Bone Deep (2 page)

She could not. She wasn’t that strong. “Stop talking,” she spat. “Stop talking,” she demanded again. If they didn’t shut their mouths, Ninka would pay the ultimate price. Ninka with her yellow hair and soft skin, her fragile bones and weak mind.

Death was stalking, curling around them all with the rising wind. The hawk was a harbinger. They wouldn’t escape the black-eyed man. He knew everything.

“Gretchen, the sky is turning very blue,” Ninka whispered louder now.

Bone could see the blue. It was startling in this place of sorrow and loss. The lighter colors taunted the sky but the blue overrode them.

“Hold on, Ninka. This task is almost over,” Bullet croaked out.

“She’ll get herself killed and the rest of us punished. Shut up, Ninka,
please
,” Blade pleaded.

Oh, Blade was angry. Bitterness leaked into her tone and should the black-eyed man hear it, he would punish her—make her take another life and another and another until she screamed her throat raw. Blade had killed more than any of them since they’d arrived here. She lost control more than any of the rest of them, even Bone. It was always painful to watch, but stunning in its own way. Her blades made a lovely noise when they danced in the air…or across skin. For some reason when Blade was pushed close to the point of breaking it made Bone want to destroy the black-eyed man—punch through his chest, take his heart in her hands and squeeze it until he was dead, dead, dead.

One day she would be strong enough.

Her breath caught, the sound a loud click in the silence left by Blade’s plea. “Shut her up, Bullet. She’ll get us all back in the water pit,” Bone whispered.

“The sky is blue, blue, blue,” Ninka sing-songed.

Bone shuddered. The cold wrapped around her feet, moving up and coating her entire body, dispersing the warmth of her hate and locking its sharp teeth into her soul to shake and tear.

“They come,” Arrow said in her voice that spoke of ages long passed. Arrow had a voice like Bone’s
ima
…ancient.

“
Kar li, ima”
Bone said on a breath but the wind took her voice and flung it.
I feel the cold, mother
.

“Ninka, hush
poupon
, don’t say a word,” Bullet pleaded.

Ninka was beyond them all now. The
Etz haChayim,
Tree of Life, called and her voice would only be heard there after today.

“
Bauy-bay, Bayu-bay,
tomorrow is a new day,” Ninka trilled out, nearly yelling now. “Gretchen, my mama is calling me. Do you hear her?”

Panic threatened to choke Bone. Her young body was weak. Not as weak as Ninka’s but too tiny to break the binds that held her. She wanted to grab Ninka from the ground and run. Instead she closed her eyes.

“Yes, Mama, I am here…” Ninka cried softly.

The sun’s rays grabbed at the clearing where they were staked, heralding the entrance of the big, tall men coming to make sure they’d remained silent. Their boots thudded against the ground. After all, they had no need to be quiet.

The black-eyed man and his minion, the one called, Minton walked into the small clearing and there was another with them, Julio. He would be the death dealer today. In her heart she knew it to be true because he had the look of evil riding his dark face.

Her feet went numb and her vision swam as fear thrummed through her veins. It was potent and even as the cold settled over her, her bladder leaked, the wetness a frigid serpent down her leg. Her hands knotted into fists.

“Ibadti et haderekh sheli,”
Bone whispered.
I am lost.

“Come to me, Mama, from the very blue sky,” Ninka said in a fading, hoarse whisper.

Ninka was
shavur
.
Broken
. The weakest one of them had splintered under the force of the black-eyed man’s training and Bone’s belly burned. It was a cold fire but it blazed brightly.

The fog left a sheen on the grass that held her gaze captive. The dew was so thick it fell to the parched earth at Bone’s feet, mocking her. Even the dew was free to go where it would. Her ears rang in the sudden cacophony of silence.

“She’s tiny, Minton, but she’s survived.” The black-eyed devil said to his minion. Then to Bullet he said, “Tell me, dove, did you stay silent?”

Do not speak, Bullet. Do not,
achot
.

Bullet nodded her head and the black-eyed man smiled. He had been there with Minton the night her parents had been slaughtered like sheep in front of her. He had given the order. Minton had carried it out with a smile on his face much like the one the black-eyed man had now.

