Page 10 of Fearless
Reaper and Mariposa walked together, looking like toy figures from my vantage point. Their hands clasped together, swinging between them. Hades walked a few feet in front of them, sniffing along the ground. They remained like that, their shadows long on the street until he wrapped an arm around her shoulders, drawing her into him as she laughed again.
I still wasn’t all too familiar with what happiness looked like, or felt like, for that matter. But her smile at him appeared unrestrained. It reached her eyes, which remained glued to him. He looked and smiled at her in a similar way. Was that what happiness looked like? Or being in love? Did one automatically assume the other?
I took a pensive swig of my liquor bottle. Navigating the world in search of love or happiness seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. Especially for me, always trying to keep up with what was normal and accepted or not. Being brought into the club was the closest thing to happiness I would reach. It was better than anyone else born in my position could hope for. A connection with a woman, or anything beyond the brotherhood between my fellow Steel Demons and I, was simply out of the cards.
A door opened and shut behind me, but I didn’t turn to look. The weight of the footfalls and the space between each step told me that Gunner had joined me on the balcony.
“Evening, Shadow,” he mumbled as he fished a cigarette from his cut pocket and lit it.
I grunted out a wordless reply before taking another swig of liquid sunfire. Curiosity slid my gaze over in his direction. He didn’t usually come up here during this time. The harsh exhale of smoke from his lungs indicated some proverbial weight sat on his chest. But I wasn’t about to ask. We could drink and smoke, talk bikes, weapons, and hunting, but I couldn’t offer deeper conversation than that.
I chalked it up to the ongoing conflict with General Tash, and how the club would be supplied with food and basic necessities now that our biggest trade partner was gone.
“Horus hunting?” I asked, noticing the absence of the bird usually perched on his shoulder.
Gunner nodded. “Yeah,” he said with another harsh exhale. “He can’t see that well once it starts getting dark, so thought I’d come up here so he can find me.”
“Oh.” I absently scratched at the scar cutting through my eyebrow and eyelid.
“He’s a daytime hunter usually, but we’ve been meeting with Reap all day,” Gunner continued, stretching his long arms above his head.
“Riding out tomorrow?”
“Yeah. Nowhere far, though. Just some local contacts for basic necessities.” He looked at me with a smirk. Smiling came easily to him, whether he was with a woman or not. “I tell ya what, Shadow. I love riding as much as the next Demon, but I am not about to sit my ass on that thing for three straight days again. Gotta save some of my future children, you feel me?”
He cupped his crotch with a lewd chuckle. I understood what he meant, but couldn’t relate to the feeling. So I just nodded and drank some more.
Returning my gaze to the sunset, a dark speck against the dark oranges and yellows of the sky slowly grew bigger. After a few seconds passed, I could make out wings stretched to the sides.
“There’s my boy,” Gunner muttered.
Horus approached us quickly. Gunner mentioned before that peregrine falcons were the fastest predators on earth. After seeing the crow-sized bird dive-bomb some Razor Wire members, I had to agree.
“What the—“
Surprising both of us, Horus’s outstretched talons grabbed the balcony railing right in front of me, instead of his master. The falcon’s beak and talons smeared with bits of fur and blood from his kill, he began to preen himself as if nothing was amiss.
“I guess he likes you,” Gunner chuckled, lighting another cigarette.
I found that hard to believe, even for an animal. Nobody liked me, except maybe Jandro. And even then, I often felt like he tolerated me more than trulylikedme.
Still, the close-up view of the curved beak and dark feathers on Horus’s head pulled up a memory in my mind. My heart began to pound like a drum. Oddly enough, it was one of my last memories of being able to feel pain, but was one of the few positive, if even miraculous, occurrences in my life.
It had been years since I thought of that day, but I remembered it clearly. Drawing my blood had not been enough. The women were particularly ornery that day. When kept in darkness for most of my existence, bright light was an especially painful experience, and she had been eager to exploit that.
The cut over my eye still hadn’t finished healing. She peeled back my shredded eyelid and shone a flashlight directly into my eye. It might as well have been a knife blade directly through my eye socket to my brain. My entire world was nothing but pain and darkness, and right then I had never experienced such pain in my life.
After she was done, there was more darkness and not the usual kind. I was almost certainly blinded. Whenever the mood struck her again, she’d surely do the same to my other eye. I’d never screamed like that before, and while I had a decent understanding of my bleak circumstances, I knew with absolute certainty then, that no one would help me. No one would ever stop them.
My sunset view back then was a mere crack in the wall of the prison I called home. I saw how the sky changed color throughout the transition from day to night. Sometimes I thought I saw slivers of clouds, but I could never be sure. The crack was only about an inch wide at the most.
The day after the light torture, I tried to look at the outside world with my one remaining good eye. But a fucking bird blocked my view.
Its dark eyes blessed with binocular vision taunted me. Small chunks of raw meat clung to its sharp beak, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten anything in two days. I cursed out that bird and tore at the crack in the wall with my already weakened, bloody hands. I must have looked insane, scratching at a wall and yelling at a bird to get the fuck out of the way. But it was blocking the only view of the world I had from this cold, cruel prison.
I’d never forget the way that bird looked at me, with the wisdom of humanity and so much more, through an animal’s eyes. Never would I forget what happened afterward.
My vision didn’t just return to my blinded eye, but I saw what I never could before. While my occasional cell mates fumbled in the darkness, I could see everything as if it were broad daylight. When my torturers came down with flashlights and had to blink to adjust to the darkness, I saw every movement and expression.
