Spritzing the fragrance into the air, I pumped until the room smelled like the inside of a sweet powdery seed. Then I sprayed the remainder on myself. The perfume sent Butch’s olfactory senses into overdrive. He stumbled about in the center of the room, oddly more at a loss with his lack of scent than he’d been with his loss of vision. Feeling my lip curl, I thought of the three senses he had left to work with—touch, taste, sound—and decided to fuck with them all.

Pushing the alarm on Olivia’s digital clock, I wrenched the knob as high as it would go. Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” filled the room. Startled confusion was soon replaced by helpless anger. Butch let out an outraged howl and began to totter unsteadily in my direction. I threw the empty perfume bottle into the opposite corner where it shattered against the wall. He whirled in that direction, his chest moving shallowly with his breath. Lowering myself to the floor, I rolled under the bed and came up on the opposite side with the scimitar clutched firmly in my fists.

Two senses left.

My anger was cold now, narrowing my resolve into an icy arrow poised for release. I was the hunter; like the big cats crouched in the waving grasses of Africa, the bloodthirsty eagle swooping to rip the flesh from its earthbound prey.

And there was nothing glorious or heroic in the way I toyed with him. I’d trained my body and mind in combat too long not to recognize a rogue warrior, a vigilante bent solely on retribution. I watched Butch revolving about the room, striking out with his fists and voice as he tottered this way and that. On his face was the dawning realization that he might lose. That he might die. That I might be the one to kill him.

Kurt Cobain’s voice rasped through the room, swearing over and over that, no, he didn’t have a gun…

I waited until Butch calmed enough to remember the weapons, counting on his memory of the room’s layout and the relative distance between him and my knife outside the doorway. As expected, he lunged for the closer and more familiar weapon, the one he’d brought with him. The one I held in my hand.

He knelt, thrusting his hands beneath the bed, searching frantically with his fingers. His sense of touch. He couldn’t smell, hear, or see my approach. Too bad, because I saw my reflection in the dresser mirror—eyes black, muscles tensed, arms raised high—and I looked like a fallen angel.

Butch froze. I smiled. And that bowed blade sang.

The stubs Butch instinctively cradled to his chest were white with bone and red with blood, trailing strings of meaty flesh. He howled, demon’s mouth opened wide, head thrown back like a baby bird searching blindly for its next meal. Obligingly, I inserted the tip of the blade, pressing lightly against his tongue. His lips peeled back in a parody of a grin.

His last point of sensory perception was at my fingertips, the sense of taste. I leaned over to take his jaw in my free hand, forcing the blade to bite into his lower lip, and he whimpered as I lowered my lips to his ear. He had lied and laughed with that tongue, and both at my sister’s expense. With the gentlest press upward of my fingers, I lifted him to his feet. “Do you have something to say to me?”

He shook his head as much as he dared, tears streaming from his destroyed eyes.

“I think you do,” I said, my tone dry as dust. “In fact, I think it’s right there on the tip of your tongue.” I pressed, felt the bite of blade into flesh. Butch gurgled, a strangled cry for mercy, and I let up. “What was that?”

“Haar-yyy.” The points where his lips had touched the double-edged blade were stained scarlet. He’d said sorry. I straightened, my body deadened to emotion.

“Well that’s not good enough.” I whispered it, not even caring if he could hear.

I could have slid that curved sword down his throat, severing the roof of his mouth, skewering his guts from the inside. I could have twisted it, sending that tip burrowing up into his skull to flay the soft tissue encased there. Instead, with a brisk flick of my wrists, I tore the blade free.

Butch leaned forward, retching blood, and fell again to his knees.

“Don’t cry, Butch. All devils speak with forked tongues. This will just make it easier for others to recognize you.”

He was bereft of all his senses now, as helpless before me as Olivia had been in his arms, but instead of killing him, I lowered myself to the edge of the bed and watched. I wanted to observe the last seconds of his life, as death marched across his features. I wanted to see if he would heal.

Then I could kill him all over again.

But he did die. The sonofabitch died and left me there in my sister’s cream-colored, blood-splattered room, with a hole in the window like some large, gaping mouth. He exited this world the same way he’d entered it—squalling, miserable, and covered in a woman’s blood.

I don’t know how long I slouched there, bleeding and crying, and intermittently screaming with the rotting stench of this demon’s death rising up around me; willing both him and my sister alive again so I could change it all.

Eventually, I stood and turned off the music. Silence buzzed in my ears as I hauled Butch’s body to the window and pitched it over the side. I didn’t watch his tumble, but the rain had stopped and the whole world was silent, as if it existed in a vacuum, so I heard the thud, and the cracking report of his body hitting pavement. Never say I don’t learn from my mistakes, I thought humorlessly.

Then I keeled over and retched up my guts.

8

“Police! Open up!”

The words rang in my ears as I came to, lying next to my own vomit. Feeling leaden and hollow, I pushed myself to my knees, then my feet, allowing a moment for my head to stop spinning. My mouth was dust-dry, my eyes crusted over with tears. I didn’t know how long I’d been laying there, but the night sky had cleared outside the destroyed window, and though the lights of the city still rendered the heavens starless, a soft, crisp breeze blew against my back.

Another knock sounded urgently at the front door, and I drifted into the living room to answer it, my feet reporting hollowly on the tile floor. My martini sat perched on the coffee tray where I’d left it, next to my still unopened gift. Tears stung my eyes again, and I had to blink them away as the pounding continued. A neighbor had finally rang the cops. I wondered why they didn’t just knock it down, but swung it open anyway.

Ajax stared back at me. “Hello, Joanna. I’d have come sooner, but I was…detained.”

Shocked, my response was delayed, and when I slammed the door he caught it easily, wrenching it open again. I backpedaled as he shut it behind him. He made no move to attack, instead cocking his head to one side, like he’d just thought of something. “Why, Joanna, dear, there’s something different about you.” He sniffed delicately at the air before snapping his fingers smartly and pointing. “I’ve got it. You’ve changed your hair.”

He did step forward then, and I retreated into the sunken living room. I knew he would kill me. I was injured and he was fresh, angry, and knew better than to underestimate me, unlike Butch. He also had all the inexplicable powers that Butch possessed, and I didn’t know if I could fight that again…or even if I wanted to. What was the point? I’d never been more alone in my life.

“Now,” he said, crossing his arms over his body. This time he unsheathed two serrated pokers, one in each hand. “Where did we leave off?”

Okay, so I’m alone. I swallowed hard. Get over it.

Pounding sounded behind me, and I turned and stared, not quite believing my eyes. There, clutching the parapet of the building, was the homeless bum I’d run over, still looking disreputable, and still popping up in the strangest of places. He was mouthing something, pointing and jerking his head toward the bedroom. I turned back to find Ajax as awestruck as I, his mouth open in obvious displeasure.