I fought wildly against his grasp, but Shade held strong, as unwavering as stone.
We kept moving, shifting from shadow to shadow, going from dark to darker and back again in dizzying succession. The constant altering light and rhythmic falling and stopping from second to second left my stomach crawling up my throat and my head swimming. It took everything in me not to vomit.
I tried in vain to stomp myself free, but I encountered the steel toed nature of his boots. When that didn't elicit a reaction beyond damaging my decorative flats, I kicked a leg back, trying to hook my foot around Shade's ankle, hoping that by sending us tumbling to the ground he'd be forced to release me. Instead of tripping him, however, his muscular thighs squeezed around my leg, cementing me even further in place.
"Let — me — go!" I hissed, reaching my only remaining free limb behind my head.
My blind, closed fisted attacks didn't faze him. Perhaps he didn't feel it at all, except, as though in response, his bare fingers tightened further around my neck, thumb and forefinger cradling my jaw to ward off illusions of escape. Tears sprung involuntarily to my eyes as oxygen grew scarce, and I was forced to give up attacking in favor of clawing at the fingers squeezing the life out of me, my pulse beating vengefully against his palm. I felt an imprint forming around my windpipe, and I imagined it would leave deep purple bruises on my body for crime scene investigators to find.
Again, Shade might have been made of stone for all the good that effort did me. My vision blurred around the edges, going light and fuzzy, my body suddenly feeling so much heavier than before. An impossible weight to carry.
Sleep, my muscles and the less rational part of my brain whispered. Succumb.
It mirrored the process of falling into the deepest slumber, the last moments of consciousness before letting go, but without any of the peace. I couldn't fight it off if I tried. Unconsciousness fell over me in a flood and I drowned in it.
I was still drowning.
At some point without realizing it, I stopped struggling, my whole body slumping back against his as I fought off a wave of numbness. My head rolled back. With the feeble strength I could muster, I resumed grappling at my throat, trying to force my own fingers beneath his as a weak barrier against his onslaught, just long enough to seek out another breath. Nothing worked, but I had an idea, one last shot. Summoning every vestige of will remaining - everything I had left to give - I slammed my head back into his cheek. My vision blacked. I could barely think beyond the rush of pain and everything else. Worst of all, my last shot didn't work. Everything I had wasn't enough against him. He held strong.
At first.
Then he shoved me roughly away, as though I was suddenly utterly repellant.
I barely had time or the presence of mind to throw my hands out to catch myself from slamming face-first into the ground, small rocks digging into the meat of my palms and scraping against my bare kneecaps.
Distantly, I recognized that we'd stopped moving somewhere; a park, maybe, or some remote nature area. The perfect place to hide a body, not that I imagined Shade particularly minded leaving my corpse somewhere for everyone to see. It would send a message, at least, something along the lines of, Cross me and this will happen to you, too.
While pulling air deep into the depressed recesses of my lungs and coughing it back up again, I managed to flip onto my back, if only to keep the supervillain within my sights. On my best day, I knew I couldn't fight him and today was certainly not that, but I refused to give him another opportunity to grasp my neck from behind. If he planned to kill me, he had to live with the memory of my stare as it grew blank.
I didn't want to die, but, at the same time, I couldn't conjure a single way to prevent that from happening. My demise seemed like a forgone conclusion, an impending eventuality impossible to avoid.
Yet, I survived before, many times. Again and again I saw the end approach and recede, like waves crashing upon a rocky beach. This, too, would recede. I had to believe that. If I couldn't believe things would get better, I couldn't believe in anything at all.
Shade surprised me by letting out a string of violent curses under his breath from where he stood mere feet away, hunched over with one hand leaning against a tree and the other tangling roughly through his dark hair.
"So you can talk," I rasped.
The instant the words left my mouth I wished I could swallow them back. Why? Why the hell would I say that? It sounded like I was goading him on.
Shade seemed to agree. His head snapped in my direction, eyes narrowed in on me. The fingers of his one ungloved hand moved to clench into a tight, white-knuckled fist at his side, as though fighting the itch to again wrap it around my throat.
He surprised me a second time by opting to respond, even though his voice barely came above a hoarse whisper. Close as we were, I caught every syllable. "You... you've heard me talk before."
"Good point." I patted around blindly for a weapon, coming up with only a couple rocks no wider than the pads of my fingertips. I clutched them regardless. They were better than nothing. "I've heard stories that you've never spoken to the others, though. Why me, then — why only me?"
"Why indeed."
There went my attempt to distract him from murder via my dazzling powers of conversation.
I tried again, pushing slowly, shakily to my feet, watching him carefully to see if he'd try to stop me. "Is this where you give a stereotypical speech about how you let me hear your voice only because I'm going to die anyway, so it doesn't matter?"
"I don't give speeches."
Not the resounding denial I had been hoping for by a long shot.
