The Scent of Shadows

7

“Jo? Are you okay?”

I lifted my head. Olivia was huddled in a corner, cradling Luna, the cat’s head tucked protectively beneath her arm. I nodded, and turned back to where Butch lay sprawled at my feet like a giant toad.

“What happened?” My voice rasped like it’d been cut to ribbons by a tiny razor.

“Y-You did what you had to do, Jo,” Olivia said, misinterpreting my question. “He came at you with that big knife and I thought for sure he’d kill you. But you didn’t back up. You didn’t run. You didn’t even waver. I couldn’t believe it.”

I glanced at the clock next to her and did a double take. It was 12:01. I couldn’t believe it either. Only a minute had passed since the onset of that tempest? “What about the storm?”

Olivia looked momentarily confused, and glanced uncertainly from me to the window, where a patter of raindrops stroked the glass. “It stopped, I guess. I hadn’t noticed.”

Hadn’t noticed? Hadn’t noticed an electrical bolt had damn near sliced her sister in two? Hadn’t smelled my flesh burning?

“Help me up.” I held up my hand and she reached for it, but Luna whirled in her arms, hissed, and swiped at me.

“Fuck you,” I said to the feline, and pushed myself to my feet. I was a bit wobbly, but alive.

“That’s no way to talk to someone who just helped save your life!” Olivia scolded before burying her face in Luna’s furry nape. “Is it, my precious pookie?” Her voice came out muffled. “My pookster? You love Auntie Jo so much you risked one of your nine lives to save her.”

“What do you mean?”

Olivia didn’t answer at first. Then she turned her face toward mine, cradling the cat to her cheek. “Look at his eyes.”

My legs were shaky, but they held as I crossed to Butch’s body. I nudged him with the toe of my boot, and he rolled like a sausage to his back. He would have been staring sightlessly at the ceiling…if there hadn’t been four long scores across each eye. The lids had been shredded with scalpel-like accuracy, slim incisions but deep, lacerating each eyeball.

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

Olivia joined me next to the body. “You’d be dead if Luna hadn’t leapt when she did.”

But why would a cat attack a human? A man, no less, whom it was obviously afraid of? I turned to ask Olivia this just in time to see her eyes go wide with shock. The heroic feline was unceremoniously dumped on the bed. “Jo! You’re injured!”

I looked down and saw the blood seeping through the left shoulder of my blouse. Part of me was surprised I hadn’t felt the injury before. Another part knew it was a bad sign I hadn’t. “It’s okay,” I told her, knowing it wasn’t. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“Lie down. Let me get something to staunch the wound, and we’ll call an ambulance.”

I was in no shape to argue. Perhaps it was only psychosomatic, but I was feeling a bit dizzy all of a sudden. Luna hissed as I plopped down among the pillows, then leapt from the bed, over the corpse, and streaked away. I closed my eyes.

I must have drifted off because when I came to again Olivia was seated next to me, pressing a clean towel to my wound. I winced as fresh pain coursed through me, and was about to tell her she shouldn’t have used the good towels when the first tear fell.

“Hey,” I said, reaching up to wipe it away. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m going to be fine.”

“I know,” she said. Her face crumpled anyway. “I just keep seeing that monster—he really looked like a monster!—and he wouldn’t stop staring at you.” She shook her head side to side, as if to dislodge the memory. “I thought for sure I was going to lose you. Again.”

I tried to make my smile reassuring. “Well, you didn’t lose me, and you won’t ever lose me. It’s just a little scratch. See? The bleeding has already stopped.”

She sniffled. “I guess.”

We sat in silence, Olivia’s cell phone clasped on her lap, though she made no move to open it. Chaos would resume as soon as that call was made, and even though it was a false sense of normalcy surrounding us now—there was a dead man on the bedroom floor—I think we both felt once we made that call, our lives would never be the same.

“Gawd,” Olivia sniffled, and lifted the edge of the towel to see if the bleeding had stopped. “I just have the worst luck with guys.”

We looked at each other and for a moment neither of us spoke. Then we began to laugh, that crazed, hysterical laughter you see in people who’ve drank too much, or who’ve forgotten their lines on their wedding day. The laughter tore at my shoulder, probably starting the bleeding again, but it felt so good, much more acute than the pain, and I didn’t want to stop. Our bodies shook with it and tears rolled unheeded down our faces.

We were both gasping, dizzy, and breathless, when I felt Olivia jerk and inhale sharply. Opening my teary eyes, I too froze. There was a beefy arm across her throat, and her fingers clawed at it, her eyes wide and instantly somber. Butch wasn’t exactly choking her, but he wasn’t being gentle either. Hauling her to her feet, he squared himself behind her body in a position that made it impossible for Olivia to defend or escape the hold, even if she knew how.

