Free The Dark Need by Stant Litore

of this night, he had not seen her actually cry.
    “What if I hadn’t stopped?” she whispered.
    Matt lifted his ax grimly.
    You would have?
She mouthed the words rather than spoke them, her eyes wide.
    He nodded. His throat tight.
    “Thank you,” she whispered. Gazed down at Richard’s body. “So long, I’ve felt—what he felt. The ecstasy when he killed. The madness.” Her eyes a sheen of tears. “It’s taken everything to hold back. From killing. From losing it.”
    “Some things you lose, you can never find them again,” Matt said softly.
    She looked at his eyes, then nodded.
    There was nothing peaceful in Richard Oslo’s face, even in death. He didn’t look like he was sleeping, or like he was forgiven. He stared sightlessly at the sky, his eyes still round with horror, his mouth a grimace. Death was messy and it was brutal, even when it was quick, and Matt had seen plenty of it. This night had reminded him of just how many he had seen die. Some whom he’d feared, some whom he’d loved. He glanced at the lake, out where the icethinned and became lethal, until finally it faded into water. Out where the stone artifact had vanished. “What do you think he saw?” Matt murmured.
    “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
    Above them, the sky was already pale with the dawn. They were very exposed out here, and there was blood on his ax. And there was a house behind them with a corpse in it and possibly traces that could point a cop in their direction. He would need to go through that bedroom carefully, and he’d need to get them walking back down that gravel road, keeping a sharp lookout for cars. And decide what to do about the victim. A call from a gas-station pay phone once they reached Darrington? Whatever they were to do, time was already sliding away.
    “Let’s find a place to bury your brother,” Matt said, “and get back.”
    “No,” she said. “So many years in the desert, in that barren place. He would have liked a sea burial.” She began pushing the body toward the water beyond the ice edge. “Help me.”

    It was a delicate business, sliding that body out to where the ice was thinner, without falling in themselves. In the end, Matt lay on his belly and carefully extended his ax over his head, using it to push the body out. Then the ice began to crack, and he crawled back hastily, grabbed Adette’s arm, and pulled her nearer the shore. The ice beneath the body and where Matt had been lying seconds before gave way, and Richard Oslo tipped and slid into the lake, his face disappearing last, those eyes glazed already in death and empty as though he had become one of his own victims. Then the water closed over his head, and he was gone, avampire given a coffin made of dark water, and there was only the crack and creak of the ice. Adette watched him go, then flipped her knife into the water after him. It vanished as though it had never been, as though there’d never been a reason for it.
    Matt pulled Adette to him on the thick ice near the shore. He lay there holding her, feeling her clutch him tightly. She was shaking. Not from fear, he knew.
    “You don’t ever have to kill,” he whispered to her, rubbing his cheek against her hair. She smelled clean, she smelled right. No trace of rot. Whatever yearning for blood had infected her, it had gone under the water with her brother’s corpse. “Not ever, Adette. It’s all right. It’s all right now.”
    She lifted her face. Kissed him fiercely, and her lips tasted of blood and salt, tasted of tears at last.
    “I would have k-killed him. I wanted to. I wanted to, Matt.”
    “I know. Shhh. I know. I know.”
    “Just hold me,” she whispered.
    He crushed her to him. Held her, the sobs shaking her small body. For the moment there was only the warmth of her and the trembling of her and the cry of one human being for another’s comfort, and everything else—the darkness of trees, the cold air, the flat tombstone of the sky over them—it all