by Jessica King
David opened his eyes and found a group of giggling girls passing in front of him. They were Trinity’s age, maybe a little younger. They had intricately drawn war paint around their eyes, like masks, sipping on flavored lemonades; a stand had seen the opportunity and set up shop, hoping murderers liked lemonade. Did their parents know where they were, or were they just as clueless as he had been when Trinity had ventured off to the Prophetess gathering?
He turned away, seeing a man around his age slipping an inhaler into his back pocket. Was he simply nervous from the crowd, or did he have an illness that would threaten his life if he released the weapon? He tried to take a moment to slow down. To imagine this man in a coffin at his hand. Would he be able to handle that? His mind drifted to the coffin he and his wife had picked out for Trinity. White, pearly. There would be pink flowers atop it and white ribbon. The inside was a soft satin with silver accents. He imagined Trinity in that coffin at the hand of the man in front of him who still hadn’t turned around but was trying to yell into his phone over the noise of the crowd.
David reached for the canister when a pair of familiar eyes caught his. He tried to turn away, but it was too late; he’d seen the eyes of his daughter projected on the screen. Deep brown and warm. As much as David felt full of ashen lava, his daughter’s eyes were molten chocolate. Behind the world “Eliminated” in all red across her neck and shoulders, Trinity’s smile was the one that stuck on her face after she’d been laughing.
His grip around the weapon in his pocket loosened. Perhaps he could manage to have someone dead in a casket because of his actions. But his daughter wouldn’t have been able to handle it. In his mind, she was storming out of the house, angry that he’d do something so severe in retaliation. The only time she’d actually stormed out of the house, she was seventeen. Her mother told her that she was okay with her dating, but Trinity would have to ask her father. He’d said no. She was too young.
She’d stormed out of the house, yelling something about going to talk to Callie about this. Callie, who had been allowed to date since she was thirteen.
“You’re gonna have to let her go eventually,” his wife had said. “Doesn’t mean she’s not still yours. You know that.”
Killing these people wasn’t going to bring her back.
The image on the screen had flickered to a new picture. A girl mid-twirl in a traditional sari. She had the same after-laugh smile on as Trinity. He swallowed. Maybe it wasn’t revenge for Trinity, but for the parents of all the other people who had been killed in the shootings.
He stood, stuck in place like the pavement beneath his feet had hardened around his shoes. The slideshow flipped to a woman older than he was, her neck ringed in tattoos. Someone hiccupped behind him, and he turned. A young woman was staring at the screen, tears dripping from her eyes, pulling dark mascara down in rivulets over her cheeks, cutting lines through the warpaint she’d painted onto her face. She swallowed and hiccupped again; her eyes glued to the screen in disbelief.
David tried not to stare, not wanting to pull her attention to him. It was startling to see how many had died because of the Kingsmen. For someone who hadn’t truly grasped all these people had died a week ago, he could understand it being jarring. The screen flickered, a young man with a big smile gave a big thumbs-up to the crowd. He’d created some sort of animated character of himself, which sat on his shoulder, his hands also molded into an imitation of a thumbs-up.
David made his way to the smoothie shop he’d come in, and watched the slideshow run through all the way again until it reached Trinity. He ignored the King’s words, and instead looked at the faces of the men and women who had been killed alongside his daughter. He watched as several people drifted away from the crowd, crying from the shock of so many dead.
When Trinity’s smile flooded the road again, he stared into his daughter’s eyes until they flickered away. He turned and walked back through the smoothie shop to his car and drove home, the canister feeling lighter in his pocket, despite how heavy his grief sat on his heart.
+++
Sunday, March 27, 2017, 4:37 p.m.
Ivy’s ears were still recovering from the festival. The general quiet of Wilkins’ office was strangely loud to her, the noise of the Kingsmen gathering had become like the sound of an air conditioner or rain on a window by the end of her shift, and the lack of it made her feel as though she was underwater, the pressure of it invading her mind.
