♠

Black Annis ran with every ounce of power and speed she could muster, sprinting bloodied and pained through the train. The wound to her upper left arm stretched from her inside elbow, running bone deep, ending with a broad puckered mouth of a cut that entered her armpit, the tip of the blade having stopped when it hit bone. Shotgun pellets riddled most of her upper body, the heavy bloody cloak absorbing the brunt of the shotguns force. Half of her left ear hung limply away from her temple, and her lungs burned like a blacksmith’s furnace in her chest.

 

Her flight was not made out of fear, nor was it cowardice. It was intellect that leant wings to her feet as she fled. Knowing with utter certainty that she had met a force more powerful than herself, her only salvation from the trap she had been caught within would be flight. To run, to hide, to flit to some other time away from here, and most definitely, away from now. To achieve such advantage she had to leave the train, she could not time slip without her feet on solid ground, and disappear. The ‘from’ far outweighing the ‘too’. The sound of Bast racing behind her, spurring her as though whatever hounds lurked in Hell had slipped their collars, and were loosed upon her, and her alone. And yet to her absolute horror, it sounded as though the kukri wielding girl in the shapeless red dress was gaining.

 

Ahead lay salvation in the form of a door. A door at the end of the carriage, but moreso, a door to the outer world, and freedom and escape. And then the door, as if pounded from the outside in by the hand of a drunken God crashed off its hinges as she reached for its handle, and flew directly at her.

 

That a domestic cat the size of a small horse was coming through it, stamping the door to the floor mid-flight, blocking her way out, only caused her to draw and swipe at it with her spectacularly well honed filleting knife. Slashing the massive black and white cat across the forehead down to its chin, rupturing the left eye, splaying her face like some dropped exotic fruit. Not stopping the momentum of her flight, Black Annis hurdled the screaming beast, the open doorway tantalisingly close.

 

And now, oddly, she was falling backwards, her eyesight vanishing, a solid weight knocking her from her feet. Her cheeks flared with white-hot pain, and her nose felt as though gripped in a needle covered vice. Reaching and tearing the furry demon clawing her cheeks, biting through sides of her nose, she threw it hard to her side and away from her. The small cat rendered immediately unconscious, the strength of the blow against the bulkhead being what it was. Picking herself up again, she ran the last steps, jumping through the door, aiming for the ground, ready to flit away through time. Landing, rolling she pulled herself upright, ready to run, ready to hide.

 

In the moment before she flitted, an enormous force threw her forward to the ground, beating her, pinning her, killing her. Driven with iron-hard brutality, Bast’s kukri was thrust powerfully through Black Annis’s cloak and shoulder-blade, slamming through her chest, standing proud from the upper portion of her alabaster breast – Bast still attached. Both flitted as one.  

 

Black Annis and Bast vanished from the sight of any who watched.

 

An owl screeched in the night, and Maude dragged herself to her feet, slipping in her blood as she did. Cat stopped screaming, and began to sob. Sardine was yet to move.

 

♠

 

Click that funky picture white boy, what is embedded is rather cool.

 

N.

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