Pretty Little Dead Girls (6 page)

You see, the trail is where the murderer first spotted our Bryony.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I See You

The girl caught his eye immediately.

She was new to running, new to the trail, and her cheeks were rosy in the misty light. There was something about her, something special, a wobbling beacon shining up to the sky, only she wasn’t calling down the stars.

She was calling him.

And being a man of great appetites he obsessed to satiate, he knew he would answer her. Because, you see, that is the way it works, and has always worked, and this man somehow knew the girl’s whole life had been leading up to this moment.

Wonderful. Simply wonderful.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Live A Thousand Years

Rikki-Tikki and Syrina were watching a movie. They had reached that lazy part in their relationship where he was allowed to gain a few pounds and she was allowed to wear sweats, and occasionally go without makeup, and throw her hair back in a ponytail. All of this was perfectly acceptable and downright cozy.

Although the term used was ‘watching a movie’, it would be more accurate to say a movie was on and they weren’t exactly watching it. They were dishing up bowls of ice cream and kissing in between strawberry spoonfuls, and Rikki-Tikki was telling Syrina about Samoa. He was also asking if she’d like come home with him sometime to meet his family, and Syrina was equally parts excited and nervous. What if they didn’t like her? What if she didn’t like Samoa? What if it all agreed with her so much that she never wanted to return home? How delightful! During this conversation, Rikki-Tikki brought up the subject of Bryony.

“Syrina, she is going to die, and I think you just don’t want to accept it so much that you’re not even paying attention to it. I know it’s easier for you, but it isn’t fair to the girl. She needs our support, to know we’ll continue on after she’s gone, that we’ll remember her. She needs—”

“Rikki, why do we have to talk about this?” Syrina interrupted. She was getting exasperated and edgy, and talking about Bryony’s fate really was quite out of the question and upsetting to her. Somebody so gentle shouldn’t have to die, not ever, not even when they are ancient. It seemed like a cruel prank somebody had been playing on Bryony all her life, and Syrina just wasn’t going to have it. It was her fiercely nurturing way, and she was ready to go the rounds with anybody who suggested Bryony might not be immortal, even if that person was her dearest Rikki-Tikki.

“I don’t see any reason why she can’t live a thousand years,” Syrina said loyally, yet not altogether realistically. “She can live forever, if she really wants to. Who are we to say any different?”

Rikki-Tikki sighed, and put his arm around Syrina, who really was dealing with this entire situation the best way she knew how.

Syrina pretends, you see, and there is a safety in the pretending. The person she is onstage can get hurt and it doesn’t affect Syrina. The words she says aren’t hers; the ideas that are shot down belong to somebody else. If Syrina simply pretends hard enough, then it will all go away. Don’t you see, Rikki-Tikki? It is her own way of protecting Bryony. It is her own way of surviving.

Rikki-Tikki is many things. He is kind and he is patient, and he is strong and steady like a great stone wall or a tree that you want to rest your back against when you are weary or in the midst of a fight. But most of all he is insightful, and listens to that little voice inside of his head and stomach that says “Stop pushing now,” and “Perhaps you had better dig into this a little deeper” and even occasionally, “Your car keys are stuck between the cushions on the couch. Please be more careful with them in the future.” And now this voice was warning him that Syrina’s head was spinning with the thought that even her very finest effort at pretending might not be enough to keep her dear friend Bryony around. This is a harsh realization indeed, and one that Syrina particularly didn’t want to face, so she chose instead to glower at Rikki-Tikki, who sighed and wisely kept the smile from his face.

“You’re right, dear one,” Rikki-Tikki said, and ruffled Syrina’s hair. “We won’t speak of such things. Not when there is such an entertaining movie on television.”

In truth the movie was only subpar, and generally Syrina would pounce upon that sentence with a: “What, are you kidding? What horrid taste you have! Sometimes I wonder if we really have anything in common. The script is amateurish and the acting makes my brain want to burst out of my eyeballs!” But right now she was simply grateful for the distraction, as B-rated as it may be.

“Yes, you are absolutely right. Let us watch this movie about . . . radioactive giant grasshoppers. There really is nothing more in the world that I would rather do at the moment.”

So he tightened his arm around her, and she rested her head upon his shoulder, and they both thought their separate thoughts.

