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She was dripping off the cloth. It was a shitty costume anyways.

He set the jar on the table with a dull click and watched it settle, pulling at the glass edges before surface tension broke and dropped it into a rippling red pool. Drop the lid next to it on stained wood. Dragged himself free from the cheap orange fabric, flames more believable now that they were reddened too, wringing them over the slick opening of the jar.

Blood drip off the sleeves into the puddle below. Blood dripped off the collar. Dripped off the feet. The legs. The hips.

He watched it run down the sides of the jar and catch on the rim like he'd watched it down her legs, catching on the tears in her tights. It smelled of her. Smelled like the protesting sweat soaked into her skirt. He thought about that, thought about picking at the seams on her underwear already torn because she had her nails at his fingertips, fighting for freedom. He didn't see her face but he could bet it was lined with salty sweat from the muffled sobs he heard. Some of the blood was his own. But he cleaned that off her thighs like he'd cleaned off her own blood.

He wrung out his gloves and wiped off his mask. He pulled off his underwear and held them dripping over the jar. Counted the droplets. Counted her whimpers. One, two.

He sat in the dark, naked, muscles twitching under the chill of the fall breeze pushing through the open window. Three, four.

She would whimper, cry out, sob her eyes raw and he'd listen with an offered shh or a there there or maybe just a low sigh and a tight grip on her hair. Too dark, too loud for anyone else to find her – city bustling with performers and tourists and focused lights. He could only hear the vibrations underfoot: feel her whines, her sniffles, her skull scraping against the brick wall of the alley and feet cracking as they clenched. The drip of blood off her tangled curls. Five. Six.

Seven.

Sitting naked on a kitchen chair and holding blood-soaked underwear over a blood-soaked jar. One of her curls was even threaded in the fabric. He squeezed to provoke the blood flow. Back in the alley he squeezed her hips and pulled. Something in her snapped. Eight.

He glanced downward and stared the mask back in its empty eyes. Looked at its badly-crafted plastic beak. He felt his gut twitch, and saw blood still lining the pressed edge of the mask. Nine. He wet his cracking lips and tasted something metal. Ten.

He pulled his mask down under his chin before he licked her dry. And before that he smashed her head back against the brick to stop her kicking and wailing. Her head drooped with blood pouring out of her scalp. She looked much better as a brunette.

Something in her had snapped. He pulled back and crouched over one of her sprawled legs. He felt around the alley’s shadows for his bag and found something round and cold and, twisting off the lid, held the jar under the blood warming the stretched, dying skin. She bled. Eleven. She bled. And what hadn’t fallen into the jar came clean on his tongue.

Twelve.

Before he capped the jar he licked away the streams that had collected on the outside of the glass. The blood amounted to little more than a centimeter. Some of it was his own. Most of it hers. There was already a marker on the table and he wrote her name on the jar. Blood on his fingers smeared on the plastic over dried and crumbling stains of dark red.

He washed his hands under cold running water. It turned red in the steel sink.

Before he slept, since midnight was getting closer, he pushed open a space on the shelves for the new jar with an orchestra of quiet glass-on-glass sounds, a quiet swishing of thick and aged liquid. Where he had it, it was filed under D. For Dawn.

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The strike slammed into my face, sending my head to the left. A metallic taste emerges in my throat, spilling forward into my beak.
Blood.
My Blood.
That's it, I will get you for that, you and that brat you follow.
I breath in, the heat flooding my lungs.
And exhale.
The flames flood the cavern, engulfing that Pidgeot and it's trainer in fire.
I rocket into the sky, and observe. As the flames subside the bird is on the flood, and the kid cares too much for it. They won't see me again.

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