She quietly lifted herself up on one elbow and looked down at him. A sardonic smile touched her lips as she remembered his arrogant trust in his powers.
Then she drove her fist into his throat.
Every ounce of her weight and will rode behind the blow. He gasped, and his arms clutched at her. She rolled away, but one hand snatched her left arm and squeezed her biceps in a vise. Fire shot straight up her shoulder to her neck. The other hand groped for her, and she slashed her own right hand across his face, sinking her fingernails deep into his eye-sockets. A rasping scream forced its way out of his throat and he let go.
She tumbled to the floor, smashing first her elbow and then her head on the wood. Dazed, she rolled through a black tunnel shot with the fire of her hurts. Something smacked her bare back, and she shook black spider-webs from her eyes.
She stared at the bed, half-stunned. Dougal coughed and spat red on the sheets. More blood seeped between his fingers where they covered his eyes. He tried to shout for help, but the noises came out more like a pig squealing than like words.
Maureen staggered to her feet. Weapons. Weapons lay all over the fucking place. She needed something with range. She didn't dare let him get his hands on her again. Her head still spun, and her left eye refused to track with the right.
She groped around the brown lump supporting her, knocking a lamp and other trash to the floor. Her knuckles brushed something heavy and cold. She hefted it for throwing before she found a hilt nestled in her hand.
Blinking, shaking her head, she forced her eyes to work. The damn thing looked like Brian's knife, the heavy bent one he had used to kill Liam. They must be more common than she thought. She jerked it from its sheath, gripped it with both hands, and made her legs cooperate well enough to stagger back to the bed.
"Got to stay clear of the arms," she muttered to herself. "Hit and run."
His head tracked the sound. She swung at his leg and spun away with the weight of the heavy knife. Blood splashed like a fountain. Instead of either attacking or defending, Dougal dropped his hands and stared at her with ruined eye-sockets.
"How?" His crushed larynx turned the word into a croak.
"Schizophrenia," she grunted. The heavy blade chopped into his groping arm.
"Depersonalization."
He jerked again. Fingers flew loose in a red spray.
"Dissociation." The words spat out of her mouth with each gasping breath of effort.
"Delusions of persecution and conspiracy." The blade stuck in his chest. She threw her weight against it, snarling the last word, to pull it free.
"Blunting and incongruity of affect." The steel glanced off his skull, laying bone open to the sunlight.
"Hallucinations." One of his hands flopped to the floor.
"Withdrawal from reality." The knife carved through his belly and swung her like a spinning discus-thrower with its momentum.
She stopped, gasping for breath. "Also . . . occasional . . . violent . . . behavior . . . against . . . authority . . . figures. You really should study more psychology."
Hands on her knees, she panted and cleared her head. Her inner voice told her she should have waited and regained her strength. She was almost too weak to kill him.
Almost, she snarled back. She straightened up and studied the carnage.
Splatters of gore painted a Jackson Pollock canvas across the bed and floor. She traced a line of teardrop spots up the wall, arcing across where they had been flung by the swinging blade.
Death as Art, her critic offered. Performance Art.
The canvas included her body. Her arms dripped red to the elbows. Splashes and smears of blood covered her breasts, her belly, and her thighs. She ignored the scratching noises of a severed hand twitching on the floor, and swabbed blood out of her eyes with her bathrobe from the night before.
Dougal was still alive. Arms and legs spouted red, great gashes tore his chest and ripped through his belly, but he still lived. She was a lousy killer.
She straddled his slippery body like a lover and hacked at his neck until his head sprang loose in a gush of blood. She snarled in triumph, grabbed his hair, and held the head up like a trophy, miming Perseus with Medusa's crawling snakes.
Then she flung the blade away and stood up to carefully set the head on one corner post of the bed. It hissed and rattled its teeth at her as if it still tried to talk with no breath to form the words. Staring into the gouged eye-sockets, she smiled.
"Welcome to my reality, Dougal MacKenzie."
Her wrists burned from the iron bands, and her ankles, and her throat. Where had the bastard hidden the keys?
She wiped her hands and feet: she didn't want red smears to disturb the impromptu beauty of the bedroom, didn't want to leave anything to show her wandering through the scene. Just Dougal's corpse, and the bed, and the splattered blood, with his severed head presiding over all. Art.
His clothing lay, cleaned and neatly folded, on a chair. Servants, again, coming and going without waking her. Once the bastard had finally let her sleep, they could have marched a frigging brass band through the room and she wouldn't have twitched an eyelid. She didn't even know if she'd slept one night, or two, or a goddamn week.
The keys were in his pants. She clicked the locks free, using a mirror over one dresser for the one around her neck. Each ring of steel left red circles behind, like narrow bands of sunburn.
Even the mirror wore dots of blood from the slaughterhouse. She stared at her face, at her naked body, at the drips and smears of blood painting her, and suddenly the slimy feel and smell
