beautiful imperfection

I hated making revisions to THE INFERNAL FAMILY. Every mistake I found was another sign that I was a bad writer. If I was any good at this I would have written a better draft in the first place.

Now that I’m revising IRONBANE, I find I’m mellowing out. If I’m making changes, it’s not because I should have done better the first time around. It just means I’ve learned something: I see now what I couldn’t see then. Mistakes are just opportunities.

(Sparked by the realisation that when your two antagonists have one plot role, one master plan and one compelling motivation-providing backstory between them, you probably only have one antagonist.)

What about you? How do you feel during revisions?

black moment fail

How can you tell when you’re an idiot? You make the same mistake twice.

During the first draft of my urban fantasy THE INFERNAL FAMILY, I nearly blew the third act by copping out. Failing to make things bad enough for my protagonist. Then I stumbled over the concept of the black moment, the lowest possible point at which all seems lost, and had a little epiphany. I ended up writing some of my favourite and most violent scenes -- a rampage of vengeful destruction that carved up most of the cast.

Guess what I did to IRONBANE? Yep. Blew the black moment.

In fairness, there is a black moment. The antagonists come together to cause a huge cascading series of disasters, which the protagonist has to fix alone thanks to what she did to her devoted companion. She comes up with a plan, but it’s horrific even by her standards. She’s terrified of what the antagonists will do to her, what she’ll have to do to her friends, what she’s becoming. There’s supposed to be a real danger of not being able to go through with it.

At this point, I apparently decided that we needed a flashback to a much scarier situation in which she successfully overcame her fear. Thus murdering any tension and burying it in a shallow grave. I mean, this black moment is bad, but at least it’s not that bad, right? If she faced that, she can face this.

Yeah, I’m a structure genius all right.

Happily, I think I can fix this. But I’m thinking carefully about how I can avoid black moment fail in the future, and I’m coming up with some rules of thumb. The black moment is only black enough (for my taste) if:

1. The protagonist is totally alone. Everyone they relied on must be dead, alienated or gone in some way. It should seem like the protagonist may never regain those close friendships.
2. The protagonist should be facing certain death.
3. The protagonist has to doubt themselves. You can be a hero in the face of certain death, but during a real black moment the protagonist can’t be a hero -- they can’t be proud of themselves at this moment. They have to be afraid, ashamed, despairing.
4. The black moment should be the worst the protagonist can remember. Period. If the protagonist has been in worse situations, the black moment isn’t black enough.

Maybe if I consult these rules when planning my next novel, I can avoid ruining the third black moment in a row.

What do you think, team? Is the black moment important to you? Do you structure black moments into your novel? Do you stumble across them by accident? Can you improve on my rules of thumb?

third draft, this time with 100% more snarkiness

Lately I’ve needed some time away from my urban fantasy THE INFERNAL FAMILY, so I’ve been focusing on revisions to IRONBANE. I feel like I need more time to prepare for the second most dramatic change in my urban fantasy’s history: adding a new point of view character.

Currently the story is shaped by the fact that the only viewpoint character is a trigger-happy borderline psychopath whose preferred method of communication is violence. Most of the other characters don’t trust him, so he’s excluded from key plot developments. Plus he’s not human and that limits who he can interact with. So I’m planning to supplement his story with a truckload of new scenes from the viewpoint of his smarter, sneakier, snarkier human partner. This is going to be a metric ton of work, but I hope it will solve a lot of problems:

• I always dreamed of having the protagonist’s partner infiltrate the bad guys using his evil devious mind. That wasn’t possible when the only viewpoint character was excluded. Now I can try that.
• My bad guys will have some much-needed screen time. I can show more hunters with names and faces and motivations. I can suggest what they’re doing when they’re offscreen. I can make things a little more complicated. I’m also going to add a new antagonist.
• A whole ton of plot I always imagined was happening offscreen never got onscreen due to viewpoint limitations. One late-stage revelation will no longer be at all surprising, but apparently it wasn’t surprising anyway -- one beta reader called it 40,000 words in advance!
• I’m looking forward to showing that the protagonist is as mystifying to his partner as the partner is to the protagonist. Neither has a clue what the other is thinking.
• The partner is clued-up in several key places where the protagonist is clueless. For example, the protagonist doesn't know the true story behind how everyone first met.
  
