Behind the fast fright boiling in her veins, which threatened to begin shaking her uncontrollably, was a jolly elf who opined that a nap would be a really grand idea right about now. Or a nice downward swoon into oblivion, like a lady of breeding in a Victorian potboiler. But Art's rattler was still alive in her chest. Don't pan out, it nagged, you've spent too much time sleeping. Avoiding. Dreaming. You've used up your allotment, you can't dodge any more.
It got ridiculous, this waiting.
***
"Dina?" Her voice stayed small, and she pushed to make it bigger. "Dina, you coming out? Because if you're not-"
Dina responded from the bedroom door. "It's okay, just a minute."
"That's not the answer I was looking for." All the guns in the house were still back there in the bedroom.
Dina was acting like someone interrupted in the midst of an important phone call, subdividing her attention, talking in one direction and doing something else, invisibly, in another. "I got 'em both with that shocker thing. They can't move any more than Michelle."
"So… come out."
"I can't, until-"
Even Blitz thought this sounded like hooey. Lorelle overrode. "Dina, listen to me. I'm coming in if you're not coming out. Period."
"Just a-oh, all right, dammit, I can't…" She must have realized it sounded lame, or that Lorelle had a point. "Okay, shit!"
Dina appeared, holding Price's stun baton in one hand. She was half-undressed.
"Please lower that thing," said Lorelle. "In fact, put it on the floor."
Dina registered the baton as though it had just astral-projected into her grasp from another dimension. Her eyes widened with comprehension. "Oh. Oh! Right, sorry."
"Dina, what the fuck are you doing?" Lorelle indicated she should precede back into the bedroom, where a single candle flickered on the nightstand.
Price was nude, spread-eagled on his back across the bed, electroshock having seriously compromised his ability to pass a drunk test. He was still wearing his socks. Suzanne, equally insensate, had been rolled off onto the floor like a dirty quilt.
And Dina stood there, her expensive blouse open, her leather pants undone, shoes off. Her choker caught the fingertip of illumination from the candle and rendered it violet. Her breasts were so excellent that even Lorelle had to admire them-a graceful, modest swell, perfect contour, and dark nipples of zero-defect symmetry. (Art would have liked them, too. Might have.)
Dina folded her arms, where normally she'd-dive for another cigarette. She sighed as though exhaling smoke anyhow. Finally, she said, "You understand?''
"Yeah," said Lorelle.
Blitz watched her back while she rummaged through Price's clothing for high-caliber death dealers, or pointy sticks, for that matter. She collected the pillowcase into which Suzanne had gathered the small arms and searched up the pistol Suzanne had been pointing at her head, just a little while ago. Lorelle locked everything into the gun safe, holding back the nine-millimeter for herself, jamming it into her waistband in what Art had told her was known as a "Mexican carry.''
"I'm taking this, too,'' Lorelle said of the stun baton. "You need a hand, call out. Just don't take too long.''
Dina nodded. There were tears on her face, too, but they were hydrodynamically flawless, coming from those compelling eyes of green/amber. She left the door most of the way open.
Suzanne had had Price, and Dina felt betrayed. Michelle had had Price, and Lorelle had learned Dina's opinion on that pairing, back at the party. Now Dina was going to have Price, one way, if not another. It took her about twenty minutes, give or take.
Lorelle finally rediscovered the painkillers in the kitchen, and swallowed a combination designed to ease her braincase but keep her alert. She put away another bottle of water, remembering what Luther had told her about stress.
"You need an aspirin, kiddo?" she said to the dog, unsure as to whether feeding one to an animal was recommended. Blitz's teeth were severely chipped on one side of his jaw; two were blackly cracked and oozing, and would soon fester into an impacted compound toothache. He lapped water gratefully from a big steel bowl in the wrecked kitchen. Animals rarely complained about their lot in the world.
Something smashed into the roof with enough force to suggest a large meteorite, shaking the entire house. Blitz wigged out and began barking.
''Christ." She had to grab back a skipped breath, and remind herself not to ask how it could all get worse.
