> A Knife in the Dark > by NorsePony > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- > The Chapter > --------------------------------------------------------------------------         As the alley flashed by, Vinyl shot a look at Octavia from the corner of her eye. “You didn’t have to attack him!”         Octavia continued galloping, not deigning to return the look. “He looked at me.”         “Well, you didn’t have to kill him!”         “He touched me.” Octavia’s voice was as cold as the blade of her knife.         Vinyl let out a growl of frustration. “You didn’t have to kill all his friends too!”         Octavia gave her a level stare. “They laughed when he touched me.”         “Hold it!” Vinyl skidded to a stop next to a padlocked door. She produced her lockpick and went to work. “They were Garlic Pizza’s button men. You know that’s going to cause problems for us, Octavia. You were only supposed to be watching the front of the place while I got the goods, not giving the Don of Eohippus City beef with us!”         Sirens in the distance echoed down the alley. Octavia glanced at Vinyl over her shoulder. “He touched me.”         “Argh. Fine, we both know I won’t win this.” The padlock popped open. “Hell, maybe when all this is done, you’ll have killed enough of Pizza’s men that you’ll be the Don of Eohippus City.” She wouldn’t put it past Octavia. The gray mare’s talent with a knife had gotten them into and out of enough trouble in the past that Vinyl rarely thought of anything as impossible anymore.         They went through the newly-unlocked door, and found themselves in a warehouse that had been closed up for the night. Crates and bags of goods were stacked to the ceiling. They moved through the maze to a window and peeked out. The spinning lights of a police cruiser flashed by on the street outside. They ducked out of view.         Vinyl went to a pile of burlap sacks and threw herself down on them with a sigh. She pulled her newsboy cap off and wriggled out of her coat, revealing the skin-tight catsuit she wore underneath. She lit her horn and began skinning out of the suit. The suits were very useful for breaking in, but they quickly became a pain in the butt when Octavia killed a bunch of thugs and they had to run halfway across the city. She paused to scowl at the back of Octavia’s head, but then shrugged. Accidents will happen.         As the suit peeled away from her body, the sweat trapped underneath cooled rapidly in the warehouse’s still night air. Vinyl sighed at the welcome relief. Octavia began pacing by the windows, stalking back and forth like a great cat, and Vinyl’s eyes followed her, noting the play of lean muscle beneath her smooth coat. Octavia had killed six ponies tonight, hardened killers all, and she’d done it silently and in moments. Vinyl hadn’t even known there was a problem until she’d come out of the shop with the diamond and found Octavia standing calmly next to the corpses, wiping the blood from her knife.         Unluckily, a neighbor had chanced to look out of their upstairs apartment just then, and had sicced the police on them. Unluckily, because Vinyl would have loved to stand there under the streetlight and stare at Octavia cleaning her blade. For that moment, she had felt that familiar rush, that thrill of delicious fear that comes of standing an inch too close to the tiger cage at the zoo, knowing that you would be dead in a heartbeat if the languid coil of muscle inside the cage had a mind to kill you. Vinyl had bit her lip and felt the sweat run down the inside of her suit, and just as she had worked up the courage to approach Octavia, that damn snooping neighbor had yelled out and broken the spell.         Now, remembering, with the cool night air on her sweaty coat, Vinyl felt a different heat bloom inside her. She imagined how Octavia must have moved when she went to work on the button men, that graceful dance of violence that had captured Vinyl’s heart the very first time she saw it. Octavia was known as ‘The Soloist’ in underworld circles, because she was such a virtuoso of violence that she had the reputation of being able to walk alone into any situation and be the only pony to walk out alive.         Vinyl was a ‘sharp,’ an expert with a knife, but she knew she’d have no chance against Octavia. The gray earth pony with the beautiful eyes could cut her to ribbons in the blink of an eye, anytime she felt like it. Vinyl licked her lips and a drop of wetness, not sweat, ran down the inside of her leg. Her horn lit and magic gently tugged at strands of Octavia’s mane.         Octavia looked sharply at her, fury in her eyes. She swept her glance over Vinyl’s body, and the rage sublimated into a different expression, no less heated. “Now?” she asked.         Vinyl nodded and tilted her head away, half-consciously exposing her neck to Octavia. “I need it bad.” Her legs fell open, her blue-and-blue tail whisking across the filthy floor under her.         Octavia smiled, a curl of the lips that exposed her teeth, and stalked toward Vinyl. “If you insist.”         