Killing Adonis

by J M Donellan

  “Nice outfit.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t need to dress up for these jerks. You know what kills me most about my parents’ friends? They walk around acting like they own the world, and the sad thing is that’s not far from the truth. These people own a lot of things, but they don’t contribute anything new. They don’t make, grow, create, or invent. They merge, acquire, downsize, and streamline.”

  “Doesn’t Halcyon do exactly the same thing?”

  “Not one to hold your tongue, are you? That’s refreshing around here, I can tell you.” Jack moves over to the bar and picks up two Peronis.

  “I’m not ready to start drinking yet, still technically on duty, and all that.”

  “That’s okay, these are both for me. As for Halcyon, if we’re speaking candidly? The company my parents built must be one of the most unethical, aggressive, malevolent corporations on the planet. And the little sleeping prince here that they were grooming to take over would have only made things worse, if that’s even possible. Until he went and fucked it all up, of course.”

  “You really feel that way?”

  “You can’t choose your parents, right? Otherwise I would have chosen Neil Gaiman and Jean Grey.”

  “Exactly what did Elijah do that was so bad? Was it the same thing that upset Rosaline—” Mentally, Freya adds a tally mark to the imaginary scoreboard where she keeps track of when her mouth has run ahead of her brain. Jack ignores the derailed sentence, walks past her and examines the wall of accolades and certificates. He puts the beers down on the windowsill and removes one of the two silver medals hanging from the wall.

  “You know the medals from the last Winter Olympics contained recycled metal from old TVs, computers, and keyboards? But that wasn’t the most remarkable thing about them. For the first time in Olympic history the medals weren’t flat, they were shaped into these undulating 3D patterns; they were supposed to evoke feelings of mountain ranges or waves on the ocean. The real genius of the design, though, was that if you looked at it from above, straight on, or, say, in a photograph, it would just look like a normal circular medal.”

  Freya looks at the elegant but very clearly flat silver medal in his hand. “But Elijah’s medals are—”

  “Very pretty, aren’t they? Rosaline’s very proud of her Elijah.” He places the medal back on its hook, picks up his beers. “I know you have a lot of questions. You’re going to find your answers in the Danger Room.”

  “Labelled in neat little boxes, I assume?”

  “Can’t say for sure. I’ve never seen inside there myself, but I know that’s where you need to look. I’ll even help you get in.”

  “Uh-huh. The question I’m obviously going to ask here is why are you telling me this?”

  “The answer to which I’m obviously not going to tell you. At 11 p.m., the alarm system will be remotely reset and reconfigured to update the security software, so there will be no log recorded of entrances and exits. With a little sleight of hand, we’ll be able to get in and no one will ever know.”

  “Why would I want to risk my job to break into my employer’s private property?”

  “I’m not exactly sure why, but I am sure that you will. Am I wrong?”

  Curiosity has been scratching away at her for days. Gnawing. Chewing. Poking. Prodding. Not knowing what is inside that room is inconceivable. That, coupled with the urge to twist a hidden knife into Evelyn’s back, is a temptation she has neither the willpower nor inclination to resist. Freya snatches one of the Peronis from Jack’s hand and downs several quick gulps.

  “Not about this, you aren’t. Now help me wheel our little Adonis downstairs. We can’t have our ball without its beau, can we?”

  ***

  The guests arrive promptly at seven. Hordes of Maseratis, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Mercedes vomit their cargo onto the Vincetti’s driveway. Mountains of cleavage burst from the gowns of trophy wives and escorts, threatening to escape from their flimsy designer garments at any moment in a silicon storm.

  Gifts that vary in size like cinema drinks—large, super large, ultra large, behemoth—are placed on the several tables orbiting the pool. The pile of gifts builds like a kaleidoscopic sacrifice to some sleeping pagan deity.