Bryony will live forever, I know it,
Syrina thought with a sternness that was endearing and also a bit frightening.
She will, she will. There simply can be no other way.
Then she vaguely wondered aloud if she should wear her purple high heels with her dress tomorrow or if she should just stick with fire engine red.

Rikki-Tikki’s thoughts were like the sea, wide and deep and constantly shifting. He knew one day death would come for their dear friend, and there was no denying it. It did not do anybody any good. He also knew he wasn’t ready for that time to be quite so soon, and he had a trick or two up his sleeve that could help stop it, at least for now.

“The purple,” Syrina decided, and snuggled closer. Rikki-Tikki nodded his head, and Syrina took that as a positive sign toward her footwear choice. She had told him about all about dresses and shoes before. Use your hips to distribute the weight while walking, for example. Five-inch heels are sexy, but six-inches have just thrown you straight to trashy. Perhaps if Rikki-Tikki had been wholeheartedly engrossed in the conversation, he would have said yes, wear the purple, they all lovely and will convey everything you silently want to say about yourself. But what Rikki-Tikki was really nodding about was his decision: although it wasn’t in his power to save Bryony, he was determined to try.

“It’s getting late. Bryony should really be home by now,” Syrina said. She kissed Rikki-Tikki and took their empty ice cream bowls to the kitchen. She stood at the sink and thought yes, Rikki-Tikki was right about Bryony’s malevolent fate, but she couldn’t let her mind explore the idea of a world without Bryony, because it would be a dim and cheerless world, an exceptionally ugly world, and nobody should be forced to live in such a lackluster place. Syrina was wiping a tear from her eye with the back of a soapy hand when she heard a strange sound from behind her. It was a furtive sound, a menacingly sneaky and surreptitious sound, a terrifyingly recognizable sound that announced, “Hello, I am everything you have ever feared and I have arrived.”

It was the sound of a knife being quietly unsheathed.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A Delicate Guillotine

Bryony sobbed all of the way to the hospital, the note crumpled in her hand. Not Syrina. Not her dear, brave and true friend. It would be too cruel. It would be too much.

She ran through the hospital doors and up to the front desk.

“I am looking for my friend Syrina. Rikki-Tikki said she was here, and I’m so afraid! Is she alive? Is she hurt? Oh, won’t you help me find her?”

The receptionist stared at this otherworldly woman whose soul was mixing with tears and spilling out of her ephemeral eyes. She wanted to grab the girl’s mitten-covered hands and tell her stories about faeries and trolls and great green monsters born from gardens. She wanted to ask her if she thought it would hurt terribly when death came to take her, as it most certainly would. Why, perhaps even this very minute! Time is of the essence! The receptionist opened her mouth to speak.

“Bryony!”

Bryony spun around at the sound of Rikki-Tikki’s voice and grabbed onto his sleeve.

“Is she dead? Did fate steal Syrina away? It was supposed to be me. It was supposed to be me!”

Rikki-Tikki smiled, and the tumultuous storm inside of Bryony’s heart gave way to the clearing sky.

“She’s all right. We’ve been in talking to a detective. Let’s go see her, my girl.”

He put his hand on the top of Bryony’s head and steered her down the hall. Bryony chattered nervously the whole time, speaking with her hands and her voice and, most especially, her heart.

“Oh, you don’t know how frightened I was. I saw your note saying that Syrina was in the hospital, and when I stepped into the kitchen and saw the blood on the walls . . . ” Here her voice gave out, and Rikki-Tikki gave her hair a soft pat before leaning against an open door.

“She’s here, Bryony. See?”

Bryony peeked inside the room. Syrina looked enraged and exhausted and very much alive.

Bryony threw her arms around her friend.

Syrina hugged her back. “You’re okay! Thank goodness! I was so worried when you didn’t come home on time, but now I’m so glad.”

Bryony didn’t realize she was crying again until Rikki-Tikki handed her a tissue. “I thought I had lost you. There was so much blood in the kitchen. Where did he hurt you?”

Syrina’s eyes flashed. “Here. And here,” she said, pointing out two small wounds in her hairline. “And he broke two of my nails. Not to mention here,” she said, and revealed three long scratches on her wrist. “This is where he clawed me when he was trying to get away.”

“When he was trying to . . . I don’t understand. The blood!”

