Forward

Lately I have been struggling to keep my creativity flowing, so I have taken to writing short stories as if they are random chapter’s taken straight from books, or side quests of characters that I write as if they are already well known. This process helps a lot, it means you don’t have to create boring explanations, you know the character, down to their core.

Here is my latest. It’s dark, like often my pieces are. If you like robbery capers, magic, and urban fantasy, check it out. If you don’t like profanity and violence, wait for my next Story Time.

The Hangman

“I need you to do something for me,” Giani says, leaning over his desk so he can stare at me with those beady pig eyes of his. “Something only the Hangman can do.”

“Well no shit,” I snort. “You wouldn’t have called me here just so you could see my pretty little face.”

I kick back in one of the plush chairs in front of his desk and prop my feet up on the mahogany. I’m not exactly in the mood to do any work, but I have to make money somehow, this city is fucking expensive.

Giani grits his teeth like I just took a dump on his desk. These big wig Society mobsters aren’t used to getting shit-talked, so I really fucking piss them off when I start running my mouth. If I wasn’t who I was, they wouldn’t put up with me, and I’d probably be found dismembered in the bottom of a dumpster.

It’s a shame they don’t have anyone who can do what I can, because I’m not here to be polite. I really fucking love pushing their buttons. If they want me out of the way, they can fucking shoot me like any normal person.

He sucks in a breath and reaches into a drawer. I don’t flinch, but my hands are all casual like near my closest weapon. Giani pulls out a bottle of brown and goes for a swig right out of the bottle.

“A little early for the juice,” I say.

Giani makes a face.

“You make me drink,” he mutters.

I give him a cheery wink that my guts don’t feel. I could care less; I don’t want to be sitting across from him either. This work isn’t exactly what I want to be doing, but it’s all I’ve got. These rich jackwagons put me here, I don’t know anything else. What would I do if I just up and quit, work at a fucking bodega? Ha, the Society would find me, laugh in my face, and then tear me limb from limb.

The Hangman can’t do anything except break the things that other people like.

“So, what do you need?” I ask.

“There’s something I want you to get me, only it’s somewhere I can’t get to. I know you have skills in getting into places most people can’t.”

His voice is all fake and complimentary, like he’s buttering me up but really fucking hates to do it.

I snort, “B and E isn’t exactly my schtick.”

“You’ve done it before, you’ve stolen from me, for me, for others.”

“People pay me to do things, you pay me to do things, shit happens,” I shrug.

“No hard feelings, but I would like my stuff back.”

“Another time, but let’s cut the bullshit, what do you want done?”

Giani pauses for a bit, then takes another drink.

“Have you ever met the Magia?”

The big cheese, the head honcho of the Society? Fuck no.

I shake my head.

“I don’t really go to public functions, and the bigwigs don’t like me close to them, but I’m sure he and his goons know who I am.”

“They most definitely do, they carry real guns now because of you,” he says.

“I’ll make sure to deflate my ego later, what’s this have to do with a job?”

“I want you to break into the Magia’s home and steal a few charms from his private vault.”

Fuck.

That’s a big order. Rycroft, the current Magia, has as much money as Jeff Bezos, and more guards than chest hair. They aren’t just going to be slinging around spells if they see the Hangman come calling, they know magic doesn’t work on me.

“What’s his setup like?” I ask instead.

Giani smiles, the grin sliding onto his face like grease off a slice of corner store pizza. He pulls a piece of paper out of his drawer and slides it across the desk towards me.

I take my feet off the desk and look at the paper. He points a finger at the crude drawing of the Magia’s home. The vault is labeled in handwriting a first-grader would mock.

“You draw this?” I ask.

Giani ignores me.

“The vault is guarded with every sigil, charm, warding spell, and mortal security you can think of. If you can’t get into the vault how you usually do, you have to figure out the codes to unlock the door. Good thing is I know a guy who works at the company who built the vault, all you have to do is get into Rycroft’s office,” he points at another poorly drawn room with one hand, and pulls out a portable drive with the other. “Hook this up to the computer and it’ll find a way to…loophole the system.”

“So, you have no fucking clue what that does?” I snort.

Giani chuckles, the first real thing he’s done with his face this whole conversation.

“Not at all, but my guy say’s it’ll work.”