  Freya has been instructed to act as the official greeter. She takes her place beside the drinks table to ensure optimal proximity to beverages. She manages to suppress the insistent voice that reminds her she didn’t spend three years at university to be an over-glorified waitress with the counterargument that the aforementioned university years accumulated a financial debt that will be repaid much faster if said voice would kindly shut the fuck up.

  She greets the guests with an admirable combination of restrained politeness and feigned interest that has been finely tempered over years of working with ungrateful, obstreperous patients who, in turn, often respond with a mixture of idle curiosity that brews and boils into pools of titillating gossip.

  “I’m Freya, so lovely to meet you both.”

  “The pleasure is all mine, my dear. I’m Jim Crawfield, and this is my wife, Francesca, daughter of Frank Thorne, founder of the Sintomax Corporation.”

  These people talk like the twenty-first century Reader’s Digest edition of Pride and Prejudice. I just want to get into that damned room. Why can’t you all drop dead like the stock prices of the various companies you control and leave the rest of us normal, mildly unattractive plebeians in peace?

  “–ineyard, you simply must come visit!”

  “Of course! How kind of you to offer. I’d love to.” Freya only manages to catch the end of the sterile, forced invitation as Jim leads his arm candy away. She hopes she has agreed to an empty promise of a weekend at a vineyard and not some high-class swingers’ retreat.

  “And you must be Freya?”

  The Aphrodite in front of her wrenches Freya from her various neuroses. She is clad in an almost offensively simple sleek black dress coupled with an audacious necklace featuring a centrepiece diamond large enough to beat a man to death with. Black hair cascades down her shoulders, framing a face that has been chiselled to perfect alignment with the golden ratio through a combination of good genes and highly paid surgeons. Her figure is to die, lie, and kill for, and her eyes could bring a man to his knees, though whether it would be for him to offer her a marriage proposal or perform some other duty would depend entirely on the situation at hand.

  “I must be. Lovely to meet you.”

  The woman raises one perfectly shaped eyebrow in query at the sight of Freya’s gloves but takes her hand, though in a most ambiguous handshake. “I’m Yvette Rothwell. You’re the new nurse, then?”

  “Yes. I just started the other d—”

  “Such a shame about the last girl, she was really quite sweet, you know? Not very clever, and far too curious for her own good, or anyone else’s, but still…”

  Freya bites her lip to avoid taking the unsubtly placed bait.

  “Anyway, I assume you’re getting along with the Vincettis, then? Aren’t you such a lucky girl to be able to live in a place like this! I bet they spoil you!” Her tone is a practised blend of condescension and feigned congeniality.

  “They’ve been very generous.” Aside from forcing me to put up with narcissistic, bourgeois…

  “So, are you with anyone tonight?”

  “My partner, Callum, will be arriving soon. He’s tied up with a business deal at the moment.”

  “I can’t wait to meet him. What line of work is he in?”

  “Carbon. He trades carbon. Right now, he’s selling it to the Japanese. Conference call, to Tokyo, time difference and all that.”

  Yvette nods as her face twists into a simulacrum of a smile.

  “Well, you will have to introduce me! Anyway, sweetie, I’ve just spotted Geoffrey, and I haven’t seen him since gloves were still in fashion. Speak soon!”<
br />
  Freya stabs a pair of retinal knives at Yvette’s back as she saunters away, then downs her champagne and resists the urge to smash the crystal, electing instead to refill and depart from her post before she feels forced to kill someone.

  She walks among the crowd of lawyers and bankers and CEOs and doctors and politicians and stockbrokers and real estate moguls and white-collar criminals. She notes the heads that turn as she passes and refuses to grind her teeth at the noses that rise in disapproval. Freya climbs the stairs to the second-floor balcony and watches the crowd shuffle and move about like so many pontifical ants. She feels distant and outside of herself, as though her life is a movie but she is the only one who has not yet read the script.

  Footsteps approach behind her. She turns and sees Rosaline greeting her with a radiant, pearly-toothed grin. In spite of herself, Freya feels her tension release and she returns the smile. She might be crazy enough to manufacture fake Olympic medals for her sleeping lover, but at least she’s nice.

