Maybe something terrible would happen.

Perhaps Valve was something terrible, perhaps she had always been. Now, after taking the light from El Aran’s eyes she was something more than terrible—a murderer.

She snorted, amused at her dramatic internal musings. Yes, she would be a murderer if that mare were even close to her equal. El Aran was a half-breed mutt with nothing to offer the world other than senseless trifling. But that wasn’t why she needed elimination—it was that she just so happened to worm her way onto the wrong mare’s shit list. Whether that wrong mare was Valve or El Halin didn’t matter; she would have ended up dead either way. What did matter was that Valve saw a chance to get her out of the way and she took it.

She was opportunistic like that.

Valve hardly cared what anyone else involved thought or felt about the entire situation—Orhan with his intense sadness or El Halin with her stoic coolness. She suspected she would encounter them both again, and when that moment came she would deal with them appropriately. Death begat more death, and it would not be her blood on the sand next.

As she stood on a nearby dune, watching a young black filly stumble through the sand with the unforgiving desert sun on her back, Valve suspected she would succumb to exhaustion before she found any water. She was heading in the wrong direction and was clearly unfamiliar with this place.

“You’re going the wrong way,” Valve announced to her flatly, raising her voice enough that she was sure it would carry to the stranger’s ears.

VALVE
slenderman x black heart machine