by Nicole Thorn
I glanced at Manny. “Do you think we should do something?”
“No,” she said, sliding her hand into mine. “I think we should stand here, watch the chaos, and stay out of everyone’s way.” As soon as the words left her mouth, I watched a kid maybe a couple of years younger than me leap off a table. He landed on the back of some poor fool, and the two of them fell to the ground together in a heap. They rolled along the carpet, biting, scratching, and cursing.
“I would be very upset if that happened to you,” I said.
“Which part?” Manny asked, peering up at me with warm eyes. I stroked her cheek and leaned my head down. It made the throbbing along the back of my skull worse but it was worth getting to feel her forehead against mine. She was warm, soft, everything that I wanted to have around me. She was... maybe she was just everything to me.
We stayed like that until the throbbing got to be too much. I could stop the bleeding, internal and external, and Manny could heal the skin. Neither of us could do anything for my skull, though. The pain was familiar, and I thought there was a hairline fracture in my head. Whatever Manny’s mother hit me with had been heavy.
Someone screamed right next to Manny and me. I blinked, then looked over to see a woman. She had a lamp in her hand, and was swinging it like a baseball bat. Another kid stood in front of her, his hands held out, both his eyebrows popping up. He looked confused, then annoyed when one of her wild swings connected. A jagged piece of metal sliced through his arm.
I didn’t think Merry would like this woman hurting one of her friends. After she had helped us out, I thought it only polite to return the favor. I focused on the woman’s head. On the blood inside her body. It was easy after that. All that blood turned into spikes, and it shredded her brain from the inside.
Blood burst from around her skull, through her ears and mouth and nose. She dropped to the ground heavily, landing on her knees. As she fell to the side, the kid standing in front of her said, “Cool!” He looked up at me, smirking. “Thanks, man.” With a salute, he took off.
Dolan, across the room, shouted, “Cameras, kids! There are cameras! Be careful what you...”
He was cut off when a girl smashed her elbow into the glass display. While the shards rained down, she took out one of the jewels from inside. She whipped around, whooping in joy. “I got it, D! This will pay for everything we’ve lost on this trip!”
I turned my attention back to Dolan, who sighed. Heavily. “Never mind about the cameras. We’ll figure something out. Find Marc. The rest of you... I don’t know. Just don’t get hurt!”
More cheers went up around the room. I watched Kentucky leap off a table and slice through someone’s neck with her machete. Blood dripped from the tip of the blade, following her as she approached another person. Across the room, Marc had finally been cornered. Merry touched his date’s chest, and she started to scream. Or tried to. It looked like her mouth opened but no sound came out. Her face turned colors, and then she fell to the ground, not moving.
Merry turned back to Marc, who looked impossibly pale.
Above us, the ceiling cracked. I looked up but there was no structural damage that I could find. The sound came again. It could have been my imagination but what if someone tried bringing the ceiling down on us? My mind threw images at me. Manny being crushed by things. Trapped under other things. Bleeding, broken, hurt.
I took her hand. “We need to find a woodworker.”
Manny cocked her head at me. “Is there a reason?”
The cracking sound came again, and this time she heard it as well. Her eyes locked on the ceiling. She did not grow concerned, though. She glared at the ceiling as if it had somehow done her wrong. Then her eyes leveled. “Most of the people here are metalworkers, or gem workers,” she said. “I recognize them from the thousands of functions my parents have dragged me to over the years. So, it has to be one of their dates.”
“Lead the way,” I said.
Manny didn’t hesitate. She waded into the crowd. The bodies on the floor had leaked blood everywhere, and the open wounds called to me. Like a presence in the back of my mind, poking at me. Asking if I paid any attention to it. I did but until it became useful, I would not touch this blood. I would not touch anything.
Behind us, someone screamed. “Why are you doing this!?”
“Got paid good money,” Dolan said. The thwack of the baseball bat followed this sentence, and someone hit the ground. “Kids?” he called. I glanced over my shoulder to see him looking at us. “Where are you going? I told you to stay safe.”
