Fourteen years – or was it fifteen? A span of time that needed no precise measurement, that didn’t matter, until it ended.

A partnership long enough to feel as if it never would end. Anything that went on for so long seemed to promise perpetuity – or perhaps that was only to the naive. Those who would be ready when the end came knew that the luck of all living creatures ran out eventually.

Whatever luck he had left was bleeding out into the muck, gravity’s slow flow, from open mouth and staring eyes. She stood over him like a body cut in two that just needed a few more seconds to realize it was dead.

But she had come out lucky. Not so much as a scratch, blood only on her coat and blade. With him at her back, a turning blur of knife and pistol against the beastly horde, she hadn’t felt like a body at all. An immortal two-piece machine, a laughing engine of righteous slaughter, until the moment he had stumbled and hadn’t been at her back anymore.

The sun would be up soon. Curious eyes would open from sleep in the red-spattered tenements all around, cries of horror would rise like rank steam from the alleys. The beasts would flake away to ash at the first touch of dawn, and there would be just her, standing over a strewn, ravaged body that still felt like part of her own.

She could sheathe her knife, turn her coat inside out, and walk unnoticed through the waking streets, but not with him. She couldn’t carry him, couldn’t take him anywhere he would rather have met death or the dawn.

She could only whisper an apology he would have laughed at – they were hunters, this was always what it was going to come to, no fault of hers. Could only sheathe her knife, turn her coat, linger for a last look, like a flimsy prosthetic for the missing part of herself, and then disappear into the streets of the city that no one who woke with the dawn would ever realize was kept safe for them at such a cost.