The Edge

Arian: Part Ten

The storm was definitely over.

Arian knew because Alistair had left him alone so long that Arian had actually fallen asleep. When he was awoken abruptly by a bright light in his face and a heavy boot nudging him in the ribs, his head felt stuffed up, the way it did when his nap had gone on just a bit too long. "Fuck off - !" he whined, his brain briefly thinking it was just Adoette shaking him awake for some reason.

No such luck.

"Have you thought things over?" asked Alistair Black.

The guy was naturally tall, but from this angle, he looked like a damn giant. Arian's brain got stuck on that thought as it rebooted. What was I supposed to be thinking about? Oh, right. Cassandra. The lady of the hour. Or the past few weeks, whatever. "I don't know," Arian mumbled. His heart started racing. He didn't have Matteo's foresight abilities, but he didn't need them to guess where this conversation might be going. "I really don't..."

"Arian." Alistair crouched down in front of him and pulled out a switchblade. An actual, honest to goodness switchblade. It was classy, to be sure, but so stereotypical. "You're not being difficult on purpose, are you?"

The blade flicked out, making the implied threat of that question a hell of a lot more explicit. Arian's gaze fixed on the blade. He had to swallowed past a lump in his throat before he could speak. "...uh, I'm pretty sure I'm smarter than that," he said. "You've already given me a lot of reasons to be helpful, and, uh...that blade's a couple dozen more."

"Oh, it's more than a couple dozen." There was that knife-like smile again. Alistair Black lifted the blade so its point was directly in front of Arian's eye. "Your sister. Have you given her any thought?"

It seemed like panic had scrambled what few brain cells Arian had left, because all he could think about was the switchblade. Seriously, why a switchblade? As if it wasn't bad enough this dude made a hobby of stabbing people, he really wanted to add additional charges for an illegal weapon? Then again, he didn't look like the kind of guy who gave a shit about legality. He also didn't look like the kind of guy who got caught for murder, which was one the scariest thoughts to cross Arian's mind.

"...I mean, I hate to disappoint, but my sister is..." Arian tried to lean back, but his head was already basically against the wall. There was nowhere else he could go. "Kind of an enigma. You know how it is with older sisters, right? Do you have any older siblings? Any siblings? Any family at all, or were you just...cloned in a murder lab somewhere?"

The rambling did get Alistair Black to laugh, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. Actually, strike that, it was a bad thing. It was a very bad thing, because Arian recognized that kind of laugh. Every person he'd heard laugh like that was a violent, mean son of a bitch who liked to crush ants and kick children. That made the knife at his eye all the more threatening. "Oh, you're chatty?" The knife moved away from his eye, but only so it could start tracing his cheekbone. "I should've known. I've met your type before. Think you have a silver tongue that can get you out of any situation..."

It was so painless that Arian didn't notice at first. Not until he realized the damp feeling on his cheek was definitely not tears. Good news: he wasn't crying. Bad news: the cut on his cheek stung like a motherfucker now that he knew, and it slicing so easily meant it was very sharp. "Sometimes it's true," Alistair said, pulling the knife away to examine the blood. "But most of the time, you're full of hot air. And you break. You break very easily."

Arian did not appreciate being called out like that by a stranger, that was for sure. He was also too terrified to say anything about it.

"Your sister really hasn't been in contact with you?"