• I also want the two viewpoint characters to interfere with each other. The partner is prone to carefully-laid plans. The protagonist is prone to sudden explosive violence. The two should not mix.
• The second half of the novel is derailed by romance stuff. I’m hoping to add more plot.
• The novel has always been short -- the beta version is under 70,000 words. I'd feel more comfortable around 90,000 words.

The reason I’m thinking about this right now when I should be working on IRONBANE? I finally figured out something going on behind the scenes that the protagonist doesn’t know about, and it’s awesome.

Still not ready to resume working on THE INFERNAL FAMILY, but I’m getting there.

day four of holly lisle’s one-pass revision method

The secret purpose of these daily reports is to make me feel guilty about lack of progress. I was planning to pack it in and go to bed at midnight, with one pathetic chapter under my belt, but then I realised I would have to confess my failure. Again. So I got back to work.

Once again, I’m feeling a little wary. I’m just not finding that many problems. Places to tighten, absolutely. Continuity errors, often. Stuff I mentioned once and never again, sometimes. (I’m enjoying rediscovering elements I planned to make much more of but forgot.) But I’m currently editing the seventh chapter, and I still haven’t had to rip out this novel’s entire skeleton and wire in a new one. The dialogue is spiky, the conflict is tense, my protagonist is snarky and frequently horrifying, backstory is arriving bit by bit -- the Winter Queen just got her first mention. It’s mostly fine. And that in itself is bizarre.

By the time I got to this stage with THE INFERNAL FAMILY, I’d already done a spectacularly huge rethink -- characters, setting, genre, antagonist, entire species -- twice. I bled. I cried. I tore my hair out. Most of the novel was scrapped and rewritten from scratch.

I can’t shake the suspicion that by hunting piddling little continuity errors I’m rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. There must be an iceberg lurking under the surface. I can’t imagine a revision voyage without one.

Keeping the lifejacket at hand.

the psychology of bullying scenes, or: hug a bully today

Someone behind Alanna grabbed her. She spun. A tall, gangling boy of nearly fourteen looked her over, a sneer on his thick mouth. He had cold blue eyes and sandy-blond hair that flopped over his forehead.

"I wonder what this is." His crooked teeth made him spit his s's. Alanna wiped a drop of saliva from her cheek. "Probably some back-country boy who thinks he's a noble."

- from Tamora Pierce’s Alanna: The First Adventure, first book in the Song of the Lioness Quartet

Bullies. They’re everywhere. They insult Tamora Pierce’s Alanna of Trebond, they gang up on George RR Martin’s Jon Snow, they appear in at least half the works posted on the Young Writers’ Society. Whenever I read a bullying scene, I get a surge of indignation. Not for the victims -- for the bullies.

Victims are protagonists, they get names, faces and personalities, the reader is intended to sympathise with them. Bullies are stock characters imported straight from the Department of Manufactured Conflict: cardboard cut-outs, often unnamed, rarely characterised. Victims are lone heroes; bullies are cowards, so they hunt in packs. Victims get snappy comebacks; bullies whine and sneer. (Note how the bully in the Tamora Pierce scene is described as ugly. Remember, kids: ugliness = evil!) If victims don’t triumph now, winning over spectators in the process, they’ll get public and humiliating revenge later. Bullies remain despicable characters throughout the narrative, despised by the readers, the author and the other characters, unless the victim wins even them over with their awesomeness.

Poor bullies, they never win.

