“Long -”

“- time -”

“- no see,” the Sisters chirped, getting subtly closer to Dru on either side while fanning out slightly. If she bolted, they would easily intercept, and just in case she got any ideas about running towards him, he popped the claws on his left hand.

“Okay, darlin‘, here’s the deal - yer a crazy bitch, and if Angel made you that way, I shoulda kicked his ass for it. You did me a favor by offing Chin actually, as the Triad can now blame it on the Yakuza, so they’re good with it. But I’m not gonna let you continue to kill people in this city, especially if it’s my fault you’re here. So here’s your chance. Agree to leave now, mean it, and we don’t kick your ass. Or, we kick your ass, dump you in a burlap sack, and toss you in the desert right before sunrise, giving you twenty minutes to find cover or become the Human torch, vampire variety. Choose.”

Her eyes, still a brightly jaundiced yellow, narrowed to slits, and her upper lip curled back in a snarl. “You think you know what’s going to happen, but you don’t. Death doesn’t like you.”

He shrugged. “Ain’t a news flash.”

“Let’s -”

“- kick -”

“ - her ass -”

“- already,” the Sisters insisted.

Dru turned her scalding gaze on them. “Treacherous children. You sold us out because you hated Daddy, and you never stopped.”

“Blame -”

“- us -”

“ - for choosing -”

“- the winning -”

“- side. Something you -”

“- never did, did -”

“- you sister?”

Dru snarled at them like an angry tiger, and the Sister on Dru’s left charged, followed by the other on her right. But it was strange, because they weren’t moving like one as always, but with an obvious delay, which made him curious. Were they changing tactics for Dru, or just not using their telepathy or whatever the fuck they had?

It wasn’t immediately clear. Dru turned to meet the one on her left, giving her a backhand smash to the side of her face, but the second Sister went low and took Dru’s legs out from beneath her with a nicely executed leg sweep, sending her falling on her ass in a flare of velvet skirts. The Sister who had taken her down then slammed one of her legs down on Dru’s face, making an impact that would have knocked out a mortal being. But Dru was not mortal, and the battle was far from over.

Dru slashed out with her fingernails, catching her across the eyes, the Sister on the ground rolled away as Dru jumped back up to her feet, snarling with pain, blood dripping from a broken nose. The second Sister was waiting for her, though, and delivered a roundhouse kick that sent her slamming back against the trunk of the tree hard enough to cause leaves to come cascading down from the higher branches.

No one expected Dru to go quietly; if the Sisters were to be believed, it was not in her make up to go quietly at any time. So they told him to let her “soften Dru up” a bit before he moved in - they even said they’d give him an opening. But did he even want to get in the middle of undead chick fight? Truth be told, if the three of them turned on him en masse, he’d be so fucked it wouldn’t be funny. Luckily, they seemed to have a history of antipathy, in spite of - or maybe because of - springing from the same general bloodline.

Dru caught a follow up kick, but the Sister was expecting that and jumped off the ground, kicking up with her other leg, breaking Dru’s hold. She also managed to turn in air and land square on her feet only a meter away from Dru, a feat only possible for vampires, or a couple of martial artists turned stuntmen.

But Dru was ready for her, and with a frustrated grunt threw a punch of her own, that managed to connect straight with the Sisters’ face, but even as she reeled back, the second Sister was there, nailing Dru in the gut with a solid kick that doubled her over, following up with a crushing knee to the face. Without her freaky powers, she was getting her ass kicked, and he felt kind of bad for her. Mainly because he wasn’t helping do it. This was the woman who made him piss blood after all.

He retracted his claws, just because he didn’t want to accidentally hurt the wrong vampire, and cautiously neared the fight, waiting for his opening. The Sister on Dru now was basically just pimp slapping her, more humiliating than honestly hurtful, and a deeply enraged Dru punched her in the throat, making her stumble back, and Dru growled as she started stalking towards her, ignoring the other Sister, who was simply standing by, not doing anything. Ah, must be his opening.

He charged in, not catching Dru’s attention until it was too late, and punched her in the stomach, popping his claws at the last second and driving her into the tree, where his claws sunk deep. She let out a breathless scream, and looked at him with pain glazed eyes. “I could cut you in half,” he snarled into her face. “It wouldn’t kill you, but the Weirds and I could keep you around as a puppet. Think that would be fun, Drusilla?”