“You’re dead,” I said dumbly, though all evidence pointed to the contrary. I’d killed him. Yet there he stood, blood staining his clothing out of a wound that no longer existed. How could that be? In fact, the only ill effect he still showed was the scoring about his eyes and a blind and total reliance on his other senses. Especially, I noted, his sense of smell.

“Not quite,” he said. “Not yet.”

The words fast healer burst through my brain, images of a wrist popping back into place on a dusty desert road, a crumpled body coming back to life. I knew then it was possible. Blindly, Butch backed away from me, dragging Olivia with him, his nostrils flaring widely with every breath. He was moving closer and closer to the blade I’d dropped. I had to do something quickly before it was too late to do anything at all.

“Let her go,” I said, pitching my voice to the right of the bed before easing myself up and to the left. “Y-You want me, fine. But leave her out of this.” My arm throbbed and the bedroom wavered as I stood, but I forced myself steady. I didn’t know how long I could stand, but passing out wasn’t an option. I’d save Olivia or I’d die trying.

“How’d you do that?” Butch asked, head tilted into the middle of the room.

“Do what?”

“Kill me. You’re supposed to be immobile during metamorphosis. How’d you move?”

Like I knew? Instead of answering, I advanced.

“One more step and you’ll watch your sister die.” He’d stilled and was focused on me despite his blindness. For emphasis, he tightened his grip. Olivia’s eyes bulged. “Now step back.”

Death rode his brow. I stepped back. Think, Joanna. Think!

Okay, so Butch’s sight was gone, but his other senses were flawlessly acute. It made me wonder at this transformation he’d talked about. It obviously meant something to him. He’d waited until then to try and kill me, and in that time all my senses had been shut down. But now that they were back, what about that “sixth sense” he’d spoken of? Was that what he was using to track me now?

As much as I hated to take my eyes from Butch and Olivia, I had to close them in order to transfer focus to my other senses. I did, and the difference was immediately discernable. Colors flashed behind my eyelids, accompanying scent and sound. By simply casting my mind in the direction of the objects I last remembered seeing, I could smell them.

On myself I smelled blood, Ben, and the faint scent of the soap I showered with. I turned to the dresser beside me where a bevy of beauty products rested—mint, eucalyptus, wax, powder, and a perfume that reminded me unerringly of Olivia. Turning my attention to her, I inhaled deeply, and caught lingering tendrils of that scent, as well as something sharp, which I instinctively identified as fear.

As for Butch, I didn’t dare cast my mind in his direction. His scent was already overwhelming me, like being locked in a room with a pustulant corpse. I was already more sensitized to him than anything else in the room.

Except the blade on the floor between us.

My eyes flew open in time to see Butch’s head jerk, then jerk again when I inhaled sharply. We scented it at the same time, or scented each other scenting it. He was closer than I. I lunged, he snarled, and we reached it at the same time.

I came up with the tip burrowed beneath my chin, Butch’s laughter hot in my face. Olivia’s squeal was choked off in a warning tug. “Don’t fucking move. You don’t think I know what you’re doing? What you’re thinking?” He flicked the blade, a swift motion that made me wince in anticipation, but no pain came. Yet. My necklace, however, dropped soundlessly to the carpet. My jaw clenched reflexively, but otherwise I didn’t move. Butch laughed humorlessly. “I can detect your thoughts before you even form them. Remember, I’ve been at it longer, Archer, and I’ve never been an innocent.”

That I could believe.

“Just tell me what you want,” I said, fighting to keep my voice even. “Anything you want. Me for her? Give the word and I’ll do it.”

“Oh, now you’re making deals, are you? Isn’t that noble, sacrificing everything for your sister. But you’ve done that before, haven’t you, Jo?” He grinned that corrosive smile. “Time to do it again.”

“No!” Olivia struggled against his iron grip. He just held on until she’d worn herself out. If it had been me, I could have bent forward until his weight was on my back, flipping him, or swept a leg, or scraped his shin on the way to breaking bones in his foot. But it wasn’t me. It was my sweet, harmless, innocent sister, and she could only stand there and weep. And choke.

“Take out the weapon in your left pocket, and throw it out the door.”

I didn’t wonder how he knew about the hidden kubotan. Even I could smell the cold, pressed aluminum. I did, tossing it through the doorway leading to the living room.

“Now step back…Step back,” he repeated, when I didn’t move. “I can smell the defiance on you, Joanna, don’t you know that? Do you really think you can do something to change what’s happening here? You think you can save Olivia now like you saved her before?”

