He thought about the girls while he gave his testimony. The only individuality they had for him was what was necessary to sort out which parents went with which corpse; important, because it told him whom to watch for the best response.
I wish I didn’t know what it feels like to be prey. I tell myself it’s just the cold that makes my teeth chatter. Just the cold that’s killing me.
Prey can fight back, though. People have gotten killed by something as timid and inoffensive as a white-tailed deer.
I wish I had a weapon. Even a cracked piece of brick. But the cellar is clean.
I do jumping jacks, landing on my toes for silence. I swing my arms. I think about doing burpees, but I’m worried that I might scrape my hands on the floor. I think about taking my shoes off. Running shoes are soft for kicking with, but if I get outside, my feet will freeze without them.
When. When I get outside.
My hands and teeth are the only weapons I have.
An interminable time later, I hear a creak through the ceiling. A footstep, muffled, and then the thud of something dropped. More footsteps, louder, approaching the top of a stair beyond the door.
I crouch beside the door, on the hinge side, far enough away that it won’t quite strike me if he swings it violently. I wish for a weapon—I am a weapon—and I wait.
A metallic tang in my mouth now. Now I am really, truly scared.
His feet thump on the stairs. He’s not little. There’s no light beneath the door—it must be weather-stripped for soundproofing. The lock thuds. A bar scrapes. The knob rattles, and then there’s a bar of light as it swings open. He turns the flashlight to the right, where he left me lying. It picks out the puddle of vomit. I hear his intake of breath.
I think about the mothers of the girls I killed. I think, Would they want me to die like this?
My old self would relish it. It’d be his revenge for what I did to him.
My goal is just to get past him—my captor, my old self; they blur together—to get away, run. Get outside. Hope for a road, neighbors, bright daylight.
My captor’s silhouette is dim, scatter-lit. He doesn’t look armed, except for the flashlight, one of those archaic long heavy metal ones that doubles as a club. I can’t be sure that’s all he has. He wavers. He might slam the door and leave me down here to starve—
I lunge.
I grab for the wrist holding the light, and I half catch it, but he’s stronger. I knew he would be. He rips the wrist out of my grip, swings the flashlight. Shouts. I lurch back, and it catches me on the shoulder instead of across the throat. My arm sparks pain and numbs. I don’t hear my collarbone snap. Would I, if it has?
I try to knee him in the crotch and hit his thigh instead. I mostly elude his grip. He grabs my jacket; cloth stretches and rips. He swings the light once more. It thuds into the stair wall and punches through drywall. I’m half past him and I use his own grip as an anchor as I lean back and kick him right in the center of the nose. Soft shoes or no soft shoes.
He lets go, then. Falls back. I go up the stairs on all fours, scrambling, sure he’s right behind me. Waiting for the grab at my ankle. Halfway up I realize I should have locked him in. Hit the door at the top of the stairs and find myself in a perfectly ordinary hallway, in need of a good sweep. The door ahead is closed. I fumble the lock, yank it open, tumble down steps into the snow as something fouls my ankles.
It’s twilight. I get my feet under me and stagger back to the path. The shovel I fell over is tangled with my feet. I grab it, use it as a crutch, lever myself up and stagger-run-limp down the walk to a long driveway.
I glance over my shoulder, sure I hear breathing.
Nobody. The door swings open in the wind.
Oh. The road. No traffic. I know where I am. Out past the graveyard and the bridge. I run through here every couple of days, but the house is set far enough back that it was never more than a dim white outline behind trees. It’s a Craftsman bungalow, surrounded by winter-sere oaks.
Maybe it wasn’t an attack of opportunity, then. Maybe he saw me and decided to lie in wait.
I pelt toward town—pelt, limping, the air so cold in my lungs that they cramp and wheeze. I’m cold, so cold. The wind is a knife. I yank my sleeves down over my hands. My body tries to draw itself into a huddled comma even as I run. The sun’s at the horizon.
I think, I should just let the winter have me.
Justice for those eleven mothers and seven fathers. Justice for those thirteen women who still seem too alike. It’s only that their interchangeability bothers me now.
At the bridge I stumble to a dragging walk, then turn into the wind off the river, clutch the rail, and stop. I turn right and don’t see him coming. My wet fingers freeze to the railing.
The state police are half a mile on, right around the curve at the top of the hill. If I run, I won’t freeze before I get there. If I run.
My fingers stung when I touched the rail. Now they’re numb, my ears past hurting. If I stand here, I’ll lose the feeling in my feet.
The sunset glazes the ice below with crimson. I turn and glance the other way; in a pewter sky, the rising moon bleaches the clouds to moth-wing iridescence.
I’m wet to the skin. Even if I start running now, I might not make it to the station house. Even if I started running now, the man in the bungalow might be right behind me. I don’t think I hit him hard enough to knock him out. Just knock him down.
If I stay, it won’t take long at all until the cold stops hurting.
If I stay here, I wouldn’t have to remember being my other self again. I could put him down. At last, at last, I could put those women down. Amelie, unless her name was Jessica. The others.
It seems easy. Sweet.
But if I stay here, I won’t be the last person to wake up in the bricked-up basement of that little white bungalow.
The wind is rising. Every breath I take is a wheeze. A crow blows across the road like a tattered shirt, vanishing into the twilight cemetery.
I can carry this a little farther. It’s not so heavy. Thirteen corpses, plus one. After all, I carried every one of them before.
I leave skin behind on the railing when I peel my fingers free. Staggering at first, then stronger, I sprint back into town.
She Still Loves the Dragon
She still loves the dragon that set her on fire.
The knight-errant who came seeking you prepared so carefully. She made herself whole for you. To be worthy of you. To be strong enough to reach you, where you live, so very high.
She found the old wounds of her earlier errantry and of her past errors, and the other ones that had been inflicted through no fault of her own. She found the broken bones that had healed only halfway, and caused them to be refractured, and endured the pain so they would heal swift and straight, because dragons do not live in the low country where the earth is soft and walking is easy.
She sought out the sweet balms and even more so she sought out the herbs bitter as unwelcome truth, that must nevertheless be swallowed. She paid for both in time, and grief, and in skinned palms and pricked fingers.
She quested, and she crafted potions: to make her sight bright in the darkness; to make her hands strong on the stone.
The knight-errant, when she decides for the first time to seek the dragon, has with her many retainers, loyalty earned and nurtured through heroism and care. She has an entourage, pavilions, a warhorse, and a mare. She has armaments and shields for combat mounted and afoot.