Downstairs, the doorbell rang, once and then over and over again with crazy urgency.
“Ryan! What did you do!” Blue Lightning’s voice wasn’t amused now. She wasn’t laughing. I could hear quick steps across the wet floor, each accompanied with a sizzling sound, as she crossed back to where Sarah lay.
“The hell with it,” I muttered and shoved the credit card down. The bolt slid back with a click, and somehow I forced my hand into a claw to pull the door open. Downstairs, the bell was still ringing, mixed in with crazy hammering on the door. Someone was shouting out there, a woman, I think. It wasn’t important.
The door came open. Inside, one of the women in my life was busily trying to kill the other. Blue Lightning had grabbed Sarah by the hair, which smoked in her grip. She was dragging Sarah over to the tub full of boiling water. Gouts of it splashed here and there, and the floor was a mix of blood and water in pale pink swirls on the tile. Sarah was semi-conscious, waving her arms feebly. Her feet scrabbled and kicked, sliding on the wet floor.
And me, on my knees, in the doorway. There I was, credit card in hand and no goddamned idea of how to stop what was about to happen.
“Stay where you are,” Blue Lightning warned me. “This will only take a minute, and then everything will be all right, I promise.”
So of course, I launched myself at her. There was no power in my legs, not from a kneeling position. I was hurt and burnt and bleeding and probably would have lost a wrestling match with a stuffed animal at that point, but I threw myself at her anyway.
She didn’t hit me. Instead, she dropped Sarah, whose face slammed into the floor with a sound like someone eating a fistful of celery. There goes the nose, I thought, and if we get out of this, she is going to kill me. I stumbled over top of her, throwing myself at Blue Lightning, and succeeded in hitting my creation knee-height with my right shoulder. My left hand went down to keep my weight from landing on Sarah, knives of pain shooting up my arm when the burned flesh of my palm took my weight, but I ignored it as best I could. It was a good hit, the sort that takes out knee ligaments and gets you fifteen-yard personal-foul calls. I was hoping that somehow it would knock her back or knock her down. Then, all bets would be off.
Instead, I just bounced off her. She stood there and took the impact while I looked up, desperately trying to avoid collapsing onto Sarah and the floor in equal parts.
She was nude, I realized, or maybe she’d just become so. Terrifyingly beautiful was the phrase that leapt to mind, that and perfect. Slender, small breasted, perfect skin and lithe strength visible underneath it, and on her mons was a thin stripe of pubic hair, neatly trimmed. Her face was porcelain perfection, sadly disapproving, looking down on me with shoulder-length hair flowing in a breeze of her own creation. And of course, from where I was crouched, I was looking right up between her legs. She looked like she was perfectly formed there, too.
I took a slow, deep breath through my mouth, waiting for what was going to come next. It was going to hurt, I knew. It was going to hurt a lot. And she was going to enjoy it. I knew this, as surely as I knew my name or Sarah’s favorite flavor of ice cream, because that’s the way I’d imagined her. There had been a little bit of sadism in the original vision of the game, a little of schadenfreude built into the game mechanics for those moments when you absolutely humiliated your opponent. Now it was manifest and looking at me through bright white eyes.
“I won’t say I’m disappointed,” she said, and kicked me in the face. My head snapped back, even as my arms collapsed under me. Before I could hit the floor, she’d reached down and grabbed me by the back of my shirt, hauling me up. A spray of blood spewed out of my nose hit her and evaporated, each spot sizzling away in sequence. I could feel the heat of her for that moment, and then she smiled at me.
“I don’t need to tell you that I’m disappointed. You already know that, because you know me.” She cocked her head, and then slammed me against the cabinets. My head hit the fake marble of the countertop and stars exploded across my vision, going from right to left.
She released me, then, leaving me swaying on my knees. I put my hand out on the counter to steady myself, and she stepped over Sarah’s body to stand right in front of me. My face was inches from her belly, but this time I refused to look up. I could see the taut lines of muscle under the smooth skin, the beginning of the swell of her hips.