I stepped back, but instead of relaxing Butch, this seemed to provoke him. Olivia struggled, her face going red, but his grip was a crowbar wrapped around a feather. If he’d shoved that knife through my jaw, I’d have felt less horror.

“No!” My fists balled impotently at my side and fear slicked my insides and rose like a tide of tar, oiling the air around me. I knew he could smell it on me. Desperation made my words earnest. “You said you’d trade me for her! Me for her!”

“Now why would I want to trade you for her?” he asked, loosening his grip. Olivia stilled. Butch raised the blade. “When I can have you both?”

With that he began to cut.

“Joanna?” Olivia’s voice was childlike, small. She looked at me as if seeing me for the first time, wide eyes filled with childlike confusion. I knew, though, that she was really viewing me through a veil of white-hot pain. I remembered how the world looked when buried beneath your own blood. Tears burned in my eyes for Olivia’s sake and a strangled cry escaped my throat.

Butch began to laugh. Laughing and cutting, precise despite his blindness. Beyond the brutality, there was just something horrifying about seeing that pure beauty marked. I’d never seen Olivia injured before and it was like seeing wings torn from a butterfly, like watching a temple being defiled. It broke something reverent in my heart, and her anguished cries filled my own mouth.

“Stop! Stop!”

Butch held out the dripping blade. “Stop? Yes, well…why not? She’s nothing to me, after all. Just a pawn, really. Just a way to get to you. Thank you, Olivia. For a job well done.”

The tips of his filed teeth sparked in a telling grin. I saw it, and still there was nothing I could do. Butch opened his stance, turned his shoulders, and propelled Olivia into the arching wall of glass. I heard the sick thud of her body hitting, the hollow crack of the pane, and in what seemed like slow motion, the glass splintered, then shattered. It collapsed, and Olivia fell with it.

Her scream razored through the night, lingering after her body had fallen. An answering cry burst from my throat as I rushed the window, clambering gracelessly over the wide bed and bounding across the other side. I clawed at the jagged glass, bloodying my hands and forearms, feeling nothing.

I couldn’t see her. She was already lost in the void of night; dropping like the rain, falling like a star, setting like a crimson sun.

Staring out into that cold black void, I had a momentary urge to follow. One step, a mere five inches, and it would all be over. I’d never have to move or fight or weep again. I wouldn’t have the unending chore of breathing anymore, and the screams pinballing in my skull would be silenced once and for all.

I heard my name; a taunting, singsong repetition, languorously drawing out the syllables. All I could think, all I could feel, was that I’d been wrong. Wrong to believe I’d taken every precaution to protect myself. Wrong in believing nothing else could be taken from me, that I had nothing to lose. There was one last thing that I had cared about in this world. My sister.

And now she too was gone.

“Jo-ahn-naa…”

Sucking in a deep, steadying breath, I lowered my head like a bull readying for the charge, and I did take that first, that final, step forward.

But not before I had turned around.

I sprang forward, body low, and used my weight to take his legs from under him. There were no thoughts of weapons as I wrapped my arms around his knees. No care of injury as his bulk collapsed and toppled forward. I swiveled, fighting for his back, but he was quicker than he looked, even blind. Before he could use his fists or weight against me, I was out of reach, regrouping, and readying for a second assault.

“What are you doing?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “You don’t have a weapon.”

“Yeah. I do.”

“No. I’d be able to smell it.”

Both of our nostrils flared, and we located the weapons; his scimitar that had skittered beneath the bed when I killed him the first time, my folding knife knocked from his grasp when I’d lunged, and that now lay outside the door.

“I am the weapon, you asshole.” And I hissed in his direction, my breath filled with the same black intent as my heart. For the first time Butch looked scared.

My movements weren’t as smooth as normal, my strikes less practiced. I swung out with more adrenaline than skill, but I got a few blows in, took a few too, before pulling back and forcing myself to think. I imagined Butch’s body as a grid. I overlaid it in strike zones, trying to see him as an opponent and not only the man who had just murdered my sister.

“Over here.” I circled him from behind. “What are you, blind?”

“I’m going to kill you.” He swiveled side to side, trying to locate me with his four remaining senses. Which gave me an idea. I backed away, edging toward my sister’s dresser until I found what I needed there. “Hear me? I’m going to fucking kill you!”

“No. You’re not.” I located Olivia’s perfume bottle by touch and picked it up. “But you’re going to die trying.”

