by Rowan Casey
Gone were her blonde locks and elfin features. In their place she saw a hard-faced man with a two-day beard, his curly black hair plastered to his head with sweat. His face was all planes and angles and his eyes were filled with grim satisfaction, no doubt at a job well done.
What the hell?!
No sooner had the thought occurred that a wave of white-hot pain exploded across her face, sending her reeling backward, fighting against a wave of disorientation and dizziness that threatened to overwhelm her with its suddenness. She probably would have lost her balance and tumbled to the ground if her back hadn’t fetched up against something solid, keeping her on her feet and giving her a precious second to regain her footing.
She shook her head to clear it and opened her eyes just in time find herself back in the ring, her back against the ropes and Hagland’s incoming fist looming in her vision. The right hook came thundering in, a follow-up to the left jab that her opponent had landed seconds before, and the combination of the two blows snapped Jessie’s face back like a bobble-head doll.
Jessie barely felt it, her mind still trying to make sense of the sudden transition. One minute she was standing there on the battlefield surrounded by the dead and in the next she’s back her in the ring with Hagland trying to take her head off.
What the fuck was going on?!
Having come within seconds of losing her title, her opponent found some previously undiscovered reserve of strength when Jessie froze for those precious few seconds in the midst of the ring and she had no intention of letting her off the hook now. Hagland pressed forward, throwing strike after strike, pummeling Jessie who, already dazed by what had happened to her, never mind the unprotected blows she’d taken in her moment of confusion, could barely protect herself.
Jessie staggered, then stumbled, her arms coming down for a split second, leaving herself exposed.
That was all Hagland needed.
Jessie barely realized what was happening as her opponent brought her foot snapping around in a near-perfect roundhouse kick that smashed into Jessie’s face like a battering ram.
Darkness swept over her and Jessie was unconscious even before her face smacked unceremoniously against the mat.
She was finished, in more ways than one, but she wasn’t yet aware of how much things would change in the days to come…
Jessie tossed and turned, lost in that place where memory and vision combined to torture her with the past through which she’d lived and the future yet to come, until a soothing voice spoke to her out of the darkness.
“Wake up, noble knight. Wake up. The world needs you.”
For just a moment she felt a warm, gentle hand laid across her brow and then sleep - real, genuine, restful sleep - wrapped her in its loving embrace and drew her down into the darkness to rest.
Grimm stared down at her for a moment longer, wanting to be sure that his spell had taken hold, and then he turned away, giving her back the privacy she didn’t know he’d invaded.
He glanced around the apartment, ignoring the drug kit on the table and instead taking in the water-stained ceiling, the dirty dishes piled ten high in the sink, and the picture tacked to one wall of Noble in her fighting prime that had served as a dartboard for so long that her features were all but indiscernible. He shook his head at how far she had fallen. It wasn’t just the drugs; her psyche had taken such a beating that he honestly wasn’t sure that he could bring her back from the precipice that she stood upon, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to try.
The world needed her, and the rest of the knights, too much for him not to make the effort.
With a final look to make sure that she was sleeping peacefully at last, Grimm let himself out the same way he’d come in.
5
It was raining when Jessie awoke the next afternoon.
She lay there in bed, listening to the water chattering against the glass like the touch of a thousand bony little fingers, thinking about the vision that had set her on this path so many months earlier, the one that she’d just relived in her drug haze the night before.
It had been the first of many.
And pretty much the tamest of them so far.
The events of that night had ruined her career, though not in the way one might suspect. Yes, she’d looked foolish, standing there like an idiot with a dazed expression her face while giving her opponent all the time in the world to set up the series of strikes that had ended Jessie’s title run so spectacularly. Yes, the press had a field day following the match with speculation at what had caused her to freeze in the middle of the fight running absolutely amuck, but Jessie had played it smart. Despite all the questions, despite all the interviews, she’d never given voice to what had actually happened that day. She kept what she’d seen to herself, telling reporter after reporter that she’d simply lost focus for a moment and in mixed martial arts a moment was all your opponent needed to steal the match away from you.
She’d kept the truth locked and they’d bought the story she spun them hook, line, and sinker.
Even now she didn’t understand how she’d pulled it off. She’d seen the tapes of the match, had seen how she’d stood there, a dazed look on her face for what seemed like forever, seemingly oblivious to her opponent, her trainer shouting at her from the corner, the crowd screaming for Hagland to finish her. She was certain that someone would call her on her version of the event every time she opened her mouth, but to her surprise no one ever did.
One news rag did publicly question whether she’d been on drugs during the match, an accusation she found darkly amusing at this point in her life, but one she’d fought vociferously at the time. She’d been tested before the match, of course, and when the results were made public the accusation went away in good order.
None of it had made any difference in the long run for the visions were just getting started as it turned out.
