Rattling. With shut eyes and heightened senses, I detected several guards entering my cell, armed and ready. Like dogs on a scent, they bounded down the halls and barrelled towards me, trampling every scent in their wake like as stampede.
I tensed. No buzzer?
I bristled. No warning?
Immediately, I felt Veronica begin to pace, prowling within my mind, ready to pounce. Balancing on the edge of a razor, the air sparked in anticipation as the guillotine of adrenaline grew heavy. It curled and snapped like a live wire as I heard footsteps, cracking like a whip, rapidly approaching me. Snapping my eyes open, I sat up and met the uninvited guests with hard eyes.
"Subject Xero." Tutting, he entered.
The Benefactor. Emerging through the parting down the centre of the group of guards, he walked proudly. It was as if he was the chief orchestrator of a grand scheme, whose pieces were finally falling into place. Standing up, I smirked devilishly at him as he inspected the walls of my enclosure. Behind my mask, Veronica snarled at the intrusion but my face showed nothing but playfulness. I couldn't let anything slip to the surface. I had to push her back. Teeth and claws were an alternative I didn't want to resort to just yet.
"The great, Subject Xero." His tone was sarcastic and taunting, a provocation I didn't care for in the slightest. With great difficulty, I dragged the rage, kicking and screaming, to the back of the line. I had to stay in control. Watching like a hawk, I caught the guards slowly moving into a formation, one I knew well. Offense.
Despite the hostility, I remained calm and seated, taking in every slight in the air and pressure change in the room. A pin could drop a mile away and I would damn well hear it if it fell on my turf. Sniffling out their numbers, I quickly realised what they had come for.
"Time's up." He whispered, raising his arms as if he led a group of wolves to hunt a lamb.
His cockiness had me bristling, and I couldn't help but scoff. He thought to slaughter me in my own home, on my land, and expected it to be easy? Anger coursed through my veins like poison, infecting my organs until they submitted and pumped the rage like blood. Darkness brewed, shadowing my thoughts with the hate it brought like day to night. Fury.
Slowly, I rose to my feet, flexing my fingers in anticipation. The hunger for bloodshed never ceased, regardless of the time and place and the idea of fresh blood hanging in my morning air had me salivating.
Change of plans.
Sinking down to a crouch, I hissed as the guards rushed towards me in waves, pelting me with rubber bullets. Their shape had them burying themselves deep into my skin but not reaching muscle: the burn like a thousand needles. Roaring angrily, I threw myself at the closest guard I could get my hands on and disarmed him, snapping his shooting arm backwards to fire at his comrades.
Blurred movement was my only advantage, as every time I got hit, I slowed. Shooting until I ran out of bullets, I found that I had to start picking them off, one by one, if I wanted to live to see the second wave. I knew this game play. Zipping in and out, I drew a zigzag of bodies as they dropped to the floor in pain. Smashing a guard in the head with the butt of his gun, I found my blood boiling. The fury was so addictive. Inhaling deeply, I found that the Benefactor had retreated to safety in the furthest corner of the room. Coward.
Xero, look out!
Too late. A quick slice of a blade laced with a sedative had me crumbling to the ground, clutching the wound on my leg. I groaned, the world spinning on its axis, as I struggled to maintain consciousness. Seeing my vulnerability, the surrounding guards piled on me, spitting and cursing: avenging their dead friends. Circled by grown men throwing punches, I screamed in pain. Hands and feet pummelled me to a heap of bloody limbs as I curled into the foetal position, crying and begging them for mercy.
It was as if time slowed, the moment stretching to eternity, until it stopped completely, and I was left to my own thoughts in the suspended silence. What on earth was I doing? On the floor, submitting to my oppressors who got a kick out of my bloodied skin was nothing like the girl I knew.
Watching as my soul left my body, I glimpsed the mess they had made of me. My heart stilled in shock. No inch was left untouched. Soaked in blood like I'd bathed, I was missing fingers and had more broken bones than strong ones. Limbs were bent in angles I couldn't bare, and the guards didn't seem to care. Tears ran black with ink as the signed my fate on the dotted line. I snatched back the quill.
No more.
I wasn't that fragile little girl anymore and I sure as hell wasn't weak. My fate was mine to decide and I was not ready to die. I hadn't lived yet. It was too soon. I could not let them win. I would not let them win. It's gonna take more than this for me to break.
Slammed back into reality, I rolled over. The vultures were on my back ravaging until my bones lay exposed. With beaks of iron, they fought amongst themselves over who could pick my skin apart next, clawing to the core. Tearing, bruising, scratching. Squawking and screaming like scavengers. Naked, they stripped me to the bone.