  “It’s a lovely view up here, isn’t it? I love when the moon is that shape. What’s it called when it’s big and round but not quite full?”

  “Gibbous.”

  “That’s it! Gibbous. It’s so exciting, knowing that the big, beautiful full moon is coming. Watching it grow like a flower in time lapse. Don’t you think it’s gorgeous?”

  Freya smiles. “Rosaline, can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course!”

  “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “How do you stay so fucking happy all the time?” Freya watches her flinch at the obscenity and would almost feel guilty if it weren’t so ridiculous.

  “Can I answer your question with a question?”

  “You just did.”

  “What? Di—Oh, I see. Ha! Yes. That’s funny. Well anyway, when you were a little girl, what did you want to be?”

  “I wanted to be a nurse, like Florence Nightingale, and a painter, like Kandinsky. I planned to spend long summer days throwing the colours in my mind onto the canvas in front of me and my nights curing the sick and saving the world.”

  “Right, well, when I was a little girl I just…I always wanted to have a family, and be a mum. My childhood was…Well, I was very lucky. At first. Then things…umm…” Rosaline plays anxiously with the pearls around her neck and says, “I wasn’t always called Rosaline, you know.” Freya’s eyebrows briefly ascend her forehead in response to this little revelation.

  “When I was little, my dad’s company made dolls. We were so happy, me and Mum and him. I guess you could say we were the model nuclear family! Well, for a little while, anyway…” The-artist-formerly-not-known-as-Rosaline’s voice trails off quietly before she continues brightly, “Anyway, he let me name all the dolls which, as a little girl, was like having all my wishes come true! There was Angela Swansong and Laura St Clair and Anastasia Evergreen, but my all-time favourite turned out to be the most popular doll by far, Rosaline Redfeather. I named her after Rosaline in Romeo and Juliet, because Romeo praised her so highly, he was so completely in love with her, then he cast her aside and then…but that’s a whole other story. In any case, Rosaline Redfeather was the most successful doll Dad’s company ever made. Nearly every little girl had at least one.”

  “I remember those! I think my aunty gave me one for my birthday.” Freya neglects to mention that she had subsequently employed the doll in a backyard BB-gun ballistics game.

  “Oh, how lovely! So, you know it then. Such beautiful skin, such bright blue eyes! Well, when I was born, Mum and Dad gave me a horrid, boring name. I always hated it. I never felt like it suited me, like wearing big clunky shoes as a child that your parents insist you will grow into but by the time you do they’re all worn out anyway. And then…this, you know, this thing happened and my family changed. Yes, I suppose changed is the right word, isn’t it? I decided that I didn’t want my old name anymore. I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I didn’t like her failures, her shortcomings, her, her…um…trials and tribulations…and so I changed my name to Rosaline.”

  “Your parents didn’t mind you choosing a new name?”

  “Well, they were, you know, at that time, they um…they were worried about other things. So I focused on becoming what I’d always wanted to be: glamorous, refined, pretty. All those things. It helped keep my mind away from…everything else. And now I’ve got nearly everything I’d ever hoped for! I live in a great house, with a family that looks after me, and new friends!”

  Freya accepts Rosaline’s hug in the same manner a death row prisoner accepts their fate. When Rosaline has finished enveloping Freya in a storm of pink-drenched saccharine affection, she pulls back and continues, “And, of course, I’ve got my Prince Charming! And soon children, starting a family of my own, what more could a girl want, right?”

  What more could a girl have wanted in 1853, perhaps.

  “Just like the family I should’ve had as a child, before everything got…messy. That’s why I still keep all the dolls I had as a kid, why I need a whole room for them. I have every type of Rosaline Redfeather, from Summer Fun Outfit to What’s Cookin’? to my favourite, Magic Wedding Dress Rosaline. And one day I’ll wear a dress and it will be just like hers. Perfect.”

