Rage (8 page)

Missy's laughter was eaten by the wind.

They thundered across the sky, shredding clouds, galloping faster than time itself. All too soon, Ares banked and dropped low, spiraling quickly, with Missy clinging to the reins and shrieking in terrified delight. Another cityscape bloomed beneath them, this one beating back the nighttime darkness with numerous streetlamps. Cars moved like sluggish beetles. People in the street were nothing more than fleas, nearly invisible but still present.

Now along with the sheer joy of flying, Missy felt the stirrings of something else, something more viscous. It rose up, congealing the white bubbles of exhilaration into thick blotches of red anticipation. She bottled her heart and reaffixed her dead face. Thus girded for battle, Missy opened herself up to the power of War.

This time, the emotions didn't hit her; they nibbled at her, taking tiny bites and attempting to burrow under her flesh like ticks. Here, a bit of joy; there, a mouthful of sorrow. She felt them all, felt their pain and pity and excitement and boredom, and she relished the sensations along her skin, even as she plucked them off and singed them in ghostly fingers.

It was the small wars, though, that rippled pleasant shocks through her: kisses of domestic violence, shivers of gang activity, thrills of verbal abuse. That last in particular left her trembling in ecstasy: the barbed tongues and heated lashes, the snide comments with their blistering aftermath, all of it thrummed along her skin, leaving it tingling. She let out an "Ummm" as, in one house far below, someone drank and drank to dull the agony of overwhelming heartbreak.

Adam's voice, all silky perfection:
Let me make it up to you.

She growled, the sound filled with the promise of bloodshed. Oh, he'd make it up to her, all right. She wanted her pound of flesh.

"Take me to the party," she told Ares, and then she gave her horse the address. The steed whinnied in response and took off like a gunshot. In her building rage, Missy didn't realize she was trailing emotional flotsam. Even if she did, she wouldn't have cared. Missy was in the Red, in the place where pain was pleasure and mouths were lined with razors. She streaked away, leaving behind feelings of cruel determination that fell upon the city below like acid rain.

Her casual disregard would prompt six cases of vandalism, eight muggings, two car crashes, and thirty-one trips to the emergency room.

Melissa Miller would have torn out her heart if she knew she was the cause of such violence. War, however, would have shrugged it off either as collateral damage or as part of the job. The Red Rider wasn't concerned with the human toll of war; that, ultimately, was Death's province.

Smiling coldly, her eyes bright with visions of destruction, Missy held tight to Ares and waited to be delivered to her former love.

***

The party was still in full swing, for which Missy was profoundly grateful. She had many things to say to Adam and his cohorts, and she meant to let her body do the talking.

The warhorse landed in Kevin's front lawn, amid a group of scattershot teens clumped like weeds. None of them reacted to either the steed or Missy; they all continued talking and laughing as they unobtrusively moved back, sloshing the liquid in their cups as they gave the horse a wide berth.

Cool,
Missy thought. She'd gone through the last two months at high school wanting to be invisible. Now, apparently, she had gotten her wish. An ugly smile warped her mouth into a parody of humor. Oh, the things she could do to Adam if he couldn't see her...

The horse snorted.

"You're right," she murmured, patting its neck. "Why imagine it when I can do it?" Not that she actually understood the steed, but what else could it have meant? She was War, after all. Time to make with the warring.

She slid off of Ares, taking a moment to get her balance. Riding in the sky had been a thrill, but it was good to be back on the ground. The grass of the front lawn was damp beneath her stockinged feet, but not unpleasantly so.

Next time,
she told herself,
wear shoes. And panties.

Knees bent, she bounced loosely until her legs were comfortable with her weight again. Then she stood tall, taking in the gossip of teens, the music thumping from behind the closed front door, the house itself. So very normal. So very ordinary. Gone was the anxiety she had felt when she'd approached earlier tonight. She let her dead face crash to the ground, and she stomped it into a thousand shards.

Let the leeches look upon her. She would salt them in righteous fury.

Missy smiled coldly as she summoned her Sword. It settled into her hand quietly, comfortably, ready to entice people to slaughter.