Up close, her yellow eyes and distorted face seemed even more inhuman. The blood running down her face from the cuts and her broken nose didn’t humanize her in the least; the blood just didn’t smell right. “This time, I’m keepin’ my word and just hurtin’ you. But if I ever see you again, it’s dusting time. Got it?”

She glowered at him hatefully, eyes lambent with resentment, but then she gave him an ugly, gloating smile, as if she wasn’t skewered on the end of his fist, but had him skewered instead. “Her name was Mariko,” she said, with a mocking lilt to her voice.

In that moment he felt so angry he did want to slice her in half and then keep going, see if a vampire could live just as a head and a pair of shoulders. But instead he drew back his fist and punched her full force in the face, his rage and the adamantium combining to make it a vicious thing - he heard something crack on impact, but he knew he wasn’t the one who was hurt. He retracted his claws from her stomach and she collapsed to the ground, unconscious for the moment, but he felt like he should keep going. He didn’t relish hitting a woman, even a bloodthirsty demon like her, but he wanted to keep going, beat her to a bloody pulp, until she didn’t resemble a humanoid anymore. How dare she say her name, use it like some kind of weapon.

“Now -”

“- that’s -”

“ - a punch.” The Sisters mused.

He sighed and glanced at the pair of them, who had a bloody lip and some fingernail scratches to show for the fight, but not much else. “At what point in the fight could you have killed her if you’d wanted to?”

“ Fifty -”

“- seconds -”

“- in. Dru -”

“- fights with -”

“- pure instinct, she -”

“- can’t concentrate long -”

“ - enough to put together -”

“- a coherent plan of -”

“- attack. She’s very deadly because -”

“- most people expect some kind -”

“- of sense in a battle plan -”

“- and she has none. It’s very -”

“- disorienting.”

That made him give them a funny look. Were they joking? How could you tell with those deliberately blank eyes and empty smiles? “Like a couple of twins who habitually finish each others sentences?”

“Exactly,” they said in unison.

His glance became a glare. “Oh good, you’re branching into being smart asses. Would you just get the fucking bag already?”

That wasn’t a joke. They bundled the unconscious Dru in a large sack - a body bag, actually, tres irony - and then wrapped her up tight with bungee cords on the outside, so she couldn’t move her arms until they wanted her to. The Sisters decided to “soften her up, just in case”, but Logan suspected they just enjoyed having an excuse to smack Dru around like a piñata. He let them, because she was a vampire (and not a “good” one or quasi-good one either), and it didn’t matter, as Dru would heal, and the Sisters had no intention of killing her. He did believe they could have killed her whenever they wanted, because when it came down to it, the insanity was just part of an affectation for the Weirds - they were amazingly calculating, manipulative, and cunning. Dru was just a fucking nutcase. As vicious as a pissed off scorpion, but incapable of manipulating it for a greater gain. The Sisters estimation of her was spot on, as it would be, since they knew her from “back ! in the day”. According to them, Angelus made Dru before he “made” Belinda, but Dru disliked them on sight, because she couldn’t “read” them, and believed them to be bad luck. “And -”

“- Angelus -”

“- liked us -”

“- more because -”

“- we were far -”

“- more perspicacious than -”

“- she could ever be -”

“- and she was very -”

“- possessive of him because she -”

“- may have been infatuated with -”

“- Spike, but even she knew he -”

“- was a waste of space, which - ”

“- Angelus wasn’t.”

He chuckled to himself. “Not big Spike fans, huh?”

“He -”

“- was -”

“- a moron -”

“ - and his -”

“- poetry sucked.”

He didn’t ask. That fell into the category of stuff he just didn’t want to know about.

He wanted to get Thrak’s cab but couldn’t, so he ended up trading in the motorcycle he got from Argenis in for a car, and just because the Yakuza had reminded him how neat they were to drive, he had Argenis get him a Jaguar, one far too nice for the likes of him. But Dru fit nicely in the trunk, and he left the Sisters in the city as he headed off for the desert. It shouldn’t have taken that long, but Los Angeles traffic was as bad as New York’s, which meant that most of the time he could have walked to his destination faster. But he was in no real hurry; there was a long time between now and sun up.

He’d already told the Sisters about his plan to hit the base in North Dakota, and of course they were in. It was a fight, and they didn’t care about the who, what or why, just as long as they were allowed to break heads. And they could go nuts there as far as he was concerned.

