Vicious Rumer

by Joshua Winning

  Scrabbling across the floor, I close my fingers around the Crook Spear and roll onto my back, raising it just in time, stopping Mara and Rose in their tracks. Behind them, Bolt grunts as he gets to his feet.

  I point the gun at Mara.

  ‘Rumer, it’s over,’ he pants.

  I switch the gun between him and Bolt, my chest heaving, my mind a spinning muddle of curses and cures and death.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Bolt huffs as the gun comes to rest on him. He looks fit to drop. I don’t know what to believe, but as I look at Bolt, I know I can’t shoot him. I could never do that. My gaze flicks back to Mara and maybe it’s the crazed expression on his face but I think I see him clearly for the first time.

  A madman.

  A killer.

  I point the gun at him.

  ‘Yes,’ he hisses. ‘Do it, Rumer.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ I spit as I squeeze the trigger.

  The gun bucks in my hand and a hole bursts open in Mara’s forehead.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Mara collapses.

  Beside him, Rose’s face twists in shock. She crouches over the body, clasps Mara’s shoulder and shakes him. A gurgling sigh escapes his throat, but then he lies still.

  ‘You killed him,’ Rose murmurs, but she doesn’t look at me. Her gaze is fixed on the Reverend.

  I realise I’m almost as shocked as she is. The magic bullet didn’t do anything a normal bullet wouldn’t. It smashed open his skull and now he’s on the floor, a pool of blood widening around his body, and there’s no way he’s getting up.

  No way he’s a god.

  The stories were bogus. It didn’t matter how much Mara believed them, how much he wanted to become supreme leader of the known universe. The bullet did its thing and Mara responded in the way anybody would. By being made totally and utterly dead.

  Turns out you can’t believe everything you hear.

  Mara’s men look at each other like they don’t know what to do. Cut off the monster’s head and its tentacles get all confused.

  I struggle to my feet and one of the ninjas goes for me. He gets in a good blow to my jaw but I’m so beaten up now I barely feel it. I hit him with the Crook Spear and he hits the floor face first.

  I grit my teeth. ‘We’re getting out of here, and you’re going to let us.’

  The remaining ninjas look from me to Rose but she’s wilted over the body and clearly making decisions is above their pay grade. They lower their weapons.

  Grimacing, I shamble over to Bolt and put my arm around his waist, shouldering his weight. I’m not gonna lie, I’m tense all the way to the door, half expecting one of the ninjas to lodge a throwing star in one of our backs, but then we’re through the door and outside and the fresh rain is cool on my skin.

  ‘So much for a magic bullet,’ I mutter, still clutching the Crook Spear in my free hand. I tuck it into the back of my jeans.

  ‘I thought you were going to shoot me,’ Bolt says.

  ‘So did I.’

  He shakes his head, half smiling. ‘You’re nuts.’

  ‘Don’t make me regret saving you.’

  ‘Saving me? You almost shot me!’

  ‘Almost. Let’s just get out of here,’ I say. Bolt leans against my shoulder and we hobble away from the warehouse, away from Mara and the pit, and I turn my face into the rain, thinking of butterflies and spears and my mother.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The story made the papers. How Celene Cross, wanted murderer and known criminal, made a comeback at Vinter’s party. How there had been rumours she wasn’t really dead, that she was responsible for the murders of a number of mob bosses, but then a dark-haired girl shot her and paramedics on the scene confirmed her death at 9:43 that night.

  My emotions are strangers lost in a crowd. They’re too painful to chase after, so I stay away from them, only catching them in the corner of my eye when I’m tired or hungry.

  I wanted to kill her, make her pay for what she’d done – not just to me, but to all those other people before. But I’ve killed a part of me, too. The part that knew I’d never hurt anybody on purpose. I have to live knowing I took a life. Two, if we’re counting.

  Bolt recovers quickly. They roughed him up, but a few good nights’ sleep and greasy fry-ups get him back to his usual grumpy self. We stay in the Dead Room but I don’t sleep much.

  One of the reports about Vinter’s ruined party included a line about a young lawyer who survived getting shot. I like to think they mean Julian but I’m not tempted to check up on him. That’s a can of worms I’m happy to leave at the back of the cupboard.

