by Martha Woods
Leila nodded, breathing out and sitting back. "Impressive that you remember all that, I would think that you've done some pretty horrifying things yourself, why is one village so important that you remember every last detail?"
"Because..." She said, meeting her gaze with an utterly haunted stare. "I killed my brother there that night."
Chapter 2
"I'm so fucking stupid."
Claire threw her shoulder against the door, the cold metal slamming open and crashing against the brick wall, the sudden shock of the cold hitting her exposed and bloody skin. She limped as fast as she could across the parking lot, her truck on the far side near the exit out to the street, hoping against all else that there wouldn't be anyone who would get in her way before the alarm was raised.
Of course, with the way her luck had been that night already, she really should have been expecting it.
"Holy shit! What happened to you?" Claire groaned, turning around and letting her hand fall to her waistband, cocking back the hammer on her pistol. The hunter that was running up to her didn't notice however, his gaze fixed solely on her cut and bruised face, her nose still trickling blood.
"I had a pretty bad fall, I'm fine though." She attempted a smile, only managing a grimace. "We're pretty low on supplies though so I figured I go and get some."
"Well shit, you could have asked any of us to do that." He stepped forward, not seeing the way that she instinctively took a step back as well. "You shouldn't really be driving looking like this."
"Like I said, I'm fine." She eyed the walkie-talkie on his hip, knowing that it she was one announcement away from a fight. "Just head back on inside, I'll be back in no time."
He ignored the way she was glaring at him, sighing while he put his hand out. "No way, come on you're coming back in with me."
"Oh, fuck this." She slipped the gun out of her waistband, slamming the front of the weapon forward suddenly and catching him in the chest with the barrel. He fell to his knee, coughing and wheezing from the attack on his lungs, his traumatized solar plexus making every breath a shuddering struggle. "I'm leaving, don't get up."
"W... Why’d you hit me? What the fuck?" His walkie-talkie crackled to life, a panicked voice coming through clearly in the still night.
"Everyone keep an eye out for Claire! She's gone rogue, she took Christian's fucking eye out!"
The guard looked up at her in alarm, her only response to shake her head with a warning glare. "Don't."
His hand shot to his hip, hand around the grip of his weapon before his shoulder exploded in pain, collapsing back screaming.
Claire kicked his gun over to the side, lowering her smoking pistol and leaning down. "I told you to go back inside." She growled, rising back up. "Don't follow me." She fired one more shot into his knee, turning on her heel and jogging as fast as she could, the other hunters no doubt hearing the two shots and his screams. Not killing him would probably come back to bite her later, but she didn't think it was fair on him given she hadn't killed Christian of all people.
That particular decision was looking stupider and stupider by the minute.
She dug around in her pockets, pulling her keys out and unlocking the door to the car and slamming it behind her. The sounds of shouting and stomping was starting to echo across the parking lot, hunters spilling out of the building behind her to investigate the shots and tend to their wounded friend.
"Over there!" Claire threw her head back, seeing that someone had finally seen her and was gesturing for everyone else's attention. A few of them took aim, shots shattering her rear window and making her duck her head against the dashboard.
"Sorry boys," She said, throwing the truck into reverse and peeling back out onto the road. "No time to stick around!"
Bullets slammed into the panels of the pickup truck, she kept her head low in case any of them decided that she wasn't worth interrogating and was better off dead, which turned out to be a very smart decision when three shots spider webbed the front window where her head would have been normally. Slamming into drive, she put her foot down and sped down the street, smoke rising from her tires and throwing off a few of their shots, the hunters not focused on firing at her scrambling to find their own cars that they could give chase in.
Once she was far enough away from the men and their guns that their shots weren't even coming close to hitting her anymore she rose up, settling into her seat and scanning the road ahead for any unforeseen threats and closely watching the rear-view mirror for threats she knew were coming. Sure enough, so far back she almost couldn't see them, two cars came roaring out onto the street to continue their chase after her, headlights already gaining on the otherwise empty road.
"Shit," She growled, checking her pistol was loaded with her free hand while she slinked down low again. "Why does everything always have to be such a hassle?"
The two cars split apart, advancing to pass by each side of her car, a quick glance showing her two people per car with the passengers already taking aim at her. She slammed on the brakes, bullets taking off one of her mirrors and skimming her shoulders, but it did the job of getting her out of the way of the fire. Claire brought her gun up, shattering the windshield with two shots that sailed through the air and buried themselves in the shoulder of the driver on the right, his pain making him drag the steering wheel down and swerve to the left. The car lost traction instantly, skidding across the road and clipping the front of the other hunter’s vehicle before it overturned, rolling across the asphalt and digging into the dirt on the side of the road.
Claire watched with morbid fascination, the other hunters helpless to stop themselves doing the same until the wreck was well behind them. She regained her bearings before they did, her foot crashing down onto the accelerator and advancing on the back of her assailant’s car, metal crunching against metal when they collided. She ducked just in time to avoid taking a round directly to the face, scattering glass cutting into her skin and marking her face with blood, her hands working the steering wheel as best she could to make her way up beside them.
