by Martha Woods
“She is bad, her shoulder is miraculously not shattered, but she still has a bleeding hole in a place that needs mobility.” She ran her hand along Clare’s side, taking no notice of the blood starting to coat her hands. “She likely has a concussion, possibly a burst eardrum, but what I’m worried about most is her stomach. She’s clearly been bleeding a while, it’s miraculous that she’s even still breathing, but she won’t be if we don’t get moving.”
“What are we even doing with her? She’s the enemy.” Iggy snarled looking into the back seat where they had loaded Claire. “Are you all forgetting that? That she spends her life hunting down people like us?”
“Did you notice that she was underneath a hunter that she’d just finished stabbing to death?” Cayden pushed past him, walking towards the driver’s side door. “When I did that it wasn’t exactly a move that I thought would mean I kept being a hunter.”
“But-” Iggy stopped when he felt Liam’s hand on his shoulder, not squeezing down with malicious intent but possessing just enough power to be clear who was in charge.
“Let it go Iggy, you can talk all you want about it but we’re taking her with us. I trust Cayden’s judgement on this.”
“Enough to save a hunter?”
Liam shrugged. “His judgement is the only reason you’re here with us, I was considering just letting you go. The girl comes with us, if she’s against Christian then she has potential to be a friend.”
“Oh right.” Cayden slammed the door shut, winding his window down and looking at the group. “Might have to tell you guys something about that.”
“What is it?”
Cayden looked to his right, nodding in satisfaction when Farah buckled herself in. He turned the car on, looking out the window and shouting, “She’s Christian’s sister-in-law!”
“What?”
Cayden didn’t hear the reply, peeling out and rocketing off, engine roaring and carrying them along the road.
“Shit!” Hayley ran over to the other car, throwing open the door and jumping in. “Everyone get in! We need to keep up with them! We can’t afford to split up out here.”
They all piled into the cars, racing off with no hesitation to follow Cayden and Farah. Skylar sat in the back seat, head in her hands while she thought over things.
“That’s Christian’s sister? What kind of man is he that he would even order his own sister to be killed? What kind of heartless monster is he?” She ran a hand over her mouth, stifling a giggle. “Moreover, what kind of woman is she that she can fight of that many hunters and still be breathing? I think I might have another friend at this rate.”
* * *
They caught up to the other car in no time, Cayden having found a motel that wouldn’t ask questions about a half dead woman being loaded out of a car lest they become a fully dead clerk buried out behind the back of the building.
By the time the others had gotten out of the cars and stepped into their room for the night, the bed had already been covered in plastic and Claire laid on top, Farah carefully cutting through her ruined clothing to uncover her wounds.
“Is there anything we can do to help?” Hayley asked, stepping forward with Michael.
“I need you to sterilize some tools for me, unless you happen to know any healing magic?” Farah frowned when Hayley and Cassandra shook their heads, before chuckling to herself, “We always have to be strong armed into learning about that don’t we? It just isn’t as fun as being able to move things around the room with a flick of your wrist.”
“Three witches between us and not one of us knows how to heal a sprained wrist…” Hayley filled a pot with water, throwing the tweezers and the scalpel from their medical kit before heating the pot with a snap of her fingers. “We’re good to go here, do you know what you’re doing?”
“Of course I do, I had to learn pretty quickly given that Cayden decided to get shot again.”
Cayden groaned, gathering up the bloodied clothes and putting them into a plastic bag. “Don’t blame me, blame Christian. Trust me, given half the chance I leap at the opportunity to not get shot.”
“I suppose I can believe you, so long as you don’t make a habit of it.” Farah leaned down, taking a closer look at Claire’s stomach and wiping the blood away with a damp cloth. “This is bad, the bleeding can be stopped easily but I want to get those bullet fragments out of her.”
Hayley stepped forward with the pot, handing her the scalpel and standing by her side. Skylar walked over, taking the cloth from Farah’s hands and resuming cleaning the blood away. “Good,” Farah said, “I’ll need you to keep the area clean, I’m going to need to see exactly what I’m doing the entire time I do it.”
Skylar nodded, trying not to gag when Farah sliced a small opening in the wound. Farah grabbed the tweezers, carefully pulling out each shard of the slug slowly and dropping them into the ashtray next to the bed. “It’s amazing that she was still walking around like this, most people would have dropped a long time ago.”
“Yeah,” Cayden said, “She always was stubborn when it came to injuries. Must have been a pride thing, she’s been like this since she was little.”
“How long have you known her?” Liam stood next to him, tilting his head in curiosity. “When did you first meet her?”
“I met her about five or six years ago, so probably when she was fourteen or fifteen, something like that. I’m not surprised that she got involved with hunting, that kind of goes without saying when you’re raised around them, but it’s still pretty sad.” He smiled down at her, eyes flicking back and forth under her closed eyelids, breath slow and steady in her unconscious state. “She really is just full of love, she always has been. You should have seen...”
“What? Should have seen what?”
“How she was with her sister.” He grimaced. “I think I have a feeling of why she decided to leave Christian’s group.”
“Why-” Liam froze, sighing to himself, “Oh. This is going to be a very awkward talk when she wakes up. If she wakes up.”
