I hesitate for a fraction of a second, then roll and duck underneath the nearest table, lunging to stop a chair falling when my skirts tangle in its legs. From the darkness under the tablecloth, I can see up the terrace steps into the ballroom. The bartenders and band members are herding the guests with black RP-3s, the Rhodes’ Division handgun, into a cluster at the edge of the room and forcing them to sit on the blood-stained floor. The dozen serving girls walk amongst the dead Marines and steal their R2s.
“Colonel, Doctor Knight, in the centre,” says a girl. My parents stand and walk beneath the central chandelier. Blood drips from the crystals and melts into Maman’s red silk. At the same time, Kyle and his four friends are dragged out and made to kneel at gunpoint with their foreheads pressed to the mirrors, hands on the backs of their heads. And, finally, my own brother is held to one side by the girl who served him a scone. He’s white with fear and looks like he’s about to be sick. Not that I’m any less afraid. I can’t move. My hands are clamped, bloodless, around the legs of the chair I hide behind.
The mirrored door to the foyer opens and a young man steps through. He observes the ballroom, the guests huddled together with reddening hems and paling faces watching him in terror - the pink-lipped cardiologist is on the verge of tears. He gives the five at the mirror a cursory glance, and skips over my parents entirely to find Leo. His expression not unreadable so much as a blank mask. Leo shrinks away.
He is tall and thin and dressed in a suit of funereal black. It matches his black hair, his black eyes - my father has described him so many times that he feels almost familiar. But time in prison has aged him. His olive skin is stretched tight and there are hollows in his cheeks, and yet I know he isn’t more than a few years older than me. He releases Leo and scrutinises the rest of the room. He frowns.
“Where is she?” he says quietly.
“Outside,” says the serving girl marking my parents. “Do you want me to get her?”
He shakes his head. “No. Just keep an eye out.” The girl nods and leaves her position to stand sentry on the terrace. I silently shift further under the table and hope she will not see my hands white-knuckled on the chair.
At last, he turns to my parents. He smiles sadly at my mother. “Bonsoir, Doctor Bouchard. Bienvenue à New York.”
In the mirrors, Maman’s beautiful face is full of grief. “Bonsoir, Shade,” she says.
My father laughs and wraps an arm around her shoulders and grins. “Evening, Shade,” he says. “How are you doing? Did San Francisco treat you well?”
Shade’s upper lip curls. “As well as can be expected.”
Dad clicks his tongue. “Rough place, isn’t it? I haven’t been to the prison in years.” He shrugs. “But we have to keep you animals somewhere.”
Shade flicks off the safety on his RP-3. The serving girls do the same.
I feel sick. Doesn’t Dad have backup? Did Shade already kill them? I scan the ginkgo trees but no one is there. No one is coming to help. I should do something. My parents need me. My fingers refuse to let go of the chair.
“Do you know how long I’ve dreamed of this?” says Shade. I look back at the ballroom to see him raise his gun, grimace, and, squinting, fire.
– and the back of Maman’s skull explodes and splatters Dad in blood.
She jerks and falls backwards against her husband. There is a perfect red circle in the centre of her forehead.
I stare. Pink-lipped cardiologist screams.
One of Kyle’s friends sweeps his jailer off her feet and then all five, including Kyle, are grappling with the girls. Other servers run to help, and the one on the terrace turns around to see what’s happening and my hands release.
I sprint up the steps on silent feet, snap my hand into the girl’s temple, and keep running before I’ve seen her fall. The thick tang of iron hits me like a wall when I enter the ballroom. I stop beside my parents. Dad is on his knees, embracing her, eyes shut, whispering into her hair as if there is no one else in the room. “Oh, Mari, my darling,” he breathes. Blood soaks into his collar, his coat, the creases in his knuckles; it’s spreading over her face, too, tracing the minute wrinkles in her skin I never noticed before. Her crimson lips are slack and her open eyes are starkly blue.
I look away, and face her murderer.
This close, I can see his eyes are bloodshot, and there’s a thin sheen of sweat upon his forehead. “Alyssa,” he says, stunned. He lowers his gun.
Mistake.
“Lys, don’t!” shouts Leo.
I run, spin, lash out, skirts billowing, my heel smashing into his temple . . . But it slices through empty air. He grabs me by the knee of my supporting leg in a steel grip and yanks. I can’t stabilise.
Damn he’s quick.
I fall hard.
.
I am bitterly cold. Not as cold as when I got hypothermia after falling into glacial meltwater, though. That was a curl up, don’t move, maybe I should fall asleep, I think I might die, how fascinating kind of cold. This cold is merely painful.
I hear muted conversation. Shouting and a coughing fit. There’s a jackhammer in my skull and a door clicks shut. Silence.
Am I dreaming?
Yes, I am because I can see him. He pulls the trigger and, BANG, Maman dies, over and over and over again. Each time he looks more gleeful, and each time the gunshot gets louder. More blood sprays out, more bone fragments hit my father, and the hole in her forehead gets bigger and bigger until, finally, her entire head shatters.
“Do you know how long I’ve dreamed of this?” he says, and he says it right to me, because I am there, next to Maman, frozen, and unable to save her, over. And over. And over.
BANG.
I wake with a jerk and a wince. My first nightmare in over eight years and it had to be that?
I’m stiff and covered in cooled sweat and smeared makeup and still wearing the damn dress. There’s a nauseating pounding in the back of my head which isn’t helped in the least by the thin pillow and lumpy mattress I’m resting on. A spring jabs me in the back. The blanket, which is thick at least, is horribly scratchy. The air is also chill and damp, and those patches on the wallpaper by my shoulder must be mould. I stare at them, then turn my head on my pillow.
Across a narrow strait of carpet, a Goo globe sits on a large vanity, bathing everything in its eerie green-blue glow. I’m in what seems to be an abandoned dressing room. It’s long and thin with a door at either end and my cot in the centre. I gaze at the Goo globe’s reflection in the vanity’s old, spotted mirror. Then I gaze at the ceiling’s flaking paintwork. Under the scratchy blanket, I scrunch my treacherous skirts in my fists.
Shade killed my mother and has, it seems, kidnapped me.
I swear in quiet, vicious French.