The classic lone victim vs multiple bullies scenario has power because it taps into a ton of underlying assumptions, myths and values:

• We admire the loner. Loners are powerful as individuals; only weak people and cowards, like bullies, have to co-operate.
• Bullies invariably provoke the conflict. They attack out of the blue, without provocation. This taps into the classic victim complex, the feeling of being unjustly treated. Real-world conflicts are much more nuanced; the victim in a bullying scene, and by extension the reader, doesn’t need to feel any guilt or reservations about their part in a conflict, because they’re clearly in the right.
• We see standing up against others as courageous. I wonder if this reflects a hostility to authority. Do bullies represent a tyrannical force the everyman hero has to resist?
• Faceless, nameless, characterless bullies are easy to read. They’re bad. They’re not like us. We can hate them without any reservations. Well-drawn bullies with genuine motivations for their actions are more challenging because they’re more like us. Could we be bullies? If we were in their situation, what would we do?
• Bullying justifies the victim’s retaliation. Under normal circumstances you can’t punch somebody who annoys you, but retaliatory violence by the victim against the bully is seen as fair, even where the violence seems disproportionate. I recently critiqued a story in which the protagonist permanently crippled a bully, ripping out his magic while he begged for mercy. The author and all the characters seemed to think that maiming is a justified response to bullying.
• Readers of the fantasy novels I’m talking about tend to be bookish people and/or geeks who were bullied for real as children. There’s a reason Snacky’s Law is so commonly invoked -- the same reason I noted so many bullying scenes posted on the Young Writers' Society forums. Bullying scenes are a way to safely re-enact the trauma of being bullied, with ourselves as sympathetic victims, leading to our retaliation against the bullies and our ultimate triumph. Fantasy ranter Limyaael, whose awesomeness I can only hope to emulate, complained in her “Author’s Darling” rant:

I often feel faintly sick when, reading through a fantasy story, I realize that the author is ... taunting the bullies who tormented her in high school. She doesn't want to actually talk to these people, or perhaps they're in the past, dead or out of contact, and she can't. So she takes the chance to create a character who's her, put her through the same situation, and say, "Nah-nah-nah-boo-boo!"

So I can see why writers resort to bullying scenes. It’s a cheap and easy way of building reader sympathy, and your typical reader is disposed to like and sympathise with victims of bullying. But I hate the lack of motivation. Why do bullies never have a legitimate reason to bully the protagonist? Forget legitimate, any reason would be a plus. Has the protagonist never done anything, accidentally or deliberately, or been thought to do something, that might make the bully want to get their own back? Does the protagonist always have to be 100% squeaky-clean and the bully 100% randomly malicious to ensure reader sympathy falls into its proper place? (God forbid that the reader should ever rethink who deserves their sympathy.)

In the George RR Martin example I mentioned above, teenage viewpoint character Jon Snow is the bastard son of a noble, despised by commoners and nobles alike. Thanks to his privileged upbringing in his father’s castle, Jon is an excellent swordsman and mercilessly thrashes his opponents in training, humiliating them to the point that four of them ambush him in an armoury to get their own back. Jon is working through the justified retaliation part of the bullying cliche when -- I love Martin so much -- somebody actually calls Jon out on his behaviour: Jon is using his privilege to unfairly and unnecessarily humiliate his peers, and if he keeps harbouring a raging victim complex, none of them are ever going to learn to work together. And it will be entirely his fault.

I was so thrilled I nearly cried.

Another example of effective bullying: the pilot episode of the TV series Merlin. The pilot episode features teenage Merlin interfering to protect a servant from a bullying lord. Merlin is promptly thrown in jail, then in the stocks. What saves this scene? The bully is Arthur freaking Pendragon. The hero is a bully. Arthur is handsome, snarky, ridiculously heroic -- and a self-centred ass. I love Arthur, and I love that they had the nerve to make their hero bully someone in his opening scene.

Suggestions for writing bullying scenes?

