Chapter V #2
Fear and panic begin to bubble up, but instead of shoving them back down, Alice lets them boil over, spill into the air around her as she tips the last of her mother’s grave dirt into one of the glasses, and pours the blood over the top.
Every passing fraction of a second, she expects to turn and see Sabine right there, knows that face will be the last thing she sees before the world snaps off like a light.
But the moment passes, and Sabine doesn’t come, and the vial is closed, the necklace back beneath Alice’s dress, and the glasses are in her hands, and she is turning, and Sabine is still there on the sofa, her head tipped back but her eyes locked fast on Alice, like a cat considering a mouse.
Alice nearly falters, but carries the glasses to the coffee table, sets one before Sabine, and then, instead of returning to the chair, she sits on the sofa beside her, just out of arm’s reach. If Sabine cares about the closeness, it doesn’t show.
Alice lifts her own glass to her lips and drinks, feels the well open inside her, the blood dropping down, down, and out of reach without even touching the sides. She empties the glass and sets it down.
Languidly, Sabine sits forward. “You and I,” she says, “are going to help each other.”
Alice tenses as she watches Sabine’s hand drift toward her glass. “How?”
“You’re going to help me catch Charlotte.”
Alice almost laughs, despite herself, at the absurdity of it, of this, of the fact that somehow after everything these two have put her through, she is still just a pawn to them, a piece, to be used, or thrown away.
“Is that so?” she says through gritted teeth, fighting her anger down again as she forces her attention to the glass before Sabine, watches as her fingers graze the rim of the glass. Only to nudge it back toward Alice. “Go ahead.”
Alice tenses. “You aren’t thirsty?” she asks, trying to keep her voice—her mind—from showing anything.
Sabine’s mouth twitches. “Always. But I don’t drink anything that’s already been decanted.” She flicks her fingers toward the bar cart. “That was all for you.”
Disappointment washes over Alice, but she fights it back, knows she can’t let it get too loud.
Instead, she thinks about the hunger, looks from her empty glass to Sabine’s full one, and thinks about how hard it is, how horrible, that even knowing that it’s tainted, she has to fight the urge to reach for it, to drink, the hunger inside her somehow disconnected from her sense of reason, and no wonder it’s the thing that makes them reckless, like Ezra said, the hunger that undoes them, when the rest has rotted.
Sabine settles back, and this time the light catches on something beneath her dress. At first, Alice thinks it is a bit of jewelry, like the pendants hanging round her neck, but then she sees the silver glint of the mesh and realizes with rising horror.
That Sabine is wearing fucking chain mail.
Alice feels the last of her hope gutter, right then and there, because how the fuck is she supposed to— no.
She forces her panic to change course, her attention going back to the sofa, back to Sabine, remembers something Lottie said, that all she had left was the hunt.
The need to stalk, to catch, to kill.
Alice shifts a little closer on the couch and asks, “What happens when we find her?”
Sabine’s lips press into a thin grim line. “I think it’s time for this game of ours to end.”
A game, even now. A fucking game. Alice lets annoyance stain the air. She doesn’t care. “I never asked to play.”
Sabine inclines her head, reaches out a cool hand to Alice’s cheek. “I know,” she says.
Alice doesn’t recoil, even though she wants to. Because there’s only one way out of this, and if she had a human heart it might give her away, but she doesn’t. Not anymore. So she reaches up, and lays her fingers over Sabine’s, and says, “I’ll help you. If it means she pays.”
Sabine looks at her again, only this time not like she’s a problem or a puzzle, but a pet. Her hand slides through Alice’s hair, cups the back of her neck.
“Maybe there is something special to you after all.”
Alice smiles, feels herself go warm as Sabine’s mouth hovers over hers, because Lottie was right, there is a power to her, a heat to her attention, like all the lights switched on inside the house. Like the sun coming out from behind the clouds.
But when Sabine leans in to kiss her, Alice pulls back.
Sabine’s eyes narrow in annoyance, but she only ducks her head. “Sorry,” she says with a light chuckle. “It’s been a long few nights.” Her gaze flicks back up. “Would you mind if I had a shower first?”
First, that word like a promise in the air.
