Cozy Christmas Shorts

by Halliday, Gemma

  He double checked his Vic to make sure he was dead before joining me back in the secret room.

  "Decent save," I said as I picked foliage out of his hair.

  "I thought about leaving some of my poems strewn about the body," Paris responded.

  "You're not serious."

  He looked wounded. "Why not? It could be that red herring thing!"

  "Please don't add to the plan. We have three Vics left, and I need to make sure they die here." There was no point in celebrating. The assignments weren't finished yet. For all I knew, Juan could be some expert at making a raft out of ceramic clown figurines and William could have a jet pack hidden in his luggage. These guys weren't supposed to see the sun come up. There wasn't any point in getting cocky.

  "They're back in the library," I said. "Go smash Anderson's clown." I bounced down the hall to watch from the two-way mirror.

  The six remaining people were sitting in the room, looking nervously about. Only Frank was confident enough to make himself a drink. He knew he wasn't going to die. The others, Gin and Liv included, avoided the wet bar.

  Annie was now looking nervous. That made me relax a little.

  "We should go find that English guy," she was saying. "He's been gone too long to just be in the bathroom."

  I started giggling. I once killed a Vic in his own bathroom. I electrified the toilet water. It was awesome. The only problem was that it left unsightly scorch marks on the body. I never did fix that.

  Juan nodded but didn't volunteer. William was busy studying the faces of the other guests. It was going great. I kind of wanted to high-five Paris.

  "Gin's next," Paris said.

  I shook my head. "They have to find Anderson first."

  Annie stood up. "I'm going to start looking for him. Who's going with me?"

  Madame Angelina and Tiffany Lauper were the only ones who joined her. Wasn't that just the way? Women doing the hard stuff. The scary stuff. I liked Annie. Too bad she was evil and we had to kill her.

  Juan got to his feet. "I can't let the women go alone. I'll go too." I rolled my eyes. Pretty chivalrous for a man who once killed two elderly nuns without a second thought. He looked meaningfully at William and Frank. Frank was waiting. If William didn't go, he wouldn't. Even though he knew Paris and I were watching, we couldn't let anyone deviate from the plan.

  "Dammit," William swore as he stood up. "Fine."

  Frank got up without comment, and the group moved into the hallway. They'd decided to search together. The paranoia was starting to set in that someone was picking them off one-by-one. Paris and I followed them as they started upstairs and checked Anderson's rooms and the bathroom. I held my breath for a moment, worrying they'd want to check the rooms with the bodies, but they went back downstairs.

  It took fifteen minutes for them to discover that Anderson wasn't in the house. They'd need to go outside. Tiffany Lauper ran into the kitchen and brought back flashlights, and they made their way outside. Paris and I ran to the secret room off the kitchen to check the monitors.

  "Oh my God!" Madame Angelina shrieked. She ran over to the dead man and everyone crowded around.

  "Someone hit him in the back of the head!" Annie gasped. "Someone's trying to kill us off, one at a time!"

  I relaxed. There it was. Now they knew they were being picked off. The fun could begin.

  Paris joined me in the walls outside the dining room as the rest of the group filed in. Annie ran to the table and frowned.

  "The fourth clown is smashed!" she said. She was starting to sound a little unhinged. And while that's what we'd wanted, it was too soon for her to go totally nuts. We'd been saving her for last.

  Annie whirled on the others. "One of you is killing us off! You want our share of the money!"

  Um, okay. Not the original reason, but let's go with that.

  William snorted. "Why look at me? I'm not doing it! I don't care how much money I get."

  "You didn't want to go outside…because you knew Anderson was dead out there…" Madame Angelina had now appointed herself as some sort of Hercule Poirot, although she looked like some hippy throwback to Miss Marple's stoner days at Woodstock.

  He shook his head. "No, I didn't. And I'll kill anyone who says I did." He ground his fist into the flat of his other hand menacingly.

  "Someone really is mysteriously killing us off!" Tiffany Lauper repeated what Annie'd said. She'd sort of slipped out of the drunk rock star mode and was trying to whip up more hysteria. That was fine, because she was next.

