by Gabi Moore
“Well, I didn’t do it,” Aurora insisted. “That’s crazy! Why would I? I’d have to be nuts to want to hurt either of them like that.”
“Honestly,” Milo shrugged. “We’re just low on suspects.”
Fury welled up Aurora’s stomach like a fireball. “That’s why I’m being given the third-degree? Because you’re low on suspects?”
Milo exchanged a look with Dora, who looked at him with the same flat expression she’d been wearing for most of the interview.
“So, you don’t have any proof—or—or whatever?” Aurora snapped. “You don’t have any reason to suspect me at all? Just, there’s not really anyone else?”
“Well, it’s not—”
“Are you even allowed to hold me here?”
Dora stiffened, and Milo shook his head. “Now, don’t get too excited. You’re involved in a violent crime investigation, Ms., and we’d appreciate it—”
“No,” Aurora slammed to her feet. “If I’m not under arrest, I’m leaving. I’ve told you everything I know. Don’t contact me again without a warrant.”
And with that, she snatched her purse and stormed out the door of the interview room, heart pounding in terror and triumph. She couldn’t believe she had just done that. Nerves twittered over her skin like ruffled feathers as she walked with her chin up out into the office.
“Hey, wait up!”
Aurora didn’t even turn around. It was Milo, of course, catching up with her. But she’d had a long night, and a long night is even longer in heels, and she was in no mood to mince any more words with this particular nuisance.
“What’dya want?”
“To apologize.”
The nerve! Aurora spun around furious, but before she could say a word, Milo pressed on. “Look, we wanted to push you a little, make sure it wasn’t you. We can learn a lot from how someone denies an accusation. It takes a little acting, but you passed. You weren’t involved.”
“I told you that from the beginning!” Aurora almost yelled it in his face, but she was painfully aware of the room full of cops that she was standing in. They had nothing to indict her with, at present. Even strung out on adrenaline and horror, she had the sense not to hand them a sentence.
Milo looked down at her, not in wariness or anger, but in sympathy. That made Aurora even more furious.
“I’m sorry for all you’ve gone through tonight, but we needed to be as sure as possible that you weren’t the killer before we let you walk out.”
“Well, it’s not me. And I’m walking out now.” Aurora spun on her clunky boot heel and stomped out into the freezing rush of a New York winter night.
Immediately, Aurora felt foolish. Her own clothes (and her sweaters) were in her locker at Witching Hour. Well, it was a crime scene, now, so there was no point in trying to go back and get them. She’d been lucky to snag her purse before she was driven downtown. And now, she was standing in front of the police station, her purse over her shoulder, dressed like a hooker, or a dominatrix, out alone on the streets of New York. And home was a long way away.
Had any night ever dragged on so long? Aurora dug her phone out of her bag. Maybe she could get an Uber. Then again, with Madame Moreau sick at one job and Witching Hour closed for the foreseeable future, maybe it would be better to save her money. The next few weeks were going to be pretty slim.
Thoughts of rides and money dropped from her mind when Aurora opened her phone and saw the notifications.
You have 7 voicemails
All from her mother.
It had been one shock after another from this morning to now, and it is a testament to Aurora’s character and sanity that she didn’t panic. After all, has any good news ever come from seven missed calls? But Ramona worried, sometimes excessively, and had a small inclination to overreact.
Aurora called her back immediately. If she waited, she’d lose her nerve completely.
“Aurora?”
It was her mother’s voice, shaky and frail on the other end of the line. Soothing, Aurora answered in the affirmative. “Yes, it’s me, Momma. How are you? Is everything all right?”
“You’re all right, baby? I was watching the news, and I saw your work—where are you? Do you need me to come get you?”
She was very upset, then. Aurora hadn’t ever been a troublemaker, but she could remember often in her school years when her mother would swoop in and save her. If she was ever ill at school, or injured at softball. From fights with friends and bad dates, and everything in between. But they had sold the car years ago, and Ramona seemed to have forgotten that she hardly even owned any clothes except pajamas now, and hadn’t ventured farther than the stairs in the hall for months.
