III.
Her name is Mara.
She's not in anyway that much of a pleasant person. Her family didn't like her, when they'd been around to raise her. And that was just fine. She hates them too, with every bone in her body. At least, she did hate them. Till she'd moved here, at nineteen, and had kept her head low and ducked, her eyes sharp, her angular features always titled up towards the sky.
Blood fell as rain, on some nights. You could almost see it, in the neon red lights of the street signs she passed by. You could imagine the smell of blood, the way it mingled in your nostrils.
Blood falls as rain, some nights, at she gags, when she smells it. When she tastes it on her tongue, but it's only the memory that makes her sprint to an alley and retch behind a dumpster, the memory of a time where she always tasted blood in her mouth.
Not necessarily from hits. From bites, from violent kisses, kisses she barely remember. Kisses with a boy, at sixteen, she wished she'd never had. He'd left a taste, in her mouth, the black-haired boy had. It was bitter, and it wasn't safe. It was violent, like the man leaving bodies lying around for cops to find.
(And like him, no one knew of him. But they will. They will. They always do find out.)
She hates that memory. There's more than one, there's always been more than one, of a boy, whose name she doesn't care to voice in her head (though she knows it). Memories of rough hands, of the only sounds in the night were her harsh breathing and his smirk in the dark. The memory of fingers digging into her hips and a mouth at her ear haunts her, when she finds a body, when she sees a dealer on the streets, when she gets shoved out of the way of a group of thuggish looking boys on their way to spread whatever hell they can think of.
But the taste of blood remains, and she keeps finding bodies. Only one of them makes her retch, makes her stomach heave until it's empty. He dumps a body, on her apartment building's door step. The limbs of the gangling woman have been mutilated, bone visible through mangled flesh. There's a message, written in blood for her.
I know you know.
She can't scrub the taste of blood out of her mouth. No matter how hard she tires.
She wants to kill him for this, for making her sick, for making her feel like the worst of them, of those who did take the lives of others when there was no real reason. But she doesn't. She only watches the city from behind closed blinds.
Waiting.