2.
Sienna
My mother had a favorite quote when she used to train me: “There’s always someone bigger and badder than you.” In the way of all teenagers, I just thought she was stupid. Drunk on my own teenage invincibility, I didn’t think I’d ever meet that bigger and badder person.
There was a pain in my shoulder. It radiated out along my arm, the product of getting dragged beneath a truck for hours. It wasn’t the sort of thing that you could call deleterious, but it still ached. It had been worse a few hours ago, before I’d caught some sleep under some bushes on the side of the road, but it was still present, like a reminder that I’d not only gotten my ass kicked last night, but kicked well and truly.
The sound of car engines was a low buzz in the distance, and I raised my head. I’d slept in the dirt, the remainder of my tattered clothes now covered with grains of sandy soil. I brushed the bottom branches of the tree above me, rattling the boughs such that I bristled, stiffening like I’d heard something. I had, and it was myself, and even that was enough to send a thrill of fear all the way through me.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother had a “bigger and badder” person in mind when she said that little ditty. His name was Sovereign. I eventually ended up fighting him and beating him, and since that day, six years ago, I had gotten in a lot of fights.
Actually, saying “a lot” might be understating it.
I had gotten in a heaped shit ton of fights, and I’d won every single one of them in the end. There wasn’t a person who’d stood against me that I hadn’t bested or let walk away. I kicked more ass than the proverbial Chuck Norris, whom the internets had suggested, lightly, was perhaps my father. There were a whole slew of jokes about it.
And then I’d come to Scotland…and man, had I gotten my ass whooped.
I finally found that badder person Mom had promised, and she turned out to be a real—
“Son of a bitch,” I said under my breath, the sound of my voice piercing the early morning calm. There was little noise of nature in this thicket of trees, overcome as it was by the nearby road. The sun was either up and covered by clouds, or still working on rising. I was in Scotland, which meant it could go either way, really. I sat up, dragging the ragged ruin of my shirt along with me, a tragic tangle of cloth that hadn’t just seen better days, it had pretty much reached the end of its effective life as any kind of cover for my body. It lacked an entire sleeve, just as my pants were missing a whole leg.
The wilds of Scotland did not answer my comment. I was in a seemingly endless forest that stretched off to hillocks on either side of me, trees giving me cover in this little valley that was pierced only by a road some hundred or so feet to my right. I was probably less than an hour outside Edinburgh, though it was hard to tell. I’d been in a rough state last night, shock and trauma having done their part. I’d been hanging on the bottom of a truck, lucky I didn’t get wrapped around the transaxle, holding tight to the chassis like Indiana Jones, for however long it had taken me to get to this point. I’d dropped to the ground when the thin sliver of the world I could see from the undercarriage had been green for a long time, and then rolled off the road to come to rest in the underbrush, where I’d remained until now.
And if I could have…I probably would have stayed there a lot longer.
The pangs of hunger were doing their work, though. My stomach felt like it was filled with a thousand living bugs that were crawling within, scratching and biting and trying to get the hell out. It was a beyond-uncomfortable sensation, and I wanted it to end in the worst way. I almost considered grabbing a handful of sand and trying to swallow it, just to shut my belly up—it had been a long time since I’d had a meal—but that was stupid. Trying to gut down a handful of sand wasn’t going to solve the problem. Nor was chewing on tree bark or leaves or any of the other nasty options available to me close at hand.
Normally, I would have been up and moving by now, in this situation. My brain was screaming at me to put some distance between myself and the road, to get going and haul ass away from here. I’d left tracks by the road side when I’d rolled down the embankment, and some sharp-eyed soul could maybe have picked them out. Movement was a compelling idea—
But it wasn’t compelling me. Not enough to move me.
Not right now.
I listened to the silence in my head. It was impressive, and total, and…
Lonely.
I’d had souls in my head for as long as I could remember. As a succubus, I could drain the life out of my enemies. I’d used the power sparingly, adding only four of the seven I ended up with willingly. The other three were forced upon me in some way, but they were still…mine.
And now for the first time since I was seventeen years old, my head was filled with a breathtaking silence. Left alone with my own thoughts, I had never quite realized exactly how much background noise that those souls had added to my life.
Car engines hummed occasionally in the distance. A bird tweeted somewhere to my left. A wind rolling through stirred all the tree branches before departing and leaving them shaking, a few overlapping ones clacking together.
Silence.
And not a silence I was used to.
“I have to move,” I said, saying what I thought one of them might say in this circumstance. I focused, the cool morning air prickling at my skin. It was midsummer, but it was Scotland, which meant that it was still chilly.
Silence. No reply in the depths of my mind.
“I have to go,” I said, trying to muster up the will to get to my feet, to get moving. My own voice seemed inadequate to the task of motivating me to action.
A car in the distance applied its brakes, and I could hear it squeaking to a stop. I listened, my ears perked up, as it slowed and finally came to a rest, engine idling. It wasn’t far away, maybe a hundred feet, close to where I’d gotten off the truck last night.
Doors opened, then slammed shut.
A voice cracked in the morning. “You check over there, I’ll look over here.”
“Aye,” another answered, “I think I see what the helicopter spotted. The ground’s all turned up over here, like someone crawled.”
Helicopter? Had I missed a helicopter in my sleep?
“Could have been an animal,” the first voice said.
“Could have. I’m calling it in anyway.”
“Aye, best be safe than sorry.”
I was on my feet now. A helicopter had spied where I’d crawled off the road, barely able to move because of injuries from my last fight, and the dragging wounds I’d suffered while riding the bottom of the truck. For all I knew, there was a trail of blood leading right to me. A bloodhound could probably follow me easily.
“I thought you said you were going to call it in?”
“I am, I am; just a wee second.”
I clenched my fist. I couldn’t let them call it in, whoever they were. They’d bring all manner of hell down on me, and now that I’d lost my voices—my souls—I’d lost the power to fly the hell out of here in a hot second, to heal myself nearly instantly after a grievous wounding—hence my spending the night under the bushes—and nearly all my power to fight back.
Nearly all.
Choosing my path carefully, I set around the edges of the bush, snaking my way hurriedly but carefully back up toward the road. I had to stop them before they called for help, or else they might summon more trouble to me than I could possibly handle.