Excerpt: His neck had been snapped by her dainty satin gloved hands...part II

The car stopped atop cobbled stones and their personal doorman appeared, finely attired in his penguin suit to open her door. Soon they ascended the great stone stairs leading to their oaken doors with stain glass windows. The colorful glass was again her keeper’s mark, the ruined sun. She entered their dark foyer in silence, in the scant light her keeper was but a shadow beside her, his eyes glowing orange in the darkness. They flashed ominously before he swiftly wrapped his hand about the back of her neck, tapped a sconce that caused a false wall to break away and reveal a door, and then promptly shoved her though.

The man she knew as her keeper was anything but gentle only his firm choke hold did not alarm her, nor did the pitch black of this passageway that she knew was dirt and stone though she could not see. It was a darkness so black it was near oblivion. He released her to walk freely beside him with nothing but the steady pace of his even breath to comfort her. It did not matter that she could not see. She knew this place well. So much that she stopped instinctively before the door to her thinking space, still he grabbed hold of her hair to jerk her to a stop. His lips brushed her ear as he spoke ever so softly, “If you persist in your insolence you may be replaced.

With that he shoved her with such force that she hit the hard packed dirt floor so hard that she scrapped the top most layers of skin from her hands smearing blood where they slid. The last sound she heard was the steel door slam and then is was dead quite and his last words seems to echo. Replaced he’d said, replaced. Whatever did he mean? She was not fool enough to think this meant her release. She knew he’d sooner snap her neck than set her free but the idea seemed to enrapture her. But if she could be replaced, could he? She dismissed the idea as soon as it occurred. She could not kill her keeper. She was not strong enough. So instead she lay upon the stone floor in all her finery.

The strength to weep had been beat from her long ago so she curled into a ball on the cold stone floor to sleep and a dream took her with malignant force. Again she was transported back in time to the plain hall of St. Mary’s home for girls. She was three and a lot stranger then than now even. At that moment in time she actually sat listening to sister Lynn-Ann discuss those very peculiarities with the man that would be her new father, or so she’d thought. All she knew then is she’d was happy to leave that place. Sure the nuns were nice enough and never mistreated any of the children but even as a child she could see what was behind the thin veil of their smiles. They were afraid of her. She recalled the reliefs of finally hearing the sister admit it.

St Mary's Orphanage

“I’m so glad you’ve come and that you believe me. I feared I’d gone quite insane”, sister Lynn-Anne finished with nervous laughter. And then came her keeper’s sickly sweet baritone.

“I’m not a stranger to these…particular anomalies. Please tell me the nature of Chazzmine’s.”

“Well she, she can, it appears she, she…”

“Her eyes start there.”

“Yes Gracious,” and then like a dam burst it all came spilling out. “They change you see, so many colors. I seen changing eyes before but this is…Twenty shades of grey, then blue to yellow and orange all they way to midnight flecked with sparks and this was even as a baby. We thought it just pretty at first until about a year back. One of the little boys pushes her down and we didn’t know at first but he nicked her little dolly. Boy did she have one heck of a fit, cried for days and days and all the while her eyes stayed the stormiest gray. That was the only time I can remember those eyes not changing. And it was raining all the while, you see, so we figured musta been the fierce wind and rain that scared her into crying so long. That’s til’ one day I see that boy tossing her little dolly around and I recognized it.

Well I gave him a good ol’ licking and I found her and give her the doll. She stops crying right then and there and wouldn’t you know those eyes went from gray to sky blue then on to the brightest yellow I’d ever seen. So I thought that was that til’ I happened to glance out a window and wouldn’t you know the rain had stopped and the sun was the brightest I’d ever seen it, big and yellow just like her eyes. And I think to myself, no it couldn’t be but the more I watched her in the days following I saw for certain that her eyes sure enough changed with the sky. So naturally I got to wondering if she was, if she…”

“I understand,” said her keeper.

