“Thanks” I said, stripping my hoodie off

“Just stick it anywhere, I’ll sort it out.” Jodie said, her back turned.

She had taken me back to her flat to wash. It was closer, and we wouldn’t wake Dotty. Getting my hoodie off had been a chore, I didn’t want to cut it, I liked it, but the blood made it stick to me like dried glue.

“Want me to make some tea?” I asked

“No, you look pretty bad, worse than me. Go wash up before it dries into your hair. I’ll find breakfast.”

Jodie’s flat was nice. Not lavish, not particularly big, but it had a separate shower and bath. She’d given me a change of clothes, I folded them over the side of the bath and got into the shower.

The water was hot, unbearably so, but I didn’t want to turn it down. It ran down me and down the drain a strange brownish red. The room filled with steam and I started scrubbing.

I remembered back nine, maybe ten years. I’d been the tall, gangly one even more than I was now. I’d been roped into doing the school play, some esoteric drama teacher’s idea. Macbeth, starring a bunch of eleven year olds. I hadn’t wanted to do it, but had a crush on the boy playing Banquo and my best friend at the time, Sara, wanted me to. I’d auditioned for Lady Macbeth, and I got the part. About six months later I’d be told that the only reason I did was because there was a rumour going around that Todd, Macbeth, was gay, and no other girls had auditioned for it, but it was a victory nonetheless. I told Sara about it and we went and bought milkshakes with the spare change she’d stolen out of her mum’s handbag.

On the night of the play, they didn’t test the fake blood to make sure it would wash off. I spent an hour offstage trying to scrub the red off my hands once the show ended. Soap, saltwater, sugar, I ended up rubbing my hands raw and sore trying to get it off.

This blood came out easier, but I still felt unclean. I started to work on my hair, it was slimy. It was gritty, why would it be gritty? I ran back through the night. The garden? The warehouse? The shelvings? Extracting Katrine? No matter. I massaged shampoo into my hair, my hands came out red, and a little chunk of bone stuck to my index finger. I brought it up to look at it. There was some meat still attached to it, puckered on like the suckers of an octopus. It took some scrubbing but it came clean. It looked like any other bone, there wasn’t anything special about it. I could almost believe it was from a chicken. I tipped my head and scrubbed at my hair. More came out, three, four, five, more. Minced up like those videos on how they make chicken nuggets.

Chicken nuggets were processed within an inch of their lives. Well, not their lives, but their existence. You couldn’t tell there was anything natural in them. You could put anything in a chicken nugget. You could put bones in them. Calcium. It adds to the nutritional value of it. How many murders had used chicken nuggets as cover-ups? It had to be a lot, had I eaten any? If I tried it now, would it taste familiar?

I almost did, but the image of that person, the bones in the neck sticking out at the wrong angle, shuddered me awake. The drain had started to clog, I was standing in an inch of bloody water. With pulp. You didn’t get pulp in anything that wasn’t orange juice. Strange, lots of fruit had pulp. Everything had pulp. That was all people were. Pulp inside chicken nuggets inside more pulp.

I thought about Katrine. When we’d found her she was nearly dead, I thought she was. She was mangled, glass was jammed in her hip and she was losing blood as if she hated the stuff. She wasn’t moving. Addie picked her up, took her to the car. Sid had instructed the rest of us to start first aid, but not before we found the book. She was going over it now, alone. Katrine was unconscious, barely alive. My necklace had barely stopped the bleeding from the lighter cuts, but on the heavier ones, the skin would knit back together and pull apart whenever Sid pulled a turn or ran over a bump, it had done more harm than it helped. Addie was with her now. He’d yelled at Sid. called her a butcher, a bitch, some other things too. If Katrine hadn’t nearly been dead he would have yelled at her too. Reckless, unprepared, dangerous. They were close, Addie and Katrine. Was it a trans thing? Were they fucking? I doubted it, Katrine was nearly old enough to be his mother. Or a young aunt, at least.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

I got out of the shower and tried to dry myself off. Standing in that water for so long dyed my cuticles brown, even a second round of hot water and more red, sensitive skin couldn’t clear it. I felt clean, but the towel came away streaked red nonetheless. I checked myself for cuts, my head was bruised, my palms were scraped, but not bloodied. I traced a hand across myself, there was a gash on my hip, I hadn’t realised. I hadn’t felt it, but it was still bleeding.

