Beautiful Monster, Chapter 19
When the bonfire died out and the morning sunlight beamed through the cave entrance, Tarja couldn’t tell if Windham was dead or simply just sleeping. She knew he wouldn’t be around for this battle to come due to his horse injuries. It was one woman versus an entire company of Paladin Cross soldiers, who no doubt wanted her blood smeared across their armor. They may have had her grossly outnumbered, but two things they didn’t teach at Paladin Cross very well were ingenuity and creativity. Those attributes required independent thinking, which Rinehart was never a big fan of.
Tarja whispered, “I love you” to Windham before planting a kiss on his unconscious forehead. Maybe he would wake up, maybe he wouldn’t. But this wasn’t the time to breakdown and give up. She grabbed her satchel full of massage oils and “went to work” on the forest around her. Paladin Cross knew about her past as a massage therapist (hence all the happy ending jokes that made her shudder). They would most likely use tortured pit bulls to try and sniff out her scent, which was why she went around the forest and lathered peppermint and jasmine oil over various traps she set. She secretly hoped none of the traps would endanger the animals, but was cautious enough not to let those hopes get too high. Poor things.
This elaborate plan took a half hour to complete and Tarja didn’t know exactly how many Paladin Cross knuckleheads would fall for the traps. Did she set enough? Would it buy her enough time to get Windham and herself out of there in one piece? These thoughts raced through her mind over and over again as she crouched underneath a bush near the cave where she left Windham. Referring to Rinehart, she said under her breath, “Come on, you frog-eyed, leather-faced motherfucker, show yourself!”
She didn’t have to wait long to listen to the sounds of metal boots clomping across the ground and dogs sniffing the air around them. Tarja poked her head slightly over the bush to see the forest swarming with Paladin Cross warriors, all of them with dogs leading the way. She closed her eyes and said a silent prayer to whoever was up there that the soldiers didn’t find her location. The sounds of dogs snarling and men barking orders at each other grated her ears. Her heart thundered in her ears while sweat poured off of her one trickle at a time. This was what it was like to try and outrun the past. Goddamn it, where were those mushrooms?
“I found her!” one of the soldiers shouted. Tarja gasped deeply, but only to find that the soldier and his dog were snared in a leather net. The soldier panicked while his dog went ape shit and chewed through his skin like a rare steak. “Get off of me! Goddamn it, dog!” he whined in vain only to have his throat torn out by the traumatized dog.
Soldier after soldier fell victim to their dogs’ confused searches. One soldier had wooden spikes jammed in his face, causing the dog to flee in terror. Another soldier had his chest caved in by a swinging ram. Another fell into a deep hole covered with leaves. Yet another had his ankle snared in a rope that hung him upside down. The dogs finally figured out that the jig was up and barked relentlessly while blazing around the forest. The screams of trapped soldiers only worsened their anxiety, along with the remaining soldiers. There still looked to be quite a few of them.
“Fuck the stupid dogs!” shouted a familiar authoritarian voice. “Spread out and find those two bitches! They’ve been playing us all along!” With a sense of urgency, the soldiers drew their weapons and scattered across the forest blindly searching for their targets, the scents of massage oil most likely giving them bigger headaches than Rinehart’s voice.
“Bingo!” whispered Tarja as she spotted Rinehart standing back while his underlings did all the work. The obnoxious leader thought this would be a good time to roll a cigar and start puffing away. “Typical,” Tarja said to herself while shaking her head. She wanted nothing more than to bash his brains in with her staff, which in her mind wouldn’t create too big of a mess. But patience was the key. She laid low and allowed the soldiers to dart around all over creation while trying to avoid the wrath of scared dogs and any other trap she might have set.
After a while of men screaming like warriors while others screamed bloody murder, Rinehart found himself all alone in the forest enjoying his cigar. “Keep it down, you low-grade morons!” he shouted. “I’m trying to have a smoke here! If I have to burn down this whole fucking forest to shut you faggots up, I will!”
He loved that F-word a little too much, Tarja thought to herself. While Rinehart’s men were trying to outrun their own fates, Miss Rikkinen tiptoed from tree to tree with her wooden staff primed and ready. The fat man looked so oblivious, lost in the enjoyment of tobacco blackening his lungs. All the more reason for Tarja to get closer. Another tree. Another. And another. She could feel her heart thumping yet again, but this time for the excitement of finally cracking her former boss across the skull with one stiff shot. That’s all would take. But then in trying to steady her nerves with a shallow breath, she took in too much smoke and gave her position away with a cough.
