There were three bodies at her feet.
That in itself wasn't unusual. Gathering starseeds, by necessity, left a trail of corpses. Civilians, knights, senshi... She was used to death and to dealing it, by now. They weren't even very old, maybe a few years younger than she had been as a human. The unusual thing about these bodies was that they looked like they'd been put through a meat grinder, their faces and bodies chewed to a bloody mess that darkened the cement and the brick walls of the alley way.
A meat grinder, or a persistent assailant with a knife. Or maybe ten tiny razors at the tips of her fingers.
Cin frowned at her hands, feeling the tacky texture of the drying blood that covered them, something thick embedded under her nails that she couldn't identify. It splattered her coat and her corset, dotting her bare upper chest. It took only a thought to let the magic of her uniform whisk away the blood, but it did nothing to pierce the big, gaping blank space in her mind.
She didn't remember killing these men. A moment of rifling about her pockets turned up no starseeds she hadn't had before, so why she'd even killed them was a mystery. A waste, even, that she hadn't gotten starseeds from them before they died.
Cinnabar remembered stalking the alleys of the city, looking for likely prey. Ones that wouldn't be missed that she could simply lift off the street. She remembered being behind the Pretty Kitty club, but there was no sign of its tell-tale pink neons anywhere. Her first victim had drawn a knife on her and actually manage to stab through the thick meat of her thigh where she wasn't protected by scales, but the space between then and now was empty... glaringly so. She didn't know what had happened to the man with the knife, or where these three had come from, or even how she had gotten here.
A glance at the watch she wore almost religiously marked a couple of hours after the last check, though that had been in some vague time before the blank spot. In a smooth leap, she left the alley to the corpses, their life trickling away into the gutter. Boots crunching against the roof top gravel, the general paced to the edge of the building and paused there to look out over the city, a frown drawing a line between her brows.
Killing someone was not as worrying as not being able to remember doing it. The loss of control was upsetting, the missing time a thorn in the back of her mind, nagging at her. This had happened before, and she'd dismissed it... written it off as explainable. This time, it was harder. Was this a symptom of something? Was it something she could treat? Fix? Finding the cause of it would be the first step... deciding what to do about it would have to come after. Thus far, nothing untoward had happened, that she could tell. Maybe it was just... selective memory loss, of times of no import.
Maybe...
Cin dug a starseed out of her pocket and crunched it between her teeth, shuddering pleasantly at the rush of pleasure from the energy now singing through her veins. The hunger calmed and her mind cleared, her muscles loose and comfortable. The episode seemed less important with the stolen life energizing her and Cinnabar teleported away, leaving the blood bath for the police to find with its lack of evidence as to who, or what, had done it.
Word Count: 596