I really want to turn down this job, so fucking bad, but I can’t back down. I’ve spent the last few years making a name for myself, making these pompous fucks and sleazy bastards fear me. I can get into anywhere, take out anyone. Those who sneered at me growing up, they fear me now. I can’t say something is impossible, nothing is impossible for the Hangman.

“You know my fee on this won’t be cheap,” I warn him.

He nods.

“I’ll pay whatever it is if you can get me what I want.”

“Keep going,” I say.

“It’s ten feet from the office to the door of the vault. It’s a wooden door with a seer star that always has one guard on it. Opens into a small room where the safe door is. There are always two guys in there minimum, and a few defensive wards. You don’t have the right charm and step on the wrong floorboard and you get fucked with a load of magefire.”

I snort. Magefire may burn off my clothes, but it won’t really hurt me all that much. That is why they fear me. I’m the Society kid who couldn’t do magic, vanished for five years, then came back untouchable. Their magic slides off me. The very thing that made them invincible, the very thing that set me apart from them, has no hold on me.

It terrifies them, which is why they have guns now.

“Ok, so once I’m inside, what’s that drive do,” I nod at it on the desk.

“After you plug it into the computer, the digital security unlocks, and you have five minutes to get into the vault, get what I want, and get out again before it locks up tighter than a gremlins asshole. Only thing is, the vault door has a magical lock too, and a physical one.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” I smirk. “What’s it like once I’m inside?”

“How the hell should I know? If I knew I probably wouldn’t have any need for you to steal it,” he snorts.

“How did you get the rest of your intel?” I ask.

“My own eyes. I was there for a party, and he likes to show off his expensive toys.”

“So, I take it he can’t have all of his hexes on full blast for these things? And the guards don’t have lethals,” I muse.

“No,” Giani says. “But there are a lot more guards.”

“But a crowd to cover my entry,” I mutter to myself. “Any bashes going on this week?”

Giani smiles.

And so, I find myself crouched on a rooftop, fucking freezing my balls back into my guts, staring at the Magia’s building, waiting for shit to get good. I have a flask of coffee with me, and I take a shot. I hate the taste, but it warms up my insides.

I don’t like the upper-crust snobby pricks in the Society, they think they’re gods with bank accounts bigger than a lot of countries GDP’s. It’s not like magician’s lower on the totem pole are really the caring type either. Especially least not to me. When I was younger, kids would get together to beat me with their fists. It was the biggest insult you could give someone. It meant you were nothing to them, meant you rated below even the vanilla mortals who walked the streets not knowing that magic even existed. To them I was less appealing than a bloated crackhead found floating face down in their penthouse pool.

I only worked for them now because I had nothing else, because they could get me close to the things that I wanted. They treated me like shit as a kid because I couldn’t do magic, they let my parents die, they didn’t even look for my corpse when they found my bloody clothes in that alley five years ago.

Babysitting assholes with toupee’s made of unicorn pubes isn’t exactly what I like to do with my day, but its all I’ve got.

Fuck, I hate these rich, magician bastards.

When the lights and sounds start to build from the windows across the street, I dig my nails into my palm until a drip of blood appears, then I imagine a word that rumbles like thunder in my bones. A knife appears in my palm, and the small cut on my hand is gone.

 Then I use the blade to cut a hole in the fabric of reality, and I step over into the place between worlds.

Dust floats upwards towards a magenta sky. I stand in a forest of dead trees; the husks of their trunks stretch up into the twisted sky. The ground beneath my feet crackles as I move, an endless carpet of bones on black soil.

I move quickly, feeling with my hand for the weakness in the air. The whole time I think about where I want to go, and then the air feels vacant beneath my questing fingers. I only have to move five feet. Good, I try not to stay here for too long. I’m not alone in this world beyond worlds, the bones have to come from somewhere, and the teeth that cracked those ribs for their marrow don’t seem all that friendly.

I part the air with the blade again and step into the Magia’s office. Rycroft has more money than my pea brain can count, and he likes to flash that shit around. His office looks like something from a movie, and it makes me want to burn the place to the ground.

I still have the knife out, so I cut a small hole in reality and use it to peer one eye through into the party. There are enough boozing millionaires in the penthouse that I probably would never have to work again if I stole their pocket change. Fuck, I want to so bad it hurts.

