Body Count

Ping. The knife shuddered in the rotting wooden table legs across from her. The entire table wobbled. She glanced at it warily, afraid it might collapse, but after a moment it stilled. Will and Cliff applauded.

"Shut up," she said, grinning as she strode over to her target and plucked the knife out. "It's not that exciting."

Will frowned at her halfheartedly from the other side of the room, where he stood next to Stone. Cliff snorted. "If any of us could do that, pigs would fly into the room and kill us all."

Shane stared at him. "Dark," she said. "And it's not hard," she stepped back again, next to Cliff, and drew her arm back. The blade of the knife was between her forefinger and thumb. With a flick of the wrist and a swift movement of her arm, the knife was once more flying through the air and landed with a soft thud in the crumbling concrete.

Stone spoke up for the first time in almost an hour of watching her practice. "Face it, boss," he said, getting to his feet and wincing as his limbs cracked. "You've got talent."

She stuck her tongue out at him - something she never would have done in front of anybody else. "Shut up, Stone."

She grabbed the hilt of the knife and tugged it out again. "I think I'm done for the day. What do you guys think?"

Stone shrugged. Will removed his bitten fingernails from his mouth and said, "Aww, no! I like watching you practice knife-throwing! It's fun!"

"You have a weird sense of fun, Will."

"No, he's right," Cliff said. "It's entertaining."

Stone looked over his shoulder at them from the doorway, slipping his mask on as he did so. "If she's done, she's done. Let her go."

Shane nodded appreciatively, and Will hunched his shoulders. Cliff glared at Stone's retreating back.

Shane watched them all leave, to go back to the minor duties and tasks The Joker might have for them whenever she had nothing for them to do. This had happened more than often lately, because she was spending more and more time tossing her knife around. It helped her ease her own nerves, by having something to do, and it also brought back fond memories - which she was surprised didn't hurt.

Knife-throwing was one of those things Shane had enjoyed doing when she was a regular teenager. She often brought a small pocketknife to band brainstorming sessions, and sat up against the wall of Dominic's garage while flinging the weapon at the opposite wall. It had always helped her think straight, for some reason.

Her practices didn't always take place in the back room, like this one had. But she had grown tired of the audience that seemed to accumulate whenever she pulled a knife out of her pocket. Goons with different clown masks and tattoos tended to crowd around her, watching the knife travel from her hand to the wall to her hand to a table to her hand to a beam and back again. What Will and Cliff said summed it all up: it was, indeed, entertaining for them to watch. She'd even earned full blown applause from a crowd one day, maybe two weeks ago now - a week after her chat with Daemyn - when she'd hit a particularly small and distant target spot on.

She didn't let it disturb her. She thought, now, that having a skill such as this would be practical for her new lifestyle. She believed that she was finally coming to terms with her being an outlaw, an outcast to society, and this was a good way to begin. Having defensive - or offensive - talent couldn't hurt.

Now, as she strolled absentmindedly out onto the main floor, she automatically began seeing things as small and insignificant targets. Would she be able to hit that discarded clown mask near the door? Would that window frame shatter if she dared try and reach it? Would anybody care if she shattered that potted plant on the wall? Blinking slowly, her arm raised behind her back, she threw the knife at the door frame. The blade embedded itself in the wood and stayed there.

Immediately, as if drawn by a gravitational force created by her and the knife she now pulled back out of the door, a small group of clowns began to amble towards her. She rolled her eyes.

It was about fifteen minutes later, and she had an undeniably enthralled audience, and her knife - the knife that read Princess on the side - was quivering inches from a goon's feet that a break in the crowd appeared.

The Joker was forcing his way through the onlookers, most of which were scattering nervously. She could see why - he was carrying a pistol at his side.

"I can see you've been practicing, Princess," he said, coming to a slow halt at her side. He glanced down at the knife dangling loosely at her side. "And Princess it is!"

She looked down at it, too. Said nothing.

"Since you're practicing with that," he said, nodding at the blade, "I think you should ... broaden the horizons a little bit." He held the gun out to her.

She blinked, her free hand reaching up slowly to take the weapon. It was cold against her skin, oddly shaped, unfamiliar in her hands. "You think I can use a gun?" she said, somewhat taken aback.

"Well, of course," he said. "That, Princess, is a 1970 HK VP70Z 18-round semi-automatic burst capable pistol."

She stared at him. She knew next to nothing about guns, other than what they looked like and that they made loud noises when the trigger was pulled.

He rolled his eyes. He pivoted so he was standing behind her, and grabbed her forearms with both of his hands. He raised her arms until they were level with her eyes. "That's it ... both hands ..." She grasped the gun with the other hand. "Good ... now. See that mask over there?" He indicated the distant mask she contemplated shooting earlier, and she nodded. "I want you to hit the left eye. You don't have to do anything other than pull the trigger."

She stared at the mask, which suddenly seemed very far away. Without hesitating to worry or think anything through, she pulled the trigger.

The kickback, which she had expected, still caught her off guard. Her torso jerked back into The Joker. She heard his foot slide back a few inches on contact. But that's not what caught her attention.

The clown mask, which had been leaning up against the wall, was now smoking slightly from the upper length of it. When she could see, she saw that the left eye was much larger than it had been before.

"Wow," they said simultaneously.

And then he was composed.

He stepped away from her, circled her, and stopped. "Don't worry about the ... the little things. You'll only ever have to use that as a last resort. If you're in danger." He paused, grinning up at the ceiling. "And we both know knifes are more fun."

As he fell silent, she looked at the foreign weapon in her hands, wondering why she could use it so well. She also wondered why a pistol was necessary, and whether danger was on the way. After nearly four months with The Joker, was something really life threatening finally about to happen? She felt herself oddly excited and terrified at the prospect.

And then he spoke, very quietly.

"Princess," he said, in his dangerously oily voice. "Do you remember what I said a few weeks ago? About your ... your screams?"

She nodded, shuddering.

He leaned closer, but not so much that they touched. "Your screams still make me feel good."