But he obeyed. Nobody moved. For a moment, all went quiet.
Then Riley laughed, her voice wet and bubbling with blood.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey, everyone. Stop me if you’ve heard this one…”
Whiff. Thud. Crack. Alice choked on a scream. Kait could not see the damage, but she could hear it—flesh slashing open, bone cracking, cartilage crushing under heavy trauma.
It made her want to claw her ears off.
“So a man walks out to a cabin in the dark forest…” Riley said.
Thud. Crack. Kait felt her stomach twist. She imagined pulped teeth, split lips, blood running down smooth cheeks into wide, unblinking eyes.
“…and of course he’s shocked when a big grizzly bear opens the front door and steps out onto the porch.”
Crack. Riley’s voice was broken and spitting now. Alice’s screams had devolved to wet sobs, and Ben was silent. Kait yanked the doorknob, but the door only rattled on its hinges.
Cheap construction. Heavy, but cheap. Maybe…
“So the bear says, ‘What’s the problem? I got sick of living in trees and caves. Can’t a bear get a little real estate for himself?’”
Crack. Kait took a breath, then backed away from the door, measuring the distance in her head. There was no time for hesitation—and yet she paused, cocking her head at the voice in her mind:
They were going to let you freeze. They were talking about how to kill you, Heart-Brecker. You don’t owe them this. You don’t owe them anything…
But Kait could hear it through the door: the sound of Riley destroying herself. The sound of Lutz murdering the girl who had tried to help her. That was louder than Jill Cicero.
That was louder than anything in the world.
“And the guy says, ‘Yeah, of course—I’m just shocked the wolf sold the place!’”
Kait sprinted forward, bracing for pain, names whirling inside her.
Then she drove her shoulder into the door.
Pain exploded all across the side of her body, pushing tears through the slits beneath her squeezed-shut eyelids—but the door gave, crashing down into the cabin as its hinges popped loose in one burst. She stumbled forward, clutching her injured arm, sweeping her eyes around the room. Alice and Ben had both whirled towards her, their eyes bulging with fear and anguish—Alice’s were already red and raw from crying. Riley loomed behind them, lit up strange by the crackling firelight.
And there, lying on the breakfast table, the stock angled right towards her, was the Model 94.
Ben saw it coming first. He lurched forwards, hands outstretched, yelling something, but he was too slow. The rifle seemed to leap into her hands, and before Ben was halfway across the room she had it trained on him, aiming down sights right between his eyes.
“Back up,” she snarled, sending him scrambling. “I’m done asking permission.”
Then she pointed the gun at Riley.
The other girl’s hands clutched the beam, spattered red and cracked from repeated blows from Riley’s head. Kait could not look her in the face all at once. She focused on pieces—the ruined mouth, the broken nose. Blood applied like makeup to her skin. A face in deconstruction. Her beautiful features looked like they’d been strip-mined.
The bloody eyes flicked down, lit on the gun, flicked back up.
“Oh, come on, Heart-Brecker,” Riley burbled. “Put that silly thing down.”
“Let her go,” Kait growled.
Riley giggled, wiping her nose and leaning casually against the blood-spattered beam. “Or what?” she asked. “You’re going to shoot me? That’ll make them love you, Heart-Brecker. Really, great plan. A round of applause for you.”
“She didn’t do anything to you.” Kait lowered the rifle slightly, watching out of the corner of her eye as Ben edged away. Alice had collapsed against the couch, her lips moving silently, almost comically, like a fish at the surface of the water. “You don’t need her,” she said. “It’s me you want, isn’t it?”
Riley grinned, or tried to grin: there were more teeth outside of her mouth than in it. “You’re right,” she said. “She didn’t do anything to me. It’s Thing Two over there that broke my nose. Wanna trade?” And when Kait did not reply to this, she continued: “You don’t remember it, do you? The masquerade. You loved dancing with this body—you made me take her twice. But you don’t remember her face. You don’t remember her at all.”
“You’re lying,” Kait retorted.
Riley’s bloody face went blank. “I’ve never lied to you.”
“What’s the point of telling me that?” Kait blustered. “So I forgot her. So you remembered. Big whoop. Why do you care?”
