Obsidian Butterfly

He smiled, and it was a pleased smile, almost proud, as if I'd done something smart. "I'm carrying two more guns, a knife, and a garrote. Tell me where they are and I'll give you a prize."

My eyes had gone wide. "A garrote. Even for you that's a little Psychos'R'Us."

"Give up?"

"No. Is there a time limit?"

He shook his head. "We've got all night."

"If I guess wrong, is there a penalty?"

He shook his head.

"What's the prize if I figure out where everything is?"

He smiled that close, secretive smile that said he knew things that I didn't. "It's a surprise prize."

"Get out so I can get dressed."

He touched the belt where it lay on the bed. "This buckle didn't come black. Who painted it?"

"I did."

"Why?"

He knew the answer. "So that if I'm out after dark, the buckle doesn't catch the light and give me away." I lifted the tail of his white shirt exposing the large ornate silver belt buckle. "This is like a freaking target after dark."

He looked down at me, making no move to lower the shirt. "It just clips on over the real buckle."

I let the shirt slide back. "The buckle underneath?"

"It's blacked," he said.

We smiled at each other. It went all the way to our eyes. We did like each other. We were friends. "Sometimes I think I don't want to be you when I grow up, Edward, sometimes I think it's too late, I'm already there."

The smile faded, leaving his eyes the color of winter skies and just as pitiless.

"Only you decide how far gone you are, Anita. Only you can decide how far you'll go."

I looked at the weapons and the black clothing like funeral clothes, even down to the things that touched my skin. "Maybe it would be a start if I bought something pink."

"Pink?" Edward said.

"Yeah, you know, pink, like Easter Bu

"Like cotton candy," he said. "Or almost everything women give each other at baby showers."

"When were you at a baby shower?" I asked.

"Do

I looked at him, eyes wide. "You, at a couples baby shower, Edward."

"You in something the color of children's candy and baby doll clothes." He shook his head. "Anita, you are one of the least pink women I've ever met."

"When I was a little girl, I'd have given a small body part to have a pink canopy bed, and ballerina wallpaper would have been perfect."

He gave me wide, surprised eyes. "You, in a pink canopy bed with ballerina wallpaper." He shook his head. "Just trying to imagine you in a room like that gives me a headache."

I looked at the things spread on the bed. "I was pink once, Edward."

"Most of us start off soft," he said, "but you can't stay that way, not and survive."

"There's got to be someplace I won't go, something I won't do, some line I won't cross, Edward."

"Why?" That one word held more curiosity than he usually allowed himself.

"Because if I don't have any lines, limits, then what kind of person does that make me?" I asked.

He shook his head, moving the cowboy hat low on his head. "You're having a crisis of conscience."

I nodded. "Yeah, I guess I am."

"Don't go soft, Anita, not on my dime. I need you to do what you do best, and what you do best isn't soft or gentle or kind. What you do best is what I do best."

"And what is that? What is it that we do best?" I asked, and I knew the anger came through in my voice. I was getting angry with Edward.

"We do what it takes, whatever it takes, to get the job done."

"There's got to be more to life than the ultimate practicality, Edward."

"If it makes you feel any better, we have different motives. I do what I do because I love it. It's not just what I do. It's who I am. You do the job to save lives, to keep the damage down." He looked at me with eyes gone as empty and bottomless as any vampire's. "But you love it, too, Anita. You love it, and that bothers you."

"Violence is one of my top three responses now, Edward, maybe my number one."

"And it's kept you alive."

"At what price?

He shook his head, and now the blankness was replaced by anger. He was just suddenly moving forward. I caught his hand going under the shirt, and I was rolling off the bed, with the Browning in my hand. I had a round in the chamber and was falling back onto the floor with the gun pointed up, eyes searching for movement.

He was gone.

My heart was thudding so loudly that I could barely hear, and I was straining to hear. A movement, something. He had to be on the bed. It was the only place he could have gone. From my angle I couldn't see anything on top of the bed, just the corner of the mattress and the trail of sheet.

Knowing Edward, the ammo in the Browning was probably his homemade brew, which meant that it would pierce the bottom of the bed and go up into whatever lay on top of the bed. I felt the last of the air in my body slide outward, and I sighted on the underneath of the bed. The first bullet would either hit him or make him move, then I'd have a better idea of where he was.

"Don't shoot, Anita."

His voice made me move the gun barrel just a touch more right. It would take him mid-body because he was crouched up there, not lying down. I knew that without seeing it.

"It was a test, Anita. If I wanted to come against you, I'd warn you first, you know that."

I did know that, but … I heard the bed creak. "Don't move, Edward. I mean it."

"You think you can just decide to turn all this off. You can't. The genie is out of the bottle for you, Anita, just like it is for me. You can't unmake yourself. Think of all the effort, all the pain, that went into making you who you are. Do you really want to throw all that away?"

I was lying flat on my back, gun pointed two-handed. The floor was cold where the gown had gaped at my back. "No," I said, finally.

"If your heart starts bleeding for all the bad things you do, it won't be the last thing that bleeds."

"You really did this to test me. You son of a bitch."

"Can I move now?"

I took my finger off the trigger and sat up on the floor. "Yeah, you can move."

He eased back off the other side of the bed as I stood up on this one. "Did you see how fast you went for the gun? You knew where it was, you had the safety off and a round chambered, and you were looking for cover, and trying to target me." Again there was that pride, like a teacher with a favorite student.

I looked across at him. "Don't ever do anything like that again, Edward."

"A threat?" he asked.

I shook my head. "No threat, just instinct. I came so close to putting a bullet through the bed and into you."

"And while you were doing it, your conscience wasn't bothering you. You weren't thinking, 'It's Edward. I'm about to shoot my friend.»

"No," I said. "I wasn't thinking anything but how to get the best shot possible before you had time to shoot me." It didn't make me happy to say it. It felt like I'd been mourning dead pieces of myself, and Edward's little demonstration had confirmed the deaths. It made me sad, and a little depressed, and not happy with Edward.

"I knew a man once who was as good as you are," Edward said. "He started second-guessing himself, worrying about whether he was a bad person. It got him killed. I don't want to see you dead because you hesitated. If I have to bury you, then I want it to be because someone was just that good or that lucky."

"I want to be cremated," I said, "not buried."

"Good little Christian, fallen Catholic, practicing Episcopalian, and you want to be cremated."

"I don't want anyone trying to raise me from the dead or stealing body parts for spells. Just burn it all, thanks."

"Cremated. I'll remember."

"How about you, Edward? Where do you want the body shipped?"