Jessie kicked off the covers and got out of bed. Stripping off her sweat-stained clothes, she tossed them into a pile at the end of her bed and walked naked into the bathroom, eager for a shower, wishing she could scrub her mind free of the things she’d seen as easily as she could wash the dirt and sweat from her body.
For weeks after her title challenge nothing unusual happened and she’d just about convinced herself that it had been a one-time aberration, a momentary misfiring of neurons that in turn were the result of having her brain bounced about inside her skull one too many times, when it happened again.
This time, she was walking home from the bus stop after a particular hard night’s workout at the gym and happened to glance into the mouth of an alley as she passed to see a woman slumped against one wall. She was young, mid-twenties or so, with dark hair that fell in waves about her head and shoulders. Her legs were splayed out in front of her and she was partially bent over, her face in her hands. She was shaking, as if crying, and the sight of her brought Jessie up short.
Had the woman been attacked? she wondered. Raped?
Jessie glanced at her smartphone, saw that it was going on eleven o’clock. A woman out alone at this hour was going to be a magnet for trouble, if she wasn’t already neck deep in it already.
I can’t just leave her there.
Jessie stepped into the alley and cautiously approached.
“Hey,” she called, as she took a few steps forward. “Are you okay?”
The woman shook harder and mumbled something unintelligible.
“Are you hurt? Did someone…do something to you?”
Jessie couldn’t bring herself to use the word rape.
The woman didn’t reply but drew her legs up, her knees pressed against her body, as if trying to curl into a protective ball. The body language, particularly in reaction to her question, sent alarm bells ringing through Jessie’s mind.
She lowered herself into a crouch, not wanting to frighten the young woman by looming over her, and crept forward the last few feet.
“It’s okay,” she told the woman, in a sooth
ing voice. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you; I’m here to help. Can you tell me your name?”
Another mumble.
“I’m sorry, I can’t understand you with your hands over your face.”
Kneeling in front of her, Jessie gently reached out and tried to pull the young woman’s hands away from her face.
The woman offered no resistance.
Time seemed to slow as her hands came away from her face and she raised her head for the first time.
Jessie recoiled in horror, a scream building in her throat.
The woman’s long hair framed a flat, featureless face with nothing more than two narrow slits in the center where her nose had once been.
To Jessie it was as if the woman’s skin had gone wild and grown over her eyes and mouth, trapping her in a prison made of her own flesh and blood!
The woman’s hands scrambled at her mouth, or rather the place where her mouth should be, and from behind that smooth expanse of flesh came a mumbled cry like the one Jessie had heard twice already.
“Mmmmm! Mmm-mmmmmmm!”
The woman was trying to speak!
Frightened half to death and not knowing if what she was seeing was real or imaginary, Jessie rose and backed slowly away, afraid to take her eyes of the sight before her.
The woman must have sensed what she was doing, for she reached out suddenly, hands waving in front of her as she blindly tried to find where her sudden benefactor had gone, her desperation echoing in the sounds coming from her with every passing second.
Jessie couldn’t take it anymore; she broke and ran out of that alley as fast as her legs would carry her.
After that, the visions came with increasing regularity, intruding on her life without warning and making even the most ordinary activities impossible to carry out. She’d be enjoying a nice dinner with a friend at a local restaurant, only to look up from her plate and find the patrons at the tables around her replaced by strange looking creatures that stared unblinking in her direction, their eyes filled with undisguised hunger. Or she’d be walking down the street and suddenly find herself moving through the rubble of a scorched wasteland while demons circled in the blood-red sky above. Sometimes she’d see the woman from that first vision moving through the crowds around her, but when Jessie hurried to catch up and confront her, the woman would just disappear, making Jessie wonder if she’d ever really been there in the first place.
It didn’t take long for the stress to take its toll. Jesse was constantly on edge, wondering if this was the moment it was going to happen again, simultaneously relieved and increasingly anxious when it didn’t, for that meant that it might happen in the next moment, or the one after that, or even the one after that. The sheer randomness of it all turned her into an emotional wreck. She lost focus during workouts, sometimes forgetting to show up at all. Her trainer demanded to know what was going on, but Jessie refused to talk about it, convinced that if she did they would think she was either going nuts or on drugs, neither of which would be good for her career.
Afraid she might have a brain-related injury or, heaven forbid, a tumor, she went to her doctor. He ran a number of tests, including a CT scan and an MRI, but to her dismay everything came back normal. She was healthier than she’d ever been in her life.
That, perhaps, scared her more than anything else, for the hallucinations, visions, whatever-you-want-to-call-them, were happening more often and with greater intensity with every passing day.
Then, backstage one night at a media event, someone offered her a hit from a joint to “smooth out her nerves.” Normally she would have simply refused, but this time around she thought Screw it and took a liberal drag, desperate for anything that could give her five minutes of relief from the constant stress.
To her great surprise, it worked.
