Free New Regime by Laken Cane

really. So someone was
going to get hurt. And it wasn’t going to be her.
    She ducked and turned, sensing the weapon, and used her
mutant vampire speed to streak toward the very spot from which it had been
flung.
    The assassin was a bad motherfucker, there was no doubt. But
she was, when she left her humanity behind, full of pain and rage and the
desire to kill. The desire for blood.
    She got that from her father, and from her fucking mother.
Whoever the hell she was.
    He was fast, the hitman, but she was so much faster. For a
second, she lost him, amazed by his quickness even as she caught a glint from
something shiny on his mask and found him again.
    An ordinary human would have hit the dirt and begged for his
life, but her assassin, when he understood he’d become the prey, pulled his gun,
spread his feet, and aimed for her head.
    He missed—she was simply too fast.
    Seconds before she reached him, he slipped away again.
    He was like smoke. Like a fucking fog.
    She smiled. His attempt to flee had awakened something primal
inside her, along with the darkness. She gave chase, almost psychotic in her
grim playfulness, enjoying the fact that he was somewhat challenging.
    She needed to regain herself, needed to be in control,
needed to prove to herself the slayer attack wasn’t going to own her.
    It didn’t matter.
    Whatever it was, it was good.
    And she was no longer tired.
    “Where are you, baby?” she murmured, slipping quietly and
slowly over the ground, through tall grasses and densely-packed trees, her ears
tuned for the slightest sound.
    But she didn’t hear him—she scented him.
    The day was warm in the early evening sun, and the slightest
of breezes carried his familiar scent right to her.
    She turned to her right and stared into the line of trees.
“I smell you, my scary masked one. Are you ready to die?”
    She dropped her fangs.
    Then she was too shocked to move when he stepped out from
the trees, his hands in the air.
    “Wait,” he said, his voice raspy and quiet.
    “Wait,” she parroted, still surprised. “Wait for what?”
    “I want to make a deal with you.”
    “You’ll give me the salt to season you with if I make my
meal quick? Because that’s the only deal I’m willing to make with you, dude.”
    “If I hadn’t wanted to be found, you wouldn’t have found me.
And I didn’t want to kill you today—I just needed to slow you down. You don’t
ever want to underestimate me.”
    She lifted an eyebrow at his pride. “I’m going to kill you,
but first I’ll hurt you until you tell me where the ghoul is. Then I promise to
end your pain.”
    He wasn’t a bulky man, but he wasn’t small, either. The
black mask covered his face, and she wondered how he stood it on hot days. His
clothes were black as well—pants, pullover shirt, boots—and he had a couple of
weapons strapped to his body.
    Surprisingly few weapons for a man who’d been sent to kill a
monster.
    She tensed, ready to take him, but hesitated when he peeled
off his shirt. “What the fuck are you doing?”
    It was not the way she’d imagined her encounter with the
assassin going.
    But then she understood exactly what he was doing when he
stood a few feet from her, his shirt held carelessly in his fist. “I want you
to see why your threats don’t scare me. Why nothing you could do to me would
make me talk if I didn’t want to talk.”
    “Holy hell,” she whispered.
    The man’s body—every inch that she could see—was scarred.
Terrible scars. Disfiguring scars. He’d been tortured in ways she couldn’t even
imagine, and for, it appeared, most of his life.
    “Holy hell,” she said, again.
    He might have smiled. The mask moved a tiny bit where his
smile would have been. There was a thin slit over his mouth—not even enough to
show his lips. Most likely, they were scarred as well.
    His face would surely have been the face of nightmares.
    Heat wouldn’t have bothered him. He’d lived in hell. He
would have become