Chapter Ten
Crystaline Car Ride
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Crystal really wanted a shower.
Her skin itched. Thick, black paste-like gunk made her fingernails ache. Her hands were caked with blood so that no cracks showed through to the skin, her arms splashed black with it, and chunks of gore had dried to her flesh. It itched like crazy, little insect legs crawling up and down her arms, from fingertip to mid-upper arm. The sleeves of her tux shirt were stiff, like crackers, dark maroon as the blood began to dry. Her white undershirt was nearly spotless, having been covered up by her tux-shirt and black undershirt. She peeled off the two outer layers, like peeling the backing off of Sesame Street stickers from hell. Her hair was strung out and tacky with the drying bodily fluids. She had a burn on the inside of her wrist where she'd been splashed by some stomach acids.
Yeah. A shower would be good.
We did a bad thing, the Good Child whimpered softly. Why did you make us do it?
It was gorgeous, Crystal growled, baring mental teeth that gleamed and sparked like electric needles. Didn't the little goody-goody get it? That guy had so deserved it! He worked for the freaking Mob, the slave masters that had ruined the Damundo sisters' lives. He'd been a murderer and a thug- she'd seen it in his thoughts. He deserved everything she'd given him and more. Unfortunately, they never lived long enough to reach that state of "more." They always died after they lost the first or second internal meat blob. If she'd had more time, she probably could've made it more painful, once she'd had the chance to calm down. But the freak had grabbed her! His hands had been everywhere! He deserved it.
He deserved it, she thought at her conscience, who trembled in the back of her mind, sick with the sociopathic monster it lived within. Crystal grinned in real life this time, and her sisters noticed a feral, hateful glint in her eye.
You can't hate everyone, the Good Child whispered.
Yes, I can.
Turning away from this totally unimportant conversation with herself, she tried to take a swipe at her cheek, where a piece of what might have been liver stuck to the prominent cheek bone, but her arm ached so badly she didn't really want to move it. She just wanted to sit there, on the floor of the Mercedes, relearning how to breath, rebuilding the ice castles in her mind, and enjoying the first relaxation she'd had in a long time.
All of them were covered in something: the bloody by-products of their unnatural urges, the scarlet slimes of their lunatic lusts. All a fancy way of saying they were all splashed all over with drying, brown and maroon blood. Rose even had pieces of gray and pink brain gel in her hair. Crystal could tell from the way she kept running her fingers through her blood auburn locks that she didn't like that. The redhead kept sucking her lips between her top and bottom teeth.
Danni had managed to wipe off a considerable amount of slime on her victim's shirt, but she still had pieces of white, gelatinous eyeball under her thumbnails. Her usually pearl white teeth were stained, as if she'd been an undead extra in a vampire movie, and her chin was still smeared with traces of unlicked away scarlet.
Sadie was relatively clean, except for the line of bright ruby down her snowy white shirt front. It wasn't from what she'd done to any of the mob's men- her lip was still bleeding. She couldn't get it to stop. She'd tried by blotting it with her shirt sleeve, and only succeeded in turning the ivory fabric a vibrant shade of vermillion. Her lip would probably need stitches, and if there was one place Sadie would not go, it was a hospital. She only willingly went into cars, the Queen of Swords, their boss's homes- they were always safe there, Bruce would never let anything happen to them- and her own apartment that she shared with her sisters and her best friend. Hospitals always reminded her of when she was a kid, and she never wanted to think about that.
Ever.
Maybe it would do you all good to talk about it, the Good Child whispered timidly, as if waiting for Crystal to lash out, lunge for it and stab it to death, hack it up like a slab of meat, a piece of roadkill. The way she had the mob goon. The way she wanted to do to the sweet, gentle inner voice in her mind that always gave her pieces of unwanted advice. But how did you kill something that was an intricate, vital piece of you? So all the blonde woman said was, We made a deal a long time ago. We don't talk about it. Ever. We don't think about it. Anyone who brings it up, pays in blood. So shut your mouth.
But I just think you ought to-
SHUT UP!
You need music, lady, was all the Good Child said in response, and then it became quiet.
Crystal glanced up, and realized the darkness shrouded interior of the car was irritatingly silent. She hated not having music on in the car. Maybe the others were too shocky to care, but she wasn't. She despised silence. Glancing at the guy in the clown mask driving the car- one of the Joker's men, apparently, who'd been waiting in the car behind the theatre all night- she whispered softly in his mind, I think I oughtta turn on the radio.
The clown creep broke her concentration by asking, "So, you ladies got names?"
