The Night Market by Zachary Rawlins

killed everyone who got close enough,” the woman
said, shrugging with disdain. “Then you hid and yelled shit from behind the
rocks and I got bored. I was on my way out of here when I saw that girl in the
mask give you a hard time. That was interesting.”
    “What do you want?”
    “I wanna talk to her. Without company.”
    The men looked at each other uneasily and Yael
wondered what the woman could have done to make them so afraid. They seemed to
want to leave, but with the woman blocking the only exit, they didn’t know what
to do.
    “If we let her go, will you let us leave?” The short,
dark man who asked the question looked very concerned underneath layers of face
paint. “Without a fight?”
    “Well, I might,” the woman offered happily, standing
as if she had the whole day allotted for that task. “Fenrir doesn’t take talk
of eating him very well, though. He’s pretty hungry, too. I can’t promise you
anything.”
    The golden-skinned man spun on his heel, stabbing one
blunt finger in the direction of Yael so violently that she almost mistook it
for an attack and grabbed for her backup spray can. Smaller than the first, and
lacking the remote detonator, it would still probably stop him before he could
get to her.
    “We will leave. For now. But you are lucky that your
friend showed up when she did...”
    Yael never heard the rest of the sentence because that
was when she sprayed him, the vapor surrounding him like a cloud. He cried out,
a sound that died down as his throat closed, and clawed at his useless eyes. On
either side of him, men stared at each other in uncertain horror while the
woman behind them cackled.
    Yael wondered if she had done the wrong thing, if she
should have let the men leave after making their threats, because she thought
they might rush her en masse, trampling their fallen spokesman. Then they
seemed to realize there was no outlet in her direction, and turned and ran, one
after the other, for the mouth of the alley.
    The woman in red stood and waited, standing between
them and the exit. Just behind her, her dog whined with eagerness.
    The first had a length of pipe that he swung with
tattooed, heavily-muscled arms, while the short man behind him held kitchen knives
of different lengths in either hand, the blades chipped and jagged. The woman
ducked the pipe swinging for her head without even taking her hands out of her
pockets, though it came close enough to knock her hood from her head. This revealed
a blond ponytail and a much younger girl than Yael had been expecting, with a
grin like a broken glass bottle. Stepping sideways, she watched the pipe
ricochet off the ground with amusement, hardly seeming to put any force behind
it at all when she stepped on top of the pipe. Her weight tore it from his
hands, then she kicked him in the side of the knee so that it snapped and
buckled beneath him. The tattooed man’s screams were muffled by the bulk of
Fenrir, who leapt on him with a particularly ferocious growl and started
tearing the shrieking man to pieces.
    The dark-skinned man attempted to stab the woman in
red with both knives simultaneously, in an act of desperation or madness. The
woman jumped backwards at the last moment and the man slashed at nothing but
air, yelling incoherently in frustration. The woman finally took her hands from
her pockets, jabbing the man in the neck with something Yael couldn’t quite
see. His whole body went rigid for an agonizing moment, then he fell over,
crashing to the ground in a twitching mass.
    It was obvious to Yael that the final man had no
intention of fighting. He ran for the mouth of the alley, sprinting with the
form and single-minded drive of an athlete, ignoring his comrades scattered
across the ground. The woman in red seemed disappointed as she let him pass. Instead,
she collected one of the dark-skinned man’s knives and sat on his broad chest,
holding the point so it hovered directly above his left eye.
    “Granted, it’s hard