The Tales of Flesh and Blood

Fear And Conspiracies, Unite!

If the boy had been able to see, I doubted he would have fallen asleep in my lap. Through what little light the cell had, I could see dried blood caked around my fingers and fingernails from where I had pressed them against Monster Guy's headless neck in an attempt to shove him off-

I swallowed back the thoughts, blinking against the tiredness prickling at the back of my eyes. I wanted to be awake when they came back and besides, I was more than terrified at what would be invading my dreams when I did fall asleep. The boy was curled up next to me, his head resting against my leg - which he also held like a childhood toy he couldn't sleep without. As if he was afraid that when he awoke, I would be gone, and he would be alone with his thoughts. Honestly, I only knew he was asleep because of his steady breathing and the fact that he hadn't talked in what felt like the better part of a few hours, at least.

I wanted to puke, but I didn't want to stir him. I kept thinking, over and over, about the woman he kept demanding for. What was her name? Kyra? And she promised to kill him if he told her his name?

He'd wanted her to kill him?

I didn't want him waking up any time soon. I wasn't sure what I was going to do if he insisted that I should kill him again. Beating the snot out of some snobby kid around my age - that, I could do. I didn't touch children.

Sure, there were times when I'd entertained the thought of killing someone. There had been many, many nights where I couldn't sleep because Hadi was still out at work, and the drunks and the thieves and the cutthroats were particularly lively. Port's minions generally kept us from killing each other, sure, but sometimes . . . sometimes, they came too late. Hadi was young and pretty and, despite everything, she tried to appeal to the good in people. It was going to get her killed. And so, because I was too cowardly to get up and chance getting beat myself while looking out for her, I'd often fantasized what I would do if someone hurt her. I would whisper to myself in the dead of night, at a ceiling that could cave in at any moment, how it would feel to bash somebody's head against a wall if I ever had to plan her funeral. The rage that followed was intoxicating, and the longer Hadi took to come home, the more difficult it became to breathe - until, eventually, exhaustion would win out and I'd fall asleep, anyway. But I never had to do it. Never had to actually try to take someone's life away.

Which, oddly enough, made me think of Jaxon. Did he really shoot not one, but two other men? His sister. They'd also killed his sister. Which had been what, ten years ago?

Something wasn't making sense. Jaxon had mentioned something about a conspiracy theory when I had tried questioning him back at the bunker. And that crazy woman . . . what she said about me - that I looked like my father, and yet my mother was someone like them. Was it too much to ask, I wondered, to at least know why I was currently being held up in some underground dungeon with a seriously traumatized boy - who, I might add, may very well be my younger half-brother?

I went from being a forgotten daughter of a prostitute to a child of a giant and a giant-murderer with twin siblings in less than a month. And now I was truly and utterly an orphan - which shouldn't hurt, seeing as how I had considered myself one for the past eight years, but it did - with a boy wanting so badly to die that he was asking anyone he came into contact with to kill him.

Was this all a dream of some sort, one I couldn't wake up from? Maybe I was dying in a coma from alcohol poisoning, and all of this was a result of my mind panicking because my organs were failing. After all, none of this insane shit started happening until after I'd drunk myself numb on Hadi's birthday.

Hadi needs to pull the plug, if that's the case, I found myself thinking, and immediately felt my cheeks heat up in shame. If that was the situation, then I was currently putting the poor woman through rounds of unreasonable, undeserved grief. If she gave the doctors the okay to let me go, she was never going to be able to live with herself afterwards.