Sabine’s hand unwinds itself from Alice’s hair, slides like a tear down her cheek, drops away.
“By all means,” she says, the benevolent host, nodding to the open doorway on the right. Slowly, Alice rises from the sofa, and ambles toward the room as if she has all the time in the world.
She glances back once, to make sure Sabine is watching, then steps through into a master bedroom, and then a master bath, leaving each door ajar in her wake. Alice turns on the shower as hot as it will go, and peels out of her clothes, fills her mind with a song she knows by heart.
When I was a child / I got lost in the woods.
The trees parted for me / made such a clear trail
Then closed up behind me / now I’m turned around
Been trying so long now / to find a way out.
And by the time she’s done with the first verse, steam has filled the tiled room, so thick it fogs the mirror, too, but when Alice pauses at the slate sink, she doesn’t search for her reflection. Instead, she sings aloud, soft but high and sweet, as her hands press flat against the stone counter.
“I live in these woods now / the trees hold me close.”
Her voice just loud enough to cover the sound as it cracks.
Alice pushes off the sink and steps into the shower, singing the last line, the one Catty never listened long enough to hear.
“No longer lost now / I found my way home.”
Catty leaves a voice note on a Monday.
(Not a call, if it had been a call, she would have answered, day or night, which Catty must have known.)
“Hey, Bones,” it starts, as all their conversations do, and when Alice listens to it later, the first thing she’ll always notice is that her sister sounds exhausted, her voice foxed at the edges, the way it used to be when they shared a bed, and stayed up talking under their covers until their thoughts went slow, dragged down with sleep.
“You ever think about how mad it is, that we only get one life?”
The sound of a lighter flicking. A long inhale.
“There are all these things I want to do. People I want to be. And sometimes it breaks my heart, that I’m stuck with just this one.”
A pause, the kind she loves to take, and Alice can see her, can’t she? Striking a pose.
Waiting to be noticed.
“Wouldn’t it be better if it were a game? If we could play until we lose, and then just start again? New Alice. New Catty. Maybe that’s what death is, and we just don’t know it. A chance to play again.”
A laugh that’s not a laugh. A sound lodged in her throat.
“Sorry, I’m tired . . . What did Mum used to say?” A sigh. “I know, you don’t remember . . . something about tired minds being good soil for bad thoughts. How the best thing you can do is go to bed. Bet I’ll wake up, and feel brand new.”
Catty leaves that message on a Monday.
And on Tuesday, Alice’s whole world just—stops.
Her cell phone rings (her number, it turns out, is the only one saved in Catty’s phone) and even though she doesn’t recognize the caller, she picks up, and she knows.
She knows in the silence before the man starts talking, in the breath he sucks in.
She knows, before he asks to speak to a parent, a guardian, to any one but her.
She knows, before she hands the phone to her father, before she watches his face collapse, and then his knees—
She knows that her sister is dead.
Brilliant, terrifying, angry, tired Catty, hit by a car in Glasgow, which is how Alice learns she never got away, never made it to London.
Maddening, gorgeous, miserable, proud Catty, who didn’t call from Trafalgar Square, didn’t journey south at all, who was in fact an hour north of Hoxburn, with nothing on her but a crumpled tenner in the pocket of her jeans, and a cheap pay-as-you-go phone in the pocket of her coat, which somehow survived the accident.
Catty, who, according to the driver, stepped right out in front of him.
The driver, who stayed with her until the ambulance came, even though it was too late. There was nothing they could do.
And Alice can’t fathom how she didn’t feel it happen.
The moment the metal connected with Catty’s side, the moment she folded like a house of cards beneath the wheel, the kind of violence that’s supposed to vibrate down the line, the kind of absence that yawns like an open pit, a sinkhole.
She should have felt it right at the moment Catty stopped, not an hour later, when the phone rang and she was doing dishes, elbows sloshing in the soapy water so it took her an extra few seconds to dry her hands, dig out her cell.
Seconds that meant nothing because by that point, Catty was already dead.
It was fast, the man on the phone assures her father, and all Alice can see is Catty sprinting down the road ahead of her.
Slow down.
Come back.