Those schmoozy bastards don’t know how much I hate taking out the trash for them. I like that they’re wary of me and all that, but rich pricks make me want to break noses.

I can’t help myself, there is this impulsive feeling bubbling in my gut. It boils over and makes me cut another slit in the aether. I pick the juiciest looking fat cat and reach my fingers through the hole, rifling the cash out of his wallet without him feeling a thing. Through my eye hole I keep watch on his back and the people around him. My hand is close enough to his ass that its practically already in his pocket, so no one makes a peep, and he doesn’t look away from the bimbo he’s trying to coerce into taking some hoodoo version of molly.

I pull my hand back, clutching a fistful of neatly folded hundreds. Dinner’s on this fucker tonight.

I smooth out the air with my hand and head over to the desk. Wiggling the mouse to wake up the monitor, I take the flash drive out of my coat pocket. I’m wearing a light zip-up whose color twists like shadows, like black and grey are unraveling at the seams. It helps me keep out of sight when I don’t want to be noticed. I may not be able to do magic, but I sure as hell can own some magical things.

Plugging the drive into the computer, I let the tech wizardry do its thing. A little loading bar tells me it’s going to be a minute, so I cut open another slit in the air and take a look into the vault’s antechamber.

I’d already tried just walking into the safe itself, but the Magia has the thing locked up tighter than Mother Theresa’s chastity belt. He has enough angelic, demonic, and mortal wards on the thing to hold a titan if he wanted to.

The vaults front porch has two guys in full riot gear camped outside. There’s also some young, new money Society stud trying to fuck with them. The kid is just trying to show off for the two drunk girls behind him.

Both guards have collapsible nightsticks and riot guns filled with rubber pellets. The smartass kid does a line of coke off the barrel of the gun and follows it up with a swig of watered-down sphynx venom. He can try to impress those girls all he wants, but with that combo, whiskey dick is the least of his worries.

The guards don’t bat an eye, they’re pros at this sort of work. They’d hit their prime twenty-five years before when they were off being bodyguards in war-torn countries. Now they are glorified butlers in adult diapers forced to stand in time out.

The kid gets bored and leaves the room, throwing an arm around each of the girls as he stumbles through the door.

My drive gives a beep, so I pull it out of the computer and use the knife to cut me a hole into the antechamber. All of the electronics in the place crash at the same time. I dive through the rift as the vault’s keypad dings like a tv-dinner is ready in the microwave.

I kick the closest guard in the balls, then rip off his facemask and grab him by the ears, yanking his face down until his nose meets me knee. I let him crash stunned to the floor and go after the second. Normally, I’d love to see what these middle-aged wannabes have got, but I need to be fast, so I jab him with a hypodermic and he’s out like a light. I hit the first guy too, just as he’s trying to crawl to his feet.

There’s an aerosol bottle attached to my belt, I take it off and spray it over the door. A grey foam jets out of the nozzle, coating the wood and the wall around it, the foam hardens like ectoplasmic rock, and I turn back to my prize.

With the digital security down, the little window covering the manual spin dial and key hole pop open. I crack the dial first, then hesitate before hitting the keyhole with my picks. Using a different spray bottle, I let a mist of liquid filter over the doorway. Runes, hexes and wards flash to life like neon lights.

They tell me to go the fuck home you magicless idiot.

I run my hand through them, brushing the workings apart like cobwebs. Only one is left, the big daddy. It won’t kill me if I trigger it, but it’ll sure as hell toss me through a few walls, so I take the knife and open up a hole the size of a dinner plate.

Someone is already hammering on the door with either sledgehammers or magic, I can hear the wood splintering, but the gray sludge from my can holds. I open up another break in reality, leading to just on the other side of the antechamber door.

As soon as it’s open, I trigger the hex. A blaze of white light roars from the vault door and through the hole in space. From the other side of the wall I hear the sound of a few meatheads being tossed through drywall and into the kitchen.

Then, I pick the lock and open the vault.

Fuck.

I’m rich.

No time to gawk though, I pull out the photos Giani gave me and start searching. My hands sift through gold coins, charmed necklaces, spell-cast rings, and stacks of cash. He has a Monet and a few Rembrandts stuffed in here too. The place is bigger than I thought, it’s two rooms with the second accessed behind another locked door. I grab most of the stuff Giani wants in the first room, plus a few add-ons for myself. The last item on the list says simply, blackmail.

