by Alex A King
“No, not that! There’s a way out, but it’s a secret.”
“Like a tunnel?”
I thought about it. “Kind of like a tunnel.”
“Then I hope it is a big tunnel because do I look to you like a woman who can easily fit in a narrow tunnel?”
Slap a dress and wig on that rolling boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark and you’d have a pregnant Marika. But I didn’t say that because I loved her and wanted to live.
“You’re as beautiful as ever,” I said.
“Okay, do your thing that you have to do.” Appeased, Marika turned around. I immediately got to work opening the safe hidden in the wall behind the medicine cabinet. Everything was accounted for, including the gun. In the cabinet I found earplugs. I gave Marika a set and kept one for myself.
“Block your ears and lie down in the tub.”
“I do not like the sound of this.”
“You’ll like it less if you don’t block your ears.”
“Okay, then I will lie down.”
She eased into the tub while I shoved earplugs into my ears.
“Ready?”
“Takis will kill me if I die.”
I aimed at the lock—because that’s what people do in the movies—and squeezed the trigger. The gun went off in my hand with an eardrum-shaking pop, even with plugs. To my surprise, the lock shattered. Marika heaved herself out of the tub with a shriek.
“It’s okay. It worked. It worked.” I squinted at the gnarl of metal. Its locking days were over. “I can’t believe it worked, but it worked.”
“No—I cannot believe you shot something and did not let me have a turn!” She raised her eyebrows. “I thought you said it would be like a tunnel.”
We looked at the tiny hole in the door. “That’s kind of like a tunnel,” I said, nudging the door open with my boot.
Elias appeared. His face was equal parts horrified and relieved. “What are you doing?”
“Katerina shot a hole in the door,” Marika told him, “and I am complaining because I am the one who has experience with a gun and she did not let me do this job.”
I had more pressing concerns. “Where did that jerk Francis go? He tried to kill us.”
“Outside, hog-tied and gagged on the front lawn,” Elias said. “I jumped on him after he tried to run. We have to get out. There is an explosive device in the kitchen.”
“Didn’t Xander check?”
“That malakas put it there before he locked you in the bathroom.” He waved his arms at us. “Come!”
I had to hand it to Grandma; she’d hired a man who was part Border Collie. Elias herded us downstairs toward the stairs with the ease of a dog steering sheep.
“Wait—what?” My feet suddenly balked at the whole leaving thing. “We can’t just leave! We have to defuse it.”
He raised his brows at me. “Do you know how to defuse a bomb?”
“I might know how,” Marika said. “Do you know how many times Takis has watched that movie where that man stops a bomb before it goes BOOM?”
My eye twitched. I pressed the twitch with my finger. “Probably Xander knows.”
“Xander is not here,” Elias said. “Takis not here. Stavros is not here. It is just us. I do not know how to defuse a bomb. My job is to keep you safe, and the way I can do that is by getting you out.”
“This is my parents house, I can’t just leave!” My whole life was here. My history. Who would I be without it?
“It is just a house. Go!” He nudged me down the stairs. I dragged Marika with me. We tore toward the front door. I shoved Marika out then waited for Elias to shoot past us. “Come,” he yelled with the urgency of a Greek widow boarding a bus.
I stopped on the porch. Shook my head. “My pets.”
“They are in the yard, they will be safe.”
“Not my bear.”
“Where is the bear?”
“Upstairs, trying to hibernate.”
“Leave it! Bears can take care of themselves.”
Maybe they could, but not this bear. She was mine and I’d promised her I’d take care of her. There was a time not long ago where she had taken care of me.
“What’s going on?” Reggie called out.
“Family meeting,” I yelled back. He saluted me—with his hand for once, which was nice.
From inside there was a modest whomp and the jagged tinkle of glass vacating its frames.
Bomb.
I strode over to Francis, who was facedown in a patch of lavender, and poked him with my boot. “You suck at bombs.”
“Mmmpf mmmp mmf.”