1. The purpose should not be to glorify the protagonist. Nor to make him look good in comparison to the evil bully.
2. Bullies need a good reason to bully. Stereotypically evil motivations like “He’s just jealous of the protagonist” aren’t good enough.
3. It is not open season on bullies. If someone makes insulting comments about the protagonist’s mother, the protagonist cannot legitimately chainsaw him to death.
4. It’s okay for the protagonist not to be squeaky-clean all the time.
5. Do not resort to making your victims beautiful and your bullies ugly as a cheap shorthand for good and evil. I swear, if I read another bullying scene in which the bully’s ugliness is lovingly described (like that Tamora Pierce scene) as a symbol of their nastiness, I will hunt someone down.
6. Therapy for the writer =/= effective fiction for the reader.
7. Don’t despise your own characters. It always shows.

(I enjoyed playing a little with bullying in THE INFERNAL FAMILY. My protagonist is continually harassed by his partner slash love interest, who thinks he’s a violent psychopath and kind of dumb as well -- all of which is absolutely true.)

What do you think? Have you noticed trends in bullying scenes in books or unpublished work? Can you improve on my analysis or my suggestions?

Further reading: Limyaael, “Breathing life into bullies”.

new year's resolutions for 2010

1. Graduate.
2. Start a publishing masters course.
3. Query THE INFERNAL FAMILY.
4. Revise IRONBANE.
5. Finish the first draft of DREAD MACHINE.
6. Panic less.

2009 writing year in review

I feel like a humiliating failure, so it’s surprising to look back on everything I’ve done in the last twelve months and say: 2009 has been a kickass writing year.

A year ago I was desperate. I hadn’t finished a novel in two and a half years. I’d put eighteen months, many bitter tears and at least 50k into my third novel, then titled EMPIRE OF HEAVEN, by the time I realised it was irreparably broken. Real writers knocked out a novel a year: I was a loser, a poser and a failure. I had a month’s Easter holiday in March, and if I couldn’t finish my novel in an entire month of writing full-time, I might as well give up.

Happily for my continued self-esteem, I ripped out the genre, setting and antagonist, rewired with new stuff, hammered out about 30k in less than a fortnight and finished what was recognisably THE INFERNAL FAMILY at the beginning of April. Narrow escape there.

Since my writing career consists of short bursts of writing interspersed with long stretches of doom, I spent the next six months ripping my hair out over revisions. I also wrote a query that everyone loved, workshopped the first chapter until it begged for mercy, and worked on my sweet and well-behaved epic fantasy IRONBANE. But mainly I whined a lot.

As Nanowrimo bore down on me like a freight train, I scrabbled to get a beta draft of THE INFERNAL FAMILY done and out to beta readers. I think I emailed it out with shaking hands at one minute to midnight on the last day of October. I even made the tiramisu of glory, my long-promised reward! Then I kicked Nanowrimo’s ass: hammering out over 75,000 words, finishing IRONBANE and kicking off my YA urban fantasy, DREAD MACHINE.

This story would threaten to have a happy ending were it not for realising that everything I’ve written needs to be insulted, ripped up and then burned.

So I guess I ended the year exactly where I started: swimming in a lake of despair near Mount Doom. Except this year I’m two first drafts, a second draft and a query to the good. I call that a win. :)

radio silence

I wrote off my novel. Bad investment, fit only for the trunk, no point throwing good time after bad. Right now I don't even want to see that pile of trash again.

So if I spend another week hiding in my room, watching TV marathons and feeling miserable, please forgive me. At the moment I can't remember why I ever enjoyed writing.

nanowrimo roundup: tastes like victory

So - I finished Nanowrimo.

November is known and feared by writers as National Novel Writing Month, a challenge to write 50,000 words during the thirty days of November. It's the month your caffeine and/or sugar intake spikes as you stay up until 4am every night cranking out wordcount: a month in which your life is ruled by the inexorable march of the target line on your wordcount graph.

Some smart friends of mine introduced me to Nanowrimo back in 2004. Nothing is more useful to a beginning writer than a track record of finishing novels, and I finished my first one on the 21st of November 2004, less than a week after I turned sixteen. Had to trunk that novel (and the next), and I crashed out of most of the following Nanowrimos, but I've had a ton of fun and met a truckload of people through Nanowrimo - starting with my dearly beloved writing group. So I scrambled to finish and send out my beta draft of THE INFERNAL FAMILY, dug out my stalled-at-30k epic fantasy IRONBANE, and hit the trail on the 1st of November.