I enter the second room and stop dead.

There’s a girl in there, sitting on a narrow bed. She has a desk covered in sketches, a shelf overflowing with books, and a lava lamp next to the cot. There are a few pictures taped to the wall near the pillow, photos of her and a reluctant Rycroft in a hospital. In the photo she’s handcuffed to the bed. Alarm bells go off in my head, but I know what Giani means by blackmail now.

I walk over to the wall without saying anything, trying not to get too close to the girl. She looks at me like I’m some alien mother fucker here to kill her. I grab a photo off the wall and stuff it into my jacket. I turn to leave and she moves so fast I don’t have a fucking chance.

She grabs my wrist and stops me dead in my tracks. She’s strong, like strong enough where she could probably squeeze and crush every bone in my hand.

“You’re not going to get me out of this mess? Save this damsel?” She says, her voice melodic and trippy, it makes my head swim.

I look back at her, then down at my wrist.

“I figure they don’t have you in here just for shits and giggles. And you’re strong enough to fuck up anyone and get out if you wanted,” I snort. “Now let me go princess, I left the door open if you want help.”

“Don’t call me princess,” she snarls, her eyes glowing with white light.

Ah fuck, one of those.

“You said you were a damsel,” I say. “I’m not here to save you, I’m here to steal from you. Get the fuck off of me.”

She growls at me, and her anger boils over. Beams of light jet from her eyes, catching me right in the chest. It fucking hurts, even for me. The magic slides right off, fizzling out in trailing sparks, but the force of it hits me like a truck and sends me rolling back into the other room. I catch the edge of the vault on my way out, and pain screams through my back.

I probably look like a wino wheezing in a gutter, my face red, sprawled on my stomach in the antechamber. My everything hurts.

The door to the apartment starts to turn cherry red. It crumbles, bit by bit. Time to get out.

I cut a hole through the floor and pull myself through just as the wall explodes. As I slip out of existence, I feel something grab my ankle. I’m too far gone, and pull whoever it is through.

When I land on the mulch of bone in the dead forest, I lash out with my foot, kicking something soft. I have my final hypodermic out and I spin around. The girl from the vault grabs my wrist before the needle can enter her flesh.

She twists the skin on my wrist, making my hand go numb so I drop the needle. It bounces off a crushed skull and disappears.

“What is this place?” She asks.

I wish I had brought a gun; she is faster and stronger than me, but no way can she stop bullets. Playing along until I can dip out another portal would be a good option.

“I don’t know if there’s a name for it,” I say, ever so slowly moving away from her. “It’s just the place between worlds.”

“Like a different reality?” She ponders, her eyes leaving mine so they can wander around the clearing. “Sort of seems like it should have a name.”

Her pale, slender arms go limp as I move away from her, as if suddenly I’m no longer a threat. Fuck her, I can be a threat, I’m just choosing not to be.

“Not really, it’s the place between those places,” I reply.

“So…another dimension?”

“I don’t fucking know,” I sigh, frustrated. “Does it look like a good place to come just hang out?”

“Fuck you, I was just asking, coward,” she mutters, looking away from me.

I use the distraction to put my hands behind my back and call the knife. It’s firm and reassuring in my hand, singing with power in time to my pulse. Without looking back, I cut a slit in the air.

The girl’s nostrils flare and her head snaps to me.

“Don’t you dare think to use that knife again, I won’t go back there, I won’t!”

She sniffs like she can smell the power.

“Whoa now bessy,” I grunt. “I broke in to steal some stuff, not to get you out, you’re not my problem now. I don’t give a shit who you are.”

“I’ll kill you before you take me back to them!”

“Let’s not go all dingo ate my baby crazy here,” I say, holding out the one not gripping the knife.

She flinches and instantly hits me with the laser beam eyes again. The blow strikes me in the chest like a sledgehammer and throws me backwards through the hole in reality. She looks horrified as I catapult backwards, through the gate, and out the other side. The rift closes behind me, leaving her behind.

I land a tangled mess in my hotel room, my jacket smoking at the edges. If Sasquatch had taken a shit in a burning dumpster, it would be less of a mess than how tonight turned out. I do some pretty sketch shit for clients, and usually skate by because I’m just the hired help and no one wants to fuck with the Hangman.

