Please feel free to leave comments - no matter if they are praiseworthy or critical.
While I really like the idea of describing Chloe during the murders, it will be more about a frank conversation between two personalities who have secrets, the disclosure of which will make them monsters in the eyes of others. However, I will also try to kill - it's really tasty, Dexter lovers will understand me. :-)
Planned as something like a series of consecutive, plot-related passages - reluctance to bother with smooth transitions between scenes. However, I can promise it won't be just a few words.
Here Chloe is very close in her personality to Dexter, although I will try to bring a little 'original Chloe' into her, as well as something unique, personally from me. I hope at least someone likes this idea as much as I do.
About her relationship with Lucifer - I'm not sure yet how far they will have time to go until my fantasy runs out. To begin with, they will become just friends who have more in common than both of them initially think. So for now, it's Jen, which may or may not evolve into something romantic.
The first time Chloe meets him is when she is hunting down another target.
Travis Smoak, twenty-seven-year-old serial rapist and murderer who chooses his victims in nightclubs. Four girls have already died at his hands. Rape, then strangulation. In truth, as a serial killer, he is banal to the point of impossibility - in her 'collection' there were already a dozen like him. Like most other 'platitudes', he came to her attention due to insufficiently scrupulous police work - he was suspected of killing the last girl, Marsha Walt, a twenty-two-year-old student, but the evidence was not enough. However, she was able to find what the cops did not find: the place where he practiced his 'hobby', and in it - trophies in the form of torn nails from the big toes of the left feet, which, as she found out for certain, belonged to the victims. That's how she got to know about the other three. So, now she watched and waited for the right moment for the kidnapping.
Now Chloe was watching him at the 'Lux' nightclub. She did not like such places - too much noise and chaos, while her preferences were the opposite - silence and order. But sometimes you have to get a little dirty to clean up, right?
"Does the beautiful lady miss visiting me?" suddenly purred a pleasant male voice near his right ear insinuatingly. "Casts a shadow on me, as on the owner. I definitely need to fix this."
"Nothing to fix. The beautiful lady wants to drink alone," she attempted to brush away casually, not wanting to lose sight of her target.
"But why then does the lady keep her eyes fixed on one particular youth for so long?" the owner of the voice did not lag behind. "You could play much better... Is he really what you truly desire?"
Chloe turned around, about to give her trademark "dead" look, which she only dared to use on strangers away from her "primary habitats" (for example, with colleagues at work, such behavior was too inappropriate and even destructive for her everyday persona of a quiet, but a friendly 'nerd')... and seemed to fall into a pair of black, like a cloudy night, eyes.
"I want to kill him," she said with a paradoxical sense of compulsion and release at the same time. "He raped and then killed four girls. And he'll do it again… if I don't finish him fast enough."
"Oh," said the stranger evenly, "how curious. And you know this because…"
"I found the victims' nails with his fingerprints on him," she frankly confessed in the same trance.
Here the interlocutor's gaze lost its strange intensity, and full lips, surrounded by well-groomed stubble, curved into a smirk: "Well... then I should not interfere with the beautiful lady to have fun," and he disappeared into the crowd in one fluid movement.
Chloe blinked after him for a few seconds, for the first time in her life, it seemed, experiencing something that was described as shock. What the hell just came out of her mouth? Has she suddenly lost the vital ability to lie after so many years?
"My name is Chloe Dekker, and I am horrified at the thought of taking someone else's life," she muttered to herself, unafraid of being heard over the rumbling music.
No, that's all right, because it's a lie already twice: murder was her favorite pastime, and horror was a concept with which she was only speculatively familiar. But maybe this is not a permanent effect, but something like an attack? She really felt strange, looking into the eyes of that bristly stranger... It was comforting to think that he hardly believed - judging by the reaction, he rather took it for the original anti-pickup. And no wonder: if you tell a randomly met individual that you are going to kill someone, he will most likely twist his finger at his temple and call him a worthless comedian - because no one in their right mind shares plans to kill with others... and not in sane is also unlikely.
Trusting her intuition, silent about the danger, Chloe continued to shadow.
Travis stayed at the club until three in the morning and, not finding a suitable victim, went home to sleep.
She did the same, but Googled what appeared to be the owner of 'Lux' before going to bed. The stranger took on a name - Lucifer Morningstar, the self-proclaimed Devil. In Los Angeles, the city of actors, such a person did not even stand out too much. By all appearances, he was obscenely rich, led a noisy and lavish lifestyle full of booze, drugs and casual sex - nothing that would have attracted Chloe in the slightest. His deals business also hinted at mafia ties, but only numerous minor offenses, such as speeding or public exposure, were linked to his name in the database.
In general, the information gathered further convinced her that the 'Devil' was unlikely to have taken her words as more than just sarcasm.
The question of why she blurted it out at all, unfortunately, remained open.
***
Their second meeting became immeasurably more… extreme.
