PSYCHOPATH

chapter 16: to live deliciously

Chapter 16: Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

~ "The wings of black angels are sharp," ~

Anna Akhmatova, 'Parting'

The rain was torrential, falling in thick strings, a heavy pitter-patter glancing off the hard earth underneath their feet. The wind was almost worse, harsh and howling in its own pain. Each gust brought a new onslaught of water, smacking the sides of her body, the force nearly knocking her to the dirt. It took all her strength to stay upright. And all her strength to keep a grip on her gun, slippery from the moisture.

A soaking wet woman was cursing in the midst of the storm, a gun in her cold hands poised in an unspoken threat. She felt like she was being punished. It was hard to see past the darkness but also the bitter tears brimming and burning in her eyes.

Another person was there with her. A man. He stood several feet away, his ribs rising and falling under a heavy strain and she watched him carefully.

Faced with the dark figure against an even darker sky, she felt more alone in the world than she had in a very, very long time. This marked the first time she actually could get eyes on him, actually come face to face when before he was only just a shadow. To see him for who he really was...she wondered how she got to that point.

Finally. She got him. Yet, it didn't feel like a victory. It had been a long, torturous path that had eventually become her existence. She couldn't really remember a time when she wasn't chasing him. And now, nearly a year into their game of cat and mouse, she had him where she wanted him, right there in front of her, in a stare-down that was so intense that it was threatening to collapse her knees from underneath her.

His strange expression coalesced with the singing and screaming typhoon engulfing them both made everything feel so unreal; she had to remind herself that this was not one of her inexplicable foreboding nightmares. This was real. He was real.

"I guess this is finally over," she yelled over the blood pumping in her ears or was that the thunder in the distance? She tried to keep her voice steady and composed, more than she ever did in her talks with him, so it could carry over the distance between them, a distance that felt like it was growing every fleeting second. "I bet you thought this game would go on forever, that I'd never figure it out?"

He shouted back just as loud. "I knew you would."

Self-assured as always, but this time the voice that spoke to her sounded different. Not just because the mask was gone, but because for once he was desperate, frustrated, not chillingly calm. "I won't lie in saying this wasn't how I wanted this to go."

She frowned, taking two long strides toward him, her aim steady despite the shivers threatening to shake her whole body. He didn't flinch, didn't move at all really, and his face started to take clearer dimensions and shapes in her approach, like she was wiping fog off of lenses of glasses. She preferred him when he decided to wear the mask, it wasn't as hard that way. But the mask was long destroyed as was his bulletproof vest, he was exposed and completely at her mercy.

"Shoot me and get it over with, Ellie. Be free of me finally." He chuckled darkly, no longer looking at her but instead choosing to watch the rain fall from the sky above, almost as if this was all so incredulous to him. Ella's entire face twitched at that.

How could she ever be free of him? He was stuck in her head, like a broken record, all the time, over and over. In her blood like a virus, a disease turning her insides black, a drug making her feel simultaneously dead and alive, a shell of her former self; a type of metamorphosis that made her into a moth rather than a butterfly.