3

                                    

                                          
Heartless
When the world at last came into focus, the first thing Evaine saw was another pair of eyes looking back at her. They were so wide and full of terror, pupils dilated to the point that there was no color left in them. Those eyes belonged to a man whose face she could finally see now he was turned up toward the moonlight, and it was not one that she recognized. He couldn't have been more than thirty or so, with a strong-jawed face and a thick scar unevenly healed over his nose. His dark hair was cut close to the scalp, revealing little pink lines and patches grown unevenly over yet more scar tissue. Everything from his face to the spiked tips of his hair was splattered and dripping with some dark, thick liquid.
No, not just his face, Evaine realized with a glance. It was everywhere, covering the other man's body as if it had rained down on him. She could feel it on her own hands, her face, soaking into her clothes, making her skin cold and sticky like she had been lying in it for some time now.
A great puddle of that dark ooze was seeping across the dirt, slow as molasses. Careless for that warning bell in the back of her mind that said Stop! You don't want to see this! Evaine's eyes followed that trail, looking for a source. Across the small space of gravel and dirt between them, over the torn and matted remnants of what had been a black shirt, her gaze caught on something she couldn't quite understand.
It was a thin beam of light, seeming to be shooting right out of his chest, as if his heart could be glowing. It illuminated the shredded edges of his flesh, glittering across that liquid that seemed to gush out of him. For a long, sluggish moment, all Evaine could do was stare, until finally it clicked.
It was moonlight. Moonlight shining through him because there was a massive, gaping hole right there in the middle of his chest where his heart should have been. All that blood, covering him, covering her, it was his blood and his heart had been ripped out of his chest and he was dead on the ground right in front of her face.
The shock of realization sent her heart running off at a gallop, speeding away as if it feared it would suffer the same fate. She sucked in a breath to scream, a knee-jerk reaction to the sheer panic lighting up her nerves, but even the slightest ragged inhale flared up the most unbearable pain in her throat. A sore ache clamped down on her airway from the inside while a sharp burn bit at the skin of her neck, marking that place where a hand had squeezed...
Hot tears spilled down her cheeks, dread and revulsion churning a slow storm in the pit of her stomach.
Without warning, the body of the man beside her—her attacker, her would-be killer—was dragged across the dirt and out of her line of sight. The sound of crunching gravel alerted her to the footsteps of another person, someone who was very much alive. 
Moving her head brought an agonizing consequence to her neck, but she managed to shift herself with her teeth clenched against the groan of pain dying to escape her lips. Her eyes followed the lines scraped into the dirt by the body, and there she saw the shadowy figure of a man, pulling the heartless man by the feet like he was nothing more than a bag of trash headed for the dump. 
This new man, either her rescuer, a heart ripper, or both, dragged the body until it was safely out of view of the main road, behind the bushes growing wild around the wrought iron gate. With the body out of the way, he dropped the lifeless feet and stood upright to walk back the way he had come, back toward where Evaine lay motionless in the dirt. 
Frozen with terror, helpless to do anything to defend herself, Evaine could only watch and hold her breath when he stopped a few feet away from her. He bent over to pick something up from the gravel and held his hand up to examine it in the moonlight, causing a thin stream of blood to run down his arm and drip off at the elbow.