On the fourteenth night I finished Nanowrimo, and on the fifteenth I finished my novel. So I'm distressingly smug right now, and also grateful to:

• All the friends who cheered me on, especially the Bristol and Bath Nanowrimo team who kindly tolerated my gloating at the write-ins.
• Auburn, who kicked my ass with her massive wordcounts, taunted me when I fell behind and took my eleventh-hour victory with grace.
• My wonderful betas, such as Amy Bai, who sent me brilliant feedback during the most insanely busy month of the year for writers.
  

And a final roundup with lots of lovely numbers:

• Hit 50,000 words on day 14.
  
• Total wordcount on day 15 = 53166 ...
  
• ... of which 27294 words were written between day 11 and day 15.
• Total wordcount for the entire novel = 86680.
• Daily average = 3544.

I've pictured my wordcount graph here for your amusement. Blue line is daily wordcount, yellow line is cumulative target, red line is running total.

The pretty colours in my wordcount graph are suggesting to me that I've built up a lot of momentum that it would be a shame if I wasted. So I plan to start a project that's been waiting patiently for over a year for me to find time and confidence - my YA urban fantasy, DREAD MACHINE. I have time, I have confidence, and I also have a secret weapon: the twifties. I know I'll be in good hands as I flail around with my first YA novel.

I can only hope that my fifth novel will be as easy as my fourth. :)

meeting new beta readers

Stages of meeting new beta readers:

1. Elation! Somebody's read my first chapter and wants to read on! I am God!
2. Excitement! Thank you so much for volunteering. I want to build statues to your awesomeness.
3. Nervousness. You're such a nice person, I don't want to disappoint you. I'm worried the rest of my novel might not be any good.
4. Panic. Oh my God, I can't send you this piece of trash, do I have time to rewrite from scratch?
5. Resignation. I am a fraud. Everyone will find out: it is inevitable. The quicker I hit the send button, the quicker I can end my inevitable humiliation.
6. Attempt to drown self in alcohol and After Eights.

I think I need to reread what I told myself when I sent my beta draft to readers for the first time.

the infernal family: now terrorising beta readers

Today I finally finished a beta draft of THE INFERNAL FAMILY.

I’ve revised from start to finish. Axed storylines. Added characters. Rewritten huge sections from scratch. And when I read through a final time and found myself changing only the punctuation, I knew I was done.

I suffer from writers’ fear. I fear that my work isn’t good enough. I fear that if I think it’s good, I’ll be disappointed. I fear showing my work to people that I respect in case it causes them to realise I’m an idiot. But I’m learning to ignore those fears - and I hit that button and mailed out the beta version to the first of my wonderful beta readers, my amazing writer friend Amy. And I’m glad I did.

In the meantime, as always in the terrifying gap between submitting work and receiving feedback, I’m remembering my five commandments for scared writers:

1. Good enough is fine. Perfect is for later.
2. Everything can be fixed.
3. This is the millionth draft. There will be a millionth-and-one.
4. People still love me even if they don't love my work.
5. At least it's spelled correctly.

(Dear beta version of THE INFERNAL FAMILY,

Hi there. I’ve waited a long time to meet you.

I know you’re not perfect. There are things I wanted to do with you that I couldn’t pull off, and scenes that still clunk after a million revisions. But there are things about you I love - things that made you worth working on. And if I wait for you to be perfect, I’ll be waiting forever.

So I’m declaring you officially ... good enough.

Go play with your beta readers.

Love,
your writer)

the evolution of a story question

Story question: the key question, set up by the inciting incident, that keeps the reader turning the page to find out the answer. I think this post by Annette Lyon at Writing on the Wall, and this post by Jordan McCollum, explain better than I could.

When I started revisions for THE INFERNAL FAMILY, I defined the story question as, "Will Johann rescue his friend's daughter?" But as I revised, I realised that saving the friend's daughter was actually symbolic of a larger question.