The people nearest Missy—two guys and three girls, all seniors—immediately recoiled as if slapped. One of the girls became noisily, violently sick right there in the front yard, and one of the guys peed himself, which was disguised by his drink slipping from his shaking hand and splashing his shirt and pants. The other teens outside, to a person suddenly uneasy, jeered at their classmates, loud in their derision and silently thankful they weren't the recipients of such attention.

Missy watched the spectacle for a few seconds, first amused, then quickly bored. She wasn't here for them. Already thinking of how she would greet Adam, she turned to Ares and commanded, "Behave."

The steed blinked its obsidian eyes.

"Don't kill anyone," Missy clarified. "Or eat anyone." After a moment's consideration, she added, "Or hurt anyone."

Ares blew through its nostrils once, loudly.

She patted its shoulder. "I promise to let you trample his carcass when I'm done. All right?"

The horse let out an equine sigh.

Missy decided that meant agreement. She hefted the Sword over her shoulder and padded her way to the front door. Around her, tempers shortened. Partygoers, already feeling tense, started to get angry—the booze was running low; the music sucked; nothing about tonight was going as planned. More than one person abruptly decided they had been there and done that, so they pitched their cups onto the grass and stormed away, complaining loudly about how lame the party was. Missy nudged past one guy—a football hero, based on his letter jacket—and he shoved another guy out of his space. That second guy accidentally jostled the girl next to him, spilling his drink down her shirt. She shrieked and slapped him, which got him to yelling about her lack of intelligence, her need for hygiene, and her questionable parentage.

And that was all without Missy doing anything other than summoning her Sword.

Smiling sweetly as she imagined using her weapon to slice Adam into ribbons, she pushed open the door and entered the house.

It was still littered with people, many of whom she recognized as her fellow juniors. The music pounded an angry beat, and Missy approved, nodding her head in time to the drums as she meandered around the living room, searching for Adam. She dragged the Sword behind her, and it left sparks of fury in her wake.

Missy walked unnoticed, but her presence was felt by every person in the room:

Erica, still sickened by the way Missy had been used but unable to bring herself to leave the party, wrapped her arms around herself and started scraping her thumbnails over her forearms, drawing blood...

Jenna, she of the fabulous shredded red skirt that Missy had admired, glowered at one of the other varsity soccer girls in the clique who'd had the nerve to flirt with Matt Higgins, knowing full well that Jenna'd had her eye on Matt for ages, so Jenna made a catty remark about the girl's poor attempt to cover her bumper crop of pimples, and the others in the clique screeched laughter even as the girl blushed in shame and rage...

Matt, who had coined the term "cutterslut," glared sullenly at the star quarterback, knowing he was the one who'd scratched Matt's custom paint job on his car but unable to prove it, and damn if the guy wasn't smirking at him, the bastard...

Missy thought about cutting Matt down right there in front of everyone, about taking the Sword and oiling its blade with his blood. But no—she was saving that murderous impulse for Adam. So instead, she smiled wickedly and blew Matt a kiss.

That's when Matt decided he'd had enough of the quarterback's sneer and crumpled his empty beer can and pitched it at the guy's head. The football star got in Matt's face. Words clashed. And then the quarterback popped Matt in the eye.

Around them, kids cheered as the fight got under way. Someone started the chant "Fight! Fight! Fight!" and now everyone was doing it, even Erica with her scratched arms and Jenna with her sharp tongue. Kevin, the party god himself, got between Matt and the other guy, telling them to take it outside for God's sake, because if the house got totaled his dad would kill him, and then he caught a fist in the teeth for his trouble. The spectators, frenzied, cheered louder. Blood was in the air.

Missy sidestepped the brawling teens and continued her search for Adam.

In the kitchen, groups of people clustered around the mostly empty punch bowl. Missy frowned, remembering how Adam had come up behind her as she'd taken a can of Cherry Coke. Around her, the teens shivered ... and then one of them, suddenly convinced another girl had started a vicious rumor about her, grabbed the target of her rage by her hair and shoved her face into the punch bowl. Shouts and laughter erupted around them, and it wasn't until Missy walked out that someone realized the girl with her face in the punch bowl was drowning.