They would both pay. She would break them into tiny pieces and eat their flesh so they did not rise again and they never knew another life. She had not been taught the softer emotions like love, but she knew possession, revenge, and pain well. They’d been her mother’s milk and daily bread. The black-eyed man and Minton would eventually benefit from her rations.

“Minton, have Julio take care of little Ninka, would you?” the black-eyed man asked.

“She’s such a waste,” Minton spat and his eyes tracked to Bone. “Julio, you heard him.”

Bone stared at him, her belly still burning, her throat closing in rage. His gaze skated away from hers and she knew in that second that she would be the one of them to kill Minton—maybe she would even take him first so the black-eyed man would know she was coming. One day…

Julio moved, breaking her line of sight to Minton. And so it began, Ninka’s death walk. If she could remember her people’s death prayer she would speak it now but the verses were as leaves tossed in the wind of her memory, brittle and scattered.

They were only words anyway. They meant nothing. But she could give the weakest of them all
something
as she left this world. Bone could be a witness to her passing and later give a testament to the girl’s walk. Ninka had broken last night though she’d been splintered all along. The cracks miniscule then widening under the force of the black-eyed man’s will.

He had known what he was doing as he destroyed her. It was in every glance, every word he wrote in his little red book. He watched them all, always. Bone felt his attention in her sleep. But today he would shape the rest of them and little Ninka would be his tool.

Ninka would be their Hell and the fires of her death would forge them. She wondered if the man realized what he was setting into motion. She shook her head as much as her tied hair would allow. He did not. If he did, he wouldn’t do this thing here today.

Ninka cried out and Bone’s gaze narrowed on Julio. She couldn’t watch the broken one—it would make her mad. As twisted and crazy as Julio perhaps. His black eyes were bright with pleasure. Bone’s stomach heaved, the ropes digging deep as her body tightened in primal fear and the need to act, to move and help Ninka.

Her stare remained on Julio but Ninka’s wheat-colored hair flailed, catching on his rough clothes as her cries turned to grunts of pain.

“You’re such a stupid child! Why can’t you learn to be quiet?” he yelled at her, his words stuttered and deep.

He was shaking Ninka, breaking her body to match her mind. The hate rose, coloring Bone’s world, outlining Julio in the shade of her parents’ blood. He threw Ninka to the ground, stepped back, his breathing harsh but a smile on his face.

He kicked her. The tiny child’s indrawn breath reverberated through her mind, sinking into her heart and ripping a hole. She couldn’t force air into her lungs but it was Ninka who coughed, blood flying from her mouth.

“Help me, Bullet,” Ninka cried out and reached for the one she clung to in the night.

More than any other Ninka had relied on Bullet, climbing into bed with her while Bullet held her close. They all provided rations but Bullet had provided more. Bullet’s pain at this loss would be great, maybe greater than all of theirs combined.

Bone didn’t look at Bullet, there was no reason. Bone had already decided Minton and the black-eyed man were going to die—it was only a matter of when. Besides, Bullet would do what she would and if the gun was in her hands no one could stop her.

So she did not glance at Bullet. Right now she would witness for Ninka so when the darkness fell again she could remember how the smallest of them all suffered the most.

Julio kicked her again, over and over and as the blue completely consumed the pink of the morning, he turned to Minton who simply nodded. Julio grabbed Ninka’s head, her frail body dangling like a wilted vine.

Bone met Ninka’s eyes then and in them she saw peace. A breath, a turn, a hawk’s wicked scream, and it was done. Ninka’s body fell but so did Julio’s. A single, smoking hole, dead-center of his forehead. His death had been too quick, painless. That made Bone sad. He deserved torture and agony, his body writhing in the fires of their hatred.

She watched as his limbs twitched but Ninka’s never moved. She heard the black-eyed man murmuring to Bullet, praising her and then demanding she untie them all and get back to camp.

Bullet did as she was told, untying them all. Bone fell to the ground, her legs unable to bear her weight. It took a few minutes to push her own pain aside but she made it to her feet slowly, drawing in air and feeling her strength return with every breath. She joined her sisters and they pulled Julio’s body to the edge of the clearing for the buzzards to feast on.

Bone gazed up at the bird of prey who still held a winged vigil in the sky above them—a portent maybe of more evil to come.