“Miss Hart?” Wilkins peeked out through the door to the waiting room. His voice sounded too crisp compared to the hissing, sliding sounds of King’s distorted voice. She followed him into his office and found her place back on the couch. His salt-and-pepper beard stood out with extra vigor in comparison with his brown and black tweed suit. She smelled the sickly sweet scent of tobacco and quickly found the pipe perched on his bookshelf.
“A bad habit, I’m afraid,” Wilkins said, following her eyes to the shelf. He took the pipe off of its holder, and they contemplated the curved piece of wood together. It was pretty in the way a trinket was pretty, adding something to the room without taking over. “I started because I thought it made me look intelligent, of course, I was wrong about that, seeing as all of my friends who studied in the sciences immediately reprimanded me, but…” he sighed. “I suppose I find it relaxing despite all the horrible effects.”
Ivy didn’t have much to say about it. She’d only ever taken a puff of a cigar in her teenage years, and she hadn’t been much of a fan. It’d been bitter, and the menthol had burned her nose until she wrinkled her face.
“Did you do your homework?” Wilkins said, pointing to the phone sitting on the couch next to Ivy.
“Yes,” she said. “I listened to it several times. I feel like I’ve memorized it.”
“How did it make you feel to listen to it?”
Ivy shrugged. “Angry that I let it happen, I guess,” Ivy said. She’d played her trip to the convenience store in her mind a million times over. Just because Lily, the young woman who had been trying to kill Ivy, was dead… That meant nothing to the Kingsmen. She should have known she’d already been reassigned, should have suspected that she’d already been found. “If I’d been on my guard, that probably wouldn’t have happened.”
“Okay,” Wilkins said, scribbling into the notebook on his lap. He looked at her. “Being attacked is never your fault.”
Ivy swallowed. She’d said the same thing to people before. “It is when you’re trained not to get attacked,” she said, waving off any further attempts to counter her.
“Anything else?” he asked.
Ivy shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
Wilkins nodded. “That’s okay. How about we try again with you recording yourself talking again. I want you to go for more of what you were feeling emotionally, as opposed to simply what you saw and physically experienced.”
When she had finished, Wilkins was still scribbling. She turned off the recording of herself and started up a new one, not letting the man see what she was doing.
“So, you felt worried about being shot,” Wilkins said, flipping through his pages of notes. “And scared when she actually did shoot you.” He landed on his current page. “And you were angry when you saw her again.”
“Yes,” Ivy said, squirming on the couch. Worried, scared, and angry still didn’t sound sufficient when he repeated in back, but that was what she’d managed to say.
“Well, that’s better than the last one. I feel like we got a bit more.”
Ivy didn’t quite understand what he meant by “more.” She’d told the same story as she had before. She expected the man wanted her to have a breakthrough, which likely meant lots of crying about how terrorized she’d been. How it would affect her forever. And then shortly after, the sound of bullets wouldn’t affect her so much because she’d admitted to gut-wrenching fear aloud.
It seemed very Hollywood to Ivy, and she didn’t think that was her way of dealing with things. She’d wanted to get back to training
and working out, though that was out of the question until her ribs fully healed. Her shoulder still throbbed, and she was still giving herself a steady stream of ibuprofen, but she knew the movement would help her more than any amount of talking would.
“Yeah,” Ivy finally said when she realized Wilkins was waiting on her for an answer, his head tilted to the side. Her eyes darted to the back window, a car’s backfire startling her. She pressed it down and pushed it away.
He smiled. “I want you to listen to it again, at least five times. Next time, I want to hear why you were worried. Beyond the physical pain, what would being shot mean? When your fears came true, how did you feel about it? What actions did you play in your mind when you were angry at her?”
“I can see the connection, but it seems a bit like a waste of time to me,” Ivy said, and he raised an eyebrow. “You told me to be honest with you,” she said, lifting a shoulder.
Wilkins scribbled a new note. “I did. Thank you.”
