Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
Sophie was eight years old when she first taught us about the protocol her school gave her for their “armed intruder” drill; old enough to recognize it as disconcerting, but young enough to find it exciting too.
“It’s called the ALICE protocol,” she recalled for us. “A for alert. L for lockdown. I for inform, C for counter, and E for evacuate. And they said counter means fight back, which doesn’t make sense. They have a gun, and I’m just a kid.”
It took Winona a herculean effort not to burst into tears. The news, as usual, had been full of stories of mass shootings; just the previous week, three students had died in an incident at a middle school, and she’d been struggling to send her baby in knowing this fate could await her.
“You’re not just any kid,” she told her. “You’re my Spectacular Sophie. And if you ever have to use ALICE, you should absolutely run and hide…but if you have to fight, baby, fight dirty, and fight hard.”
People are streaming past me in slow motion, racing for the exit, but I can’t move, let alone fight.
I’m on the ground, uncertain of how I got there, and when I try to stand, I find that my body has turned to lead.
There are others still in the room, some laughing and watching with curiosity like this is just act 2 of Rose’s show and they are witnessing more spectacle instead of an attempted murder.
“Witch,” the man shouts. “Get out of my head! Get out of my head!”
His knife arcs through the air again. It comes down slowly, enough that I can track its intended path for Rose’s heart, that I can see the wildness in the man’s ice-blue eyes.
A streak of blood, still warm, splashes onto my cheek.
I make people bleed as my job, drive needles into vessels.
I know that blood dries down tacky, that it jets out of arteries and oozes out of veins, and that I can use hydrogen peroxide to get it out of my scrubs.
It doesn’t scare me. Rose’s cries of pain, destroyed and ragged, could be the wails of family members when I walk into their room and tell them that their loved one didn’t make it through the procedure to save their life.
None of this, I realize, is unfamiliar. It’s just the scale, the setting: a formal event instead of a catheterization lab, an artist instead of a patient. I am rooted by this macabre, familiar sight, by the calming certainty that I’m probably not going to make it out of here alive.
But then something changes, and the world speeds back up to real time.
Across the room, I hear Leila shout something in a different language, and Rose, her face twisted in agony, grabs the man by the wrist. Her scream is different this time, a warrior cry that I can feel rattling in my own chest. I find my limbs again, scrambling to my feet, and my heels slip in the blood.
The man goes still. I watch, in horror that turns quickly to understanding, as his hand goes limp and his knife clatters to the floor.
Wrinkles form and fold in his forehead, at the corners of his eyes; jowls make his cheeks fall.
He begins to stoop, his brown hair receding first, at the corners of his widow’s peak, then graying, then falling out altogether.
His skin pales, then yellows, turning that horrible neon color that I know is synonymous with liver failure.
Rose’s hair lengthens, then explodes into a cloud around her head. The pitch of her scream increases to a playground whistle note, piercing, childlike, and she shrinks too, her arms and legs shortening, her dress sagging around her.
She turns to look at me with round, frightened eyes that remind me of Sophie’s.
Then, suddenly, my view is obscured. Before I can process what I’m seeing—a man, sliding into a crouch, terrified brown eyes, arms outstretched—I’m lofted into the air.
I flail in my captor’s hold, my body regaining its survival instincts, but he’s strong and firm and pitches me over his shoulder with ease.
Up close, he smells smoky and sweet, like chocolate melting over a bonfire, and instantly I know.
I and everyone in this room are in mortal danger, I am living in a waking nightmare, one I may not survive—and yet, for one mystifying millisecond, I’m awash with an almost euphoric relief. He came for me.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Julian hisses, just as Leila’s voice projects: “Lock the doors.”
Julian breaks into a full sprint. From over his shoulder, I survey what I can of the room: ten or so remaining guests, looking on with confused amusement. The assailant’s bloated, yellow corpse on the floor as Child Rose weeps at his feet in a pool of her own blood.
And Leila. Her beautiful face is contorted in fury, a vengeful goddess. She rushes toward us, her gaze locked on to me.
“JULIAN, YOU ASSHOLE!” she screams. “YOU KNOW WHAT WE HAVE TO DO!”