Not with this job.

No fucking way is the Magia going to take a look at this whole thing and be like, let’s give Jason a pass. First of all, there is no one else dumb enough to break into his fucking apartment, no one who could even survive the attempt. All fingers will point my way.

Maybe if I’d just taken half the shit Giani had wanted he would be like, fine, I’ll send a few thugs to kick your ass and we will call it even. No. I had to go let Rycroft’s little Lolita crazy mutant girl out of her cage. What a fucking idiot. He was going to send a hit squad of goons after me with military grade shotguns. There wouldn’t be enough left of me to fit in a matchbox.

I could hide in the Between, but then I’d have to see that girl again. It’s better to hope that whatever made the bone carpet will eat her too.

Ah fuck.

I get the stuff I’d stolen and stick Giani’s merchandise in a bag. The rest of it I put back in my coat. I really want to just go straight to the storage unit we’d set up for the drop, but I can only instantly Walk to places I’d been more than twice. If it’s somewhere new, I have to use the Between.

I go downstairs and spend the next two hours losing myself in and out of streets and alleys to make sure I’m not being followed. Then, I make the drop with one of Giani’s goons. I sort of wish the big cheese is there to meet me so I can tell him that this blackmail is some crazy girl locked up in a safe, just so I can charge him more, but of course he’s not. He’s somewhere public for deniability. I walk for a while, then take a cab to the diner I told Alicia I’d meet her at.

It’s well after three, and the single waitress is doing her nails at the register. There are a few drunk kids in a corner booth, and a homeless guy snoozing over a cup of coffee, but otherwise the place is quiet.

I take a seat at the edge of the counter, where I can keep an eye on the door and most of the windows. The waitress slides me a menu without moving away from her place at the counter. I don’t blame her; this graveyard shift seems like a drag.

She shouts to the back for my milkshake and fries, then leans against the counter again and scrolls through her socials.

Alicia walks in just as I’m getting my food. She nods at a corner booth and slides into it. As a wanted man, I don’t like booths. Sure, they’re comfy, but I can’t get out of them fast enough to start dodging bullets. I calm my survival instincts down a bit and sit across from the her, she doesn’t want the merch I have to be seen. I spill it on the counter and eat as she paws through it.

“Jeezus, who did you rob? This shit is no joke,” she says, holding her hand over each piece as if she can feel it vibrate beneath her hand.

“What do I have? Anything good enough to keep?”

She eyes me.

“Some of this is worth a hundred grand,” she says. “Your fingers are stickier than a teenage boy’s. You know I can’t just sell any hot goods in my shop, right?”

“Come on, don’t be like that. I know you can fence anything underground if you want to.”

She rolls her eyes at me, then starts separating out the pieces.

“This one is a protective ward, not against magic, but touch. It feeds off your body heat. When you activate it, you burn whoever is grabbing onto you in a flash of heat.”

I’m definitely keeping that. If the laser girl is still wandering around the Between, I can use all the help I can get.

“What else?”

Most of them aren’t really useful for someone like me, but there is a nifty ring that basically acts like a taser. It only has three charges, but each is enough to make a bull nut and pass out if you zap him.

I pocket the amulet and ring and slide the rest towards Alicia. A bit more cash would be good if I needed to disappear quick.

“You keep glancing out the window, expecting trouble?” She fidgets.

Since I’ve gotten back, she’s learned to expect a shitstorm around me. You want violence and action and a goddamn good story, become my paparazzi. I’m not some two-bit hustler looking to get petty cash, I have a name, people know that name, those same people want to take down the magicless Society asshole who makes them all look like idiots holding laser pointers.

“Nah, we’re good,” I lie.

Honestly though, I’m afraid some shit is going to go down. Over the years I’ve stolen from a lot of people and beat up a lot of goons, but no one as high up on the food chain as the Magia. Yeah, magic couldn’t hurt me all that bad, but guns sure could, and Rycroft could hire a lot of guys with guns.

“Fuck, that was what the photo was for. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“What are you talking about?” Alicia asks.

“Well, uh, that sleazy mafiosa bastard wanted me to get some blackmail while I was at it. Must have been to save his own ass if he was caught. Turns out the blackmail was for a kid he had stashed in the vault.”

“Who the fuck would lock a kid in a vault? Bastards. Did you get them out?”