When he could drive, traffic allowing, he did enjoy driving the car. It smelled new, was still in all likelihood stolen or somehow illegally acquired (well, Argenis was a fixer after all), and he liked not having to think about much of anything. He just listened to music, or when that got boring, NPR or the BBC London feed. When that got depressing, back to music. Given enough time it would drive him crazy, but he wasn’t going to be doing this long enough.

He had timed it just about right, as he found a wonderfully remote spot of Death Valley in which to dump Dru. And while it was cooler than it surely had been, he could still feel stored up heat coming up off the sand in waves. It would be a miserable day out here; it was a shame vampires really didn’t notice temperature extremes.

She was awake and pissed off when he pulled the body bag out of the trunk, “accidentally” hitting her head as he pulled her out. When he popped his claws she suddenly went very quiet, but he just sliced off the cords and told her, “Be careful opening the bag - you may need it for shelter from the sun.“ Then he heaved her, body bag and all, off the edge of a small cliff. She impacted the sand below with a dull thud, but remained cursing, so he knew she was fine. Really, he was being nicer to her than she ever deserved, and he had no idea why. So he felt bad because she was a nutter - was that his fault? Was a crazy vampire a good thing to have running around?

Well, if she lived, she’d be someone else’s problem. If she showed up in L.A., she’d have her choice of facing the Sisters or Bob, and he was willing to bet that Dru wanted to avoid those confrontations, although she’d probably be better off with Bob. He might let her live, in some permutation or another - the Weirds would just rip her head off with their bare hands and be done with it.

On the drive back, he started to feel honestly weary, tired to the bone, and he wondered if he really wanted to risk sleep. He wished he could tell the Powers that he’d had enough, that he was done, but he couldn’t. It was cowardly, he knew that, but he also knew he was on the verge of remembering something he probably didn’t want to remember, something pretty damn bad. He still didn’t understand how he could have ended up with the Organization, even if their sinister intent came along later.

But maybe he had just nailed it. He was a coward; something in him was a coward. And that weakness made him a lamb to the slaughter for them.

If that was true, he just didn’t want to know. But it was too late to back out now.

18

By the time he got to town, he could already see the crowd forming around the Heller’s place, and his stomach clenched and turned cold. Oh no - of all the places to hit …

People cleared the way for him - well, he was the “Sheriff” after all - and he went around back to find Mimi Heller crouched down next to the prone figure of Bill Heller, her husband, who was bleeding copiously from the nose and ears, his head swelling up slightly on the left side, laying within meters of the barn. Doc Withers was kneeling on the opposite side of Bill, holding his wrist as if taking his pulse. Logan noted, not far away, a metal feed bucket that look crumpled inward and warped, with the slightest trace of blood and Bill’s wispy gray hair sticking to the wet patch. “What the hell happened?” he asked, surreptitiously scenting the air. It was difficult, as there were so many people around, and the air was rife with horse manure, hay, and blood, with the lingering undertone of fear and pain and … what was that? He smelled something familiar, but he couldn’t place it - did he smell it at Camp Baker, or at the pond? Both?

“I don’t know,” Mimi said, her voice cracking with tears. “Bill took Matty out to feed and water the horses, and I was in the kitchen, putting up some green beans for the winter. I heard a … noise. I can’t describe it, it was just odd, and I called out back to see what was going on. There was no answer, so I came out, and I found him like this.”

Attack Bill and leave? That seemed odd. But using something at hand - the feed bucket - followed the M.O. of the killer. “Matt? Where is he? Did he see what happened?”

Mimi looked up at him, tears spilling out of her pale gray eyes and lining her kind, grandmotherly face. “Matty’s missing. I don’t know where he is.”

Holy shit. Maybe he ran away after Bill was attacked. “Matt!” He shouted, moving to the edge of the crowd. “Matt, you can come out now!”

There was no movement, no noise. And he noticed, at the far end of the paddock, two of the wooden slats that made up the fence were broken, and they weren’t that way the last time he was here. He looked around, and spotted Mac’s brother Gordy in the crowd, and motioned him out. He obeyed, as he was a big, good natured kid, who had absolutely no problem playing the “muscle man” when he had to. “Get every able bodied man in the village, tell them to grab any weapons they have, and start searching the woods. No one goes alone - I want everybody in groups of four. But no wild shooting - a seven year old boy is out there, and he may just be hiding. Think you can handle that?” He nodded tersely. “Go.”

