Steel Sapphires and Shattered Emeralds
Chapter 7
She slept so deeply that she woke up an hour after her alarm had gone off. Tonight, she had a date with Sage, who had promised to make time for her. Already the sceptic in her was saying ‘after the last few days, fat fucking chance of that,’ but she was determined to give Sage a chance. Their reservation was for 9pm, but Sage had promised to be early.
By the time 7pm rolled around, Kayleigh was getting worried. She’d changed her outfit once, and then changed it back, and already spent a good hour on her hair and makeup. She’d picked her underwear specially, moisturised and then re-moisturised. By the time 7:30 rolled around Kayleigh was getting angry. By the time Sage walked in at 8:10, Kayleigh was ready to spit nails.
The phone going off almost as soon as Sage had come in didn’t help this. Kayleigh picked it up, expecting it to be cold calling, but it was the day coroner, who was covering her shift. She listened to what he had to say, and then handed the phone over to Sage. “It’s for you.” She said shortly. “I take it Bishop is too busy.”
Sage took the phone and turned her back on Kayleigh. “You need me to verify the victim is a mutant? I’ll be right there.” Sage turned to face Kayleigh, her face blank, and her eyes slightly distant. “As you know, we have another possible killing. They need me to know for sure.” Sage was barely looking at her. Kayleigh knew she was calculating something.
“What about our date?” asked Kayleigh, sounding resigned. Her inner sceptic had been right.
“Another time. I need to contact Bishop.”
“Wait…” Kayleigh called after her. Sage turned to look at her, almost impatiently, and Kayleigh exploded. “So this is all I am to you then. A pleasant distraction when you need one and have time? A hotel, free of charge? Fucking laundry service?”
“I don’t have time for this.” Said Sage. There was no anger, no emotion registering at all.
“No, you don’t, do you.” Kayleigh said quietly with resignation, and then coldly, “you know what, fine. Fuck off. After all, you’ve got a job to do.” Kayleigh would have held back her tears, but Sage was already leaving and in communication with Bishop.
Kayleigh stormed into the bathroom and slammed the door, pulling off the outfit that she’d picked for that night. It consisted of her embroidered blouse and the skirt Sage had given her, with a pair of elegant sandals. As much as she wanted to throw it on the floor, she gave in and hung it up carefully and got in the shower.
After scrubbing off her makeup, put on especially for the occasion, she turned the water up as hot as she could bear it, trying to wash away the tears and the ache in her heart. She showered for a long time, luxuriating in the water and filling the room with steam.
Finished, she got out and wrapped a towel around her waist. As she turned to close the cubicle door behind her she felt both a presence behind her and a cold, hostile presence in her mind. Slapping up a mental shield as Sage had taught her she heard her attacker grunt in surprise. She spun around leading with her right fist, the fear of her ending up on her own autopsy table lending her speed. As her fist connected with her assailant’s jaw she followed with the nails of her left hand, aiming for his eyes. She wasn’t expecting him to slap her hand away, and the pain from it hitting the wall distracted her enough for him to get another strike in. The heels of both his hands struck either side of her breastbone, sending her reeling back into the shower door, with enough force to shatter it.
As Kayleigh fell through the glass he grabbed her and pulled her onto the floor under him. The shock and the ferocity of the attack had winded her and broke her concentration enough that her mental shield slipped, and he was in.
It felt like her eyes were bleeding fire and she fought with everything she had to deny him full access to her mind. She also tried to lever herself up, but as she pushed against the floor, she found she was pushing against broken glass and that pain brought the rest of her mental shields all the way down.
Kayleigh felt her body shut down and become unresponsive to her commands, but realised that she could still think, look around and feel pain. This came as his fist cracked across her face, and he leant down and whispered in her ear. “That’s payback, bitch.”
She looked at him, feeling pure fear growing in her, trying desperately to regain control of her body, but to no avail. The next blow caught her by surprise, she tried to gasp, but before she managed to catch her breath it was followed by dozens more. She felt her nose shatter under one blow. Her lip split, her eye socket cracked, and she knew that she’d be swollen and black and blue within hours. She closed her eyes, trying desperately to escape.
