Chapter Twenty-seven

When the doorbell rang, the first thing Fay did was reach for her gun. The only reason anyone ever came to her house was because of Aries, and he hadn’t been home since he went out the day before. Without him around, the other gang members were no longer afraid of showing their lack of fondness to her. Aries wasn’t answering any phone calls. No one had told her anything. She had been alerted over the news that two of the gang members that went with him were confirmed dead, but that could mean a lot of things. It wasn’t enough to tell her what had happened and sure as hell wasn’t enough to make her believe it.

There was a revolver in her hand and another pistol on the counter. She went over and grabbed it with her other hand just as the doorbell rang again, nearly making her pull the trigger. She couldn’t be afraid. In terms of intimidation, she felt as perfect as she could. Her makeup had been done that morning and she had sprayed her hair with blue hairspray as a way of distracting herself. Her jacket was wrapped around her like a bulletproof vest, a selection of knives lining the inside for no practical purpose.

She held one of her guns out near her shoulder and turned the doorknob using the fingers she wasn’t holding the other one with. The silver barrel of a shotgun was the first thing to peek out from behind the door. The impulse to aim her guns burst up Fay’s spine, and she would have if the faces of her security guards didn’t follow so closely. She had almost forgotten they existed, standing outside her door.

The mountainous man and woman were both holding shotguns and wearing Spartan jackets. Both wore stony expressions that could have been either boredom or anger. Neither of their shotguns were at the ready, so if it came down to it, Fay could shoot faster than they could. She stepped forward as a way of telling them that she wasn’t letting them inside the house, still not letting her guns below shoulder-level just yet.

The woman was the first to speak, not afraid to stare at Fay in the eyes. When she spoke, her fingers ran up and down the shotgun in her hands like it was a nervous compulsion. Even so, her voice was clear and unafraid to the point of being condescending. “We were told to deliver news to you. Aries is dead.”

“What happened?” she spat back before she understood what the woman said. After a few silent seconds, she suddenly regained the ability to relay words in her mind. The moment she started stringing sounds together, one after another, she thought she saw something behind the man begin to float. After all, that was what usually followed in her nightmares after someone said that. It would have made sense if it was real. He had gone after Ed�"the smartest guy she had ever known. It would destroy her, but it would make sense.

The woman glared at her like it was a waste of her time to answer. If Fay was the person she was when Aries was around, that woman would be dead with a knife in her throat, but in her daze, she didn’t notice. It was the man that finally spoke up, quiet and severe, “Edward Montgomery rigged our West End truck with a bomb. Aries died near Burming Street.”

She felt the air being knocked out of her through her eyes, and instead of being light enough to float, she felt herself sinking. She was sinking deeper and deeper into her own body, the knife that cut her anchor to reality of course being Edward’s name. Somewhere along the way, she grabbed onto the meaning of the word dead. He’s dead. Aries was dead. Her boyfriend was dead. Her true love was dead. Edward killed him.

She took a glance beyond the two in front of her and noticed a car in the driveway. Knocking the tip of her gun against the door hard enough to shock herself, she whipped around to the coat rack next to her and said to the both of them, “Take me to where he died,” her voice giving out halfway through from lack of breath. She didn’t realize that she wasn’t breathing until she spoke.

They should have run to the car at her beck and call. The two only shook their heads. Through the glaze that had just started forming over her eyes, Fay made out what could have been a sneer on the woman’s face. She could have been wrong, but she wasn’t going to take a chance in letting her get away with that. Fay’s arm brought itself up and struck the woman across the face with the barrel of her revolver. The woman lurched backwards for just a second before standing straight again with a red mark starting to form on her cheek. She tried reconnecting with Fay’s eyes, but they were lost. Fay could barely see from behind the tears welling up but refusing to fall.

The next moment she could feel, she was being thrown against the wall. At that point, it felt like a tap on her side through her bedsheets.

“Nobody takes orders from you anymore, b***h. Pluto told us to bring you to him.”

A second of absolutely no thought in Fay’s mind transported the three into the car, her in the long, black seat at the back and the two in the front. Ropes that felt like spiked chains were tied around her hands and feet so that she could only wriggle in her seat�"the same ropes she remembered having on her coat rack. Of course, her guns were gone, as were any other weapons she kept in her pockets and jacket. Looking down at herself, her jacket was gone too. The man and woman were operating the vehicle, starting it up with booming spurts from the engine and driving away at mach speed. Fay only saw silhouettes of what was around her, and she heard nothing except her own voice yelling Aries’ name. Her memory blacked out once again, and the next thing she knew, she was cruising along the highway on her way to get a bullet in the face. The car running over rocks and speed bumps felt like punches from inside the car seat. From what she could make out of the grey outside, she was halfway there.