“No, Momma, I’m all right,” Aurora insisted. “Everything’s… I’m safe. I’m on my way home now, so don’t you worry.” No, Aurora wasn’t about to explain what had happened at the club. No, she wasn’t about to explain about the police station, how they tried to get her to confess. No. None of these things; Ramona Potier was not in any condition to handle such information.
It wasn’t fair. Aurora was so shaken herself, she felt like a snow-globe, with all her myriad pieces flying in every direction, nothing going right. When had it become her job to look after her mother? She knew, of course. She could name the date and time. But it still wasn’t fair. None of it.
“Aurora?”
She sniffled and tried to settle her voice. “Yes, Momma?”
“I love you, Aurora. More than anything. Anything, anybody in the whole world.”
A choked sob ripped out of Aurora’s throat; she managed to pull the phone from her lips just in time. It wasn’t only the stress of the day turning her head, squeezing her heart. In her gut twisted the guilt of her thoughts, of how badly she wished she was free of her mother and yet how terrified she felt at that wish ever becoming real. What would her life be without Ramona? Everything, and nothing.
“I love you too, Momma,” Aurora replied finally, and it was the truest thing she’d ever said, ever felt. Nothing was ever simple, not when the cost of freedom was the person most precious to her. Not when the weight holding her down was the person she loved the most, who had given up everything on Aurora’s behalf. No fairness here. No ease.
“I-I’ll be home soon, Momma,” Aurora told her. “I’ve got to go, now. I’m going to be home soon. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Aurora hung up and took a deep breath, then another. The air was cold on her skin, but it stabbed her lungs as she filled them. She breathed deep anyway. For a moment, she could pretend that her world wasn’t a cage.
Her phone was out and the Uber app open when a car pulled up to the sidewalk, just beside her. Aurora moved away from it automatically, but the window rolled down and Officer Milo’s face grinned out.
“Howdy, Sunshine.”
“What do you want?” she snapped.
“Don’t be like that. We caused you a lot of trouble on top of everything else you’ve had to go through tonight. I want to get you home, as quickly as possible.”
Aurora eyed him suspiciously. He was driving a dark sedan, probably black, but details were hard to make out in the dim street light. He didn’t seem threatening, but then, crazy people who kidnapped you and left your body in the sewers probably didn’t seem threatening at first, either.
There was the fact that he was a cop, at least, and Aurora wanted very badly to convince herself that it was safe to accept the offer. Money was always tight, and in New York, Uber surge pricing was out of this world. Hell, standard fare was astronomical.
“Okay, fine.”
She stepped carefully through the snowbank around to the passenger side of the car. Milo leaned over to push her door open (somewhat gentlemanly, Aurora guessed) and in she climbed, in to the relative warmth of Officer Milo’s car. She shivered; at least Milo had a coat.
“So where’re we going?” he asked, although he’d already started driving in the right direction. Aurora snor
ted.
“You mean you didn’t do a background check and research where I lived and work and what sort of ice cream I like? What kind of cop are you?”
“Well, I did all those things, but I was so hung up over the fact that you like mint chocolate-chip, I completely forgot your home address.”
Aurora laughed reluctantly, although it was a little odd that Milo had managed to guess her favorite ice cream. She shook it off and gave him her address, and they cruised off through the quiet streets.
“So. That’s quite a uniform they have you in at Witching Hour.”
“It fits the theme, or so Chip says. I tell him it’s going to scare women away, and a bar without women is a bar single guys don’t care much about. But he’s held on this long. At least until now. I don’t know what we’re going to do now.”
Aurora fell silent. She hadn’t meant to touch on her real fears with this total stranger, especially not this total stranger. She was getting sleepy in the warm car, and now it was a bit of fight to keep her eyes open. Quickly, she added, “So how long have you been a cop?”
His voice was proud, and maybe a little amused, as he answered. “Twelve years.”
