Funeral for a Friend

37

Cat pushed through the people that filled the corridor. She made it into the chaos of the ballroom, but when she looked over her shoulder, she saw Colleen not far behind. The girl emerged from the bathroom with a ribbon of blood dripping through her hair and down her pale cheek. Her gaze traveled with the coldness of a robot from person to person until it landed on Cat, and their eyes met across the crowd. The tiny smile on Colleen’s face lusted after her, but her stare had the sharpness of a hawk’s talons, ready to cut into prey.

The densely packed men and women formed a wall in front of Cat. She shoved against it, trying to get through, but she felt mired in quicksand as she fought her way deeper into the ballroom. She looked for Brayden, she looked for a police officer, a security guard — someone, anyone — but all the people blurred into a single mass in front of her eyes, and she could barely see who was around her.

“Cat.”

The other girl’s voice trailed her like the sultry whisper of a lover. Cat looked back again, and Colleen was barely even six feet behind her now, calmly threading the maze and catching up with her.

“Cat, don’t run from this,” Colleen told her. “Don’t run from me. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Other voices bubbled up around them. They saw the blood on Colleen’s face, and fear spread from body to body. That girl. Look at her. What’s going on? Find the police! In their confusion, they squeezed together, tightening the web around Cat and giving her nowhere to go. She beat her fists to get them to separate, but the crowd drew in like a claustrophobic mass of strange faces and eyes that made her dizzy.

“Cat.”

She tried to scream and couldn’t even muster the sound. The bodies around her held her in place. Colleen floated toward her; one moment, she was a few steps away, and the next, she was in front of her, pulling Cat to her with a hand around her neck. Colleen’s blood smeared on Cat’s cheek as their faces came together. The girl’s other hand came up, and Cat felt the gun press into her chest below the swell of her breasts, hidden from view. The barrel pointed upward, where the bullet would sever bones and arteries on its way through her. Colleen spoke into her ear.

“Cat, why are you running from me?”

“Let me go. You’re crazy!”

“Cat, I don’t blame you. You’ve been poisoned against me. Curt, Brayden, Wyatt, Stride, everyone, they all want to keep us apart. They don’t realize that we’re meant to be together. I wanted us to run away. You and me. I wanted us to be ghosts. Mysteries. Legends, remembered forever. It would have been amazing. But I guess we’ll have to jump to the very end. We’ll die in each other’s arms. Your blood and my blood, mingled together.”

“Colleen, don’t do this. Please, stop, don’t do this.”

Cat tried to wriggle away, but the girl held her tightly and pressed against her. The gun pushed harder into her chest. Cat stared into Colleen’s eyes and saw there was no hope. No escape and no way out. Those frozen, dark brown eyes came from another world.

“This will be quick. No pain. Then I’ll join you. Don’t worry, you won’t be alone, my love.”

This was the last moment. Colleen’s eyes drifted shut. Cat knew the next thing that happened would be Colleen squeezing the trigger and the bullet ripping through her body.

Then, out of nowhere, a man in the crowd stumbled heavily into Colleen. Like a miracle, the gun swung away from Cat’s chest. Cat grabbed Colleen’s wrist and hung on, and a woman near them looked over and saw the two girls struggling over the pistol.

“Gun!” she screamed.

Someone else shouted it, too. “Gun!”

“Police!”

With Colleen’s arm swinging back and forth and Cat desperately trying to hang on, the girl squeezed the trigger. A man in the crowd lurched back, a bullet searing through his shoulder. The explosion echoed against the ceiling, and screams and wails rose out of a thousand throats. Panic seized the ballroom, and a stampede began. Running bodies spilled against them, driving the two of them apart. Cat had an instant of freedom where she could see the steps to the stage right in front of her, and she ran. She bolted up the stairs, knowing Colleen was behind her, knowing she had only seconds to save herself. She didn’t look back.

Cat burst onto the stage, where she saw a long stretch of empty space ahead of her and three people standing apart from all the others, bathed under the hot glow of lights.

One of them was the man who had saved her life over and over and over.

Stride.

Cat sprinted for him.

Stride looked up as the gun went off, as pandemonium set in, and had the strangest experience of his life. He didn’t know whether it was a vision, or a hallucination, or a waking dream. He looked across the empty stage, and there was Ned Baer, soaking wet the way he’d been at the Deeps, with a bullet wound oozing blood from the center of his forehead.

Ned’s lips pulled back into a skeletal grin. The smile on the man’s face widened and turned into a mocking, cruel laugh. Ned raised his arm and extended a bony, brittle finger at Stride’s chest, and he shouted across the stage.

“You’re the one who’s dead!”

Then the hallucination vanished.

Ned disappeared from Stride’s sight, and where he’d been, Stride saw Cat running across the stage, her hair flying, her face twisted with terror. Stride ran, too, meeting the girl halfway and gathering her up in his arms. Her heart beat wildly against his chest as he held her, and she clung to him as if he could save her from everything.

“Cat, what’s going on?” he heard himself say. The words seemed to come from someone else, sounds that were disconnected from his body.

Stride looked around the stage. The world slowed down, and every tick of the clock took forever. He heard a roaring in his ears, as if his body had crashed underwater. Everything seemed so crisp, so clear, a film moving a single frame at a time. He saw it all in slow motion, saw everything happening around him in the span of a few heartbeats.

There was Andrea, paralyzed in the middle of the stage with a look of confusion and fear. He could hear himself shouting at her to duck, to get down, but she stayed where she was, as if rooted to the ground.

There was Devin Card bolting to the front of the stage with the microphone in his hand, his voice booming through the ballroom, telling everyone to stay calm, not to panic.

There was Serena leaping up the steps on the east end of the stage, her arms and legs pumping as she ran. And yet every step she made happened at a glacial pace in Stride’s mind. She hardly moved at all; she was still so far away. She had a gun in her hand, and as he watched, she sank to one knee and aimed.

She screamed.

“Stop! Drop it! Drop it!”

There was Brayden, the young cop, on the ballroom floor below the stage. Sweat poured down the man’s face. He had his gun in hand, too, pointed where Serena was pointing, and he screamed just as she did.

“Colleen, put the gun down! Put it down!”

Slow, slow, slow.

The world hardly moved at all.

Stride felt his head rotating ever so slowly like the wheel of an overturned car. He followed Serena’s eyes, followed Brayden’s eyes, followed the direction of their guns, and they all led him to a girl walking calmly across the stage. No one else was around her. Everyone else had jumped from the stage or dived to the floor. She was a pretty blond girl, not even twenty years old, with brown eyes and a cryptic smile and blood on her face.

She had a pistol at the end of her outstretched arms.

Pointed at Cat. Pointed at Stride.

Stride heard the muffled noise of his own voice from deep in that ocean inside his mind. “No!”

Slow oh so slow, the world hardly moved at all.

His body had the thickness of honey as he tried to react. He felt himself pushing Cat down, throwing her to the ground, felt himself stepping over her, kneeling, and blocking her with his body.

Then it was just the two of them, the girl with the gun and Stride acting as a shield between her and Cat.

The world sped up again.

Everyone began to fire.