The walls of the bathroom were lined with bleach, drain cleaner, all the things you need to get stains out of the tiling. The cupboards held sheets of clear plastic, the kind you use to make a murder room. Of course the medicine cabinet had a full surgery kit. I took the iodine and poured it on some loo roll, and started cleaning myself. I started around the cut, then moved inwards. As soon as I touched it it was like my body was realising it was cut and it started to burn, badly. Wad after wad of tissue still came away red. It needed the Component, but Katrine was on it and I didn’t want to go back to the hideout just yet. Not for a few days, at least. My other option was the old fashioned way.

‘The old fashioned way’. I’d never have thought that getting stitches after a heist would ever be described like that. I almost laughed.

I put the joggers and sports bra Jodie had lent me on but left her hoodie, I didn’t want to bleed into it. The bathroom was a mess, the shower looked like someone had been murdered and the cabinets were all searched. I’d help her clean it up later.

“Hey I kind of fucked up the shower, I can clear it up after we’ve eaten,” strangely enough my appetite hadn’t gone. I’d expected it to, I’d waited for it to, but I was starving. She wasn’t in the living room, I made my way towards her kitchen “There’s a cut on my back, I think it needs-”

Jodie was collapsed on the floor in a pool of blood, her clothes shredded like they’d been torn off and hurled away from her. Her blood? Other blood? Shit, her blood? I rushed over to try and cradle her, but a wave of heat nearly made me stagger. Was there an attacker in the flat? I glanced around and reached for my gun, it wasn’t there. I couldn’t see anything, the windows were all closed. On the other side of the room a glass coffee pot shattered, imploded nearly. The pieces hung in the air, convulsing like a heartbeat. There was more glass from behind me, probably the shower, but I didn’t register it. Jodie wasn’t motionless, she was convulsing, slowly, in the same rhythm as the glass. Was she seizing? I rushed over, ignoring the burning air around me, to cover her. Where were her rings? There was one on her index finger, another on her little finger, I pulled them both off, throwing them away as soon as I could, they burned in my hands. If she was unconscious her magic would bring more danger than safety.

The glass hung in the air a few moments more, then fell to the ground, ringing and smashing. Jodie was still on the ground, I went to see if she was lucid. She convulsed again and produced a sound I’d never heard from her. A wail, a moan. Animalistic. She wasn’t seizing, she hadn’t been attacked. She was crying.

Shrill, wailing sounds, choking her. I sat back, in the blood, shit. I looked at Jodie, actually looked at her. She was small. Not in size, obviously, but right now, at this moment, she was small. Her body was a mess, scars, burns and clear, brown skin vied for land. Every gasp of breath wracked her core. For the first time, I couldn’t see Jodie, the soldier, the trainer; the fighter. All I could see was Jodie, the nineteen-year-old girl. Jodie, a child.

I started to try and make her comfortable, to bundle the hoodie as a pillow, but when I did she reached out to take my hand. I gave it to her, and she tapped a finger on my ring, the one I’d been given by the Efrit, Saghir.

I was back in the warehouse, Looking at Jodie. The man would be right behind me, screaming his last breath away on threats. Except he wasn’t. It was my voice that was scraping my throat raw, my arm that was jamming a pistol into the woman I was holding. I could even smell my own shampoo. In the same moment, for no reason I could define, I moved my gun right up to my head and-

I was back in the apartment. Jodie had let go, cut me off early. Telepathy. Had she done that to the man? Made him shoot? Had she been right there in his head the whole time I was looking at her? Had she felt what he did? Had I watched Jodie die?

Her movements started to slow. What was I supposed to do here? Was I supposed to hug her? Talk to her? Leave her?

I decided to do the second. I leaned myself up against a cupboard and tried my best to console. “That was… shit, Jodie, that must have been hard for you” What was that? That was pathetic. I tried again. “I’m sorry.” Sorry for what? Sorry for forcing her to commit suicide? How did you apologise for that? Why couldn’t I find the right words?

Jodie’s crying slowed again, and she managed to pull herself up into a sitting position. She was still curled up naked in a pool of blood (not hers, I decided, I couldn’t see any decent-sized cuts on her) but she was upright, that was something, wasn’t it? She leaned against me, wordless, eventually motionless. I think she fell asleep.

The sun was well over the horizon before either of us moved. Jodie’s twisted mask of tears softened into a reddened, wet face. I didn’t want to disturb her. She looked up at me, still in pain but now somehow relaxed.

I thought she would kiss me. She didn’t.