Her existence, and Art's, had become one of theoretical toughness.
But all the prep and armor on Earth cannot save you when a person decides to leave you behind.
Normal people did this every day. Normal people wanted others to think the best of them. You played to your strengths. If you were good at it, you could write your own version of history.
You told stories.
***
Sitting on the toilet like an invalid, Lorelle forced a few drops of urine that smelled vile, loaded with poisons decanted from her system. The door was cracked. If her captor, and his complicitors, thought she was moving her bowels, they might not watch her so avidly.
Luther's vial of Price's special all-black capsules was on the rack above the hand towels, feigning complete innocence, hiding behind a pharmacy label for sinus medication. Lorelle watched them and thought:
The solution to my problem is right at hand.
Pop one or two of those babies and she would Hyde out, become reckless again, heedless of personal safety, blind to risk, coldly uncaring, and ruthless enough to engage these damned predators on their own emotional terms. The pills would make her more like them; they could swivel the advantage, and it would be ironic indeed to turn Price's own chemicals against him. The Bry-Guy had certainly learned a rude lesson about payback. Under the influence of the drug, Lorelle had screamed in his face, bashed him about, hurt him even more when he was tied up and helpless… and had done it all without hesitation or misgivings. Price wanted to wind up Lorelle, to see what she would do.
Well,
she thought,
why not show the son of a bitch for real?
The pills were the edge she needed, and the prompt to act. Swallow them, and you donned cape and boots and became capable of super-deeds.
Lorelle made her decision.
She stood up, wobbly but under her own power, and flushed the toilet, ignoring the pills. Dina and Michelle marched her back into the living room, slinging an arm each.
"Where's your fearless leader?" Lorelle said, trying to peer beneath the sofa as she was eased down, still seeing nothing.
"He's back in the Blue Room giving Suzanne her reward," Dina said.
Lorelle immediately sought Michelle's expression, her reaction to this. Michelle refused to be read.
"You don't completely understand about Price," Michelle said, weighing her words as though testing them for her own reasons.
"Once he noticed you, learned about you, you became a part of him whether you wanted to or not."
Lorelle let her next words go just as carefully, honing for impact, intending to goad for reaction. "So, he's like a pimp, then?"
Dina actually cut loose a monosyllabic laugh.
Michelle just smiled. "Or a God complex. You can't make me angry at him. He saved my life. He just saved yours, tonight, although I'm sure you don't see it that way."
Lorelle tried to even her breathing. Appear to settle in for another story. Buy time to marshal the returning ability in her limbs.
"I met him in New York," said Michelle. "Art, I mean."
Lorelle realized she was sitting in her own home less than a foot away from the woman for whom her husband had walked out the door. Their shiny, almost unbreachable, stainless-steel front door.
The whole west face of the house seemed to give a couple of inches as it was slammed. A stray huff of chilly air extinguished the candle someone had added to the remains of the coffee table; its flame jerked hard left as though slapped.
Memories of the party (only yesterday?) flooded back in a blast wave. Michelle saying
So relax and tell me a little about yourself, when she already knew.
Saying,
It's nice to get a look at you at last, strange as that may sound.
Now Lorelle knew what she had meant. Saying,
I'm not attracted to you in that way, at least not yet. More oh a kindred spirit thing. We have a lot in common.
Lorelle's eyes had gone wide, white, bright with new tears. Her heart felt like a chunk of rust.
"He really put you on a pedestal," Michelle said, in the here and now. "By his own reckoning, he could never do better than you. He was satisfied and you weren't. So you had an affair with his closest friend."
The swashbuckling Derek had never come to the house. Not then, not more recently. That had been their ground rule-never in the house.
"Art met me." Michelle shrugged. "Then I met Price, because Art couldn't let go of you. He really did love you, not that that's something anyone values anymore. Everybody ignores love in favor of focusing on Doing Better."
Derek's gritty tale-about grabbing gun in hand and duly unplugging his own rival-was a fiction. In it, Lorelle recognized elements of her own wish fulfillment, the staircase wit of wanting to do something branding-iron hot and deliciously appropriate, too late.
"From what Price gathered, Art tried to contact you and you tossed his first letter into the ocean, a separate bottle for each page. He could have tried a suicide note, one of those cry-for-help things, but knew you wouldn't rise to that. He could have just slipped into a black hole, changed his identity, but he didn't. You knew what was best for him. You spoke when people called, and Art was covered. Since he didn't care about erasing himself, you took his life. Literally. You took his life along with the house and the dog. But he left that gap, for you to fill."
Art had been inside this woman, more recently than Lorelle.
Today, Art was off happily penetrating some lady journalist, as Price had divulged.
The world could not collapse any further. It had hit rock bottom and was tasting Jurassic sediment.
At the party, Lorelle had asked,
But, Michelle, if it's on purpose, doesn’t it all seem a bit cruel?
And Michelle had said,
Sometimes, yes, I suppose.
There' seemed to be a tennis ball blocking Lorelle's throat. "I need to check on Blitz. He's hurt.''
"Sorry, hon, we're not opening that door.''
"Can I at least have some water?"
Dina rousted up another bottle in the kitchen and put it in Lorelle's hand, already open. She also had a Dixie Double Hex with the bottle cap still on. Derek would have said, Never trust a beer that unscrews. She did not open it. She held it by the long neck and swung it right into Michelle's head, the heel of glass hitting next door to her left eye. Lorelle could hear Michelle's neckbones crack as her face (and expression of total surprise) snapped to starboard for a close-up. Michelle fell across Lorelle's lap, still conscious, until Dina bonked her again on the back of the skull, hard enough to make her still-damp hair jump.
"That's enough of that." Dina said, having not uttered a syllable during Michelle's entire discourse. She took the church key she had held in her other hand all along and opened her beer. It foamed over but she drew a long swallow anyway.
Drinking the beer helped allay Lorelle's unavoidable thought that perhaps she was next for a bludgeoning. Michelle was facedown in her lap. It was highly unlikely that Dina was going to suggest building a campfire and singing songs.
"We don't have much time," she said. "Can you move?"
Lorelle held one arm straight one and flexed her fingers. Then she hoisted the inert Michelle away to hang limply, half off the couch, terrible for the posture. One raven eye was slitted and gleaming in the lamplight but she was not seeing anything. They waited until they were sure they could see her breathing, faintly.
Lorelle rummaged around beneath the sofa. Sure enough, the shotgun was there. When she held it up, Dina nodded.
"I'll be right back," Dina said, and headed for the bedroom.
"Blitz!"
The dog's nose was instantly in her face, slurping. Blitz's bloodied breath was worse than maggoty pork, but his doggie contrition caused an ache in Lorelle that nearly brought another downpour of tears.
All she could hear from the bedroom was a yelp of surprise, and a lower, more basso protest from Price, words she could not interpret. Outside, the Wind insisted on taking them all away, jolting the barricades of the house and rendering all other sounds secondary, adulterated. Dina did not reemerge right away, and Lorelle thought, trap.
Another trick out of Price's sorcery bag was coming, surely, to take her between the eyes.
Lorelle held fast in the kitchen, low against the counter, shotgun ready, one arm wrapped around Blitz. "I'm not letting you go, buddy." Michelle remained non compos mentis in the living room.
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.