The door to the adjoining room where Troy and I are staying is slightly ajar. I stagger over, ready to throw it open and collapse in Troy’s arms. I’m even considering tossing discretion out the window and telling him everything. About Patchwork. About Osiris. About the imminent danger we’re all in. What does it matter anyway? If time continues to flow backwards, assuming we survive the attack, it’s not like he’ll remember the conversation.
When I come to the sliver of open door, I see Marcie lying in our bed.
She doesn’t see me—she lies on her side, propped up on one elbow, her eyes trained on the bathroom. I can hear the shower hissing on the other side. Between Marcie’s provocative pose and the fact that she’s changed into a nightgown that’s far from blizzard-appropriate, it doesn’t take a detective to see the seductive trap she’s set for my boyfriend.
The old Renata probably would have kicked open the door, maybe even pounced on Marcie to scare the shit out of her. I should have known, given the way she was gunning for me during Truth or Dare, that she had her eye on Troy. In fact, reflecting back on the last time we were here—even when we’d skipped the game—Marcie had made suggestive comments during the drive up. She’d also looked more than a little forlorn during dinner when Slade, perceptive bastard that he is, had guessed about the “milestone” that Troy and I had reached upstairs. “I can’t tell whose afterglow is brighter,” he’d said during a stretch of silence. “Renata looks like she’s about to burst into flames.” The embarrassment that followed had been unimaginable, but replaying that dinner scene in my head, I can almost see Marcie’s miserable expression.
Now, here, she’s making a play for my boyfriend.
Osiris is depending on distractions like this to catch me off-guard. So rather than enter into a firefight with the Mississippi temptress, I gently push open the door until it creaks. Marcie lets out a frightened gasp and flops over like a fish that just landed on the deck of a ship.
When she sees that it’s me, she holds her ground. I have to give her credit. She has more balls than I would have guessed.
“Out,” I whisper. I step away from the open door and grandly wave my coffee mug back toward her room. It takes all my willpower not to say “shoo.” I’m supposed to be diffusing the situation, not blowing it up.
Surprisingly, Marcie complies and heads for the adjoining door, but not before she tries to get the last word. “If you think your New Year’s Eve hookup with Wyatt is a secret, you’re delusional.”
So she does know. We’re way past the point of me playing innocent. “You know the funny thing about secrets, Marcie?” I ask. “At first you pray that you won’t get caught. Slowly it stops weighing on your conscience every waking moment.” I swallow. “But then a month or two passes. And even when you think you’ve forgotten, it will find you. Maybe in a moment when you’re alone. Maybe in a moment that should be pure and happy. Maybe you’re with him. Sooner or later, you pray that you’ll get caught just so that the secret will stop gnawing away at your insides like a disease.”
“If you think that guilty look on your face will earn any sympathy from me, you’re out of your mind,” she snaps. “I don’t care how drunk you were—you would never have done that if you’d really appreciated a catch like Troy.” She glances pointedly at the bathroom door. “And you certainly don’t deserve his forgiveness.”
“You’re right,” I say. “The good news is that you’re not the one who has to forgive me.” With that, I shove Marcie the extra few feet into her room and slam the door behind her. I flip the lock.
I crawl wearily into the bed. The citrusy tang of Marcie’s perfume lingers. I chug the rest of my coffee, hoping the bitterness will wash away the aftertaste of my conversation with that opportunistic succubus.
I struggle to pull off my boots. My arms feel unusually weak, and even after I undo the laces, I can’t seem to pull them off my feet. After a minute of frustrated struggling, I collapse with my head in my lap and start crying. I can’t take this anymore.
A shadow passes over me and I straighten up, half-expecting to find Osiris standing at my bedside wielding a hatchet.
It’s just Troy. His bare torso glistens from the shower, and he has a green towel wrapped around his waist. He stares down at me tenderly, but there’s something else there.