Slowly, Bone sat down beside Ninka’s body wondering if the tiny girl’s soul had already fled or if she’d remained to watch them all gathering around her. “She’s dead. Why wouldn’t she shut up?” she asked.

Her question had been directed at the God who abandoned her but it was Arrow who answered. “She was breaking.”

“We can’t break,” Bullet said and wiped tears from her cheek.

Bone wished for the desire to cry. Where were her tears now?

“She was a stupid girl and we are already broken,” she responded. Her body was tired, her skin raw and her heart bleeding.

She hated them all in that moment—the black-eyed man, Minton, Julio, Ninka. Hated them with a violent ferocity because they’d each taken something from her she knew she’d never get back.

She was only six and she
knew
what it was to yearn for revenge.

Blade bent over Ninka’s head, lifted it and placed it in her lap. “We can bend. Like the steel that is used to make my long blades, we can bend,” she whispered.

Bone considered Blade’s words—took them in and processed them but quickly came to the conclusion that bending was nothing more than the beginning of a break. She would never bend. Ever.

“We have to hide her so nothing can hurt her anymore,” Arrow said as she stroked Ninka’s long, mud-stained yellow hair.

They could hide her. It was a way for them to protect her since God had failed in his duty. “Then we’ll have to say a death prayer, but the God of my fathers doesn’t listen to my prayers anymore, so someone else will have to,” Bone replied.

Her bleeding heart stopped for single beat. When it began again she acknowledged He wasn’t there. She would struggle in the land of death for eternity because He had abandoned her. Beloved hate replaced her rage and in it was a coolness she welcomed.

Better to kill with the ice of hate than with the fires of rage. She fisted her hands, really looking at them, seeing the broken nails and short digits and she knew she’d kill many before she revisited this place where Ninka had left them.

She raised her head and stared at her sisters. Bullet rubbed her chest, Blade stroked Bullet’s hair, and Arrow stroked Ninka’s. Bullet grabbed Ninka’s hands, flattening them between her own, praying.

Bone wanted to shout at her He wasn’t listening but decided against it. The black-eyed man would return soon. The warning was on the wind. They needed to get back to camp.

Arrow whispered in her native Japanese and chills danced across Bone’s skin. Bone stared at the ground but her hand was on Ninka’s arm, squeezing and letting go, squeezing and letting go.

They were all there but Ninka was gone from them. Five had become four. Bone finally looked at Ninka so she could remember.

Bullet leaned over the girl’s head which still rested on Blade’s lap, placed a kiss on her brow and whispered, “I’ll kill them Ninka. I’ll kill them all.”

Arrow leaned over and whispered something in her native tongue and then it was Bone’s turn. Righteousness poured through her, floating on a wind she imagined came from the plains of Jericho.

“Baruch dayan emet, aval n’kamah hayah mokesh,”
Bone whispered.
“Shalom, achot.”

A single tear dropped onto Ninka’s pale cheek. Bone wiped it off, smudging dirt and blood on her sister’s pale cheeks. She stood then, raised her arms to the wind and silently promised that no matter what happened she would live to kill.

She would lust for death and hate would hold her hand but she would survive it all for the ones who remained—her sisters. And in the end they would stand over the black-eyed man and watch the life drain from his eyes.

St. Petersburg, Russia, Present Day

The woman was a killer. If you drank from the cup of wrath she carried inside her soul she would go down like milk mixed with honey, sweet and smooth, putting you to bed with a smile on her face and death in her eyes.

Taut, slim muscles rolled beneath the silky sand of her skin. Everything in his body squeezed tight as the colors of the strobe lights above them danced over her body, slicking over supple skin and sexy hollows. She walked with a grace not many women could match—fluid, even, nothing spared in the stride. Her back was straight, but the generous curve of her hips swayed just enough to definitively belie her intentions.

Dmitry didn’t understand the pull he felt toward her but realized there was no way to control it. It was what it was, no matter how bitter the taste in his mouth.

Her attire consisted of a bra-like contraption and a thong. Attached to the bra and thong were long silken skeins of light pink and blue material that fell to the floor in a halo of sorts. There were swift, tantalizing glimpses of her skin which only served to frustrate. His fisted a hand around his snifter of vodka, cursing softly.