CHAPTER SIX
Idodge Jack by a hair, screaming as he takes a swing. His knife swooshes through the air, just barely missing my neck. My skin prickles with the nearness of the blade. I’ve practiced knife attack defenses hundreds of times, maybe thousands. But this knife isn’t rubber, and Jack isn’t Uri.
And if he were, he’d point out that I just made a huge mistake: in my haste to get away, I ducked in the wrong direction. Now I’m backed against the window, and there’s a manic pixie nightmare boy between me and the exit.
Jack steps casually over the bathtub ledge and gives me a lecherous smirk. Or maybe it’s the same ruthlessly charming grin he flashed me when we first met, and I was just too stupid to recognize the danger in it then.
“Roxie, Roxie, Roxie,” he sighs. “You’re my one that got away, did you know that?”
“I’m not your anything, asshole.”
He winces theatrically, a sharp intake of air hissing through his teeth. “Pet names? Oh, I don’t know if we’re there yet.”
He steps closer, the hall light haloing his hair. My limbs crackle with energy, itching to strike, but I have to wait for the right moment. I don’t take my eyes off his, shadowed in the darkness, but take stock of his every move in my periphery.
His face cracks into a wide smile.
“Now, where were we?”
At that, I kick him hard in the stomach, but Anna seems to have given him rock-hard abs by force of habit; it only sets him stumbling back for a moment. He rebounds quickly and with a vengeance, raising his knife with dramatic flair. I can almost hear the halting strings of the Psycho score.
I know this one. I shoot my arm out to block him, slightly bent at the elbow and hand flat as I was taught. It works, I guess, as I remain unstabbed. But that’s not enough. I have to get the knife away from him.
Moving quickly, I jab my knee up at him and seize his wrist, but he doesn’t drop the knife.
My hands are sweaty and my confidence is waning.
Focus. I try to hear Uri’s voice as if he were here coaching me, standing in the bathtub with his crossed arms and his scrutinizing gaze and his arsenal of acronyms. OODA: observe, orient, decide, act. KISS: keep it simple, stupid.
I pivot away from Jack but keep hold of his arm, using the rotation of my body to pull him off-balance and weaken his hold. He shouts in pain and loses his grip, and the knife falls out the window, swallowed up by the night.
“Fuck you,” he grunts, as if appalled at my rudeness for disarming him, and I almost laugh.
But I don’t have time. Before I can see it coming, his hands close around my throat and he jerks me back to the window.
My head hits the raised pane, grinding painfully against the glass, but it’s nothing compared to the fingers digging into my neck, cutting off my breath.
My ears are ringing, thoughts flickering. Do not panic. Do NOT panic. DO NOT PANIC. I have a number of defensive maneuvers to choose from, combinations of twisting and wrenching and shoving to free myself and force him back. One of them will work. It has to.
I don’t get a chance to decide which. With an earsplitting clang, Jack’s grip loosens and his body goes stiff. His face fades into blankness before he falls, revealing the scene behind him—a shell-shocked Grant, breathing hard and wielding a massive cast-iron skillet.
I gawk at him, my heart pounding as the air whooshes back into my lungs. He stares at where Jack went down. For a moment, we’re trapped in silence like bugs in sap, because what can you possibly say at a time like this?
“I had it under control,” I blurt, barely breathing.
But he doesn’t look at me. The pan falls from his hands, clattering to the floor. Only then does he seem to break from his daze.
“Oh my God,” he exhales. “Did I—is he—” He rushes forward and bends over Jack, presumably to check his pulse, but I can’t look. I squeeze my eyes shut until Grant speaks again.
“Oh, fuck.”
He stumbles backward, a new kind of wild-eyed terror on his face. His breaths are ragged and too fast, filling the hallway as he paces back and forth, burying his hands in his hair.
I’m careful not to look down as I step clear of Jack and into the hall.
“Breathe, Grant,” I say. “You have to breathe.”
He stops short, his hair standing up at odd angles, his face drained of color, then points toward Jack.
“Self-defense,” he says breathlessly. “It was … it was self-defense. He was killing you. He would have killed me, too. I had ?o. I—” He falls back against the wall, crumpling to the floor.
“It’s okay,” I lie. I lift a hand, hesitating for a moment before patting him awkwardly on the shoulder. It’s not like there’s a handbook for comforting a first-time manslaughterer.
He looks up at me in disbelief. “In what world is it okay? None of this is okay. I killed someone. I just killed someone. And in such a cliché way.” He rubs his hands over his face and a pained sound erupts from him. “What is happening?”