Tears welled in my eyes as my blood crackled with an energy that was becoming all too familiar. The pleasant hum had me moaning as the fire burned the pain away. Bones crunched and rectified themselves as skin grew over the holes. My hands began to shake like the bubbling of a pot. The rumble of an earthquake warmed in my heart, growing and glowing like hot coals, until it tore through my throat and spewed from my lips like smoke.
"VERONICA!"
Like a dive into ice cold water, I was thrust into the darkness of my mind - thrown back behind the front lines - and switched with a ravenous red. The force left me reeling. We swapped seamlessly like the tossing of a coin from heads to tails and back again. A tightrope dancer teetering from side to side, I chose as my body became hers, the raw meat of the tender wounds toughening in response.
The beast was released from her cage. Saturated with rage, she grew hungry and tired of their exploits and itched to douse them in medicines alike. Thoughts of their actions, mere suggestions of their depravity, had her burning bright as the sun. A fury that broke the chains in me. A dam had opened, and its power poured.
The cuts on her arm began to swell as blood began to boil, contract and morph into strange shapes. She stared at it in shock, the vultures forgotten, as it grew to a point around her left wrist, the tip reaching far beyond her fingertips. Her lips parted as the same tingle started on her other arm, the same growing proudly as it knitted together and fastened itself against her skin.
I won't let them break you.
Anger fuelled her instincts into natural, primal movement, cajoling her to roll over and start cutting through the bodies piled in top of us. She hacked, slowly as screams and cries that weren't my own began to fill the air. The centre of the heap remained obscured as the bodies provided the necessary cover from gunfire, so we took our time, both getting used to the balance and feel of the blades at our fingertips.
Blood spurted from all directions, immersing her senses and driving her wild. The sweet taste pushed her to a state of euphoria as she hacked faster and faster. The beast was beginning to live up to her title. Bursting from the centre of a guard's body, she shoved his intestines out of the way and pulled herself out of the carnage. My usual attire had been stained with the appetite of a monster.
No turning back now.
Flicking her right wrist, she let the blood blade melt down into a long, thin rope watching her scrambling targets with amusement. The whiz through the air was hardly warning enough, before it tethered to a guard's neck and flung him across the room like a rag doll. Snap. Lights out.
The second wave of guards arrived a second too soon, as when they scanned the battlefield they realised they had reached their last. I would kill them all without batting an eyelid, simply because I could. Revenge was a dish best served cold and the ice I was bringing to the table was cataclysmic.
The world had rectified itself, for I was no longer drenched in my own blood but theirs. The smell was like nicotine, the taste a drug that lulled me into the sweet release and satisfaction of death: a harbinger of sorts, I served many a slice. Breathing deeply, she looked straight into the dark eyes of the Benefactor.
"See why they call me, Queen?" She smirked, venom gathering at the corners of her curled lips. A forked tongue slipped out from between them, as she taunted him with her eyes.
Cracking her neck, she rubbed her hands together, gathering every drop of blood spilled towards her - levitating - gravitating around her burning body like a beacon. As if she were praying, her hands aligned, turning the edges of the blood ring into spikes that speared every direction.
Catching on a second too late, the guards scrambled to my bolted door, fearing for the skin on their bodies. I would peel it from their backs and hang it on my borders as a warning. Like Dante's Inferno, it would spell the words: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here. As it fucking should. The sounding of a thousand fists on dry wall brought me out of my reverie; the Benefactor had scurried like a rat and trapped the rest of them on the other side.
Cackling, she threw her hands out, flinging the spikes at a devil's speed that severed the heads of many but impaled them all. Giggling at them rolling like turds in the wind, she kicked one out of our way as we strolled to the hatch of my cell door. Smirking. Time slowly slipped through my fingers, hanging in horror at the dead man's sand. A turn of the hourglass. Screaming, she charged at the door throwing him back.
An alarm.
Relentlessly, she bashed against the door. Her fists, bloody and bruised, were healing at a rate I didn't bother questioning. There was no time. The whirring siren alerted the rest of the building of the carnage. A breach. The military would be informed and they would send the cavalry. I had minutes.
Quickly, she raised her hand and curled it into a fist, wrapping blood around it like a cloak. The solid chunk slammed against the door like a battering ram, leaving the Benefactor crawling away, stinking of sweat and piss. His expression had me dying from a laughter that bubbled from my gut. I was like a caged animal, rabid with the realisation that I was finally big enough to break free.
