“That’s nothin.” I shrugged, trying to stay modest.
“You didn’t have to filet his neck, Brat.” Grimm said. His expression was blank, but there was a prideful look in his eyes that made me smile. “Come on, we can clean you up when we stop again.”
“Is there blood on my face?” I lifted my hands up to check.
“No, but if you touch it with those, there will be,” he said, grabbing my left wrist and starting forward.
“I’m Katya, but go by Kat,” the dark haired girl said, steppin right into our path. She had a non-English lisp, and a small gap between her two front teeth.
“That’s Blue and Parker
.” She gestured to her companions. The woman, Blue, actually had bold blue hair and could’ve been a pin-up girl in another life, and Parker had blonde dreadlocks with huge black gauges in his ears.
It was such an odd combination of people.
“We don’t have time for this.” Grimm kept walking, forcing Katya to step aside.
“Never say the Savages haven’t done the world an act of kindness,” Cobra said, giving a two finger salute and falling in step beside me.
We went right past the room with the horrible smell coming from beneath the door. I knew whatever or whoever was inside was dead, and had no desire to find out how much worse that smell was with no barrier between us.
The only people I gave a damn about were either right beside me, or hours away in a compound somewhere—so sucks for whoever the hell that person was who had to die in an abandoned shithole.
The group followed, not making a sound. Cobra and Grimm must not have thought them a threat, or they’d all be dead, and there was no way in hell they’d let them walk behind us.
“So what’s the deal with you guys? I mean, what are ya’ll doin in here?” I asked after a minute or two.
I’d just killed a man with Katya; it seemed kind of wrong not to say anything at all.
“Those freaks with the snake tattoos are all over the city,” Blue said.
“We were just making our way through, paying them no attention. They cornered our group off—we got away and they found us again. There used to be seven of us,” Katya added.
She didn’t seem torn up about the people lost, which reverted back to the old adage: safety in numbers. The Venom took out four of them, just because. That seemed to be a thing in the Badlands. It was survival of the worst. A human eat human world. There was no place for morals here. There was no law. The only rule out here if you wanted to live was simple: don’t have any rules.
The silence had awkwardness settling between our two trios as we headed in the same direction.
I wanted to keep them with us simply for the fact that they didn’t seem outwardly evil. They were just strangers who wanted to survive. Didn’t we all? My judgment of character hadn’t let me down thus far.
I waited for Grimm to tell them they needed to go a separate direction—he didn’t.
He and Cobra shared a look, doing the brotherly bond thing they always seemed to do.
The sun was nearly gone, leaving only faint light to pave our path to the parking deck.
We passed a body slumped against the wall with a long metal pole—I assumed a piece of an old hospital bed—jammed through the bottom of his jaw. His fixed eyes watched us pass him by.
On a staircase was another body with no visible marks; his head was facing an unnatural direction. I knew Grimm was responsible for that one.
He truly lived up to his personification. Death could be swift, fast, and something you never saw coming. That was Grimm.
His gaze was focused on the path ahead of us, no doubt in his own head, being his usual quiet self as he planned the journey of mass destruction we were about to embark on. I studied his side profile, feelin familiar warmth in my chest that came from looking at his handsome self.
I know he was supposed to be this unfeeling, cold, cruel man, but there was a heart in there somewhere. He showed me that time and time again. It was dark and diabolic, just like the man who carried it, but it was still a heart. I had every intention of owning it fully and completely. I knew it would take work. It could be said we were just two strangers with the same hunger: to feel loved, to feel a lil less lonely, to feel anything at all other than numb.
Hell, I didn’t even know this man’s real name, but the way I felt about him, I couldn’t care less.
And that was really what it came down to, because I felt as if I’d known Grimm for a thousand lifetimes and was just now findin him again—like my twin flame. He was mine, I was his, and this hell was ours.