6. Murder
Claire staggered forward as the blade sliced across her throat, hands flying up to clutch at the weeping maw that gaped in her windpipe. Crimson trails spiralled out from the wound, circling her neck, soaking her t-shirt, covering her grasping fingers with her own blood. She choked and gurgled, fluid welling in her mouth, spilling out over her lips, even as it simultaneously rushed downwards into her trachea, filling her lungs and stifling her breathing.
Her brother let out an incomprehensible scream of loss and grief, words lost to the sudden, biting anguish that tore through him. He dived for her, barely catching her before her knees buckled beneath her and betrayed her weight to gravity, only just saving her from slamming into the frozen concrete at their feet. He cradled her head in one muscular arm, reaching up with the other in a desperate attempt to stifle the bleeding.
"Oh God," he sobbed, as his palm slipped across her skin, slick with the life of his sole remaining relative, the young woman whose life he had come all this way to save, only to fail in his mission, "no, no, Christ no!"
Her body jerked and twitched, the spasms of a body fighting death, but facing a losing battle. Stricken eyes locked with his, a wordless scream of pain and terror echoing through his paralysed mind as he watched the light fading in her eyes. Though he didn't realise it, a groan of the worst agony flowed unbidden from his lips, long, low and harrowing, voice broken with emotion.
Her struggling died, fading to the weakest of convulsions, until at last she lay still, the expression of absolute horror frozen upon her features. Even with her skin pinched by the chill of the Antarctic facility, he had never seen her look as pale as she did in that moment, bled of her very essence. Her limbs hung slack, bloodied lips trapped in an eternal circle, eyes staring vacantly ahead at nothing, never to see another, solitary moment of the world that was now leaving her behind with each passing second.
Painful tears escaped his eyes, each bead of water passing like a stone in the chill of the frigid air. His hands were sticky with scarlet, his body numb from head to toe. His mind felt like a glacier moving through icy seas, slow and ponderous. Eventually, he looked up through misted vision to glare at his tormentor, the perpetrator of this murder.
"Why?" he bellowed, his cracking voice echoing from the walls of the cavern where the confrontation was yet continuing, "she didn't deserve this; any of this! Why would you do this to her? She wasn't important to you!"
"No," Shakahnna said, eyes flashing red with menace as she spoke, "but she was important to you."