It was almost imperceptible in the firelight, but Kait thought she saw Riley’s face fall. “It was our first dance, Heart-Brecker,” she said. “It was important to me.”
“Oh, my God.” The rifle quivered in her hands. “Get over yourself. We’re through, don’t you get that? Do you really think this, all this, is going to get me back?”
“No.” Flame-light glistened in the blood on Riley’s chin. “No, I didn’t think this would get you back. I’m not an idiot.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
Riley—Lutz—heaved a sigh.
“I love you, Kait. Nothing can change that.”
Then her hands tightened on the wooden beam.
“I just need to show you what that actually means.”
With a terrible crunch, she whipped her head forward.
Kait let out a squawk. She’d struck the corner that time, and the edge had opened a long crimson seam that split her forehead neatly down the middle. Kait aimed the rifle, but the gesture felt impotent. The rifle grew heavy in her hands, useless as lead.
“Let her go,” she wanted to scream, but her lungs would barely whisper. Her throat was closing up. “Let her go—Lutz, please, I’ll do anything…”
But Riley would not look at her. She peeled herself off the beam, whipped her head back, and struck again and again. Pain crossed her eyes, ragged in her breath, but that grin—that stupid, lopsided, horrible grin—never left her lacerated lips. Alice would not stop screaming, and now Ben was yelling “What do we do? Kait, what do we do?” over and over again. The air was a soup of sound, bubbling in her ears.
“I don’t know,” she breathed, each word threatening to choke her. “I don’t… Lutz, I’m begging you—”
“Kaitlyn…”
Kait stopped breathing. Riley paused, halfway off the beam—a long strand of gore ran from her brow to a splinter in the wood, sagging like a spider’s thread. She faced Kait in profile, one bloodshot eye juddering in its socket, struggling to meet her gaze. The lips moved slowly, sticking like wet playing cards can stick, slimy and suppurating: “Kaitlyn… Honey… What are you waiting for?”
“No…” Kait shook her head, her eyes suddenly heavy with tears. “No, it’s a trick. This isn’t her, you’re trying to trick me…”
But Riley only moaned, her hands shaking on the beam. Kait thought she would shake the entire cabin down. “You know it’s not,” she replied, her voice like a dark, wet mountain cave. “You know… He’s not going to let us go. He’d rather die than let us go. You know what you have to do, Kaitlyn—Goddamn it, this hurts so much…”
“But what if I’m wrong?” Kait wailed. “I can’t do this, Riley. I can’t. Not again…”
Riley coughed red, sniffed, coughed again. “I can’t hold him,” she gurgled. “He’s going to come back.” Under the blood, her face was pale as printer paper. “Kaitlyn, honey,” she pleaded. “He’s hurting me. Please. I’ve never begged for anything… But I want to… While I can still see your face…”
Kait sniffed hard, tooth grinding against tooth. She could barely see, but she could not take her hands off the gun to wipe her eyes. She peered blearily around the room. She could not see the faces of her friends, but she could picture them clearly in her head. They were all around her. They were all watching her.<
br />
Ben, who had tried to forgive her.
Alice, who had tried to save her.
Riley, who had tried to be her friend.
Jill Cicero, who made her promise—
“Kaitlyn…?” Riley breathed. Then her head pitched back…
You have to lead them into the shot.
Up from Kait’s lungs tore a scream like a blast of wind. The rifle bucked once against the hollow of her shoulder—then thunder, like the end of the world.
Chapter 16
Help Me, Kait
Jill Cicero had been practicing.
The closet door was closed but not latched all the way. Werelight poured through the crack and through the slats in the door, forcing Jill to squint in the resulting quarter-gloom. She could hear the sounds of the other two returning: first Kait’s high giggle, then Lutz’s bleating laugh, approaching from down the hall, closer and closer. Soon they would reach her.
By her side, she flexed the fingers on her right hand, first one at a time, then all together in a tight fist, over and over again. Then the wrist: she rolled her hand around, testing the joint, the range of motion. And now the elbow, and the shoulder. She could never get past the shoulder—struggle as she liked, the warmth of Lutz still flashed there, and in the rest of her body as well, like yesterday’s embers.