“Uh…sort of.”

“You’re a black fuck Jason, if you left them in there…”

“She wasn’t some innocent young girl, she fucking shot laser beams out of her eyes and tagged a ride into the Between,” I say.

“What does that do for you? Magic slides right off you,” she snorts. “Don’t make excuses if you hurt that girl.”

“Yeah, the magic slides off, but it still hurts,” I say. “And it wasn’t like I wanted to hurt her! She attacked me!”

“Don’t be an ass, what could a little girl do to the Hangman.”

“She was a hell of a lot stronger than me,” I snap. “Don’t treat me like that. I put up with it for years from all those other Society assholes, I don’t want to hear it from you anymore.”

Her mouth twitches like it wants to say something snarky, but her brain knows better and her eyes dart away. She’s terrified of me, terrified that I can take all her power away if I wanted to. Do I feel guilty I made the only person who puts up with me in this city afraid? Not one goddamn bit.

“She was faster than me, smarter, stronger. I had to leave her in the bone forest. I don’t know who she is, what she is, but she’s not normal. She was locked up in a vault only I could get in to. Even if she’s just a kid that means something, means she’s dangerous, even to the Magia.”

“Wait,” she gasps. I can hear her pulse quicken even from across the table. “You stole this shit from the Magia?”

Ah fuck, why did I have to open my damn mouth. She slides all the merch back to me.

“I’m not taking this. No way I’m peddling that shit, not even off the market,” she stutters. Her eyes are wide in her dark face, and her lips are bloodless. “What the hell have you gotten me into. You’re like a fucking stray shitting on the carpet. You come in, people think you’re cute, and next thing you know, there’s a pile of wormy crap on the floor.”

“Jeezus, didn’t think you felt like that,” I snort. “Who cares who it is? They won’t look past me.”

“Yeah, and here I am with you! You already fucked me over by beating up Salitore’s errand boys the first day you were back. I would’ve just paid them their cut and been done with it, but nooo, Mr. Scary Pants Hangman thinks he can just mess with anyone he wants. Maybe you don’t have to worry about the consequences, but I have to worry about getting firebombed every day I’m in my shop!”

She’s loud enough that the waitress looks up from painting little black cats on her nails. I don’t meet her accusative gaze. I hope she just thinks we’re some couple in a fight, I don’t need cops on this, I’d rather not have to bail with the knife before I figure out what to do with the girl.

“Don’t be self-righteous, I helped you out. And who cares who the perp is, you’ll make enough money to not have to worry about him after you sell that.”

“Not worry? Are you kidding me? I can’t do what you do, Jason, the Magia will rip through me. Do you know how many families Rycroft has destroyed because they tried to cheat him?”

I shrug.

“I’ll deal with it,” I sigh, trying to quiet her down.

I honestly don’t feel guilty about it, I like Alicia and all, but when they thought I’d been beaten to death all those years ago, she hadn’t shed a tear or even held a funeral for my magicless ass.

I put the charms back in my pocket.

“Can you at least check in quietly on that girl from your end? Your kind don’t like to just have conversations with me,” I ask.

“Why? Because you’re a selfish asshole?”

I rub my face with my hands, time to pretend I give a shit.

“Because who I am scares them, they made me this, and now I’m not theirs to control,” I snap.
“Do you know why they call me the Hangman?”

Ok, maybe I do give a shit about some things. Out of all the society jackoffs I work with, all the time’s I’ve been insulted, I only feel a little guilty when it comes from her. She doesn’t want to meet my gaze now; I can tell she feels guilty too. Guilty for not caring that I had died, for living life like I’d never existed, for fearing me now without reason.

Ok, I guess with reason.

Her hand rises self-consciously to her throat as an answer to my question. I pull my collar down lower, letting her see the gnarled scar there in all its glory. I press a hand to my other scar, the jagged white mar over my heart. Beneath my fingers it pulses dark and twisted.

“After they tortured and broke me, I did their bidding, until I came to realize that they couldn’t hurt me. Old, frail men with all the power in the world, and they couldn’t control their beast,” I growl. I feel the hate rise in my throat like bile. “They set men after me, and I killed until I was covered in blood, but then they got me. They hung me so I would know who my masters were, so I could see them as I died. I didn’t want to die.”