Having ditched his biological family (demon) and legal family (abusive), protagonist Johann believes that real family is something you choose with people you love: like the kid he raised and thinks of as his son, his close friend, and her daughter. This is the stable, loving family he's always dreamed of.

In the first 4000 words the antagonist kills his son and steals his friend's daughter, and the friend is so outraged by his part in her daughter's kidnap that she bails out. Bang. No family. If he saves his friend's daughter, maybe he can get his friend back as well, and then he can reassemble a family worth having.

So a better question is, "Will Johann put what's left of his family back together?"

Then I realised that that was too simplistic. 99% of fiction has a happy ending, and while I'm a fan of the apocalyptic tragedy endings, unfortunately the thematic elements of this novel constrained me to a happy ending. So you can confidently answer "Yes", to the story question. And I don't want the conflict to feel predictable. If you can answer the story question before you even pick up the novel, I think something may be wrong.

When I looked a little deeper - especially at how much at fault he is, or feels he is, for everything that happens in those first 4000 words (not to mention torturing people and being a borderline sociopath) - I realised a better question was, "Does Johann deserve to put his family back together?"

Not so predictable. (I hope.)

things I'll never win prizes for

Things I'll never win prizes for:

1. Beautiful prose.
2. Literary merit.
3. Originality.
4. Plot.

That said, when I reread THE INFERNAL FAMILY today, I liked it. In a clunkily written, non-literary, unoriginal, poorly plotted way. :)

teaser tuesday

Teaser from my urban fantasy, THE INFERNAL FAMILY. Protagonist Johann is back in the wreckage of his home to pick up the body of his murdered son.

(Here be bad language.)

*

By night the hall glittered with broken glass, smeared with blood gone black, the carpet stiff underfoot. It looked unreal enough that he could pretend not to recognise it. Must have been somebody else who’d let his son die here.

A trail of black footprints led upstairs.

“You put him to bed?” Nicholas said.

“I couldn’t leave him there.” His voice cracked for some stupid reason. “Not on the floor.” Like an unwanted thing, a toy Johann’d ditched when it broke.

He went upstairs. If he didn’t touch the footprints it wouldn’t be the same as before, as the weight of his son curled in his arms, fingers slipping from his shirt. So he could look into Marcus’ room and not see --

Johann stopped, feet stuck, couldn’t take another step. Nicholas said “What?” and looked over his shoulder, and went silent.

The body lay curled under the duvet, hair fair against the pillow. Johann couldn’t look at it, but it kept dragging his eyes back, displacing his memory of cradling his warm living son. Marcus couldn’t be a huddled thing under a duvet, dead long enough to stiffen, he’d been bright and brave and alive and this wasn’t real, Johann refused to let it be. He wanted Marcus back.

“When I first took Marcus in he, he wouldn’t sleep in the room I gave him.” The words spilled out, even though it was a stupid story and Nicholas hated personal stuff. “I’d find him curled up in a chair in the morning looking miserable. I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, maybe he was scared of me or something -- But later I found out his dad walked out on him. Just left one night and never came back. So he only wanted to sleep somewhere where I’d wake him if I left.”

God, Johann’d been so scared back then. Scared of hurting him. Scared of him leaving. Scared of this fierce need to protect him. It didn’t make any sense that Marcus would want to stay, and every time Marcus crept sleepily under his arm and tucked his fair head under his chin Johann thought it’d be the last.

“He never does that any more. Did. And I left him today. I left him while he was sleeping. What if he wasn’t really dead yet, what if he woke up and I was gone, and he thought I walked out on him, I didn’t want him any more --“

The words were running down into useless babble, so he stopped. It wasn’t right that he’d survived.

“Stark,” Nicholas said awkwardly behind him. Johann reached out and took hold of his arm without looking, grip too tight but not caring about hurting him, and just -- focused on what was real. What mattered. Not this thing that wasn’t his son.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Johann said.

Something moved downstairs.

