Disclaimer: Nope, I don't own any of this. I'm just enjoying myself a little bit with it. I hope you are too. The universe is the property of Mr. Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. This is a purely creative exercise, and no breach of copyright is intended.
Chapter 10
Maria pulled herself from blissful unconsciousness with a cough. Her body shook at the end of the long chain around her wrists and a near-unbearable wave of agony ripped mercilessly through her body.
She gritted her teeth together and the involuntary cry of pain only escaped as something akin to a grunt.
She couldn't breathe very well, her lungs felt wrong, somehow, although she couldn't fully explain how. They just didn't want to expand properly. The dark red puddle beneath her toes had grown significantly, which was really her only way of guessing how long she'd been hanging there. She found herself wondering how much more blood she could possibly lose. She'd heard of a lot of people losing far less blood than that and falling over dead.
Then, she'd done a number of pretty incredible things since she'd escaped from Death Row.
She felt colder. Maybe the sun had gone down. Her uncovered body was shivering uncontrollably, sending white-hot pulses of pain tearing through her body.
She looked up at her hands. In the dim light of whatever warehouse they'd dumped her in, they were now a deep purple; almost black; as the minimal blood pressure in the veins in her wrists attempted to force its way past the chains around them.
She couldn't move. She tried, but her body adamantly refused to respond. Her arms didn't have her worried much; they were bound. But her legs, hanging free, wouldn't move either. She didn't think her back was broken. She could still fell her legs —God, could she ever feel her legs— she just couldn't get them to move.
So, is it because you can't move, or because you don't want to?
Shut up.
You break your way out of a maximum security prison, and you can't break out of a warehouse?
I'm hurt, I'm weak. I've lost a lot of blood.
I don't believe that, and neither do you.
Go 'way.
Fine, but bear in mind, whoever did this to you is gonna be back sooner or later; and this time you might not have the good fortune of being unconscious when they get here.
Leave me alone.
How? I'm in your head. If I'm here, it's 'cause you want me here.
Yeah, and now I want you to go.
Make me.
Fuck off.
There was a brief silence, then; nope, still here.
I've done just fine without you for fifteen years, I don't need you now.
Have you ever really been without me?
What?
Let's face it, sweetie…
You call me that again, and I swear…
What? Threatening a figment of your imagination now? Get it through your head, cutie-pie, everything I'm doing, part of you wants me to do. The fact that I'm here is your doing. That's how much power I've got over you.
You have no power over me.
Don't I?
What?
The single driving motivation in your life has been that you didn't want to turn into me. Well, guess what, honey; you failed miserably.
How dare you, you son of a…
Rape, abuse, at the end of the day, it's all about power. Having power over another human being. Rape isn't about sex, abuse isn't about inflicting pain. They're both about owning someone; totally dominating them.
I was seven you God damned son of a…
You were seven, and I had power over you. Now you're twenty-one, and you got a taste of that power yourself, didn't you?
Go to Hell.
Already here, babe. You brought me here, remember?
This isn't Hell.
Really? If this ain't Hell, then explain to me why you can't leave.
What are you talking about?
Well, just about every religion on Earth has some version of Hell written into it. Every one of them says that once you're there, you're stuck there. Everyone always assumes that there's something holding you in. A wall, a barrier, a three-headed dog… Maybe it's a lot simpler than that. Maybe they can't leave because they know they don't deserve to. Deep down, they know they've earned whatever is happening to them.
So this is what? Redemption?
Redemption has to be earned, sweetie. Let that thought ferment for a few hours, since you're not going anywhere.
Then, abruptly, the voice was silent.
xxxxxxxx
"So, we're not going to drink her? They say that Slayer's blood is pretty intense." It took her a moment to realize that this was an actual voice; a woman's voice coming from somewhere behind her, although she couldn't turn to see her. She was fairly certain that she'd blacked out for a while, as she hadn't heard anyone enter.
"It is." She recognized that voice, a man's, but she wasn't exactly sure from where. Her brain didn't seem to be working all that well.
"You've drunk her?"
"Well, look at her, she's bleeding out, and she's not gonna be using any of the blood she's lost anytime soon."
"Why don't we just kill her?"
"The Fyorals want her to die slow after they've taken care of the family that was keeping her."
"So why don't we just eat her and tell 'em that she died from her injuries?"
"Fyorals aren't exactly the brightest of demons out there, but they'll see through that. You wanna piss off a pack of Fyorals?"
"I see your point," the woman's voice responded, shaken.
"Hey, I'd love to eat her myself, but I can't take on a Fyoral, can you?"
Now she recognized the man's voice.
Crap.
One bad date was going to haunt her forever, wasn't it?
"I know," the woman's voice replied, "but… She's a Slayer. Supposed to kill our kind. I'd feel a lot better knowing that she's not gonna be doing any slaying around here."
"Our kind?" What the hell is she talking about? Her attention was necessarily divided between her abused body and her keeper's words, so she was only really half-listening to what they were saying, but a lot of what they were saying just didn't make much sense.
"Hey, she's not going anywhere, she's got no strength, no clothes, and she's been beaten within an inch of her life. She's a Slayer, but I don't think we need to worry."
"Yeah, but they say that there are more of 'em these days. Thousands, tens of thousands, maybe. Maybe she's not the only one here."
"Possible, but I don't think so. Actually, I don't even think that the other Slayers know she's here. I think we've got ourselves a rogue."