“Elias?” I said.
“Yes?”
“Was there just the one bomb?”
“I think so.”
“That wasn’t so big,” I said. “I’m going back for my bear. Get Marika to safety.”
“Katerina!” Elias grabbed at me … and missed. I’d already employed eel mode and slipped through his fingers.
My bodyguard was wrong: This wasn’t just a house. It was a house on fire. A wall of heat hit me as I slipped inside the front door. Flames were eating their way through the kitchen, a bit like a pregnant Marika really. I ripped off my sweatshirt, wrapped it around my face like I was Lawrence of Arabia, and charged up the stairs. If I moved fast I could get us both out without becoming barbecue. Tears poured down my face. I wiped them away. They sprang back again. The world blurred. My lungs stung as I bumped along the hallway to the master bedroom, where the bear was simultaneously hogging both sides of the queen-sized bed.
“Come with me if you want to live.”
Bear opened one eye. The great black triangle that was her nose twitched. Then she scooted forward and plopped onto the floor with a seismic thud.
Jesus in a jelly jar, she was huge. Huge and scary or not, I had to get her out of here.
“Let’s go.”
She sniffed the air. Her head swung around leaving her body no choice but to go with it, which left me staring at bear butt. Her mouth opened. She roared.
“Want to go out the window? Fine, we can do the window.”
I flicked the lock, yanked the window up and—
Out she went, straight through the screen and into the tree, where her claws dug into the bark. One massive paw at a time, she scrambled down the tree.
Huh. Well, at least one of us wasn’t going to die in a fire.
There was no way I could make it to the tree with anything like bear finesse. Climb out the window and I’d risk a bunch of broken bones—important bones, too. None of that busting a kneecap or snapping a pinkie.
No choice but to go back the way I came.
I grabbed souvenirs on the way out. Family photos that I stuffed under my coat. Mom’s jewelry. Sweatshirt wrapped around my nose and mouth, I burst out into the hallway. The staircase was a no-go. The living room was filled with fire and it was coming straight for me. Between the upstairs windows with their bone-breaking heights and the fire vaulting from room to room, I was surrounded by certain death.
My choices dwindled, and what was left was hopeless.
I dragged my blanket off the end of my bed and drowned it in the tub. Then I slung it over my whole body and ran. The fire would never get me now, as long as I kept my escape to less than thirty seconds.
I could do this.
A voice struggled to reach me through the billowing clouds of my parents’ belongings.
“Katerina? Are you Katerina?”
I pivoted but couldn’t see a thing with all this smoke and fire and blanket.
“Who are you? Wait—I don’t care. Take my hand unless you want to wind up smoked like rack of baby backs.”
“I want to hate you.” The woman’s words were thick, tear-stained. “I came here to punch you in the throat for being a skank, you know.”
The heat was closing in on us. No time to worry about punching and skanks. I lifted the wet blanket. “First, get in my blanket fort.”
There was a pause. Then: “I
like blanket forts.”
Ditto. Especially when they were standing between death and me. I held my breath, raised the blanket’s edge. Suddenly, there was another woman under the blanket with me. I knew her face, even blackened by smoke and smushed by the blanket’s weight.
Terri Dogas.
A small gasp slipped out of my mouth.
“Why?” she pleaded.
“Why what?”
“Why did Periphas love you and not me?”
Because her dearly departed husband was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. “You need to get a grip because he didn’t love me. He didn’t know me. We spoke one time. One.”
“He sent you his things!”
“No—the prison sent his things. Probably they messed up and sent the box to me when it was supposed to go to you. Prisons aren’t known for their efficiency.”
She bit the edge of her bottom lip. “Do you think?”
Did I think so? No.
Did I tell her so? Also no. I wasn’t stupid. I wanted to get us both out of this house before we asphyxiated.
“Yes, absolutely. I’m sure that’s what happened. Let’s get out of here.”
