Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

kill him before he reached the door, if she decided she'd been insulted, and partly because . . . there was something almost touching in her awkward attempts to reach out to someone else. Maybe for the first time in her life. It didn't make her one bit less scary, but. . .
    "You can talk to me, Rose, if you want," Brett said carefully. "What would you like to talk about?"
    "I don't know. This is all new to me. New territory. Is this what friends do?"
    "Sometimes. Don't you have any friends, Rose? No, of course not, silly question."
    "I never wanted friends. People complicate things. They want things from me, things I never understood.
    Friendship, love, sex; those things have always been a mystery to me. But now ... I want to know about you, Brett. Who you are, what you are. Who and what you were, before we met. Is that the kind of things friends want to know?"
    "Yes, Rose. You got it."
    Brett got ready to launch into his usual patter, the carefully rehearsed and polished parcel of lies he always trotted out when he wanted to impress a new woman in his life, but somehow ... he couldn't do that to Rose. She wouldn't have appreciated them anyway. So for once, and much to his surprise, Brett told the truth.
    Brett Random had grown up in the Rookery, with a mother who earned the rent on her back, and a whole succession of stepfathers who came and went as the mood took them. Sometimes they gave him
    money, and sometimes they hit him, but Brett never gave a damn either way. He took to the streets at an early age, looking out for himself because he was the only one he could trust, getting himself into every kind of trouble there was going, teaching himself the art of the con and the dodge, because that was what he was best at. And because he enjoyed it. He made himself a name to be reckoned with before he was out of his teens, while outside the Rookery he carefully constructed a dozen new names, faces, and identities, all of them ready for use at a moment's notice. He made and lost a dozen fortunes before he was twenty, and never missed any of them. He wasn't in it for the money. It was the chase and the challenge, and the thrill of the game that consumed him. That made him feel alive.
    But he never forgot his one distinct claim to true greatness; that he was descended from not one but two of the Empire's greatest heroes. He was a Random's Bastard, through his long-lost father; some wandering soul who'd impressed his mother so much she gave her only child his father's surname. It could all have been a lie, of course, just a line to impress his mother, but Brett didn't think so. He'd always known he was destined for greatness. He could feel it, in his bones and in his soul. One day he would be great himself. Whatever it took.
    You need dreams like that, in the Rookery.
    "So there you have it, Rose. The story of my life, such as it is. I am what I have made of myself. The prince of the con and the double bluff. How about you now? What awful and traumatic events divorced you from the rest of Humanity, and made you into the Wild Rose, the terrible and legendary killer you are today?"
    "I made myself what I am," said Rose. "No one helped me. I had a perfectly normal family, and a perfectly normal upbringing. Never actually rich, but always comfortable. I had parents who cared for me and were always there when I needed them. There's nothing in my dull, ordinary past to explain me. I'm just a cuckoo, a monster, a freak of nature. Blood and suffering and slaughter are meat and drink to me; it's music and laughter and sex. And all I ever needed . . . until now. When our minds touched, through the drug, I saw there was more to life than I thought. I saw things . . . that I've always wanted without knowing it. I saw love and sex in your mind, and for the first time it seemed to me that perhaps there was more to them than the bumping of bodies. There's comfort and sharing and peace of mind, and more. I want those things, Brett. I want to know them. Teach me about friendship. Teach me about sex. Show me."
    Oh hell, thought Brett. Why me, Lord?
    But you don't say no to a psychopath. So Brett reached out and took her hand in his. He pulled off the crimson leather glove and dropped it in her lap. She looked at him, curiously, dispassionately. Brett brought her bare hand to his face, and slowly trailed the tips of her long slender fingers across his cheek.
    And slowly, very slowly, guiding her hand with his, he moved her hand from his cheek