The Thin Red Line
"It would be so convenient if you'd just Buffy-ise," Scarlet says, almost conversationally. "Turn to dust and blow away on the wind, never to return. Or disintegrate within a few hours. I'd even accept bursting into flames at the first touch of the sun. But no."
Scarlet carefully turns her head and spits. "You just stack up like firewood, messing up the landscape and leaking fluids everywhere."
She drags the back of her hand over her lips and eases down so she can wipe the bloody smears on the dew-slick grass. Her head falls forward and her hair spills over her shoulder.
She stays like that, concentrating on the rhythm of her breathing, on the coldness of the earth beneath her palms, as the minutes slide by. Eventually she draws one last shuddering breath and flips her hair back. Black as turkish coffee, her eyes narrow on the slender silver device to the right and she pounces on the phone, jabbing viciously at the numbers.
The phone rings and she straightens, features sharpening as the limbo of message bank looms. A blurry hello echoes over the line and she grins, needle-sharp fangs popping. "Xypher, wake up. You might want to consider adding a warning label, something like twelve second delay to your little flash incendiaries."
"Oh."
Scarlet pulls the phone from her ear and scowls at the bright blue screen. She shakes it twice, quick hard flexes of her wrist, before lifting it back to her ear. "Oh," she mimics. "Is that the best you can do?"
"Oh, merde?"
"Yeah, you keep practising," she drawls. She snaps the phone off, shoves it into her back pocket. "Bloody lab rat. Inconsistently mad scientist. Vaffanculo."
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