"Danielle Leona Spinnelli," Danni murmured, scraping some gunk out from beneath her fingernails. She jerked her head at Sadie, who sat between Danni and the right hand back door of the Mercedes, and added, "That's Sadie Polly Damundo." The Joker gave Rose a look, and Rose added, "My youngest sister."
"What about you, Ms. Hack-And-Slash?" The clown asked the blond, who'd been trying to focus on pushing her thoughts onto the driver so he'd turn on the freaking radio. Maybe Rose was right- she did need to practice more. Hmmm. She answered, almost without thinking, "Crystal Persephone Damundo." Ignoring everyone else, she tried again: I think I oughtta turn on the radio. It's too quiet.
"Hey, boss," the goon mumbled. He sounded drunk. "How 'bout I turn on the radio? It's too frickin' quiet."
"Too quiet?" The Joker asked softly. Crystal shivered. There was something more than ice in that voice. If hell was dark, and stygian, and arctic, than his voice was like hell as he snarled the rhetorical question. She shivered at the sound of it, and felt hate smoldering deep inside, flaring up as that cold voice whispered soft breath on its embers. She refused to be frightened by a clown. She wasn't afraid of anything. After all, fear implied she was concerned about what would happen to her, and she honestly couldn't give a damn.
"Yeah," she ground out into the silence that followed the painted man's question. The crook gave her a questioning look, almost innocently curious. Alice as she wandered through the kingdom of Wonderland after falling down the rabbit hole. But this was no innocent, fair haired, chubby cheeked English girl-child looking for her cat. "It's too quiet," she added. She could feel defiance blazing in her eyes. Yippee freaking skippy for her.
For an eternal second, their eyes met, and locked.
She struggled against the sensation of falling, fought it, screamed silently at it, and knew she was being pulled inexorably downward, into other worlds, twisted and mad realities, lunatic psychic reservoirs she'd never dared to wander before. The Good Child began wailing in the back of her mind, and for the first time since she could remember, it echoed her own fear as midnight forests tried to swallow her, wrapping her in ocular branches, drowning her in opthalmic leaves and pine needles. She cut herself on the sharpness of the thorns and nettles inside that gaze. The skies reflected in the hellish, verdant eyes were bleeding emerald pain inside their sockets, inside her skull. She shuddered as she caught a whiff of wet, green wood. It was like wandering inside a world of jade...
Joker stared into the eyes as they melted from glinting violet ice shards into something else. Frosted, sugared violets, sweet enough he could taste them, cold enough still that they burned him, sharp enough even now that he could taste the copper tange of blood in his mouth, a culinary delight when mixed with the vanilla taste of sugar and the glass sharpness of ice. There was a spinning vortex inside her eyes. She was caught up in it. Her entire life was a destructive natural disaster, slamming through the world like a tornado hell bent on smashing everything in sight, a purple cyclone raking across everyone around her, beating them bloody with the debris and slag and shrapnel flung up in her wake. And she didn't even know that her rage spun and twisted, driving her like a beast before the Hunt, making her wild, making her crazy. She danced, she sang, she fought, she butchered, to escape that rage but all it did was push it back a little ways, and only for a little while. She was a ticking time bomb. One day, she would explode, and take everything with her in a blonde, violet eyed, hateful version of Hurricane Katrina.
But that would only happen if he didn't intervene. And he had every intention of intervening.
Who are you, you beautiful, psychotic mad thing? Who are you? He thought to himself, the question dancing in his head, an imp poking at his brain with its little pitch fork.
He watched as her eyes blanked out, but it wasn't the same as Rose's alcoholic eyes. This was different, but just as intoxicating. Eyes like violets, now so dark it was like plunging the dusky twilight sky into an infernal, empty abyss. Something in her eyes made his eyes burn in their sockets. Her blank, sleeping beauty eyes were sucking him down into blissful lethargy, and that was wrong. He was frantic, spastic, jerky, anarchaic, psychotic, electric. He didn't do lethargic behavior. And yet her eyes... like opium. So calming, drugging, making him so spacy and...
What are you? Her voice whispered in his mind, and it was the frigid chill of winter's kiss right before your marrow crystalizes in your bones. Every thought in his head suddenly sharpened, and he realized she was speaking right inside his brain. Well, what did ya know?
Anyone and no one, he snarled at her, and he could see the way she jumped, as if she'd been shocked. Her pulse jumped in her throat. A crack in the glacial ice of her armor. Her eyes darkened until they were almost black, midnight violet like a drug. Soothing the nerves, calming the fire just a little. Valium gaze. Opium eyes. Helping him think, helping him focus. Crystalizing his thoughts into jagged, diamond ideas and impulses. His synapses fizzed and crackled as everything clarified, transparent razor blade sharpness. And what are you?
