Chapter 9 #2
It was just a nick, but when she looked down at her arm, there was horror in her eyes.
I looked down at the blade and saw a smear of red. That knife was even sharper than the glass.
“What have you done?” she whispered, and then her knees went out and she was sprawled out in the glass.
I winced, because it wouldn’t feel good to get out all those slivers, but at least the morphine was finally hitting her system.
She’d be snoring in a few minutes and then I could call the cops and put her in jail.
I wasn’t about to try and move her when those hands were still pulsing, wanting to break my neck.
I’d break much more easily than Flowers.
I limped over to check on the man who had saved my life. Was he breathing? It didn’t seem like it. Did I give him CPR?
“Come back here,” Mrs. Hammer whispered, sounding like death. She was fighting the drugs hard. Lying there, talking like that, she made this whole thing so creepy.
CPR would distract me from her slowly passing out. I leaned close to Flowers, happy to note that he smelled like toothpaste. Heels of my hands should be on his breastbone right there. Now, compressions. One-and-two-and-three-and-four. How many was I supposed to do?
“Thirty,” a woman’s low voice said right behind me.
I jumped and glanced back to see Pinkie the cellist pulling out her phone and scrolling through her apps.
Not Nix’s mom. No, she was still sprawled on the glass, twitching slightly.
She shouldn’t be twitching from the morphine, should she?
Probably was still fighting it. She was a fighter, like her son.
I smiled at the woman. “Thirty. Right. Thanks.”
Her phone started ticking. “Faster. Ideally, you’ll need a higher bpm.”
Had she seriously started a metronome so I could keep the beat more even?
I couldn’t process through the weirdness of that, so I just compressed more quickly.
Twenty-nine, thirty. Now for the breathing mouth to mouth bit.
He was my birth father. Did that make it weirder or less weird? “Do you want to do this?” I asked her.
She shook her head resolutely.
Can’t blame her. Well, he was dying because of me, so here we go. I tilted his head back, lifted his strong chin, pinched his nose, and then sealed my mouth against his and blew firmly.
“That’s long enough,” she said.
I pulled away gasping then blew another breath into his lungs before starting on his compressions in time to her metronome.
“I should have brought my cello. Vivaldi’s Winter would do nicely,” she mused.
“Next time,” I muttered. She was so incredibly weird. Then, “What are you doing here?”
“It’s fascinating to see a legend fall.”
I shook my head while I focused on my counts. She was insane. Another breath. And another. More compressions. My hands would be so bruised after this.
Another second and the rooftop was full of people. Daniel, picked me up, Horse took over CPR, Roger leaned over Nix’s mother, who looked distinctly purple. Wait. That wasn’t the look of a happily unconscious person. Was she somehow dead? Did she overdose? Did I kill her?
“Don’t look at her,” Daniel said as he carried me away. “Aunt Willie, her feet are bleeding. She’ll need more stitches.”
I thumped his chest with my fist. Ow. I would hate doing compressions on him. “Where are you taking me? I need to find out if they’re okay. I’ll need to tell someone how many injections of morphine I gave her.”
He shuddered. “No, you actually can’t ever tell anyone anything about that. Flowers killed her. You fell in the glass. She almost killed him and you tried to save him. That’s it. You didn’t inject anyone with morphine. Understand?” His voice was so hard. It reminded me of Nix after the accident.
I slumped against his shoulder, suddenly exhausted. “And now you’re going to fly around the world to get away from me too. Where’s my phone?”
“I’ll have someone bring it to you.”
“This was supposed to be a lounge day. Nix’s mom wasn’t supposed to show up and try to kill me.”
He shuddered again. “No, she wasn’t. Did she say why?”
“I’d be a distraction to his single-minded devotion to destruction. She wanted to be the only one who controlled him.”
“Nix? What do you mean?”
“You don’t know? He said it would be broadcast all over. Come to think of it, it wasn’t a high quality camera, more like a security cam. Nix has been fighting for twenty-four hours and shows no sign of stopping. I don’t know if he can.”
He shuddered again. “He has to stop. He can’t lose control now.”
“She said I triggered it. She thanked me.” I pressed my face into his neck and inhaled his skin.
It smelled like spice and rage. Was he mad at me?
Would he take me somewhere and quietly kill me?
Did I care? I was so tired. I hurt all over.
I was bruised from Flowers rescuing me, cut from the glass, and still recovering from the accident and my aunt’s blood work.
I straightened up and grabbed his face so he had to look at me. He stopped on the stairs to stare at me with those cold, psycho eyes. “You can’t kill me. Okay?”
He frowned and nodded. “I know. At this point, you’re the only one who can stop him.
She didn’t think that anyone could defeat her, but she didn’t count on you.
” He swallowed hard. “I didn’t count on you actually destroying the Crocodile.
You’re terrifying.” He continued down the stairs, his whole body vibrating with rage and stress.
“The morphine shouldn’t have killed her,” I said quietly before he turned and pushed us through the door and into the hall on my floor.
“It didn’t.”
“Then why are you saying that I killed her?”
“Flower’s knife. You had it, didn’t you?”
I frowned down at my empty hands, looking so delicate and innocent while bruises blossomed under the skin. “I barely nicked her.”
“They’re poisonous. Nix was stabbed twice by Flowers.
The first time, he barely recovered, and it took weeks and weeks even though they caught it right away.
The second time, he took an antidote beforehand, but still had side effects for twenty-four hours.
The Crocodile only needed a scratch. You saved Flowers instead of her.
No one could come onto that patio until she died, until her will released them. ”
“Flowers and Pinkie were there.”
“They’re immune from her will.”
“I was also there.”
“And you killed her. Your parents were both immune to her will. Doubly immune. Guess Nix won’t have an easy time controlling you after all. Pity.”
I poked his neck with my sore finger. “Ow. Why is your neck so hard? Ah, because you’re stiff-necked.
It’s not a pity that he can’t control me.
It’s a pity that he’s not here to control me, also that he’s trapped in some hole on the other side of the world unable to stop fighting. What are we going to do?”
He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing. “There’s nothing we can do. Nix has to find his own way out of this. He can do it. He can do anything.”
Like his mother? Who I’d apparently killed? That was my fault? How could Nix ever forgive me? How could I forgive myself?