The hunter in the passenger seat was in the process of reloading his pistol, face set in determination mixed with telltale nervousness. She had already managed to grievously injure Christian and survive, then she'd almost effortlessly taken care of another three hunters that had come after her, it wasn't every day that they came across someone who gave them that much trouble, much less one of their own. Which was why when he brought his gun up and out the window and found a hand clamped around his wrist, pulling with all its might, he screamed in terror.
"Get out of the fucking car!" Claire yelled, ears ringing when he fired a panicked shot closer to her ears than she would have liked. She pulled hard, his body halfway out of his car and his waistband held securely by the driver, who was clearly having a very hard time keeping control of both things.
Claire snarled, slamming her truck against the side of his car, the hunter's arm crumpling between the two vehicles and making him lose his grip on the pistol, the weapon falling into her lap and tumbling underneath her seat. She pulled to the right as hard as she could, dragging him out of the startled grip of the driver and out into the open air, letting go of his wrist and letting him tumble out onto the hard asphalt below.
"What's it gonna be?" She yelled over to the driver, his eyes fixed on the sight of the tumbling and injured hunter behind them. "You can keep chasing me and get shot, or you can go back and save your friend! He's going to die out there if you don't!"
He fixed her with a look of pure malice, hatred burning at the sides of his vision as he let his foot of the gas, slowly coming to a stop and letting her drive off into the night. Christian would kill him if he found out why she had gotten away, which was why he was never going to tell him this was what happened. He would just have to kill her another day.
Claire watched his car disappear over the horizon, headlights turning to brake lights as he turned around and drove the other way. "Good choice," She s
aid, fingers tightening around the steering wheel until her knuckles went white. "If everyone else in that fucking organization showed that regard for life then we never would have ended up in this situation."
She wiped away at the blood covering her cheeks, grimacing at the amount that covered her hands, both dried and wet. "Hope no cops pass me, they'll think I'm a fucking ax murderer." She looked at the pistol still cocked and clutched in her hand, barely hidden from view from outside the car. "Ok that wouldn't help either."
Tucking the pistol back into her waistband and kicking the other back further under the seat, she opened the glove box and searched for one of the medical packs they always carried with them, pulling out a cloth and attempting to clean some of the blood from her face and neck. "The things you do for family," She grumbled, swiping the cloth across her eyes and clearing her vision for the third time in two minutes. "Some fucking family, did they all lose their goddamn minds somewhere along the way?"
She drove for another ten miles before pulling off the road, heading further into the forest along a trail, if anyone else was still after her hopefully they wouldn't think to follow and would just assume she had continued along the road. Claire brought the truck to a stop in between two trees, otherwise invisible in the night forest, her head falling back against the seat with a sigh.
"What the hell am I doing? What have I done now?" She ran a hand over her face, wincing at the sting of her clean but otherwise still open cuts. Claire sighed, flipping open the medical pack and pulling out a bottle of antiseptic, breathing deeply before she poured it into the cloth and dabbed at her cuts. "Fuck!" She clenched her teeth, putting more pressure on her face and closing the wounds.
The forest outside was silent save for her muted grunts of pain, the screeches and howls of distant animals barely audible from her position inside the car. Even if someone tried to follow her into the forest in hopes of an ambush, there was no way that they would ever be able to find her, the thick darkness making anything more than ten feet away all but invisible even if you knew what you were looking for. With this in mind she should have felt safe, should have been able to take the moment to relax and think over what had led her to be here in this moment, but she couldn't bring herself to do so. Every twitch of her hand against the cuts aggravated her, every time she thought back to Christian above her, face twisted in pleasure at marking her as his property was another shard of ice lodging itself in her chest.
More than anything else however, even with everything that had happened, discovering what she had been a part of, confronting Christian and finding out how remorseless both he and her sister had been... Even with all of that she couldn't help that small, insistent voice at the back of her skull that insisted on telling her that she had done the wrong thing, that if she had just shown patience and understanding for his point of view then she could have brought him around to her side. That fighting him only pushed him deeper into his views and ensured that he would never turn back.
"What a load of shit," She sneered, shaking her head. "People like that don't respond to reason and understanding. We weren't arguing over taxes, he was treating lives like they didn't even matter in the first place, he'd already gone too far to deserve anything else."
She threw the bloodied rag onto the seat next to her, thumping her fist against the steering wheel a few times to work out her building anger. "I gave my life to that place, to those people, and this is what it was all for? For... For some fucked up genocide against creatures that weren't even hurting anyone?" Tears started to blur her vision, the reality of everything finally hitting her. "Is... Is that what my nephew died for? To have an atrocity dedicated to him by his evil monster parents?"