Her hand seized the back of my head. I tried to wriggle away, but she held me there, held me with a grip as strong as the one she’d had on me when she was just an idea and a pile of documents.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Instead, she shoved my head down between her breasts, holding me there, her fingers knotted in my hair. And then my mouth was on her, and the blood coming out of my nose forced me to spread my lips just to get some air, and I could feel her stiffen against me.
“I know what you want, Ryan. I am what you want, or what you think what you want should be. You know what else I know? I know you. I know you want someone else to tell you what to do when things get hard. You want someone to tell you it’s all right to want and need and lust, to hate having to share what you’ve created with anyone else. That’s why I’m here, with you. I’m telling you it’s OK. It’s always been OK. Want me. Love me. Keep me. Obey me. Give yourself to me, the way you always have.”
I listened to her, her words muffled by the pounding of her heart and mine. I listened to her, and tried to find a flaw in her logic, and found none. I listened to her, and wondered what it said about me that this was the manifestation of my creation, the inexorable end product of my imagination.
She ground herself against me, just a little. “Tell me you love me,” she whispered. “I already know that you do.”
I thought about it, about Sarah on the floor, bleeding. About the additional time I could win for whoever was pounding on the door downstairs if I played along. About how true it might be.
“I love you,” I told her. “God help me, I love you.”
“I love you too,” she said, her voice nothing but gentleness now. “I was always supposed to love you.”
I listened to her and nodded and prayed she’d keep talking. And my right hand, the one that had been holding me up against the counter, closed around the only thing I could find—a heavy, ugly porcelain liquid soap dispenser.
Downstairs, something broke, loudly. It was glass from the sound of it. Whoever had been pounding on the door was tired of waiting for someone to answer.
Blue Lighting jerked back, away from me. “Ryan!” she said. “Did you call the-”
I slammed the soap dispenser into the side of her face. She let out a steam-whistle shriek and started toppling over, arms flailing as she tried to regain her balance. In the background, I could hear the sound of the front door opening, and a woman’s voice shouting my name.
Shelly, I realized, even as I brought the soap dispenser around for another shot. Blue Lightning was twisting away, bending impossibly as she strove to regain her balance. If she got that, I was dead, Sarah was dead, Shelly was dead…
Like a willow tree in a high wind, she leaned back and twisted. Her hands caught the top of the shower stall, stopping her fall, and then pushed her forward.
She wasn’t falling any more.
There were footsteps on the stairs now, doubletiming it up with staccato insistence.
“Shelly! Get out!” I tried to say, but the words weren’t there. I swung again, the soap dispenser coming around in a wide arc that she ducked under easily. Before I could stop, Blue Lighting reached up and grabbed me by the wrist. “I don’t think so, Ryan,” she said, and squeezed. Something crunched under her grip and my fingers were suddenly nerveless. My weapon dropped to the floor, miraculously not shattering, but useless to me now.
Just like I was useless to Sarah.
Who chose that exact moment to wrap her arm around Blue Lightning’s ankles and yank, hard.
She didn’t make a sound as she went over. Instead,
she fell to her right, her waist hitting the top of the tub as she toppled into the scalding hot water. She let go of my hand as she fell, and I staggered to my feet. Sarah stared up at me. “Do something!” she croaked, and I did.
Bubbles were coming out of Blue Lightning’s mouth—screams, no doubt, mixed with the still-boiling water. Already her hands were reaching for purchase on the side of the tub. In a second she’d be able to leverage herself back out.
I wasn’t going to give her that second.
I put my hand in the water, on the back of her neck, and shoved her down just like she’d shoved my face down a minute before. Her hands slipped off the edge and into the tub, splashing furiously. Drops of boiling water went everywhere, hurting where they hit, but I ignored them the same way I ignored the screaming agony of my hand, submerged to an inch below the elbow in the steaming bathtub.