But this was fine. She had the arm. The arm was all she needed.
She had found her lever point.
Jill could barely contain her glee. She could not physically jump for joy, or even smile without Lutz’s say-so, so the feeling had nowhere to go—it cooked inside her, like bottled lava, scalding her from the inside out. It had taken her two weeks to dream up the idea, and then another three weeks of practice before she could reliably manage the trick.
But now she had it. Her circuit-breaker. Her manual override. Her CTRL-ALT-DEL. So long as Lutz was not consciously driving her physical body, so long as his mind stayed elsewhere, she could make that right arm do whatever she wanted. And now they were coming down the hall, closer and closer, but Jill Cicero felt no fear. There was only excitement—excitement, and the plan.
There were five tiny screws in the meat of Jill’s shoulder.
She didn’t know how it worked—didn’t know, and didn’t care. But that shoulder was where she began, or Lutz ended, and that was enough. Sometimes when she concentrated very hard on the flesh just below the ridged scar slashing across her deltoid, she could feel them, actually feel the five hard points of the bioabsorbable screws lodged in her rotator cuff. She imagined them turning, slowly, as if suspended in her flesh, twisting in jelly-red space. She imagined them arrayed like a fence, keeping Lutz’s warm power at bay, or biting into his fingers like tiny, threaded teeth.
She remembered the nightmares she got when the surgeon first drilled them into her—that the screws would come loose inside her somehow, tumble down into other parts of her body as though she were a hollow suit of armor and not a girl. That they would get lost in her inner machinery, like loose change or a slipped cog. She imagined looking down at her hands, seeing threaded metal cylinders pushing out beneath her fingernails, the points twisting and chewing free of the prison of her flesh. Oh, the horror she tortured herself with: watching dark, gleaming claws splitting her fingertips—squeezing them out, she thought, waking soaked in cold sweat. Squeezing them out like she was birthing them.
She could not remember the operation itself at all.
But she could remember what came before. She could remember everything.
I’ve seen what boys like you are capable of, Lutz Visgara.
His hand rattled the doorknob, followed by footsteps in the front hall. Jill’s heartbeat rolled like thunder. The shuffling of shoes leaving feet, coats peeling off shoulders. Lutz said something unintelligible, and Kait’s rasping laugh spurted out like a landmine going off.
“But what was her name?” Kait said, giggling drunkenly. “She—oh, you know who I’m talking about. The one wearing that… cape-thing. Cloak. Cape.”
“I don’t learn their names,” Lutz replied irritably. “My head fills up. There are only so many names a man can learn.”
“You learned hers.” Kait’s soft footfalls padded into the kitchen, and Jill heard the hoarse whisper of the faucet turning on. “Whasname. Jill’s.”
“There are only so many names I can…” Lutz’s voice trailed off—she could almost picture him scowling at the ceiling, his features clouding like a mountaintop.
“Well.” The fridge opened, closed; ice-cubes splashed in a glass. “I liked her. The cloak girl. She was nice.”
“I was nice,” Lutz replied waspishly. “Honestly, Heart-Brecker…”
“I don’t want to fight tonight,” said Kait. “Tonight was nice. Let’s be nice to each other, huh? Have a drink. You’re making that face again.”
“Maybe…” A rattle at the closet door—his hand was on the knob.
“Y’know… There’s something I wanted to show you, Kait,” he said slowly, so close Jill thought she could reach for him, reach through the slats in the door with her screwy right arm. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now.”
A pause. The knob turned a quarter-turn. Jill’s heart leapt up into her throat.
“But I don’t think tonight’s the night for it.”
The hand on the knob relaxed, and Jill watched Lutz’s shadow pass the door and plod into the kitchen. Her free right fist uncoiled. Fine. She would wait a while longer.
Jill cast her mind outward, mapping the interior of the apartment before her unblinking eyes. There, she could see it now—the small linoleum-floored kitchen, and the carpeted den beyond, and around the corner from that the dark hallway that led to Lutz’s bedroom. She calculated the volume of the space in lungfuls of air, the distance in footfalls:
Nine steps from the closet to the sofa. Twenty steps from the closet to the bedroom. Fifteen steps from the sofa to the bedroom.