  Tiffany was supposed to go into the bathroom, where she'd pull a hypodermic from the inside of the back of the toilet and inject herself. I'd whipped up a serum that would do what it did to me, slow her heartbeat tremendously. Frank and Madame Angelina would discover the body with the hypodermic needle next to it and spirit it off to her room. Easy, right?

  Except that it didn't. My cousin, the aging rock slut, forgot. Instead of excusing herself, she started getting all worked up.

  "The murderer is in this very room!" she howled. "It could be any one of you!" Her eyes grew wide, and she started to tremble a little. She was good. Really good. But we didn't need her to get into hysterics. We needed her to go off herself in the bathroom with a toilet syringe, like a good little assassin.

  The others in the room just stared at her. The Vics because they realized she was right. My remaining cousins because they knew she'd just gone off script.

  Madame Angelina walked up to Tiffany Lauper and slapped her hard across the face. Paris' jaw dropped, and I clapped both hands over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

  "You need to pull yourself together!" the gypsy shouted. "Why don't you go splash some cold water on your face?"

  Uh-oh. Liv had forgotten to use her accent. I held my breath and looked at the others, who bizarrely didn't seem to notice. Okay—I wouldn't panic yet. At least she'd given Tiffany Lauper the excuse to leave the room.

  "But I can't! Not alone!" The rock star was hysterical now and had seemingly lost her mind. "None of us should go anywhere alone! We need to stay together in order to survive the night!"

  Whoa. There was a U-turn. These people weren't supposed to survive the night. And she was supposed to follow the plan.

  "I think she's actually drunk," Paris whispered, unable to take his eyes off of her performance.

  "Well that's not good," I replied. "She's got to take out Juan right after."

  I was nervous about Juan's demise. In the old poem, his little Clown Boy ends up in chancery. That loosely means in court. In the book, they got by with killing a judge. But the five of us had had a lot of trouble trying to think something up for Juan. And even then, we didn't come up with anything great. In fact, all I had come up with was the idea of beaning him with a gavel.

  But in order for that to happen, my cousin, Tiffany Lauper, had to die first. But no. There she was, doing whatever the hell it was she was doing.

  "The poem…" Annie said. She ran to the mantle and read it. "We've all been dying according to this poem."

  I'd kind of wanted them to notice that a little later, so they wouldn't figure out their deaths in advance. Although the remaining murders were a little hard to figure out, like red herring, and hugged by a bear. At least there'd be a little mystery in those cases.

  "Who's next?" Juan asked. He was terrified. "What's the next death?"

  Annie didn't answer him. She set the poem back on the mantle. "We aren't here for any sort of inheritance."

  William looked up sharply. "What do you mean? That's why I'm here."

  Tiffany Lauper scowled. "No. We're not."

  What the hell was she doing? I rolled my eyes and knelt down to a hidden trapdoor. One little tug and I pulled out four pistols, giving two to Paris. He seemed to understand that things were going south, and we'd probably need to go in there and gun the rest of them down. Liv probably wouldn't talk to us for weeks if that happened, but sometimes you have to do what you need to in order to get the jo
b done.

  "I think," Tiffany Lauper said, licking her lips, "that we're not related at all. That we're here for another reason entirely."

  Madame Angelina froze. I knew she was toying with going over and slapping her rock star cousin again to see if that would jog her memory or at least shut her up. Frank was actually smiling. Maybe he'd wanted it to end in a brawl anyway? There were still six people in there. Three Bombays and three bastards who deserved to die. The odds were good.

  "What would that reason be?" Juan asked. There was no shark smile now. He was starting to freak out. That didn't surprise me. True, he'd been a trained assassin, but he did everything fast, easy, and out in the open. And he'd always had the upper hand. He was in charge. But here, he wasn't.

  Tiffany Lauper raised her arm and pointed at him. It was pretty cool. Like I thought the Grim Reaper looked to people. If the Grim Reaper looked like horribly unsuccessful 1980's Madonna impersonator.