Julian doesn’t slow, just kicks the glass doors open and sends us barreling through. We have just crossed the threshold when they slam shut and I hear the crank of a mechanical lock.
“Don’t look,” he says as we race through the emptied lobby.
The words have hardly left his lips before the horror starts.
The lights go out, and suddenly I hear screaming, chaos.
A group of men throw themselves at the locked door behind us.
One of them is Harold, the man who had been so kind to me when I first arrived.
His eyes are wide with terror. He is shouting.
I can’t hear him, but I see the words form on his lips: “Help me.”
A litany of gunshots bursts through the air. Blood splatters onto the glass.
I gulp down air to keep from screaming, and the winter cold cuts my throat like shards of ice. Julian slows, throws open a car door, and deposits me inside. He’s in the driver’s seat and peeling out of the lot in seconds, flooring it down the road and onto the highway.
Shakes wrack my body, the iron taste of blood lingering on the back of my tongue. I look down at my hands and realize that blood is flaking in the crevices of my palms.
The world is whipping too fast around us. A wave of nausea overcomes me, and I lurch forward over my knees, letting my head hang between them in the hopes that it will abate.
“I need to throw up.”
They’re the first words I’ve spoken directly to him in weeks.
“There should be plastic grocery bags in the back seat,” Julian says.
I turn, grab them, hold them in my lap, and wait for the heaves to start.
They don’t. I feel like a ghost, like I’m gliding alongside this car at ninety miles an hour.
If I didn’t have the evidence of what I witnessed still drying on my palms, I could almost convince myself that tonight wasn’t real, that I just watched an excessively realistic movie or woke up from a particularly twisted nightmare.
Most bizarre, my ex-boyfriend might have taken part in the killings—if he hadn’t opted to kidnap me instead.
“Where are we going?” I ask. I don’t expect a real answer, and Julian doesn’t surprise me with one.
“Somewhere far away,” he says. “Do you have your phone?”
Somehow I do. I’d been wearing my clutch across my body when Julian swept me up, and it hangs off my back. I pull it out.
Julian snatches it out of my hands, lowers his window, and throws it out onto the highway.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shout, watching as my eight-hundred-dollar iPhone gets crushed under the wheels of a semi.
“Leila wants to kill you,” Julian says plainly.
“She’s wanted to kill you for weeks now, but after today, after what you saw…
I think it will be especially difficult to dissuade her.
” He looks away from the road for just long enough to affix me with a hard stare.
“There’s a possibility she’s had your phone bugged. We shouldn’t take any chances with it.”
It’s the first time I’ve gotten to look at him, really look at him, since I realized what he is.
He has bags under his eyes, and he’s missed a spot shaving his chin.
I assumed I would be able to see the supernatural in him, like I’d just been ignoring it all this time.
But I was wrong. This is still the Julian I know: absurdly good-looking, yes, but so very human all the same.
“When the hell would she get a chance to steal my phone to bug it?” I snap. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard—”
“You’re not surprised that she wants to kill you,” he observes. Then, more urgently, “You’re not asking about Rose.” His eyes leave the road to turn, wide, to mine. “You know.”
The pressure that builds up in my head feels explosive.
“That you’re a life-sucking dream demon?” I hiss. “Of course I fucking know. What’s your plan, Julian? To lock me up in a tower until your succubus sister decides to give up on the hunt?”
Julian doesn’t respond, just weaves around a driver who is crawling along in the sixties in the fast lane. The longer his silence stretches, the more apparent it becomes that I might have actually hit the nail on the head.
“You’re joking.” I’m sans coat, sans phone, and, apparently, sans the rest of my life. “You’re kidding me.”
“I didn’t know you would be there tonight,” he says in hushed tones. “This is exactly what I was trying to avoid, Sean.”
“Avoid?” I point to my hair, the silver-white curls that I’m getting accustomed to but still occasionally shock me when I catch my reflection in a mirror. “Did you start feeling that way before or after you snatched up my life?”
Julian’s body sags with abject misery.
“Look, Sean. You have to understand. I didn’t mean to…” He fumbles on his words, tries again. “I thought, maybe, we got away with it when we—”
My laughter cuts him off.