  On the fourth morning of staying in the Dead Room, I start tugging the newspaper clippings from the wall. My mother’s face crumples and the headlines fade before my eyes. They don’t stab the way they used to. I crouch down to scrape the brittle pieces of paper into a ball, crushing them together.

  ‘Gonna burn them?’

  Bolt’s propped up against the wall. I thought he was asleep.

  ‘Bit clichéd,’ I say.

  ‘We could make papier-mâché hats.’

  ‘No glue.’

  Bolt smiles. ‘Sometimes rubbish is just rubbish.’

  ‘Yep.’

  I throw the scraps in one of the dustbins down the road, then I go back for Bolt. After prying some nails loose we leave by the front door and get into Bolt’s van.

  I don’t look back as we drive away.

  Sometimes rubbish is just rubbish.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Autumn leaves crunch under my boots as I wander through the cemetery. If I look back, I’ll see Bolt waiting by the gates, but I keep going, looking for the grave I’ve only ever visited once before.

  The wind wrenches at my hair and I rake it back out of my face. I shove my hands into the pockets of my leather jacket and slouch past a tree that stretches skeletal claws towards the sky. Its roots disturb the gravestones around it so it seems something down there has been moving.

  Past the tree, I find the grave I’m looking for. Black, dripping letters carved into stone.

  CELENE CROSS

  BURNS IN HELL

  The last time I visited, I was fifteen. I found out it was here from a newspaper article. What else? It made me feel weird, though, so I never came back. Maybe I suspected, even then, that she wasn’t really buried here. Whoever’s in the ground, it’s not her.

  ‘They could’ve spent a little more on the headstone.’

  The woman’s voice is behind me.

  A chill prickles the nape of my neck. At first I think I’ve imagined the voice, or that the woman in the grave is speaking to me, but then I screw up the courage to turn.

  Her skin’s stone grey and she’s cut her hair. It’s short and wavy. She’s swaddled in a winter coat and a scarf. There’s nobody else in the cemetery but, if there was, I doubt they’d recognise her. There’s no mistaking the steel in her eyes, though, and I realise every muscle in my body has wound tight.

  ‘Ghosts in a graveyard,’ Celene murmurs, standing there, just standing there, hands by her sides, no weapons visible. ‘Who’d have guessed?’

  Not for the first time, I think I’ve lost my mind. It’s finally cracked under the strain of the past week and my brain is spewing phantoms into the autumn air. But she looks solid. Dangerously solid, like she could grab me any second, sink her talons in, unwind my flesh in stringy ribbons.

  ‘Should’ve known it would take more than a bullet to kill you.’ I exhale at last, my voice shivering nerves.

  ‘It almost did.’ She’s motionless; a hunter with sights on its prey. ‘If Vinter hadn’t stepped in, I’d be in there.’ She nods at the grave but I don’t follow her gaze. I’m watching for a flickering muscle, any sign she’s about to lurch at me the way she did at Vinter’s before I shot her. It’s been a week since I killed her and she looks stronger than ever.

  ‘Vinter?’ I ask.

  Celene’s lips split into a parched half smile. ‘A
good hunter always expects the unexpected. I knew you wouldn’t make it easy. Vinter got me out of there after Mara took you. He acted quickly. Saved my life.’

  I’m so thrown, it takes me a moment to understand what she’s saying. She knew I’d betray her. Am I that transparent or is she just that distrustful? Her own daughter shoots her and she’s already got a plan just in case.

  ‘You realise how fucked up that is,’ I say.

  ‘Look who’s talking.’

  ‘But the papers. They said you were dead.’

  ‘You believe everything you read in the papers?’

  Colour floods my cheeks and I scowl. She’s right, though. How much of what I’ve read has turned out to be true? Celene isn’t the savage killer the press wrote about – she’s more dangerous even than that.

  ‘The press have a price, like everybody,’ Celene says. ‘It wasn’t cheap but luckily neither is Vinter.’

  ‘You wanted to die.’

  ‘Mara had to believe it.’

  ‘You knew I’d shoot you.’

  Celene stares at me. She played me, just like she’s played everybody her whole life. Was there a small part of her that hoped I wouldn’t do it? Did she have a plan B in the event that I couldn’t pull the trigger? The look on her face tells me she knew exactly what I was capable of, even if I didn’t.

  ‘You had to shoot me,’ Celene says finally. ‘I guessed you would get into the party, and I knew you had a good chance of grabbing the spear. It’s what I’d have done. Your anger… Those few days at the camp… You hate me. It had to come out some way.’