And only three from the closet to the kitchen.
Jill had been practicing, there in the dark closet. Quick, powerful movements with her free right arm. With fist, with open hand, with grasping fingers—ready for whatever opportunity showed its face. She could not turn her head to look, but she imagined the wall next to her knuckles cracking, caving, bulging inward from her practice, from the brutal attentions of that callused right fist. She could almost feel his hair between her fingers, his nose breaking against her fist, his trachea crushing in her grip. She could almost feel the blood, really feel it, as it trickled down her taut and trembling wrist. And then, the instant his hold inside her broke, the moment she could use her entire body—yes, then she would act out the deeper fantasies, the things she could not practice in that closet, the thousand terrible revenges she could only dream of, there in the darkness.
Yes, she could wait for that. She could wait forever, if she had to.
Then the door swung wide. Light flooded the closet; Jill’s eyes narrowed to slits as Kait leaned through the doorway, their faces so close that Jill could smell the other girl’s breath. The two of them regarded each other for a long moment, Kait’s face bobbing before Jill like a cork in a bathtub, Jill’s own features a scowling mask that reflected Luz’s own frowning visage. She’d gotten used to this by now, her face twisting into parodies of emotion on Lutz’s moods.
“Hey,” Kait said at last. “Jill—why the long face?”
She grabbed Jill by the shoulders and pulled her free of the heavy winter coats hanging in the closet and half-led, half-dragged her out into the intersection of foyer, kitchen, and living room. Jill’s arms flopped limply by her sides like marionette’s arms; Lutz kept her upright, but only just, and Kait giggled drunkenly, dancing Jill around and around in grand, sloppy circles, sweeping empty beer cans and a stack of magazines off a low table with one dangling hand.
And with every turn, Jill whirled closer and closer to Lutz.
He was lurking by the corner, watching the antics of the two girls with a slac
k look on his face. Jill could not turn her head or even swivel her eyes to track him, but she could sense his shape on the periphery—in the same uncanny, crawling way she could feel his warm grip inside of her. And she did see him, though his form was a blur, wiping by like the blur of a streetlamp through a rain-slick window.
And now he was seven steps away, eight, four, six, five, two, dancing closer and closer, almost within her reach…
“You’d dance with me, wouldn’t you, Jill?” Kait was saying. “You’d dance with me. If I asked you too. My lady, offer me your arm, and we’ll take a turn about the room…”
“You’re drunk,” Lutz said flatly as he blurred past them.
“I’m enjoying myself,” Kait responded gaily, breathing alcohol into Jill’s face. “I’m reminiscing. It was our first dance together—doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Jill saw Lutz heave a sigh and roll his eyes towards the ceiling. “I’m tired,” he uttered. “You’re wearing me out. I’ll be in my room—come in when you’re done playing with your dolls.”
“Tally-ho!” Kait went for a pirouette, nearly sending Jill’s body crashing into the TV table. Lutz stretched, scratched himself, and turned on his heel and sauntered back towards the bedroom, humming something tuneless.
No—she had been so close!
But the bedroom door clicked behind him, and the muscles in Jill’s right arm went slack. Well, it was for the best—she’d want to be alone when she carried out the plan. Wouldn’t she? She wasn’t certain how this Kait girl would react to the attack.
Would she react? Would she try to stop it?
Would she have to kill her too?
The realization struck her like a hook catching in her lip. She didn’t want to kill this girl. She had tried to want it, Lord knows she had—but she had never managed the trick of opening the umbrella of her hatred to shade Lutz and Kait both. It would be easier, she knew, to hate both, to paint them both in loathing. A unified, faceless threat to vanquish. But Kait… She asserted herself, somehow. Showed her face in ways Lutz never managed. It made no sense, Jill knew—Kait was her jailor, just as much as her preening beau. But no matter how hard she willed it so, she could never look into the girl’s face and see the monster. But perhaps this, too, was Lutz’s power writhing within her. Lutz loved Kait, and Lutz was inside of Jill.
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