Gordy went off, followed by a couple of others who heard the instructions and wanted to grab their guns, and Logan went out the back of the paddock, over the broken fencing, trying to catch a scent in the air. The wind was currently against him, but the scent of Matt was still pretty fresh. Matt, and … the other. That’s all he could call it now.

Why abduct the boy? It didn’t make sense, so he just had to assume Matt fled, and since he liked to play in the woods, he must have headed to it, thinking he could get lost there. And the killer followed. Not a wise decision, but actually it was, inadvertently: it was quite possible that, if the killer followed Matt into town, he’d have killed everyone he set his eye on. But no seven year old should ever take a death for anyone, even an entire town.

By the time he reached the edge of the woods, he heard footsteps behind him, running, and he turned to see Mac jogging towards him, holding his shotgun. Logan scowled at him, and snapped, "What are you doing?"

"Coming with you?" He replied, an accent on the final syllable making it a question. "Gordy's getting the rest of the guys together, and you said no one should go alone."

He didn't like it, but he supposed if he went completely alone he'd look like some kind of hypocrite. Besides, if he smelled something, he could make up an excuse to get Mac to return to town, or otherwise separate from him.

Mac was green enough to let him lead the way into the woods, and scared enough to keep his mouth shut. Logan tried to stay upwind of him, as Mac's fear was sour and tainting all other scents.

Why was it familiar? There was something familiar about the scent of the killer, making him think it was indeed a townsperson, someone he had overlooked because he simply couldn't believe they were a killer.

And why had he believed that? Because he honestly thought they were all good people, in spite of their sordid pasts, or because of his own arrogance? Because he was so smart, so worldly and so freakish, no one could fool him, no one could get by him? He was starting to see his own hubris now, written in the blood of others. If Matthew paid for it, he ... well, he didn't know what he would do.

They had gone far into the woods, farther than he thought Matt could have ventured, when the wind shifted direction and he smelled, up ahead, blood. Thick and fetid, new and old.

Not small amounts, not a hint - lots. Not quite Camp Baker level, but close. He didn't know how, unless ... did the loggers continue to work today? Oh god no, oh shit.

He had stopped dead, trying to scan the thick, dark forest, and Mac almost walked into him. He could feel eyes burning into him, watching him, and he knew he was close. "Sheriff?" MacDonald asked, nervously gripping his shotgun tight as his eyes darted furtively around them. Obviously he couldn't smell it - good for him.

"Go back to town, get Doc Withers," he ordered, keeping his voice low.

"What?" Mac asked anxiously. He lowered his weapon, aiming it ahead of them. "Is there something wrong? D'ya think he's -"

"Go," Logan growled, making sure his voice was so hard the boy wouldn't even dare consider disobedience. "Now."

The scrawny young man swallowed so hard Logan could hear his Adam's apple bob, smell his fear. "Y-yes sir," he agreed, quickly heading back down towards town. He tried not to crash through the underbrush, but it was hard for him to avoid doing so, both in his haste and his panic.

This was going to be ugly - very ugly. And he didn't want any witnesses .

As soon as he was sure Mac was out of earshot, Logan said, "I know you're there. You want me? Fine, just give up the boy."

No response, but then again, he didn't really expect one. A little further on, he found an interesting sight - a small clear cut off to the far right, a circle cut out from the trees, and on the farther left was a huge mound of blackberry bushes, obscuring what was probably a bear's lair, a small cave cut into a collection of large boulders.

There hadn't been many loggers out; maybe they were even hikers, people birding or on a nature walk. He didn't see much of them, just blood splashed on the trunk of a jack pine, an arm dangling from a low branch, black, muddy slicks where their blood had spurted out. There were probably only four or five dead, but people had so much blood in them, and if it was all spilled out, it smelled like a slaughterhouse.

But wasn't there something else? The meaty smell of blood almost totally obscured it, but there it was - that undertone, dirty, metallic, with a hint of ... what? He heard low growling, like he had disturbed a bear hiding in the cleave of the rock, but the noise was too human.

And his heart sunk as he finally realized what that elusive scent was. So fragile, so altered in body chemistry, it had been hard to place, but he got it now, and couldn't believe it.