“Why you little bitch!” grunted Rinehart as he threw a bladed punch towards Tarja’s face, only to have her dodge out of the way. The Paladin Cross leader ripped the punching dagger out of the tree and started throwing more wild haymakers. Tarja blocked every punch by whacking the boss’s fingers with her staff. The fat man didn’t care if his knuckles were red; he kept swinging anyways.
It was Tarja’s turn to attack as she swept low and whacked Rinehart in the thigh, doing minimal damage and earning little more than a sadistic grin. The bladed punches came faster and more frequently and Tarja’s blocks and dodges came slowly enough to earn her a gash across her other cheek, to match the one given to her by Christian Savage. The drops of blood sent wild heat through Tarja’s veins as she gave several staff shots to Rinehart’s ribs and back, also to no avail.
She went for a kill strike to the dome only to have her weapon hooked. Rinehart pulled her closer and stamped out his fiery cigar in her right eye, causing blistering screams to erupt from her vocal chords. She dropped her weapon and rolled around on the ground holding her wound, tears of pain sending heat waves through her head. She secretly wished for a visit from the angel of death, the pain was so agonizing.
“You should have stuck to giving hand jobs on massage tables, sweetheart!” growled Rinehart as he leaned down with his fist raised to the sky. “I got to be honest with you, pumpkin: hell doesn’t smell like lavender and peppermint. It smells like shit. It smells like blood. It smells like dude nectar. If you thought Windham had it rough in Shelly’s castle, oh-ho-ho-ho, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Goodbye, you dirty slut!” Out of her one good eye, all Tarja could see was a sharp fist crashing down upon her.
In between ashes and dead memories, out of her bad eye she saw a leather whip flying by and lashing Rinehart in his own eyes. His face nearly exploded with bloody pain. Screams resulted in splashes of crimson color all over Tarja’s already fucked up face. Breathing intensely in between moans of pain, Tarja rolled over and saw Windham standing there in little more than leather pants and bare feet.
This was an entirely different Windham than she was accustomed to seeing. This was a frightening, insane Windham with foam oozing from his mouth in shades of white, beige, and red. This was a demon on earth with red streaks pouring down his eyeballs and nose. This was a beautiful monster who seethed and growled like a grizzly bear waiting for its next meal. Tarja wanted to close her eyes and shut this version of her boyfriend out, but the cigar stain hurt too fucking badly.
Instead she watched Windham finish the job on Rinehart, whipping the fat man’s now exposed back with vitriol in his every word. “You sold me out!” TWHACK! “You wanted me to fail!” TWHACK! “You hate everything about me!” THWACK! “I martyred myself for you!” THWACK! “I built my life around Paladin Cross!”
The whiplashes came more frequently and in more violent volumes until all that was left of Rinehart’s back was a volcano of blood and shattered bones. Needless to say, he was dead from excessive blood loss. Some of that blood puddle oozed towards Tarja’s mouth and she felt like puking at that moment.
She lifted her head up and saw out of her good eye Windham dropping to his knees and shaking badly. The foam in his mouth poured like a Zen fountain. The blood in his eyes pooled up to where his face almost mirrored his victim’s corpse. When his chest finally hit the ground, he shook even harder, prompting Tarja to fight through her eye pain and sit beside him. She rolled her boyfriend over and tried to steady him.
“Windham! Windham, don’t die on me!” she begged and pleaded. “You have to fight, damn it! You have to fight for us! Don’t let a couple of fucking mushrooms do this to you! Please!” The elf’s back bounced against the ground the more Tarja tried to stabilize him. “Fight for me, Windham! Fight! Don’t you fucking die! Wake up! Wake up, you fucking idiot!” Except he didn’t wake up. The convulsing eventually stopped and the rest of Windham’s foam flowed out along with the blood in his eyes. He was motionless on the ground without a single parting word for his girlfriend. He finally got what he wanted: permanent peace from the hell in his mind, but at the expense of his life.
“No…No…NO!” shouted Tarja as she pounded Windham’s chest in her own emotional version of CPR. His heart wouldn’t restart. His loving thoughts wouldn’t come back. His body stiffened while his soul departed this world forever. All Tarja could do was lay her head across Windham’s battered chest and unleash her tears despite the ashes that invaded her vision. The black tears had become more disgusting to her than Windham’s red ones.
“Any last words, honey-bunny?” said one of the many soldiers that now surrounded the sorrowful Tarja Rikkinen. All of them had blades drawn. All of them had sadistic stares on their faces. All of them could pounce on her at a moment’s notice and shred her to pieces.