She felt the pressure and struggled harder, twisting left and right. I could feel her slipping away from me, slipping out from under me. I grabbed for her hair but it came away in my grip, spreading out in the water like dead pine needles floating downstream. Another twist and she was suddenly free and on her back, looking up at me, her arms reaching for me.
I pulled away, but not fast enough. Her hands were claws now, sharp and hard as iron, and they caught my arm hard enough to draw blood. She pulled, and I realized that she was trying to climb out, to use me as a ladder.
Instead, I let her pull me down. The triumph on her face turned to horror and she let go, my face an inch above the top of the water. But now I wouldn’t let her go, wouldn’t let her get away, and it was my hand clamped to her wrist.
Suddenly, there was another hand with mine, pushing her down.
Sarah.
I looked at her, her face a mask of blood and rage. “We’re going to have a talk, Ryan,” was all she said, and then we needed every breath and every ounce of energy to keep Blue Lightning under the water.
It took longer than I would have expected, considering the temperature of the water and the fact that she hadn’t had time to take a breath before she went over. Then again, I had no idea if she breathed, so I was prepared to call it even. She gave one last, shuddering effort, her eyes wide and shining, and then it was all over.
I still love you, she mouthed, and then lay still.
I held her there a minute longer, Sarah standing beside me with a look of grim satisfaction on her face.
“Jesus,” I said. “Oh, God, Sarah, what did she do to you?”
“I was about to ask you the same question,” she said, and tried to smile. “Along with a few others.”
“I’ll answer them all, I swear,” I said. “But first, we’ve got to get you to a hospital.”
“You, too,” she said. “Maybe we should-”
“Please tell me this is the amazing makeup sex Ryan is always telling me the two of you have.”
We both turned to look then. Michelle stood framed in the bathroom doorway, her hand leaking blood onto the already-ruined carpet. “I’m sorry,” she said, “But I just wanted to come over to apologize to Sarah, and then I got this awful feeling, and then…” Her voice trailed off. “I am seeing a naked dead chick in your bathtub, right?”
“Terry’s ex-girlfriend,” I said, and then I started laughing. I couldn’t help it, great racking sobs of laughter pouring out of me. “Oh, Jesus, you were here to apologize to Sarah…”
“It’s not funny,” Michelle said, visibly annoyed. “Sarah, are you all right? What happened? Did he try to hurt you?”
“Not like this,” she said. She sat there, shaking her head. “He didn’t do this to me.”
“Sarah, I’m so sorry—” I began, the laughter draining out of me.
She shook her head. “I don’t want to hear sorry right now, Ryan. I want to go to the hospital and get you and me and even Shelly looked at. We can talk about all this later” She looked up at Michelle, pinned her with eye contact and wouldn’t let her look away. “Thank you for distracting her,” she said. “I don’t know if we would have made it without you.”
Shelly opened her mouth to say that she was welcome, but lost the words somewhere along the way.
“I think I can drive,” she said. “Do you guys have any Band-Aids? And are we going to call the cops about her?” She jerked a thumb, the non-bleeding one, at the corpse in the tub.
“I don’t think so,” I said. I could see her losing definition around the edges, pixelating and falling apart, bit by bit. The water fizzed around her edges. Soon, there’d be nothing left. “And the Band-Aids are in the medicine chest.”
“Of course they are,” Shelly said, and that was the last thing any of us said until we pulled up at the emergency room over at Rex Hospital, half an hour later.
* * *
They took Sarah first, a nurse wheeling her back into the ER in a wheelchair like she was auditioning for the local stock car circuit. Her coworker at the desk alternated between demanding our insurance info and demanding that we call the police. I finally told her that it had been an accident with a light fixture in our bathroom, and that I’d love to fill out the insurance forms if I had a hand that wasn’t either well-done or sliced to ribbons. While she was sitting there, her mouth wide in an indignant O, I made the agonizing mistake of pulling my wallet out of my pocket and yanking out the insurance card. Small, crisped bits of skin came with it.
I flipped it to her. “Here. Take what you need. I’m going to go over into the corner and bleed quietly. Let me know if there’s anything you need from me to help take care of my girlfriend.”
