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Why? Why is it that we, as humans, feel the need for violence? Feel the need to kill? He didn’t know. Couldn’t know. Because he was the instrument for the violence, blood leaking from their abdomens into his palms, drying sticky beneath his nails, staining hands that are a furious scarlet from those who came before, and those that will come next.
Feet press mulch into the concrete tracked from the woods, following tracks of the car he knows is parked in the front of their home. Night blankets Annecy, cold pressing into his skin like sand into glass, coal into diamonds, the pressure making something better, something beautiful. Dirt cascades from his clothes, where his gravesite could no longer hold him down, couldn’t keep the switchblade from his hand, his boots on the path. There are wolves prowling tonight, the wolves with hooked clawed and bloodthirst, all of them hunger, and so why not make the count one higher?
Serge Garrel prowls, just as he had seven years prior, before his brother dug his grave and left him to rot. But he is not alone, not the only predator hunched over their living and breathing prey. Hundreds who laid in peace only the night before lurch and grumble forward, pulled together in hunched packs with no leaders, shambling for the air in the living’s lungs. All of them know the messiah. A nameless thing with the motivation to destroy them all at it’s will, a snap of a finger or a shrill whistle into the winter’s air, cold dropping, dropping into them, yet they do not shiver. They never shiver.
His eye catches on the brunette form of a woman he doesn’t know, shrouded in black clothes with words he cannot perceive, a white smudge across her back and all it does is move with her breath; inward, outward, over and over. Her heart beats gently in her chest, once, twice. Faster than it should be, red pulsing through her veins in agitation at something he doesn’t care to know. Her hair cropped into a bob, grown out from years of neglecting care. Hands are shaking with life, trembling anger that does not reach any further than her fingertips. One foot in front of the other, leaving the man she has been speaking with behind. It’s funny, he hadn’t even noticed him until it was too late, trailing from a few metres back, careful not to make noise, to be noticed, until there is nothing to do but die. It works too well, it is too easy. After a while it is no longer fun, they do not squirm as they walk, do not flit their eyes over their shoulders to the figure in the hood that is taking the same turns over and over. They do not lock their keys between their knuckles, press a button in their pocket, hook their finger into the trigger of a canister meant to burn. Just walk like the prey they are, oblivious and just too easy. Serge Garell pounces only once, around a corner and in the dark, arms wrapped around the torso, blade pressed into the abdomen. There’s a system, and there’s pleasure to be dug from the violence.
She does not bleed. The switchblade long rusted with gravedirt falls from his hand as she lurches away into the space she has left. It’s only then he is able to focus enough on something other than the vitality coursing through her veins to read her jacket. Gendarmerie. Police. He does not have the time to panic, not the time to retreat and find another target. Before she lurches to the left, hunched forward in defence. He takes the bait as easily as a wolf, before his own shoulder leaks crimson, and gunpowder smoke chokes into the air from the barrel of her pistol, wrenched from a holster he had not seen.
“Captain!” She yells, contained and measured, a simple distress call and nothing more. The cotton of his hoodie deepens with the dampening skin, leaking blood a red dark enough to be ichor. Noise emanates from his throat, low and rumbling and far from what a human should be. Knees bend in a flash, as his hand scrabbles across the alleyway concrete, searching for the blade his father had placed in his hand and taught him to use. An extension of his arm, the weapon he had forged himself into becoming.
“Lieutenant?” A ringing call returns, echoing down the streets, the rhythmic thunk of heavy boots approaching, fast.
“I could use your help!” The woman says, more casual than she should be, before her knuckles meet his jaw in a solid hook, and he feels his brain rattle under the force. “You are being detained for assault against an officer. You have the right to remain silent, don’t move.” She hisses, wrenching one arm behind his back. Somewhere else, somewhere beyond the pull of his shoulder and the stones digging into his right hand, radio static crackles; unintelligible clammering ringing as the caller picks up what speed he can muster. Serge winces as the free hand holding him up pulls away, not in the Lieutenant's other hand, but to push into the wall and topple the pair of them into the dust. She topples from standing as his force crashes into her legs, both landing on the ground in a painful heap. His eye locks onto her empty hands as the pistol she’d held clattered away, out of reach for the officer. In an instant his fingers find the trigger, barrel still warm from the shot fired not a moment before.
“Stop!” In a moment of better judgement, he freezes. Chest heaving with air he didn’t need, itching to feel the recoil in his arm, inhale the smoke and watch her bleed. It’s not nearly as fun this way, there’s not the same sensation of ripping someone’s life away with your bare hands and a rusty switchblade. A pistol shot to the forehead is too clean, too proper, he supposed that’s why the cops carried guns, and his temple was met with a second barrel, it’s cold steel pressed behind his eyes. “You’re gonna put that down, or I’m gonna make you.”
“You won’t, will you?” He utters, turning his head to put the barrel between his eyes, to meet the gaze of the Captain, with fright hidden behind his gaze with his second-in-command at the end of this line of fire.
“You don’t want to do this,” The Captain urges as he searches through any mental database he can find for a name, a story, anything to use against him.
“Serge, right?” It is enough to shake him from the blind nothingness that resulted in being exactly where he is. From the Lieutenant on the ground, pulling breath after breath into her shaking form. “I know your brother, you can ask him. My.. My-” She stops the train of thought before it goes any further, and Serge clicks the pieces into place. The last one, the one in his beautiful blaze of bloody glory, the nurse. She was there for a while, the woman before the prey was alone. A face Toni described, full of life and joy and love, left only with despair and the steel of her own service weapon aimed at her forehead.
He does not pull the trigger. Only swings the metal at the Captain to force his dodge, ducking beneath his arm and disappearing into the pressure of the nighttime void.