He took out his phone, and he put it against his ear, and he heard the final bleep of a phone call not going in, the quick noise of having been hung-up. Beep. The absolute noise of rejection.

And he (Turnus) grabbed his phone and twisted it until it looked like a damn screw and he drilled that screw straight into the floor. And as it goes, plastic tends not to mix well with concrete. The glass screen shattered, the plastic phone broke into a thousand pieces, and Turnus was left there.

"They got her," Turnus laughed, though it wasn't for him. "They really found her and got her."

And in front of him was the little man with the armband and the name tag. He was the bartender, was. Now he was a rat and a bit of a coward.

This bartender shook the sweat off from his eyebrow and blinked and licked his lips for a taste of his salty perspiration.

"Sir, they barged in, and they started hurting everyone and made a mess and sir-" The bartender licked his lips. "We had to comply. It was imperative."

And Turnus looked at him. Here in this empty street, with the daunting light poles all around him, casting long shadows, in this wide range of space where no car approached, his breathing came loudly. And here in this empty parking lot, the bartender felt tenser and tenser. He took a step back and put both hands in front of him.

Turnus approached him.

"What were we supposed to do, sir?"

Turnus remained steady and straightforward, his eyes laser-focused on the individual with the shaking boots.

"What? What could I do?" The man said. "H-how can I pay it back?"

"Pay back?" Turnus asked. "Your pay. Your debt?"

Turnus's eyes brightened. His smiled curled, "Do you even know how much you owe me?"

He gripped the bartender's arm. Twisted.

Then softened. Caressing almost, like a massage. Like fraternal love.

"S-Sir?" The bartender said.

For a brief moment, it was a loving touch. For a very brief, brief, moment.

Green energy shot out of Turnus's arm with a force so quick and urgent that his clothes were ripped off from his forearm. The energy made its way, an electrical wire through the green currents from his shoulder to his fingertips.

Then there was no arm, not for the bartender. It all happened in a moment so quick he couldn't even scream.

"Wha-what?" The man raised his stump to his face.

Turnus came up in front of him, straddling the fallen body of the bartender. Mockingly, laughing almost, repeating; "What? What? What!"

So both of them were at it, screaming like fools. And Turnus grabbed the stump of a hand once again. His arm lit up, and his hand went to work, quite literally reducing the man's flesh into dust. It looked like his (the bartenders) arm was going through a wood chipper.

What was left of the arm was on the floor in a pool of dust. Brown, black and a little grey with white sprinkled across the mound.

"That's what you're made of, did you know that?" He said, laughing.

"What?" The Bartender's eyes rolled around in his skull.

"What?! What? Don't you know how to talk you fucking retard?" Turnus slapped him.

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"Wha-what?" The man asked again.

"Carbon, nitrogen, calcium." Turnus counted his fingers. "Potassium. A little sulfur...and I forgot the rest. Shit."

"What?" Now he was watching his arm with deliberation, now the pain was registering into him. His eyes rolled into his skull.

"I just told you what, are you listening?" But he wasn't talking to anyone conscious anymore. The man was on the floor, sleeping, with his eyes reaching the back of his skull.

"Fucking idiot," Turnus muttered. "That's an arm, I'll come by for the leg later."

He spat. Left him there belly up in the middle of the road as he headed into the casino.

"I'll get her back, right after I deal with you." His face looked up, to the vaulted ceilings of the casino.

♠

Jaimi and Kacey walked closely together through the slot machines, giant rows of black and gold square boxes with ripped off lever arms rolling on the floor like swollen red limbs.

Most of the machines were shot or exploded or mismanaged or blasted with sand that the grit was still falling down from the cracks of the slot machines.

It was like their younger days in Morocco, running hand and hand, stealing from stalls. They weren't thief's anymore, of course. And they weren't human (were they ever?), but it was nostalgic feeling at least to Jaimi. And because of that, she slacked, dragging her hand against the leather stools and metal machines. It wasn't quite Moroccan grass or Bindweeds, but it didn't matter.

Kacey stepped on a glass panel, it was one of the three slots. A cherry.

Jaimi stepped on a Seven as she stopped next to her brother.

Upon them, a staircase leading up, emergency it read.

Kacey's eyes flashed orange, and something moved within, what looked like a small sperm or tadpole or other auxiliaries, drilling its way into his orange eyes. It looked like live impregnation, maybe it was.

Because the minute that little parasite drilled into Kacey, something appeared on his shoulder. A bump. A movement that road down his back, and swelled and tightened his skin.

Then it exploded, near his kidneys. He didn't flinch, nor did he bleed.

A shadow quite literally grew out of him. It spun around the two like a hurricane before settling into corporeal form in front of Kacey. A sleek creature, whatever it was (because there really wasn't quite any kind of species to compare it too). A homunculus, sort of. This creature, this strange thing looked like a lion - feral and lean - with three-fingered claws like a kind of fowl. Five eyes looked back, two on each side of its red-furred face. Two tails erected out from its sides, like kind of gliders. And this animal keeper extended his hand out, he shot a finger upwards to the stairs.

It had mostly feathers, and the few inches of flesh were thatched, scaly.

"Go on, find him for us," Kacey said.

The animal walked up a few steps, the first into the emergency stairway. A body still dangled by the guard rail. The creature took a sniff of the corpse and growled and jumped from the edge of the metal rail, upwards.

He disappeared into the above darkness.

"We'll have him in five minutes. When that happens, I'll get the other one out." Another tadpole grew out from Kacey's second eye, it swam close to his iris. "I'll distract him. You go for the kill."

"Alright." She said in a hushed voice.

"How long can you bring it out for?

"Ten minutes." She said. "I didn't have too much to eat today. Sorry."

The man rubbed her forehead. He smiled.

"That's alright. We'll have him in five."

They waited by the side of the building, waiting for a kind of message.

They got it. The feline creature let out a throaty-roar. Or cry. Plead. It followed them all the way down the steps, touching each floor before hitting them. They nodded and walked and looked for the guttural sound.

They arrived at the scene with the same patient calm that brought them here in the first place; the slow, almost dragging footsteps. The same closeness, locked in hands.

"And who are you two?"

They heard his voice across the room near a draft from a shattered window not too far off. The curtains dangled.

"Why would I even ask? You're Turnus’s taxmen, no? Here to collect a debt…" Ritcher lifted his hunched body. Below him, Kacey's creature. “I thought he’d take longer to try and kill me, I guess he didn’t want to wait. A quick striker, a surprise even to me.”

It released a strained growl. The tip of Ritcher's cane held the creature by its neck, he pressed down. Snap.

The creature turned to dark dust and came back to Kacey's eyes as such. The black particles swimming into him as if falling into the drain of his iris.

Black eyes returned back to orange, almost yellow in their neon glow.

Kacey blinked. His left eye bled, he covered it with his hand.

"We have to kill you, mister," Kacey said, whose boyish voice was anything but compelling. Jaimi took a step back, aligning herself directly behind her brother's shadow. She peeped with one head out, tip-toeing past his shoulders.

"It can't be any other way." She muttered.

"I wouldn't want it any other way." Ritcher smiled. "There's nothing I despise more than the diplomatic man. What's a paper to the battlefield? The pen to the sword? Ink for blood? It's not even comparable. Let war be its own diplomacy. Have no mercy. Cleanse the enemy so that there is no man left to negotiate. Like a flood."