Raine chuckled softly as he looked down at Xander, coppery blood that seemed just a bit too orange (but about as far from black as a color could get) leaking from the boy’s mouth and ears, which were already starting to swell. “Hey, look’it man,” he laughed, pointing at the battered teen. “It’s that Xander Drew freak!”
Allan careened his head around to look in the bloodied face. “Yea, so it is. Little punk,” he giggled, and he sounded more than a little nuts. He was probably just high, though. “We should make him wear his ass as a hat,” he laughed again, and that time Raine chuckled too.
Come on, Xander thought, fighting unconsciousness as more blood dripped from the growing crack in the roof of his mouth down onto his tongue. You can do this, Drew. Just think of... of... but all he could think of was that almost metallic-tasting liquid that was pooling in all of his facial orifices. Sara! He realized suddenly, and he felt the true Womb twitch a little. Think of Sara. Concentrate on her, he thought, coaxing his ‘other side’ out of its shell. Think of her, lying there in that coffin... he continued, tears welling up from the memories and the pain.
“Look, he’s crying,” Allan said with mock sympathy. “Poor baby.”
Julie, lying in an alleyway across from her bedroom window, that smile ruined, trying to find enough shards of clothing to get her home without her perverted neighbors catching too much skin... still, the Womb just fizzed. It was like trying to start a cold engine in the dead of winter. In Antarctica. It just wasn’t happening, a fact that slowly grew in the back of his mind as he watched the red liquid from his nose seep into the soaking-wet plywood flooring.
I can’t transform, he realized with horror.
Xander stared at the little pool of blood forming on the floor between his feet. “I can’t transform,” he whispered to himself, feeling how the rip that Genblade had put in his side still ached as it healed. “The Womb burns out. Burnt out at Engen, couldn’t transform for a week to stop those rapists... burns out when Genblade stabs me...”
Drake brought his hand up to his ear quickly, and found that it wasn’t there anymore. When he brought his hand back he couldn’t even see his own skin, it was so laden with his own blood, dark crimson in the low light.
Genblade locked eyes with Xander for a long moment, then finally smiled the first honest smile he’d ever had in the boy’s presence, nodding graciously.
“Is the killer in this room?” Xander yelled, jumping to his feet.
“Order!” the judge yelled, slamming her gavel against its mount again.
Genblade grinned.
“Genblade, is the killer in this room, here, one of us?”
“Order! Young man, sit down or - -”
“Forgive the child, Your Honor,” Genblade said apologetically, his voice laden with a thick accent that wasn’t quite anything. “He just hasn’t learned how to be direct yet.”
Xander stopped, cocking his head to one side. “What?”
“Xander, sit down!” Megan hissed, finally stepping away from Genblade and towards the boy.
“But don’t worry,” Genblade assured them. “We’ll teach him.”
“Just say it!” Xander screamed, shoving away someone next to him.
“I’m sorry, Xander, but you’re not being very... direct.”
“Direct,” Xander repeated, and immediately his head began to cascade with thoughts that he hadn’t even realized were there. “Direct.”
“What has The Womb ever spoken, except for the words ‘Black Womb lives’?” Xander posed, raising a finger to his friend.
Mike opened his mouth to answer, then paused, and closed it again.
“Any time. Ever?”
Mike leaned forward, rubbing the sides of his nose with his thumbs. “No. No, it’s never talked before.”
Xander brought the nail of his thumb to his lower lip, picking at it obsessively as he thought. His eyes were locked on some random spot on the wall, not looking at anything but refusing to look anywhere else all the same. “Why would it change?” he huffed, thinking back to the day that Genblade had been captured. He’d almost smiled at Xander from across the mounds of rubble and police between them, and said ‘it’s not over’. “Is this what he meant?”
“What?” Mike moaned, looking up.
“Nothing, just... nothing.” He ran a hand through his hair, a few strands shaking loose as he tugged on it. “This whole thing just keeps getting worse and worse.”
“Makes you wonder, really,” Mike mumbled, almost to himself.
“Wonder what?”
“Humans change their behaviour. Animals don’t. Animals hunt the same way, day in and day out, until something forces them to change. Even then, not really. So if the Womb’s changed the way it does things, that’ d make it - -”
“Human,” Xander finished, a bitter taste in his mouth.
Xander’s mouth went dry, as he looked from Genblade to the hand that still hung bleeding at his side. “It wasn’t me,” he said finally, his voice hushed and low.
CHAPTEN TEN:
SEE
Xander spun on his heels, leaping over the row of chairs behind him and heading for the courthouse doors.
“Xander!” Megan called after him, though he didn’t even look back at her.
“It’s all been said before...” Genblade laughed, as the bailiff came over and began to wheel him away.
“Where are you going?”
“... just nobody pays attention, so we’ve got to say it all over again.”
Darkness covered Coral Beach that night. And when it came, the city closed its doors. Roadblocks were set up. Police were even borrowed from nearby towns to patrol the streets, which were like vacant lots, giving the entire town a ghostly tranquility. Everything was silent and still. The only
