Lita knows death. She and death are old, close friends. Hardly a day goes by when she's not inundated with the dead and dying. Sometimes merciful, often ugly, and completely inevitable, there is nothing she hasn't seen or endured doing what she does. She spends her days fighting death like an adversary; holding him off with just her own two hand hands and her stubborn will. She's surrounded by death, fueled by it, but not like this. Never like this.
She almost died, once. In a metal deathtrap of her own making, Lita knows how close she was to the end. The too sharp fear piercing clear through the excruciating and unending pain is something her mind recognizes and her body remembers. As real as the blood on her face and the bodies at her feet, the fear is real and is choking her just as sure as the patrolman's hand had been around her throat and it doesn't stop when all the patrolmen have fallen.
Lita doesn't want to see the man in the monster but she does. She wants to separate and codify what is James and what is the Dog King but there is no seam where one ends and the other begins. She's seen glimpses of this hidden part of him before, Lita sees now. The baiting, smirking tone in his voice. The hungry glee in his eyes. In his brutal, deadly efficiency. The way he's looking at her now, like she's the most precious thing in the whole world. She's seen it all. When is a monster not a monster? Lita knows. Lita knows and it's beautiful and terrible just like him.
James puts a hand to her cheek and Lita flinches and looks away. The patrolman with half his face blown off has gone silent but is still twitching. He's on his side, blood pooling from his ruined face into a sticky puddle seeping into the knees of her pants. Lita stands, knees aching, throat raw. She towers over the fallen private and with a nudge of her shoe she tips him over onto his back. Blood bubbles at the opening where his mouth used to be and he begins to shudder and shake. After a few moments, he stops moving.
"We should go," Lita says dully. She doesn't answer his question. She's not okay. She'll never be okay, not now. She has no time to process what she's seen, not when they have to run. There's no time to get rid of the evidence of them being here. She knows that strands of her hair, ripped out at the roots, are intertwined between the patrolman's fingers and James has left enough blood behind for a thousand DNA tests. She wants to douse everything in gasoline and burn the whole thing to the ground. But there's no time. There is never enough time.