Troy and I have had fights before, but no matter how seriously we bicker, his eyes never lose their softness, their fondness for me. Like our relationship is some sort of fragile orchid and the petals will fall off if he reacts too harshly.
Now, his eyes whisper something else altogether:
Look what you made me do.
That’s when I realize that Troy knows. He knows about my trespass into temptation with Wyatt.
If he knew all those months—all those months that have just been erased—how come he never said anything? And how come, after all that, he still had the confidence in our relationship to propose to me?
Troy must have seen my losing battle with my boots, because without saying a word, he kneels and straightens out my leg. With a soft tug, my left boot comes free in his hands, then the right one. His eyes never leave mine. “So are you crying because you couldn’t get your galoshes off,” he asks, “or because you wish you’d bought the ones with the fur lining?”
Even though I’m crying, I can’t help but laugh. “Galoshes and winter boots aren’t the same, you dope. You would have made a terrible girl.”
Troy lifts up the edge of his towel and checks underneath. “Good thing I was born with this, then.” He whistles with mock relief.
“Put it away.” I punch him playfully and he drops down next to me on the bed. If circumstances were different, the soapy, fresh scent he’s exuding right now would have been enough for me to mount him, to run my hands down his chest and over his abs, to coyly play with the top of his towel until he begged me to take it off.
However, it’s starting to get really difficult to be romantic, not simply because there’s a serial killer out there—but because if we go back much further, our relationship will be just another fragment of Patchwork, dropping into oblivion. The only souvenir will be the memories I have left.
Troy leans in, but instead of kissing me, he sniffs the air in front of my face. “Have you been drinking coffee? I thought you swore off that stuff because it made you too jittery.”
I wipe my nose, runny from all the crying. I’ve never felt less attractive in my life. “From time to time, I think we all need to try things that are bad for us,” I say. “Just to remind ourselves that we still don’t like them.”
I was speaking figuratively, but it’s like what I said snapped a harp string in his mind. He tightens up. Then the words rush out. “I cheated on you. With Marcie.”
I wave dismissively at him. “It was Truth or Dare. Let’s forget about it.”
“No. Last month.” His words are like puffs of air that he has to fight to get out. “After … after New Years.”
Of course what he really means is, After you and Wyatt made out and you didn’t have the balls to tell me about it.
I don’t know how to respond. It’s my damn fault for cheating on Troy in the first place. Still, a part of me feels like it was supremely childish for him to go out and retaliate. He had to tell me now, to unload his conscience on this February 8? I try to swallow the softball-sized lump lodged in my throat. “Congratulations. You sure got me back.” I stand up to leave.
Troy’s hand wraps around my wrist to stop me. “It wasn’t to get back at you, Renata,” he says. “When Marcie first told me about you and Wyatt, and others confirmed it, I was devastated. But in all my anger, leaving you never crossed my mind. I wanted to confront you so bad, but I was terrified that if I said it out loud—if you knew that I knew—things would never be the same, even if we worked through it.”
I nod slowly. As disgusted as I am, I can at least understand him not wanting to rock the boat. “So you hooked up with Marcie so that you could feel like we were
even. Like we both had secrets.”
“It was a moment of weakness,” he says. “And it’s only made me feel worse for the last month.”
A sudden wooziness comes over me. The room tilts, and lines of darkness wriggle through my vision.
Troy catches me as I go down.
As he pulls me toward the bed and cradles me, his voice sounds strangely distant as he repeats my name. Something is wrong, more than just exhaustion. My wits are scattering away from me like a bag of loose marbles.
I want to believe it’s just another panic attack, maybe my phoenix abilities igniting early—but those attacks intensify my senses. This is dulling them.
Sounds turn to muffled echoes. Dark clouds tinge the edge of my vision, spreading inward.
That’s when my eyes fall on the coffee mug, sitting on the carpet.
I’ve been poisoned.