I didn’t have time to answer because one of the metal workers ripped the chandelier from the ceiling. It whooshed through the air, and I watched as a kid underneath it stared up at the thing. His eyes widened but he wasn’t quite fast enough to move out of the way. Like the others of Dolan’s group, this kid wore street clothes. A white t-shirt, and pale jeans. It was easy to see the blood leaking from his body. Without thinking, I reached out and stopped the bleeding. He still screamed in agony but he would not bleed out now.
His right leg had been pinned underneath the chandelier, and I could see where it pierced his skin. Teeth ground together in pain, he thumped back against the ground, staring at the ceiling.
A glance behind showed Dolan’s face. It had lost that cheerful mien and turned into all hard, cold lines. He called out, his voice ringing above the screaming and begging. “Change of plans. No one gets out alive.”
All his people turned to him for a brief second, then looked back at everyone around them. Their faces hardened, much like Dolan’s had, and then they set about a systematic slaughter.
“Found him!” Manny called. I turned away from everyone else and rushed to join my girlfriend. She had the woodworker pinned to the wall, her hand around his throat. As I approached, I started heating up his blood, making it practically boil from inside his body. The man’s eyes widened, and he started to scream. I did not stop, though because he would have killed Manny by bringing the ceiling down.
He would have... taken away the only thing I had. So, his blood grew hotter until Manny had to drop him onto the ground. He writhed there, screaming in agony. My girlfriend looked back at me, a smile on her face. Then his throat opened up, and blood came pouring from the wound. I called that as well, letting the red liquid pool around my feet. It did not touch me, not really. I could step away from it without leaving any footprints behind.
The man died shortly after that. I turned from him, looking back at the room. Dolan’s people had chased everyone to the corner of the room. They begged and pleaded but that didn’t seem to help them any. The man himself had knelt next to the fallen boy. He examined the chandelier, trying to figure out how to remove it.
I started over, and Manny quickly took my hand and followed me. “Is he okay?” Manny asked when we reached the two people.
Dolan shook his head. “I don’t know yet. I can’t seem to get the chandelier off him.”
I knelt down, peering through the spokes of metal and diamonds that the thing had been made out of. “It’s pierced his leg,” I said. “Probably has him pinned to the floor.”
With a frown, Dolan said, “But there’s no blood.”
The kid didn’t react. His eyes were glassy from pain, his hands clenched weakly on the ground. He was likely seconds from going into shock. I answered the man, while Manny took off for the crowd that had been pinned against the opposite wall. “I’m keeping him from bleeding.”
Dolan looked at me and snapped his fingers. “That’s right. Merry said that you’re a blood worker.”
I nodded.
“I appreciate your help but I fear it’ll be for naught if I can’t get this thing off him,” Dolan said, standing up. He walked around the chandelier thoughtfully. “If I can find some way to make a pulley system, I could hook a rope around the top of the chandelier, then have all my people haul on it, until the thing lifts up, and then it’s a matter of breaking the metal and pulling it from Dunc
an’s leg.”
Manny shoved a guy, about twenty, onto the ground in front of the chandelier. “Remove it, now, and we’ll let you live.”
“Or we could do that,” Dolan said, sighing. “I’m getting too old for this shit.”
The guy looked up at Manny, and then Dolan. “Please don’t kill me. I didn’t do anything wrong. I swear that I didn’t. If you want money, I’ve got plenty.” He pulled his wallet out, flashing about a thousand dollars in cash. Dolan took it, leafing through it thoughtfully.
“This is very generous of you,” he said. “Now, remove this damn thing from my boy.” The last words were spoken in a guttural snarl that had me blinking. I’d never heard the man sound anything less than kind.
The metalworker took a deep breath, to calm his nerves. I looked past him, to the corner of the room. Kentucky had stuck her machete into someone’s chest, and Merry had another person pinned while the kid who thought my blood working had been cool sliced their throat.