“No you don’t…” he whispered, “you are going to look at me while I have some fun. I don’t want you escaping into your mind yet.” Kayleigh felt her eyes open themselves, and found herself looking into a leering male face with wild eyes. Her whole face was burning, and she knew by now her hair was bright blue.
He stood up, and she felt horror and disgust when she saw his hand go to his belt. She felt him rip off her towel, saw him leer for more, and tried desperately hard to close her eyes, but they were immobile. She watched him kiss her bloody lips, desperate to have enough control to bite his tongue. He licked her blood from his lips and laughed. She felt two huge, rough hands push her thighs apart, and blinding pain seared down every nerve in her body as he forced himself into her. She wanted to scream, so loud that his ears would burst and she’d cough blood, but nothing came out. She could barely breathe, and then his hands wrapped around her throat, squeezing until she felt that her eyes were about to burst.
She knew then that she was going to die, and found herself begging for her life as the shards of glass cut her back to ribbons and her blood pooled sticky underneath her as he moved. The only answer to her pleading was her attacker’s hollow laughter, although whether it was in her head or not she wasn’t sure. She fought to close her eyes as blackness descended, her eyes watering as she tried to block out his leering face, but her eyelids wouldn’t respond. As she felt herself falling into the abyss, a slap echoed across her face, and his hands clawed at her breasts as he released the pressure on her throat. She felt his shuddering climax, and distantly wondered what colour her hair was.
‘Pure white.’ Came a sneering voice in her head. ‘Shame really. I always preferred it dark. You were nice and tight you know. I should have done that to the others, but you’re special.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ Kayleigh whimpered, her fear overridden momentarily by the need to know.
‘Because she took something of mine once.’ He said, laughter echoing around her head. ‘So I’m taking something from her. I won’t kill you yet, not like the others. I want to see the look on her face when I kill you.’
‘Get out of my head!’ Kayleigh screamed, fear rising yet again.
‘No. You get out.’ The voice laughed. Kayleigh felt him reach between her legs again, and then found her eyes closing, as the yawning black oblivion swallowed her whole.
She next came to sitting in front of the mirror of her dressing table. Blood ran down her back from where the glass had slashed her. There was makeup laid out in front of her, and a pair of scissors. In horror, she watched her hands apply the makeup without her violation. No matter how hard she fought she had no control. Her hands picked up the scissors, and pulled a handful of hair around. Waves of pain seared through her as clump by clump, she cropped her hair back to only a few inches long. As it fell, it darkened back to its natural brunette. Only the few inches of tattered hair he’d left her still retained its colour. ‘Nearly fifteen years worth of hair…’ she thought as the watched her hands take off the last of the length.
Her body then got up, and was guided into the clothes her attacker held up for her. Then her headscarf was wrapped over her head and around the front of her face, disguising what of the broken nose and black eyes the makeup didn’t hide, and the freshly cropped remains of her hair.
‘Sage will save me…’ she thought desperately as he groped at her breasts.
‘Tessa? You really think so?’ he laughed, ‘she doesn’t care. She didn’t even tell you her name. You think she’s going to risk anything to save you? Self-preservation is her first priority. You’re all mine now.’
‘Please, don’t kill me.’ Kayleigh whimpered, ‘I’ll do anything for you, just don’t kill me.’
‘You’ll do anything for me anyway. I will kill you. I just want to make an example of you first.’ He slapped her again, and she felt her body stand up. ‘But we’ve got to go for a ride, before she gets back.’
She was walked out of her door and down the steps towards the exit of the building, all the time banging her mental fists against the prison of her mind, hearing her captor’s laughter at her feeble attempts to fight him. As a car door shut behind her she felt her body close down and once again welcomed oblivion.
