Outsider by W. Freedreamer Tinkanesh Read Free Book Online Page A

Combat trousers,
as dark as the night, two hunter knifes hanging from a studded
leather belt. A confident pace. A female human with a crossbow in
her hands. The sure shot caught the throat of the magnificent
red-spotted green frog in the middle of the next leap.
    Bewildered, the frog fell to the ground,
croaking lamely. Fatally wounded. It slowly changed back, body
swapping its heaviness for female hips. Blood came out of the no
longer smiling mouth, life gone out of Gill’s eyes. Pat was on her
knees, a hand holding Gill’s right hand, an arm under the
motionless head. She looked at the stranger, shaking her head:
    “You killed her!”
    “It’s my job, sweetheart. I’m a bounty
hunter. Werefrogs are dangerous monsters. She was about to attack
you. You should be grateful!”
    “She was my mate!”
    The smirking bounty hunter, still bouncing
with satisfaction on the balls of her feet, was now at touching
distance. She never read the danger in Pat’s eyes. The tail of the
giant scorpion struck her between the eyes, lethal and
unforgiving.
     
     

CHAPTER SEVEN

    Riding the bus had never been Sid’s favorite
idea of getting from point A to point B. She discarded public
transports as unreliable and uncomfortable. It was an observation
based on personal experience. Cycling would have been more of her
taste, in a small town. She vaguely remembered being 9 or 10 and
riding a vaguely green bicycle round and round her neighborough,
hours on end. And then she stopped, stung by the absurdity and
uselessness of the wistful activity: in her solitary world, she had
imagined she was training for cycling championships around the
world, but in the real world she was never gonna do that.
Consequently the bicycle forgot itself in a desolated corner of the
parental garage and its vague green turned into a definite
rusty.
    Motorbike was her favored means of
transport.
    (She had actually been riding the top deck
of a bus, hating it for all its lack of worth at rush hour, when it
had trundled past a plethora of two-wheels sporting big engines.
One of them had winked at her with purple and yellow stripes, and
Sid’s heart had jumped back at it with painful longing within its
ribcage. Mercilessly the bus had taken her away, but the exile
could only be temporary; Sid Wasgo had returned to the scene of the
crime the very next day. She didn’t touch, she stared intensely.
She had no money, she had no license. At the time, in between
monthly gigs and rehearsals, she hated herself as a temp worker and
her co-workers disliked her green mohican. So the hate lessened.
What had been a survival mode transmuted into a means to an end.
Within a year or so, she had the license, the insurance, the purple
and yellow winker had been sold, and Sid was riding her dream bike:
a shiny black and bright red version of the purple and yellow
Kawasaki Eliminator.)
    But on that day of reminiscing, the misfit
with the freshly greened mohican was traveling by bus. Let’s face
it: riding a motorbike, even a Kawasaki Eliminator 250, was not
ideal with a freshly tattooed and thus sore leg tightly covered
with thick leather. Otherwise, she would have timed the route to
perfection instead of arriving early, but early enough to be
ushered by Pam the receptionist-cum-piercer into the cubicle where
Jessie, her friend and tattooist, was applying the finishing touch
to another masterpiece on the back of Elizabeth Ashtead, an
acquaintance and colleague of Sid, from the acoustic scene.
    Sid was always afraid of intruding, getting
tattooed was such an intimate experience for her, something so
special. She hadn’t undressed for anyone else in the last few
years. There was a touch of absurdity to her reasoning: after all,
she wasn’t the only one undressing for Jessie. Even so, the
relationship with her tattooist felt as special as a relationship
with a lover. This said, Sid had never felt intruded upon whenever
Pam had ushered any of Jessie’s friends into the cubicle while