“This the best you can do, asswipe?” my target growled as the light of his veins and arteries paused, the forward pace of the streams stilling even as the blood coursing through them pulsed with each beat of his heart. “I was asleep, and you still couldn’t fucking manage to ambush me? Pathetic!”

The vessels in his eyes swiveled back and forth in tandem with the abrupt side-to-side of those lacing through his brain. His frantic searching for me was as artless as his tongue was foul, making it easy for me to silently slip through between the boxes and containers littering the warehouse he had holed up in.

The lifeblood in his heart shifted, and wanting to gauge his strength myself, I paused long enough to put my full focus on the coming strike. He burst into motion with the anticipated backhand, and the sound of crunching metal followed as he struck a shipping container.

“Where are you?!”

“Where are you, Carmen?!” echoed my Father in my memories.

I drew my knife and moved, quickly but quietly advancing under cover of the haphazardly arranged obstacles. The Butcher of the Bay, so called for the nature of the first murder attributed to him. An odd choice of name for the leader of a group known as the Teeth, yet one he had claimed nonetheless. The power to grow stronger and more durable the more he wanted to hurt his target, not to mention manifesting that desired pain in people close enough to see. If nothing else, his strength seemed to live up to the rumors, but that was the only positive I could afford him. He had wasted the advantage I had graciously given him and was brashly broadcasting his position, though perhaps he too was used to giving his foes advantages in order to have any sort of fun…

I watched, trembling as my furious father scoured the playground for me, stalking through the open halls of the sprawling wooden castle, the aged, rotting beams groaning with each step from his massive form.

“I’m going to rip off your head when I find you, little man,” he snarled as he smashed another container, the stack it provided the base for toppling as their foundation was cut from beneath them. Had I not seen the intent boiling in his veins and changed my course, I would have been crushed.

Father’s movements grew more and more frantic as he failed to find me. What would happen if he couldn’t? Would he leave? Search elsewhere, in case I had slipped away into the dark? What would he do?! My grip on Mama’s kitchen knife anxiously tightened, the weight of it making my arm shake.

No. Lying to others was child’s play, but lying to myself was an altogether different beast, and it was plain as day from the lifeblood wildly pulsing within his heart that I was assigning this worm far too much credit. The only entertainment I would be able to derive from this failed endeavor would be found in working around his durability.

My heart stopped when his path turned towards me. He would be beneath me in seconds, and if he thought to look up, I would have nowhere left to run. He would unmake me, destroy me in the name of his perfect daughter—in the name of a lie who never even existed.

“You pansy ass pussy!” he howled, the frustration, impatience, and insecurity bubbling out like the volatile concoction it was. He was small, his psyche so easily wounded. A man perpetually caught in the heat of the moment, who ruled through fear of his power alone. A parasite who lived day to day, always taking what was needed while leaving him forever trapped in the cycle of needing more.

I silently prayed for deliverance. Not to God—Padre had made more than clear in his sermons at mass how God felt about me. I had tried to live as His Word demands. Dios mío, I had tried. But no. No, I knew God would answer no prayers to Him.

My lips curled as I closed in on my prey. I did not know, but I knew. All the puzzle pieces were right there, bound within the pulsing bands of muscle and tissue that kept his meat sack afloat. It may as well have been written in stone, how immutable his future was. The illusion of choice, while cause and effect inexorably led him ever closer to this moment.

Too late I realized the creaking sound of wood was not only a herald of my Father’s approach but of my fall, like the morning star before me. No! No!! Had God heard me blasphemy and struck me down?! Please!! All I want is to—

The Butcher of the Bay punched another container, overcome by his failure to find me, and cloaked beneath the deep groan of the stiff metal giving way to his strike and his furious roar, I swept behind him with my knife raised.

The stars swam in synchrony, two galaxies that lived and breathed as surely as I did, moving with purpose I couldn’t fathom. They were too great to comprehend as they drifted across the sky, creatures beyond God or the demons to whom I’d prayed. I was insignificant in the face of their majesty, yet they fell all the same, bleeding their light into the world… into me.

A heady rush of adrenaline flooded me, my senses sharpening to match the edge of my blade. This was what I lived for—the moment when the die had been cast, my course made immutable. I had yet to misinterpret the chain of causality, how each link was bound to the next ad infinitum, yet it was impossible to suppress the fear that this was the time I had failed, that I had doomed myself, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

—be me! ...?! My Father’s insides lit like the stars that had fled me, and I knew where he would be, what he would do.

Where I needed to strike.

My knife jabbed up through the roof of the Butcher’s open mouth, his thoughtless submission to his anger having afforded me the opportunity I needed. His light fled him freely, and I blocked his eyes with my free hand as I wrapped myself around his flailing body, holding on tight as we fell to the ground.

The knife and the wood beneath us was awash with dying starlight. The moon’s stolen light, reflected upon us, and my Father’s, his constellation dimming as he came apart.

I revealed in the warmth of the final faint flickers of the Butcher’s fire fading away even as I mourned the ever briefer and distant revelry. Fear of a different kind took root in me as I extricated myself from under his limp bulk. Would the day come when my conviction in the path to victory became certain? When life lost its luster?

“My name is not Carmen,” were the last words my Father heard before he dissipated entirely into the black, leaving only a corpse behind.

[The fuck…? What is this?!] the Butcher snarled in my head.

I smiled. Perhaps, but not today.