I look down at my food like some bum just puked on my plate. All this talk is making me sick. I’m angry again, I don’t care anymore if Rycroft has death squads hammering down towards me.

Let them come with fire and lightning. Their magic won’t hurt me.

I want to rip someone apart.

“No,” I snarl. “They don’t call me the Hangman because of my scar. They call me Hangman because I strung up every last fucker whoever did me wrong and watched them kick. I didn’t even break their necks, I let them starve for air and I was the last thing they saw before they died.”

I shove the half-finished food across the table to her.

“I’ve had things done to me that Hemmler didn’t dream about. If you think you know what happened to me, think worse thoughts, scratch those out, and go darker than even that. If you think I’m an asshole now, just be happy I’m not as evil as I should be.

I walk out the door. I don’t realize how mad I am until my lungs are black with rage. I can feel dregs of resentment washing around the pit of my stomach, drawn to the surface from the mistrust and fear. A girl I’d once had a crush on, who was passingly kind to me, who had helped me out for seemingly no reason when I’d returned, now made me so angry I couldn’t stand the sight of her.

It all changes so fast. My moods flash. In the morning I could be singing a different tune.

But she’d abandoned me once, and I’d paid the price. I am not human anymore. I am not Society. I am the darkness that drifts between. The rift between realities is a fitting place for the likes of me.

In my anger I go there, to face the only girl with powers greater than my own.

From the alley behind the diner, I enter the Between. I kind of dig the name, even if it was that psycho who came up with it. Honestly, I just want to figure out how to get her out of the bone forest, so I don’t have to be afraid of her every time I travel.

Maybe if I put her back in her cell, Rycroft won’t try to mount my head on a pike?

Yeah right, the fuckhead would do it anyways in a spiteful power trip.

I make sure I remember the words for the stun ring, and step through the rift. In the middle of the circle of trees, the bloodied sky hanging heavy above her, the young girl sits cross legged in the ring of corpse-trees.

She doesn’t look like she won a fight, but she doesn’t look like she’s lost one either. A deep cut runs from her collar bone, to her elbow. Her shirt is all torn up, and from the way she’s holding herself, she’s got at least one set of puncture wounds in her chest. Even one of her legs is bleeding from where she scraped it.

She looks like she went ten rounds with Mega Croc.

And won.

The corpse of something horror movies don’t even have names for oozes just outside the ring of trees. The bone mulch is all churned up like there was a lot of action here. The beast looks like something my subconscious dredged up. My masters used to set monsters on me just to see if I could survive them. This could be their evil baby daddy.

The girl had ripped one of its arms off and beat its face to pudding. It’s rent gut still smokes from where she had eviscerated it with her eye’s.

I look back at her, sitting there, eyes closed, meditating. Red pulp covers her up to the elbow of her uninjured arm, and a heavy, chunky, mass sits beside her on top of a skull. Oh shit, she ripped the things heart out.

My stomach flops, and I back up. I didn’t think this through. That monster’s corpse is huge, and even injured she ripped it’s fucking heart out. If I want her out of my bone forest, I’m going to need to come up with a plan that doesn’t involve pissing her off and having her chase me.

A wheezing breath rattles out of her throat.

Fuck me sideways.

I’m a bastard, but she looks thirteen and I’ll feel like shit if I just leave her here to die.

I let the knife vanish and have a quick hissy fit. Out of all the goddamn jobs I had to let my ego accept. Why do I always think I can slap the most powerful people in the world on their ass and not pay any consequences.

My blood is itching in my veins, and my senses are telling me to just let her bleed out, but I make myself walk over to her anyways.

She opens her eyes when I’m close.

“Come to finish me off?”

“Trying to figure out the best way to get you out of here so you stop bleeding on my carpet,” I grunt.

My instincts pull me to the left, where they can sense a weak spot in the air. That spot would take me to a safehouse I had from when I worked in Shanghai. The rift tingles against my fingertips, making me taste noodles and dumplings on my tongue.

The bone forest knows I want nothing more than to just get the fuck out of here.

My feet don’t go where my gut is leading, they take me forward and I squat in front of the girl. I’m just far enough away that she can’t grab me and break me in half before I hit her with the stun ring.

“I can buy you something to clean it up with if you’d like,” she rasps, her eyes heavy and bloodshot.

