Page 15 of Blood & Snow
I fucked up, and nowI'm tethered to a lion who will devour me if I don’t answer that phone.
The metro car is nearly empty at this hour, a few late workers heading home from second jobs, a handful of students returning from evening classes.
They're just normal people living normal lives, unaware that someone among them just spent hours cleaning up an execution.
If I had blood on my hands, they'd know, but would they even notice?
I study my reflection in the dark window and wonder if the experience has changed something visible about me, left some mark that others might recognize.
My hands still smell like bleach despite washing them three times before leaving the apartment.
The chemical scent clings to my skin and hair, haunting me.
I press my face against the cold glass and try not to think about that dead man's empty eyes staring at nothing while I scrubbed his blood from the spaces between floorboards.
Forensic science teaches you to read violence as data.
Blood spatter patterns reveal the angle of impact.
Wound characteristics indicate the weapon used.
The position of a corpse tells you how death occurred and whether the victim had time to fight or flee.
All those textbook lessons made tonight's work possible and gave me the analytical framework to process horror as nothing more than technical information.
But textbooks don't prepare you for the stench of bile and feces, or the way urine soaks their clothing.
The way blood smells metallic and sweet when there's enough of it pooled on the floor.
How it dries into something so thoroughly staining that it requires serious scrubbing to remove completely.
The sound your brush makes when it works loose the coagulated pieces that have settled into wood grain.
The train carries me north through neighborhoods that become progressively safer as we approach the city center.
Street lighting improves.
Graffiti disappears from building walls.
The passengers around me look less desperate, less worn down by whatever circumstances drove them onto the metro at midnight.
I count the money in my pocket without removing it from my coat completely.
He paid me in small bills too, ones easily spent on rent or groceries, or gifts for Anya and Mikhail for the holidays.
It's blood money earned by helping a killer cover his tracks, but money that could solve problems I've been carrying since our mother's funeral.
The moral repugnancy makes my stomach turn.
I've become an accessory to murder in exchange for financial stability, traded my safety and possibly my soul for the ability to provide for my family.
And it sickens me.
I'm a monster like him.
That man has a family somewhere searching for him now, waiting for him to come home.
And he never will.