“Twelve—?” Aurora stared at him. There was no way he was that old. Unless he was counting his years in the police academy. Yeah, that must be it. If he joined at eighteen, he could be a youthful thirty.
“I know, I know. How does a guy like me survive in this city for twelve years?” He asked it in complete sincerity, which led Aurora to believe that he’d mistaken her shock. Fair enough. “I’ve been with Dora for four. She’s a damn good cop. She’s got a poker face for Vegas, I tell you.”
Aurora snorted. “Honestly, neither of you look much like cops, sorry to say.”
“Hey! That’s done purposefully,” Milo protested, grinning. “We work together, you see. Different interrogations require different techniques. In your case, we had to play a little ‘smart cop, dumb cop’.”
“You’re performance was stunning. You must be a method actor.”
He looked at her, surprised. “You’re almost as snarky as she is.”
Aurora had to laugh at that. “Give me a few years, and I’ll be a real terror. I just have to finish my English theater studies so I can earn my merit badge for Shakespearean insults.”
“That was impressive! Do you think these up ahead of time?”
Aurora was still laughing when they pulled up to her apartment. She couldn’t help it; Milo was infectiously humorous, easy-going and yet sharp. Much sharper than he’d acted in the police station. Her conversation with him had been her best in a long time, and Aurora wondered whether she’d ever get to speak with someone like that again between fluttering foolishness at Moreau’s, pumping EDM at Witching Hour, and the timeless, catacomb-quiet at home.
She stepped out of the car, and movement overhead caught her eye. Aurora looked up toward the clear February sky, and felt her chest tighten in fear.
A curtain was billowing out a broken window several floors up. It was her living room window, her mother’s curtains.
No. No, this was too much. Aurora shut Milo’s car door, not hearing at all as he called after her to stop. After everything else today, this was too much, surely. Aurora punched in the door code and started running up the stairs. About halfway up, the lights in the stairwell were broken, one after the other, but she didn’t notice, just kept running up through the darkness.
Milo was shouting after her as she climbed the stairs three at a time. She tripped more than once in the cumbersome boots, but that didn’t matter. She had to get upstairs. She had to get to her apartment. She had to her to her mother.
On her floor, none of the lights were on, and filtered street lamps threw deep shadows across the hall through windows at either end. Aurora didn’t even stop to be afraid. She reached her door in three large steps and snatched the door handle, forgetting that it was locked, that she’d need to dig her keys out of her purse.
But the door swung open. It hadn’t even been shut all the way.
Cold air pressed out through the door, but Aurora didn’t feel it anymore. Tears were blurring her vision, terrible tears of expectation, dreading what she was going to find inside. She walked in slowly, not ready. Milo had caught up, and entered the apartment behind her, gun drawn.
Something bad had happened. It was clear at once, with one look at the splintered kitchen table, the shattered living room window. Deafening silence beat against her ears like waves of the ocean, relentless and bigger than Aurora could have ever imagined. It was so, so still, and cold, and dark.
Her mouth opened to call for her mother, but no sound came out. Numb, Aurora moved through what was left of her apartment, not knowing at that moment that truly, she was walking through the wreckage of her old life. She didn’t know it, but she felt it, and sat down heavily on the old lumpy sofa in the living room. There was a gash in the back, as if it had been cut with a sword, or several swords. Or claws.
Milo scanned through the apartment as Aurora sat alone, staring at the wall. It seemed he didn’t find anything, because he returned minutes later to find Aurora lying in a ball on the couch, with an old flannel blanket pulled up over her shoulders. Her eyes, large and dark in the cold light of the street outside, didn’t seem to see him standing there, and he had to shake her a bit to get her attention.
“Aurora. Aurora. There’s no one here. Your mother is gone.” He shook her until her face turned in his direction. “Here—sit up. We need to leave, okay? It isn’t safe here.”
Safe? Where was safe? The only place Aurora had really felt safe was with her mother, and Ramona wasn’t here. Where was she? Where had she gone?
