Page 95 of Shattered Stars
It’s cold and wet, all squidgy, yet strong; solid. The muscle that kept that dude alive. This is the organ they say I don’t possess. Sometimes I think they might be right, even though I can hear the thing beating in my head day and night. Letting me know it’s there.
But I guess what they mean is that I have no feelings, no remorse … no empathy. People talk some serious crap. This ugly, smelly organ controls nothing but the blood pumping in your arteries. And the only thing it has to do with love is pumping the blood to your cock when you want to fuck a girl.
If any of those crackheads had held a heart in their hands, they’d know that.
I turn to the other ingredients I spread out on the counter, the herbs and the concentrates. It had been fucking hard to track some of these ingredients down, but a little arm twisting here, a little neck squeezing there, and I’d found everything I needed.
I think of my mom doing this, standing at the kitchen sink in her holey socks, the radio blasting, noise to cover up all the shouting and screaming out there on the streets. She used to balance on her tiptoes and hum along with the music. So I hum too, that tune that’s humming in my belly. That’s where those feelings really lie, deep in the pit of my stomach. That’s how Iknow she’s mine and I’m hers. Nothing to do with this lousy muscle.
I slop the heart back into the bowl and concentrate on concentrating. I can’t fuck this up. It needs to be perfect. It needs to work.
I concentrate so hard I give myself a fucking migraine as I shake the herbs and mix the liquids and finally pour my little rabbit’s blood into the bowl, swimming my hands in intricate patterns over the bowl, humming the old words, letting my magic creep into the core of the muscle and molding and shaping it, changing it into something different, smaller, prettier, feminine. When I’m done, my hands stained red, I fall back onto that bunk, the lantern still blazing, my feet still inside my boots, and close my eyes. My head hurts so badly I think my skull will crack in two.
I don’t knowhow long I sleep but when I wake, the lantern has burned itself out and a night owl hoots somewhere out there in the wood.
I find a torch under the bed, then search through the cupboard finding a small wooden box at the back full of notes and coins. I tip them into my pockets and then carefully, admiring my work as I do, I lift the heart from the bowl and place it in the box, snapping shut the lid with satisfaction, and hooking it under my arm.
At the door of the cabin, I roll the mutilated body of the man – some dude who liked to ship women over the border for fuck knows what – out of my path with the heel of my boot and open the door.
Am I going to go to Hell for all the bad stuff I’ve done? I think as I step over the corpse and out into the darkened forest. That’s what my mom said. Hell, that’s what half of my victims said too. One last-ditch attempt to stop me from the inevitable. But what do I care if I am? Where I am now, here on the Earth, with my boots sinking into the damp ground isn’t that great. Or it wasn’t until her.
I kick away the stand of my bike and sit on the machine, the box resting on the seat in front of me.
I’m going to tell Marcus I killed her. That I crept into the forest at the academy and lured her under the trees, pretended I was her friend, that I was going to help her, then wrapped my hands around her throat – her pretty, tender throat – and squeezed her life away.
Ahh shit, that is some fucking fantasy. One that makes me hard. I want to wrap my hands around her throat, feel that heart of hers pumping against my palms.
“Shit,” I mutter, the word loud in my ears. I need to concentrate.
I go over my story again and again in my head, all the way to Marcus’ compound. When I arrive they tell me he isn’t in the boardroom. He’s asked not to be disturbed. So I ignore the instruction and jog up the stairs, the box tight in my hands, finding him in bed with some girl, different to the one before. A girl who looks almost relieved when I barge into the room and interrupt them.
“Barone! What the fuck?” Marcus says, rolling off the girl and taking the sheet with him, leaving her bare and exposed and scrabbling to cover her tits with her arm. “I said I was not to be–”
“It’s done,” I say, tossing the box towards the bed where it lands with a thud on the mattress.
“What is?” Marcus says.
“The girl. She’s dead.”
Marcus stares at me and I stare right back. He can’t read me. No one can. One of the advantages of having no fucking heart.
He reaches for the box and lifts it onto his lap, peering up at me again before he opens the lid.
The girl can’t help her own curiosity, she leans over to look inside too. Then she screams scrambling away so quickly, she tumbles off the bed.
Marcus studies the heart for several long minutes and I kick at the ground and study my fingernails, whistling a tune under my breath.
“This is hers?”
“Yep.”
“I’m going to need to test it. Check that’s true.” He presses down hard on a button on the machine by his bed. “Send Carlton up here.”
“You don’t usually test the gifts I bring you.”
“How did you do it?” Marcus asks, closing the lid.
I grin at him and lift my hands, miming wringing her neck. The girl on the floor whimpers, but Marcus simply stares at me some more.