Violets. It was a hint of violets.

Celia emerged from the small cave, blackberry vines tearing at her flesh and her clothes, but heedlessly, as she didn't seem to notice. "No," he said breathlessly, feeling like he had been stabbed in the heart.

But it wasn't quite Celia, was it? Her eyes had changed color, from their usual black to an old sort of gold, and her smell had ... altered. Still Human, but not the same one. "Oh yes," she snarled, and even her voice had changed. It was lower, throatier, still female but more aggressive. "You think I don't know what you were planning to do to her? She can send me away all she likes, but Ceely was always a stupid bitch. She needs me, and she wises up eventually."

"Send you away?" But didn't he know it? It wasn't just the eyes or the voice that had changed, but her scent. People's scents didn't change. Not normally ... "Are you ... are you her sister?"

Celia - the woman who used to be Celia - scoffed derisively, emerging from the thicket. The hem of her plain gray dress was torn and ragged, and now generously spotted with black splotches of blood. Her hands were red up to her wrists, strips of errant flesh dangling from her fingernails. "You men. You're all alike. You use her and throw her away. She'll put up with it, but I won't."

"Where's Matt?" He asked, but he guessed he was in the cave. Christ, oh god, was he still alive? He prayed to a god he had never believed in that Celia's "sister" hadn't killed her son.

Celia's "sister" glared at him with cold eyes, and he was reminded of a mountain lion, or even the bear he initially thought she was - no compassion, but no hate either, just a predator's need for the kill. "You're afraid, aren't you? You just wanted to screw her, didn't you? You didn't think she'd ever be anything but your whore."

He backed up, not completely sure what was going on. Something had happened to her, but he didn't know if he could reach Celia. It reminded him of Harris, a guy in his unit, who was so badly shell shocked and traumatized by the bloody death of his best friend in the trenches that he claimed to be him: he took up all his habits, adopted his flat Newfoundland tone, even insisted on being called Milligan. He was eventually kicked out of the regiment and put in an asylum. But his eyes hadn't changed color, nor had his body language or chemistry. Celia had perfect posture and a gait that could almost be called stiff; everything about her screamed "proper. But now she walked with a loose limbed gait but stiff shoulders, like a boxer making his way to the ring. And that was another thing, wasn’t it? The sleeves of her dress had torn away, and he could see a definition to her arms he had never seen before. Muscles, hard, thick, and new, strained beneath taut skin like cables, and! what he could see of her calves seemed to have bunched knots of muscles like he’d never seen before. “Wh-what’s your name?” He asked, stalling for time.

She tossed back her head and laughed, loose black slicked with blood clinging to the side of her face. “Name? Do I need a name? What does it matter to you? You’re all alike.”

People just didn’t do this. They didn’t suddenly have muscles they didn’t have before, different eye color - a meek woman didn’t become a cold blooded killer overnight. Normal people didn’t -

Normal. She wasn’t normal. Understanding bloomed, and left a hideous taste in his mouth. “You’re not like the others, are you?” He didn’t add: ‘You’re like me.’ But he had wanted to. There were indeed other people just like him, and right under his nose.

But some secrets were far more dangerous than others.

Something glittered in her eyes, nasty and cold. “No, I’m not. I’m special. They tried to beat it out of me. You know what they did at that damned school I was imprisoned in for so many years? They said, when I did these things, I was the devil. Can you believe it? Possessed by the devil. The nerve of them, after all they did to us, to call me the evil one …”

He had no idea what she was talking about, but he supposed he could guess the gist: someone had done something awful to her. Awful enough to make her like Harris, to make her mimic someone else’s personality and believe it as her own? He wouldn’t have ever pegged her as insane, but there wasn’t another answer, was there? “Celia, I need - “

“Celia isn’t here!” She spat. “That stupid little girl, the mousy, respectful, weak one they always wanted. And where did following their rules get her, huh? Hurt, impregnated, abandoned, always at the mercy of some man or another. That’ll teach her for pretending I didn’t exist. Without me she’s nothing.”

“You are her - she’s you.”

That made her upper lip curl back in a sneer. “She is a lie. She never existed; she was what they wanted to see, what she needed to be to get by in your society. But she’s never been real. No one that weak could be.”

“Celia wasn’t weak. Ceely, if you can hear me -”

“Shut up!”