The nurse raised an eyebrow and flicked her pen in Michelle’s direction. “Her?”
I laughed, and not in a good way. “Oh, no. Not her. The one you took inside already.”
“Oh,” Her eyes got big again. “Sit tight, Mr.”—she paused to read the insurance card—“Colter. We’ll let you know how she is as soon as the doctor has seen her. You go sit down.”
I nodded and turned to take the seat next to Shelly, whose hand was mummified in Band-Aids and bloody paper towels. The nurse must have gotten a good look at my back as I did so, because before I’d had a chance to sit down and get the Naugahyde nice and bloody, another nurse—this one short, Asian, and built like a dump truck—came through the swinging doors to pretty much bully me into the patient area in the back.
“Sit down!” she instructed, and nearly threw me onto the bed. “Don’t lay down. The doctor will be here in a minute, and he’ll want to take a look at your back. And don’t exert yourself, or you’ll tear it open all over again.”
With those final words of admonition, she pulled the drapes shut and left me alone. My little area was one of two tucked into that corner of the ER. It held a hospital bed, a couple of chairs, a few pieces of nicely anonymous medical equipment and a magazine holder bolted to the wall that featured six-month-old issues of Sports Illustrated and Oprah’s magazine. I thought about hopping down to get one, weighed the pain potential for my back from the jolt, and decided to stay right where I was. Whatever secrets Oprah had for me, they could wait.
So I just sat there and closed my eyes and listened. Phones were ringing, phones were always ringing with harried nurses answering them in tones that were torn between annoyance and compassion. Doctors barked orders, and occasionally nurses barked right back. Curtains and doors opened and closed, and wheels squeaked on the too-shiny floor.
And over in the station next to mine, I could hear someone sobbing softly.
“Sarah?” I asked. “Is that you?”
There was a pause, and then, “Ryan?”
“Yeah.” There was a lump in my throat that made it hard to speak. “Oh, God, Sarah, what did I do. I am stupid and selfish, and I would rather have died than let her hurt you.”
I heard a sniffle. “That was the ghost you were talking about, right? The one you said Terry…did things with?”
I nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see me. Well, the hell with that. Gingerly, I lev
ered myself off the bed and shuffled out of my little area. The curtain on hers was closed, so I drew it back just enough to let me in.
She was barely recognizable. Some of the blood had been cleaned up but not all of it, not by a long shot. Her arms were folded across her chest so I could see the long gashes that Blue Lightning had made, and her face looked like I’d been hitting softballs off it for a week.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, and collapsed into one of the chairs. “Sarah, I don’t know what to say.”
“Then don’t say anything,” she said. She slipped her hand off the bed in my general direction. I took it, carefully, and didn’t make a noise when she squeezed.
We sat like that for a minute in silence, knowing that there weren’t any good places the conversation could go. Finally, she detached her fingers from mine with more gentleness than I deserved. “How long were you awake,” I asked, dreading the answer.
“Most of the time,” she said.
“Ah. Then you heard.”
She nodded. “Most of it.” She stopped for a minute. “It wasn’t hard to keep my eyes closed for that part.”
I thought of a dozen things to say—that I hadn’t wanted to, that I’d been trying to buy time, that she’s forced me—but none of them seemed even vaguely worthy. “If there had been any other way….”
She turned her head and gave what might have been a half-smile. “I know why you did it. That was hard, but it didn’t hurt. The stuff with Michelle, that hurt.” She raised her hands. “More than this, almost. And this hurts a lot.”
I laughed, which I think is what she intended, but only for a minute. With my feet, I pulled the chair closer to her. “Two different screw ups, both of them mine.”
“No. Parts of one big one.” She patted my cheek. “Poor, stupid Ryan. You still don’t see it, do you?”
“See what?” I asked, not really wanting to hear an answer.
“Any of it,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m really tired, and I’m not up for any more deep emotional moments right now. Besides, the doctor is coming.” She closed her eyes and turned her head away from me.
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