  "Because we're bad people. Because you're a bad man," she said, looking him right in the eye.

  "Oh wow," Paris said. "She's giving him his trial in court."

  I stared at her. Weirdly enough, everyone was sitting except our cousin and Juan. He stood facing—clearly the defendant. Tiffany Lauper stood pointing at him, clearly the prosecutor. It was pretty good. Way better than the gavel thing. Well, I still had to use the gavel. He still had to die.

  The standoff was kind of cool to watch. Tiffany steady and unblinking, with Juan growing more nervous and fearful by the second.

  "Now," Tiffany said. "Now I will go splash some water on my face." And with that, she left the room.

  "She kind of went off script there," I mumbled.

  "She did set it up pretty well though," Paris said.

  We watched as our cousin left the room. She'd definitely made an impact. Annie looked worried. William started scanning the exits. Frank shrugged and folded his arms over his chest. Madame Angelina had this blissed-out look of admiration on her face. I guess she'd forgiven our cousin for going off script since she came up with that interesting summation.

  Juan, however, was visibly shaken. The swagger was completely gone now. He started to pace the room like a caged animal waiting for slaughter. He kept reaching into his pocket and fumbling with something.

  "Shit," Paris said. "Did he bring a weapon?"

  I shook my head. "No. It's something else." I had a hunch but didn't want to say until I knew for sure. It didn't take long. Finally, Juan pulled a rosary out of his pocket. His fingers began to work the beads like he was saying Hail Marys. He was terrified. And he was worried for his soul. Interesting.

  "That was weird," Annie said.

  Madame Angelina looked at her watch, "She's been in there a while. I foresee that something tragic has happened!" She pointed at Frank. "You. Whatever your name is. Come with me, and we'll check on her."

  She turned to look at the others. "Stay together and stay here." As she and Frank left the room, I could see that the others had no intention of going anywhere. But Paris and I gripped our pistols, just in case.

  They were still all there when Frank popped into the room. "She's dead."

  The others looked confused. Frank hadn't said who was dead. Then Madame Angelina appeared.

  "We will convey the shell of her former essence to her room," Madame said sounding a little like Paris' Giuseppe. Her accent wavered a little. She was getting tired. I could understand that—her performance was exhausting even to me.

  "For your own safety, don't go anywhere unless you want to come with us," she announced.

  Madame Angelina had no takers. Apparently, these assholes didn't care if one of them was dead. They eyed each other suspiciously.

  "But we were all in here," Juan said excitedly as my cousins left them. "Who could've killed her when we were all in here?" His voice squeaked on the last word.

  Annie backed up against a wall, facing the other two men. It was clear she didn't trust them any more than they did her.

  "Had to be that carney. Or the weird gypsy wannabe. We only have their word the singer's dead." William's words made sense, but he was coiled like a cobra, ready to spring if the other two rushed them.

  "But like us, they didn't know each other before they came here," Annie said.

  "It could be that butler guy." William said.

  Butler guy? Raoul would be deeply offended by that. I'd make sure to give him a nice bonus for the holidays.

  "It's the wrath of God," Juan said it so softly we almost missed it.

  "Come again?" Annie asked.

  "We are being judged and struck down. By God," Juan said. His face was a deathly white, and he'd started to perspire. Spoken like a true guilty bastard.

  To my surprise, neither Annie nor William denied this. Neither one of them insisted they were innocent. That they were good people who didn't deserve to die.

  "Hey!" Gin joined me and Paris in the secret passage. She'd changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes but still had the teased hair and makeup. She looked at the memory foam floor.

  "Squishy!" she said as she bounced around. She was juicing on adrenaline. We all did during an assignment.

  "Nicely played, if not a bit overdone," I said.

  "You like that?" Gin grinned, ignoring the criticism. "Thought I'd throw in a little show. I know you weren't 100% on the Chancery thing."

  Frank and Madame Angelina came back into the room.

  "How did she die?" Annie asked quietly.