In that moment, while she couldn’t breathe, see, or speak from the wetness of her face, Aries’ voice narrated her thoughts. We were going to be the king and queen of the Spartans, he said. We were in love. Survive for me. Your leg�"

Aries’ nonexistent hand touched her knee so lightly that she wouldn’t have noticed if she couldn’t see him. His body sat beside her, stroking his hand through the front of her hair. He brushed a strand behind her ear with a finger so cold that the blood in her face stopped running for a second and kissed her cheek on the wing of her butterfly tattoo. She only heard his voice in her head, coursing through her brain from where her skull met her spine, but she could feel his breath on her ear; escape for me.

She made her legs as straight as they could be, leaning to the side to give herself a bigger workspace. With all of the strength she had saved from not thinking or breathing, she threw her heel backwards into the bottom of the car seat.

Pain�"like giant screws were being forced through her veins�"erupted from her knee down to her foot and up to her stomach. It felt like her knee had been torn out of her body and then stuffed back in, and she screamed. She had been sobbing so much before that her outburst only warranted a glance back from the man. She sniffled and squeaked for a few seconds after to cover it up before going silent again and letting the man turn back around. Really, she squeaked from elation and relief. Poking out from the black fabric over her knee was the silver, glinting tip of her knife.

That’s my girl, Fay.

She slid to the side to hide her actions behind the car seat in front of her. She leaned forward and grabbed the metal between her fingers, directing it back and forth to cut a bigger hole for the rest of it to squeeze through. Millimeter by millimeter, more of the blade showed itself, ducking back in and out like a worm crawling from a hole in the ground. Fay took a look out the window, only to motivate herself to work faster. It wouldn’t be long before they got to the Southside diner. She had less than ten minutes.

The handle of the knife was stuck. Using the tiniest movements possible, she undid her belt and forced her two bound fists down the inside of her pant leg to try to coax the thing out. She couldn’t touch the knife, but she managed to make the hole wide enough that gravity did its work and the widest part of the handle slipped through. Little by little, the precious little knife slid out of her and onto the seat of the car right before her hands. After that, it was all unthinking, animalistic impulse that took over for her.

She held the blade backwards and went to work. The ropes rubbing against her skin littered it with scratches that turned into wide patches of exposed pink and red but bit by bit, the ropes grew thinner. Outside the window, the Southside diner was just a few minutes away. Whatever happened next hinged on how quickly the ropes wanted to give in.

She dove at the woman in the driver’s seat. The broken ropes were thrown backwards like birds after a gunshot. If it weren’t for the armrests that she held onto, Fay would have fallen to the ground from the binds still around her legs. But she didn’t, and the woman in the driver’s seat had her throat slit from left to right just barely deep enough to open her windpipe. Red spilled onto the steering wheel and the front of her shirt, and she clasped her hands around her throat. The sounds she made were reminiscent of air being blown over a plastic jug.

With a blood-soaked hand, she groped for the steering wheel, but only managed to jerk it ninety degrees to the right before the bleeding was too much. The man next to her tried reaching over her towards Fay, but it was too late by then. Fay turned and thrust the tip of her knife into the window beside her�"once, twice, thrice, four times�"making it shatter into pieces blowing in her direction. The man’s scream was her signal to jump out.

The first thing the cement hit was her right shoulder blade, paralyzing that side of her for less than a second. After that, it was her head, and then she was numb rolling along the street as the front of the car met the bumper of another with the sound of an earthquake cracking through the road.

All around her, cars screeched to a stop and started off the other way to a soundtrack of screams. The shockwaves and the smoke shot out of the wreckage in all directions, shredding the side of Fay’s face. Surviving that was possible, but Fay didn’t care enough to check. Instead, she bent over and sawed away at the ropes around her feet. Tearing them away, the shards of glass pierced her knee and the palms of her hands as she scrambled to her feet.

She ran. One foot in front of the other, she ran, and it was the simplicity of that motion that freed her mind from the cage of fight or flight into the open with much more deadly monsters. Without being kidnapped to keep her mind busy�"to keep her in a safe house where she couldn’t think�"thoughts and memories lunged at her, sinking their teeth and claws into her throat. Aries was dead. His body had been blown to bits and Edward planted the bomb. Aries had been blown up. Edward had killed him in a way that rendered her unable to ever recognize�"much less see�"his face again. Now, Pluto wanted her dead. She could kill him. She could kill Edward. She could plan to kill anyone for it and have varying chances for success, but she couldn’t think of it. She just cried. With her tears spilling down onto her black jacket and onto the sidewalk behind her, she cried. With her eyes red and her face full of so much mucus that it blocked her windpipe, she screamed and wept and ran away as fast as she could away from the passers-by whose lungs weren’t burning from lack of air and who couldn’t feel the blades that came up from her stomach, shredding her heart. She did all she could do then. She ran and she cried, and it was Ed’s fault.