She lost track of how long she sat there in that lonely darkness, the sound of her sobs swallowed by the forest and lost to uncomprehending ears. She cried for every life she had taken that she had felt off about, where explanations had been held from her even after she pulled the trigger and watched the light go out in their eyes. She cried for every time she had celebrated a job well done, taking a man to bed on nights she had been on the crew and drinking happily until sunrise on nights she hadn't.
She wept for every time she held her sister through the bad nights, the nights where she woke up in the middle of the night wondering where her son was. For every time she held her hand and buried her head in her chest and let her shirt grow damp with her grief. For every time she had told her that he was in a better place, that everything they did was to honor his memory and to protect others from feeling that sadness that they did every night.
Claire wept, bawled, howled into the night at the fact that her sister had grown into a monster in front of her eyes and she hadn't even noticed.
"Why did you do this Laura?" She shuddered to herself, "When did it happen? Was it because of me, did I plant that idea in your head? Or were you always this way, always filled with such toxic hatred?"
She swiped a hand across her eyes, rubbing her tears away before looking in the mirror, steeling her features when she saw how red her eyes had gotten, how flushed she had gotten by giving into her sadness. The windshield cracked and her knuckles split open when she slammed her fist into the glass, growling in anger all the while.
"Don't even think about her Claire, it's not worth it." She spat out the window, pushing the door open and stepping out. "The bitch isn't even worth it."
Spreading a map out along the hood of the car with a flashlight held between her teeth, she began to plan out a route for her escape, the easiest route she could see being right back through the towns they had already passed through. While it was likely they knew exactly where she was going to go, she didn't really have any other options available to her. While an advantage to driving through the middle of nowhere was that no one really took notice of you, the downside was... That you were driving through the middle of nowhere, which meant that the small towns you passed through were the only hints of civilization for hundreds of miles. Which meant that if she didn't drive through the town she knew was there and risk being attacked, then she would have to take a chance driving along another route with a tank of gas that was a quarter full and with no food or water to speak of.
The choice wasn't exactly hard to make, all things considered.
Claire took the flashlight out of her mouth, turning and shining the beam through the swaying trees and penetrating the darkness, small animals fleeing from the sudden light to hiding holes that would never be seen by human eyes for years. She took a deep breath, cold air shocking her lungs and icing her blood, her eyes closing in simple bliss at being able to enjoy a single moment after all the chaos and turmoil of the previous few hours.
Throwing the car back into drive and making her way back out of the forest, she felt like she had a renewed purpose, or at the very least she felt like she wasn't going to be completely screwed once she managed to escape. If she managed to escape. Her sister and her husband weren't the only people who had caused untold grief to creatures that hadn't done anything to warrant it, she had been a willing participant in those acts as well. She hadn't had all the information, but that didn't change the way she had relished the thrill of the hunt like all the rest of them. If she made it out of this then she had a lot of work to do before she could hope to find redemption, if she could even find it at all with the blood on her hands.
Still, the thought that she was going to try was enough for her at the moment, it was certainly more than anyone else in her family had wanted to do. And if that redemption needed to be earned through blood then... Well, that was just the price that she was going to have to pay. She supposed it would only be fair after the amount she'd spilled, even poetic.
"I can think about that later though," She sighed to herself, looking over her shoulder while she reversed through the trees. "Right now, I have bigger fish to fry." She smirked while she adjusted the mirror, catching a glimpse of her eyes almost shining in the darkness.
"I just need to find the pan to do
it with."
* * *
While Skylar certainly couldn't say she was surprised at how things had gone, she had to admit that she was still rather... Dismayed that the atmosphere between everyone had gotten and remained so awkward. Everyone had really taken their admonishments about how they had treated Leila to heart, all of them aiming to apologize for their quick judgement sooner or later.
Except no one had gotten the chance just yet, a combination of nerves, stubborn pride and Leila walking away whenever she was approached keeping those two simple words from ever leaving their mouths. Which left them here, spread over three cars with Leila and Cassandra engaging in hushed conversation while Iggy and Leah focused on driving and ignoring the feeling that they were being consciously ignored.
"What do you think of her?" Skylar turned to Liam, his response a started grunt while he continued watching the road. "My mother, what do you think she's like?"
He took his time answering, really wanting to find the right words to describe exactly how he felt about her. It was much harder than he thought it would be, either he was getting worse in his impressions of people or she really was that enigmatic. He didn't think it counted as boasting if he thought it was definitely the latter.
"She's... Interesting." He cleared his throat, not having to look to the side to know that Skylar wasn't impressed with his answer. "I can normally get a good read on people, it's my entire job, but her... I couldn't really pick up on much other than she cared about you and she apparently loves making enemies."
Skylar grimaced. "Yeah... That first meeting really could have gone better couldn't it?"
He laughed to himself. "Skylar... I had a more pleasant meeting with Sarconi of all people, and it ended with him threatening to kill you and me telling him I ate his son. So, when I say that your mother is impressive for managing to make people more agitated and uneasy than that... Well I'd be lying if I said it wasn't kind of a compliment."