“- Matty is your son, you don’t want to hurt him -”

“That brat is not mine!” She roared, and charged him, throwing a meaty punch that he ducked. Her fist slammed into the trunk of the tree behind him - not into it, but through it, sending chips of bark flying anywhere. As stunned as he was by her power - she didn’t appear to notice she had nearly punched her way through an entire tree - he gritted his teeth at the idea of hitting a woman (and Celia on top of that), and kicked her in the stomach, not trying to hurt her but shove her away. She did stumble back, but didn’t seem hurt, just pissed off.

With an angry grunt, she reached behind her and pulled out a knife she must have had stashed behind her. It looked like one of the lumberjack’s utility knives, a big blade with a serrated edge, and rather than stab him with it, she threw it with great force.

It hit him in the chest with the force of a maul, and he fell backwards, hitting the ground hard, the pain of impact so great he hardly even noticed the feeling of penetration, the metal sliding into his skin like it was coming home. An almost electric twinge in his side indicated that he had at least one broken rib.

She was muttering under her breath, something about always cleaning up her messes and teaching them a lesson, and he stared up at the canopy of blue sky between the tops of the trees, the view wavering through the tears in his eyes. They were half angry, and half sad.

Malloy - was he here looking for her? Or was she just an object lesson for him? (“The world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place, Mr. Woods. Unusual things - people - seem to be occurring at a rapid rate, and not all of them are as benign as we would hope. We foresee problems, problems that will take special handling … “) It couldn’t have been a coincidence.

And now that he was laying here in the dirt, waiting for her to finish killing him, he remembered that one of the loggers at Camp Baker, a bearded American lug everyone called Red, in spite of the fact that he was a brunette, had bothered Celia the week before. He got obnoxious and fresh - hardly a new occurrence - and offered her money for a quick fuck by the time he showed up at Gus’s to toss him out and warn Red that if he ever acted like that again, he’d break both his arms. Was that the reason? Was Celia so disturbed by Red’s behavior that she “invited” her “sister” back to take care of him - take care of them all?

But how could this be anything like him? When his unusual abilities kicked in, such as they were now, heat filling his torso like steam, there were no external changes; no one - thankfully - could see it, unless he was so incautious they could see a wound closing up. Still … what if it wasn’t that way for everybody like him? What if some of them changed? And drastically; it wasn’t just the eyes, but the fact that frail Celia looked like she could barely lift a tray full of plates, and yet now she had put a hole through a tree trunk with her fist, and broken at least one of his ribs from the force of the knife embedding itself in his chest.

He actually wanted to see if she could kill him. He didn’t want to hurt her, didn’t want to face the leering weasel that was Malloy. But as she started walking towards him, hefting a bloody hatchet he had not seen before, he remembered why he was here. It had nothing to do with him. “I can help you,” he said softly, trying to swallow back all the emotion. He could not feel, or he couldn’t do this. “Put that down, and I know someone who can help you. It doesn’t have to be like this.” He would make Malloy do it at gunpoint if he had to, but there had to be something they could do to help her.

She hefted the hatchet, and he realized the blood on the blade was fresh. Oh god no. Her face was half in shadow, as hard as granite, yet her eyes seemed aglow with hate. “Just die already, jackass.”

And as she brought the hatchet down, he kicked her legs out from her, sending her sprawling on her back, and he quickly scrambled on top of her, going for the hatchet. But he’d forgotten just how strong she was, as she instantly bucked him off with an angry roar, and jumped on top of him, grabbing the knife still in his chest and twisting it, pressing down harder on the haft. He screamed in pain, angry red and black spots blotting out his vision, and in pure reflex, he punched her.

But it had been so long, he had forgotten. He had forgotten what great pain could make him do, unconsciously, unbidden, and the pain in his chest was so great, like acid spilled in the wound, that he didn’t feel the pain in his hands until after it had already happened - thin skin torn, sliced from the inside out by something like bone, but not; something sharper, harder, and deeply unnatural, much like him.

When his vision returned, he saw that his punch, a simple one to the side aimed at her kidneys (painful, but not major), had turned into a stabbing, as the claws in his fist had pierced her side, and her hot, reddish black blood was now spilling down his arm at such a great rate he knew he had punctured the kidneys if not obliterated them. It was a fatal injury, and from the way she just stared at his arm in disbelief, she knew it too.