Aurora let herself be coaxed into a sitting position. Part of her felt like it wasn’t healthy to endure this many shocks, one after the other, but mostly she just felt sleepy. She pulled the flannel closer. Maybe it was time for a nap.
Then she looked up at the open doorway.
There was a shape standing there; he was tall, almost touching the doorframe with his head. Out of the light of both the hall and the apartment windows, he was nothing but a shadow, a mass of muscle in the darkness, filling the space of the door without a sound.
Milo swung his gun around the second he saw the horror in Aurora’s eyes.
“Jeez, man,” he breathed, dropping the weapon. “You’re going to give me a damn stroke.”
The figure stepped into the apartment, his dark face solemn. “I was too late. I tried to chase them, but I lost their trail three blocks over. They took the mother.”
Aurora had heard that voice before. She looked up at the figure, trying to focus on this one thing. One thing at a time. There was no way she could bear to handle more than one thing at a time.
“Shit!” Milo hissed. “How long ago?”
“Minutes. If you arrived five minutes earlier she’d have been right in the middle of it. It’s better than you arrived too late. If she showed up right then, we would have been trying to fend off a horde on our own, with sunrise hours away. This way, they ran instead of fight me.”
“Cheng is going to blow his lid,” Milo sighed. “He knew this was coming. Dammit, if Moreau would have just seen a doctor, like we told her—”
“Moreau?” Aurora spoke up suddenly. She’d heard a word she knew, and struggled upwards through the thick, sluggish current of her thoughts. She realized where she’d seen the stranger before. At Moreau’s.
“Mr. Fredericks?”
The stranger cringed as Milo threw him a surprised look. “Mr. Fredericks?” he asked thinly.
The stranger from Moreau could hardly have looked more different, now. Instead of a suit, he was dressed in tight jeans, sneakers, and a thermal shirt. It hugged his corded arms, broad shoulders, burly chest, and narrow waist much better than the suit ever could have.
“Mr. Fredericks?” And now, even in her shocked state, Aurora couldn’t fail to hear the humor in Milo’s voice. ‘Mr. Fredericks’, in ques
tion, was looking very uncomfortable, more uncomfortable than a six-something black man built like a wall of muscle was expected to.
“Look, she was… I couldn’t give my real name.”
Milo chuckled harshly. “Moreau told you not to go there at all.”
“Well, it’s good that I did, isn’t it?” the stranger replied with a snap. “Cheng and I both felt something… off, but he didn’t want to upset things—if we’d leapt straight in, none of this would have happened.” He gestured to the apartment around them, and at Aurora, who was sitting on her couch in the ruins of her life, watching their exchange as if through deep water.
Nothing they were saying made any sense to her. How did they know Moreau? And Cheng? What did they have to do with anything? What did they have to do with her? She was just a sales girl. A bartender. A nobody. And now, perhaps, an orphan. Alone.
“Oh…no…” she whispered. Her voice sounded far away in her ears. “No… no… Momma…”
“We can’t stay here,” the stranger insisted, glancing down at Aurora. “We’re sitting ducks. Much better to be on the move. Cheng wants us to all meet at the hospital. The sooner, the better. I think it’s time.”
Aurora wanted to ask, ‘time for what?’ Milo seemed to know; he looked very grim as he nodded. “All right, let’s get moving. Same hospital?”
“Same one as always,” the stranger replied, holding out a hand to Aurora.
She looked at it as if she didn’t know what it was, and honestly, at the moment, Aurora wasn’t sure she did know. He world had turned several full loops in the last few hours, and she didn’t have any secure footing, anymore.
She’d gone from one horror to the next today, and Aurora wasn’t sure she could take another one. What was there left to be tossed into her lap? She was afraid to ask, but as she looked around her old apartment, the kitchen table where her mother had always sat reduced to a pile of wood shards in its corner, she realized that she had already stepped into the next act. Whatever it was, she was already in it, now. There was nothing for Aurora to turn back to, so she took the stranger’s hand and let him help her to her feet. She needed more help than she’d realized.