Everything about him had turned carefully blank, from his tone to what I could see of his face above his black mask obscuring up to the bridge of his nose. It was a careful blankness, like a portrait covered over by a single coat of white paint, not the true blank canvas he'd shown when he arrived at my graduation.
"I see. Well, good talk," I managed, turning as I forced the words out.
I ran. My feet pounded into the packed earth, carrying me as far away from him as possible, hopefully before he could regain his wits enough to think about following. One by one, the straps on my useless, decorative sandals snapped, leaving my feet bare against all the worst the outdoors had to offer. Sharp rocks, thorns, twigs, and everything in between.
It would be just my luck to step on a snake.
I didn't make it far before I began fighting for breath, forcing my abused lungs to work harder in one day than they ever had in my life. Trees blurred past, branches occasionally whipping across my face and tangling in my hair. I don't have the luxury of carefully unknotting each strand, so I let whole locks be ripped free, barely feeling the pain.
There was a reason humans were the most dangerous predator, I'd learned long ago, and that was because of our hunting style. We wore our prey out over miles and miles, and when they were too weak to escape any longer, we slaughtered our defenseless quarry. Shade didn't chase; he wasn't hot on my heels. Several long minutes after leaving him behind, I got the impression he was letting me tire myself out. Why would he bother running after me? One of his many insufferable abilities, as recent history proved, was to teleport through shadows.
The sun disappeared below the horizon, gifting him nothing but shadows to utilize.
I skidded to a halt in what I thought, at first, was a clearing. Upon second inspection, however, it looked less like random whimsy of nature or the carefully devised work of man, and more like the victim of a small hurricane. Trees were upended on their sides, some yanked out of Mother Earth by the root, others snapped in half, jagged edges and splintering wood chips strewn across the glade. Large puddles of water littered around at sporadic intervals, despite no rivers or recent rain to account for them.
Dread pooled in my stomach. This place was bad news.
I shouldn't be here.
Before passing through, I bent at the waist to collect one of the longer, more manageable boughs of wood and tucked it under my arm. As far as weapons went, it would be like hitting a dragon with a flyswatter, but I preferred to have something more substantial than pebbles. Maybe I could manage to give him a nasty splinter.
"There are worse things in this forest than me."
I leapt about a foot in the air, heart hammering treacherously in my chest and thundering in my ears. To my credit, the stick remained firmly in my grasp. My fighting instinct snapped into place in a way it never had before, and I spun on my heel, bringing the wood down in a whistling arc in the direction I heard his voice come from, too close for comfort.
Shade blocked with his forearm, anticipating the move, and the branch snapped worthlessly around him, half of it dangling from the end I still held. His sleeve had ridden up his arm, exposing his flesh to my pathetic blow. The reward for my effort? A measly scratch, and a thin swell of blood.
My grip tightened, desperation leading me to swing again. He caught my wrist, and murmured, "That quite hurt," while looking not at me, but at his own arm, as though I was so utterly beneath him that I didn't warrant his full attention.
To my horror, that minor cut stitched together right in front of my very eyes, skin stretching and weaving together until it repaired without blemish.
He could heal, too?
"Are you immortal?" I demanded, jerking myself free.
His eyebrows pinched fractionally. "What?"
"I asked if you're immortal. You spontaneously healed! I've stabbed you twice before, and we both know you didn't go to the hospital for treatment with those types of wounds. There would be no faster way to get the police and Supers on your case. But without the hospital you should be doing so much worse! You ought to be dealing with a nasty infection, at least. I don't think I've washed my brother's knife since the day I inherited it. No doubt it carried quite a few germs. It's not fair! How can we stop you? How can we kill you if you'll always recover?"
"Would you like to kill me?" The question seemed to amuse him in some twisted way, the corners of his eyes pulling up in a way that told me he was smirking beneath his mask. "Would you take my hand and stake me through the heart?"
I didn't need to think, so immediate was my reply. "Yes. I would."
"Go ahead." His voice took a soft lilting quality, somehow even more disconcerting than if he'd yelled. "I won't even try to stop you this time, and," he waved at my broken branch with exaggerated gentlemanly flourish, "you have the perfect staking weapon."
I didn't move, couldn't, really. It was a trap. It had to be.
"Do it," he challenged. "See what happens."
"So you can wait for me to be close enough to grab again?" I spat out, teetering between anger and fear. For a moment, anger won.
"I don't need you to come to me for me to capture you."
He was right and I hated it.
"Did you do all this?"
"Enjoying my handiwork?" His low lidded gaze leisurely swept across the destroyed surroundings without further elaboration on my part, appreciating the scenery.
"What, are you some sort of — some sort of eco-terrorist on top of being a regular terrorist?" I asked, incredulous.
"I've heard I'm a lot of things," he replied evasively. "If it weren't for others telling me who I am, I imagine I wouldn't know a single thing about myself."
What did that even mean?
Insane, I reminded myself. That is just the insanity peaking through his brief veneer of coherence. Nothing more.
Nothing more.