Eros

Killing Time - 72

"Personal business." He replied. "Do you know where he is?"

"No," She frowned. "I don't."

Peter nodded, then gestured at his empty glass, stained with red. "I will have another glass before I go."

The waitress came up to take the glass, but Peter seized her wrist before she touched it. He yanked her closer, created a dagger in his other hand, and put it across her forearm. The cold touch of steel stilled her struggling, mere skin separating the white blade from her pumping arteries.

"Hey, let go of her!" The short man rushed towards him with a shout and a metal flagon. Peter lurched out of his seat, manipulating the woman's wrist to turn her body around. The waiter's charge halted at her gasp of pain, and at the smooth gleam of white across her throat.

The cook came out with a big frying pan, and the bartender with a vicious kitchen knife. They both froze alongside the waiter when they saw Peter's hostage.

"You better release her now, buddy." The scrawny bartender lifted the knife in a practiced grip, pointing it at Peter . "We'll still make you pay, but we might let you live as a deformed cripple."

"Where is Kaido Blackrose?" Peter pierced the woman's skin carefully. Droplets of her blood rolled down the length of his blade, painting crimson trails against the white steel.

"Stop you piece of shit!" - "Motherfucker!" - "If you harm her I swear..." All three men shouted out in panic, their bodies tensing to charge, but their reason holding them in place. Good call. Peter could stab half a dozen new holes in the waitress' neck before they even got close.

"Where is Kaido Blackrose?" The High Executioner repeated in his monotonous voice. They answered him with silence. For a split second, the cook's eyes flickered from his gaze, right over Peter's shoulder. He turned to look.

A blonde boy, maybe of five years, ran towards him from the stairs. A battered sword made a clumsy swing in his little hands.

"Michael stop!" Screamed the scrawny man. Peter spun with speed and ease a dancer would envy, his dagger pulling through the woman's throat, a matter of habit. Her blood sprinkled the men, and she fell to the cries of their despair.

Peter kicked at the boy as he came, his leg faster than the sword. Before gravity put him on the floor, Peter snatched the boy back by the tunic. He whirled around just as the men were upon him. They froze all the same, perhaps even faster, now that they saw his swiftness to kill. The woman's blood trickled down his dagger, rolling from its tip to the tender skin of the boy's neck.

An odd urge rose in Peter at the sight of their terror, and he let it out in the form of a smile. The grasp of their fear only seemed to tighten.

"Where is Kaido Blackrose?" This time, eagerness cracked the unchanging tones of his voice.

"We don't know!" The scrawny man screamed again, his knife shaking in his clenched fist.

"You lie to me?" Peter was rarely empathic enough to read lies from a person's face, but always pretended he was. The cook spoke when the other two didn't, his words in a silent growl.

"I know where he is."

"Tell me." Peter suggested, and rotated his dagger. Making the boy squirm.

"Anerock!" The cook breathed out.

"Where in Anerock?"

"I don't know, I just heard a couple of words when I was out for a piss."

"Where?" Peter pressured the dagger's tip in the boy's skin, and droplets of his own blood joined the crimson slide down his neck.

"To the Bladeweaver!" Cried the cook. Very tragically, Peter thought.

"Go there, damn you!" He continued, rasping. "Kaido will punish the likes of you."

Peter smiled again, the stretch of it suiting his lips better at second try. "That is bound to be interesting."

"You got what you wanted." Said the bartender, his grip on the knife steadying. "Let the boy go and leave."

Between them, the waitress made her final writhe, blood spurting from her slashed windpipe. The boy's whimper vibrated against the steel.

"Release him!"

"That won't be possible." Peter replied. "I am a man of status, if word of my search leaks to the wrong ears, it'll become a hindrance."

"What the hell do you mean?" The short man snapped.

"That no witness can be left alive."

There was no necessity for force, the blade was all too willing to sink in the softness of the boy's neck.

"NO!" As soon as the boy's blood sprayed, the men rushed on Peter, their cries echoing. He sidestepped away from the cook and bartender, and ducked beneath the swing of the waiter's flagon. His stabs were so fast the dagger's shape blurred into stripes of white and red. The first scraped against the waiter's ribs, and the second cut between them, piercing in his heart.

Blood shot after Peter as he ripped away, letting the short man collapse. The body hadn't yet hit the ground, and the bartender was upon him.

Peter danced away from his whistling knife, luring him into position that blocked the cook behind him. With a terrible wail, and a crazed look in his eyes, the bartender threw his scrawny frame at Peter, knife thrusting before him. Peter stepped towards him, spinning past his side. The kitchen knife missed, their shoulders brushed, and at the end of his whirl, Peter slammed his dagger hilt-deep in the bartender's temple.

He came face to face with the cook. With no friends left to stand on his way, the large man swung the heavy pan, bellowing. Peter lashed up his leg, the snap of it as quick as a whip's, his heel digging hard in the cook's stomach. Before he could straighten up again, Peter ripped his dagger from the bartender's skull, and rammed it in his nape.

He felt the cook's body loosen as his spinal cords gave way to steel. Without the support of Peter's dagger, the bartender tilted over. The two corpses hit the floor at the same time, joining the short man in a growing puddle of blood.

The High Executioner reached down, extending a finger hilt of the white dagger, jutting out the cook's neck. His touch made steel into bright light, losing form as it vacuumed into thin air, blood pouring from the cut it cleared.

Peter rose and strode out the "Red Reaper" saloon. The dark reign of stormclouds prevailed in the skies, but dawn shone through a single fracture, right on the doorway to the massacre. Sunlight bathed Peter, casting his shadow behind him, highlighting every stain of blood across his white garments. A proper priest would have undoubtedly said Adonael had put his eye on him then.

Were he looking, what would the God of Light think of his High Executioner, slaughtering to his own will? As Peter pondered on the gods' judgement, he looked to the horses' brackets. To his disbelief, his horse was there all alone, staring back at him with his blank, black eyes. For the third time that day, Peter smiled.

Two times he left that horse unattended in the streets of the Deadman's Bay, and still had it. If that wasn't a sign of the gods' approval, nothing was.