I was flattered. I truly was. No one had ever called me loathsome before.
"If I'm loathsome," I said, "what does that make you? Oh, wait, don't tell me, I already know. A two-faced backstabbing bitch, right?"
The next thing I knew, she'd pulled that knife from her sleeve and was once more pointing it at my throat.
"I will not stab you in the back," Maria assured me. "It is your face I intend to carve."
"Go ahead," I said. I reached out and seized the wrist of the hand that was clutching the knife. "You want to know what your big mistake was?" She grunted as, with a neat move I'd learned in tae kwan do, I twisted her arm behind her back. "Saying my losing Jesse was my fault. Because I was feeling sorry for you before. But now I'm just mad."
Then, sinking one knee into Maria de Silva's spine, I sent her sprawling, facedown, onto the porch roof.
"And when I'm mad," I said as I pried the knife from her fingers with my free hand, "I don't really know what comes over me. But I just sort of start hitting people. Really, really hard."
Maria wasn't taking any of this quietly. She was shrieking her head off - mostly in Spanish, though, so I just ignored her. I was the only one who could hear her, anyway.
"I told my mom's therapist about it," I informed her as I flung the knife, as hard as I could, into the backyard, still keeping her pinned down with the weight of my knee. "And you know what she said? She said the trigger to my rage mechanism is oversensitive."
Now that I was rid of the knife, I leaned forward and, with the hand I wasn't using to keep Maria's arm bent back against her spine, I seized a handful of those glossy black ringlets and jerked her head toward me.
"But you know what I said to her?" I asked Maria. "I said, it's not that the trigger to my rage mechanism is oversensitive. It's that people . . . just ... keep ... pissing ... me ... off."
To emphasize each of the last six syllables of that sentence, I rammed Maria de Silva's face into the roof tiles. When I dragged her head up after the sixth time, she was bleeding heavily from the nose and mouth. I observed this with great detachment, like it was someone else who had caused it and not me.
"Oh," I said. "Look at that. That is just so interfering and loathsome of me."
Then I smashed her face against the roof a few more times, saying, "This one is for jumping me while I was asleep and holding a knife to my throat. And this one is for making Dopey eat bugs, and this one is for making me have to clean up bug guts, and this one is for killing Clive, and oh yeah, this one is for Jesse - "
I won't say I was out of my mind with rage. I was mad. I was plenty mad. But I knew exactly what I was doing.
And it wasn't pretty. Hey, I'll be the first to admit that. I mean, violence is never the answer, right? Unless of course the person you're beating on is already dead.
But just because a hundred and fifty years ago this chick had had a good friend of mine offed, for no other reason than that he had very rightly wanted out of a marriage with her, she didn't deserve to have her face bashed in.
No way. What she deserved was to have every bone in her body broken.
Unfortunately, however, when I finally let go of Maria's hair and stood up to do just that, I noticed a sudden glow to my left.
Jesse, I thought, my heart doing another one of those speeding-up, skidding things.
But of course it wasn't Jesse. When I turned my head, what I saw materializing there was a very tall man in a dark mustache and goatee, dressed in clothes that were somewhat similar to Jesse's, only a lot fancier - like he was a costume party Zorro or something. His snug black trousers had this elaborate silver filigree pattern going down the side of each leg, and his white shirt had those puffy sleeves pirates always wear in movies. He had a lot of silver scrollwork on his holster, too, and all around the brim of his black cowboy hat.
And he didn't look very happy to see me.
"Okay," I said, putting my hands on my hips. "Wait, don't tell me. Diego, am I right?"
Under the pencil-thin mustache, his upper lip curled.
"I thought I told you," he said to Maria, who was sitting up and holding her sleeve to her bleeding nose, "to leave this one to me."
Maria was making a lot of very unattractive snuffling noises. You could tell she'd never had her nose broken before, because she wasn't tipping her head back to stop the bleeding.
Amateur.
"I thought she might be more amusing," Maria said in a voice laced with pain - and regret - "to play with."
Diego shook his head disgustedly. "No," he said. "With mediators we do not play. I thought that was made clear to you from the start. They are entirely too dangerous."
"I'm sorry, Diego." Maria's voice took on a whiny quality I had not heard before. I realized she was one of those girls who has a "guy" voice, one she uses only when men are around. "I should have done as you said."
It was my turn to be disgusted.
"Hello," I said to Maria. "This is the twenty-first century. Women are allowed to think for themselves now, you know."
Maria just glared at me over the sleeve she was holding to her bleeding nose.
"Kill her for me," she said in that whiny little-girl voice.
Diego took a step toward me, wearing an expression that told me he was only too happy to oblige his lady love.
"Oh, what?" I said. I wasn't even scared. I didn't care anymore. The numbness in my heart had pretty much taken over my whole body. "You always do what she tells you? You know, we have a word for that now. It's called being whipped."
Apparently he was either unacquainted with this expression, or he just didn't care, since he kept coming at me. Diego was wearing spurs, and they clanged ominously against the roof tiles as he approached.
"You know," I said, holding my ground. "I gotta tell you. The goatee thing? Yeah, way over. And you know a little jewelry really does go a long way. Just something you might want to consider. I'm actually glad you stopped by, because I have a couple things I've been meaning to say to you. Number one, about your wife? Yeah, she's a skank. And number two, you know that whole thing where you killed Jesse and then buried his remains out back there? Yeah, way un-cool. Because you see, now I have to - "
Only I never got a chance to tell Felix Diego what I was going to have to do him. That's because he interrupted me. He said, in this deep and surprisingly menacing voice, for a guy with a goatee, "It has long been my conviction that the only good mediator is a dead one."
Then, before I could so much as twitch, he threw his arms around me. I thought he was trying to give me a hug or something, which would have been pretty weird.
But that wasn't what he was doing at all. No, what he was doing, actually, was throwing me off the porch roof.
Oh, yes. He threw me right into the hole where the hot tub was supposed to go. Right where they'd uncovered Jesse's remains, just that afternoon....
Which I thought was kind of ironic, actually. At least, while I was still capable of thought.
Which wasn't for long, since I lost consciousness shortly after slamming into the ground.
CHAPTER 10
Here's the thing about mediators:
We're hard to kill.
I'm serious. You wouldn't believe the number of times I've been knocked down, dragged, stomped on, punched, kicked, bitten, clawed, whacked on the head, held underwater, shot at, and, oh, yeah, thrown off roofs.
But have I ever died? Have I ever sustained a life-threatening injury?
No. I've broken bones - plenty of them. I've got scars galore.
But the fact is, whoever - or whatever - created us mediators did give us one natural weapon, at least, in our fight against the undead. No, not superhuman strength, though that would have been handy. No, what we've got, Father Dom and I - and Jack, too, probably, although I doubt he's had an opportunity to test it out yet - is a hide tough enough to take all the abuse that gets heaped on us and then some.