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This time they chose the wrong one to traffic.

It’s funny how sometimes it’s the most usual of things that bring an operation undone, and this certainly was instant karma, rough justice really. They’d done their usual sweep of the city in its darkest shadowy corners, finding its most broken and lost and abandoned women and children. Sometimes even flagrantly grabbing less unfortunate off the streets when they looked well suited to a particularly wealthy client’s taste.

Just another run in a grand international operation, as organised and bureaucratised as a government department, and no doubt secretly sponsored by some behind the scenes.

But then, they grabbed her. A young girl, barely out of her teens, wandering the less darkened streets on the way home from school. She cried and screamed prettily, as they’d expect, and one or two of them took the opportunity to grope the merchandise as they drugged her and put her in her cage, her box, her transportation device.

But what they didn’t know was that she was just playing possum. She could have escaped and killed them right from the outset. She was impervious to their drugs too. But she wanted to get them all together and do it right because she understood what her capture meant.

And frankly she’d had enough of the darkness. Other darknesses had trained her, made her what she was. Now it was time to pay it all back. Or pay it forward, depending on your view of things.

They didn’t think much when they saw her hand grasping out of the cage. They just figured she’d woken from the drugs a bit more quickly. They dragged the cage out to the centre of the human marketplace precisely for that reason, because she could come out and show herself to the high rollers encircling them now.

And she came out alright, a fire in her eyes blazing and the power of her will shimmering and striking with the intensity and precision of a nuclear strike. Within seconds every foul creature in the room was dead and her only regret was that they didn’t last long enough to really see it coming, or to suffer.

Never mind. She knew about hell too. She’d been there and back, literally, in her training. Once she’d freed the other victims she’d take a trip down there, to the icy inner circle where she knew they’d be found.

Vengeance is a dish best served cold, after all.

Helen M Valentina (c ) 2019