Sage made it back to apartment an hour and a half after she’d left, rushing as much as she dared to be safe. Once she’d found that the suspected victim wasn’t a mutant and that the coroner covering Kayleigh’s shift wasn’t entirely sure why he’d called her she’d become very suspicious and left as soon as she’d been able.
She knew something was wrong as soon as she walked in. The door was unlocked, the place smelt wrong, and when she called for Kayleigh there had been no answer. Sweeping the kitchen and living room quickly she decided the bedroom was the best bet. After all, she could just be deeply asleep.
Opening the door, Sage walked into a room that looked like a bomb had hit it. There were clothes all over the floor and bed, the makeup was out and open on the dressing table and Kayleigh's headscarf was missing. The mess itself said that something wasn’t right, Kayleigh was normally very tidy. Then she saw the pile of hacked off brunette hair around Kayleigh's makeup stool, spattered with drops of blood.
Fighting a sense of foreboding that was almost physically painful Sage made her way into the bathroom. It was a battle zone, and the detective and analyst in her automatically started cataloguing the evidence. The attack had definitely begun here. Broken shower door, blood and, she snarled, semen on the floor. Lots of it. She closed her eyes for a second, fighting the memories and helpless rage that threatened to drown her, before continuing.
Signs of a struggle. She bent down and looked at the bloody spittle and tooth on the floor. It wasn’t one of Kayleigh’s, she knew that. It looked like Kayleigh had managed to land at least one punch. ‘Good girl.’ She thought to herself. Using the electronic DNA swab she’d persuaded Forge to develop she sent the blood sample to Bishop and continued looking around.
Stepping slightly further into the room she caught sight of something in the sink, which on closer inspection turned out to be the Leprechaun mug, chipped and now missing its handle. Next to it was a piece of bloody glass. Sage picked up the mug and cradled it close to her chest. It took a second for her to register the fact that for a piece of glass from the shower door to have been travelling at a high enough velocity to take down the mug, it must have been an incredible impact. She doubted that she herself would have been able to keep her mental shield up through it, let alone Kayleigh who was new to this. She could only hope that Kayleigh hadn’t been pushed through face first.
Holding the broken mug closer she felt a few tears slide down her face. ‘He’ll pay’ she vowed. Looking down she noticed a print in the blood, far too big to be Kayleigh’s. Putting on her glasses she commed Bishop and sent him an image of the print. “I need to know who this is, and I need to know now.” She said coldly.
“I take it we’ve got another victim, and this time the killer’s messed up?” Bishop asked.
“Hopefully not another victim, not yet. I don’t know. The MO is different, but that’s not important. Whoever he is, he’s got Kayleigh.”
“Jesus.” A second passed. “Ok, I’ve got a Jamie Taylor, and an address. I’m sending you everything they’ve got on him now. Got picked up for shoplifting a few years back, nothing much in his file apart from that.”
“Thank you.” She signed off before Bishop could offer any platitudes, and reviewed the data as she headed for her bike at a run.
Twenty minutes later found her kicking down the door of a suburban bungalow, gun in hand. She knew from the plans she’d pulled up of this place that it had a basement, and after a quick sweep of the main floor headed down there.
She found the ninth victim dead down there, confirming that this Jamie Taylor was the same serial killer she’d been hunting before. Not that any of that mattered now, not now that he had Kayleigh. And that’s when she realised with a start that she was falling in love with the Irish woman.
She knelt down beside the dead woman and rolled her onto her back. There were the customary finger marks on her neck, her eyes were open and she’d had a severe beating, but Sage saw something that made her blood run cold. Amidst the bruises on the woman’s face were two distinct blood patterns. The self same patterns that adorned her cheeks. Jamie Taylor was just a host.
“Bogan,” she growled, furious at herself for not having put the pieces together, furious for not having protected Kayleigh better. She scanned the room quickly, and soon found a note and an aerial photograph pinned to the wall.
The photo was of a disused, derelict warehouse district, and Sage pulled up the plans to correlate while she read the note.
‘Dearest Tessa.
Since I can’t have you,
I shall take something of yours instead.
B’