Michelle stirred with a groan, but gravity kept her in her original position. A line of drool had escaped from her slack mouth. Her arms and neck were scared into gooseflesh. Good-if she revived, the cold would slow her down, too. Whatever had crash-landed on the roof was not obvious from inside the house. Maybe a chunk of the storm-dissected Spilsbury place. Maybe the corpse of Tobias.
Maybe a fingernail from some pissed-off lesser god.
Hard spray assaulted the entire structure from the west. The sea was determined to make it all the way to the deck, and eat it. Blitz fretted in canine circles, now wary of sitting down.
***
It was half-past eleven, out in the world where time mattered. A minute or two later, Dina emerged from the bedroom. "He's all yours," she said.
That seemed chilling enough for Lorelle to ask, ''Is he-?"
Dina's expression said, Jeez, who do you think I am, some kind oft murderer?
Lorelle imagined Dina zapping Price in the gonads with the baton, and winced.
"But we might have a problem with our dear Suzanne. She managed to scuttle into the bathroom and lock the door."
Lorelle did not tarry to invent some kind of response to a question as thorny and perforated with loopholes as Who do you think I am? Up until today it had been a more innocent question, rhetorical.
The door to the master bathroom was shut, and indistinct candlelight shone from the jamb's floor crack.
"Suzanne? It's Lorelle. Come on out."
***
It had gone exactly this way when Art had announced his intention to leave, no preamble, no conflict, no argument-just the Wind, ghosting him to more fulfilling ports. It wasn't that he didn't love her. In an oddly convex way, it had almost nothing to do with her. They had tried talk, and Lorelle had tried tears, and nothing would deter Art's resolve, and at some point where communication just vaporlocked and they had run out of words, she had sought sanctuary in the bathroom, door closed, as if that was all the point that needed to be made. Her chosen person, her partner, her mate, had decided that their exclusive deal was off, reneging on all the promises of love and one-and-only, the silly, dangerous words that people like Lorelle had the ill humor to take at face value, and seriously. Art had been a kind of predator, too, frustrated that she could not seem to perceive the clean sense of his honesty. What was she, stupid?
Flash-forward through the storm and madness of the last three days, and here she was, facing the same closed door again, with much the same sense of dread. In parallel to Derek's saga of make-believe, Lorelle had arrived at an unpredictable destination via violence, gunfire, and the worst convolutions of human nature. To tell this story would bring the easy accusation that it was all made up; heroic braggadocio designed to make her look good, and counter the shame of having lost her husband to the Wind.
***
"Don't hurt her," Dina said, resolving out of the darkness behind Lorelle with her ever-present cigarette, like the Roman slave whose purpose was to utter sic transit gloria. "Don't hurt Michelle, either, okay? I mean, any more than I did." She had not asked What about me? or What the hell am I going to do? or Am I pretty? She had asked Lorelle not to hurt them. That was her price for their pact.
Suzanne had evidently bypassed that deal memo. ''I've got a gun," she said from within the bathroom. "Go away."
Art had also simply gone away, meaning, can't we just pretend this whole partnership thing was a mistake, and we're old college cafeteria buddies, and can't you just turn loose of the love thing and let m
e go, because I've got to move on? It was easy for him, to alter the blueprint and delete the essentials. He was still out there, a coast apart, changing things around to suit his immediate wants, while Lorelle had been struggling to keep things the same, working more and more maintenance on a stasis that was impossible.
It was no longer time to be waving guns around, and Lorelle hoped this psychic resolve would leak through the door, and infect Suzanne's train of thought… if she really did have a weapon, and wasn't bluffing outrageously from behind a closed door.
"You don't have a gun, Suzanne," Lorelle said. "Nobody has a gun." Dina's expression, her face also close to the door, advised that this might not be a ploy. She and Lorelle waited for the next answer (but they kept away from the center of the door, ruefully) while Lorelle battled the toxic brim of bad memory.
One night stood out in particular.