  She strolls towards the grave and I flinch and take a few steps back.

  ‘Relax, Rumer,’ she says. ‘What’s done is done. Luckily, you’re a terrible shot. Missed the heart completely.’

  ‘Mara wasn’t so lucky,’ I mutter.

  Her hand’s reaching for me before I know what’s happening, but it doesn’t snap around my throat. It presses into my shoulder and the steel in her eyes flashes.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ she says again and something in my chest shudders over and over, threatening to spill tears.

  My mother’s dead again, but this time she came for me. She knew she’d never escape her past unless everybody thought she was dead. She tried it before, with the Thames job, but then she messed up by taking down every major criminal in London who’d ever crossed her. She had to die again.

  I don’t know what this means. Where we go from here. I wouldn’t go back to that camp, even if it hadn’t burnt down.

  ‘Was it legit?’ I ask, the question occurring to me suddenly. At her blank expression, I add, ‘The camp. What you were doing there. Was it all for show or were you really trying to… you know… save the world.’

  The corner of her lip tugs into a shape like a comma and I realise mine does the same thing when I smile. All those pictures on the wall of the Dead Room and not one of them showed her happy.

  ‘Legit,’ she says.

  ‘But…’ I stop. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. ‘People… I followed loads of them for Julian. Loads. Nobody ever changed. Not the way you did. You were…’

  I don’t need to say it. We both know what she was.

  ‘Yeah.’ She releases the word as a breath. We stare at each other for a moment that fills and stretches with unspoken things and I think she’s not going to answer. Because she can’t. There is no answer. But then she draws a breath and her gaze settles on me, those eyes so impossible to escape.

  ‘People change,’ she says. ‘They go back and forth and round corners their whole lives. Sometimes they end up back where they started. Sometimes they discover something new. That’s what…’ She blinks. ‘I found out I was going to have a child. It’s like… I did something. I created something and it was mine and it was on me if it survived. If it lived. All that death, ending lives, and then somehow I had created it. I didn’t know what to do about it.’

  Seems to me she still doesn’t.

  ‘That’s it?’ I’m still cynical. I wonder if I’ll ever understand her. ‘You got pregnant?’

  ‘It was the start of it.’ Clearly she doesn’t want to discuss her crisis of conscience and, honestly, I don’t think I’d understand anything she said.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Celene asks.

  ‘I’m getting out of the city for a while. Bolt has family up north. We’re going to visit. He needs a break, too.’

  ‘That sounds like a good idea.’

  My belly flutters. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m dead, remember?’

  ‘Right.’

  We both stare at the grave and then I feel Celene’s eyes on me. It seems like she’s going to say something, but then she doesn’t. The spider in my mind is still. I don’t know if the curse was broken when I shot my mother. I don’t know if I believe in curses any more.

  ‘Guess I’ll see you around,’ I say.

  She’s already gone, but I know it won’t be for long. As wild as I am, she’s wilder. Like the wind. I turn and stare across the cemetery at Bolt. He raises a hand and I know I’m not invisible any more. I’ll never be able to shadow again, but that’s okay.

  Acknowledgements

  It takes a lot of people to spread a Rumer, and I’m eternally grateful to everybody who helped make this book happen. To the beta readers, the early reviewers and, most of all, the pledgers who got Vicious Rumer out into the world: thank you.

  Special thanks to the editorial team at Unbound, including Kwaku and in particular Craig and Andrew for their fastidious and enthusiastic guidance in all things literary. You whittled this manuscript into something better than I could have ever imagined.

  Rumer’s early cheerleaders: Troy H. Gardner and Erin Callahan. You always kept the faith and helped me keep mine. And Rumer wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for Rosie Fletcher. You helped me take a germ of an idea and make it grow. You’re a brilliant friend and one of the most talented people I know. Thank you.

  Finally, obviously, my family. You’ve always at least feigned interest in my little writing projects (kidding). You’ve shared in my triumphs, been my avid first readers, and believed in me when I struggled to believe in myself.

  Oh, and the women I’ve never met but who were instrumental in helping me find Rumer. Stevie Nicks. Fairuza Balk. Holly Hunter. Joan Jett. Rose McGowan. You’re all Rumer, and I love you for that.

  SPREAD THE RUMER!

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