“I wouldn’t doubt Farah, she fixed up my shoulder pretty good.”
“My fears don’t have anything to do with Farah, she worked with me for years I know how skilled she is. I’m worried that her body has just gone through too much, you saw how many she’d taken down by the time we got to her, you can see her injuries. For all we know she may just not wake up again.”
“No.” They turned to Iggy, who was watching over her wit obvious hostility, but clear admiration as well. “Her heart is beating steady, she is hurt, and she’s lost a lot of blood, but she will probably recover from this.”
“See?” Cayden said, “Even Iggy thinks she’ll make it through, and he doesn’t even want her to.”
With a clink, Farah pulled the last of the shards out of Claire’s wound, reaching over for a bottle of disinfectant and wincing in sympathy. “I really hope she doesn’t wake up for this.”
She tipped the bottle slightly, a generous splash of liquid coating her wound and falling in, Claire’s eyes shooting open at the sudden burning. “Fuck! What are you doing!”
“Calm down!” Hayley placed her hand on Claire’s shoulder, pushing her down to the mattress and holding her in place. “We’re making sure that you don’t get infected, I know it hurts but just push through it for now.”
“You could have… Warned me… Fir…” Claire’s head fell back against the mattress, her body going slack and her breathing slowing again.
Hayley stepped back, shrugging. “Or I guess you can do that.”
“Your bedside manner could use some work, but thank you for that.” Farah threaded a needle, preparing to sew the wound shut. “The hard part is over now, I can do this bit alone. I have a feeling all of you need to talk about a few things.”
“Yeah.” Cayden looked nervously between Claire and Skylar. “Looks like we do huh?”
* * *
They moved outside, leaving Farah to take care of sewing up Claire and making sure
that she wasn’t in anymore danger. Noticing that Cayden still couldn’t quite look at her, Skylar cleared her throat, “Um, Cayden? Why do you still look like that? Have I done something wrong?”
“I wouldn’t say that, it’s more of… An unfortunate coincidence?”
“What do you mean?”
Liam nudged him, looking at him pointedly. “Just tell her, or I will.”
Cayden sighed, “You remember that hunter that was… Holding Abigail?”
Skylar felt her blood heating up at the memory, clenching her fists and squeezing her eyes shut in anger. “Yes, I remember her pretty vividly Cayden, why do you bring her up?”
“Well, I don’t want you to get angry or freak out when I say this. Are you going to stay calm?” When she nodded impatiently he took a deep breath, wincing as he said, “That hunter was Claire’s sister.”
She froze, looking slowly back towards the motel room where the sister of the woman who had almost killed her child was laying, under their care, being brought back from the brink of death. “Oh.”
“Yeah, ‘Oh’.” Cayden ran a hand through his hair, groaning up at the sky. “I don’t know how this is going to go now. Claire and Laura were always close, sisters are always close but these two were pretty much joined at the hip.”
“Do you think there’s a risk that she might try and get revenge for us killing her sister?”
“Honestly?” He looked back at the motel door, shrugging. “I don’t know. My first thought was yes but… She idolized Christian, you couldn’t have a conversation with the kid without hearing her going off about her hero. For him to put a kill order out on her, and for her to kill that many hunters, something very clearly went wrong with them.”
“How shocking, that psychopath can’t keep ahold of his family without alienating them,” Leah said, “He’ll even try and kill his own family, because wiping out other families en masse isn’t nearly enough for him.”
Leila looked distracted, as though she was thinking of something completely different, but she shook her head and said, “Poor kid, she couldn’t control who her sister decided to marry. It’s always the things that you have no control over that end up ruining your life.”
“That raises another question…” Michael stepped forward, looking between all of them. “She was part of the inner circle, right? Her sister and her brother-in-law organized that whole thing to kill all of us. So, where was she? If she was so close to everyone then why would she stay behind, why wouldn’t they involve her?”
“You think that she might have been there that night?” Hayley said.
“The thought crossed my mind.”
Liam and Skylar thought back to that night, Cayden recalling who he was dragged past before entering the parking garage where everything went to hell. There were many faces that they remembered, ones that had escaped and ones that hadn’t, but they couldn’t recall seeing her face among them. “I don’t remember seeing her there,” Skylar said, “Could they have left her outside while everything happened?”
Cayden shook his head. “That’s not how his group works, if you’re involved then you are involved, there’s no half-assing. Which means that they probably froze her out so that she wouldn’t realize what they were up to.”
“They would do that to someone so close to them?”
“With Claire?” He chuckled, “Yeah, they would definitely do it with her. When I knew her, she didn’t have an evil bone in her body, always talking about protecting people and saving the day. The first time you do a job with Christian, a proper job, you start thinking that being a good guy is a bunch of bullshit. I don’t really see her outgrowing that part of her, at least not to the point that she does the sort of shit I used to do with Christian.”
“Oh my god...” Hayley leaned back. “This is just making more questions, can we trust her, or can’t we?”
“I want to say yes, but I honestly won’t know until she wakes up.” Cayden looked between all of them, gauging their expressions. “And she is waking up, right?”