Terri had other, way more inconvenient plans. She sank to the ground, moaning. At least she wasn’t rocking back and forth in the fetal position, so we had that going for us. “I don’t want to live without him.”
I tried yanking one of her arms. She wasn’t going anywhere unless it was her idea.
“I hate to point this out but you don’t have a choice.”
Her squinty eyes blinked at me. “I want to die, too. Then we can be together for eternity. It will be like the movies and our love story will never end.”
“Or, you could claim his remains, bring him home, get him cremated, and keep him on your windowsill the way my grandmother does with my dead grandfather. She talks to him all the time, and the fun part is that he has to listen. He can’t avoid her.”
“Really?”
“Cross my heart and hope to not die in this fire, which at the moment it looks like we’re probably going to do.”
She sniffed. “I guess I could dig up his body and bring it home.”
“Great! Awesome! You should do that! But first we have to get out of here.”
Terri looked up at me with a whole lot of crazy in her red-rimmed eyes. “Okay.” Her teeth sank into my left ankle.
I howled.
While I was crying like a wounded infant, she clamped her hands around my other ankle and yanked me to the ground. I hit the carpet with a winded OOF. Terri Dogas tugged the blanket off me, threw it over her own head, and ran out of the house, leaving me to burn.
Some people sucked. And after I’d shown her hospitality and played grief counselor, too.
Smoke clouded my vision, filled my lungs with stinging nettles. My eyes watered. I coughed and spluttered. All that did was make room for more choking smoke.
With my family photos stuffed under my coat and Mom’s jewelry in my pockets, I crawled toward the front door—or where I thought the door used to be.
Bang.
Wall.
I backed up and veered right.
Bang.
Coffee table.
Why did this house have so many walls and tables?
I put my face down at ground level and tried swallowing a breath of less polluted air. Bad idea. It was smoke all the way down. My biological clock said time was up. This was the end.
Suddenly, boots appeared instead of furniture and walls. Xander bent down, a black bandana hiding the bottom half of his face. His eyes were hard and black. His forehead had more lines than a coke dealer’s stash. He scooped me up. That was nice. I wasn’t going to die alone.
“It’s you,” I said with my dying breaths. “It’s always you.”
Chapter 17
Spoiler alert: I wasn’t dead. I knew this because everyone was staring at me like I was Lazarus—the Bible guy, not one of Grandma’s neighbors—coming forth from my dry and cozy burial cave. Probably they were gawking because I was a tiny bit on fire. Xander dropped me on the grass and rolled me around until I was no longer a glowing Yule log. Once I was out, he sat me up.
While I was barbecuing inside, part of the family had shown up and assembled on the lawn. Grandma and Aunt Rita were absent.
“Nice hair,” Takis said. He laughed himself into a coughing frenzy.
“That is what you get for being a malakas,” Marika said. “I think Katerina looks adorable. Like a baby bird.”
“Mirror,” I croaked. Sucking down smoke for a few minutes made me sound like a pack-an-hour barfly.
“You want a snack?” Marika said, waving a koulouraki under my nose. One end had teeth marks.
“Maybe in a minute.” There was no way that cookie would survive the next couple of seconds, let alone a minute. “Where’s a mirror? Mirror, anyone?”
No one gave me a mirror.
My eyes narrowed. Why wasn’t anyone giving me a mirror?
“Mirror?”
Nothing. Mostly they were avoiding eye contact.
Ha. Who needed a mirror when I had a pocketful of modern technology that made the human nose look like a root vegetable? I located my phone and toggled to the front-facing camera.
I peered at the nightmare on the screen. Soot-blackened face. Hairstyle by fire. Nothing a good guillotine couldn’t fix.
My phone vanished back into its pocket.
“Let us never speak of this,” I said darkly.
“Too late,” Takis said. “A lot of people are already speaking about this. They love your new hair. This one says you look like his dog’s kolos when it had the ringworm. This other one says you look like a chicken when his yiayia is plucking the feathers, also from its kolos.”