“Oh thank heavens, thank heavens and the baby…even the others have noticed that. Though at first they thought me mad then as well. He crushed my finger you see and when I told sister Jean-Louise she said I must have bumped it and didn’t remember but I knew. I felt it break when he wrapped his little hand around it but they didn’t believe me until he started breaking other things. Things a baby should not have been able to break…”

She woke then, the dream still fresh in her mind. She’d not been aware she’d had those memories. She didn’t know she remembered the baby who’d initially joined this hell with her, Keondre. His name had been Keondre. She was so glad he’d escaped to wherever they’d sent him. Still it made her shiver to think she’d forgotten that strange ability of hers as well as her only friend. This realization brought about another memory.

At this point she’d been with her keeper a while and Keondre was long gone but it was only a year into her training. And as she recalled she hadn’t seemed to be improving yet. She hit the ground outside in their grass covered clearing for what must have been the millionth time. She was so exhausted that when she went to push her self up her arms had buckled. She didn’t so much see but heard her keeper huff in seeming disgust and move to walk away. Then she’d heard the grating voice of the other one. If she feared her keeper it was nothing compared to him.

He was a constant staple in she and her keeper’s life, the only servant who wasn’t rotated out yearly. It was unaccountably odd that her keeper should call this one his manservant. The man was clearly in the lead in whatever their arrangement was. On this particular day the man, called of all things Ga, just Ga, had been laughing his particular laugh that made her skin crawl.

“You must not truly mean to break and rebuild her, master Amour. Very well then, I was never of the opinion that women could possess the will of the warrior.” said Ga with laughter clearly in his voice. She could almost see his sideways smirk complimenting his salt and pepper hair that was also parted at the side, along with his milk chocolate skin and dancing black eyes. He like all household staff wore a ridiculous penguin suite but it must have been by choice. Even at that young age she knew this man never did anything he didn’t want to. At his words she heard her keeper starting to turn back so she hurriedly made to get up.

She struggled to make her arms accept her weight but she simply couldn’t manage as he appeared beside her though all she could see were his shiny loafers. She tried again in vain to rise but this time as her elbow jutted upward his foot came down upon it with bone crushing force. It felt as if everything from her shoulder to wrist had shattered and then they walked away with Ga’s  cruel laughter wafting back to her adding the sting of insult to injury. She’d been eight after so long she felt a glimmering of her old power then as the wind kicked up with such ferocity that the trees swayed and threatened to snap away from their anchor to the earth. Storm clouds began to gather and thicken as a dense fog  rolled over the hills and the trees rapidly approaching their clearing as rain and hail pelted the earth.

She snapped back to reality  with a cool chill and the feel of sweet beads falling from her forehead and landing in the bodice of her lovely gown and mingled amongst them was the surprising release of tears. It was almost too much; dreaming about those long forgotten powers and remembering the little baby that she thought would be her family, her brother. All on the evening of her failure, it drove the defeat home like a stake to her heart, twisting and churning.

She took a deep shuddering breath though she wanted to scream for mixed amongst the hurt was a bubbling anger and she’d already killed one man, the wrong man. Yet she still wanted another dead, the one who’d done this to her. Truly she wished the death of both her keeper and the one called Ga. They were dually responsible for her freakishness; they’d trained her to kill. And yet Malik would have her believe she could choose.

She snuck a glance to her wrist and sure enough there laid the pearl and jewel strap of her dainty gold purse. Like her its handsome looks were no indication of what lay inside; her knife, gun, and her ever-present one of kind lock pick kit. With it she could pick any other lock. What if she really could choose? Desperately she crawled to the steel door in the pitch black and began to touch its complex lock, assessing it with her hands alone.

Instantly she knew she could open it and the tears nearly began again. What if she really could do it? She knew she’d likely have to go through her keeper but she had her gun. The very idea was terrifying but she wasn’t seeing any other options. She had to be free and her keeper, damn his god-awful power to burn things with his very eyes, he still must be able to die. She had some freakish power but she knew for certain she could die, why not he? She realized that none of it mattered for she refused to be the monster they would have her be. She did not want to be a killer

All this ran through her mind whilst her hands seemed to move independently of her consciousness and even she was surprised when the door swung open silently. The cool air of the hall felt good on her sweat-dampened skin as she took a brave leap of faith, a word she’d not previously known the meaning of. If her overall strangeness meant some odd destiny she could face it on her own terms.