For someone who looks like she’s thirteen, she banters like an adult. It sort of makes watching her squirm a bit easier.

“If I touch you, are you going to try and break my neck?” I ask.

“Depends on how you try to touch me,” she snorts.

I take that as a go for it and move slow. With that heart next to us, I know I don’t want to spook her again. If she puts a hand in me, I’m going to get some sort of alien hepatitis.

I check out the injuries on her arm and leg first. I’ll need to bind those up. They aren’t pretty, but they’re not life threatening if I can clean and put pressure on them. The next is her chest wound.

“Can I?”

I wave to her chest.

“You know that’s illegal right?”

I roll my eyes at her and take out a knife.

“You stab me with that thing and I’m going to rip your guts out and strangle you with them,” she coughs through a blood bubble.

She can do it too.

I cut from the collar of her shirt, to just below where the wound hole is. She winces and sucks in a breath. She’s a fucking psycho mutant chic, but she’s still a thirteen-year-old. My teeth grind together as I try not to feel the slightest bit bad about it.

The hole is a bit wider than my thumb, but it doesn’t suck, so that’s good at least. There’s another gouge that leads away from the hole, so I peel back the bits of shirt that blood has plastered to her skin.

No.

Darkness rises in my throat.

No, I’d killed them.

“How did you get that?” I growl, my voice the deep warning of thunder in the distance.

She looks at me in shock, but she’s slow and in pain, so I stop her from darting away by sticking a finger in her stab wound. She writhes in agony, but stops moving.

“You try to rip my heart out, and I cook you with this ring from the inside out,” I snap. “Again. Where did you get that?”

She has a scar over her heart, the same hand-sized patch of white that formed over mine after I’d had my chest ripped open and my ticker experimented on. Thin, jagged lines of black edged from the outsides of the scar and nearly meet in the middle, leaving a small circle of white in the center.

I want to press a hand to my own scar, but instead I put a knife to the girl’s throat.

“How are they still alive?” I snarl when she doesn’t answer me fast enough.

She looks at me, eyes wide. She’s afraid now, afraid of me. She knows who I am, and not just the Hangman the Society knows, but the darker pieces of me I left behind before I rose out of the shadows.

“The kid you let live,” she whispers, wanting to flinch away from me with every last breath in her body. “He didn’t keep his promise.”

A piece of me crumbles, I don’t want to believe that someone else went through what I had. That kid I had let live had been younger than me by a year, had probably been dragged in off the streets to serve, so I’d let him walk if he didn’t take up magic again. I guess that was too big of an ask, even from a demon like me.

I want to cut her throat and be done with it. If she’s seen half the things I’ve seen, she’s more dangerous than I thought. She’s stronger than me, faster, more powerful. I probably don’t know half of what she can do. The second someone angers her, the second she cracks, she can go apeshit and level a skyscraper with everyone still inside.

The girl can see those evil thoughts move within me. She whimpers, but closes her eyes, accepting the knife over a lifetime of fear.

I start to cut, and hesitate. She draws in a ragged breath like a terrified young girl who’s seen too much, and I fucking hesitate. I should kill her. I shouldn’t be alive either. I got lucky, I somehow stayed sane enough to function.

“I don’t want to go back there,” she sniffs.

Then, she breaks open and falls against me, sobbing like she hasn’t been allowed to feel the pain that ate the insides of her like cancer. She presses against me, her tears and blood soaking my shirt. My finger is still inside of her chest wound, so I maneuver it out without hurting her too bad.

I don’t know what to do, so I pat her back awkwardly.

She remembers what it’s like to hurt, to be human, but they got to her young, and she’s nearly lost the taste. She’s stronger than me, but she’s barely holding it all together.

I can feel the hate in me strip the spiteful mask from my face. That snide jackass I act in public, he isn’t me. The hate is me; the pain is me. That snarky bastard I wear as a face, he is something I made up to not scare the Society assholes who stomp on the world in thousand-dollar shoes.

They don’t realize how real the Hangman truly is; he wears my skin like a disguise.

I don’t have consoling words, I don’t have a soft touch, I only have the devil they put inside of me.

“I can kill them for you if you want,” I whisper vengeance in her ear.

The words strip away her tears, strip away the memory of the young girl she so desperately cradles in the secret places of her heart. She isn’t that girl anymore; she is too much like me.

“Can we?”