Scientists scrambled, offering aid, tranquilisers and blood thinners like sellers at a market stall. She shrugged them off.
It'll take more than that to stop me now.
I smirked.
Crawling up the door, we whispered at his fearful face, a gentle caress of wind amid the hurricane.
"Impressed yet?"
Finally, the door blew off, taking a large chunk of the wall with it as it collapsed in a cloud of dust. With a sigh, she allowed the blood to change back to its liquid form, swirling it around her fingertips, only to form a shield to protect us from their onslaught. Rapid fire of their specialised cocktails was a storm I wouldn't be caught dead in.
She pouted childishly at their attempts to ruin her fun, but that dissolved, as fast as it came, into her signature smirk. A sweeping motion with her hand had all the scientists trapped, blown away by a bloody tidal wave that travelled through the rest of the East Wing. The cycle ends with me.
A voice interrupted her liquid bliss.
"Xero, stop! This is not who you are." It was Genevieve, running towards her from in between the blood walls. "You're not a killer."
"She might not be, but I am." Veronica snarled, flashing her fangs and tongue.
Not her.
I wouldn't let her die at my hands, nor the hands of any other but time. She deserved nothing less. A true angel in disguise, she deserved a guardian of her own.
Fine.
"The name's Veronica, love. Pleasure to meet you." With a wink, she flipped my hair over my shoulder as she turned to look at her.
Sauntering between the walls caked with blood, she giggled at an almost comatose guard. Letters. Words. Sentences. He spoke. Waving theatrically, she put her hand behind her ear as if straining to hear him when we could, crystal clear.
"Witch." He muttered, repeatedly as if in shock. Accusative eyes stared me in the face. She cocked her head with a scoff.
"Oh please. Do I look like I'm wearing your grandmother's drapes?" She chuckled, gesturing to her bloody attire. With a single swift movement, she slammed her heel into his throat, effectively crushing his windpipe.
Someone had to put him out of his misery.
"This is what you wanted." She laughed, inching the gap between her walls closed. The people enclosed within the crack, precariously squirmed on the edge of life and death, balancing on the flick of a wrist. Screaming: it excited her to no end.
"You paid for your tickets with innocent blood, now enjoy the show."
With a single snap of my fingers, she closed the gap, drowning them all, guards and scientists alike. All aggressors succumbed to the waves as their sins finally caught up with them. Freedom was a luxury they couldn't afford in the currency they paid in.
I want them alive.
Coiling her blood ropes around their abdomen, she propelled us up to the roof of the West wing. Landing with a sigh, I felt her anger start to slip away, the adrenaline was fading. Returning to her iron cage, she crept back into the shadows, drawing close to the warmth.
Thank you.
As my eyes returned back to normal and the rush faded, I realised that someone was talking. Ezra.
"Holy fucking shit, man!" He cursed, arms flapping frantically as he stared at me in absolute awe.
Casting my gaze over the demolished East wing, I smirked. The cycle ends with me. Shrugging, I looked over at Andreas whose eyes swam with a pride I'd never seen before. Reaching for me, we almost abandoned our regular customs to embrace in front on onlookers - Shaw interrupted.
"Do you have any idea what you've done, Subject?" He screamed, grabbing me roughly by the arm.
"More so than you." With a snarl, I snapped it away from him. "My freedom is mine and you will not take it from me. I am not a slave with a debt to pay."
Shaking with anticipation and adrenaline, I spat my words at him. The power of which resonated in the air, hanging with the weight of worlds. A silence stretched between us like No Man's Land, touching the frontiers of both battle lines, until I crossed it with satire.
"Not even rent." I added, chuckling quietly at the ruin I had left the Institute in. Nothing was left standing. Brought to the ground they built it from. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
"You owe me your life and you will pay me back every damn dime. Even if I have to bleed you dry." He hissed in my face. The sick scent of him made my breakfast come up to take a peek. I gagged.
My teeth elongated.
"I don't think so." I smirked with a fierceness I had never felt before, as I felt my body gear up for another fight. Finding myself already recharged, my jaws ached with a tension I was more than willing to release in the flesh of his throat.
"Watch me."
Just as I was about to sassily retort I felt something.
A pinch.
Reaching for my neck, I felt a protruding appendage sticking out of it. It was a thin and cold cylinder that reeked of mercury. Staring Andy in the eyes as he rushed over to me screaming and cursing, I crumbled to the ground. Blurs flitted in and out of sight. I could feel his warmth. His pulse. His life. Not removing my eyes from his, I watched his face slowly fade away as I time began to slow. A hand stroked my hair out of my face. So close.
"Initiate Transition."