Lilah has a hole in her, bleeding her guts out into her shirt. Every predator for miles must be able to scent her even through the sewer stench. She pads her stomach with cloths as clean as she's able to find them, tries to cover the wound, to keep it sterile - though this city will kill her, the brilliant blip on its radar that she is, before infection will.

It doesn't stop. It doesn't heal. Hours stretch into days, spent in darkness with a target on her belly. She has to sleep sometimes, even if she doesn't want to sleep, the places she has to sleep.

It's familiar, this control of blood flow. Familiar, and creepy just how automatic it becomes, how matter-of-fact her approach. She has a hole in her. It's nothing new. At least it's her own sins, here, that she bleeds for.

The pain is not menstrual, though, there the analogy ends. There is no cycle; it never fucking stops. It's sharp and hot, searing, a lance through her side, wrenching the posture it took so much practise to perfect. If she stands straight it makes her pay for dignity - bends more than that ugly, comfortable-inasmuch-as-she-can-be-now hunch and there's enough fireworks to bring in the next millenium sparked behind her eyelids, and once, her head kissing the sewer floor.

She woke up in inches of dirty seep, clothing soaked and rank, bandaging soaked and rank, the water tinged red where she lay.

There is no infection. There is no change. She knows, by now, there never will be.

The slow seep of blood, the slow drain on her energy. Such a sly and intimate stigmata.

There is a hole in her. He reached his hand inside her and tore it out. Shook tissue matter from his claws when he withdrew.

There is a hole in her for her sins, and she should have left LA but she didn't. She should have left LA when he said.

But if everything she had here is gone, if all she has to lay claim to is absence, then at least it is hers. Bought and paid for, like so many things in her life, in blood.

She never did give a fuck whose.