Tarja stood up and faced these warriors not with fear, defeat, or sorrow, but with conviction. She furrowed her eyebrows at them with no attention paid to the burning sensation in her right eye. The pain of losing what she loved was more agonizing than a cigar to the face. As far as she was concerned, the angel of death was her new romantic love. “As a matter of fact, I do have last words.” She kicked Rinehart’s dead body over to face his now sullen soldiers. “You’re all free.”
Tarja whispered, “I love you” to Windham before planting a kiss on his unconscious forehead. Maybe he would wake up, maybe he wouldn’t. But this wasn’t the time to breakdown and give up. She grabbed her satchel full of massage oils and “went to work” on the forest around her. Paladin Cross knew about her past as a massage therapist (hence all the happy ending jokes that made her shudder). They would most likely use tortured pit bulls to try and sniff out her scent, which was why she went around the forest and lathered peppermint and jasmine oil over various traps she set. She secretly hoped none of the traps would endanger the animals, but was cautious enough not to let those hopes get too high. Poor things.
This elaborate plan took a half hour to complete and Tarja didn’t know exactly how many Paladin Cross knuckleheads would fall for the traps. Did she set enough? Would it buy her enough time to get Windham and herself out of there in one piece? These thoughts raced through her mind over and over again as she crouched underneath a bush near the cave where she left Windham. Referring to Rinehart, she said under her breath, “Come on, you frog-eyed, leather-faced motherfucker, show yourself!”
She didn’t have to wait long to listen to the sounds of metal boots clomping across the ground and dogs sniffing the air around them. Tarja poked her head slightly over the bush to see the forest swarming with Paladin Cross warriors, all of them with dogs leading the way. She closed her eyes and said a silent prayer to whoever was up there that the soldiers didn’t find her location. The sounds of dogs snarling and men barking orders at each other grated her ears. Her heart thundered in her ears while sweat poured off of her one trickle at a time. This was what it was like to try and outrun the past. Goddamn it, where were those mushrooms?
“I found her!” one of the soldiers shouted. Tarja gasped deeply, but only to find that the soldier and his dog were snared in a leather net. The soldier panicked while his dog went ape shit and chewed through his skin like a rare steak. “Get off of me! Goddamn it, dog!” he whined in vain only to have his throat torn out by the traumatized dog.
Soldier after soldier fell victim to their dogs’ confused searches. One soldier had wooden spikes jammed in his face, causing the dog to flee in terror. Another soldier had his chest caved in by a swinging ram. Another fell into a deep hole covered with leaves. Yet another had his ankle snared in a rope that hung him upside down. The dogs finally figured out that the jig was up and barked relentlessly while blazing around the forest. The screams of trapped soldiers only worsened their anxiety, along with the remaining soldiers. There still looked to be quite a few of them.
“Fuck the stupid dogs!” shouted a familiar authoritarian voice. “Spread out and find those two bitches! They’ve been playing us all along!” With a sense of urgency, the soldiers drew their weapons and scattered across the forest blindly searching for their targets, the scents of massage oil most likely giving them bigger headaches than Rinehart’s voice.
“Bingo!” whispered Tarja as she spotted Rinehart standing back while his underlings did all the work. The obnoxious leader thought this would be a good time to roll a cigar and start puffing away. “Typical,” Tarja said to herself while shaking her head. She wanted nothing more than to bash his brains in with her staff, which in her mind wouldn’t create too big of a mess. But patience was the key. She laid low and allowed the soldiers to dart around all over creation while trying to avoid the wrath of scared dogs and any other trap she might have set.
After a while of men screaming like warriors while others screamed bloody murder, Rinehart found himself all alone in the forest enjoying his cigar. “Keep it down, you low-grade morons!” he shouted. “I’m trying to have a smoke here! If I have to burn down this whole fucking forest to shut you faggots up, I will!”
He loved that F-word a little too much, Tarja thought to herself. While Rinehart’s men were trying to outrun their own fates, Miss Rikkinen tiptoed from tree to tree with her wooden staff primed and ready. The fat man looked so oblivious, lost in the enjoyment of tobacco blackening his lungs. All the more reason for Tarja to get closer. Another tree. Another. And another. She could feel her heart thumping yet again, but this time for the excitement of finally cracking her former boss across the skull with one stiff shot. That’s all would take. But then in trying to steady her nerves with a shallow breath, she took in too much smoke and gave her position away with a cough.
“Why you little bitch!” grunted Rinehart as he threw a bladed punch towards Tarja’s face, only to have her dodge out of the way. The Paladin Cross leader ripped the punching dagger out of the tree and started throwing more wild haymakers. Tarja blocked every punch by whacking the boss’s fingers with her staff. The fat man didn’t care if his knuckles were red; he kept swinging anyways.
