Mother & Slaughter Excerpt
Chapter One
(The Horror Show)
The bitch wouldn’t stay down.
A hole in her side, blood in the sod, and one eye in a puddle by Eleanor’s foot. But she wouldn’t stay down. Sighing, Eleanor flourished the battle ax in her good hand and hefted it onto her good shoulder. She’d told Clive repeatedly not to put girls like this in the arena with her.
Twenty feet away, the girl was crawling backwards on her elbows in the mud. She used the broadsword she’d brought into the stadium to push herself to her knees, and then to her feet. She gripped her side and leaned heavily on the sword, and glared at Eleanor one-eyed across the bloody quagmire of the pit.
“Had enough?” the girl yelled, so the people in the stands could hear.
Eleanor almost laughed as she swung the ax from her shoulder. You had to admire the balls on these women.
“Enough what?” she yelled back, and pointed at the girl’s remaining eye with the ax. “Bits of you?”
The crowd laughed, and Eleanor glanced up as she took the ax through a practice swing. They liked that one, did they? She’d have to remember it.
Spinning the ax and kicking the eyeball aside, she advanced. Across the pit, the girl heaved the tip of the sword off the ground with both hands. She could barely lift it, and Eleanor had been at this long enough to recognize the paroxysm of a person’s final stand. Mud arced as the girl wheeled it down, hollering, and Eleanor dropped to her knee, throwing up her bad arm to block the blow.
Not bad arm, she reminded herself for the umpteenth time as she did. According to Roz, she wasn’t supposed to call it a bad arm. It was a wooden arm. Not even a fully wooden arm; she still had her shoulder and elbow, secured to the wooden forearm with screws and leather straps. Eleanor had nicknamed the wooden bit Pridwen, and while Pridwen was no good for wielding axes, it was actually pretty handy for blocking swords.
Handy. What a way to describe an arm that didn’t have a hand.
The blade lodged in Pridwen and stuck there, and Eleanor used the stump to yank the sword from the girl’s grip as a roar of approval went up in the stands. That was a move they’d seen her do before. It was a crowd favorite. The first few times she’d done it, it had hurt like hell. This year, she hardly felt it.
The girl stumbled, grasping for the sword, and Eleanor swept the ax one-handed at her knees. It went through her kneecap like…well, like an ax through a kneecap, and the girl sank wailing into the mud. Poor thing didn’t even see it coming.
Eleanor got to her feet.
She stepped back to put distance between them while the girl wallowed, clutching her leg. She stowed the ax on her back, and began working the sword – which was still stuck in her wooden arm – loose. It took her a minute: getting the sword out of Pridwen always looked much less cool than getting it stuck in there.
“How are you folks doing today?” she called up to the stands to fill the dead air. “Did we need this rain, or what?”
The crowd indulged her with a chuckle.
Tossing the sword onto the ground, she approached the girl, who was facedown, struggling onto her forearms. Eleanor used her foot to turn her over onto her back, then put that foot on the girl’s chest.
“It’s over.”
“Fuck you,” said the girl, and spit blood onto Eleanor’s boot.
“Girl, you are missing an eye and a knee. And your weapon.” Eleanor looked her over. “And quite a lot of your blood.”
The girl grinned. Which was an odd thing to do, given the circumstance, but not an uncommon occurrence. People did all sorts of strange things in the moments before the slay. The grin turned manic as she reached into a holster on her thigh and whipped out the dagger she obviously thought Eleanor didn’t know about. Eleanor lifted her foot long enough to kick the knife out of the girl’s hand, then put the foot back on her chest.
“Yes, yes. We’re all very impressed by your tenacity.”
The grin vanished. Now she understood what was happening; they always did eventually. This one had taken longer than usual. This one had been pretty determined. Eleanor watched defeat sink through her as whatever spirit was left inside seemed to trickle out. She went a bit limp under Eleanor’s foot.
Slipping her own dagger out of its sheath, Eleanor squatted and touched the point of the blade to the girl’s pale, blood-spattered throat. The girl’s remaining eye went as round as an onion.
“Please,” she whispered.
“That’s not how this works.”
The tip of the blade moved as she swallowed. She shut her eye and began muttering under her breath and Eleanor sighed and lifted the dagger. She scratched her brow with the hilt while the girl prayed, and when she was finished, she looked down.
“You really think he’s up there, huh?”
“She is up there, yes,” the girl replied, fiercely.
“I don’t know.” Eleanor set the knife back at the fragile skin of her neck. “Seems like if she was, she’d be doing something about this. Like, if it was a dude up there, doing nothing? That I could almost believe.”
The girl smiled weakly. “Sitting around in his undergarments. Eating cheese curds.”
Eleanor smiled back. “Exactly.”
The girl went very still. “Do you ever wonder why they make us do this?” she whispered. “Do you ever wonder why it has to be this way?”
“I used to,” said Eleanor, and levered the knife behind her windpipe.