  "Injected with something," Madame Angelina said. "There was a little hole in her neck and an empty syringe on the floor. We locked her body in her room. Like the others." Whoa. The dramatic language was gone. She barely clung to the accent. Liv really was tired. Maybe we shouldn't have had her go last. Would she be able to carry it out when the time came to kill her Vic?

  "Could've been a drug overdose," William said. "Could've been a junkie."

  Annie shook her head and pointed at the mantle. "It's the bee sting. Like the poem said."

  I turned to see why Gin wasn't complaining, but she was gone. Over the intercom, we heard something breaking in the background.

  "The clown," Gin said with a huge grin as she rejoined us. She started bouncing up and down like she was on a trampoline.

  "Another figurine," Annie said, looking desperately at the five of them. "Someone just now smashed it. But how? We're all in here!"

  Juan had frozen in place. His lips were moving silently, praying the rosary.

  "I'm not going in to look," William grumbled. "We all know what that was."

  "And yet all of us were in here," Annie said.

  "It's Tiffany Lauper's spirit returning from the great beyond for a reckoning!" Madame Angelina tried to look worried, but it was obvious she was too happy for the way things were going down. Her weird dialogue had returned. Weirdly enough, I was relieved.

  "So what do we do now?" Frank said in the longest sentence he'd uttered since arriving in character.

  "I'm on!" Gin giggled and ran upstairs.

  This was better than television. Watching our Vics squirm like this was fun. Normally you just killed them in their sleep or quickly some other way. We'd never gotten to play with our "food" like this before.

  "I can't remember what happens here," Paris said, never taking his eyes off the people in the room.

  I frowned. "You really should've paid more attention in the briefings."

  He shrugged. "We don't usually work together to kill multiple people. This is new."

  "I'm not going to tell you." I pointed at Frank. "Just watch this."

  Frank moved toward Juan. He didn't say anything, just focused all of his attention on him.

  "W-w-what are you doing?" Juan said, holding his hands up in front of him and backing up defensively. "Stay back!"

  Frank stopped. "Didn't mean to freak you out, man. You looked like you could use a hug." He held out his arms like he was waiting.

  A hug? Did our cousin, big, tough Coney Island
Bombay, the carney, just ask Juan if he needed a hug? That was an interesting improvisation.

  "What?" Juan asked just as a giant sledgehammer fell from the overhead rafters of the ceiling and smashed in his skull.

  "Oh right." Paris had a look of recognition. "I forgot about that part."

  I squinted. "I really wanted it to look like a gavel." I'd thought about decorating it somehow. But there wasn't enough time. A sledge would have to do. Rigging it up into the ceiling was easy. I used hologrammatic camouflage with a projector so it wouldn't be seen until it swung down. Gin simply had to release it from her bedroom, above. Frank's job was to get him on the mark.

  I'd spent days testing it, using a slew of department store mannequins I'd bought on eBay. It took fifteen mannequins being smashed in the head before I'd gotten it just right. You wouldn't want to see what happened to the others.

  Annie screamed. Madame Angelina looked horrified. William jumped to his feet and backed up against the wall. Frank bent down to retrieve the sledge and examine the body.

  "Drop the hammer," William growled. "Put it down now or I'll strangle you with my bare hands."

  Frank stood and looked him in the eye. The hammer fell to the ground, but he was definitely challenging William. "You'll what?"

  William leaned forward with an ugly sneer. "I'll be your worst nightmare, asshole."

  "You mean the one where guinea pigs become extinct and man discovers that there is no meaning of life?" Frank asked. I rolled my eyes. Philosophy majors.

  "What? No!" William looked confused and backed down.

  "Well that's my worst nightmare, man." Frank glared at him.

  Shit. It wasn't time for Frank's "demise." It looked like he was going to kill William right here and now. Frank's death was the red herring.

  William pointed. "You're behind this! You're the one killing us all off."

  Frank folded his arms across his chest. "What makes you think that?"

  "So you don't deny it?" Annie's lip quivered.

  Frank shrugged. "I'm not saying anything." He looked around the room. "In fact, I'm going to get the hell out of here."