on my shirt.