“Are you okay? There’s blood-”
“It’s Troy’s. I’m fine.”
I saw my cell phone still in my hand and lifted it. “Have you called-?”
He took it from me, fingers flying over the keypad. I knelt beside Paige. Troy had been shot in the chest and was unconscious. Blood soaked his shirt. There were more bloodied clothes on the floor, where my father must have tried to stanch the flow.
Paige was ripping off Troy’s shirt. I leaned in to help.
I could see the shot now, an exit wound just below his heart. There was so much blood…
My father bent beside Paige. “What can I do?”
She asked him to bring cold cloths.
A minute later, he returned with wet towels. “The ambulance should be here in five minutes. This damned room…”
“Built before the cellular age,” I murmured as I cleaned the blood from Troy’s chest, looking for other injuries. “And never tested for reception later, because it had a land line. But a land line can be cut.”
He nodded. “When the guards didn’t call the office for their hourly check-in, the security office would have been alerted. It always seemed that would be fast enough…”
Unless you had a man dying on the floor, and the gunman possibly right outside the door.
My father mopped Troy’s brow, then looked at Paige. “Is he as bad as-?”
He stopped and shook his head, realizing he didn’t want an answer. Troy was too pale. His breathing was too shallow. As skilled as Paige and I were at first aid, this was beyond us.
“He was talking to someone,” my father said after a moment. “I was in my room. I couldn’t make out who he was talking to, but nothing seemed to be wrong, and I thought it was you, that I’d misunderstood and you were already on your way when you phoned. I was heading to the door when Troy walked in. That startled me-he didn’t knock first. I think he knew something was wrong and was trying to warn me, but as he walked through that door-”
My father blinked. No outward sign of emotion, but that blink told me everything, as did the slight catch in his voice. “They shot him in the back. He tried to tell me something, but he passed out before he hit the floor. I managed to get the door closed and cast a barrier spell. I should have looked first, seen who-” He shook his head. “All I could think about was getting him into this room and calling for help. Then, too late, I realized I couldn’t.” A pause, then he looked up sharply. “The ambulance. It’ll be here any minute. You should-”
“I’ll open the gates,” I said as I got to my feet.
“Hope and Karl,” Paige called after me. “They’ll be-”
“I’ll call them.”
KARL WAS AT the front door, trying to find a way in after discovering that the outside guards were dead. Had he attempted to break a window, he or Hope could have been seriously injured by the protection spell. I should have warned him about that. Another unacceptable oversight.
Who had been on duty tonight? I almost certainly knew them, had talked to them, inquired after their families, who would be expecting them home in a few hours…
I shook it off and told Karl and Hope about my father, pointing them to the panic room, then opened the gates. I was partway up the drive when the ambulance arrived. I climbed in and updated them on the situation.
As the paramedics and I got close to the panic room, I heard Karl and my father arguing, and broke into a run.
HOPE: CHAOS-CRAZED
I stood in the panic room, my brain a swirl of perfect chaos.
Paige’s thoughts were loudest, a frightened jumble of self-doubt. Did I do that right? Am I missing something? What if I’m making it worse? Where’s the ambulance?
Benicio’s thoughts were too muddled to distinguish, one intense wave after another. Under that, I could pick up Karl’s steady throb of anger and distress.
Then there was the man on the floor. Dying…His soul, slipping from his body, the grief and anxiety and fear of the others swirling around him, a cocktail more potent than anything I ever dreamed of. I drank it in, oblivious to my surroundings. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten in there. Couldn’t remember why I was there. Couldn’t even remember who this man was, lying on the floor, dying. All that mattered was that he was dying and when he did, the reward would be beyond imagining.
Karl was yelling about getting someone to leave. Not me. He wouldn’t do that-wouldn’t pull me away, not when death was so close, hanging in the air…
This was what I was made for. This was where I belonged, in the center of the whirlwind, drinking it in…
“You need to get her out of here.” Benicio’s voice.
“You don’t think I’m trying?” Karl’s snarl.
The room spun, pulling me under.
“It’s the chaos.” Benicio. “She’s-”
“I know what’s happening.” Karl. “And apparently you do too.”
His anger spiked and I shuddered. So delicious, so perfectly-Hands went around my waist. Lifted me. I lashed out with everything I had. The arms only gripped tighter and carried me, kicking and punching and screaming, from the room, out two doors, into the bright glare of a white room.
The chaos lifeline snapped under the glare of those bathroom lights. I looked up and saw my reflection-a nightmarish version of myself, my hair wild, lips pulled back in a snarl, face contorted with pure animal rage.
The face of a demon.
Karl carried me into the bedroom. He lowered me onto the bed, and as I gulped air, my throat raw from screaming, I struggled to block the memory of my reflection, telling myself it’d been some hellish trick of my mind.
The last five minutes flooded back. What I’d felt in that room. What I’d thought. All of it as alien as that horror in the mirror and yet, like the reflection, recognizable.
“K-K-Karl…”
I looked up, my eyes filled with tears of shame, and could see only a watery figure. I felt his arms around me as he crouched, pulling my face against his chest.
“Shh, shh, shh.”
“I-I-I-”
“Shhh.”
I forced my head up, to find his face, to look him in the eyes.
“I wanted him to die, Karl. I couldn’t even remember who he was. A man I know, I like, and I wanted him to die so I could feed off-”
My head jolted forward, gorge rising, and before I could stop it, I threw up on him.
“Oh God, oh God, I’m so-”
He took my chin and lifted it, looking me in the eye. “It’s okay, Hope.”
With his free hand, he deftly unbuttoned his shirt, peeled it off and tossed it on the bed, never breaking eye contact. Thinking of that-throwing a vomit-covered shirt onto Benicio Cortez’s Egyptian cotton sheets-I had to bite back a surge of hysterical laughter. My eyes filled at the same time and I started shaking so badly I couldn’t breathe.