The squeal of metal brought my attention back to the scene in front of me. The chandelier lifted off the kid slowly, trembling like the metal worker’s hands were. It floated a foot away, then crashed to the ground with a jingle of diamonds. “There,” he said. “Can I leave now?”
Manny looked at Dolan, who sighed. “Yeah, yeah. Far be it from me to renege on a deal. But don’t piss me off a second time. Then you’re dead. Understood?”
The metal worker took off like a bolt of lightning. Dolan had to call Merry to let him out of the room, and then he was gone. I looked back to the kid on the ground. He was perhaps a year older than me, though it was hard to tell with how pale he had gone from pain. A light sheen of sweat had coated his skin, and he looked shaken. Dolan examined the open wounds on his leg. They did not bleed but they still looked nasty.
Manny knelt next to him, and said, “May I?”
Dolan glanced at her. “Go ahead…” He watched as Manny sealed all the wounds on the boy, turning his skin perfectly smooth once more.
“There’s nothing that I can do for the broken bones but at least he won’t get an infection this way,” she said, standing back up.
“Thank you,” Dolan responded. He called two of his people over, and they carried the boy from the room. Blood had soaked everything. It had splashed across tablecloths, onto windows. All the displays had been busted open and looted. I could see bloody glasses lying on the floor, and the gems had all been stained as well.
Merry brought Marc over and threw him onto the ground in front of Dolan. “He says the money is in his car, and that he’ll pay you now.”
“Go retrieve the payment,” Dolan ordered. “Then kill him.”
Merry didn’t hesitate to grab Marc and drag him from the room. As the doors closed behind them, Dolan turned back to us. He examined Manny and me, his eyes lingering on our clasped hands. “The two of you have gotten yourselves into quite the predicament,” he said. “What with the bodies in the back, and what you’ve done here today.”
Manny’s hand tightened around mine. “I know,” she said.
“How do you plan on fixing that?”
We both stayed quiet. We had been working on excuses for why my father had vanished, and hadn’t found any that wouldn’t get me into some kind of trouble. I feared that they would take me away from Manny. She feared that they would hurt me in some way but I had already been hurt so many times that I couldn’t feel anything new.
Dolan nodded, and rocked back on his heels. “We’ll do our best to take care of the cameras,” he said. “But in a building like this, it’ll be extremely hard to get all the footage erased. The chances of someone seeing you two helping us are great. I’m sorry to say that there’s nothing I can do about that.”
Manny looked at the ground, her jaw tight.
“However,” Dolan continued. “Merry told me what happened at your school earlier this week. The pictures and what they showed. After everything else that I’ve seen here…I would be willing to offer you both a place in my company, if you wanted.”
I cocked my head. “What is your company?”
He grinned wide, his white teeth flashing around his beard. “We’re mercenaries, kid. Take a look around. Someone hired us to kill her parents but Manny’s done that for us, hasn’t she?”
“You would take both of us?” Manny asked.
Dolan nodded. “I would. We could always use another pair of helping hands, and you’ve both proven to be extremely helpful. I can’t erase what’s happened here today but I can promise that if you give me some time, I’ll make sure that no one comes looking for you again.”
Manny’s hand squeezed mine, hard. She looked up at me. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to stay with you,” I said. “After what I did…”
“What did you do?” Dolan asked.
“I killed my father,” I answered, staring down at the floor. My chest ached as the words left my mouth, and my mind went back to that moment where he died. The look of surprise on his face. He hadn’t thought I would ever hurt him. He hadn’t…I stopped thinking because everything turned into a jumbled mess.
Dolan put his hand on my shoulder, forcing my eyes up. “That’s okay,” he said to me. “You did what you had to.”
“Did I?”
“Yes,” Manny said. “You did.”
I looked at her, and took her words. Dolan didn’t understand but Manny did. She had seen everything, learned everything. She mattered more than anyone else in this room, and if she thought I hadn’t done anything wrong, then maybe I hadn’t. Maybe everything would be all right.