“I told you, I—”
He holds up a silencing hand. “I swear to God, if you say crime novel one more time.”
I sag against the opposite wall. If Grant doesn’t believe me now, he never will. Still, it seems like a good sign that he came to my aid. I’m pretty sure it’s too soon for Stockholm syndrome. Maybe he’s just a decent guy who wouldn’t wish bathroom strangulation on anyone, even me.
I nod toward his foot. “How did you even get up here?”
“I don’t know,” he says, rolling his ankle.
“Adrenaline? I think it’s just twisted.” He shuts his eyes and throws his head back against the wall.
“This does not look good,” he laments. “Even if I say it was self-defense, even if they believe me, that’s not the end of it.
You can’t just say oh, but it was self-defense and they let it go, right? ” He looks to me, his face drawn.
I shrug. I have no idea how any of this works.
He shakes his head. “Of course not. There’s got to be protocol I’d have to go through.
Maybe even a trial. I can’t afford a lawyer.
And even if I’m cleared, people will talk.
People don’t like people who bludgeon people.
Oh my God, I’m going to lose my job. My apartment … my cat … I’ll never be published …”
“You could write one of those tell-all books,” I offer.
He buries his head in his hands and groans.
An idea sparks in my mind. I push off from the wall and crouch in front of him, and for once, he doesn’t recoil.
Progress. He looks up sharply with desperate eyes.
“Or you could trust me,” I say. “Just for a few hours. Help me find the Gifter and get them to undo everything. I know you don’t want to believe me, Grant, but it’s the only way to get out of this.
That or we wait out the story. But then we might die. ”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what the Gifter said. It’s just like a dream. If you die in a dream, you die for real.”
“That’s provably untrue,” he says, looking nauseous. He’s frowning at me, his eyes full of suspicion, but there’s also a hesitation that gives me hope. “So, just for argument’s sake. You’re saying this Gifter can make everything go back to normal?”
“Totally normal,” I say. “Never happened. No bludgeoning, no Jack, nothing. You go back to professoring and I go back to not being a felon.”
He stares at me for a moment, as if deep in deliberation, then glances toward the bathroom.
“Fine,” he says. His voice is half mumble, half whisper. “God. So … we have to dispose of a body now.”
Even facing the bleakness of our next steps, I feel a thousand taut nerves in my body slacken. I’m not alone in this anymore. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that feels good, it definitely feels less bad.
“Right,” I say. Then I accidentally glance into the bathroom and my stomach churns. “Just, first, tell me … is there blood?”
Grant’s brow creases.
“You mean on him?”
I nod. Grant looks back and forth between me and the bathroom, a bemused expression dawning on his face.
“Uh, yeah. I hit him in the head with a cast-iron pan. There is definitely blood.”
I press my fingers over my mouth to keep from retching. I close my eyes and breathe deep through my nose. Inhale. Exhale. Do not think about a dead man’s bashed-in head leaking sticky crimson fluid all over your best friend’s bathroom floor.
Oh, goddammit.
“You’re kidding,” Grant scoffs. I open my eyes in a glare. “You’re afraid of blood?”
“I am not afraid,” I snap. “I just … don’t do blood. It’s a very common aversion. It has nothing to do with fear.”
He scrapes a hand through his hair, leaning back against the beadboard paneling.
“Well, this is going to be interesting.” After a minute, he takes a bracing breath and sits forward.
“Okay. I’ll handle the cleanup if you go look for a tarp and supplies.
But you have to help me carry him out of here. ”
“Deal,” I say, eagerly turning for the stairs.
“And think about where we can put him,” Grant calls after me.
I stop and look over my shoulder, careful not to let Jack into my periphery.
“Did he strike you as the kind of guy who would like to be buried at sea?”
Grant pauses. “… No?”
A vengeful grin pulls at my mouth.
“Good.”
· · ·
THE SCENE SCREAMS Anna Matthews: the rowboat on the lapping waves, the hush of the world just before daybreak, the last moonbeams dancing on the water. Except that the rowboat contains me, the man who tried to kill me, and the man who killed him. That just screams Anna Matthews having a stroke.
When the house is a shadowy blip behind us, Grant pulls up the oars and I help him lift the tarped bundle that used to be Jack.
We struggle to hoist it to the edge of the boat, weighed down as it is with all the biggest stones we could find from the beach.
When we finally push it overboard, it sinks beneath the waves with an unsatisfying splash.