***

Outside, the red steed stood at attention, waiting for its mistress to return. It ignored the humans around it as a giant would ignore a smattering of gnats, and it entertained itself with memories of battles past. It pretended that beneath its hooves the ground was slippery with spilled guts, that its ears rang pleasantly with the music of murder. It hoped its mistress was serious about giving it a carcass to trample, but War was known for a sharp sense of humor that the steed didn't quite understand. Humor was a subtle thing, dependent on nuances and emotional inflections. Such things were beyond the horse. It saw the world in terms of black and white.

And red, of course. And red.

It gazed at one human who got too close to it, and it was sorely tempted to bite off the creature's hand. But its mistress told it not to hurt anyone. The steed was certain that even if it cauterized the wound as its teeth sliced through flesh and bone, the action would cause great pain—indeed, pain would have been the point. So it merely watched the human, and it imagined the taste of blood and marrow in its mouth.

Beneath its hooves, weeds slowly choked the grass.

***

Missy paraded through the house, musing over the different scents of anger. There was the peppery smell of irritation, and the mustard spice of slow fury. Bitterness smacked of garlic, and resentment was the cloying odor of burned chocolate. She walked, taking in the aromas of reaction, and around her, people fumed.

Adam was nowhere to be found on the first floor.

Missy marched up the stairs, and the sounds of fighting faded to background noise. The handful of teens loitering in the upstairs hallway started arguing as Missy approached; as she walked by them, they replaced words with fists. By the time one of them took a tumble down the stairs, Missy had entered one of the bedrooms.

The same bedroom where Adam had fooled her so completely.

Another boy was on the bed, doing things with a girl that should have made Missy blush. Their limbs were pretzeled together, their bodies undulating, skin on skin, keeping time to the creaking of the bedsprings. Missy watched, and she blinked away the unbidden memory of her and Adam back when things were good, the two of them wrapped tightly and exploring each other with fingers and mouths. She sucked in a heated breath as she remembered the feeling of him on her, of him in her, and for a long moment her world went red.

Looking hot under all the black.

Missy shuddered, shedding the memory and the feeling like snakeskin.

On the bed, the boy became more aggressive. His fluid, almost tender movements now were jerky thrusts. The girl enjoyed it, based on the animal sounds erupting from her mouth. She speared him with her nails, lacerating his shoulders, his back, his bottom. He was too caught up in his own passion to notice the stings of his lover's affection.

Missy figured he'd notice in the morning when he tried to sit down. She left them to their grunting.

In the next bedroom, the scene was much the same ... except it was two girls.

As for the master bedroom, well, Missy was sure Kevin's parents would sooner burn the bed than sleep on it if they had seen what Missy witnessed. She never would have guessed that Trudy, the fullback on the varsity soccer team, was that limber.

Amusing, yes. Educational, even. But without Adam there, it was pointless. She growled in frustration, and around her the partygoers snarled in anger. Her former boyfriend wasn't at the party. For all she knew, she had just missed him.

She slammed her fist against the wall. Next to her, two students launched themselves at each other, spittle and fists flying. By the time they were separated, one of them had a fractured hand, and the other sported a split lip and broken teeth. Neither of them could explain why they had started fighting; all they could say is they just
had to
feel their knuckles pounding another person's body into raw meat. Missy didn't see any of it; she was already down the stairs when the first punch landed.

She thought of Adam—of his eyes glinting like diamonds; his smile, filled with barbed-wire teeth.

I'm coming for you,
she promised him silently.
I'm coming.

Outside once again, she meandered around the clumps of shrieking teens as they fought and taunted one another. Their sounds washed over her, splashed her in crimson drops of rage. Her schoolmates screamed like rabbits, and Missy basked in their howls. It occurred to her, as she approached her waiting steed, that when everyone screamed, you couldn't tell who was the football hero and who was the nerd, who was the head cheerleader and who was the band geek. Violence smashed through societal expectations and exposed people at their core—and at their core, they were all the same. Fury, Missy decided, made people honest.