Art had slept on the sectional, leaving Blitz in uncomprehending dog conflict, forced to divide his watchdog time between the master in the living room and the mistress in the bedroom. It was not a scenario that accommodated easy slumber for any of them. Sometime during that endless night, Lorelle had thought of going to the (open) gun safe, choosing a weapon, and putting it to Art's head while he was in dreamland. It was important to note that she never progressed to the second stage of this fancy, which involved killing herself once the topic of Art was rendered moot by a gunshot. She could not bring herself to keep him, at least not that way.
Behind the barrier of the door, they could hear Suzanne weeping. Probably sitting on the toilet, head in hands, more or less the original way Lorelle had found Dina. On the bed, Price had all of Blitz's concentration. Price was still a floppy toy, but the dog was hurting, angry, and in no mood to cut slack for troublemakers.
"Suzanne, babe, we've got to go. Party's over." Dina, talking.
"It's not over," Suzanne said from inside. "Price promised. He fucking promised me."
"That's your version of the story, not his," said Dina. "He talked about how he was going to do both of us, but only on his terms, to get the things he wanted. That makes any deal null and void. No fun warranty. He would have beat me up, same as you, to get himself what he wanted."
Price had split Suzanne's lip, blackened her eye, battered her, dumped her on the roadside in the storm, and sacrificed her to the Bry-Guy… merely to bait the trap for Lorelle. Suzanne had let him do all this, afloat with dreams of a sort of commitment and bond that could transcend anything Price could get from the perfect Michelle, or the only-slightly-less-perfect Dina, or any of the other candidates at the party house. Suzanne viewed each blow and injury as affirmed love, and now she was being cheated.
Whatever Price had done to her, it could no longer be perfumed as making love, and she was understandably defensive, for all the wrong reasons.
"It's all fucked up," said Suzanne between sniffles. "Just let me go.''
Lorelle spoke while advising Dina with her eyes in the cone of illumination from the flashlight. "That's exactly what Dina's going to do. She can get you out. Thanks to Dina, everyone will be safe from the storm."
"No, I don't believe you. I want Price to tell me.''
"He doesn't give a damn about you," said Dina.
"You're just saying that because you want him for yourself," said Suzanne. "Fucking cunt; you're supposed to be my friend."
"Oh great, she's five," said Dina, lighting up what was apparently her last cigarette.
"Price has left the building," Lorelle said carefully. "Remember how you said it yourself-Michelle always wins. She's more important to him than you are-before, after, now. It's just us, now, and Dina wants to take you out of here."
In a breath of smoke, Dina said, "She's right, Suzanne; Price used us both. Neither one of us is good enough for him. We always knew that. Nobody will ever be enough for Price. Michelle will run out of gas herself, someday. I'd like to be there when it happens, just to watch her flame out. Can't we just get out of here? We can go home."
"We're not going to grab you, or blind you with the flashlight, or hurt you, Suzanne. We just want you to come out. Both of us."
Price went ung and tried to move. His bones lacked starch, and commanding them was a miserable failure because he had supplied-typically-one of the most powerful stun guns on the market. Having experienced its bite personally, Lorelle was aware of her own window for decision and action. Price's blood sugar parameters were the same as any other human's, but his metabolism was a question mark. For now, the fight was out of him, having abandoned ship.
"Talk to her." Lorelle spoke to the cherry of Dina's cigarette in the dark, the way she had when they first met. She needed to check on Michelle.
Bandage her head. On the way out she got a better look at Price, and saw glints of fresh blood on his chest.
Where Dina had carved her initials. Shallowly, but painfully; blood was pooled in his navel. Lorelle recalled Suzanne's mention of a knife in Dina's belt. Dina had gotten naked, slid around on top of Price to whatever oblique purpose she kept a secret, and then marked him. End of story.
Michelle's temple had colored with subdermal bleeding. Her pupils were shrunken, cowed. Her nostrils dilated in slow and unthinking breaths. Lorelle applied antibiotics and gauze by lamplight. This was Price's partner, his second, his familiar. The queen bee. You and me together could overlord this entire party, she had told Lorelle… after she had had her go-round with Lorelle's husband. Her jolly secret.