“You would really take me?” I asked the big man in front of us.
“Of course,” Dolan said. “I don’t offer anything unless I’m willing to give it.”
“Okay,” I said. “If Manny wants to go, then I will too.”
Manny nodded her head. She looked around the room, and softly said, “I don’t think there’s anything left for me here.”
Dolan put both his hands on her shoulders, drawing her attention. “You have nothing to fret over. If I had been you, I would’ve killed the lot of them a long time ago.”
Manny smiled.
“Now,” Dolan said. “We’ve got a lot to clean up. I want you two to head back home. Pack up everything that you want to take with you. We’ll come get you as soon as we can. This can’t be covered up like those kids you killed. It’ll take some time. If the police arrest you, let them. I won’t let you rot in a prison cell. Promise.”
Manny and I left the ballroom. Outside, in the hall, it no longer smelled like blood and death. It smelled like fresh air. I stopped Manny just outside the doors, turning her to face me. “Are you okay?” I asked.
She wrapped her arms around me and rested her cheek against my chest. “Yes. I’m fine. I love you, Becket.”
“I love you, too,” I said, stroking a hand down her hair. “I’m sorry that your family had to die.”
“I’m sorry that your father had to die,” Manny responded. “I’m sorry that everyone treated you so badly.” She rubbed my head, not on the spot that had been hit but close to it. “I’m sorry that all of this happened.”
We kissed, standing in the middle of the hallway. Once we had broken apart, I pulled all the blood from our clothing and skin and sent it to the floor behind us. Someone would find it soon but no one would be able to trace it back to us. Then I took Manny’s hand and started walking her out of the building.
Outside, it was quiet and normal. No one had figured out what happened inside. It was a large building but the screams should have carried, unless a sound worker had been in attendance. All the limos waited along the curb, and the fancy cars remained parked behind the building. Drivers sat behind the wheels, reading or playing on their phones. Looking unbothered by anything.
We quickly found Manny’s limo. She knocked gently on the window until the driver looked up, surprised. He unlocked the doors, and we climbed in. “Sorry. I wasn’t expecting you f
or another hour,” he said.
“Oh, parties just aren’t our thing,” Manny said, laughing. “We decided to head home. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. Mr. Anders’ house first?”
“No,” Manny said. “Drop us both off at my house. Then you can head home for the night. I’m sure you’re tired of being here, staring out the window.”
The man smiled at her, then pulled away from the curb. He put the partition up, to give us the privacy that we didn’t need. Manny and I sat in the back, looking out our separate windows, holding hands. We were almost completely silent for the entire ride. It wasn’t until the driver turned into her neighborhood that I said, “They might blame me.”
“What?” Manny asked.
“For everything that happened here? They might blame me, saying that I corrupted you. Everyone already thinks I’m a killer... Which I am, and have been for years. I just wanted to warn you, so that you don’t get upset if and when it happens.”
Manny’s eyes narrowed. “It would be dumb of them to blame you. I’m the one that killed them. I told you to stand back while I did. I’m even the one that drew first blood with Hel. Surely they can’t think you talked me into all of that.”
“They always look for a scapegoat,” I said back to her. “It can never be someone did a bad thing. It’s always someone did a bad thing because this other thing made them think it was okay. I don’t think people like admitting that sometimes there isn’t something else to blame.”
Manny sighed, looking out the window. “I still think it’s stupid.”
I kissed her cheek, and she smiled at me. It lit up her entire face, making her green eyes sparkle. I wanted to kiss her again but I refrained because we had pulled up outside her house. I held the door for her, so that she could gather the skirt of her dress. She stepped from the car and waved to the driver as he took off.
The two of us immediately went down to her room. She looked around at everything while I unzipped her dress. She stepped from it, leaving her wearing nothing but her bra, panties, and so many diamonds that she shined. She started to remove the jewels and stuff them into her tiny purse. Somehow it had survived the night. “Do you think I should keep these?” she asked.