Vinyl shuddered, hearing Octavia’s accent come to the fore, twisting the sounds of her syllables just a little. The accent was only present when Octavia was aroused, either in lust or rage. Vinyl was a local girl, and had never been able to determine where the accent was from. Octavia had never offered the information, and she’d never thought of asking.         Octavia swept the fedora off her head and bent down over Vinyl. She never bothered with foreplay or gentleness. Her tongue sliced out and entered Vinyl’s wet flesh, and Vinyl bucked up into her with a groan of pleasure. Octavia’s tongue was as quick as her knife, darting and licking around Vinyl’s swollen labia and into her vagina.         Vinyl grabbed her black mane, tugging on the soft locks in a vain attempt to keep Octavia’s attentions focused on a single spot. Octavia ignored her grip, ignored the pain, and continued to lap teasingly at her, driving Vinyl’s arousal higher and higher without quite allowing her the release she so desperately wanted.         Vinyl whined and squirmed, holding Octavia’s head tight between her legs. “Oh please, I need it, finish me off, end it, oh please.”         Octavia lifted her head away from Vinyl’s crotch, her muzzle wet with arousal. She bared her teeth in a smile. “You want it, little one?”         Vinyl moaned as the pleasure stopped, then gasped as Octavia’s words spiked a new pleasure through her. She gritted her teeth and forced out a single word. “Yes!”         Octavia’s eyes sparked with amusement, as though she were watching a particularly entertaining puppet show. She bent her head back to Vinyl’s needy body.         Neither of them heard the warehouse door open.         Octavia fucked Vinyl with her tongue for a moment longer, until Vinyl was panting and blowing at the fiery sensation filling her hips. Her clit throbbed in time with the wet muscle thrusting into her. Then Octavia bit down on her clit.         Vinyl’s eyes shot open at the overwhelming storm of intense pain and intense pleasure, and she let go of Octavia’s head as she fell back onto the burlap sacks, her back arching and legs stiffening as she cried out in orgasm.         A uniformed police officer came out of the maze of crates and bags, gun drawn. He pointed his weapon at them and shouted, “You’re under arrest!” Then his brain received the memo from his eyes and he hesitated, finally seeing what he was seeing.         His hesitation proved costly. Octavia plunged a hoof into the pocket of her coat, and an instant later her gun was smoking in her grip as the young cop’s body collapsed to the warehouse floor. Vinyl looked up at Octavia’s beautiful, cold eyes and saw that look of violence in them, and she came again, writhing on the burlap as her pussy clenched around nothing, panting Octavia’s name.         Long moments later, when she could think again, Vinyl raised her head and saw Octavia by the window, her fedora again on her head. Sirens approached and stopped, and swirling police lights flashed through the room. Octavia gave a predatory grin. “It seems they heard the shot.”         Vinyl relaxed on the burlap. “What’s the plan?”         Octavia gave a shrug, and Vinyl could imagine her muscles moving under her pinstripe coat. “We kill a few, we escape.”         Vinyl smiled at the ceiling. “That works.”         The booming whine of a megaphone vibrated through the warehouse as one of the cops outside keyed it on. “Attention, warehouse! Vinyl Scratch and Octavia ‘The Fiddler,’ we know you’re in there!” Vinyl’s eyes widened and she shot a glance at Octavia. The cop hadn’t really been that stupid, had he? “Surrender and come out, or we will have to use force!”         Octavia was no longer grinning. She was snarling, her eyes alight with rage. She hated that nickname. When she was pushed far enough to lose control, her quick and graceful knifework became brutal sawing. Years back, when that first hacked-up corpse had been tied to her, the nickname had been coined by a reporter with some knowledge of music. Not long after, he had screamed in a beautiful tenor as Octavia crushed his eyeballs. She was not a pony who liked being reminded of her losses of control. “Change of plans,” she said, and her accent was thick over her words. She yanked a pair of grenades from her coat, and tore the pins from them. “We kill them all.” The window shattered as she hurled the grenades through it.         The explosions outside destroyed the rest of the windows, hurling glass shards like shotgun pellets through the warehouse. Vinyl lay on the burlap sacks, unworried, and watched with a smile as the glass and flame danced like summer snow around her partner’s beautiful, terrible face. Author's Note: The original version of this story was written for Sexty Minute Ponies' Prompt #15, "Summer Loving." The prompt was "Somepony seeks relief from the heat." Obviously, I interpreted the word "heat" in a metaphorical sense, and this is the idea that popped out. Thanks are due to Zedrin for kindly granting me permission to use the cover image.