Off Track

Part 7: Death

I had a short temper.

But in my defense, all the idiots in the world made it too easy for me to lose it. Take the idiot mining for gold in his nose next to me. Early thirties. Greasy. The type to hang Pokemon cards on a Christmas tree.

Oh, yeah. This dude definitely lived in his mom's basement. He was a car with three wheels and one of them was going flat as hell.

I mean, clearly I had chosen that spot outside the train station, far away from civilization, because I hated civilization. And––well, I also needed to maintain my cool and dangerous bad boy look, but I digress. I just wanted to be left alone. Was that too much to ask?

Picker flicked a booger in my direction.

I stiffened and nearly growled. Don't, I reminded myself. Still, my gloved fingers tightened into a fist at my side, and I swear, my vision went a little red in one eye.

I mean, would the world really miss this screwball if I just...wiped him off the face of the earth?

It took everything in me to push off that wall and walk away. If only Faith, my unofficial official girlfriend, could have seen me now. She didn't believe me that I could restrain myself from killing someone. Ha!

Faith. I'd almost forgotten about my argument with Faith and by almost I mean I couldn't stop thinking about it. Funny enough, she wasn't mad at me for the reason I was stripped of my flying privileges. By the way, I had been punished because I'd massacred innocent humans at a taco bar and exposed the supernatural realm...again.

No, Faith wasn't mad at me about that. She was mad at me because I'd forgotten our alleged "date" consisting of Netflix, popcorn, and chocolate snowcaps. And, I think, something else was promised called "Netflix and Chill." According to Google, that was something I very much would have enjoyed.

Anyway, instead of meeting with her for the date, I'd stupidly taken Cruentas, my immortal black stallion, to Petco, to get him some new shampoo for his coat. Don't worry, he wasn't a full sized stallion when I took him into the store, he'd shrunk to the size of a medium dog and only got a few stares. Yeah. My supernatural stallion could turn into a mini stallion.

"You expect me to believe," Faith was seething earlier, while angrily picking up clothes off her floor (her new thing was to clean when she was mad), "that you missed our date because you went to Petco to get your mystical horse shampoo?"

"Well," I said, and ran my fingers through my fohawk, "yeah. It'd be a lot easier if you believed that. Since it actually happened, and all."

She jabbed a finger in my face. "Don't you friggin' sass me!"

I put my hands up. "Alright, alright, alright..."

"And on top of that, now you tell me you're grounded again for massacring innocent civilians." Faith began to fold the clothes that she'd picked up off the floor. "I'm not mad about that, though."

"Really?"

"Well, not at the moment, at least. I like to be mad at one thing at a time with you, so that I don't over-mad myself."

I frowned. "Since when are you doing this?"

"Since yesterday," she said. "There's just a lot to be mad about with you and I needed to structure it into my schedule. That's the only way I'll stay focused on everything else going on in my life."

I thought about that a moment. "I'm over two-thousand years old and I still don't understand females. Anyway, cupcake, I'll make it up to you–"

"You better," she cut me off. "Because clearly you can't even make time for me these days, nor can you check your calendar. I did put the date down in your calendar, you know. The one I got you? I put, 'Netflix date with cupcake" and even drew a cupcake in the date box."

"You mean the calendar with the cute puppies?" Ah, that explains it. "Baby...I burned that one last week and replaced it with this year's award winning cutlery collection calendar. I thought I told you?"

"No, you didn't and that's not an excuse. I put the date in your phone, too! It had an alarm!"

"I thought the phone was taunting me when it went off so I smashed it," I said defensively. "It also...might have... startled me."

She stared at me for a long time. "Why in God's name would you smash your phone when it started to ring?"

"Please, don't bring his name into this."

I happened to know, because of my heightened sense of smell, she would get her period early this month, and that therefore, this argument was mostly a hormonal one, too. However, if I had learned anything at all about women in the past 2,000 years, it was that females didn't like those kinds of things said by men to explain their pissy mood.

Faith turned the sink on and created an orchestra to block me out.

Growling, I started to exit her bedroom but stopped when I heard Faith's voice again.

"Have a nice flight home!"

My lip lifted in a snarl. "Oh, real mature!"