For the next hour or so, her anxiety levels dropped and, more importantly, the horrible things she’d been seeing off and on for weeks failed to materialize anew. It was only after her high wore off that the visions returned.
Jessie made a few discreet inquiries, found a dealer of her own, and began smoking regularly. For a while, it worked, too. Her fear seemed to diminish. She was able to leave the house and interact with others, even work out semi-regularly at the gym. Most importantly, she didn’t see, hear, or feel anything out of the usual, thanks to the soft, soothing cocoon with which she’d surrounded herself.
Looking back, it would have been nice if she’d been able to maintain that standard indefinitely. But mixed martial arts was a physically demanding sport and it didn’t take long for her trainers to recognize that her reactions and coordination were a far cry from what they usually were. A surprise drug test ended with sanctions from the sport’s ruling body and a three-month suspension from fighting.
Jessie barely noticed, because by then the marijuana had stopped working, the visions were back and were significantly darker than before, and she found herself searching for harder and harder drugs to keep them at bay.
It wasn’t long before she ended up addicted to heroin.
Of the half-a-dozen or so drugs that she tried, only the heroin seemed to keep the visions at bay without fail. As long as she had some of the drug coursing through her system, she remained planted firmly in the here and now. For Jessie, it was like the clouds had parted and she could see the light of day again.
The repeat drug use meant the end of her fighting career, of course, but for Jessie, it really wasn’t a choice; her sanity was more important. With a bit of experimentation, she managed to find just the right “dose” to allow her to keep enough of the drug in her system to keep the visions at a distance while at the same time letting her function without too much impairment. She’d dose up at night and sleep through most of the high, most often waking up in the late morning or early afternoon the next day, just like she had today. She’d have a few hours to get her shit together and then she’d head on down to Dex’s, if it was a fight night, or off to try to find some temporary work to do in order to earn enough to keep the process going for another week or two.
It wasn’t much of a life, but it was the only one she had.
“It’s just until something better comes along,” she said to the empty bathroom around her as she stepped into the shower, trying not to think about the fact that she’d been saying that very same thing for three years now.
If something better was going to come along, she sure as hell hoped it would be soon.
6
Jessie returned to Dex’s arena that night and for the several nights thereafter, taking on a new challenger each time and always coming out on top. Her opponents had little to no training but, surprisingly, their lack of the same didn’t give any of them even a moment’s pause as far as Jessie could tell. They walked into the ring eager to show her and the assembled crowd just who was boss, only to find themselves on the short end of the stick moments later. A few walked out of the ring under their own power; most had to be dragged out when Jessie knocked them into unconsciousness. If they thought a few bar fights qualified them to face a fighter of her skill and experience, they were sorely mistaken and Jessie made sure that it wasn’t a lesson any of them would quickly forget.
Several times when she looked out into the audience, she thought she saw the guy who’d caught her eye the night she’d fought the Cossack, the one Dex had referred to as Dante Grimm. When she tried to track him down after a couple of the matches, though, he was nowhere to be seen.
Tonight was no different. She saw Grimm watching when the fight began, but when she’d finished off her opponent by literally choking him out from the rear and got to her feet, Grimm wasn’t anywhere in sight.
Did he want something from her, she wondered, or was he just a fight junky looking for some action, sanctioned or not?
With no way of knowing, Jessie shoved the thought away and returned to the locker room. She was dressed and waiting for her cut of the night’s take when Dex entered the room, an odd expression on his
face.
“Guy here to see you, Jessie.”
She frowned. “Come on, Dex, you know I just want to get out of…”
Her voice trailed off as the man she hadn’t seen standing behind Dex reached out with both hands and calmly moved the fight promoter out of the way, giving the newcomer room to step into the locker room from the hallway outside.
The man was of medium height and thicker than average build, but something about him made him appear twice that. He was dressed conservatively in a dark grey suit and tie, the latter of which matched the brilliant green of his eyes. His features were blunt enough that he couldn’t be called handsome, not in the classic sense, but the man certainly had presence, with dark stubble on his cheeks and hair just a shade longer than fashionable with streaks of grey that curiously gave him a certain sense of vigor about him.
He might not be handsome, but he is certainly arresting in his own right, Jessie found herself thinking.
Apparently, he was having a similarly unusual effect on Dex. Had anyone else touched Dex without his specific approval, he would have found himself facing an irate Jamaican with certain specific feelings about personal space that he liked to enforce with a vicious beating or two; usually delivered right then and there in spectacular fashion and generally ending with the instigator being carried out of the room under someone else’s power.
That didn’t happen in this case.
In fact, Jessie had the unusual sense that not only did Dex know exactly who the man was but that he was frightened of him, as well.
She knew Dex didn’t scare easily.
If he was frightened, she should be downright terrified.
But she wasn’t.
Not of this guy, at least.
“Can I help you?” she found herself asking, even as Dex nodded to the man beside him and then slipped out the door without another word.
