How to Raise an Assassin

CHAPTER 7: I DREAM OF A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

I usually had nightmares. Most of the time they involved the tables being turned and someone coming to kill me in my most vulnerable moment. That was the reason many assassins slept with a weapon close at hand. I had a gun beneath my pillow, a sword mounted above my bed stand, and multiple knives in my bedside drawer.

But none of those weapons could help me in my nightmares. And the one I had the night after the branding center was the most vivid.

I was back in the branding center, alone and unarmed. I had on a frilly silk nightgown that was practically a wedding veil spread across my body. Around me were the dead from the brawl, but not just them. I saw the eighteen-year-old boy who fell from his death from the tightrope failure. I saw the restaurant waitress who drowned in Lake Michigan after I took her out deep into the water and allowed her an attempt at option three: swim back to shore alive. I saw the amputee who lost his foot at his job and whom I took his other foot from him after he tried to resist being killed—and many other previous contracts.

But the person I least wanted to see there was my brother.

He looked just as I last saw him, the hole in his chest from where he was shot. No blood flowed from it. His spiked hair rose upward like the summits of the Rockies. He had naturally tanned skin that would make you think he wasn't a part of the family. His eyes were the color of washed up green grapes and they always saw past you whilst in deep somber thought. He had a scar across his left cheek that nearly connected to the corner of his lip—a scar I was responsible for too.

Seeing him as he stood in front of the group of mangled souls, all revitalized in the states I left them in...it made me want to collapse to the ground and cry. Out of everyone in my family, my older brother Noastir was the only one I loved. To me, he was the only member of my family.

But he's dead, and it was all my fault.

"I tried to save you from this life Zay," he spoke with the same voice he would whenever he was disappointed in me. Usually behind that voice was also a pitch of hope. With each disappointed muse, he would sigh as if all was forgiven.

This time, I didn't hear that release of breath that unlocked the knot in my chest. "You killed me for trying to save you."

My tongue had tied itself. My knees wobbled. I couldn't support this guilt any longer. I wanted it all to end; and who better than the only person in the world I would allow to take my life.

I fell to my knees, my neck hung down ready for its deliverance from my body.

I wasn't worthy of such an end.

"Soon the check of all this chaos will be cashed in a most painful manner," my brother spoke. I peered upward and saw him gesturing to the room around him. All the expressions of those I've murdered stared at me with complete loathing. And the few who lacked faces to express such anger had other ways of flipping me off.

"Noa," I hiccupped. I couldn't look at his face. The hole in his chest made the memories too much to bear. "I'm sorry," I blinked back tears. An assassin never cries, my mother once told me. "I didn't mean to get you killed."

That's when I felt his hand cup my chin with the soft touch he specialized in whenever he bandaged my wrist after fracturing it from a poorly angled strike, or the dab of an alcoholic cloth on a skid knee. "Zay, your weakness got me killed. Had you done the job like you were supposed to, I wouldn't be in your head."

He smiled, but it was most certainly forced, like most of the grins he displayed in front of others. Much like myself, Noa hated this life. He hated the family he was born into. He tried to keep me away from this life. He argued to spare me from becoming an assassin.