It was Tarja’s turn to attack as she swept low and whacked Rinehart in the thigh, doing minimal damage and earning little more than a sadistic grin. The bladed punches came faster and more frequently and Tarja’s blocks and dodges came slowly enough to earn her a gash across her other cheek, to match the one given to her by Christian Savage. The drops of blood sent wild heat through Tarja’s veins as she gave several staff shots to Rinehart’s ribs and back, also to no avail.
She went for a kill strike to the dome only to have her weapon hooked. Rinehart pulled her closer and stamped out his fiery cigar in her right eye, causing blistering screams to erupt from her vocal chords. She dropped her weapon and rolled around on the ground holding her wound, tears of pain sending heat waves through her head. She secretly wished for a visit from the angel of death, the pain was so agonizing.
“You should have stuck to giving hand jobs on massage tables, sweetheart!” growled Rinehart as he leaned down with his fist raised to the sky. “I got to be honest with you, pumpkin: hell doesn’t smell like lavender and peppermint. It smells like shit. It smells like blood. It smells like dude nectar. If you thought Windham had it rough in Shelly’s castle, oh-ho-ho-ho, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Goodbye, you dirty slut!” Out of her one good eye, all Tarja could see was a sharp fist crashing down upon her.
In between ashes and dead memories, out of her bad eye she saw a leather whip flying by and lashing Rinehart in his own eyes. His face nearly exploded with bloody pain. Screams resulted in splashes of crimson color all over Tarja’s already fucked up face. Breathing intensely in between moans of pain, Tarja rolled over and saw Windham standing there in little more than leather pants and bare feet.
This was an entirely different Windham than she was accustomed to seeing. This was a frightening, insane Windham with foam oozing from his mouth in shades of white, beige, and red. This was a demon on earth with red streaks pouring down his eyeballs and nose. This was a beautiful monster who seethed and growled like a grizzly bear waiting for its next meal. Tarja wanted to close her eyes and shut this version of her boyfriend out, but the cigar stain hurt too fucking badly.
Instead she watched Windham finish the job on Rinehart, whipping the fat man’s now exposed back with vitriol in his every word. “You sold me out!” TWHACK! “You wanted me to fail!” TWHACK! “You hate everything about me!” THWACK! “I martyred myself for you!” THWACK! “I built my life around Paladin Cross!”
The whiplashes came more frequently and in more violent volumes until all that was left of Rinehart’s back was a volcano of blood and shattered bones. Needless to say, he was dead from excessive blood loss. Some of that blood puddle oozed towards Tarja’s mouth and she felt like puking at that moment.
She lifted her head up and saw out of her good eye Windham dropping to his knees and shaking badly. The foam in his mouth poured like a Zen fountain. The blood in his eyes pooled up to where his face almost mirrored his victim’s corpse. When his chest finally hit the ground, he shook even harder, prompting Tarja to fight through her eye pain and sit beside him. She rolled her boyfriend over and tried to steady him.
“Windham! Windham, don’t die on me!” she begged and pleaded. “You have to fight, damn it! You have to fight for us! Don’t let a couple of fucking mushrooms do this to you! Please!” The elf’s back bounced against the ground the more Tarja tried to stabilize him. “Fight for me, Windham! Fight! Don’t you fucking die! Wake up! Wake up, you fucking idiot!” Except he didn’t wake up. The convulsing eventually stopped and the rest of Windham’s foam flowed out along with the blood in his eyes. He was motionless on the ground without a single parting word for his girlfriend. He finally got what he wanted: permanent peace from the hell in his mind, but at the expense of his life.
“No…No…NO!” shouted Tarja as she pounded Windham’s chest in her own emotional version of CPR. His heart wouldn’t restart. His loving thoughts wouldn’t come back. His body stiffened while his soul departed this world forever. All Tarja could do was lay her head across Windham’s battered chest and unleash her tears despite the ashes that invaded her vision. The black tears had become more disgusting to her than Windham’s red ones.
“Any last words, honey-bunny?” said one of the many soldiers that now surrounded the sorrowful Tarja Rikkinen. All of them had blades drawn. All of them had sadistic stares on their faces. All of them could pounce on her at a moment’s notice and shred her to pieces.
Tarja stood up and faced these warriors not with fear, defeat, or sorrow, but with conviction. She furrowed her eyebrows at them with no attention paid to the burning sensation in her right eye. The pain of losing what she loved was more agonizing than a cigar to the face. As far as she was concerned, the angel of death was her new romantic love. “As a matter of fact, I do have last words.” She kicked Rinehart’s dead body over to face his now sullen soldiers. “You’re all free.”
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