Everybody has relationship problems, Lorelle thought. Even exotic creatures like Price and Michelle.
From the bedroom, Dina's voice assumed the register of steady, calm patter. She had been painted into a corner of circumstance like all of them. She needed to deploy her wiles to charm Suzanne ' out of the bathroom and end this awkward stalemate. Back in the world, this scenario might have been trivial, part of the day-to-day psychodrama all of Price's guests held as essential as nourishment, to make their existence important. Now it really was important, and Lorelle had left Dina to unlock the impasse. Not fair.
Whose house was this, anyway? If there were problems here, Lorelle had to take care of them.
She watched the unmoving, softly breathing form of Michelle. She short-listed her own hurts, thinking excuses. excuses. Then she bent to set Michelle upright, and do what she had to do. Since this was her house; hers, dammit.
You try to dope out a syllabus for your life, thinking that fiction is better than reality, then what actually happens to you is so absurd that it wouldn't even make a coherent story. Nobody would buy it. Too many holes. No character arc. An absence of sympathetic players. That was why people read stories, watched movies, and lied to themselves a million times a day-they not only preferred the unreal, they craved it, needed it to replace the dreams they grew incapable of manufacturing in slumber. Dreams ended. Life just… stopped, one day.
Lorelle well and truly felt that she had earned this day of living, like a proto-woman scoring a kill and shelter in the wild. The hostile, uncaring cosmos-at-large was represented by the fulminating storm, ever closer, ever louder, a malignant giant that threatened the house with every breath. Players had come and gone, been protected and brutalized. Battle had been enacted. Her faithful canine companion stood by, on guard. That was the primal version of the whole story.
Dina and Suzanne appeared in the hallway. Suzanne looked chastened and diminished, defeat rounding her shoulders. After an uncomfortable static moment she said, "Is the dog okay?"
Blitz stuck his snout into her hand. "Oh, sweetie, you're all bloody," she said. "You're a mess." Her eyes sought the fireplace, recalling the haven she had seen on her first visit. Home and hearth, dog and fire, warm clothes and sympathy.
"You really need to have a doctor look at you," Dina said.
"You hate me," Suzanne returned.
"No. We both said some nasty things, and I'm sorry. The truth is that Price doesn't deserve either of us. He gave everybody drugs that fucked up their heads. He just
let the storm sweep into that house and didn't care what happened to anybody. You should have heard him-we were all disposable to him. Expendable, just for laughs. He talked about all of us like garbage. People died over there, Suze. And Price scooted away clean, like he always does, bailing out just in time."
"You want to send us away," Suzanne said to Lorelle. "Into that fucking storm."
"Because this house might collapse or get hit by a Force Ten wave any minute," said Lorelle. "Thanks to Price, it's not safe here anymore. I don't know what might happen."
"So then why aren't you coming with us?"
"I explained that before. It's my house. I have to stay."
Now Lorelle needed Dina to make a personal plea having to do with her own insanity. She moved to the kitchen and Blitz followed. The dog was wobbly and needed a vet, and the only need that superseded that was Lorelle's imperative to get everyone out, until it was just her and the dog, as it had been in the beginning. Back to one, as Derek would have said.
Dina leaned closer and spoke to Suzanne in a hushed whisper that Lorelle dearly wished to overhear, but she already knew the gist: This chick is nuts, she wants to stay here and get killed by the storm, like's out of her mind, and can we please get the hell out of here?
Suzanne took Dina's hand and Lorelle heard her say, "I'm sorry," one of her favorite expressions. Everybody was just sorry as fuck, it was a sorry world. Sony was the big emotional Band-Aid supposed to fix all the hurts, when it merely covered them up. Art had been so sorry. Sorry had not stopped him from driving Lorelle's whole life off a cliff. Sorry, shrug, move on to tastier fields. It occurred to Lorelle that Art had a few things in common with Price. I can't change what I heel: sorry. Responsibility, commitment, obligation; sorry beat them all in the grand game.
When Lorelle felt her status as a madwoman had been concretized, she drifted closer to their circle of light.
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