He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but instead added something to his scribbles. “How,” he said, pausing like he was unsure how to continue. “How did you feel about her calling you Mary? I brought it up last time, but you never gave me your take on it.”
Ivy studied her nails, a habit she only deferred to when she didn’t want to make eye contact. It was something she’d done in her teen years, for the most part, but apparently, the impulse had never entirely died. “I just wanted her to stop believing it,” Ivy said. “I’m tired of people thinking I’m a witch.”
“Why are you tired of it?” he asked.
“Because I’m not a witch,” Ivy said, the old annoyance prickling at the back of her neck. “It’s like being arrested for a crime you didn’t do over and over again.”
“You find this to be more of an annoyance than something you’re frightened of?” Wilkins asked. “Being considered to be Mary and not Ivy, I mean.”
Ivy nearly corrected him to tell him that she was terrified of the fact that killers were going to come after her until she was dead. But she didn’t. If Wilkins was the King, she didn’t want him to know how much she feared his minions. “Yes.”
“It doesn’t scare you that this annoyance is life-threatening?” he asked.
Ivy shrugged, and Wilkins sunk in his chair just a fraction, defeated. “Perhaps you don’t trust me because you, like several of my students, believe that I might be a Kingsmen. I’m afraid I’ve done my job of analyzing the group too well if I do say so myself. I’ve convinced several that I am part of the cult, and I’m certainly not.” He shifted. “After Mason described his plan to me, I decided to take my own spin. I didn’t become a Kingsmen; I helped women fake their deaths. Made sure it was public enough that they wouldn’t be hunted.”
Ivy’s eyebrows knitted together. It didn’t sound real. He could have made it up on the spot, she reminded herself. Some criminals were great on their toes.
He handed her his phone. “Feel free,” he said, gesturing for her to go through his messages. Three women whose names she recognized from the Kingsmen site were in the messages of his phone. They’d sent him grocery lists, and he’d asked what movies they’d like for him to pick up. Messages with Meredith White discussed the process of changing her name. Would she need plastic surgery? He might know a friend who could help with that.
“If you look them up, you’ll see they were each found “dead” by suicide about a week and a half ago,” he said, putting the word “dead” in air quotes with his fingers. A quick search proved his words true.
“Where are they?” she asked, glancing up from an article.
“One in here in L.A. and one in Chula Vista. And Meredith left for Ohio two days ago, and her name will be changed within the month. Even I probably won’t know it,” he said. “If you know where the L.A. coven is now, that might help for the woman still in town,” he said.
Ivy ignored the obvious red flag of his asking the location for the coven. Would he really come right out and ask her that if he were the King? She’d think about it later. “How did you know them?” Ivy asked. “How did you help?”
Wilkins sucked in a breath and held it, and Ivy could tell he was holding in a frustrated sigh. Was he, like she was, tired of being questioned and misidentified? It didn’t matter. She had her mother’s journals—proof beyond a simple picture on the internet—saying the man in front of her might be a serial killer.
“Loraine was a former student. Katherine is my friend’s sister-in-law. Meredith is an intern for my colleague in the psychology department. She overheard me talking to Loraine on the phone and told me she’d been mistaken for a reincarnated witch and asked for help, so I obliged.”
“That’s kind of you,” she said. She handed him back his phone.
“Mason gave his life for it, so I don’t feel like I did much in comparison.”
Ivy considered the man in front of her for a long moment, openly analyzing him. He was clearly trying not to appear annoyed by her open suspicion of his actions, though he did raise an eyebrow as if to say, And?
“But you clearly didn’t appreciate my mother being involved. And now, you’re just so willing to help people after cutting her off?”
Wilkins shook his head. “I regret every day not helping your mother, Ivy. I was scared of what she was getting into. It looked like a gang when she started. These women were getting into some dangerous things, and I was scared of it. Now I realize it was pretty harmless in the end, at least the things she was doing. This is my way of trying to make up for past actions.”
Ivy didn’t say anything, just continued to look at him.