“People? What people? Takis?”
He put on his innocent face, which was his regular face with a hundred percent more stupid. “What?”
“Did you put me on YouTube?”
“Of course not. I posted pictures to the Instagram. Why are you looking at me like that? I used filters to try to make you look better, okay? But I am not a magician.”
One of these days I’d get payback. Not today though. Today I was glad to be alive and not on fire.
Fire trucks arrived. I stood on the sidewalk watching firefighters battle to save my home. I wasn’t dead and I wasn’t alone. My family was with me, my pets were safe, and so were the feds, who had questions like “Why is your house on fire?” and “Did you do it?” and “Can I use the bathroom if you still have a bathroom?”
I told them what I knew: Francis did it because like half the country he was chasing fame and fortune. Killing me, pinning it on Grandma, and then scoring the exclusive story was his version of winning American Idol.
“Worst villain ever,” the Woman in Black said.
Her partner made a face. “Kite Man is the worst villain ever.”
“Kite Man? Who the hell is Kite Man?” she said.
The Man in Black snorted in disgust. “You need to read more.”
“Say …” the Woman in Black looked around “… where is this so-called Francis character?”
Francis had vanished, along with Terri Dogas.
“Maybe you should go find them,” I said, “seeing as how that’s your job.”
Grandma arrived with Aunt Rita and a man in a suit. He spoke five languages and knew everything there was to know about the law, or so Aunt Rita told me when she recited his resume.
“Leave,” he told the feds. “Leave now and never come back.”
Phone calls were made. Apologies happened. The feds peeled away in their black car.
Reggie Tubbs was impressed. “Anyone who can ditch those guys for good has real power. Say, if you ever need a former judge in your pocket, I’m always happy to look the other way for a small fee,” he told Grandma.
Grandma glared at him. Or maybe she was smiling. Hard to tell sometimes.
Reggie wasn’t deterred. “Your grandma looks like an old leat
her sofa cushion, but I’m turned the hell on.”
The house eventually stopped burning. It wasn’t a total loss. Most of the upstairs was intact, which meant Mom wasn’t lost completely. I had that. I had her photos and jewelry. That was better than nothing.
Grandma walked away to make a call. When she came back she said, “Someone will come to fix your house.”
“I need to call the insurance company,” I said, suddenly remembering I was an adult.
“No. No insurance companies. They will stick their poutsas in your kolos. No one in this family gets a poutsa in their kolos.” Her gaze skated to Stavros and Elias, who were on the verge of holding hands. “Almost no one in this family gets a poutsa in the kolos. Your house will be exactly the way it was. If we cannot find the right furniture I will have it made for you.”
Emotions welled up. Grandma was okay for an undercover spook and a part time mobster. Other emotions quickly followed. Annoyance. Disgust. A bunch of anger all aimed at the two numbskulls responsible for the fire and my hair issues.
I turned in a slow circle and took stock of the lawn. Nobody around except family and Reggie, who had his eye on Grandma. “Where are Francis and Terri?”
“Gone,” Grandma said, cooler than frozen cucumber. “Xander took them.”
“Ohmygod, is he going to kill them? Because you can’t just kill people here. We have laws and consequences and Supermax.”
“Laws. Consequences.” Grandma’s pucker said she didn’t care much for the legal system. “Both of them need to eat wood.”
“Can I at least see them?”
“For what?”
“Closure.”
Grandma fixed her gaze on me. Maybe it was my imagination but I got the feeling she was glad I hadn’t sizzled up in the fire. Then she reached up and planted a kiss on each of my sooty cheeks. “Tomorrow is Christmas. Clean up and help me get ready for the feast, eh?”
“It’s Christmas Eve?”
Time was stubborn and relentless, marching day and night toward I didn’t know what. Hopefully a big cosmic cake or pie.
“Takis will take you to them,” she said. “That is one of my gifts to you. You deserve to be able to look your potential killers in the eye—if you can find their eyes with all the swelling.”