Slayer. A lot of people had been using that term to describe her over the last month. She wasn't exactly sure what it meant. She had slain, definitely. She'd killed one man with a baseball bat; that had landed her on death row. Then she'd killed a security guard with her bare hands. Maybe slayer was an appropriate term, but it didn't make any sense for them to be using it.
Unless there was some other meaning that she didn't get.
"C'mon, how could you possibly know that?" The woman's voice replied, angrily.
"She's been here almost a month. A Slayer has been living in this town; the demon hotspot in Québec, hell, the demon hotspot anywhere east of Alberta, with the possible exception of Moncton; for almost a month. How many demons has she actually slain?"
Demons? What the fuck was he talking about?
"She gave you a pretty thorough beating with a two by four."
"When she could just as easily have stabbed me in the chest with it."
"She…" the woman's voice paused for a moment, trying to make that last intuitive leap, "she doesn't know what she is."
"Right. And if she has no clue, then the odds are that the other Slayers don't either."
"So, when are they going after the family?" The woman asked.
"Midnight."
"How bad'll it be?"
"If they're lucky, the Fyorals will only bring their apartment building down on top of them. That'll be relatively quick." He paused for a moment, "If they're feeling more sadistic…" He left the thought unfinished.
"Damn. Wish I could be there to see it." The woman's voice replied.
Oh God. They were going after Claudette. They would kill her, Geneviève… They'd murder the youngest one, whatever her name was, without a second thought.
Élodie.
They were going to kill Élodie. The kid was strong, and she had guts; there was no doubt about that; but she couldn't beat them.
She pulled against the chains, but her efforts did little more than make her body lurch, hanging freely. She ignored every muscle in her body as they screamed in protest in unison.
She pulled again, her body felt like it was on fire. Like she was burning alive.
"Uh oh. Looks like our Slayer has a little fight left in her." That was the man's voice again.
"What say we beat it out of her?" The woman replied.
"I'm game." She heard a pair of footsteps gently tapping against the hard concrete behind her.
The man she'd shared a beer with all those lifetimes ago slid into her field of vision, his image drifting drunkenly back and forth as her eyes struggled to focus on him.
"I told you we were gonna have a little fun, Slayer," he whispered, "turns out that it's gonna hurt you a lot more than it does me."
She didn't even see the left haymaker coming at her right cheek, and even if she hadn't been chained up, she doubted that she could have defended herself against it. Her head snapped hard to the left, her whole body spinning wildly with the force of the blow.
A second blow, directed at her left cheek; she couldn't tell if it was the man hitting her again or the woman this time, as she couldn't tell which direction she was facing; halted her spin. She had no time to recover from those blows before a hard kick to her abdomen forced the air out of her lungs in a rush, and a primal scream was ripped free of her throat as her body protested the assault.
"They're gonna kill you, Slayer," the man whispered, "and I guarantee you that it's gonna be slow, and it's really gonna hurt."
"What the fuck do you want from me?" The words gurgled wetly out of Maria's mouth.
"How sad," the man's voice was deadpan, "You're gonna die, and you don't even know what this is all about." He sighed, "pathetic. Truly pathetic."
Another right hook slammed across her left cheekbone.
"We can't beat her to death, Davvik, The fyorals want her."
"I know that. Doesn't mean that we can't have a little fun, though."
"I might have a thing or two to say about that." A new voice echoed in the vast chamber.
The man in front of her whirled to face the new voice. Maria couldn't turn her head to see who was talking.
"Who the hell are you?" The man demanded, the slightest amount of fear creeping into his voice.
"Interesting choice of words, considering the speaker." The woman circled around in front of Maria, then looked her over, quickly assessing her injuries. She was about five-four, maybe five-six. Her dark red hair hung over her left shoulder. Her features would have been quite attractive had they not been contorted into a nasty grimace as she looked at the deep gashes in Maria's body "see, now you've gone and made me angry; and I hate being angry."
"Who the hell are you?" The man demanded again.
"You don't know? Didn't they tell you that Slayers were hunting in packs these days?"
"A Slayer?"
"I told you there were more of 'em, Davvik," the woman's voice admonished her male companion.
"Calm down," he snapped back at her, taking a step toward the new arrival, "if we take her together, there's no way she can beat both of us."
"Smart plan, jackass," the redhead shook her head, "one problem, though."
"And what's that?"
"It ain't gonna work."
The redhead launched herself at the man, catching him off-guard with a hard right hook. Simultaneously, she lashed out with a perfectly-executed sidekick which caught the woman in the abdomen. She effortlessly redirected a strike at her ribs and responded with a strike at the man's throat. He stumbled backwards as she whirled at the woman, slamming her fist into the center of her chest. The woman stumbled backwards a few steps, a look of shock fixed on her face for an instant before she disintegrated.
Disintegrated?
Maria had the strange feeling that she'd stumbled into some kind of nightmare world. People didn't disintegrate when they died. She knew. She'd killed a couple in her time.
The redheaded woman was, quite literally, dancing circles around the man. He swung a number of blows at the diminutive woman, none of them landing. She slammed whatever it was that she held in her hand into the center of the man's chest and he, as the woman had, disintegrated.
The redhead stood for a moment, allowing herself to catch her breath. She then looked over to Maria, hanging helplessly.
"Jesus, what did they do to you?" She walked up to her, and with a quick tug, Maria felt herself drop to the ground, her body collapsing as her feet made contact with the cold concrete, he face slamming forward to drop into a cold puddle of her own blood.
"Oh, shit. Sorry, Maria, is it?" She kneeled next to the injured woman, and gently brushed her blood-soaked hair away from her face. "I'm Anne. You're a tough woman to track down."