“Perhaps you should work with a different psychologist,” Wilkins said. “This will do neither of us any good at all if you can never bring yourself to trust me on this.”
Ivy looked at her still-recording phone. “Can I think about it?” she asked. It was becoming too complicated to try to help fix the problems her mind had created while in captivity and try to test to see if Wilkins was simply playing her as the King.
“Of course,” he said. “But do try to consider it without any bias. I think I can help you.” He crossed his arms over his chest, giving her a close-lipped smile that barely tilted up at all.
She probably seemed insane, after asking this the first time he offered help. If he really was innocent, he was likely as exasperated as she was every time someone called her Mary. But she was the one who was constantly in and out of life or death situations, not him. Fingers on the door, she turned back. “Can I get the address of that woman hiding in L.A.?” she asked.
Wilkins gnawed on his upper lip. “Yes.”
Ivy drove along the 405 to the address Wilkins had given her in Inglewood. She was on the third floor of an apartment complex, and Ivy stood against the wall, waiting for her breath to return to her before she knocked on the door. She was sore all over still, her heavy breathing disrupting her healing rib and the uptick in her blood pressure giving her bullet wound a heartbeat.
She counted out her breaths until they were even and slow, and she knocked on the door. There was a nail where a wreath might have hung, and the dirt on the ground was displaced, and the wood was faded in the shape of a welcome mat. When no one answered, Ivy knocked again. “LAPD, open up,” she said, pulling volume from her stomach.
There was scuffling behind the door, followed by the pause of someone looking through the peephole. She pulled her badge from the back of her jeans and held it up at eye-level. The door opened. A pale young woman with dark hair in a middle part and a smattering of freckles raised an eyebrow.
“Loraine?” Ivy asked. The young woman blinked. “Wilkins gave me your address,” Ivy said. “He said he helped you stage your death.” The young woman held her stare, and Ivy thought maybe the girl hadn’t heard her when she sighed and took a step to the side.
“Yeah,” she said. She looked behind her. “Did you want to come in, or—”
Ivy stepped through the threshold, a
nd Loraine locked the door behind her. “I just wanted to make sure you were, well, actually alive,” Ivy said. Loraine tugged at the sleeves of her shirt, covering all of her arms except her fingertips.
“You one of the people who think he’s secretly some Kingsmen conspirator?” she asked. Her eyes were a cutting green. Harsh and intelligent.
“I might be,” Ivy said, feeling her own hackles rising in the judgmental gaze of the young woman. She steadied her own gaze.
Loraine blinked, looking away. “Well, I’m alive,” she said, gesturing around her. The apartment was sparsely decorated, though Ivy noticed a near-nest of blankets on the couch as if Loraine had wrapped herself in layers before Ivy had come knocking. “Barely. Can’t do much. But, you know, I’m breathing, and I owe that to Professor Wilkins. So…”
Ivy couldn’t imagine the two of them getting along well. Wilkins was suave and smiling, and this girl was made of glass and rough stone.
“Did you practice magic?” Ivy asked.
Loraine looked to the ceiling and closed her eyes, her dark eyelashes settling into her freckles like ravens landing on sand. “No,” she said. “I happen to look too much like some girl stupid enough to think she was a witch back in eighteen-whatever. Now I’m stuck in my apartment for the next known forever.” The acid in her tone gave Ivy a sour taste in her own mouth.
She couldn’t seem to align why the young woman was so angry. She hardly seemed like an extrovert who would need to constantly be out and about.
“I see,” Ivy said. She scrolled through the Kingsmen site, finding the woman Loraine was supposedly a reincarnation of. “You know, you have some differences. The freckles and the shape of your nose and stuff. Maybe if you just change your name, you could—”
“I could start over?” Loraine asked. “I know that.” She almost spat the words. “I want that eventually. But can’t I mourn the life I had?” Her dark hair reached down to her elbows. She was already a short woman, and the effect of it made her appear near sprite-like. “I’ll bleach my hair and move to Florida or something. Isn’t that where everyone goes to die?”