Iggy scowled, but he reluctantly nodded. “I don’t like the idea of helping a hunter, but… If she’s anything like what you’re saying she’s like, then I guess she deserves a chance. You gave me a chance, and everyone else in this group gave you a chance when you came from the same place as her, it’d be majorly hypocritical to not give her the same.”
Hayley and Michael nodded. “We want to see where this goes, we shouldn’t punish her for something that she didn’t even have a proper part in.”
Nods went around the circle, Cassandra and Leah adding their approval before Skylar and Liam did the same. When all heads turned to Leila they all expected to see their first refusal, but to their surprise, especially Skylar’s, she nodded, saying, “The girl deserves a chance to explain what she’s about, I’m sure there’s more of a story to us finding her in the aftermath of a knife fight in the middle of the forest than we realize.”
She looked at her daughter, smirking at the look of shock still on her face. “What’s wrong Skylar?” She asked, “You seem surprised by something.”
“I just… Didn’t expect you to be advocating for someone to keep living.” Skylar said, ducking her head in embarrassment. “It hasn’t exactly been top of your priority list in the time I’ve been travelling with you.”
Leila shrugged. “We don’t have to kill everyone, especially those that may not have even done anything wrong in the first place. Besides, she probably knows some very valuable things if she was close to the two people in charge, probably knows where their safe houses are, what their plans for escaping would be, it’s just smart to keep her around to ask.”
Skylar was waiting for the “But”, and when it came she could only sigh.
“But if that doesn’t work out and she is after revenge,” Leila said, “We can always just kill her then.”
* * *
Christian hadn’t stopped staring into the mirror for the last hour, the still bloodied bandages mocking him with the knowledge of the horror show that lay underneath them. He didn’t have to have the wound uncovered to know that his eye was completely destroyed, Claire having made absolutely sure that he wasn’t able to get up once she had attacked him.
“That little idiot.” He growled, staring into his one working eye. “If she had let me explain, if she hadn’t let her emotions get the better of her… We could have ruled together, we could have ushered in a new world, a better world for humanity. I would have taken her to bed every night, I would have given her everything.”
Christian ran a hand down the bandages, wincing at every cut and stitch that he put pressure on, teeth clenched and his skin on fire. “I’ll make her feel what she’s done to me, I’ll string her up and introduce her to the parts of us that she was so horrified to discover. She has no idea the things that I’ve done to make this world a better place, but she will find out.” His hand dropped limply to his side. “She will find out.”
He stepped away from the mirror, walking across the still ruined and shattered room, boots crunching on glass that had saved Claire’s life and taken his eye. Placing his hands on his desk, he took a deep breath, head bowed and back rising and falling. “Just be patient Christian, you have your best men on this, she can’t hope to get away, not in one piece at least.”
He looked to the side, the picture of Claire, Laura and himself staring back at him. Picking it up delicately in one hand, he looked down at it sadly, tracing a finger over Laura’s face. “Oh Laura… I’m sorry about my indiscretion with her. She was a mistake, I should have seen that earlier. I’m sure you always saw the way that I looked at her, you were right to have your worries, you knew she wouldn’t be good for me.”
He growled when he looked at Claire, then a few years younger and smiling widely, no indication of the betrayal that she would commit years later. “How could you do that to her Claire? How could you betray your sister like that? How could you turn your back on everything the two of us built, what Laur
a died for, all for your own selfish desires.”
He tossed the picture back onto the desk, sitting down with a grunt and closing his eye, hoping that some good news would await him when he awoke. The problem was that luck just wasn’t on his side that day, he neither got the chance to sleep, nor was there good news awaiting him when he was interrupted.
“I’m sorry to interrupt Sir.” His underling walked in, clearly nervous to be speaking to him in such surroundings and in his condition. “I can come back if you would prefer me to.”
Christian waved him in, not making any effort to disguise his irritation at being intruded on. “It’s fine, you’re already here. Just say whatever it is you need to say and then leave me be.”
“Y-Yes Sir…” He stepped forward, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “We… Have some news on Claire.”
Christian looked up, recognizing the fear on the young man’s face. “Given that you look like you’re going to shit yourself any second now, and you keep glancing between me and the door like you’re guessing how long it would take to make it out, I have a feeling that the news isn’t good.”
“N-No Sir, it isn’t.”
“Oh?” Christian stood, his chair pushing out from under him and hitting the wall behind him. The messenger jumped at the sound, watching with bated breath as Christian advanced on him. “Go on, tell me what you have to say.”
“Claire she…” He gulped, fighting the urge to shudder when Christian leaned in, the bandaged face almost pressing against him.
“You see this?” Christian pointed at the bandages. “She did this to me, she abused my trust and my hospitality, and she injured me. She wounded my flesh, and she scoured my soul, and that is an offence that I cannot forgive. Now, stop stalling, and tell me exactly what you came here to tell me.”
“Claire has escaped again Sir.” The messenger closed his eyes, not wanting to see the growing rage in Christians good eye. “She was wounded last we heard, but we have lost contact with the teams that we sent out. We’re trying constantly but… We might have to assume that they’ve been killed.”