No, not poisoned—sedated. In my confused delirium, even that much makes sense. I’m the one that Osiris wants to torment. He’s punishing me for reasons I haven’t fully grasped, forcing me to watch my loved ones perish before he comes for me. If the sedative he slipped me keeps my adrenaline down and my panic flatlined, then I’ll be defenseless and locked out of Patchwork until it’s too late.
I lunge for the bathroom. My knees buckle with every step. My legs feel as sturdy as plastic straws.
Splashing water on my face buys me time. Troy is saying something to me in the doorway. “Caffeine,” I say. I can’t tell whether I’m shouting or whispering. “Go get caffeine, now … no coffee.”
His footsteps thunder out of the room. I’m fading quickly. As I feared, I can’t concentrate enough to withdraw from the time stream while I’m drugged like this. And I can’t physically protect my friends if I’m unconscious on the carpet.
But if I can hide someplace where Osiris won’t find me before I wake up, maybe I can survive long enough to escape back to Patchwork if something horrible happens to my friends while I’m helpless.
I stumble back into the bedroom and throw open the French doors. As I shuffle out onto the balcony, I latch onto the railing to hold myself upright. The frigid cold briefly cuts through the sedative, but I can still feel the curtain coming down fast.
Then I spy my one last hope, a beacon of sanctuary in the white expanse of the yard.
The Jacuzzi.
A blue tarp covers it for the winter, but even that is nearly invisible beneath the falling snow. Osiris will probably come looking for me in the house, but maybe he won’t expect me to have escaped before I lost consciousness.
I get one leg over the railing, fully intending to jump the twelve feet to the ground. My body, however, has other ideas. Straddling the railing, I lose my grip and my body pitches over the side.
Even the two feet of snow that have accumulated do nothing to cushion my fall. Ironically, the pain causes one last adrenaline surge, enough to get me over to the patio. The wet snow seeps through my jeans and my socks as I crawl for the Jacuzzi, although even my sense of touch is vanishing beneath the sedative’s enveloping fog.
With my last scraps of energy, I peel away the tarp’s edge and crawl through the gap. I slip over the lip of the Jacuzzi and my body rolls to a stop in the empty plastic basin. My final thought as I curl up into the fetal position to keep warm is that if this is truly the end, if this is the time that Osiris finally bests me, then I hope I don’t wake up when the guillotine comes down.
While the snow outside erases any traces that I was ever here, unconsciousness drags me away to a quieter place.
Lightless.
Cold.
Disoriented.
Sore.
Really cold.
This is the order in which I return to the world.
At first I think that my eyelids must have frozen shut, because it’s so dark. My neck aches, stiff from the awkward angle I’ve been lying on the hard plastic floor, When I turn my head, I see a few whispers of moonlight leaking through the edge of the tarp.
I vomit into the Jacuzzi’s drain. I hope it flushes the remaining toxins from my system—while the sedative seems to have already done its worst, my world still feels submerged in water. This is exactly how I felt waking up from anesthesia when I had my wisdom teeth extracted last year.
I lift the edge of the tarp and cautiously peer out. The blizzard has erased the path I carved through the snow, which is probably the only reason I’m alive. Osiris would have surely tracked me out here otherwise.
As soon as I’m sure the coast is clear, I crawl out of the Jacuzzi. When I reach the back of the house, I can hear a muffled moaning coming from inside. My first thought is that it might be one of my friends, wounded or dying, but when I work up the nerve to slip through the sliding door, I hear it for what it is.
Whale songs.
The aquatic sounds playing over the intercom unnervingly alternate between bellowing moans and high-pitched squeaks. Whales crying out in dark waters, calling for their friends, calling for their mates.
I know how they feel.
Beyond the whales, I hear no human-generated noise. No laughing over another stupid game of Truth or Dare. No sounds of Troy or the others worriedly searching for me. At this point, it would even be a relief to hear Garrett and Dana fooling around again. Hell, it would be a relief to hear Troy and Marcie going at it. Just to know someone was alive.
