I sidestepped slightly and braced. He impacted hard with my shoulder, which knocked him sideways so he went flying onto one of the beds.
It was so tempting to end him there against the bed, but it was all too easy. The insatiable darkness inside me was a black hole, voracious for more, and I was helpless against the need to feed it.
So, I wrenched him by the ankle off the mattress and his heavy weight thwacked loudly against the floor. Before he could right himself, I flipped his leg into the air over my shoulder and dragged his considerable weight easily across the floor into the bathroom.
It was easier to clean blood off laminate than carpet.
“Fucking Canadian cunt,” Patrick spat as he tried to leverage his arms against the bathroom doorframe.
I cocked my head, studying him as he fought my grip, then swiftly kicked in his left arm with the heavy heel of my motorcycle boot. The snick of snapping tendons and the crack of bone was nearly as satisfying as the following roar of pain that ripped from his lungs.
“Actually,” I told him conversationally as I hauled him across the bathroom floor. “I’m just as Irish as you.” Then in rusty Gaelic I hadn’t used in years, I insulted him in a language he would understand. “If only ye had brains, you’d be dangerous.”
I noticed the tension build in his muscles a hairbreadth before he launched himself at me. He was slow, the excess weight and a slow mind making him so. But I was bored with him, and I wanted to play.
So I let him take a swing at me.
It landed poorly on the barest corner of my chin, my beard taking the sting out of the bone on bone contact, the force only enough to turn my head an inch.
But the pain sang through me like a drug, exhilarating and right in a way not much in my life ever was.
A little laugh danced on my tongue as I made to swing again. I rolled to my toes and, just before his sloppy left hook landed, I ducked and came up with a hard jab to his right kidney.
He buckled, a slow sway like a tree just cut through the core of the trunk, and then the timber, his head hitting the porcelain pink tub with a sickening crunch.
Moaning pitifully, he tried to recover his equilibrium, scrambling for the knife that had fallen to the floor when I’d hauled him through the door. I bounced lightly on my toes as I let him grasp it.
He was bleeding from a gash over his left ear.
The same way Bea had bled in the wreck, her beautiful face transmuted horrifically by blood.
I hadn’t allowed myself to think about her at all since I’d last seen her broken, her natural glow tamped out by the artificial yellow lights of the hospital room. I hadn’t let myself think of her blood on my hands, both literally and figuratively as I’d pulled her from the car wreck I’d orchestrated myself, and I hadn’t let myself visit her again, even though I’d done nightly drive-bys of her house after she was discharged.
I was a man who did not allow himself a lot of things, so I was surprised by the difficulty of this particular exercise.
Everything in me compelled me with some strange magnetic force toward the slight girl with a halo of curls who would forever be too good for me and therefore too wrong for me.
This pathetic excuse for a man bleeding on the floor before me was partly responsible for her injury. I could self-flagellate myself as much as I wanted to pay penance for my own guilt, but who was there to extract it from Patrick.
Me.
That’s who.
Something in my chest ignited, my clear-headed rationale wavered, and suddenly, I was on him.
The time for fun and games had passed.
It was time for Patrick Walsh to meet his fucking Maker.
The bones in his hand ground together beneath my punishing grip as I smashed his hand against the bathtub to release his grip on the knife. He grunted and gasped, spittle flying, perspiration breaking out across his pocked forehead. All that energy so inefficiently expended.
In seconds, he was disarmed.
A moment later, I wielded that same knife in my own hand, the dangerous point tipped like a pen to the papery skin of his throat.
Soon, I would write the conclusion of his destiny in the ink of his blood.
“This,” I told him, somewhat merrily, because fuck, but I loved the hunt and that precious, poised moment before the kill. “Is what happens to those who go after The Fallen.”
“Fuck you,” Patrick said before spitting at me, the viscous liquid too heavy to reach my looming face so it landed pathetically on his heaving chest. “And your Fallen fucks.”