  Freya tries and fails to think of something appropriate to say, so she elects to squeeze Rosaline’s hand in sympathy.

  Rosaline beams at her. “Oh, dear. Look at me blathering away with my whole life story! You seem a little down, is there something you wanted to talk about?”

  “It’s nothing. One of the guests rubbed me the wrong way, that’s all. Yvette Rothwart or something. That bitch really puts the ‘super’ in ‘superficial’.”

  Rosaline bites her lip, hard. Freya sees a tremor run through her, like a road beneath the weight of a passing truck, and then very quickly Rosaline is shaking so hard that she has to put her glass down before she drops it. Her face is flushed violent red and her eyes look as though they are about to pop right out of her skull.

  “She is a complete cunt!” The word blurts out of her like a grenade and smacks Freya so hard she nearly stumbles. Rosaline sags with the effort. “Oh! Oh! My goodness! Forgive me! I shouldn’t! I mustn’t…I have to go!” She runs down the hall as if every ruler-toting nun on Earth is chasing after her, demanding her penance.

  ***

  Excerpt from The Sins of Adonis

  I think what surprised me was the complete lack of regret. The act itself was almost irritatingly simple to complete. A bribe here and there, a few phone calls to the right people. I even bought a special black sporting outfit especially for the occasion. I’m starting to think about wearing the shirt, still stained with his blood, to the funeral. Underneath a jacket, of course.

  The most revolting part was the gargling sound he made when I slipped the knife through him. God, it lasted for an aeon and change. Thank goodness the lonely bastard lived by himself. It was over quickly. A little too quickly, perhaps. Next time, I think I might try something a little slower, give myself time to savour the moment. The Chinese are good at that sort of thing, aren’t they? Might need to do some research before I pick my next quarry. I wonder where one can purchase chloroform nowadays?

  14

  Aristocrackheads

  ***

  Freya looks back over at the crowd beneath her, thinking that this would be the perfect place to start picking people off with a sniper rifle, if one were so inclined. In the distance she spies headlights cutting through the darkness and makes her way down the stairs to greet her fashionably-late-as-per-fucking-usual best friend.

  As she weaves through the crowd, she feels a hand placed gently but decisively on her shoulder.

  “Freya?”

  “Hi, Harland.”

  “Enjoying yourself, I trust?”

  “Yes! Of course! You Vincettis throw a mean
shindig.”

  He smiles and drains his glass. There’s a sway in his step and it’s barely after eight. “Thank you. The band will be starting soon. I trust I can rely on you to join me for a dance?” He looks at her and through her at the same time.

  “Sure, why not? Listen, I have to go meet my friend. I’ll find you later.”

  She runs towards Callum’s car without waiting to see the reaction she’s provoked. Hopefully Harland’s too busy getting drunk and chasing the several dozen other young women on his dance card to be troubled by her hurried departure.

  Callum passes his car keys to the valet and waves at her.

  “Well, look who finally gets around to showing their offensively good-looking face.”

  “What? It’s barely after eight! I would have thought it rude to show up any earlier than an hour after suggested arrival.”

  Freya grabs him by the hand and pulls him towards the house.

  “Cal, it’s like I told you eleven and a half million times already, rich middle-aged people have a whole different set of party etiquette to us plebs. Arrive at seven means arrive at seven.”

  “I wasn’t aware that we were so beholden to other people’s social standards.”

  “Cal, I fucking live here. I could hardly show up late with a reasonable excuse, now could I? Which means I’ve spent an hour in the company of a bunch of self-important aristocrackheads talking about their vineyards and Fabergé egg collections and holidays on islands where they won’t even stamp your passport unless you own a Picasso.”

  “I didn’t realise.”

  “That’s alright, you can make it up to me by pretending you’re my carbon-trading boyfriend and you’ve just gotten off a conference call to Tokyo.”

  “What? When?”

  “Here. Now.”

  “So! This must be the lucky man!” Yvette appears as quickly and unexpectedly as a warning light on a cockpit dashboard.