“It was the other guy’s,” Rikki-Tikki said. “I heard Syrina scream and I can’t tell you how that felt, Bryony. Like I was sitting outside watching the moon and it just exploded in front of me. By the time I got there, she already had him backed into the corner.”

“I threw some bowls at him,” Syrina said. “I tried to find our kitchen knives but they must have been in the dishwasher, so I beat on him with a saucepan instead.”

“You beat him pretty ruthlessly,” Rikki-Tikki said. “I had to jump in to protect him. He seemed relieved to see me.”

Bryony blinked at Syrina.

“But why?” she asked. “Why would you do something so dangerous? What if he had hurt you? Surely you understand the risk of just being my friend.” Bryony stood tall, her fury hissed and mewed and wrapped itself brilliantly around her. “This is my burden to bear, not yours. I should never have asked this of you. I will go home and pack my things.” She took Syrina’s perfect dusky hands (save for the two broken and ragged fingernails) in her own. “I love you, and you are utterly exquisite and now you have been marred because of me. I have stayed too long.”

Bryony kissed Syrina’s cheek and turned to the door. It was blocked by Rikki-Tikki.

“Excuse me,” she said to Rikki-Tikki. He just shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest.

“What a silly girl,” Syrina said. She hopped off the table and stood beside Rikki-Tikki. She looked angry, amused, frustrated and frighteningly fierce. She was a radiant warrior, a delicate guillotine. Bryony very nearly wanted to step away from her, but then she remembered it was Syrina, and she felt brave again.

“I would die if you were hurt,” she told Syrina. “I wouldn’t want to live any longer.”

“Bryony, don’t you see the implication of what happened here tonight?”

Bryony didn’t see. She saw that Syrina had walloped the daylights out of an unfortunate criminal who chose the wrong house to break into. She knew deep within herself that he had been wandering down a darkened street in the evening, and had said, “Gee, which home should I plunder this evening? I shall most certainly cause some wild mayhem.” and she knew her apartment shone with a luminosity that made his heart pop with the brilliance of it, and he thought, “There, that’s the place! Oh, the wonders I shall behold and the magnificent havoc I shall wreak.” Only he didn’t really partake in any scintillating misbehavior at all because Syrina swooped upon him with her fiery Saucepan of Vengeance, and Bryony felt quite sorry for our poor would-be murderer for a moment.

Syrina sighed. “The implication is this: that man came into our home in order to hurt you, but he failed.”

“Because I wasn’t home,” Bryony said, and the tears almost started again. “I wasn’t home and so you had to defend yourself against him.”

Rikki-Tikki laughed. “She wasn’t defending herself, Bryony. She was defending you.”

“What?”

Syrina nodded eagerly. “Don’t you see? He came in to hurt you, and neither Rikki-Tikki nor I were going to allow it. That man slithered into our home with a weapon and I grew so angry. How dare he come after you. How dare he enter our home and try to draw the breath from your lips. Fate took a swing at you and what happened? We stood and we fought and we won. He’ll go straight from the hospital to a jail cell, and we will never deal with him again. It is a wonderful thing.” Why, Syrina looked quite drunk on her victory, and Rikki-Tikki smiled so hard that his eyes disappeared, and Bryony’s heart began to lighten and turn its face to the sun and scream, “Yes! Yes, I have survived!”

“We won’t leave you,” Rikki-Tikki said simply, and for a brief second fate choked and quaked and drew back from the power of these two fierce protectors, who stood together in a united front between it and the Star Girl. How was it to get to her? It was much too difficult. After all of its work, plans, and delightful scheming. Everything was nearly lost.

And then fate shook its head and narrowed its eyes, growling deep in its throat as it remembered how crafty and venomous it could be. And when that venom is stoked by wrathful humiliation, well. Well. Careful, Star Girl. Your time has nearly come.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

He Kills Again

Fate grumbled and schemed and plotted. Sending an enthusiastic but second rate robber to do a professional killer’s job certainly didn’t seem to work. Now the gloves were off. It was time to call in the big guns.

It is time to check in on our murderer.

What the murderer really wanted, of course, was Bryony. He did not know her name. He did not know anything about her. She could be a young doll-maker named Cassandra or she could be young man-turned-woman who was originally named Maurice, although he did not quite think so, and he had a fairly decent eye for that sort of thing.