“I just found out. Wanted to tell you. Wanted to hear your voice. Been a long day without you, baby,” he murmured.
After two months, the reaction my body had to that voice had not changed. I reasoned after twenty it still wouldn’t.
“Well, okay. Me too. See you soon,” I said as the boy stopped in front of me, obviously wanting to talk.
“Yeah, babe.”
I hung up the phone, looking at the boy expectantly.
I hated strangers talking to me. I hated people I knew talking to me at the best of times. Unless I liked them.
I only liked a small amount of very lucky people.
“Are you Lucy Walker?” he asked, rifling through his messenger bag, looking like he was ready to get out of there.
I sighed, feeling his pain. The kid was most likely doing a hundred jobs and didn’t want to dillydally, but something in my mind clicked.
“Why?” I asked, frowning slightly at the mussed head. “Am I being served? Or sued? Because I swear I didn’t even see that cyclist and she said she was totally fine. It was just a bump, really.”
Ice-blue eyes met mine. Eyes that didn’t match the disheveled hair and wrinkled shirt and worn Nikes of a bike messenger. They were unnerving.
“No. You’re not getting served,” he said, his voice easy and boyish, yet another conflict with the eyes. “Are you or not, lady? Got places to be, and my boss will kill me if I don’t deliver this message.”
I shook off the feeling in my stomach that signaled something hinky, thinking maybe Keltan had me on edge and I was looking for demons everywhere. Even there, on the busy street, in broad daylight, where just an impatient, underpaid and undergroomed bike messenger stood.
I sighed. “Yes, I am.” I held out my hand for the paper I assumed he was rifling through that leather bag for, guessing he’d found it because the hand was stilled and now resting in there.
He grinned. And not the boyish grin from before that didn’t match his eyes. No, this one matched perfectly, as it was full of malice and not happiness.
I frowned against it, planning on stepping back slightly but not feeling hugely afraid because I was on the street outside my building in the middle of the day. Keltan was coming in a few minutes, if he wasn’t already striding down the sidewalk leaving slack-jawed females in his wake.
The sharp and intense pain in my torso demanded my attention away from Keltan and the slack jaws of the women who marveled at him. At first, I thought it was a nasty and unexpected cramp from the red devil. Then I realized that even that devil, my own body, couldn’t muster up such agony.
“Message delivered,” the boy rasped, grinning wider as his body pressed close to mine.
There was another brutal, white-hot lance of pain in my middle. I glanced between us, seeing his hand between our torsos, pulling out a long and pointed blade covered in red.
Blood, I thought vaguely. That’s my blood.
I watched it tumble from his hands, moving through the air in slow motion, almost as if it was underwater, and then clatter to the ground soundlessly.
Then I registered that nothing had sound. There was no more traffic or people or snatches of conversation. There was merely a dull beep that didn’t seem to originate anywhere but took over the sound waves.
I blinked as he walked quickly but purposefully towards the bike leaning against the stand and then rode off. His haste wasn’t even blinked at; there were enough assholes on bikes hurtling through the streets.
But not women bleeding from a knife wound. I reasoned there weren’t that many of them.
Yet I wasn’t even blinked at either.
I looked down. You couldn’t see the red blossoming around the wound through the black fabric, but it was dripping next to the fallen knife on the sidewalk like rose blossoms.
I didn’t seem to have purchase over my own body, even though logic told me to do something like scream, attract attention, ask for some kind of medical help.
Instead, I pressed my hand to the side of my body and somehow remained standing. I brought the hand back up to my face, turning it in the sunlight to look at the maroon liquid coating it.
“Snow?” a deep voice protruded through the ringing from behind me.
Putting my hand back on my midsection, I turned.
Keltan walked towards me, his face easy, gait unhurried yet purposeful.
That was until he saw me. Something on my face must’ve communicated alarm even when my mouth didn’t seem able.
Every ounce of easiness and happiness was stripped from his gaze and he went from a gentle stroll to a full-on sprint for the few feet that was left between us.
Lucky, really, because the second he reached me, I unceremoniously crumpled to the ground.