Both of them froze. Streetlights poured between the open curtains, a tide of orange creeping across the bedcovers, Johann felt trapped in amber.

The silence resounded. Maybe he’d imagined the sound. He was already losing his mind, it wouldn’t be a big leap from there to hearing things --

A door shut.

Hunters. In his home. Where they’d murdered his son.

Everything else slipped through his fingers. Fury fired up, hot and savage, settling in the pounding of his blood and the curling of his hands into fists.

When he went for the stairs Nicholas barred his way, knife already drawn, light jumping along the edge. “Could be anyone. Neighbour. Police. Drunk idiots who --“

Johann slammed him aside and took the stairs three at a time. Empty of people, the skeleton of the house passed by in a blur, the walls its bones, doorways gaping like sockets. A shadow moved in the kitchen -- Johann burst into the kitchen feeling alive and full of fire, smashed aside the hunter’s pathetic attempts to defend himself and threw him into a kitchen cabinet.

Wood splintered. Glass rattled in its frames. The hunter fell onto the counter in a cascade of cabinet wreckage, rolled off the counter clutching his ribs, slid to the floor. Johann flexed his hands and the fresh cuts on his knuckles stung; he liked that, proof that he could still hurt people.

The kitchen was a mystery now, shadowed and streetlit, no longer home. “Marcus and I used to cook here,” Johann told the hunter conversationally, hauling him off the floor. “I was never any good at it, but Marcus enjoyed it. Flour everywhere.” Marcus used to sit at the kitchen table and reread the recipe with furrowed brow, ticking off with mathematical precision things he’d already added. For a moment Johann pictured him there, real enough to reach out and touch.

Johann slammed the hunter onto that table so hard something broke, wood or bone, he didn’t care. The hunter choked and couldn’t scrabble out of his grip. “Doesn’t happen any more. Since you killed him.” He flung the pathetic human down with a snarl. “My boy was smart. Aced all his exams, he liked studying, he wanted to go to university. He could’ve done, I would’ve figured something out, I -- He used to sit right here.” Johann broke that chair with his hands, sudden bunch of muscles, satisfying smash. Another memory broken.

The hunter gripped the counter and pulled himself off the floor. His other hand skittered out for a kitchen knife.

Johann didn’t care. “Go ahead. You should have killed me instead, I would’ve let you, why would I care, he was just a kid, he was my son --“

The hunter smashed a jar in his face. It spilled white, the stuff got in his eyes and burned. Salt. Then the hunter slashed him across the ribs -- shocking cold at first, then the cut burned, warmth seeping through his shirt.

Johann hit the bastard in the face and rocked him back against the counter. The bloody knife Johann ripped out of his hand; he wanted to stab and stab but that would be too quick, Marcus had suffered before he died. Johann slashed him instead, going for his face but catching his upflung arm, cutting and cutting, red lines running down and blood smearing everywhere, the taste of salt in his mouth and stinging his eyes --

“Stark, what the fuck are you doing?”

He spun and Nicholas stood in the doorway, cold and stern and out of reach, and for a second Johann choked on the red urge to hurt him.

“What is wrong with you?” Nicholas demanded, his accent sliding into a vicious extreme. “You can hear him screaming from outside the house. So can all the neighbours you just woke up, and so will all the police they just called, who will find us in a ruined house with a corpse!”

His heart hammered, the knife slash stinging, hands slippery with blood. Nicholas always talked too much, stupid words that meant nothing. “Scared?” Johann threw back at him.

Nicholas narrowed his eyes. “Give me that knife.”

The hunter slipped as he tried to get up. Johann stamped him down, fury hot and blind, wanting to smash him into a red pulp he could squeeze through his fingers. “No.”

“Then I’m taking it off you.”

“This is what you do to things that scare you, isn’t it.” Johann lifted the knife, liking his sudden tenseness, not quite a flinch. “You get in their faces and dare them to hurt you. Like you did to the angel.”

“Go ahead.” Nicholas stepped right in, startlingly close. “Dare you.”