As I tread softly across the carpet, there’s only an all-consuming quiet where there should be sounds of life. From the kitchen. From the bedroom upstairs. The silence circulates through the room like a bad smell, from the floor to the rafters. I don’t have the heart to go upstairs and look around, so I open the front door and step back out into the cold.
I immediately wish I’d gone upstairs instead.
Where the front yard had been a flat stretch of white before, there is now a line of lumpy snowmen all standing in a row. These aren’t the idyllic, neatly rolled snowmen I made when I was a kid.
They’re human-sized lumps, hastily packed together. Red seeps through the white. Snow cones saturated with blood.
With human limbs protruding in certain places.
I drop to my knees when I begin to see other signs of the friends I know.
The hatchet Troy brought with him, protruding from one snowman’s head.
Wyatt’s letterman jacket, torn to bloody shreds.
A slender hand reaching out of the snow, and on it, Ivy’s mood ring turning the same blue shade as her frozen, dead fingers.
Osiris butchered all my friends and packed them into monuments of snow.
There’s something else though, something I didn’t originally notice. The floodlight from the front of the house is blinding, but when my tear-blurred eyes adjust, I see a different light in the woods.
A flashlight, scouring for something in the trees. My first thought is that one of my friends survived. Maybe Troy escaped the same bloodied fate of the others and headed for the forest to search for me. But right as I experience that buoy of hope, the flashlight stops moving at the wood’s edge … then points in my direction.
I don’t have time to register the gunshot until the snowman nearest me explodes. The blast reveals Dana’s frozen face, twisted in a dying scream. Her blood sprays across my cheeks and forehead.
The second bullet whistles past me and hits the floodlight over the front door. I dart forward and pluck the hatchet from the snowman before I lurch back into the house. Another round splinters the thick door right as I slam it shut.
I throw the bolt, even though that’s not going to buy me much time. I just need a minute to concentrate and exercise my phoenix powers, to drag myself back to Patchwork. Seeing my friends die has been enough to trigger it the last three times, but with the sedative still coursing through my veins, I can’t summon the burn in me. Can’t find my wings. Can’t dissolve myself into ash and rise again.
The butt of Osiris’s rifle smashes through one of the windows nearest me, littering the floor with glass. Rather tha
n running upstairs, like the stupid kids in horror movies always do, I take off out the back door. After I hurdle over the edge of the patio, I stumble down the embankment toward the frozen pond. I cling to the hatchet like it’s a life preserver even though it won’t protect me from Osiris’s rifle, which he must have stolen from the locked hunting cabinet belonging to Slade’s father.
The cold numbs my bootless feet down to the bone. Much longer exposed to the elements and I won’t be able to run. I already feel like I’m about to go into shock.
“Shock …” I whisper.
That’s when I realize what I have to do. If an emotional shock isn’t enough to cut through the sedative, then maybe what I need is a physical one.
The blizzard has already covered the surface of the pond, but I know I’ve reached the ice when it creaks under my weight. Slade warned us last time that despite the cold, the deep pond hadn’t frozen enough to walk or skate on.
I’m counting on that.
Out in the middle, I drop into a crouch and desperately wipe away the snow. I laugh with crazed relief when, after all the hand shoveling, I get my first glimpse of the ice beneath. It’s thick enough to support my weight. Still, I can see the bubbles trapped against the underbelly of the ice. The surface is slick. This is good.
I hold the hatchet over my head and bring it down. The dulled metal blade only gouges the ice, which holds true. I bring it down again. Again. Again.
Osiris comes around the corner of the house. Once again, he’s draped in black robes, with the howling sun mask covering his face.
My hatchet comes down again. Again. Harder. Faster.
Osiris levels the rifle at me. Takes deliberate steps toward the ice. He knows he has me cornered. One well-aimed blast from him and I die.
And everybody stays dead.
And nobody comes back.
Picturing Troy out front, buried in one of those snowmen, is enough to access my last reserve of strength.
I raise the hatchet high.
Osiris peers down the barrel.