Spritzing the fragrance into the air, I pumped until the room smelled like the inside of a sweet powdery seed. Then I sprayed the remainder on myself. The perfume sent Butch’s olfactory senses into overdrive. He stumbled about in the center of the room, oddly more at a loss with his lack of scent than he’d been with his loss of vision. Feeling my lip curl, I thought of the three senses he had left to work with—touch, taste, sound—and decided to fuck with them all.

Pushing the alarm on Olivia’s digital clock, I wrenched the knob as high as it would go. Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” filled the room. Startled confusion was soon replaced by helpless anger. Butch let out an outraged howl and began to totter unsteadily in my direction. I threw the empty perfume bottle into the opposite corner where it shattered against the wall. He whirled in that direction, his chest moving shallowly with his breath. Lowering myself to the floor, I rolled under the bed and came up on the opposite side with the scimitar clutched firmly in my fists.

Two senses left.

My anger was cold now, narrowing my resolve into an icy arrow poised for release. I was the hunter; like the big cats crouched in the waving grasses of Africa, the bloodthirsty eagle swooping to rip the flesh from its earthbound prey.

And there was nothing glorious or heroic in the way I toyed with him. I’d trained my body and mind in combat too long not to recognize a rogue warrior, a vigilante bent solely on retribution. I watched Butch revolving about the room, striking out with his fists and voice as he tottered this way and that. On his face was the dawning realization that he might lose. That he might die. That I might be the one to kill him.

Kurt Cobain’s voice rasped through the room, swearing over and over that, no, he didn’t have a gun…

I waited until Butch calmed enough to remember the weapons, counting on his memory of the room’s layout and the relative distance between him and my knife outside the doorway. As expected, he lunged for the closer and more familiar weapon, the one he’d brought with him. The one I held in my hand.

He knelt, thrusting his hands beneath the bed, searching frantically with his fingers. His sense of touch. He couldn’t smell, hear, or see my approach. Too bad, because I saw my reflection in the dresser mirror—eyes black, muscles tensed, arms raised high—and I looked like a fallen angel.

Butch froze. I smiled. And that bowed blade sang.

The stubs Butch instinctively cradled to his chest were white with bone and red with blood, trailing strings of meaty flesh. He howled, demon’s mouth opened wide, head thrown back like a baby bird searching blindly for its next meal. Obligingly, I inserted the tip of the blade, pressing lightly against his tongue. His lips peeled back in a parody of a grin.

His last point of sensory perception was at my fingertips, the sense of taste. I leaned over to take his jaw in my free hand, forcing the blade to bite into his lower lip, and he whimpered as I lowered my lips to his ear. He had lied and laughed with that tongue, and both at my sister’s expense. With the gentlest press upward of my fingers, I lifted him to his feet. “Do you have something to say to me?”

He shook his head as much as he dared, tears streaming from his destroyed eyes.

“I think you do,” I said, my tone dry as dust. “In fact, I think it’s right there on the tip of your tongue.” I pressed, felt the bite of blade into flesh. Butch gurgled, a strangled cry for mercy, and I let up. “What was that?”

“Haar-yyy.” The points where his lips had touched the double-edged blade were stained scarlet. He’d said sorry. I straightened, my body deadened to emotion.

“Well that’s not good enough.” I whispered it, not even caring if he could hear.

I could have slid that curved sword down his throat, severing the roof of his mouth, skewering his guts from the inside. I could have twisted it, sending that tip burrowing up into his skull to flay the soft tissue encased there. Instead, with a brisk flick of my wrists, I tore the blade free.

Butch leaned forward, retching blood, and fell again to his knees.

“Don’t cry, Butch. All devils speak with forked tongues. This will just make it easier for others to recognize you.”

He was bereft of all his senses now, as helpless before me as Olivia had been in his arms, but instead of killing him, I lowered myself to the edge of the bed and watched. I wanted to observe the last seconds of his life, as death marched across his features. I wanted to see if he would heal.

Then I could kill him all over again.

But he did die. The sonofabitch died and left me there in my sister’s cream-colored, blood-splattered room, with a hole in the window like some large, gaping mouth. He exited this world the same way he’d entered it—squalling, miserable, and covered in a woman’s blood.

I don’t know how long I slouched there, bleeding and crying, and intermittently screaming with the rotting stench of this demon’s death rising up around me; willing both him and my sister alive again so I could change it all.

Eventually, I stood and turned off the music. Silence buzzed in my ears as I hauled Butch’s body to the window and pitched it over the side. I didn’t watch his tumble, but the rain had stopped and the whole world was silent, as if it existed in a vacuum, so I heard the thud, and the cracking report of his body hitting pavement. Never say I don’t learn from my mistakes, I thought humorlessly.

Then I keeled over and retched up my guts.