Three days later, she, dressed in a plastic forensic suit, woke Travis Smoke with ammonia, naked and taped to the table. He blinked, throwing off the dope from the tranquilizer, then twitched in an attempt to free himself and grumbled through the tape on his mouth.
"Quiet!" Chloe ordered sharply, but without raising her voice too much, slapping his latex-gloved palm on his chest. He froze, but more from surprise than from obedience. "I like silence. And you will keep it when I remove the tape. If not, I will return it... and then I will make you a little smaller, say, on some finger," she looked at him with a slight squint. He hesitated, but still nodded - and the tape was immediately torn off his face, making him scream.
"What kind of sick bitch are you? What do you need?" Travis hissed angrily, though he couldn't hide the twinkle of fear in his eyes, which made her smile in satisfaction.
"'Bitch'," Chloe began to think aloud, rubbing her chin with her fingers. "Such name-calling in the direction of a woman, which is more banal and difficult to come up with. It doesn't touch anything in me… although, in principle, very little touches me. But sick… well, I guess the urge to stick knives in people is really not a model of perfect mental health." She shrugged. "However, this is not about me. Did you recognize the room?" the question was supplemented by a wide wave of the hand at the environment, completely draped with a film. "I know it looks a little different after my… modification, but… you spent too much time here not to recognize it. In this place you enjoyed other people's bodies, someone else's pain and someone else's helplessness."
"Do not understand what you talking about! I didn't do anything like that! You're delusional!" he began to deny.
She gripped the man firmly by the jaw and roughly turned his head to the left, towards the wall, on which hung four photos of girls she found in the database among unsolved murders after identifying the DNA from the nails.
"I'm delirious?" Chloe smiled coldly. "I don't think so. Marsha Walt and others "spoke" from their graves. Your trophies were very informative." She let go of his jaw and pressed hard on his forehead with her index finger before pulling away. "This place was your temple, where you indulged in lust, satisfied your thirst for violence and control. You brought them here, deprived them of their freedom, and then of their lives. You took everything from them. It was a wonderful feeling, wasn't it?" While saying this, she took a scalpel, cut the cheek of the person lying on the table, causing him to hiss in pain, and collected some of the blood that had come out with a pipette, so that she could then drip onto a glass slide, thus taking her own trophy.
"You… you understand me!" Travis blurted out with sudden realization.
"I understand," she agreed easily. "That is why we are here now. I, too, have a thirst for control that needs to be quenched from time to time. That's why I made your temple mine. That's why I took your freedom. And very soon…" an anticipatory smirk slowly distorted her lips, "I will take life. But unlike your victims, you deserve it."
"Fuck you, you crazy bitch!" the man spat out in a flash of hatred. "I will do to you what I did to them! You will also squeal while I break into you! I m-mh-h-hm!" then he could only mumble unintelligibly because of the tape returned to his mouth.
"I said to be quiet," Chloe reminded him with mock gentleness. "But assholes like you never listen." She took a knife from her kit and walked over to Travis's feet. "I think the big toe of the left foot will be symbolic. I would have torn out a nail... but my passion is to cut, not tear," and she, grabbing the right finger, cut it off with a quick movement. The former owner of the finger let out a muffled howl. The woman, putting the cut off part of the body on his chest, began to wait for him to get used to the pain. Seeing a glimmer of consciousness in his eyes as the incessant howl turned into a moan, she spoke again. "You know, you are the most common and boring type of serial killer. Already, let me think… the eleventh? No, even the twelfth is very similar in my account! And everyone had these boorish habits! I can not believe it! It seems that they are being cloned somewhere in a secret laboratory!" She snorted at her own joke. Then any trace of emotion slipped from her face. "But in the end, it doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is that by killing you, I will not only satisfy my Dark Need, but also make the world a little nicer, safer... cleaner. I look at it like cleaning." As she said this, she placed a plastic face shield over her head, then stood next to the man's head. "And when you do the cleaning, you get dirty in the process, right?"
With a quick and precise movement practiced dozens of times, she jabbed the knife into Travis's carotid artery. Blood began to spurt out of the wound in small fountains, but Chloe didn't pay too much attention to it, focusing on the eyes of the victim, becoming less and less meaningful, and the slowing pulse beating in her palm, lying on someone else's chest.
At the moment when the heart of the next killer, having made the last convulsive blow, stopped forever, and the last spark of life disappeared in his eyes, she was filled with a familiar peace. Chloe took a step away from the table and closed her eyes, savoring the feeling of the rightness of the Hunt being done, leading to the moment when the tension of the last weeks completely left the inside, giving way to her personal version of zen. Yes, there was still the disposal of the body, which was far from an easy job... but, like every previous time, it was worth it!
And then something happened that had never happened before in more than a decade and a half of her activity - an outsider invaded the Killing Room. This was signaled by the sound of an opening door and the rustling of film curtains, as well as a familiar voice with a strange accent and purring notes: "And you have here... nice."
Chloe's wide eyes saw none other than Lucifer Morningstar.