A diamond death, she breathed. Her lips were parted, and he could see the dried blood on her chin, each individual rivulet now a rust colored line from her lips to the very top of her throat. I cut everything I touch. That blood was beautiful. It matched the ivory smoothness of her skin and the golden silk of her hair, the indigo daggers of her eyes. It was so beautiful. Almost as brilliant as a blast of dynamite. Almost. And her words... her voice cut him in all the perfect places. He loved the knife edge kiss of that voice against his skull. And those words! A diamond death who cut everything she touched. A weapon, a lunatic, a sanguine explosion waiting to happen. Perfect. Not perfect like Rose, but perfect in other ways. In her own way. Another monster to his collection.
How deep? He asked, and his voice was like sulfur. She shuddered at the way his eyes cut her. She could practically feel the biting sweetness of his gaze. She couldn't stop looking at his eyes, at the insane fire behind them. They burned, they burned like magnesium phosphate, like hydrogen, like the air waves blasting from the impact of an atomic bomb.
To the bone, she breathed, and she found it almost impossible to drag air into her lungs. The air between them shimmered as her mind began screaming and sobbing, moaning and shuddering, laughing and gasping. The Good Child wept. To the very core of all that wet red meat.
Ohhhh, he groaned. He didn't realize he'd groaned aloud, but Rose and the women knew why. They were shamelessly eavesdropping on what was happening. Someone had to keep Crystal from losing control. Say that again, the clown growled.
Wet...
He let his head fall back against the seat, ignoring the way Crystal was slowly edging toward him. This wasn't like before, with the knife Rose had been trying to get off of him. This was different. She wanted to be inside his head. She wanted to slip into his mind, slide into black fires, and fall asleep, cradled in their chaotic blaze. But he just wanted to hear her talk about killing. When she said "wet" he saw... so many things. Body parts. Entrails. Brains. Blood clots. Rotting corpses.
Red...
He shuddered. Blood. He could see her in red, a red dress perhaps, but a dress that matched the shade of her skin because she was spattered, splashed, painted with the scarlet blood of the hacked up, bleeding, lifeless carcasses lying in heaps of now gutless, white meat on the floor. Her heels, spiked crimson three inch heels, sinking into the bloody carpet so that squirts of scarlet shot up and left droplets on the red leather as she walked toward him, and he sank his switchblade into one of the softest parts of her and saw her blood bead along that creamy, soft looking skin.
Meat...
He wanted this one. He wanted this monster a lot. The things she could make him think when she whispered such viciously violent things in his head...
"We're here," Rose said loudly, breaking the connection between the clown and the blond woman. The car pulled up in front of a dinky apartment building and slowed to a halt. The driver killed the motor, and they got out. The redhead added, "Come on. Third floor." They started towards the staircase Rose indicated. For a minute, the Joker thought he saw a halo around Crystal's head when she passed underneath the amber streetlight a few feet away from their car, but it was just the golden nimbus of light reflected off of all the beautiful blond hair. The woman was no angel.
He knew that for a fact.
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Next time, on Five Queens and a Joker:
Chapter 11: Holy crap, what the hell? What about a mate? Rose and the rest of the Damundo girls were destined to be single for life. That was obvious from the lack of success in the boyfriend department. What about mates? Nothing about mates, that was what. The Dark Passenger was off her freaking nut if she had any kind of romantic designs on Gotham's own killer clown.
Chapter 12: Every drop of blood scalded him. It practically sizzled when it touched his cool skin. But all he could do was laugh and laugh and laugh at the incredible joke he'd walked right into. Now he saw the funny side of it all. Now he knew the truth- she was completely, totally insane.
Chapter 13: Rachel popped a Valium, sighing as Maggie flopped down on her bed, lounging oh so casually. The brunette knew why the ice eyed woman was still there. She wanted to talk about the past. She wanted to talk about old friends and old flames. She wanted, in other words, to talk about Jack.
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Pwease? Review? What happened to everyone? Where you go?
Thank you, my awesome reviewers: My-Echo, Lord Dragon Claw (kisses), and Alys98. Also, thanks to my current favorite authors: Alys98, KatxValentine, Kendra, & Harlequin Sequins. I love your guys' stories! I read them, and then I write, and then read, write; read, write. It's one vicious cycle. D KatxValentine's probably not even reading this but who cares.